Blissful Brioche

Nope, not the bread, though you will wreck your diet just by looking at this Google search.

Please, just a taste?

Brioche knitting is a technique that creates a squishy double-sided fabric.  I've dabbled in it before to create a simple infinity scarf with a variegated yarn and a more complex cabled scarf based off of the Reversible Cabled Brioche Stitch Scarf pattern by Saralyn Harvey.  Brioche has its own rhythm, slightly different from the flow of regular knitting, and I found it very therapeutic.

But I wanted to step it up a knotch.  I kept seeing all these patterns for brioche knitting in two colors, like this wonderful hat:

Photo courtesy of the Ravelry 

That hat, the Pinwheel Beret by Nancy Marchant, blew me away.  It's so pretty, and the color combinations are endless, and I WANT one!  But the pattern is almost written in a different language.  I had no idea what a "bark" was or how to execute a "burp," so I thought this technique was beyond my reach.

Until, of course, I signed up for a Two-Color Brioche class as Vogue Knitting Live.  And who do you think taught it?  The very same designer, Nancy Marchant!  

I have to admit, I was a little bit disappointed with the class.  It cost a lot of money, and we spent the vast majority of the class trying to learn what she calls the "Italian Cast On," which was not an essential skill but a nice-to-know.  It felt like a waste of time to learn that one picky little trick instead of what we were actually supposed to be focusing on.  

Nevertheless, I did learn what a burp is (brioche purl stitch), how to read a brioche pattern, and how to work with two colors in this fabulous stitch.  Check out my perfectly imperfect beginner's swatch:

Isn't she lovely?

If you look closely, you can see my mangled stitches on the third or so row up.  Other than that and the poor color choices (they were just a couple scrap balls I had leftover), I think it turned out marvelously!  I'll put that in my success column.

If you want to learn more about this brilliant technique, check out Nancy's website, www.briochestitch.com.  She has tutorials and explanations for working the stitch with one or two colors, all the accompanying tips and tricks, and free patterns!  Her book, Knitting Brioche, is also beautiful, and I'm dying to get my hands on it, especially now that I know what I'm doing.  

Nine Rubies

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm travelling this week on business.  And it is a very,very lonely trip.  I'm down in Foster City, CA, just outside of San Francisco.  None of my teammates are here.  My husband stayed home with the cats.  I don't know anyone, and no one speaks English in the break room (which was a big surprise for me).

Even though I'm down here for work, my evenings are my own.  Tuesday, I drove over to Chinatown to see what all the hype is about.  Honestly, I found it to be really dirty.  I mean, people often say that Paris is a dirty city or New York is a dirty city, and I never saw what they were talking about.  But Chinatown was dirty.  Like, lots of trash all over the sidewalk and funny smells everywhere, dirty.  I didn't want to stay there for very long; it was still rush hour when I went back to my hotel room.

But I knew that Wednesday night would be better because Nine Rubies Knitting in San Mateo hosts a social knitting circle on Wednesdays.

Ah, sweet beautiful knitters, you make me so very happy.

This shop is gorgeous.  I've never been in such a large LYS.  Rather than the cramped/cozy little stores I'm used to, Nine Rubies has a high ceiling (with a sparkly chandelier), lots of open space to walk around, and plenty of seating area.  What they lacked in yarn variety, they made up for with their incredible samples.  I asked to see a sample of a silk-straw yarn, and she showed me three unique garments and said, "I have more samples of this in the back, if you want."

They ladies around the circle were as warm as the California sun.  Jeanine was working on designing a tutorial for crocheted dragon stitch fingerless mitts.  Two sisters sat crafting and telling me about their dogs and plans to move to Seattle.  A mother came in with her daughter to get help on knitting a herringbone cowl edged in faux-fur.  We chatted about ergonomics, cats, local yarns, Ravelry, and restaurants in the area.

Lonely knitters can always find a refuge in local yarn stores.  Nine Rubies Knitting was an excellent safehaven.  A skein of Malabrigo Worsted and Anzula Cloud made its way into my stash.  For a couple of hours, I almost stopped missing home.  Almost.

Like Sweet, Sweet Manna

When yarn is literally falling from the sky, you push the person in front of you over and grab as many skeins as you can.  Right?

Actually, that's not what happened at all.

