Free Knitting Patterns, Instructions, Projects & Designs.

I’m just full of exciting pattern news today!

First, the pattern for the Santa Fe Mitts is complete. You might remember that I originally came up with the idea from an ill-fated trip to Santa Fe. They were meant for my husband to wear when photographing in the cool New Mexico mornings. Instead he decided to break his elbow. Is that akin to the curse of the boyfriend sweater?

Here’s a re-creation of what might have been, had the photography workshop not gotten derailed:

The design is sized for a Mens’ Medium and Large. The hand is fair isle, and the pattern is charted in full color. The mitts feature a ribbed thumb. At the top, the stitch count decreases from the hand area so the ribbing stays snug around the fingers and the mitt doesn’t droop. And still speaking of ribbing, the cuff is meant to be long, so wrists stay warm even when bending.

Reflecting Southwest colors, I chose Lorna’s Laces Sock yarn for the oranges, blues and green. I wanted a rock and bark feel for the background, and elected to use some heather colors in Regia 4-Ply Wool. The sock yarn makes the mitts washable, a good idea for guys. My hubby does a wonderful job when he does the laundry; asking him to hand-wash delicate knits would be pushing it, though.

Here he is, recovering from a long day shooting pictures:

And showing he’s a tree hugger at heart:

The motifs I use in the design reflect, I hope, a Native American heritage, with hints of local mountains, water, and trees.

The design calls for small quanities of some colors. I’m going to make socks out of the unused portions of the skeins and balls. I’m thinking of using the Regia as a main color, since it wears so well on the foot, and then making a cool design for the leg out of the beautiful Lorna’s Laces.

In other news, I’m excited to have my Smock Top Sweater design included in the new issue of Knotions, the online magazine. There are more pictures of it along with the pattern itself on Knotions, but I wanted to post one I’m particularly fond of. I shot this very early one morning, and loved the way dawn’s light made the flower arrangement glow. It reminded me of old Dutch Masters still lifes – sort of a moody quality, but with colors that pop.

Thank you, Jody, for providing me with the opportunity to have my pattern published in your online magazine!

I’ve had fun raiding my sock yarn stash for the Santa Fe Mitts I’m designing. I settled on Lorna’s Laces for the oranges, blues and greens. The deep reddish color is named “Manzanita” – the arid climate plant with the lovely red stems. Perfect!

Regia 4-Ply provides the heathered background colors. I’m going for the look of rocks and tree bark.

After a few more adjustments, and my tech editor finding all the mistakes that I’m sure aren’t there when I read the pattern, and the Santa Fe Mitts pattern will be ready. It’ll be sized for men, in mens’ medium and large.

Last year my husband and I were enrolled in a week-long photo workshop put on by National Geographic. It was held in Santa Fe – we’d never been there before.  Some of the photography sessions started early in the morning.

Naturally, I wanted to accessorize my hubby. I latched onto  fingerless mitts as a way to keep his hands warm but dexterous in the cool mountain air. I looked at photos of the area, and grabbed some items from around our house that fit the area’s color palette. Then I got swatching. Here’s my inspiration board:

I like the earthy orange in the pot, but opted to replace its grayish/teal with the more vibrant blue in the picture frame. A splash of green made a good accent against the oranges, and represents the foliage found in the riparian parts of the region.

Sadly, my husband broke his elbow – spectacularly, poor guy – just before we were to go. So I put aside the project until now. I think it’ll be a great pattern for Fall, even if it is a year and a lot of miles away from Santa Fe!

I like the colors together and have finished a preliminary chart for the fair isle pattern. I love this stage of designing!

Remember that picture of the yarns as seen through the Teleidoscope? You don’t?? Ok, to refresh your memory here it is:

Here are how the colors came together in the actual swatch:

The swatch is my launching point for making fingerless gloves from a book I’ll be reviewing later in the month.  The book walks the knitter through all aspects of planning and designing her own projects. Now that I have a color combination that I like and gauge from my swatch, I’ll follow the author’s simple worksheets to create fingerless gloves just the way I want them.  I can hardly wait to get started!

What do kaleidoscopes and knitting have to do with each other? I’ve come to find out that the beautiful patterns we all enjoyed as kids looking through kaleidoscopes and the yarn colors we use as knitters today come together through a nifty gizmo that KnitPicks calls a Teleidoscope.

The Teleidoscope is a simple cardboard tube.

