I hope to have Part II of Creating your Own Stranded Patterns posted here by 4th of July. Also, I have decided to do each pattern using eco-friendly yarns separately instead of a booklet. The pattern for the fingerless bamboo mitts I showed this week is now available on Lulu and Ravelry.

Finally, tomorrow, June 28, 2008, there will be another Rabbit Adoptathon in Albuquerque at the eastside Petco (on Lomas) from 10 am to 2 pm. This will be in conjunction with the celebration of the House Rabbit Society's 20 year birthday so they'll have cake (carrot of course) for everyone and presents. You can talk to other bunny people and get rabbit questions answered and meet some adorable adoptable bunnies. Here are a few of the available candidates: Belle, Chocolate Drop, and Fiona. Personally I think Belle with the gray spots is my type of bunny because of the goofy look on her face.

I have really been trying hard to not use so many bright colors but this hot pink alpaca magically jumped into my shopping cart as bright colors always seem to do around me. This is my second pair of Arctic Spring Mittens (on Ravelry HERE). In my defense, I really tried to tame the hot pink by using darker colors on the cuff but this color (Carmine Pink, Elann's Pure Alpaca Fina) won't be tamed. The other colors are Spruce, Everglades, and Alpine Violet.

These mittens are even brighter in person. I was planning on giving these away for a holiday gift but I'm not sure I can part with them.



I am seriously in love with this yarn for stranded color knitting. I already have plans to knit a pair of gloves, some Nordic mittens from my beloved Norwegian Rauma Selbustrikk booklet, and perhaps even some Christmas stockings.

CREATING YOUR OWN STRANDED PATTERNS, PT. 1

Creating your own colorwork knitting projects is really a lot of fun and I encourage everyone to try it. Here's one of my first efforts for a child's garden leaves hat with a picket fence around the cuff.



Before you start I'd recommend knitting a few stranded color knitting patterns so you understand the basics. It is helpful to understand how to deal with long floats, tension issues, and the inevitable color pattern jogs that occur at the end of the row. If you want to design a pattern that uses 3 or more colors per row or is knit flat it is good to know that these colorwork methods are more difficult to knit. Also, it is a good idea to understand the difference between intarsia and stranded color knitting so you understand what will work in a stranded chart pattern and what is better done with intarsia.

The easiest way to make charts is to use graph paper and colored pencils. Most graph paper you buy at the office supply place is square which is okay but generally the knitted stitch is a rectangle. (In stranded color knitting the knitted stitch is actually closer to a square because the floats pull in the stitches but it still depends on the yarn and gauge and pattern, etc. Once I knitted a cross stitch pattern and the end result looked nothing like it did on the chart.)

To get graph paper that is exactly the same size as your stitches, you can use this free online graph paper. You simply add in the calculations from your gauge swatch and then you print out graph paper that is the same size as your knitted stitches.



If you want to share your stranded knitting patterns with others you're probably going to want another method of creating charts. You can use Microsoft Excel; Marnie MacLean wrote an excellent tutorial on how to do this HERE.

Software used specifically to create needlework charts varies in price from free to several hundred dollars. If you don't mind squares, HERE is a free program for counted cross stitch software. Denise's Needleworks (also a great source for Rauma patterns) sells a knitter's chart software for $10. This program also generates only squares and the link includes a free demo you can try.




I personally use Stitch and Motif Maker. I found the best price at Knitpicks and it is drop dead easy to use. There's a little tutorial and when you're done you completely understand the program. There's a free demo of the program HERE.

Two other programs to look into are Knit Visualizer and Stitch Painter. They both have free demos you can download as well.

Once you have the ability to make a chart then you can start creating a design. You can simply start playing around with patterns or you can find some charts. Most Fair Isle and Norwegian books contain lots of charts for color knitting - my two personal favorites are the inexpensive reprints of Sheila McGregor's Traditional Scandinavian Knitting and Traditional Fair Isle Knitting. There are also many knitting charts online - check HERE for a zillion Latvian mitten and glove patterns and HERE for some lovely Scandinavian charts.

Finally I want to provide links to two fun free online programs: KnitPro generates a color chart from any .JPG image and Palette Generator provides a color palette from any photo.

