Pattern Sale

In honor of starting early with the Christmas knitting, I’m offering a sale on patterns. Now through Friday, August 4th, I’m offering a 15% discount on all of the patterns for sale on my site. To receive this discount, you need to enter this code “53322O73″ into the discount box. This includes

* Lightweight Mountain Peaks Shawl - was $6.50, now discounted to $5.53.
* Blessing Socks - was $6.00, now discounted to $5.10.
* Eleanora Socks - was $6.00, now discounted to $5.10.
* Original Mountain Peaks Shawl - was $6.50, now discounted to $5.53.
* Seraphim Shawl - was $6.00, now discounted to $5.10.

If you’ve been waiting until you’re ready to knit the pattern, this would be a good time to buy it. If this goes well, I may have another sale in the future, but for now, this is the only one planned.
Happy knitting!

M

p.s. if someone is willing to test this, I can refund your money, but it won’t let me “send money to myself” so I can’t test it myself.

*FINAL EDIT* It's working now, just be sure you refresh the page before you click the button.

And don't forget that my new blog is located at www.mimknits.com/wordpress. If you subscribe via Bloglines, they have already moved your subscription over to the new feed.

Movin' over

Hey everyone, the time has come, and I have moved my blog over to my own domain at www.mimknits.com. The blog's new address is http://mimknits.com/wordpress or www.mimknits.com/wordpress works too. You can update your links to that. And the RSS and ATOM feeds are working, and bloglines should be migrating subscriptions to the new feeds as soon as I can figure out the verifcation for them. I have reposted the posts from this month (July) over there, but I will leave the rest here for the time being with a link to the old blog.

Yay for the move! Let me know if anything doesn't work. And I've posted a jam tutorial with lots of pictures to celebrate :)

Miriam

Hmm....

I've had this window open for about 2 hours hoping to be inspired on what to write. I've still got nothin'. OK, I take it back. I like apricots. How's that for content?

The scarf was progressing, but I've got a shooting pain in my left elbow from a nerve issue in my neck that I can't fix until I'm done with the working day, so I don't even feel like taking out the scarf to take a picture. I'll just feel bad if I do.

I wanted to post my "M" entry for the ABC along, but I forgot to take the picture when I was at home (as I have forgotten all week long) so no go there. Similarly, I would also like to post my "N" entry, but I don't want to do that before I do "M" or I will never get back to M. The desire to do N-Z is what's keeping me motivated on M.

Thanks for all your kind words yesterday. I'm still feeling a bit whacked out, but one thing at a time, and my tomato plants are staked up now, so that precious 15 min. that I spent every day wondering if my tomatoes had fallen over, can now be spent on wondering how I'm going to get patterns printed, and how I can knit the scarf when my elbow is twinging.... Off to ice it again.

Oh, one last thing... if you live in Salt Lake City, GUARD YOUR BACON! Link via Blurbomat.

M

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Quiddity finished a modified version of the Simple trekking socks. check them out!

And Marlana finished an Icarus shawl! It's BEAUTIFUL!

I'm absolutely crazy. Thought you all should know. If you're interested in why, keep reading, I'll cover it at the end so you can skip it if you're bored.

I keep sniffing my wrists. I got some lovely perfumes from an etsy shop and then realized when the package came that the artisan was in the same city as me! Her name is Tiffany and her shop is Blackberry & Co. I got 1 Pomegranate Rosewater and one White Tea & Ginger. I love them both, but if I had to choose I'd say I like White Tea & Ginger better. It's just soothing and lovely to me.

C and I were driving through downtown yesterday and we saw this crazy truck! I had to take a picture. First the back of the truck said this:



And then it switched and said this:



WTF! Shouldn't that be illegal?! Like, distracting to drivers and all that? The whole truck was covered in these switching billboards. It was all a mobile advertisement! It was crazy!

So on to why I am insane.....I was knitting - like a maniac - on my scarf design last night. C suggested I just put it down and enjoy watching a movie with him. I said frantically "NO! I have to work on this scarf!". He asked me why and even though it sounded stupid even as I said it, I told him why. This has a deadline. Yes, it is a deadline that's 2.5 months away, but frankly, I'm nervous about it. With this scarf I have to come up with a printed pattern because the pattern will be the basis for a kit that Andie will sell at the Knitting and Stitching Show in Harrogate, England. Maybe I'm off my rocker, but I think this is a big deal. This is a whole different country where my patterns will suddenly be sold in hard copy. And along with the patterns to include in that kit, I figured I might as well start printing out patterns to try selling wholesale to yarn shops. Whoosh! Load off my back. I haven't written about that here because I was worried about jinxing it, but I feel better now that it's out there.

