CogKnition » Knitwear Design

Free Pattern! Saturday Night Knitted Purse

Yvonne — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:08:25 +0000

Photo by Randall Smith

Pattern: Saturday Night, by Lauren Abrams and ME!
Yarn: Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece, Cavern, 2 skeins
Needles: US 6 (4.0mm) and US 7 (4.5mm) Addi Turbos

Saturday Night, aka Mystery Project #3, is the first result of an ongoing collaboration with Lauren Abrams.

Lauren is the woman behind LaBeana Bags. Her designs are beautiful and she is a joy to work with. The look of the bag is all hers, I’m just the one behind the scenes, translating her art into a knitting pattern. Not that knitting can’t be art, but my role in this project is more of an engineer.

I hope you enjoy the pattern as much as I enjoyed helping to create it.

And yes, Mystery Project #4 in the sidebar is also a Lauren collaboration. I’ll be shipping her the finished sample this afternoon.

Other pattern news: I’ve made two small corrections to the Amy Scarf pattern (fixed a typo in row 17 of the pattern, and deleted an erroneous knit stitch in the instructions for KRL). Please download a new copy!

Wave of Babies Booties, Knitting Pattern Posted

Yvonne — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 05:43:01 +0000

Pattern: My own, download it here!
Yarn: Plymouth Encore, #1203, #599, #208, #515, #9621, #9401, #1202
Needles: Addi Turbos, US 7 (4.5mm)

These are my sanity-restoring baby booties. I’ve had the pattern written up for forever, I just needed to knit more samples. And then I knit the samples, but just needed to take pictures. And then I let the pictures sit, even though all I had to do was plop them into the pattern, convert to pdf, and upload.

Oh, and update the web site. Which is done now, so I’m going to bed. While I sleep, you can download the pattern and knit some booties.

A Problem and a Solution

Yvonne — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 05:52:35 +0000

It’s sort of been a grumpy week so far. Well, it’s sort of been a grumpy month or two, but this week has been no good. Yesterday was a good day but Monday nearly made me cry and today started out good and rapidly went downhill. I was such a frowny mess when I got home that I ate potato chips and ice cream for dinner (don’t do that, your tummy won’t like it).

I’ve been seeking out happiness where I can find it this week so, in addition to giving the froggy some arms and a new mouth, I made these:

If you remember, I originally designed these booties to alleviate some work-related grumpiness. I don’t know if it’s just coincidence that I always choose to knit these booties when I’ve been having a rough time, or if I’ve somehow invented baby booties with sanity-restoring properties.

In which case, I should totally market them to harried mothers and become filthy rich in the process.

But I’m hoping that today will be the end of the grumpiness, or at least the worst thereof. I had a breakthrough moment on my walk home today: I am grumpy because I am overwhelmed.

Continue reading A Problem and a Solution (342 words) »

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Tweed

Yvonne — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 05:34:24 +0000

Author: Nancy J. Thomas
Publisher: Potter Craft
Rating:
Buy Tweed on Amazon.com

Once again, the copy I am reviewing was generously provided by Potter Craft. Tweed is a combination knitting history/pattern book scheduled to be released on Tuesday. If you pre-order it now, Amazon will give you an extra 5% off.

I don’t know if you guys have noticed, but I have never knit anything with a tweed yarn. Go ahead, check out the finished projects. No tweed yarns. But then I started lusting after Eunny’s Tangled Yoke Cardigan, which is knit with a tweed yarn, and all of a sudden I wanted to learn more about tweed.

Tweed‘s first two chapters are full of the history and making of tweed yarn. Did you know that:

Coco Chanel popularized the use of tweed fabrics in high fashion?
tweed yarns are more prone to felting?

The third chapter contains stitch patterns with pictures of swatches knit up in tweed yarns. This chapter was especially useful to me, as a tweed newbie and fledgling knitwear designer, to see which patterns are made more interesting with tweed yarns and which patterns are strong enough not to be obscured by the tweed flecks.

The last section is full of knitting patterns, grouped by skill level. There are 22 projects total, including hats, scarves, bags, sweaters, vests, pillows, and throws. Although all of my favorite projects below happen to be sweaters, sweaters make up less than half of the total pattern count.

Pattern previews after the jump!

Continue reading Tweed (258 words) »

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Achernar

Yvonne — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 04:57:31 +0000

Pattern: My own, download it for free here!
Yarn: Gedifra Cashmerino, #1446, 3 skeins
Needles: Addi Turbos, US 4 (3.5mm)

Looky, looky, it’s done! I was a little uncertain about the design as I was knitting it, but I do love the finished product. It looks great either under or over a wool pea coat. The finished fabric has a nice, flowy drape, but is still nice and warm. This one’s a winner.

Continue reading Achernar (186 words) »

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A Scarf Mashup

Yvonne — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 21:08:37 +0000

I finished Shedir before leaving for Thanksgiving and I’m still waiting for someone to take a picture of my head. I tried to do it myself, but it’s hard to see the cable detail in the blurry mess. In the meantime, what better to go with a new winter hat than a new winter scarf?

The design is a mashup of Shedir and Grumperina’s Shifting Sands scarf, tentatively named Achernar. I really liked the sort of swooshing allover-cable look of the Shifting Sands scarf and tried to create a similar feel while preserving the intertwining Saxon braids of the Shedir hat.