It is quite hot here so this week I'm planning to spend some serious time in this chair in the shade knitting up a storm.

Here are the fingerless mitts with a sore thumb gusset - they are the first of 4 patterns I'm doing for a booklet of stranded patterns in eco-friendly yarns due at the end of July .

These are knit in Crystal Palace's Panda Cotton which is a bamboo/cotton/nylon blend. I used 1 skein of black and periwinkle for these. I think this yarn might be fun to use for socks as well.

I hope to have the completed fingerless mitts from bamboo yarn to show you tomorrow. Next on the agenda is a pair of heart-themed mittens in Karaoke which is made from soy silk (tofu manufacturing leftovers I guess.) Also, this week I want to do a series of posts on how to create your own stranded knitting patterns - I just need to gather all the links.

Go check out these gorgeous mitten kits from Finland. All the yarns are naturally-dyed with plants and mushrooms. I'm really trying to resist by telling myself I already have 45 million pairs of stranded mittens and that it is currently the middle of June in the hot desert.

I have to get busy cooking. Every Sunday I work hard to use up the fruits and veggies from the previous week because on Mondays we get the next box of organic goodies from our CSA (community-supported agriculture). To find a CSA near you check out Local Harvest. Here's a photo of the contents of one of our recent boxes. Our wonderful CSA, Los Poblanos Organics, is a year-round CSA with items from regional organic farms. That yellow watermelon was seriously good.



And here is some more New Mexico sunset action for you.

Wow! Panda Cotton really takes a licking and keeps on ticking. Can you believe I've ripped out this fingerless mitt 4 times so far? The yarn still looks great after all that abuse. The first time I ripped I decided to make the mitts longer. The second time was because I wanted to change one of the patterns. The third time I ripped to remove the doodads between the stars because it was messing up the gusset colorwork. The fourth time I ripped to change the gusset. Now that I've seen the photo I realize what I need to do to change the gusset again. Yes, that involves more ripping.



I really do like the bamboo in this yarn though. Can anyone recommend any other bamboo yarns I should try?

Bubbles the house rabbit and Jack the cat still don't like each other after five months. Occasionally I will see them coexisting peacefully but it mainly involves either Bubbles annoying Jack by sitting on his tail or Jack will hide behind a door and scare Bubbles when she enters the room. She then goes under a bed and thumps for a while.

At least they agree on what team is going to win the World Series this year.






Poor Jack looks demented in every single photo I take of him.

I'm working on a little booklet of 4 stranded knitting patterns using some of the new "green" fibers. Unfortunately Elann's Canapone hemp yarn is probably not going to make the cut. I love this yarn for its shininess but as you can see from the top swatch below, it is just too fine. That swatch was knit using size 0 dpns and the colorwork is still too loose.



The bottom swatch uses Crystal Palace Panda Cotton which is a bamboo/cotton/nylon blend. I was originally planning some summer gloves with lacy cuffs but this yarn is very prone to splitting. For some reason splitty yarns don't bother me in colorwork but they drive me insane in lace knitting. I think this swatch may become some fingerless mitts instead.

We planted a vegetable garden with a unique solution for our many gophers, cottontails, squirrels and other plant-munching creatures. DH made containers of chicken wire with a double wire bottom. He dug the holes, inserted the wire container and some dirt, and then the plant. I have been gardening disastrously long enough in New Mexico that I still think this method has only a 10% chance of success.

In the photo above you see some tomatoes planted right next to our trombe wall. A trombe wall is a passive-solar design element; basically it collects heat due to the windows right next to an earthen wall. There are vents that shoot heat into the house through the trombe wall in winter. Supposedly the angle of the sun is supposed to keep the trombe wall from heating up in summer but ours is always quite warm to the touch so I'm not sure there are any energy savings when you add in the extra cooling costs. Anyway, we thought the tomatoes might like the extra heat there.

I've been having computer issues but at least that has given me a lot of time for spinning with my spindles. I'm over halfway done on the angora blend.



For Memorial Day DH took me on his favorite hike in the Sandia Mountains.



I'm glad I wasn't around when this Ponderosa pine fell.



This squirrel looks a bit demented - I do love the long ears though.




We even saw a UFO. I guess it is some sort of rainwater collection device.