Knit Off: I'm behind already

I leapt into this challenge feet first and had been happily knitting along on my sweater making great progress. I had knit about 12" of the back and was ready to start the armhole shaping. I was acting rather smug about it too, flashing it to Marsha, showing off how much I had knit, until I reread Marsha's blog post about our Knit Off yesterday.

Heather has her sweater well under way. She has altered her pattern and the changes over the pattern may slow her down. That girl wants to win.

I did make a change to my pattern, I cut four inches out of it. The pattern book said the smallest size would be 40" around when finished. I wanted a less bulky, more form-fitting sweater and I worked out that if I removed one pattern repeat it would decrease the size by 4" making the sweater 36, my size.

Had I used my BRAIN when calculating this major pattern alteration, I may have realized that by removing one pattern repeat removed 4" from one half of the sweater. It would have required me to also remove 4" from the other half of the sweater, thus making my pattern 8" smaller and a size 32. This alteration would have most definitely been form-fitting but it would not have been attractive.

I started over.

My knitting renaissance

Tah dah! I finished another stocking for Santa to fill.

Last year I designed and made the red-topped stocking and it hung on the fireplace until April. I liked it so much I didn't want to take it down. Last week I decided we needed two hand-knit stockings, one for each of us. I hauled out the yarn and got to work. As you can see, I switched the red and green so they didn't match but coordinated, like Thomas and me.

Also, I've been challenged to a Knit Off. I'm making this sweater that I bought last year from NobleKnits.

Marsha's daughter wants a new sweater for Christmas and made an off-handed comment that she would be lucky to see a finished sweater in under six years. Marsha took that to heart and is determined to wrap the sweater and have it under the tree on Christmas morning. We both doubt that will happen so we set a competition finish line for January 25. Wish me luck!

He'd rather be chasing lizards

Every little bit helps

I'm still on my kick of learning new stuff. As I said before, I didn't do much design work for about three years and I spent the better half of my first year of freelancing just trying to get comfortable with the Adobe applications again. With my confidence back up, my brain has time to design again. I've found my mind wandering on to bigger and better designs while I'm still layout out my first idea. I know that was supposed to be happening all along, for all the clients I've had, but it just wasn't. I was too focused on the how-to to let my mind create. Now in my spare time I've been watching tutorials online and I also subscribed to Layers Magazine.

Layers touts itself as "the how-to magazine for all things Adobe." It has tons of articles and tutorials about every Adobe product. InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat, DreamWeaver, it's all in there. Their website also has a bunch of video that combine two or three applications in one lesson.

I also picked up a couple issues of Photoshop User. It teaches me to love this big beast of an app again.

Do you have any resources you like? Share with me.

I guess I should at least have a bottle of it in the cupboard

A few years ago Thomas signed up to be a Maker's Mark Ambassador which means he has his name on some whisky-filled barrel deep in the heart of Kentucky, and it also means we get tons of cool stuff in the mail. Today a mysterious black tube arrived. Inside was a tube of wrapping paper adorned with stars made out of tiny Maker's Mark bottles, some To/From hang tags and a hank of red ribbon emblazoned with the Maker's Mark name. Thomas said, "You should go work for Maker's Mark, hon. They let their designers do cool shit!" I agree.