blue bee studio

Millrace

2012-02-10T11:53:00.000-08:00

Featured in Quince and Co.'s new Scarves, etc. e-book, Millrace is a long, slightly crescent-shaped scarf that begins and ends with just 4 stitches. The undulating lace border is worked at the same time as the stockinette body of the scarf. A twisted rib provides a visual transition between the two parts, and also serves as an aid in keeping track of increases and decreases in the stockinette portion of the scarf.

Like the rushing water it is named for, Millrace's lace edging keeps things moving along, enticing you to knit "just one more" repeat. It's an intuitive and entertaining knit.

The lovely Finch

I got a bit of a sneak peek at this yarn last fall, and couldn't wait to get my mitts on it. The latest addtion to Quince and co.'s lineup, Finch is a very biddable little 4-ply that renders stitches with a crisp, sculptural quality. It was perfect for this design, combining next-to-skin softness with wonderful stitch definition.

Seaweed and sand dollars

2012-01-27T09:28:00.000-08:00

While I love knitting complicated lace, when it comes to wearing a lace shawl, sometimes simplicity wins out. Ebbtide is an elegantly simple shawl that dresses up or down equally well.

Worked from the top down, the pattern features waving bands of stockinette and feather and fan lace that show off tonal variations in semi-solid and tonally dyed yarns to great advantage.

Entertaining as the body of the shawl is to work, the real fun comes at the end – the feather and fan flows into a band of Sand Dollar lace, a gorgeous circular motif that gives Ebbtide a rather modern feel.

The Sand Dollar edging – a variation on Barbara Walker’s lovely Sunspots pattern – only looks complicated. It's surprisingly straightforward to work, and makes a stunning finish to the shawl.

Bumble

2012-01-10T09:55:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the yarn just tells you what it is going to be.

As soon as I saw the three colors of Quince and Co's Chickadee sitting together on my desk, the idea for this hat came to me – and I knew there had to be a bee in it somewhere.

The design features a rolled edge, corrugated ribbing, and stranded colorwork. On the top of the hat, a bee motif is worked over one segment of the crown. After blocking, the body and head of the bee are recolored using duplicate stitch.

The tam uses approximately half a skein of each of three colors of Quince and Co. Chickadee – Storm, Carrie's Yellow, and Egret – and is sized to fit an average woman's head.

The Bumble pattern is available for purchase in my Ravelry pattern store.

Blocking Bumble

Blocking tams has been a bit of a problem for me in the past. It's not always easy to find a dinner plate of the right shape and size – in fact, mine are square. I've pinned tams out to a blocking board, but I wasn't that happy with the results. No matter how many pins I place, I always seem to get points along the edge.

For Bumble, I thought I'd try making a custom blocking form instead. I took a piece of Gator Board – the tougher cousin of Foamcore – marked out a 10" circle with a compass, and cut it out with a matt knife. Gator board is not easily affected by water and since the core is expanded foam, it's pinnable.

I slipped the damp tam over the form, matched the fold line to the outer circumference of the disk, and pinned it along the edge. Then to keep from crushing the band and to allow for air circulation I set it on top of a small box that fit just inside the band. The tam dried quickly, and came out flat and round.

Bounty

2011-08-25T22:04:00.000-07:00

Growing vegetables at 6000 feet above sea level can be a bit of a challenge. Tomatoes, squashes and eggplant all resent our chilly nights. It might be 85° F (30° C) during the day, but as soon as the sun goes down all the day's heat rushes away into the upper atmosphere. Our nighttime temperatures frequently get down to 35° F (2° C), even in the middle of August.

To make matters worse, this year winter seemed to drag on forever – it snowed 9 inches on May 28th, and another another few inches in early June. All through June, and much of July, the seedlings just sat there. Waiting.

Now in late August we have a springtime bounty. Peas! Shelling peas, sugar snap peas, and snow pea pods in abundance. Fava beans and lettuce aplenty. The yellow wax beans are almost pickable, and the kohlrabi is forming globes.

And though we have to cover them every night and uncover them in the morning – tomatoes! Aaaah.

