In the Making...

Gentle Blooms is perfect for using up those special skeins of yarn. Gentle Blooms is a bandana-style cowlette, which means you get the beauty and fun of a shawl at a small scale but it’s easy to wear and will stay in position. The design came about as I had quite a lot of yarn leftover from my Vertices Unite . The yarn was a gorgeous merino and silk blend, and I didn't want to leave it languishing in my stash. Maybe you've got some gorgeous yarns in your stash that aren't enough for shawl. The quantities needed are - MC: Navy - 225m [247yds] CC1: Cream - 85m [93yds] CC2: Pink - 97m [107yds] As usual, I wanted the knitting to be enjoyable, so the vast majority is knit and purl. There is a handful of stranded knitting rows for the "Gentle Blooms". The positioning gives the biggest impact for quite a small section of stranded knitting. Or as they say "the biggest bang for your buck!". Since it's all about the details on a project like this, the neckline...

Let's talk about gauge. I know a lot of you dislike making a gauge swatch. I, personally, have no issues with it, as it gives me an opportunity to try out my yarn and I like to knit. It may have something to do whether we lean towards process or product knitting. If you're more of a product knitter, then I can see why you perhaps feel like the gauge swatch is a waste of time.  We invest a lot of time into our knits and it's not a pleasant feeling to get to the end of the process and realise that it doesn't fit or we've run short on yarn. I've been making swatches for a long, long time and for most of that time, I've been writing down what the measurements are. This has saved me a lot of time on swatching. Just one thing to be aware of is our tension changes, so a swatch made 5 years ago is very unlikely to be exactly the same as what we would be knitting now. Let me give you an example of where this database comes in handy. I'm making a shawl and the gau...

So you’ve chosen your pattern, but either you don’t want to use the recommended yarn or you can’t find it to buy. This does not mean you are stuck. Many knitters, especially when they are just learning to knit, get stuck on the idea that you can only use the yarn that the pattern is written with. There are, occasionally, a few projects where it can be quite hard to find an alternative but that is very rare. There are a few factors that you want to think about when changing yarn.  Yarn Thickness The main one is the thickness of the yarn. This is the one factor that you absolutely have to consider. Everything else that I discuss below helps to hone your decision down but yarn thickness is at the core of a project. If you use a thicker yarn, it could make the fabric too dense and often make it impossible to match the gauge of the pattern. If you use a thinner yarn, then it will be more open and airy than intended; there’s more scope with this but some projects such as toys an...