Hi everyone!

Summer has been delightful so far! Here’s an update on where I’m at:

Typha shawl, photo copyright KnitScene

My Typha shawl is about to come out in the Fall 2010 Knitscene.

I’ve got another pattern coming out soon in an online pub (you know the one…) and a third possibly getting into the following issue.

My first full garment design has been commissioned for a print mag for next year, and I’m waiting for the yarn to be delivered.

I have two garments on the needles that may become self-published at some point, along with a few hat and cowl ideas.

I’m preparing ideas to become online video lessons (a class for knitting Piper, another for the textured swatch class I taught for years, a third for the advanced vintage sewing techniques translated to knitting that I’m teaching live this fall at Vancouver’s Maiwa textile symposium.

I’m reading through Shannon Okey’s KnitGrrl guide to professional knitwear design, and preparing a review for a future podcast.

..and, our home renos are at a point where I’ve just been able to clear out a room to become my office, and my sweetie has just bought a bunch of gorgeous birch-faced plywood to turn into pretty boxes that will stack and become shelving for all of my yarn collection, in my future craft studio! Wooot!

In hooping life, I’m mid-summer festival, getting ready for the Vancouver Folk Music Festival next weekend (I volunteer in the Info Booth, and am organizing a bunch of hoopers and jugglers to perform/teach in the Little Folks area) and also planning workshops for the fall.

.. and life is good!

How are you? What’s happening in your life that should be shared and celebrated?

Wow, so much has happened since my last post!

January - I was hit by a kidney infection, and didn’t give myself nearly enough recovery time once I knew what it was (”I FEEL better, so the drugs must be working, so I can go back to work, right?”).. so it hung on for the better part of January and into February. This made renovations really tough - have you ever tried to stay in bed while your partner works day and night to get the house in shape for guests.. after you thought it would be a good idea to tear the bathroom out down to bare studs and floor joists just one month previous? Hard. Hard hard hard. Poor C, he worked his hands raw retiling the last week, and then pulled an all-nighter right before Lolly and Kris arrived, making sure that we actually had a sink and toilet in place, and that the new tiles were grouted and caulked. I was feeling better by that point, but still gave myself 3 hours of sleep that night so I wouldn’t be a miserable zombie greeting them at the door!

Sooo.. that puts us in mid-February: Lolly and Kris are with us (and they’re AWESOME, so it was a great two weeks of getting to know them and hang out and compare notes), the Olympics are in full swing, I’m feeling better, and C is ready to NOT work on the house… so we had a good time wandering the city, checking out some of the Olympic events, going out with friends again, and just relaxing at home watching the Games. Did you know that those old rabbit ear antennea work for picking up digital airwaves? CTV was broadcasting in High Def, and we could pick it up for free (no cable subscription in this household)!

March felt like a gradual return to normal, though Vancouver itself was abnormal: We’ve had spring since early February (you might have heard of our problems keeping the snow around for the ski hills), and there was a post-party slump going on - sad to see that most of the special events and pavillions that were here for the Olympics were in total take-down mode as the Paralympians were coming to town. After being off from waterpolo for the better part of three months, I returned to practices and slowly started regaining my cardio conditioning, to the point where I now don’t feel like I’m having a heart attack after three minutes of passing the ball! I’m not quite up to full speed yet, but I can do the whole 1.5 hour practice without having to take a break (though I’m still quite happy to sub out during our scrimmages).

April has been delightful! The weather is hit-or-miss, so I’ve been scoping out some decent rain pants for cycling, while also knitting up more strapless tops for summer, and I’m currently in the middle of a summer cardigan knit with DK weight wool. We’re returning to some home-care action, and having visitors last weekend had us put in a decent amount of cleaning effort that looks so much nicer as sunshine streams in through the windows!

Design-wise, this has been an exciting time: I participated in the Ravelympics, and published a hat called Whipped Lolly (see the photo above) to win gold in the Designer Biathlon; I’ve had two requests for hat designs to go into books (woo!); a shawl that I had started for myself turned out to be just the thing that a magazine needed for their Fall issue; and I’ve just heard that another hat design has been accepted to an online publication, hooray! In self-publishing land, the strapless top and the cardigan I’m working on now are both potential patterns - I need to practice scaling the designs into a wide range of sizes, and then get them out to a bunch of test knitters so the patterns themselves will be safe to share!

Knitting classes are going well, hooping classes are picking up, my fall workshop for Maiwa is tickling the back of my brain, and online lessons are percolating, too! All in all, I’m having a lovely spring!

How’s yours?

I’ve already made a personal donation to Save the Children’s Haiti effort, but I am also jumping on the bandwagon over at Ravelry and have added a pattern to the Help for Haiti drive.

(I’m donating throuth StC rather than MSF/DWB because StC accepts funds easily through PayPal, and PayPal has waived transaction fees for these donations)

I will pass on 100% of the proceeds from the sale of Heartbeat patterns to StC’s Haiti effort until February 28, 2010.

