This is Pinion, a cardigan I designed for Twist Collective’s Winter 2012 issue. See it on Ravelry here, or on Twist Collective here.

The inspiration came directly from TC’s mood boards, a collection of pictures that they send out to designers as part of their Call for Submissions for each issue. This mood board included several photos of birds and feathers, and that was the primary image floating around in my head as I was imagining possible designs to swatch and submit.

(I love how well this sweater fits the model, with the waist shaping in exactly the right place! This doesn’t always happen, as I am knitting up a general size rather than to a specific model’s measurements, so I am always pleased when it turns out perfectly!)

Pinion’s structure (a top-down sweater with radiating motifs spreading from the collar onto the yoke) is similar to a design that I had already knit up. That one is destined for self-publishing later this year and has a very simple box motif suitable for first-time stranded knitters, but knowing that I was designing for Twist Collective’s readers let me throw in a few tweaks that would happily challenge more experienced knitters.

Most colourwork designs are made up of pixels, each little box being a single knit stitch worked in colour A or colour B. When I was thinking about feathers, I wanted swooping curves and flowing lines, not boxes and jagged edges, so I started combining colourwork with cabling, and a swatch was born!

My submission was accepted, and the Halcyon yarn arrived shortly after. This is the same yarn I was given for Thornia, and I think it is perfect for steeked projects: nice and grippy, with great blockability! I think Pinion was actually the easiest start-to-finish knit that I’ve done for Twist Collective (Boundless, Lara and Candlewick are in competition for the hardest) so the finished sample sweater flew off my needles with enough time left over for me to make a variation for myself!

This is my version of Pinion:

It was somewhat influenced by the sweaters knit by the Cowichan people of Vancouver Island, as I wanted a big, chunky sweater but didn’t want to use their traditional imagery or motif layout as I am not of First Nations descent. I really liked the feathers of Pinion, so after working a swatch consisting of two strands of Cascade 220 and one strand of Drops Alpaca (YUM!), I crunched the numbers and figured that the instructions for the smallest size would work with my gauge to make me an oversized knitted coat to wear through the winter, layered over a lightweight hoodie. A cozy hood and generous pockets were also part of my modifications, and I’m super happy with how they turned out.

I had also been looking at a lot of watercolour paintings of bird plumage, and planned to use an undyed cream yarn for my contrast colour, so the feathers would eventually be painted with acid dyes!

It worked.. right up to the point where I had to admit that I have very little experience dyeing wool, and had no idea why my colours were going on as I had imagined but disappearing overnight to leave me with weirdly tinted feathers the next morning.

After working on it for about three days, I finally achieved a result I could live with, and steam-set the whole thing using a giant canning pot on my stove. There must have been another level of failure in my skills, as the sweater acquired a rusty orange blotch across the right pocket (you can see its edge on the front buttonband trim) but I am still happy wearing it out and about.

A handful of testers helped us catch glitches in the pattern prior to publication, and have provided additional inspiration for you! See everyone’s Pinion project pages on Ravelry here, and some additional ideas about styling Pinion on the Twist Collective blog here.

Need help with the embroidery for the feather shafts? I made a tutorial video!
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Happy knitting!

Like planets aligning, all of these things combined to create the perfect condition for me to work on a project that I have had in mind for YEARS: I have time to weave, I want to do something nice for my sister, and I have to return the floor loom to its owner so its room can go back to being a bedroom.

I don’t remember how I first came across Bonnie Tarses and her horoscope weaving - either in Handwoven magazine, or listening to WeaveCast (a podcast about weaving produced by Syne Mitchell)… but I thought the idea was interesting, and I desperately wanted to try converting her horoscope charts to knitting. I got in touch with Bonnie via email and shared my idea, and she kindly offered to create a horoscope chart for me to use in my experiments.

Bonnie uses a person’s birth day, date, time, and the location of their birth to create an astrological horoscope based on the position of the planets and stars in the sky overhead when they were born. She then converts this into a warping plan that tells the weaver what colour goes where as they are preparing the loom for weaving.

(JARGON ALERT: in weaving, the “warp” is the group of threads or yarn that are pre-strung onto a loom during set-up, the “weft” is the threads or yarn that does the over-under-over-under part across the warp during active weaving.)


I wasn’t able to find my own baby book with all of these details, so I got my sister (or maybe my Mom?) to give me hers, and off it went to Bonnie. Once I had the drafting plan back (along with a cool chart of astrological symbols arranged in a sky-circle) I started plotting my project.

