Sometimes, if your life is feeling out of control, you can fix it all by putting on some Christmas pajamas and taking control of your stash of partial skeins:

What is a worsted worry, you make ask? Well, I’d say it’s a medium weight worry, a worry suitable for a wide variety of projects. It’s also my go-to knitting worry.

And now that I’m done making (bad?) jokes about worsted weight yarn, I’ll tell you what I’m really worried about.

I have been living in Madison, WI for the past (nearly) 5.5 years, and I’ve only been shopping at The Cat and Crow for my primary yarn store for the past (nearly) 1.5 years. Which means that it took me 4 years to find them.

Which brings me to my worry.

I’m moving to Rochester, NY in just under 2 months, and frankly, I can’t imagine waiting 4 years to find my next perfect yarn store. The Cat and Crow is just so wonderful! The owners are super nice and always willing to help. The atmosphere is great, and you can just sit and knit in the front of the shop. They have a great selection of yarns–both for when you are trying to be economical about your addiction, and when you want to treat yourself. They also have a steady stream of classes and new learning opportunities that are both fun and a way to keep challenging myself and become a better knitter. The Cat and Crow is where I learned how to do stranded colorwork , knit my first sweater, dye my first yarn, and cut my fist steek.

If it weren’t for them, wouldn’t be doing any of that! I’d probably still be knitting the same things that I was making years ago, and that might have even caused me to become *gasp* bored with knitting the same old, same old and given up the craft entirely! The horror!!

That last bit might be an exaggeration, but you get the point; I feel like I found my LYS, and now I am moving away from it.

They’ve assured me that they can ship anywhere, and I’ve assured them that I have a lot of farewell purchases to make.

Ugh. I just worry that I won’t find a yarn shop as good as The Cat and Crow in Rochester. I even sent them a postcard from my time in New Zealand.

I’m probably worrying for nothing, and it’ll probably all work out, but I’ve just got a really good thing going here right now, and I don’t want to lose it. I’d like to have my cake and eat it too, thank you very much.

So there you have it, folks, a worsted worry.

I’m now going to get back to my treat-your-self yarn to make myself feel better:

Six years ago, a friend from college taught me how to knit. I bought my yarn and needles from the Walmart in Lewisburg, PA, it took me about two years to finish this garter stitch scarf, and there are several random holes in it because I didn’t know I was doing yarn-overs, BUT it was the start of what I hope is a lifelong passion.

Four years ago, a friend from work retaught (reminded?) me how to knit and I finally finished the above scarf. Additionally, I learned how to purl, knit in the round, and read a pattern. Before I learned how to read a pattern, I decided that I wanted to knit a headband. My plan was to cast on a reasonable amount of stitches, knit back and forth like a mini scarf, and then when it was done, sew the two ends together to make a headband. However, I had zero knowledge of gauge back then, and it turned out that my “reasonable number of stitches” was not exactly reasonable. I soon realized that I was actually knitting another scarf, not a headband. Whoops.

Two years ago, I made my first mitten. I didn’t understand how to do the thumb (“what do you mean, I just start knitting?”), so I ended up FaceTime-ing my Grandma for some help. I had also just figured out how to do cables and made a wine bottle sweater. Back then, I SWORE that would be the largest sweater I would ever make. However, I continued to experiment with miniature sweaters in the form of Christmas ornaments and beer bottle sweaters.

All those mini sweaters gave me decent sense for the geometry, structure, and construction for a sweater, so when I saw a class posting for the Lemongrass Sweater by Joji Locatelli at The Cat and Crow, I felt like I was ready to take the plunge.

One year ago, I took that class, learned about gauge, made my first swatch, and ultimately finished my first sweater sized to fit a human (and an adult human, no less!).

It was a great experience–and it didn’t take two years to knit, like I feared! I then went on a hat knitting spree, but a couple of months later, I was ready to take on my first solo sweater.

Now, my tally of finished adult human sized sweaters is up to 1, 2, 3, 4–with no end in sight! I’ve done top-down, bottom-up, stranded-knitting, and now steeking as well! There is a wide world of sweaters out there, and I just can’t stop!

I’m going to try to take a quick break from knitting myself sweaters to make something smaller, like a hat, so I can get some instant gratification and also add some stock to my Etsy shop before the holidays. However, I don’t think it will be too long before I’m back at it with another sweater on my needles. Here are some of the sweaters that I’m looking forward to knitting next:

• Mountain Mist by Tin Can Knits
• Icelandic Overblouse by Elizabeth Zimmerman (I will be doing Meg Swansen’s stocking stitch version)
• Bodie by Elizabeth Doherty (If, of course, I can overcome the fact that this sweater is not knit in the round)

I’m planning on heading over to The Cat and Crow tomorrow to show them my latest finished sweater. What are the odds that I come home with another sweater’s worth of yarn? 🙂

Until next time,

Megan “not a normal  person, but a sweater person” Sinton

After I finished the So Faded Sweater, I had every intention of doing something quick and easy, such as hat, to get some much needed instant gratification. That’s what a normal person would do.

However, it turns out that I am not a normal person. I am a sweater person.

As I was still finishing up the So Faded Sweater, my favorite yarn store, The Cat and Crow, announced that they were going to offer a class called “Yeeks! Steeks!” at the beginning of October. So naturally, I finished up the sweater I was working on, brought it to the shop to show off the finished product, and in the same visit, signed up for the steeks class, and bought another sweater’s worth of yarn. Life is good, isn’t it?