Heartbeat is knit in worsted weight yarn and is a great starter project for those who haven’t previously tried beaded knitting.

The pattern can also be worked without the beading, either knit plain or with your own chart inserted instead (one of the early projects posted on Ravelry used a skull and crossbones design!), continuing to follow the bottom and top shaping as written.

Two options for making your $5 purchase:

Directly from me, PDF will be emailed within 24hrs of payment

Through Ravelry, PDF will be added to your Rav library and a download link will be emailed immediately upon payment.

Along with chopping my hair off and dying it pink/blonde/orange/red (this is an older photo, it’s currently light reddish brown), this has been an exciting year for me in knitting land: getting published in Twist Collective (my first publication!), having another pattern accepted for a print mag next fall, and getting a bunch of new patterns out there for the world to see, thanks to some advertising purchased on Ravelry!

I’ve just finished up an online course on How to Teach Online Courses (yup, teehee!).. and 2010 holds some online expansion for me, as I plan to add classes for some of my patterns (starting with Piper), techniques (including the Stitch Sampler workshop I’ve taught at Maiwa for the past two years), and possibly other things (bust shaping options, perhaps?).

Pattern design will get back up to speed once the Olympics are over - Chris and I are going full-steam to finish things upstairs before Lauren (of Lolly Knits Around) and her Kris come to stay.. and I’ve got a couple patterns that got through testing but are waiting for photos and formatting, plus another half-dozen already crowding that part of my brain!

Mid-January 2010 will also be the end of an era: I’ll be handing in my keys to the UBC Aquatic Centre, teaching my last springboard diving class, and ceasing to work in Aquatics. I’ve decided that the time spent travelling over an hour each way to the pool, for just a couple hours of work each trip, could be better spent working at home developing patterns and classes. Wish me luck!

I hope you and your family have had a joyous holiday, and that your New Years Eve celebrations are wonderful. Happy New Year!

Thanks Diane, aka GrapefruitGeek on Ravelry - I like the simple design of this participant button!

Yes, I have joined the ranks of slightly insane people who are pledging to knit a full sweater in the month of November. A take-off from NaNoWriMo, this has been going for a few years courtesy of Shannon Okey, designer and great mind behind the knitgrrl blog.

There’s a knit-along over on Ravelry here, and I’m planning to blog tidbits fairly frequently right here.

Want to see what I have planned? No swatches to show just yet, but you can see my brainstorming page here.

I still don’t have the full design finalized yet, but the bottom hem and the main body pattern are ready to go… almost… just going to do a swatch tonight of the main body pattern to check that it IS as cool as I think it is (it got a total revamp this morning, after I got pouty about how what I was working on didn’t look right, and I didn’t have ANY plan, and then I reread my Rav notes with C looking over my shoulder.. and he pointed out that it looked like I had a pretty reasonable amount of plan built, and I didn’t really need to be so upset)… and then I’ll sketch out my schematic and get to it!

No hat designing for this month, I’m giving myself a break… okay, aside from the two that are 80% ready for testing, and the three in testing right now that will be ready by this Wednesday.. but that’s all!

I’ll leave you with a picture of one of the upcoming designs This is Pemberton:

FINALLY I get to tell you about this! Do you know how hard it is to record a podcast about knitting design, and the goals that I have been setting for myself for my Year Of Goals… and then hit one in the first two months and not be able to tell you about it?! Heehee….. it makes me laugh now, but I really suffered for a while!

Piper is available for purchase here.

The story of the hat:
I was working on a collection of hat designs in Fall 2008, and I had picked a couple handfuls of suede-covered buttons from Button Button as inspiration. I had been imagining button-trimmed hats, though more of a handful of smaller buttons scattered or lined up on the brim rather than the one-chunky-button styles that were already making the rounds. After a delighful hour of realizing that almost all of the buttons had a perfect colour match available, I had an armful of Cascade 220 Heathers from the glorious wall of Cascade at Three Bags Full - browns and rusts and greens and lighter teal-ish blues - to take home.

The heathered brown yarn was one of the few yarns I had picked out that didn’t have a button match, but the heathered orange had a perfect mate, so I already had an idea of using the two colours together, and on a scale where the brown was used in larger amounts and the orange would be the trim. After a bit of swatching, I knew that I wanted to create piping for the hat.. and after some manipulating of the piped swatch, the image of buttoned pleats came to me! The pleated and piped hat was born!

When the Call for Submissions for the Fall 2009 Twist Collective came out in January, I looked at the style boards and realized that this hat would be a good fit for one of their ’stories’, and put it together with a couple other design ideas to submit. Here’s the project description that I sent in with my submission package:

Pleated and piped hat

-Worn with the button to the front, it is a quirky turban, with the button to the side or back, it resembles a vintage cloche
-Circular construction, knit top down
-Contrast colour is knit for a few rows, then knit together to form piping
-Hem is worked on smaller needles and then stitched in place Hat is shaped with short rows to minimize bulk within pleated section
-Pleated section is stitched in place and trimmed with a coordinating button
-Bottom up construction is also an option
-Other colours (deep navy or plum with silvery grey) and button choices (vintage metal or cut glass) would look great, too!