12 colours, in a fairly standard rainbow range? We’ve got Cascade 220 at the store that would work…

A pattern that is simple and doesn’t require lots of darning in of tails at the end of a row? Well, a sweater is out (can’t imagine how I’d do the sleeves), and a scarf isn’t big enough… Hm! Maybe a wrap? Something like the Colourflow Wrap would work well, and it means I just need to knit a giant tube and then I can cut it open, knot the fringe, and call it done. Yay!

Not yay.

Rainbow yarns in a worsted weight held together as three strands at a time doesn’t make the subtle eye-fooling colour blends that rainbow yarns in laceweight do… so my wrap was going to be tragically ugly if I didn’t quickly abandon the idea.

Oh wow.. while composing this blog post, I just came up with another idea for working the horoscope into a knitted garment.. woot, I love inspiration! Not sure if it will work, but I like the vision in my head…

Okay, so aside from THAT bit of excitement that just happened, I hadn’t come up with any really GOOD ideas to make this work using the Cascade 220. Next step: change out my yarn! Lunatic Fringe Yarns has cones of teeny cotton in gorgeous bright colours that they promote for their colour gamp projects or for use with Bonnie’s horoscopes. I loved this yarn, but not for knitting, so the design project was put on hold and I’ve been planning (for years!) to just weave a wrap or blanket for my sister and see for myself how the colours will all blend and work together. Bonnie has always assured me that it would be fabulous, I just need to DO it… so here I go!

(JARGON ALERT: a gamp is a weaving pattern where the colour and/or the stitch pattern changes in a specific way as it moves across the warp AND up the weft)

When I dove into the project today, I realized that I would also need some additional yarn as there is a large amount of the horoscope chart that specifies “favourite colour - your choice” and Heather’s chart already ran pretty heavily through the cone of blue that came with the set of 12 from Lunatic Fringe. I remembered that C had bought some royal blue tencel at a fibre fest many years ago and had never used, so I managed to dig it out of the depths of my stash and got permission to use it (with promises to replace it as he still has plans for it).

These are the “after” cones, once I had taken off between 40 and 100 lengths of approximately 4 yards each. The middle photo up there shows bundles of warp threads chained together (crochet with your hands!) to keep them from tangling between the measuring stage and the actual installation/warping stage. I forgot to take a photo during the warp measuring stage, will try to remember if it turns out that I goofed on my counts and have to do more.

So, I am stopping for tonight, because I think it is a good idea for me to go to sleep fairly soon, after a brief look through my Learning To Weave book to see if there are any hints on sleying the reed when I have more warp ends than I do slots in my reed.

(JARGON ALERT: “sleying” = threading the warp threads into the slots on the thingy (”reed”) that keeps them spaced at a particular distance AND helps to press the weft threads into place)

More photos to come tomorrow! I’ve just figured out how to blog from my iPad, photos and all (assuming this works!) so there will be updates over the next few days.. hoping to finish this by Friday!

photo copyright Jane Heller

Candlewick is a knitting pattern that can be purchased via Twist Collective for $7.00.

C fixed my computer for me, and I have now backed up everything I’ve worked on in the last three months AND committed to moving things over to my external harddrive on a regular basis [pausing here to add an Event with reminders to Google Calendar] so now I have access to all the photos I snapped back in December!

This sketch was first submitted to Twist Collective for Fall 2011 (when they chose Boundless and Asher (!!)), resubmitted for Winter 2011 (when they chose Corinth and Thornia (!!!), and then held for Spring 2012 (!!!!!) The mood boards prepared by Kate and her team are always so inspiring that my head is overflowing with ideas. Sometimes I will be sending them just a ton of swatches and sketches, other times it will be photos of a fully-made thing (like my purple Boundless) that fits their theme.


My original design idea was something like, “If a Bond girl wore handknits, what would it look like?” - I think I had been watching Casino Royale while working on another project, and this began drifting around in my head. It would be black, it would be close fitting, it would have a high collar but a plunging neckline, and it would be sexy. I had also been noticing that the lace patterns on Ravelry that were sticking in my head were those with a fair amount of texture to them, made by combining decreases, plain stitches, and yarn overs in ways that created changes in fabric height, not just opacity.





My laptop had been suffering from a cracked case for several months, and just before it was time to start writing up the pattern, the screen decided to die… so my new glam writing space was a table in our living room, with a HUGE old monitor taking up most of the table while I still used the laptop’s keyboard for typing. (my current setup is slightly better, still have the busted laptop in use, but with a flatscreen monitor and external keyboard and mouse hooked up - much more elegant!) The pieces of graph paper you can see here are bits of chart that I had printed and cut apart, so I could figure out the spacing for every size that would keep the main Honeybee motif in the right place while removing or filling in extra stitches for larger or smaller bodies. Sandi Rosner and the tech editing team at Twist Collective deserve special credit for this pattern, as it got a major rehashing of the charts that resulted in each size having its own page, instead of YOU the knitter having to do all the manual cutting and pasting!





Candlewick is written to be worked in pieces, from the bottom up, and then the fronts are joined to the back with a saddle extension from the sleeves. This is what the piece will look like when you get to the blocking stage.





To get the collar to stand up during blocking, I propped it around the lid from a small wicker basket that has been living in my collection of containers for years… see? There’s a reason why I don’t like to get rid of things, they might be useful some day!





Post-blocking, the sleeves are ready to be set in, then seams worked from hem to armpit and cuff to armpit. (do you know that trick? Start at the outer edges because they are most visible, and leave any end-of-seam fudging for the hidden armpit area!)





I love these buttons. I wanted something with a bit of subtle glam, but knew that cut glass would be too heavy for the sweater. These are made from mussel shells, and I found them at the glorious Button Button shop in the Gastown section of Vancouver. The yarn from Elann is wonderful too - I’m making a second version in MY size, using the same Peruvian Baby Silk in the same colour.

Final photos here were taken on the shop mannequin at Three Bags Full (thanks Francesca and Zoe! [best bosses ever]) You can see that the stitches are expanded a fair bit, especially on the upper back.. the mannequin is a 36 bust, the sweater is a 34ish, and the model that Twist Collective used for Jane Heller’s photos was probably a 32! This is the joy of knitting for yourself, getting to choose the size you make based on the amount of ease (positive/extra ease aka bigger than your real chest measurement = looser fitting, zero or negative ease means it will be skimming your body or stretched to show off your curves! The size I am making for myself is the 46″, with short rows in the front to give my 38Es a bit more length but not adding any extra width (I’ve made that mistake too many times before, and have the baggy-busted sweaters to prove it!).. so it will be fairly close-fitting at my bust, and hang from there. Photos can be found on my Ravelry project page whenever I finish it!

Are you thinking of making Candlewick? I’d love to see your projects! Please share your photos on Ravelry (I watch for User Activity on my patterns pretty regularly so I will spot them when you post) or drop me a note in the comments if you are sharing your photos and project notes elsewhere!

(also please include some text telling you all about my design process and enthusiasm for this cardigan)

My computer crashed tonight… In a big, no-whirring, no-display kind of way (!!!!!!!!) and while the recent addition of a shiny new iPad to my house (reward for a week of teaching lifeguard courses during Spring Break) lets me at least look at the pretty pictures over at Twist Collective and on Ravelry, it doesn’t let me access the stuff on my hard drive.

Please wish me luck - in the grand scheme of life, this is no biggie, and I am totally aware that I have been gifted with a wonderful life… But it would be nice to have my hard drive and desktop machine back. Hope C can work some magic for me tomorrow!

Whenever the crew at TB put out a call for participation (testing out Vulcana fabric, or receiving selvedge scraps of their Dyneema fabric for a crafting challenge), I would jump at the chance… and I also chatted with them via Twitter whenever I saw a TB bag around town or if my Swift had had a mention-worthy adventure!

Their invitation to review the line of knitting bags was a very pleasant surprise, and I was even happier when they added an Imago and Field Journal Notebook to the shipment at my request - you’ll see why I wanted to include these as “knitting tools” in their reviews!

I love Tom Bihn shows off the TB gear I had acquired on my own over a few years.

The Swift

The Little Swift

The Field Journal Notebook
(since recording this, I have received the graph paper insert, and it is AWESOME!)

The Imago


Organizer Pouches


Yarn Stuff Sacks

(Whoops! I just noticed that I have failed to blog about Corinth and Thornia… too many projects on the go, I’m slipping! I’ll put those at the head of the queue for 2012.)

To celebrate the holidays (and maybe give you something fun to knit for yourself once gift-knitting is over?), I’m offering a 50% discount code for all patterns in my Ravelry store until December 31st. The code is “happyholidays” which can either be typed in when prompted as you finish shopping, or you can follow this link to go directly to your Ravelry shopping cart and then choose to add patterns from there.