The clear ball lens at one end distorts whatever you’re looking at – in this case yarn. You look through the other end, down through mirrors that crate a kaleidoscopic effect.

I’m embarking on another stranded knitting project. It will – I hope – help bust a bit of my stash. I knew I wanted to use a teal-ish blue I have on hand, plus a creamy white. But I needed some accent colors to jazz it up. How would they look all together? This is where the Teleidoscope came in. Here are the two main colors as seen through the the Teleidoscope:

As you look through the Teleidocsope you add and subtract yarns to see their effect on each other, including the proportions of one color to another. I tried a variety of accent colors, and here’s how a mustard looked added to the original:

I kind of like it. But the pattern I’m using calls for “bright, multi-colored ribbing.” Hmm…. it needs more. I threw in a bit of brown I have left over from a scarf. And then tossed in a coral from another project. Here are how the five balls of yarn looked through the Teleidscope: 

I’ll use all five of these colors in the ribbing for my new project – fingerless gloves. The colorful stripes will make a nice accent to the teal and white hand, and will maintain the pattern’s ethnic tradition. I can hardly wait to swatch!

Just (barely) in time for Christmas knitting, I have finished designing the Christmas Smock Top Socks. This is what the Mystery Sock decided it wanted to become. I love the way the smocking stitch lends a quilted, cozy look to the sock’s cuff. It took some trail and error to come up with the right number of stitches and rows to form an appealing look once the cuff is stretched out over the leg. I’m happy with how the proportions turned out.

I chose Regia 4-ply sock yarn for its crisp stitch definition. In the pattern I call for 9 sts per inch rather than the 7.5 sts on the ball band. I just hate walking around on too-loose knitting. It feels like some kind of couture torture involving twine! At 9 sts per inch, the Regia make a smooth, kind-to-the-feet fabric.

The sock is knitted from the cuff down. An important design consideration was that the cuff must be knit flat so the smocking’s horizonal bars meet up properly. Trying to knit the cuff in the round wouldn’t work because the rounds are really spirals. The “rows” would never match up.

Once the cuff is completed, the yarn is joined and the rest of the sock is knitted in the round. I hid some ribbing under the cuff to make sure the sock stays up through all the Christmas day festivities.

If you like the way Christmas Smock Top Socks truned out, you may want to check out the Pattern Store.

…and red. I just love Christmas, which may explain the Mystery Sock’s morphing into a holiday design. Jimmy the Vicious Attack Cat doesn’t care about seasonal matters. He’s just glad to have a project to curl up near.

So I’m working on a new sock pattern. For now I’m just calling it the Mystery Sock, since it’s a mystery to me why I can’t get the design written faster.

I’m using Regia 4-Ply. I am SUCH a stickler for sock soles, I always end up knitting on a smaller needle than called for to get a tighter fabric. There’s nothing worse than taking the time to knit a sock, then have it feel like you’re walking around on twine when you wear it. 

The ball band for Regia 4-ply indicates 7.5 st per inch. But even at 8 st the weave seemed too loose for me. So I stuck a stitch marker in my work, reduced the needle size, and got 9 st per inch. You can see that the stitches to the right of the marker have that “stringy” look, while the fabric to the left looks nice and smooth, like something your feet will appreciate.

Knitters should be able to obtain this gauge on #1 needles. As I work through the design process, I hope that when people knit up my patterns their feet will be glad for the tighter gauge I suggest.

This is where it all started. I suppose I could have put an end to it at the first hint that I was going to get obsessed. Again. But I ignored that inner voice which cried “Stop while you can!”

Three skeins of Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock yarn. That’s all it took. (Plus a visit from my friend Mary, who has so much creativity that apparently she left some behind for me when she went back to Ohio.)

I didn’t mean to design a sock. I certainly didn’t mean to design anything in fair isle. But the shmooey yarn with bright spring colors drew me in and demanded I grab some needles. A design snuck into my mind as if it were a gremlin….  

With the help of the Stitch & Motif Maker software, here’s how the swatching process evolved for Mary’s Garden Socks.

A lot of trail and error, ripping out, starting over, and here is the final product:

 At a later date I’ll post more on the Stitch & Motif Maker, but you can imagine how helpful it is to be able to plan this sort of design out on a just-the-right-proportion grid.

If you like this sock you can find it my Original Designs in my Pattern Store. I find knitting it to be a nice dose of fair isle fun, and I hope you do to!