Here are the fingerless mittens. That is supposed to be a rabbit's head and ears but perhaps I should have made the ears asymmetrical. The yarn is Heirloom Alpaca from Ozeyarn and is really nice. It reminds me more of angora than alpaca. This pair is going to the Colorado House Rabbit Society for sale in their gift shop.











I thought I'd answer my comments in the blog today. KarenC writes and says she ordered the Dancing Violets sock pattern from Blackberry Ridge and points out how much nicer the colors look than in their photo. I've noticed this phenomenon before Karen - sometimes it is hard to see the pattern in their photographs. I changed the heel in the sock to a Dutch heel instead of an afterthought heel - I'll have a photo of the first completed sock here this week.



Mare sent a neat link to this Fibonacci bunny chart HERE. Thanks Mare! I can always use more bunny charts. This week I'm going to try to collect all my rabbit charts and chart them out in my notebook for future reference.



Blue Earth Knitter writes that she signed up for the TKGA convention two months in advance and only got one of her class choices. That would annoy me as well BEK. I've never gone to any of the TKGA events or Stitches because I live far away from most of them.



Isabelle in France writes that she is designing her own fair isle sweater. I am in awe of anyone who can design a fair isle anything! I'm going to try to design a fair isle tam this month but all the colors are intimidating.



Peaches loves the compliments. I'll have new photos of her this week.

In my continuing efforts to actually design something (I'm working on some fingerless mittens in alpaca with rabbits on them) I'm learning a lot about different graph papers. I initially tried a rabbit chart in Annemor Sundbo's Everyday Knitting which looked adorable in the square graph chart in the book. Knitted up the rabbits looked more like anteaters with big ears. I do have some knitter's graph paper so I've been using that for charts and it really does make a difference.



Once you know your row and stitch gauge, you can go HERE and input the numbers and print out knitter's graph paper so your color charts will be exactly the same size as your stitches. How cool is that?







Here's a Peaches action shot. Happy weekend!

Here are the completed Salsa Socks done in Regia with an additional chart repeat to make up for the thinness of the Regia. I also changed the heel gusset colorwork.



With the amount of worrying I do about running out of patterns to knit (knitting may be quite popular now but colorwork seems practically dead) I often wonder why I don't just design my own stuff. Lately I make adjustments to every pattern I knit. In the Dancing Violets socks I'm substituting a Dutch heel for the afterthought type heel in the pattern. I do this stuff all the time and yet I dread designing my own stuff.



Now look at this web site HERE and scroll down to look at the beautiful gloves. Here is a knitter who designs his/her own colorwork glove patterns. They are beautiful and very inspiring. There is no reason I can't do the same thing so what am I waiting for?

This is a Dancing Violet sock, #6 in the Elite Feet Collection, from the kit from my favorite Blackberry Ridge Farm. The kit was a mere $16 and includes the three colors of their lace weight wool yarn. The gauge is 10.5 stitches per inch so this isn't speed knitting by any stretch of the imagination but I know I'm going to love these socks.

Apparently Lisa isn't the only knitted glove fanatic out there. Look at the photos from a terrific article, "Gloves from Handspun: Totally Tubular" by Jude Daurelle, Spin-Off Winter 1996. The in-depth article offers patterns for the Pansies in the Snow and Cashmere Lace Gloves shown in the first photo.











The brown gloves in the center of the second photo are made from handspun camel down. The article includes information on spinning for gloves, designing your own gloves, dividing stitches for fingers and bridging the gaps (spaces between fingers). The Interweave web site doesn't list this one as available but I think you can find old issues of Spin-Off on Ebay and via Google.



I've said it before and I'll say it again - Spin-Off is by far the best knitting magazine out there.