(Speaking of Grumperina, her latest is full of knitting porn. Lorna’s Laces! In a gorgeous dusty pink! Knit into a gorgeous sock! *drooooool*)

The scarf will need a good blocking to beat it into submission. Right now it’s curling quite a bit, and the cables are all scrunchy scrunchy. I had to pin it out for the photo so you could see anything. I’m still not completely sold on the proportions of or the transitions between braid and lattice, but I like it enough to keep knitting.

I think when all is said and done, it will be a good medium-sized scarf that’s a notch more sophisticated than the half-dozen uberlong chunky things I’ve knit so far.

Quinn Pattern Posted!

Yvonne — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 18:35:01 +0000

If you keep tabs on my progress bars to your left, you may have noticed that Quinn #2 hit 100% a couple days ago. You know what that means? I finished writing the pattern and posted it!

Free Quinn Cabled Bag Pattern

The complete package is a 9-page pdf, with nice big photos and instructions in charted and written form. I daresay it looks like a real knitting pattern.

I’m pretty pleased with what I put together, although the true judges will be you, my fellow knitters. I had a lot of fun designing Quinn, I hope you will have a lot of fun knitting it!

Pattern Preview:

A Plague of Ugly Purse Handles

Yvonne — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 18:04:21 +0000

Some time last night, in the middle of the Big Brother and CSI watching and the Print o’ the Wave Stole knitting, I got bitten by a muse. It must have been Terpsichore, muse of the dance, otherwise why would I have started thinking about knitting a cute little clutch suitable for a prom?

A lace pattern in chunky yarn, maybe with a leaf motif. Something a little more advanced and a little more polished than those oft-knocked-off Margaret Nicole bags (which, in turn, may be a knock off of a free pattern). Baby blue, or maybe black. Or one of each!

I thought about using wooden rods a la Margaret Nicole, but decided I wanted something a little bit…sparkly. Prom, remember? Never mind that I’m nearly a decade too old for prom. Besides, we did have a grad student prom/glorified cocktail party this spring. So there!

And then I hit upon it. Silver rods, or maybe a silver purse frame, upon which I could hook a short, elegantly-beaded handle. It would be cute. It would be sparkly! It would be fit for a prom queen.

So I went to scour the internet in hopes of finding exactly what I was looking for. And from what I found instead, you’d think that crafters only make large, tacky purses, because why else would the market be flooded with these?

Continue reading A Plague of Ugly Purse Handles (65 words) »

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What do you mean, I can’t keep them?

Yvonne — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 15:27:33 +0000

Remember these?

I’ve had them for oh, five weeks now, and managed to leaf through all of them several times. I’ve taken notes on stitch patterns I liked, stitch patterns I might be able to modify, and otherwise drowned in happy knitting goodness.

Continue reading What do you mean, I can’t keep them? (121 words) »

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Planes, Brains, and Ideas Entertained

Yvonne — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 01:10:13 +0000

I was in Vancouver last week, attending a research conference on cognitive science. I didn’t get that much knitting done on the trip (have a hard time knitting on a plane for some reason), but the energy of the conference seeped into my brain and infused my knitting consciousness in addition to my research consciousness.

Conference poster sessions are a rite of modern academic passage. You stick months of work on what amounts to a giant Powerpoint slide, print it out, and tack it to a 4′x8′ display board. Yep, that’s four feet by eight feet.

For those of us who don’t have those fancy shmancy poster carriers, getting your poster to and from a conference is an exercise in wrestling giant cardboard tubes, getting weird looks from airport security, and hearing exasperated sighs from flight attendants when they figure out the reason why the overhead bin isn’t closing.

You know what would make this rite a whole lot easier? A poster tube cozy. I’m picturing something textured, with a drawstring, a handle, and a strap. The pattern could also be re-sized to yoga mat bag proportions.

Cable Me This

Yvonne — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 23:55:36 +0000

As you can see, Quinn #2 (first seen at the end of this post) is back on track. I’d forgotten how quickly the body of the bag goes, even with all the cabling. I managed to do two whole rounds on my 30-minute walk home.

Continue reading Cable Me This (83 words) »

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Designing Women

Yvonne — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 18:44:47 +0000

This is what’s on my coffee table at the moment. Guess what I’m up to!

That’s right, I’m going to try to design something. Something lacy, in fact. That involves charting my own lace pattern.

In addition to the books piled on the coffee table, I’ve ordered a copy of Margaret Stove’s Creating Original Handknitted Lace and a ginormous cone of Jaggerspun Zephyr. I figured, what better way to make a dent in 5,000 yards of laceweight, than to knit several dozen test swatches and then a lace stole of my own design?

My idea is for the lace pattern to resemble aloha print, so the finished stole matches my knock-’em-dead red aloha minidress. I’ll be chronicling my efforts here, for better or for worse. Any advice or suggestions for additional resources would be much appreciated.

CogKnition » Knitwear Design

Free Pattern! Saturday Night Knitted Purse

Similar Posts:

Wave of Babies Booties, Knitting Pattern Posted

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A Problem and a Solution

Tweed

Achernar

A Scarf Mashup

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Quinn Pattern Posted!

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A Plague of Ugly Purse Handles

What do you mean, I can’t keep them?

Planes, Brains, and Ideas Entertained

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Cable Me This

Designing Women

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