podcasts

Episode 163

April 8, 2017April 8, 2017 by Sara

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This episode features the following segments: The Front Porch, The Back Porch, Ever-expanding Skill Set, and Off the Shelf.

Cover Art by Samuel St. Thomas

The Front Porch

beach

Join in the Summer Tops Make-along. Begin April 1; conclude on the first day of summer. Projects in progress are welcome. Tell us what you’re making and share resources on the Ravelry thread.

knit
crochet
sew
embellish
up-cycle

The Back Porch

dubgus.01 — Socks with a double gusset heel, as written in a pattern by Cristi Payne. This type of heel is ideal for a wide instep. I experimented with 1×1 and 3×1 rib on this pair. Click image for a link to my project page.

dubgus.02

Ever-expanding Skill Set

History of salad
Bittersweet Roasted Radicchio recipe — this looks so delicious
Dishing up the Dirt by Andrea Bemis (recipes on blog and there’s a new cookbook!)
share your recipes and photos of salads

Off the Shelf

It’s National Poetry Month. I’m going to try something new and memorize a poem in celebration. My choice is “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye. In the recent issue of Taproot magazine, Andrew Maxfield suggests turning poems to songs by first memorizing them. Would you like to join me? You can memorize a whole poem, a stanza, or just a few lines. Reciting memorized verse is a great way to enter meditation, or just take a few moments to push the cares of the world from your mind. I’ll be providing some tips and encouragement for memorization this month.

TIP 1: Type your poem. Word for word — type it. Use the same capitalization, punctuation, and line breaks as the author. Print it and place in your wallet, or other location where you can access it during the day. Better yet, print several copies. Place them all around. Leave one on your night stand so you can read it just before bed and upon waking up.

Arrows and Doorways

The design for this super-cozy cowl was inspired by textiles in a hotel lobby. Concentric geometric shapes kept playing in my mind until finally I was able to chart the pattern and get it onto my needles. The interplay of this chevron-like patterning has a mesmerizing effect–while you’re knitting and when you wear the finished accessory.

Knit up a cowl with yarn from your stash, adding some magical new mini-skeins from your advent calendar, or exchange leftover yarn with a friend. The design invites frequent color changes, and makes an ideal knit for the advent season. It could be just as striking knit with two high-contrast colors.

While most cowls of this type are seamed within a band of a single color, this pattern incorporates a technique called stranded donut grafting, an incredibly clever and completely seamless graft that allows you to maintain colorwork patterning so that your starting and ending rounds are undetectable. Really! With many possibilities for color play and a new technique to add to your skill set, this cowl pattern is really an opportunity for knitters to level-up!

NEW PATTERN DESIGN!

ONE DARK BLUE NIGHT

This hat is the third in a series of patterns inspired by teachings in Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run with the Wolves. This time, I drew inspiration from Estés’ retelling of a Japanese tale, Tsukina Waguma or “The Crescent Moon Bear,” in which a young woman travels to the cave of an incredibly intimidating and ferocious bear. She makes several journeys to the cave, leaving food and quickly retreating, until “one dark blue night,” she musters the courage to stand her ground and ask for what she seeks--one hair from a moon-shaped patch on the bear’s chest--which she is granted. The young woman returns, triumphant, to the old healer who has sent her on this quest. She believes this single hair is the magic ingredient in solving the problem that plagues her. She holds it forth, but the healer tosses the hair into the flames. The young woman is in despair until she realizes the true lesson of her quest: that using her determination, courage, and patience, as she did with the crescent moon bear, will help her to confront the challenge at hand.

The moon phase motif of this colorwork hat is meant to capture the magic of a dark blue night--when the moon shines brightly overhead, the frosty air sparkles with possibility, and we succeed in summoning accumulated wisdom from deep within ourselves so that we can apply it to our own healing. Choose colors to conjure a wintery night sky, or select a palette of your signature colors.

Available on Ravelry December 20th.

Yarns at Yin Hoo

Episode 163

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