June 17, 2009
Ok, so I made a sweater once. It was an early sweater in my knitting life, and I just kind of made it up as I went along. The yarn was gorgeous gipsy hand-dyed wool from Fingerlakes Yarn. I wanted a shawl collar, so I made a shawl collar. I wanted a cardigan, so I [...]
April 22, 2009
In honor of Earth Day, I want to celebrate my new discovery – a store called Muji. I encountered it when we visited London, but it apparently is all over the globe (including a few stores in the New York City area).
The store stocks practical no-nonsense items with minimal packaging. I walked out with a [...]
December 30, 2008
What is a Nostepinde, you might ask? I asked the same thing when I was searching online for a ball winder. For reasons I’ve never quite understood (letting knitters view the yarn in a relaxed state?), yarn stores sell yarn in completely useless skeins, which must be wound into a ball before use. Otherwise it [...]
December 28, 2008
I love knitting. I love yarn. I love yarn shops. I love bamboo and birch needles. I love starting projects. I love finishing them. I love photographing my knitting. I love looking at other people’s knitting (commercial, machine, and hand-knitted) for ideas about pattern and color and yarn.
Ravelry.com has just exponentially increased my knitting fun [...]
December 26, 2008
I tackled a fun project with scrap yarn this Christmas: ornaments for my sister, my niece, and my nephew. I started with an ornament for my sister with scrap yarn from the socks I made her – Raphael from Colinette Jitterbug. I kept using the size 1 birch double-pointed needles I’d used for the socks.
When [...]
December 2, 2008
It’s the holidays now, and calls for giving arrive in my mailbox every day from charities to which I contribute and charities I’ve never encountered. My knitting meet-up, the Ann Arbor Stitch n’ Bitch Knitters, is doing a “Knit One, Save One” Hat Drive. We’re knitting hats for low birth weight babies for Save the [...]
November 30, 2008
My in-laws visited, and my mother-in-law and I spent as much time as we could knitting. We compared yarns and brainstormed projects, we exchanged patterns and even traded needles. She had just finished a lacy scarf and lamented that she wanted to put beads on it. I had a crazy beaded mohair, so I [...]
July 26, 2008
What better to do on a rainy day in Nova Scotia than to knit socks? Janet gave me this lovely yarn from Baadeck Yarns for my Birthday – Colinette Jitterbug 100% merino wool. Of course, I went for the fuschia to blue colorway, alizarene. I followed the free simple sock pattern on the yarn’s label, [...]
January 1, 2008
I thought a lot about my resolution this year. I’d like it to be challenging, but not obviously impossible so I don’t set myself up for failure. I decided I’m going to work on better enjoying my weekends.
I like the structure and the rhythm of the workday. It organizes my restless energy in a way [...]
October 31, 2007
So, a bunch of us at work took the PersonalDNA online personality test. They seem to do it right, not asking for personal information up front, providing an interesting experience (not too many questions, not totally superficial, sliders, multi-way sliders, 2-D charts).
The results were interesting, grouping us differently than I might have predicted. Surprisingly, I [...]
not particularly objective musings on odds and ends – Dunrie Greiling, Ann Arbor, MI 48103