That's the craziness that is all surfing around in my head and making me INSANE! I feel like there are so man things all in flux right now, and I don't know where the tide will take me. And in a way this scarf is symbolizing that. I've got this irrational belief that if I finish the scarf and finish it well, then everything will sort itself out. I'm trying to take it one step at a time and figure out a business plan... decide if I want to invest in a printer and print them myself or invest in a print RUN and have a bunch printed professionally. If I want to find a distributor for paper patterns, or just distribute myself. And then yesterday this wacked out thought came to me to offer this service to other designers to print their patterns so that they can go paper without the initial investment.

There's so much to think about and so much to nail down, and right now I sort of want to go hide in a hole and knit things that other people have designed, but alas, I don't think I'll let myself start anything (Green Gable? Chuck's Cable Socks? Spearfish? I have the yarn and the patterns and the desire to be knitting any or all of those) but Damn it! I have responsibilities! I don't just NOT go to work so that I can stay home and knit all day (even though I may fantasize about it sometimes). Anyway... there it is... if any of you have a Color Laser printer sitting around that you don't need anymore, please drop me a note. I could use one right about now.

M

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Look at Tina's finished Seraphim shawl! It looks GREAT Tina!

And Monica finished her Adamas shawl! YAY! (and in the same post, check out the Blessing socks she's making! They're fabulous!

Silk and a Shitload of Stitches

On the left you have the beginnings of the scarf for Andie. I have swatched, washed and measured, and as a result I have cast on 301 stitches! That basically took my whole morning commute, but the balls are all wound, the stitches are cast on, the pattern is even charted, so all I have to do now is knit it, take copious notes as to when I change colors and which of the MANY colors I change TO.

On the right you will see some amazingly lovely SILK laceweight yarn that my sister gave me for my birthday!



This stuff is BEAUTIFUL! I could pet it all afternoon! I need to find out how many yards I have, but I plan on dying it.

In other news, my garden is growing (click those links for a couple of pictures of the wee tomatoes), and I even found a volunteer in there one day. The bell pepper plant is blooming, and keeps blooming, but I haven't seen any peppers starting and it's having ant problems.... I'll have to find some way to get rid of them.

And I thought I should draw your attention to this in case you haven't ever played this. The game is 1000 Blank White Cards and you can view the rules and guidelines here. It was the MOST fun I've had with my family in a long while. The basic premise of the game is that you draw cards. The cards can vary from loosing 6 million points if you don't cluck like a chicken to no effect at all, to ending the game. You can also draw new cards as you are playing, which makes for some interesting retaliation. We're big into history in my family and my little brothers came up with these cards.



The first was the one on the left titled "A Crusade Has Been Declared" (drawn by Daniel). It says "Fanatical warriors from a distant land have declared a holy war against you, you stinking infadel. -10000 (points)"

And then David retaliated with the "Jihad!" card you see on the right. It says "Suck it, Christians, Saladin recaptures Jerusalem! Your soci(e)ty wastes away in its E(u)ropean hell hole. -1000 points, France loses its knighthood." hahahahahahahah! Good times, good times....

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I almost forgot! Go check out Wanda's finished Seraphim Shawl! Woot! It's GREAT Wanda!

M

Still tidying :)

I've finished an update with corrections for the Blessing Socks. If you purchased the pattern, you have been sent the corrected file to the e-mail account associated with the paypal account you purchased the pattern with. If you would like to purchase the updated pattern, the new pdf is uploaded. Please be sure to refresh the post so that you see the updated date at the bottom to ensure you are purchasing the right pattern.

Also there was some confusion as to whether or not the socks said baraka (meaning blessing), and they do. I checked this with 2 native Arabic speakers. Apparently, the little dot there is very important and unless you can see it (it's hard to spot in the photos) the arabic doesn't make any sense. But it DOES indeed say what it's supposed to say.

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By way of updates, C's socks are plodding along, I've swatched and wound all the yarn for the Renaissance wool scarf, and I'll probably start it this evening after I do some charting. I've worked a few more rows on the new shawl design, but nothing really worth bothering taking pictures of.

I did manage to get my house pretty clean on Friday before I went to Logan for family stuff. It was really nice to come home to a clean house! Now if only I can get to the laundry.....

M

Update to Simple Trekking Socks pattern

Hello all. Ina caught a missing bit in the pattern for the Simple Trekking Socks (thanks Ina!) so I have corrected it, and the new pattern is linked in the sidebar. You can also click this link directly to open the updated pdf file. If you click the link in the sidebar, please be sure to refresh your browser window first.

M

*edit* The new file's name is SimpleTrekkingSocks.pdf. If you have that one (not SimpleTrekkingSocks2) then you've got the right one.

Blog and Purge

Gotta clear out the que in my brain, so a list seems to be a good way to do that.


1. I wanted to wax a bit more poetic about the yarn that I used for the Lightweight Mountain Peaks Shawl. The yarn is a crewel wool (meaning it was originally intended for crewel embroidery, it does not by any means make a statement about the wool's personality) that is dyed with natural ingredients by a lovely woman who lives in France by the name of Andie. Andie originally sent me an e-mail asking if I would mind if she linked to one of my patterns with a list of mods to be worked in her yarn. I told her that I wouldn't mind making a shawl myself and posting a modified pattern, and she thought that was a good idea, so she sent me some yarn. This yarn surpassed my expectations. It was lightweight (but not so light as cobweb), soft, and VERY strong. To give you an idea, my nephew Aiden loves to grab my yarn while I'm knitting, and he would snag my ball and run off with it, and in the many times that he got away from me and twisted up in the yarn, he never once was able to break the yarn. He's a rather strong little 3 year old, so that's saying something.



Another thing that I really loved about this yarn was the subtle color variations that the dyeing process gave it. It gave the color a lot of depth that it wouldn't otherwise have had. Her color range is astounding too! I liked knitting with it so much that I agreed to design a scarf pattern for Andie, and the yarn you see above is what she sent me for that. I think it will work up beautifully doubled up and it should go more quickly than the shawl (which used a single strand on 2.5 mm needles).

2. When I saw Cassie's shawl pin, I immediately e-mailed the artisan who made it, Leslie Wind. We got to e-mailing and next thing I know, I have a shawl pin in my mailbox!



It truly is as beautiful and delicate as it appears, and Leslie even engraved it on the back to say "To Miriam from Leslie 2006". Isn't that sweet? Go look at her stuff!

3. So I'm working on this pair of socks for C.



They're my first toe up socks. I decided to try a toe-up pair because C likes taller socks and I always end up shorting the cuff for fear of running out of yarn when I make him socks from the cuff down. So I decided I would go toe-up (with the help of Sensational Knitted Socks-and what a GREAT help it was!) so that I could just work the cuffs until I ran out of yarn, then do a tubular bind off and call it good. So those astute among you, might have realized what those little spools are on TOP of each of those socks-in-progress. Yes, that is the cute little spool of reinforcement thread that Jawoll sock yarn has so kindly tucked away inside. Well, I was 2 rows from finishing the short row heel on the SECOND sock before I realized that I hadn't used the reinforcement yarn at all. *headdesk* Oh well.... Maybe I'll use it to jazz up the heel on another pair of socks later.

4. I finished an FO last weekend, but haven't gotten around to blogging it:

Yarn: Louet Euroflax Originals Blended Linen (100% Wetspun linen) in Color "Melon Mix". Gifted for my birthday by Michaele (miss you!).
Pattern: Shopping Bag
Modifications: I skipped out on the ratan handles and made a convertable strap. I also altered it to be knit in the round so I didn't have to seam it, with a 3 needle bind off at the bottom.
Needles: US 4 and US 13 circs. Be wary... the pattern has a typo in the specs section that says you need US 4 and US 3, but then in the text it tells you it's a US 13.
Gauge: God only knows... it's open and meshy... I don't think gauge matters.
Verdict: The linen was a little harsh to knit with after I'd been knitting so long with wool, but once I learned to loosen up, it went quickly and easily. And although it seems stiff in the skein, it really softens when you wash it.

5. I am working on a new shawl design. It's a bit slow going right now since I'm fighting sinus-infection induced equillibrium nausea and it's hard to knit hand-drawn charts in that state, and it will probably have to take a back seat to the scarf I'm knitting for Andie, but it's gonna be pretty! I'm excited about it.

OK, that's enough verbal diarrhea for now.
M

Jammy goodness

I celebrated my Independence Day holiday by proving my independence from tradition! :) I did absolutely nothing that could be considered traditional for the 4th of July. No BBQ, no fireworks, no shopping. I started the day off by cleaning my kitchen, tidying my living room and folding laundry (all things that have moved down in the frantic list of MUST. DO. NOW!), and then I knit for a bit while C and I watched a movie. And then the fabulous Katherine came over to help make JAM! On Saturday I had purchased a ton of fruit from the Farmer's Market (or at least it FELT like a ton as I was hauling it home), and so I had apricots, raspberries, cantaloupe, and cherries taking over my fridge.