Sorry, this sale doesn’t include any of my Twist Collective or Interweave patterns due to my contractual obligations!

photo by James Brittain

This is Asher, from Twist Collective’s Fall 2011 issue, find it on Ravelry here.

Asher came to life after a trip to Portland in June 2010, with an hour (possibly more) spent at Yarnia combining a bunch of thin strands of yarn together to make myself a custom blend of chunky goodness. I didn’t have a plan for it at the time aside from “big cozy sweater” but swatching with it while on the train ride home eventually suggested that it liked the slip-stitch rib pattern I used for a simple scarf design, Picker’s Delight.

I also realized that the second yarn I had created at Yarnia, a blend of smooth strands that made a worsted weight yarn, coordinated nicely with its chunky sibling, and I started playing with combinations. Eventually, the yoke design was born, with garter stitch, concentric increases, and contrast piping to separate each ring. A needle size change helped the garter move smoothly into the slip-stitch rib, and I was off!

Okay, truth? That sweater is still in that state of completion (or lack thereof). When I got the thumbs-up from Twist Collective after submitting this photo and sketch, I did my usual squeal and happy dance, and then promptly sought out a more commercially available yarn that would work. A shipment of Cascade 220 had been delivered to Three Bags Full, and in the process of unpacking, pricing, and stocking the new colours, this purplish grey caught my eye and stuck. The purplish brown was a good choice for the contrast trim, and both came home with me that night.

photo by Andrew Ferguson / goldengod.net

photo by Andrew Ferguson / goldengod.net

In case you can’t see it in the design lines, I was pretty inspired by Elizabeth Zimmerman. Her love of the knit stitch calls to me - I have made two adult-sized Surprise Jackets, and one (so far) in the original baby size, and because I knit continental style, the slipped-rib pattern used here doesn’t feel at all like working a purl stitch. Jared Flood’s version of her TomTen design was also in the back of my head - I love the contrast shoulder lines he created!

Some mods: my prototype has all of the contrast lines done as piping: four rows of stockingette stitch with a single strand of Cascade 220 which are then closed to make a rounded trim line (see Piper and Lallans for more of this accent), and a row of piping on the back of the hood just before the shaping begins. I designed a tab for the back, but haven’t actually sewn this on yet! Last one: because I’m on the busty side (in case you hadn’t noticed from that photo!), I shifted the break for the sleeves back a little bit on each side, so my front width is wider than my back width.

Vancouver has been having a wonderful Autumn, with many days of crisp sunshine and cool evenings spaced between the rainy drizzle that we know and love (or at least accept..), and Asher is the perfect outer layer to pop on over a tshirt and still be snuggly warm. I love the giant pockets and hood in this weather, and am designing more sweaters with these features!

photo by Andrew Ferguson / goldengod.net

photo by Andrew Ferguson / goldengod.net

.. and I have two (!!) patterns in it, my first garments for Twist!

1) Boundless, a complex-cabled cape, on Twist and on Ravelry

2) Asher, a simple, joy-to-knit garter and slibbed-rib sweater coat, on Twist and on Ravelry

I’m working hard to meet another design deadline fast approaching, but I will share more on the creation of these two pieces another time!

I’m so happy to announce that I have another pattern up at Twist Collective! This is Lara, from the Winter 2010 issue:

Lara Hood, photo copyright Jane Heller 2010

I have been playing with hood designs for a couple years, both those attached to sweaters and stand-alone versions that in the past hadn’t really worked. When the Mood Boards for this issue were sent out, I was inspired by the skating story to try again, so my submission included a sketch of a hood along with a couple other hat ideas… and the hood was accepted, yay!

When I learned that I would get to work with Unwind Yarns Merlot, I was especially happy – Shannon (the dyer) is from the Vancouver area as well and I have actually met her in person a couple of times at the LYS where I work and at mutual friends’ parties! Her yarns always get rave reviews at the shop, and I love her semi-solid colours. Though I wouldn’t have chosen bright golden orange for ME, I totally understood Kate’s editorial vision of high-impact colours that would really pop against the white background of a skating rink, and the Glow colourway does a great job of showing the stitch patterns!