Litchfield

2011-08-01T00:43:00.000-07:00

My Great-Grandmother Nettie Mae Colby was a prolific knitter, and what she made was mostly mittens. She made them for her family, for the hired men who worked on the family farm, for folks around town. In this she was abetted by my Great-Grandfather James, who would bring her reports of children with cold hands and the approximate dimensions of the needed mittens.

The mittens she made were extremely fine, knit on steel pins, probably #000 or #0000, and apparently very warm. My mother had a treasured pair that she lost some years ago. She mentions them every winter. This past year one of her cousins unearthed a pair, and passed them along to me. I made a fairly faithful reproduction of them for my mom – though I could only bring myself to use #00 needles.

Nettie Mae taught me some interesting tricks with those mittens: the rolled-edge cuff, and the purled gutter around the thumb gusset. Somewhere along the way, I became rather fascinated with mitten construction, and came up with a few of my own improvements. The result is Litchfield.

I have always liked the anatomical shaping of “technical” mittens, those used for skiing or ice-climbing, and used them as a model for the shaping that I built into the design. And where Nettie Mae made a purely functional mitten, I can’t resist embellishing those small blank canvases with a little balanced asymmetry.

Designing a companion hat was a natural progression from the mitten. The suggestion for its shape came from Twist Collective's editor, Kate Gilbert. As soon as I heard the word 'cloche', I saw the hat perfectly – what fun to take that asymmetrical cable, and make it run around the band. The technical challenge was to create a brim with enough structure to keep it from going floppy as soon as the hat was washed. My solution was to use a ribbing pattern that comes together before the rolled edge to form a sort of buttress to the brim. It was quite an interesting puzzle to work out.

The pattern name? It's the New Hampshire town where Great-Grandma Nettie Mae's steel pins were kept so busy.

Plowshare

2011-07-26T20:43:00.000-07:00

I've just set up my Ravelry store and uploaded my first pattern: Plowshare, a unisex sock pattern that pairs chevron-patterned ribs with slipped-stitch ribs.

It's a pattern I designed for my brother Paul, a connoisseur of wool socks. I made his pair from MadelineTosh Sock, in the Fig colorway, and for his size 10.5 foot, I used nearly all of the 395 yd skein.

Spinning and Knitting

2010-12-23T17:14:00.000-08:00

When you spend a lot of time sitting, some things are inevitable. The one big drawback to having become such an avid knitter is the enhancement of my, er – bum. And not in a good way. But I've recently found that it may not always be necessary to forgo excercise in order to get some knitting time in.

With the change in season and snow on the ground, I brought my road bike inside and set it up on a bike trainer in the guest room. I was sitting in there working on a pair of Anne Hanson's lovely Curling mitts, trying hard to avoid the reproachful glare of the unused bike in the corner when it struck me. Why not work on them on the bike?

I rigged a little bag to hold my yarn, set up my laptop so that I could see the pattern, clicked in and started pedaling.

Now I'm not going to pretend that I got as good a workout as doing a Chris Carmichael training DVD, but it was not bad either. I quickly got into a rhythm of knitting a couple rounds while spinning at as quick a pace as I could maintain, then setting the work aside and pedaling hard for a few minutes between rounds. There is an unexpected harmony between purring along in stockinette stitch, and spinning the pedals, concentrating on making nice round strokes.

Obviously, this knitting/riding thing works best with small projects like mittens, socks, hats or cowls. I don't see myself working on large sweater – unless I invent a gizmo to hold the work off my lap. (A bib?) Yarn management is key – I have to focus a bit to keep from having a loop so long it could tangle in the pedals. And it helps to open a window to keep the room cool enough so that I don't get the work all sweaty.

While I intially thought that this would be a way to at least get a little exercise, one happy consequence of the knit-cycling is that the more time I spend on the bike, the more time I want to spend there – so I've been getting in some full-fledged, non-knitting workouts, too.

Finally, although it goes without saying, I'll say it anyway: You won't be seeing this act on the open road, no matter how ace I am at no-handed riding.