Fall was a very busy time for me, with my daughter’s Nutcracker dance schedule as well as knitting.  It began with KnitPicks publishing my first ebook!  Collinwood Collection is a group of related doily, shawl, and tablecloth patterns.  They are all knitted in the round with fingering weight yarn.  This is some high intensity knitting – every row is patterned!

Next up for me was the long awaited publication of Medallions Hooded Scarf by Tangled.  It was great working with Tangled, and they did such a great job with the photos!

Meanwhile, I was busy submitting more patterns to publishers.  Enfolded Shawlette, a Comfort Shawl was selected for an interesting program by Dream in Color Yarns.  The idea was for the designer to host a KAL, including a contest where the prizes were Dream in Color Calm yarn.  We are just finishing up the KAL now, and two lucky winners should be receiving their yarn very soon!

The best part of Enfolded, though, is that the members of the Tinyknitters group got to choose a charity.  All proceeds (price less Ravelry and PayPal fees) are donated to Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières.  If you look at the pattern on Ravelry, you can see the receipts for the donations made for 2012.

Speaking of the Tinyknitters Group, you might like to take a look at some of interesting things we are doing there!  Besides the KAL, we just had a fun swap for Valentine’s Day.

Here are a few photos of the patterns from late 2012 ~

Collinwood is still at a discounted price, and doesn’t yet include the shawl/tablecloth pattern.   If if you purchase the pattern now, you will receive the small and large doilies as well as the table centerpiece for $3.99.  The shawl/tablecloth will be added to your collection around Labor Day in early September!

Here are the rules:

Enter any time from now until September 3, 2012. One entry per Raveler.  You must be a member of Ravelry to enter.

Your entry should have the following questions answered. Please post in this thread:  http://www.ravelry.com/discuss/tinyknitters/2199180.

1. What is your favorite yarn fiber or blend?
2. What is your favorite yarn weight?
3. What is your favorite type of project to knit or crochet?
4. What is your favorite technique (eg. lace, cables, intarsia, Fair Isle, entrelac, mosaic, twisted stitches, color pooling, etc.)

And that’s it! Winners will be contacted by September 4, and prizes will be mailed within a week.

Now for the prizes! Winners will receive 100 grams of Yarns of Italy Crespo yarn in dark blue. Sorry, but only Ravelers in the US can win this prize due to shipping costs. However, others may still enter the contest and win any Tinyknit pattern that is sold on Ravelry. Or, if you’d like to send me the difference in shipping cost with PayPal, I’d be happy to mail abroad (eg. If US shipping is $3 and shipping to the UK is $8, you could send me $5).

There will be a total of 3 skeins for this giveaway!

Just a few rules for the contest:

1. Deadline to enter your tip is July 2, 2012, and winners will be announced on July 3rd.  Winners will be chosen at random.
2. There will be at least one winner for every 5 Ravelers that share a knitting or crocheting tip.
3. The prize will be any of my patterns sold here on Ravelry – your choice. If you prefer, I will send the pattern to one of your friends instead of you.

And while you’re there, take a look at all the other tips!

Making the video was so much fun!  Gives me a new perspective on the creators of real stop motion animations.  This one has 5 pictures per second, which creates a pretty choppy animation – can’t imagine the work that goes into a professional video.

So, how to make a video like this?  Get out all your knitting supplies, set up your camera, and be sure to have a few extra batteries!  I took three photos per round of knitting, mainly because I was using three double pointed needles for this small doily.  And, I chose to do a small doily, not just because it would take less time (thankfully!), but also because a larger one would have been quite bunched up on the needles, and you wouldn’t have really seen the doily growing as clearly.

After taking all the photos, I choose music.  Since this is the Rondeau Small Lace Doily Pattern, I wanted to have music that would match the theme, as well as coordinate with the knitting process and speed of the video itself.  The music form of a rondo was a natural, if not obvious choice.  And who can go wrong with Mozart as their composer?

For the software, I simply used what was already on my computer.  I read reviews of other packages, from free to expensive, but in the end, simplicity won out.  This video was created with Windows Movie Maker.  It was pretty easy to learn the software and come up with something relatively presentable.

You just might want to give this a try yourself.  The entire process beginning with the cast on and ending with a complete video was only a few hours.  Plus I get a cool doily and a cup of tea at the end!

Quite often, I wake up with thoughts about a pattern at 5:00 AM.  As I make my way to the computer and coffee, the realization comes that there will be problems with this idea.  Often, it’s in the transition between lace motifs or in the shaping.  I type what has come to mind, and then I wait.  This might be a few minutes, days, or maybe I will never make it back to that design.   Something eventually clicks subconsciously and again I seem to wake up with the idea of how to solve the problems that first bothered me so much.  And then I chart.

Probably it’s charting that I love most of all.  I make hundreds of little squares in Excel all with nice black lines.  The squares are transformed into knitting symbols.  I stack them up neatly and move them all around the spreadsheet.  I arrange, I count, I recount, over and over again, until all the increases and decreases match up mathematically and aesthetically.  It’s a puzzle than can entertain me for untold hours.  It might be a little embarrassing to find out how much time I spend stacking little boxes with knitting symbols!  It’s also embarrassing to show my little squares to others and asking if they like my design.  Blank looks…that’s what they give me while they sheepishly tell me that they can’t see how it will come out in the end.  But I’d bet you could see those doilies and shawls if I showed you the charts!

After all that fun with boxes, there comes the work.  The hunt for the right yarn is quick and easy, but after that, it’s all sitting and knitting.  I love to knit, but it seems to take forever for that idea in my head to make its way through the work of my hands into a piece of lace.  Some knitters (and you know who you are!) are whirlwinds of activity, knitting 400 yards of fingering yarn in a single day.  For me, the going is slower, though I do eventually get there.

Here is a current project, which began as a little white swatch.  After dyeing the yarn, I began knitting the full sized project.  Photos show work through rounds 54, 74, and 100. Progress seems slow, but with each round, I am closer to where I want to be.

Conception becomes completion.

To kick off a more active spring and summer, we’re hostng a yarn giveaway at the Tinyknitters Group on Ravelry!

I hope you’ll give our contest a try!  No purchase is necessary, but it does involve knitting or crocheting a Tinyknit pattern.  Since quite a few are free, a tight budget shouldn’t keep you from entering.  Also, you may enter more than once if you’d like.  Every completed entry will win a free Tinyknit pattern (of your choice, any which are sold on Ravelry), and we will have at least one yarn prize for every 10 entries, up to 100 entries!  Please visit the Tinyknitters Group to learn about the details to enter:  http://www.ravelry.com/discuss/tinyknitters/2073379/1-25

There will be lots of prizes, including Cascade Alpaca Lace, Fortissima Colori Socka Color, and Lanaloft Sports Weight.  Here’s an idea of what you could win!

There were still more freebies in store for members of Tinyknitters!  Last week, I finished up Flurry, a Lace Snowflake and sent this pattern out to nearly 500 knitters!  Everyone who belongs to Tinyknitters, plus everyone who purchased, tested, or published one of my patterns received one.  This is just my little way of thanking all of you for your interest and help with my patterns.

I wish you great holiday joy, and may the new year bring you happiness and plenty of time for knitting and crocheting!

Just reply below to enter here with your first name and either your Ravelry name or e-mail address.  You can also enter on Ravelry, at this thread in the Tinyknitters Group:  Shawl Contest.  The deadline is December 25th.  Good luck and happy knitting!

You may be aware that I had a few goals for 2011, including writing a new pattern every month, as well as giving out a free pattern for every tester, and for each pattern tested.  I plan on continuing this for 2012 as well, and plan to have at least one pattern monthly.

Some of the patterns you will see for 2012 have already been accepted by publishers ~

A secret test for a cabled project knitted with bulky yarn (very different for me!)

A test for a shawl or scarf pattern (your choice) which combines cables and lace, very open and pretty for sport weight yarn

A secret test for a shawl pattern that uses beads and some interesting construction techniques, for sport weight yarn

And, there are quite a few others that are in the early design stages, including mosaic knitting, a tank top/vest, a circular shawl/table cloth, a Faroese shawl, a shrug, a very unusual doily, and a skirt.

If you’ve wondered what pattern testing entails, the answer is patience!  Although I really hope that the patterns are error free before the test even starts, there are usually a few mistakes.  For me, this is probably because I have seen the pattern so much that mistakes really don’t stand out.  I tend to knit on autopilot, as I’ve been looking at the pattern from its earliest stages and know how it developed.

Knitters of all skill levels are needed for tests.  It is often from the least experienced knitters that I can learn the most. They ask more questions, and this gets me thinking about how I can make the pattern more clear.  The more experienced knitters have a lot to add too and seem to spot errors quickly.  Really, the best tests have all sorts of knitters from all over the world!

One thing that I can’t stress enough is that testers should post a project on Ravelry.  There are many reasons for this, but most of them basically involve the sharing of information.  For example, you may have chosen the perfect yarn for a pattern, and others would love to know that!  Or, it could be the opposite case, and you would be helping others avoid a bad, and costly, yarn choice.  Needle size and type is also very helpful.  Let’s not forget the yardage that you used to knit the item.  What’s worse than knitting a large project, only to run out of yarn near the end?  Not much, especially if the yarn’s been discontinued!  Are you tall, or maybe very short?  Plump or thin?  It would be such a huge help for Ravelers to have fit information!  So, if you do sign up for a test, and you wonder why I am asking testers to post projects, now you know why

Does any of this interest you?  If they do, or you have another suggestion, please let me know.  I’d love to hear about what types of patterns you’d be interested in testing!