I attended Vogue Knitting Live! this weekend in Seattle (disclaimer: it was not actually in Seattle; it was in Bellevue, a large neighborhood outside of Seattle.  It made the Seattlites VERY angry that this event is labeled Seattle).  At the end of the event each year, they do a Yarn Drop: the lobby has skeins of yarn hanging by fishing wire off a balcony, and hopeful knitters gather on the floor below to try and catch the REALLY good ones.

Photo courtesy of the Vogue Knitting Live Facebook page.
You can see me standing about halfway down, looking up expectantly.

It made me really, really anxious.

Seriously, I thought someone was going to pull my hair out to get at the skein above me, a lovely pink/yellow/purple number that reminded me of sunsets.  Glorious, yarny sunsets.  We stood their, our necks aching as we looked up at the generous gods above us, standing against the balcony with scissors and occasional pulling on fishing wire to make the skeins dance in terrible torment.

Ten minutes before the scheduled drop, I made a deal with the girl standing next to me.  If she caught the amazing blue and I caught the awesome pink, we would swap.  When the cutting of the strings began, and the yarn came raining down upon me, I caught that pink.  And I caught two others!

I turned around and gave one away to a lady behind me who just couldn't push through the crowd to catch one herself.  I'll call it a sacrifice to karma; she didn't maul me, so she got a free skein of green superwash.

And the girl next to me was as good as her word.  Here are my wondrous spoils:

I'm travelling this week, so I'll leave my discussion about my two classes until I can get back home and add relevant pictures.  But it was a great conference.  I spent more money than I meant to on yarn (again), but I picked up these treasures for free.  Add the knowledge I gained and the time I spent just enjoying knitting, and it was totally worth it.

Startitis

How many projects do you work on at once?  And how many is too many?

Assuming that we don't count the blanket I started five years ago that is still sitting forlornly in my closet waiting to be finished (let's be real, that is just never going to happen), I have

• 3 projects on needles and currently active
• 6 projects that just need a little bit of finishing (blocking, sewing seams, weaving in ends)
• 4 dead projects that need to be frogged
• and an ever-expanding queue of projects-yet-to-be.

Basically, I have this bad habit of starting a project and not finishing them before starting another project.  It's called startitis, basically a disease in the knitting community.  Check out the webcomic Worsted For Wear for a relevant example.  

Here's the first problem. I cast on in November (early November, mind you) for a scarf that I was going to give to a friend for Christmas.  And in my twisted, gnarled brain, I was going to finish that fingering weight, linen stitch scarf with 375 godforsaken stitches in a little over a month.  As an added challenge, I decided to knit the thing up in a different style of knitting than my usual, beloved throwing English.  Continental, I told myself, would be way faster.  And yes, Continental has been faster for this particular project, but I have to watch what I'm doing because I'm not familiar with the technique.  That means I can only work on this scarf when I don't need my eyes.  I'm (only) about halfway done with it, and it seems like it will never end.

So to fix the first problem, I have to cast on for another project.  This time, I want something to work on in my own style of knitting, English.  I choose lace, again in fingering weight yarn but at least it's on larger needles than the linen stitch scarf.  And the pattern is really interesting to me because it's not the same thing over and over again.  But, that's the problem.  I actually have to think about the pattern.  I can't memorize a lace pattern that's ten lines long, and I have to constantly be counting to make sure I decrease and yarnover in all the right places.  That means that I can only work on this project when I don't need my brain.  

So to fix the second problem, guess what I did?  That's right: I cast on for something else.  This one is a shawl that is so tediously simple that I can set my brain on auto-pilot and work on it while I'm in a meeting, watching tv, or reading a book on my Kindle.  The other great thing about it is that when I think I might want to burn it because I'm so bored with the pattern, that's just when the lace border will begin!  

Those are my three active projects right now.  The six projects that still need finishing are doomed to sit in the closet until I get really bored or until I have time to work on updating my Etsy shop.  They're looking at 6 months to life.  As for the dead projects, I will frog them when, and only when, I desperately need the bag they are sitting in or when I have a truly brilliant idea of what to do with that yarn.  

What's next up in your queue?  Because I'm thinking about casting on for slouchy cable hat...

A Knitter's Approach to Copyright

Since I have only designed one thing in my knitting career, 99.9% of the items I knit are from another designer's pattern.  They've come from magazines, books, Ravelry, other blogs, Reddit, and pamphlets.  But regardless of where they're published, most of the patterns I use have a copyright notice that I have to pay attention to, especially because I intend to sell a lot of my knit goods.  So what do knitters need to know about copyrights?