I still thought that I would make a quick hat before my big trip, and then take something small–like socks–with me to Australia and New Zealand. However, Melissa, one of the owners of The Cat and Crow, then told me everything I needed to  know to get started on the sweater so that I could be much closer to actually steeking for the first class session. So alas, I started it right away and will now be lugging a sweater around Australia and New Zealand. But it’ll be beautiful, and fun, and that’s the point, isn’t it?

The pattern is Bergitte Cardigan by Kristin Drysdale, and my yarn of choice is Cascade 220 Superwash for the main color, and my hand dyed blue gradient for the contrast color. I’m super excited to see how this one turns out, and learn a new skill in steeking! This will also be my fourth adult sweater since I knit my first sweater in October/November 2017! Check out the rest of my sweaters here and follow my progress on this particular sweater via my Ravelry project page here.

As some of you may know, I am currently getting ready to embark on the trip of a lifetime to Australia and New Zealand (!!!!!!!!). Unfortunately though, the farmers of rural Australia are experiencing a severe drought this winter (remember, it’s winter in the southern hemisphere right now). This means that they don’t have the usual amount of food to feed their animals, and are struggling to get by.

More specifically, many of the mother sheep are rejecting their newborn lambs so that they can focus on their own survival. Consequently, the lambs started dying from the cold.

Australian knitters did not accept this tragedy, and instead rallied around their craft. A Facebook group was started, and soon knitters from all over Australia were mailing in hand-knitted lamb sweaters. The organizers were then distributing them to farmers in need. The Facebook page is now full of happy pictures and posts from farmers about how thankful they are and what a difference the sweaters have made for their lambs.

Since I had just finished up a sweater for myself, and I was getting ready to head down under, I decided to get involved! My plan is to finish up the sweater here, bring it with me to Australia, and then put it in the local mail once I get there.

Sheep give us the gift of wool (and hence yarn), so I think it’s pretty cool that all these knitters rallied together to give that gift back to sheep in their time of need.

If you’d like to get involved, check out this article in The Canberra Times or the Lamb Jumpers “Helping Our Farmers” Facebook group.

Aren’t gradients fun?!

The Cat and Crow had an open dye day last month, and I had a great day! It was my second time dyeing yarn (read about my first experience here), and now I can’t wait to knit up something new with these yarns!

Check out some of my past gradient projects for some inspiration:

• In Threes Baby Sweater
• Green Apple Pie Hat
• Alaska Hat

Two weekends ago, I had the pleasure of attending Meg Swansen’s Knitting Camp with my grandma.

It was an excellent weekend full of knitting, knitting, and more knitting. We learned a ton (short rows, steeking, and bears–oh my!), and it was a lot of fun.

The daily Show and Tell sessions were especially nice. My To Knit list grew quite a bit (I can’t wait to start the Icelandic Overblouse in Unspun Icelandic!–after I finish my teeny tiny yarn sweater, of course), and it was so inspiring to see all the beautiful things knitters can create with two sticks and some string.

Meg was also awesome. She has such an incredible attitude towards knitting (and is definitely her mother’s daughter). Grammy and I had been working on our camp homework beforehand, which were the little baby sweaters pictured above. The pattern called for Elizabeth Zimmerman’s phony seams, which we each looked up in our EZ books, but were a little wary of what this extra work was really accomplishing. Then at camp, Meg explained that it all started when Elizabeth started exposing more people to knitting sweaters in the round, and they would push back with various (unfounded) reasons on why knitting the pieces flat, and then seaming them together was better. Elizabeth always had a (stronger) counter argument, and one of those was phony seams. Basically the advocates of knitting back and forth said that circular sweaters had no seam, so they had no structure, blah blah blah. So in Meg’s words, Elizabeth came up with the phony seam “just to shut them up.” But then she ended up liking how it looked, and how it helped the sweater lay flat, so they stuck! And the beauty of it is that it doesn’t interrupt the lovely rhythm of knitting in the round–you just take care of it at the end!

There were a lot of little stories like that at camp: they said, “you can’t do X in the round,” and Elizabeth said “watch me.”

EZ was so ahead of her time, and a serious engineer of knitting. If women were allowed to be engineers way back then, Elizabeth would have been one of the best. It was humanity’s loss that she wasn’t. I’m sure if she was, this Physics of Knitting article that Grammy sent me last week would have been discovered decades ago. The patriarchy, man.

Overall, it was a great weekend–and Grammy finally got to visit Wisconsin! I bought a book of Fair Ilse motifs from the market at Camp and put it to work in designing my own yoke for that baby sweater we started as homework!

There were definitely a few hiccups along the way (I put my short rows on the wrong side, and the back accidentally became the front–not good enough for my Etsy shop), but I finished it last week, and am overall pretty pleased with the finished product. Now I’m just hanging onto it until someone I know has a baby.

Until then…happy knitting!

 

P.S.

Grammy and I totally forgot we had to make name tags until the day or two before camp, so we had to get creative and I think we succeeded with flying colors! We used yarn scraps to make a mini hank, and also re-purposed a Christmas ornament from last year Teeny Tiny Sweater Ornaments for a name tag on a sweater on a sweater:

I’ve been working on my So Faded Sweater for a little over a month now…and I’m still going strong!

I’m actually a little further than this picture (I just started the fourth and final color of the body), but this picture was better 🙂

And although it’s not knitting related, my garden is also progressing nicely! But I may have lost my green beans during some overzealous weeding….