Taking Time to Smell the Roses

I seem to be on a trip down memory lane more often these days. Is it something about advancing age, or what, lol? My latest is on reflections of a holiday greeting card I made 18 years ago as a gift to knitting friends.

The card is actually a pattern for the Christmas stocking in the photo. Although I was doing some computer publishing at that time (for the text and charted page layouts), this pre-dates my digital camera days and so it was made in the style of a photo glued to the front page.

The terminology and writing style pre-dates the official launch of the Jackie E-S / HeartStrings pattern line, but patterns like this are timeless. “Christmas Stocking” pattern as originally published in this holiday card style is now available as a world exclusive at Patternfish.

In this pattern, you’ll be humored by the reference to “round” needles rather than circular. To me, calling needles “round” (to differentiate from straight needles) made sense at that time because the needles were for making things in the round. However, I recall giving a presentation to my local knitting guild not too long after this, and when I referred to “round needles”, a knitter rather sarcastically challenged me that all knitting needles were round. Not to interrupt the flow of the presentation for the other participants, I quickly conceded to her statement, but that was before the days of square needles being manufactured, lol.

Another sort of humorous reflection is the omission of a suggested needle size. Only gauge is given. Seems that my group of knitting friends felt that should be all the information that was necessary, and that pattern writers should not be suggesting a needle size. I didn’t agree with that point of view once I started officially publishing HeartStrings patterns, so you will always see a suggested needle size to use as a starting point in achieving the planned gauge.

Anyway, my knitting friends enjoyed their gift card/pattern, and that is what makes life go ’round. I hope you’ve enjoyed the story, and that it might have even awakened some good memories of your own, too!

I took off for a good part of the summer — Mainly it was to escape the excrutiating high temperatures and > 90% humidity, so our trips took us to the Colorado rockies in July (mildly cool and only 16% humidity – yay!) and to Vancouver, WA in August (fortunately just missed the heat wave; ‘hi’ to Ann and Bob of Elann – thanks so much for the wonderful dinner and company). Along the way, there was plenty of time to ’smell the roses’ . I think we all owe it to ourselves to sometimes just escape and do something totally for ourselves. I am now feeling more energized and productive than I have in quite some time. We shall see how long this lasts before reality sets in, lol.

I am really pumped up about the new Tilli Tomas Symphony Kid Lace yarn. This yarn is a very soft brushed kid mohair plied with a soft glittery metallic thread and tiny glass seed beads.Tracy Robinson (owner and creative director of Tilli Tomas) asked me to design one-, two-, three-skein projects for this yarn. It’s been great fun to create designs that showcase this yarn. Watch for these new HeartStrings patterns to be released soon: Lace and Cables Scarf, Lace Starlight Stole, and Put on the Glitz Shrug.