Weeks of February 12th - March 12th

After several weeks' work, I'm pleased to say that I've helped my dad, William Ruleman, open an online shop for his artwork: RulemanArt on Etsy. He's a painter, as I've mentioned before, and we've been working on having giclee prints made of some of his work. I found a company here in Cleveland, Jakprints, which does excellent work. He has one print listed so far, and more are in the process of printing. It's entitled Summer at Huckleberry Bald and is one of my favorites:



The prints are 8" by 10", printed on 100% cotton museum-quality paper, and are almost indistinguishable from the "real thing." I'm REALLY excited about them and will probably order some for myself and as gifts at some point.

As for me - I finished my cape pattern and have it listed here and on Ravelry:



Oh, and I knit another Baby Surprise Jacket for a new baby in the family:

Weeks of January 9th - February 11th

Has it really been a whole month? It's lucky that weekly blogging wasn't one of my resolutions. Joann Fabrics has had me working a lot of 6 a.m.-2 p.m. shifts, which I like just fine but they usually leave me too tired to blog. I suppose I could blog on weekends, but I'd prefer to spend the time with my husband. Priorities.

I've been busy on the design front. Last month I wrote two patterns for a local customer, both for children's clothes. Over the past week I designed and knit a superwash wool cape with Fair Isle designs; still need to type up the pattern, then photograph and list it. Right now I have a baby blanket on the needles.

As for reading, I've been working my way through the Ender's Game quartet; I'm on Xenocide at the moment. Most of my reading time comes during breaks at work, so I'm a little behind on my book-a-week quota, but the Orson Scott Card books are rather long. I finished Speaker for the Dead rather quickly, partly because it's a great book, but mostly because I got a 24-hour stomach bug a couple of weeks ago and didn't have the energy to do anything but lie down and read! I felt so icky I couldn't even knit.

And I'm pleased to be able to share some more Mother Bear Project photos featuring my bears! I found a bunch of last summer's bears with children in Botswana. Here are a few of them:



Now I'm yearning to knit more bears...

My busy weekend

Three hats - that's what I achieved from Friday through Sunday last weekend. All three are for my men's Fair Isle line. And yesterday and today, between a couple of job interviews, I've been working steadily on a yoke sweater (for myself, for once!) while watching my way through Buffy on Netflix. Awesome show - it's the second time I've watched it through - and a great sweater-knitting companion. Next up - a jacket pattern for Etsy and a sweater for my husband.

Fair Isle capelet thingy

Many will say that they're either a "process knitter" or a "product knitter" - meaning they either knit because they love the process more or because they love the finished product more. I'm somewhere in between - I love the knitting process, but I have a ferocious drive to finish everything I start. (Finish it or, if I don't like the way it's going, frog it.) Though I usually have two to three projects going on at a time, I hate having too many pieces sitting around on the needles at one time. This piece was in hibernation for a while before I figured out where I wanted to go with it; I started it a few months ago, put it aside for a while until its unfinished presence started bugging me, then brought it out and finished it last week. The yarn I used was Vickie Howell Rock, a nifty soysilk/wool/hemp blend, to work a Fair Isle design. Once I'd finished, I still wasn't sure how I felt about it until I broke out the iron and blocked it - which flattened the stockinette-stitch edge beautifully and gave the piece a nice drape, just as I'd hoped it would do. It's not so perfect that I would put it up for sale - especially since it'll probably need reblocking after every wash - but it was a good experimental piece for this yarn.

Tam finished!

Finished my first Fair Isle project this afternoon - a tam I knit with some glorious wool I bought to do colorwork. It's set me on a yarn binge, buying up lots of wool and wool blends in different colors so I can experiment more with this style.

This tam can't be called Fair Isle precisely, since it's knit in a larger gauge and in something other than Shetland wool, but the patterns and technique I used are traditional. I made this one for myself, a kind of experimental copy or mock-up before I make another for my shop. The next one will be almost identical, so I can model this one for Etsy photos. This first one has a few mistakes in the pattern, but I'm pretty pleased with it as a first attempt.