fringeassociation.com

Our Tools, Ourselves interview, but I want to get it into New Favorites (which I literally reference when looking for knitting projects) and these sorts of confluences are what tend to lead me to such posts. When I was going through all of my favorited shawl patterns in putting together the most recent New Favorites installment, I ran across Julie Hoover’s Walsh (top), which I had saved as a shawl pattern because it’s literally a little triangle that would also look great scaled up to shawl proportions, and even at pattern scale might double as a neck kerchief like the one I made my mom long ago and still want for myself. And a matter of days later, along came Denise Bayon’s Now I find myself wanting to knit one of each — and why not, when they’re perfect little portable warm-weather projects.

As a young woman living in New York, I worked in the fashion industry as the VP of a public relations agency for many years. The meetup is a sew-and-tell of sorts where participants pledge to make 25% of their wardrobe by hand. I try to keep my tools to a minimum and buy the best quality and most beautiful tools I can afford. That’s where I cut fabric, sew, knit, work on my laptop and drink hot coffee.

If you’re using the yarn specified in a pattern, you might find out you don’t really like it, or would prefer it knitted at a denser or looser gauge. The swatch in the center right above is my first swatch for my Amanda cardigan, and in addition to establishing my gauge, it gave me a chance to get comfortable with some cable motifs I hadn’t done before at that point If, like in the cable example in No. 3, you consciously decide to knit at a gauge different than pattern gauge, then knowing your gauge (the size of your stitches) in comparison to the pattern gauge is the way to control the outcome. If, on the other hand, she likes the look of her smaller blocks but wants to use them to make a wall the same size as mine, again, knowing the size (the gauge) of her blocks is the key.

Since I first published images of this hat back in June 2017 — the Debutant Hat, originally designed for use in my classes — I’m happy to have finally had the time to put it into pattern format and publish it through Ravelry, where it’s now available for download! Debutant was inspired by a couple of mid-century hat patterns I love but was, as noted, explicitly designed as an introduction to cable knitting and chart reading. So it’s a great first pattern if you’re new to either, and a quick, pleasant knit for anyone already versed in those skills.