The Mission Falls booklet that I coordinated is finished and will ship to stores on August 15. There were three designers, Galina Carroll (who doesn’t have a blog), Simona Mercahnt-Dest, and me.
It’s available only through yarn shops at this time, and only those shops that carry Mission Falls yarns.
You can see all of the pattern pictures here.
The featured yarn is the new 136 wool, a DK superwash which comes in the same colors as the 1824 (worsted) wool.
This is a pile of Lorna’s Laces Green Line DK in the color Chagrin.
It’s for a magazine pattern, and I actually got to choose my own yarn! Usually, you submit sketches and they tell you what yarn it will be, in what weight, and which color…so this is the first time that I’ve gotten to make this choice for a print publication. Kinda cool.
I’ll tell you more about it as the time comes near.
Here are my swatches:
I absolutely love the texture of that honeycomb cable pattern. I decided to use the honeycomb cable and the two-strand rope-looking one. Though I really like the look of the three-strand braided cable, the ones I chose to use both cable on the same row / round, so it’s easier to keep track of.
This yarn is so pretty! It’s a true red, and is a hand dye, so it has some variation in the color. (This is called a “semi-solid.”)
One thing I’m noticing in my work is that I’m starting to add in more texture. My first few published designs were pretty texture-free, just playing with color and shape. And now I’m starting to fill in the outline. To add all-over texture stitches, and to play with cables and how they grow out of nothing:
Or how they grow from the shoulder increases:
So, even though I still love the raglan construction, I’m evolving. I will probably always love the raglan.
Sometime I’ll post some photos of the sweaters my grandma knit. She was a big raglan-er, too. Two of the ones I inherited are in storage, but I’ll see if my mom has some in her closet that we can see.
Things around here are busy-busy. I’m in my third official month as freelancer (with no “real” job on the side) and it’s a little weird. It’s hard not to just sign up for every job that comes up, and to really think about my time. Since I stopped working so that I could spend time with Mazie…I need to be really conscious of what I can actually handle and what I should pass up.
I’ve felt sort of out of the loop for the last few months, with a brand new baby and was not really paying attention to what’s going on in the larger knitting universe, so it’s especially tempting to overbook. It’s just going to take some getting used to and some experimentation to figure out what my schedule should be like. It’s really nice, though, to be able to “think knitting” all the time.
(in a good way!)
I finally have a chance to work with this gorgeous yarn from Textiles a Mano. I bought two hanks at Knitting in the Heartland when I taught my workshop for the Sunflower Knitters Guild this past spring.
This yarn is called Dali. It’s a blend of silk and rayon. It’s shiny, shimmery, and has just gorgeous depth to both color and texture.
I’m making a sweater, and I’ve only got 2 hanks so I wrote to Laura for more. Luckily, she was able to stick another hank in the mail for me so I’ll be able to do sleeves!
SO…I finished my Cleo a couple of weeks ago and am just getting around to posting pics.
Here’s one of me and Mazie…that’s a new dress that I made for her. Grandma helped me with the front pleats, but I did the rest.
Here’s a mosaic:
If you clik on it, you go to the set of all of the pics.
I added the one of me just in the dress so that you can see what I’m wearing under the sweater, and how it might affect the shape. It’s gathered at the waist and kind of poufy, so it adds a little volume right in my tummy area.
This pattern is *almost* ready! I just have a couple of nitpicky things to fix and it should be available next week.
Nathan took these new pics on his lunchbreak today on our back patio. I hung up the sheet thinking it’d remove some of the distraction of the house and plants, the cement wall and high chain link fence (our backyard neighbors have their house done up like Fort Knox, it’s rediculous!) But the light was doing really funny things today and I of course couldn’t wrangle Mazie long enough to iron the sheet. ANYWAY…the pics give you an idea of what this looks like on a middle-aged person with a little extra padding! 
(…on a triple-digit temperature day in the middle of the desert…)
Next time i use a backdrop, I’ll use something long enough that I can also stand on it…like at the Portrait Studio! The cement is kind of distracting.
I like this shot because my tattoos look cool:
