I’ve said it before but it bears repeating…knitwear designer Martina Behm is a genius.  For today’s blog post, I’ve knit a little shawl (shawlette, if you will) of her design, one that I’ve knit many times before.  It’s called Lintilla, and you can get the pattern here.

Elizabeth Zimmermann could reasonably be considered knitting royalty.  She’s written a number of books, has done a knitting series on PBS with her daughter Meg Swanson, and is widely considered to have brought the art of knitting back into vogue in the United States.

I posted a few weeks ago about a hat I’d made from a pattern of my own design.  In the course of that post, I referenced head measurements.  Specifically, my own head measurements.  And the hat was gorgeous and fit me beautifully.  However.  I have many (MANY) knit hats already and I honestly didn’t need another.  So I thought it would make a nice Christmas gift for a friend of mine.  So I left it in her cubby at work and didn’t think anything more about it until I finally got around to asking her a couple weeks later if the hat fit her.  No.  It didn’t fit her.  Because her head is smaller than mine.

In 2016, I decided for some reason that now escapes me that all three of the nephews needed handknit hats for Christmas.  And I wanted to use down some of my (really ridiculous) stash of sock yarn, so I went looking for hat patterns using fingering weight yarn.  And I didn’t find a single one that I liked.  I just wanted a simple hat pattern, but I couldn’t find one.  Most patterns were with worsted weight yarn.  So…I made one myself.

As my favorite sister-in-law’s birthday approaches, I had set aside a few things to send her that I thought she might enjoy. Amongst the pile of items to be mailed to her were a couple bars of my favorite soap “Shea’s All That,” made by a lady who runs an online business called Goodies Unlimited.

You’ll want to read part 1 first, naturally…

Some folks (my non-knit-worthy brother, for example) might question why anyone would hand knit socks in this day and age “when you can buy six pairs for $10 at Walmart.” (Walmart! Walmart? Seriously?) All I can say is that a pair of socks custom knit to fit your feet is a sumptuous luxury. Try it and see for yourself.

I like hoods. Not the hoods you find on your average coat or sweatshirt…I mean, I like those hoods just fine, functionally speaking. But what really catches my imagination is the more fantasy-style hoods; elven, medieval, Robin of the Hood’s merry men-style hoods.

I really do think that knitwear designers must be secret geniuses. Take the sock, for example: a hand knit sock is a tube that makes a 90° turn at the heel and then continues on being a tube until you get to the toe, where you close it up. Or, if you were a Philistine and started from the toe, you would end at the top of the sock.

I first saw the original store-bought C.C. Beanie hat on a co-worker, and took a bunch of pictures with the intent of reverse-engineering it myself for hand knitting. Imagine my delight to discover on Ravelry that someone else had already done that work!