Todd Gibson

With shawls, I am finding that I am not an agressive enough blocker So they come out smaller.

As for hats—2 very l9vely patterns that were quick knits—windshief, & Beeswax(cables). beeswax looks so complex. But the patternis SO intuitive.

And sometimes you just have to out the needles down and walk away for a bit. Thdre is nothing…[Read more]

Oh, and just to add, I’ve been very happy with the Brooklyn Tweed patterns thus far, everything works out pretty well. I had a lot of growth in a pattern where I didn’t block the swatch but obviously that was my fault. Blocking is quite the art form in itself, I might add. It’s *very* easy to undo months of good work with improper handling of a wet piece.

I really feel your pain on this one. I also feel that knitting is so labor-intensive, it’s not worth it to use yarns you don’t love, so even a small project gets very expensive very quickly. The problem is that swatching it so much slower and more expensive than doing a muslin for something sewn. You have to knit a big swatch, using the same yarn…[Read more]

I can’t say I’ve found knitting patterns across the board to be unreliable, but I do think that there are so many factors that can affect how a project turns out – gauge, needle size, changes in yarn after blocking, etc. It is easy to get an off result. I went through a shawl phase a couple years ago and I found that it was more difficult to get…[Read more]

I am also an obsessive reader of project notes on Revelry before starting something – I usually at least scroll through every picture on the project pages and click on a few. I love it when people leave really detailed notes about finished measurements so I try to do the same with my projects. With shawls I think I have found that I needed to do…[Read more]

I am a frog-er when things don’t go right in knitting. Nice yarn is expensive and I am cheap! It is true, though, that after I frog a project I tend not to want to pick the needles back up for awhile. I always end up going back to it, though. There is something wonderful about knitting, curled up in a chair, with a cup of tea or coffee at your…[Read more]