…and the sketch (drawn over a face/head shape that I traced from a “How to draw Fashion” book from the 60s):



.. and the photo:

I had sent the package via email before the submission deadline arrived at the end of February. Mid March, an email from Kate Gilbert arrived, accepting the design! Whoop! I was pretty excited, and ran around telling all of my friends and family that I GOT IN!!! I was going to be PUBLISHED!!! This would make me FAMOUS!!! Heehee

I asked Kate if I could blog/podcast about the submission and acceptance process, and she asked me to wait until the pattern had gone live - sometimes unforseen glitches happen and patterns don’t get used, and there was also the delightful element of surprise that readers get, when they open a new issue and see patterns that haven’t been previously leaked! Fair enough… so I sat on it. (okay, I may have mentioned it a teeny bit on the podcast, but I didn’t name names, or describe designs, or anything!)

The hat as-knit didn’t actually fit me, though it suits Francesca (co-owner of Three Bags Full and my boss) perfectly… so I asked her if I could knit up a shop sample to display once the issue went live, and we picked out some delicious Ultra Alpaca by Berocco to use. As I started working on the sample, I decided to play with the sizing and shaping to get something that WOULD fit me… and so a second circumference and depth option became available.

Even though the design work and writing was done, I still needed to format the pattern to match Twist Collective’s style guide. Easy enough, as the guide was very thorough: I knew where periods did and didn’t belong, when to use ‘k’ instead of ‘knit’, and how to write a pattern key to use their common terminology. When it came time to work with the technical editor, Sandi Rosner, our main challenge was to accurately describe the disconnect between the stitch count (and the width it would provide, when knit to gauge) and the actual hat measurements (once the finished hat was thoroughly blocked). Sandi had some great suggestions, and the edited pattern moved on.

The next stage was to take a look at the finished pattern as it would appear in PDF form. Mary Joy Gumayagay was the person responsible for pattern layout, and she had a brilliant system set up for group editing, using Google Documents and a table in which the to-be-edited chunk could be identified by location in the pattern, labeled ‘Major’ (pattern will not knit correctly if we don’t fix this) or ‘Minor’ (would it look nicer over here?), and the suggested correction added, along with an area to discuss the correction if needed. At this point there were a few easy catches of glitches that had come through when the pattern was reformatted, and then a bit of a discussion again about how best to describe the sizing options and help the knitters to have a finished product that would fit!

After a couple rounds of editing the PDF, I made my last few requests and signed off on the final version, and then waited.. and waited.. and waited… and oops, here’s an email from Julia Farwell-Clay asking for the designer headshot that I THOUGHT I had sent in back in July when it was due, but apparently did not… and then finally late last night, as I got back from a delightful mini-vacation in Seattle, it was live!!

I am really thrilled to have a pattern in Twist - hopefully this will only be the first of many - and I’m giddy reading everyone’s comments on Ravelry and elsewhere about how much they love the issue, and that they think Piper is pretty cool! Hooray!

A final note: the name “Piper” didn’t come easily, but when it did, it was a perfect fit: I wanted something to describe the hat (which began life as “the pleated and piped hat”) rather than just an unrelated name.. but I was hoping for something a bit less.. bland. I spent an evening playing with online dictionaries and thesauri, looking for words that meant ‘piped’ or ‘pleated’ or ‘folded’ or ‘gathered’.. and wasn’t coming up with anything brilliant… … but somewhere along the way, perhaps while taking a break to catch up on blog reading, I ran across something written by Kim Werker, crochet and editor goddess… (who has been mentoring me on building my knitting design business) .. Kim *P* Werker…. Kim PIPER Werker!!! .. and it all fell into place. I had a hat with a fun, quirky, suitable name, and I could honour the woman who had coached me through the submission process and gotten me to this point probably two or three years earlier than I would have made it on my own. Thanks, Kim!

I am REALLY loving this summer: great weather (okay, today it is actually raining, and that’s a nice break from the crazy heat wave we had for a couple weeks last month.. but the average has been good), lots of good times with friends (Katie’s wedding yesterday, Navi’s a few weeks back, new folks joining my hooping class), and a spiffy new home on its way (in the form of renovations, with the house competely filled with plaster dust and bits of wiring right now).

So, life is busy, but there is still time for knitting! I’ve been working on a couple of hooded scarves and a hat or two for self-publication, and I’ve got a couple things coming out in knitting magazines soon, woohoo! When each one goes live, I’ll be able to blog about the design process and share a bit more about my (great!) experiences working with each publisher.

I have new podcast episodes on the way too, with some book reviews and a second-hand account of a new designer’s first visit to TNNA… whenever I can find the time!

How’s your summer?