This is where my design story goes downhill a bit: When the yarn for Lara arrived, I was already working on meeting the deadline for a sweater for another publication (the Bandha hoodie for Knitscene Winter/Spring 2011), so I didn’t jump into working on it right away. I knew that I was going to be flying out to Toronto the weekend before our designs were due, so I thought that if I started it a couple weeks before that, I could have it done and pop it in the mail from Toronto for a quick delivery to Montreal.



Lesson Learned from Lara: don’t leave things until the last minute!

I started swatching… and swatched… and swatched… and swatched… I was struggling with a couple of things: my original idea and sketch had the vines starting at the bottom corners of the hood and growing in both directions (towards centre top and back neck), and I just couldn’t get the vine AND the background to both increase in a satisfactory way… and then I was also having issues with choosing background stitches that would lay flat rather than curl the edges around, but that would also let the delicate vines stand out without being overwhelmed by a lot of extra texture. An email to Kate came back with her approval to move away from the original construction concept, and a suggestion that a simple purl background (like the one used in Red Oak in the Fall issue) would block flat if it was kept in scale to the vine patterning.

More swatching included working on the corner design and general construction, and testing different versions of the leafy vines. So the deadline is now looming.. but I’m still feeling pretty okay because I have the whole day of flying to Toronto, plus the weekend at my in-laws, to finish it up and get it blocked. Great! Only one problem: I’m a perfectionist.

I was still swatching on the flight over, and through the first day of our visit… and then continued knitting like a fiend for the next two days to get it done! (An apology to my niece and the rest of Chris’ family: next time I’ll be more available for hanging out and playing, promise!) I-cord added, leaf tassels done, blocked, charts done and notes written… into the mail it went! Whew!


And then came the email.

I have give Kate a lot of credit: she has excellent taste (I LOVE so many designs in every issue), the drive and skill to get issues of Twist out on a regular schedule, AND the ability to write very clear and straightforward emails when she’s not satisfied with a submitted design!

Lesson Learned from Lara: refer back to the original sketch frequently, and consult early!


Kate pointed out that my hood had morphed to a point of being unrecognizable from my original sketch: it was bigger, the vine pattern was scaled larger in relation to the overall hood, and I had changed the shape of the front bands dramatically to the point where it reminded her of the plastic rain bonnets that our grandmothers used to wear! Whoops, so NOT a good thing! A few more emails back and forth, clarifying sizes and shapes and timeframes, and then I was in a flurry to get the rework done in time to make the original photoshoot deadline.

I had to wait for the original hood to come back so I could frog and reuse the yarn, so in the meantime I started swatching again for smaller vines. You can’t see this from the photos, but the vines on both sides of the face point UP, due to being worked in two pieces and a quick graft at the centre top… I thought this was a decent solution rather than having upside-down leaves on one side of the face! Another construction tweak kept the hood smaller - the point on the first version was a huge thing reminiscent of Lord of the Ring costumes! (The fact that a lot of my friends are into costuming and Faerie World gatherings made this seem like a good thing at first…)

With Kate’s guidance, the second version (what you are now seeing as Lara[Ravelry link]) got finished, and shipped back in time to make the ice rink photoshoot. I agree with her that this smaller version is really cute, and from the response I can track on Ravelry, it is obvious that many knitters think so, too!


Lesson Learned from Lara: an initial rejection is not the end of the world, and the acceptance of critique and feedback can result in the creation of a really cool thing!

These lessons (and a couple others I learned during this project) will serve me well as I continue building my career as a knitwear designer – thanks so much, Kate!

For those of you who will be knitting Lara: there is one technique in the vine charts that I may have invented (or unvented) called a Combine. This came to life after hours of swatching leaf variations, trying to keep the edge of the increasing leaf body clean and crisp, while also managing a decrease somewhere so the stitch count wouldn’t change. The result is a combination of a left-lifted increase worked with an immediate SSK decrease: the Combine!

(Have you seen this technique before? Let me know, I’d love to see how other designers use it!)


Here’s my latest version: knit following the pattern, still using Unwind Yarns Merlot DK but in a yummy green this time. This one hadn’t been blocked yet when I took the photo, so you can see the issue with curling edges that I was worried about..but blocking really does make it go away! (see more photos on Ravelry)

I always enjoy seeing my patterns worked up in different colour combinations and yarns – the variations on Piper and Lallans posted on Ravelry are neat! I really appreciate your support for my designs, and can’t wait to see your Laras!

There will be a box for a discount code at some point during your transaction, just type “CASEYROCKS” for the 20% off deal.

Visit my Ravelry shop here.

Enjoy!