Adventures in Handmade
If you don't care about knitting please follow aherl.tumblr.com
I am a writer & knitter from Boston.
This tumblog is a collection of yarn-y things I've met and liked. Anything tagged "#herlihyknits" is something that I made. Please click "My Crafts" To see all posts containing my projects.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Vortex Spiral Afghan | Wendy Knits Lace
My current Work in Progress! It’s my first blanket for big people!
I have a knitting book called Wendy Knits Lace and it has a lot of amazing patterns. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who’s interested in lace. It shows its versatility (for example, really cozy knit hats), because sometimes lace gets a reputation for being super delicate, mind numbingly time consuming, and altogether not very practical. A lot of the patterns are good for mixing and matching yarns, as well. For example, this pattern, when completed in a fingering weight yarn, can be a circular shawl as opposed to a blanket, which is cool.
I’m getting really into lace right now, and found a ton of beautiful shawl patterns on ravely that I’m itching to try.
I have another WIP that is a mini shawl that is like bandana sized, but it looks fugly as hell on the needles so you’ll only be seeing that bad boy when it has become an #FO
Welcome back to the world
One of my friends from school is a beautiful knitter, and her blogging at With Pointed Sticks has inspired me to get back into knitting blogging. I have a few WIPs and now that I’m in New Zealand, the land of more sheep than people, I’m hoping to make a lot of my souvenirs for people.
But seriously
You should check out Susan’s site, she makes a lot of beautiful stuff
Baby sweater for my friend’s baby. He’s obsessed with lost.
baby hat!
Hat
Cowl
A scarf for a friend at work. Promised to have it done by the nd of march. Aka not sleeping till the end of march
Start of a simple swatch. Part of a new project!
400 Knitting Stitches {A Knitting Book Review}
I bought this book a while ago because I really thought the photos were lovely and 400 seemed like an awful lot. I recently got a chance to actually come through all of the patterns and have tried out a few on scarves and the like.
I sort of, so far, run hot and cold with this book. The way it’s organized is extremely helpful—It’s seperated into sections by type of stitches (Slipped Stitches, Cross Sitches & Cables, etc) and there are many variations and all of the stitches are beautiful. However, to save space, a lot of the instructions are put as succinctly as possible, sometimes sacrificing clarity.
For instance, it takes a while to figure out if a phrase like, “For symmetry, work on a multiple of 17 + 5 sts, + 1 edge st on each side” means truly a multiple of 22 stitches or if it means a multiple of 17, plus five stitches after the fact as well as the edge stitches. I’ve attempted many stitches from the book and honestly am still not 100% on this. It seems to work sometimes one way and sometimes the other.
Other times, the book includes charts with no key in text. I usually prefer to read patterns written outright as opposed to charts, so I haven’t dug through the book to find where they key to the charts actually is.
I feel as though this book is better served as a long term reference as opposed to a quick one. I have a lot of scrap yarn, and I really wish to attempt every stitch in the book on a swatch sized scale and do something neat like sew them into a quilt. Then, after being familiar with the stitches I could look back and reference them when designing patterns. the thing is if you’re looking like, “Oh, I need a quick guide for an intricate cable to fill up some space on a scarf,” it is quite an annoyance to intemperate the patterns in this book.
I may revisit this review once I’ve sat down with my only goal to be to attempt the patterns in this book, as opposed to adding patterns from this book to other things.
I’d still recommend it if you like having these sorts of books, because the stitches are really beautiful.