Knitty.com has a great laymen's guide to copyright for knitters that explains the basics.  Knitters have to be aware that copyright can apply to an entire written pattern including charts and instructions, stitch patterns, photos in a pattern, and knit goods that come from patterns.  Knitty's conclusion is that it's best to ask the copyright owner if you have any question about your usage.

A lot of knitters disagree on the matter.  Copyright can be really hard to enforce, especially when it comes to the gray area surrounding the sale of knit goods.  A designer would have to be particularly litigious, really adamant about the use of their patterns, for a knitter to see any consequences from infringement.  As such, a lot of knitters don't worry about copyright issues.

Honestly, I wish I could be one of those knitters.  There are a lot of pretty patterns out there that I want to make and would like to sell, but I hate the idea of stepping on another crafter's toes.  These designers have been kind enough to put their work out into the world (many of them for free), and I want to reward their kindness by actually paying attention to their wishes.  So I look for a copyright notice on every pattern I consider.  I think of copyright notices in three categories that I call restrictive, optional, and permissive.

Restrictive copyright notices retain all rights for the designer.  These designers are clear about their work being for personal use only.  I would not use patterns with these copyright notices for selling items:

• Copyright 2011.  All rights reserved.
• For personal, non-commercial use only.

Optional copyright notices are a little less definite.  You may or may not be allowed to use that pattern, and the only way to find out is to ask.  If I see something like this, I'll contact the designer for permission:

• Pattern and images © 2013
• No copyright notice

Permissive copyright notices, god bless them, are when designers specifically say that they don't mind their work being used for commercial purposes:

• Written pattern copyright 2012. Please do not reprint or repost this pattern, but please feel free to link to this page to share this pattern with others. You are welcome to sell items made from this pattern, but please link back to [the designer] with credit for the design on the listing or tag.
• "Please link this pattern to your listing if you do plan to sell from it."

Most often, permissive copyrights include a little request from the designer that you link back to their pattern so that they get credit for the design.  That's the type of copyright notice I chose for my Refreeze pattern because I want credit for the design but don't mind if people sell their items.  

There's a lot of wiggle room in knitting copyright, a lot of gray area to sludge through.  I just try to do what feels right, give credit where credit is due, and knit the things that make me happy.  

Beading Madness

Adding beads to my knitting is a relatively new skill for me.  Last year, I took an Advanced Lace with Beads class at Vogue Knitting Live with a fabulous designer, Laura Nelkin.  She gave very detailed instructions with helpful tips and tricks for both methods of beading, and by the end of the class I had a firm grasp on the techniques.  I even had a darling (though imperfect) little swatch:

This swatch used both techniques for beading: pre-strung and placed.  For the pre-strung, we used beading needles.  Actually, we used something cheaper and easier to find: floss threaders.

A great tutorial for using floss threaders to string beads onto yarn can be found here.  The same tutorial also explains how to use regular old thread or a yarn needle, but I like the floss threaders because they can take even the smallest beads.  Basically, all you have to do is put a few inches of your yarn through the big loop in the threader, then slide beads down the threader and onto the yarn.  For one of my latest projects, an Entomology Shawl, I had to pre-string more than 1200 beads. At least it turned out beautifully:

Each technique has their own advantages.  For pre-stringing, the majority of the work happens up front: you can't start knitting until you've strung as many beads as you're going to need for that ball of yarn.  But then, you just knit along without having to stop.  For placing beads, you have to stop knitting each time you need to bead, but you don't have all those beads adding weight or wearing down your yarn as you knit.  Pre-strung beads can float along the yarn in your work and more than one bead can be put on a single stitch or yarnover.  Placed beads stay put where you tell them to.  Pre-strung beads can have a smaller opening and accommodate thicker yarn because only one strand of yarn has to fit through the bead.  When you place a bead, both legs of a stitch have to go through it. Finally, though this isn't really an advantage or disadvantage, the two techniques look slightly different because pre-strung beads have the hole going horizontally in the work and placed beads have the hole going up and down.  

If I had to choose one technique and stick to it my entire life, I would go pre-strung.  I like being able to focus on the knitting and have the beads be a perk of the project rather than feel like my time is split throughout the project between knitting and beading.  But each pattern will be different, and I think the placed method is more common.  My Refreeze pattern happens to use a crochet hook to place the beads.  The Jeweled Cowl is another great example.  It's easier, I think, to conceptualize and design a pattern that places the beads while you go rather than pre-stringing.  As to which one is easier to knit, well, try them both and decide for yourself!