After cutting, mashing, boiling, sugaring, skimming, pouring, bottling and boiling again, THIS is what I had.



To the left, we have Raspberry-Cherry Jam, made with Red Raspberries and Queen Anne Cherries (Queen Anne is a semi-golden cherry). To the right we have Apricot-Cantaloupe Jam, which I had made last year and LOVED, so I made some more. And between them we have their love-child. I sort of tossed all the fruit I had left over into the pot and ended up with Apricot-Canteloupe-Raspberry Jam, which is actually QUITE yummy.

And if you recall my LAST jam making attempt (Strawberry-Mango), I had a problem with the fruit all floating to the top, and it didn't set completely. Well, glory be, I figured out what the problem was. I didn't use a large enough pot for the Strawberry-Mango which, considering that the jam doubles size while it's boiling, made for uneven heating as I kept lifting the pot off of the burner to keep it from boiling over. And the fruit separation seems to have come from not skimming enough of the foam off. You see, because of the boiling, there is an opaque foam that forms on the surface of the jam. You have to skim this off if you want clear jam. And what I discovered is that since I wasn't taking enough time to skim all the foam off, there wasn't enough time for the jam to cool down a bit before I bottled it. And as it cools, it becomes more viscous and therefore holds the fruit suspended better. So there you have it, ALWAYS skim the foam off VERY well, and ALWAYS use a steady heat so that your jam will set. This bunch came out PERFECT!



I realized half way through that it would have been good to take step-by-step pictures, but I promise I will think of it next time.

M

p.s. I just saw that the Summer Knitty is up. And LOOKIE! Salt Lake grrl Karen has a pair of FABULOUS socks in this issue!

Lightweight Mountain Peaks Shawl Pattern Available

I designed this shawl to evoke the feeling of the beloved Wasatch and Rocky Mountain Ranges. This shawl echoes my deep and abiding love for the mountains that surround my high desert home. From the many foothills to the craggy peaks all throughout the year. From rocky ridges to sleeping snow-capped titans. This version is done with a lighter weight yarn, and smaller needles to make a more delicate shawl. The pattern for the original is available here.

Yarn Requirements: 800 yards (about 65 grams) of lace weight wool. Sample was knit using naturally dyed crewel wool from Renaissance Dyeing (100% Wool) in 'Dark Green'. I used less than 3 250m skeins. I cannot say enough good things about this yarn! It was absolutely BEAUTIFUL to work with, and it was MUCH stronger than I would have expected from such a fine wool.
Suggested Needles: 2.5mm (US 1.5) 24" circulars.
Gauge: 8.5 spi and 13 rpi in stockinette when blocked.
Finished Size: 60" across the top from point to point, 30" from neck to bottom point.

Techniques Used: This pattern uses the following techniques:
knit, purl, k2tog, k3tog, k tbl, yo, double yo, placement and slipping of markers, p2tog, p2tog tbl, p3tog, sl, ssk, psso, and wrap and turn short rows (explaination included in the pattern).

Other Notes:

• This pattern includes full color charts, an example of which can be seen here. It also includes a detailed section on construction of a top-down shawl.


• This pattern is 6 pages long with 3 pages of charts. The charts can be printed on standard sized paper, but are meant to be printed on legal sized paper for best viewing. If you have trouble getting them printed, please e-mail me for help.


• This pattern is a downloadable .pdf file. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open it. You can download Acrobat here for free.


• This pattern may only be purchased through PayPal. If you do not have a paypal account, you can open one by clicking that link.


• Once your paypal payment has gone through, you will be e-mailed a link to download the pdf file. BE AWARE THAT THIS LINK EXPIRES after a time. You CAN request additional downloads if you miss this window of time. Also be aware that if you pay with an e-check, you will not receive the download link until your payment has cleared, which may take up to 7 days.


• With this pattern (and with all of my patterns) I offer full technical support. I will do anything at all possible to help you figure out the best way to download and use this pattern and knit this shawl.

If you have any additional questions, please feel free to e-mail me.

The cost for this patten is $6.50 USD. You may purchase it by clicking the Button below.

Please go to my new shop to purchase this pattern


Original pattern uploaded 7/4/2006