Keyword: How do you do that

I just want to finish everything at once again knitting and am a little project crazed. I need it anyway always colorful and versatile, so I work best. Very far ahead on my needles are currently the spring waffle cloth for Sandra and the baby blanket, whose name I will tell you when the new citizen is there, which may happen very soon.

Knitting projects-progress-plan

The baby blanket is knitted in different steps garter stitch. It will be brightly colored, which splits the taste buds. Just for fun, I calculated how many stitches I "must" knit for this blanket. I came up with a staggering 42'404 stitches. Depending on how I will knit around the corners, it will be about a hundred more. That no longer falls into the weight.

I primarily get to knit in the evenings when the kids are asleep and nothing else is planned. In between, however, there is always room for a row. While waiting at the ballet school. Or after lunch. You know how it is, if you really think about it, you can integrate knitting into your everyday life quickly and easily. A few less times on Facebook and you've already knitted one more row.

When I have time pressure for certain projects - like right now - I divide them into days. For the spring waffle shawl, I calculate one skein per day. I manage that well in addition to working on the book and my other projects, because the pattern knits up wonderfully quickly. For the baby blanket I plan 5,000 stitches a day.

Progress-Planning

Nah, I'm kidding, of course I don't really count the stitches. Since I knit the blanket in strips, I take five strips of 10 rows each day and hope that the baby still well-behaved lingers a little in the cozy cave.

So I divide the projects according to the number of columns to be knitted or according to pattern sequences. You could also calculate in gram increments.

Are you also sometimes so fond of planning? Do you sometimes have time pressure for certain projects? How do you do it?

Last year, on one of my visits to Woolspire at the airport in Denmark, I bought these three baskets from ferm living. These are my project baskets.

Storage knitting projects

Shawls and baby blankets fit in there well. But I also have a large basket, which just my actually finished knitted jacket still hogs (I have to unravel one more sleeve, the attentive reader may have already missed the finished piece - me too!).

There are a few things that I should always have with me, but in reality they are always somewhere else:

Knitting Accessories Blog

My Embroidery scissors. As many stitch markers as possible, I like to use them to mark pattern changes, as well as front and back, for mindless knitting. I have some nice closed stitch markers that Cecile gave me a while back. I really like those. And then, of course, I have those standard markers that you can open and attach to stitches. But safety pins do it too (the golden ones hung on price tags).

A Wool needle for sewing the threads is of course also very important. But it doesn't always have to be there, because I like to put off sewing the threads for days or weeks anyway. Then even the needle in the basket is of no use.

I actually knit exclusively with my addi Click Set and therefore I often have a few ropes in other lengths with me.

But most important of all is my knitting notebook. I have already filled a few of these. I use the Knitters Graph Paper Journal from Fringe. It's actually a simple notebook, but with a corresponding grid and I just love that. Carina got me a bunch of them a while ago. I now urgently need a new supply!

Where do you keep your knitting project and what do you actually always and everywhere have with you?

My Loppa cardigan is the slippery-right-I-don't-have-to-think-about-it project right now, next to the rather complicated tunic I'm knitting for the Brooklyn Tweed Knit Along. That will change soon though, because then it's time to cut it up!

Steek knit

It should not be a sweater, but a cardigan. The middle strip is cut open for this purpose. A little queasy it gets me at the thought, do you have a clue about Steeks? Any tips? How do you do it?

Fräulein Sonnenschein of NadelSpielLust has recently eliminated her needle chaos and that reminded me of my good old resolution to sew sometime a pretty knitting needle storage. Has of course never happened, while I have now quite a few needles.

Store knitting needles sort

So much does not look at all, but even this small pile can hardly be neatly accommodated. I've spent many evenings looking for a nice, really comprehensive way to bring all these needles under one hat, or even in a single bag. And in such a way that I also have a constant overview of existing needle sizes. My not too pretty order now looks just like this:

Knitting needles sort arrange

Not a feast for the eyes, but as we all know, the eye also knits, doesn't it?

Not too long ago Cécile had shown here a super simple DIY for a double pointed needles storage without a sewing machine. I find great! But I would really like to have all the needles in a bag. A tutorial for a knitting needle bag, which is already pretty close to my ideas, can be found at Noodlehead.

How do you do it? Do you have a nice little bag (here with the link)? Or several? Or are you more the "needle chaos" type?

A nice good Saturday morning to today's knitting net whisper! Unfortunately, unfortunately, I simply lack the time in recent weeks to make beautiful pictures. That changes now (hopefully) again, I still have so much to show. But today there are first as usual, a few links, but this time with a very specific theme.

Knitting blog knitting inspirations

Sonja, who writes one of my favorite non-knitting blogs because she always makes me think, tells how she keeps her consumption in check. The first 7 points can almost all be wonderfully applied to conscious yarn shopping. So the topic today is:

Sensible yarn consumption

1) Hard to believe, but true: I actually browse very little in online stores. Of course, I'm on Pinterest, Instagram and Ravelry way too often. But in online stores I actually only look very specifically for a certain yarn for the next project.

2) I practice this to the extreme. I write down or save on Ravelry or on my bulletin boards, which projects I would like to knit and come back to it later. If I'm still convinced of the part, it goes on the to-knit list, but is still not bought, because I usually do that just before I cast on stitches.

3) Every time I buy yarn, I think about whether the color and material will fit into my closet and whether I really have a meaningful project in mind. Sounds funny? Ha! Fooled me, of course that doesn't work at all. I let my mood, pretty pictures and beautiful yarn colors guide me way too much. Sometimes you just have to take chances, like when Sophia flies to America and brings me Woolfolk, remember? I actually still haven't found the right project for that.

4) Mmhhh. Yes ... so quite sometimes I look at my yarn supply and consider whether I could not knit the next project from it. But honestly? Most of the time I just look and buy again. After all, I usually buy matching quantities, so my yarn supply but also somehow keeps within limits.

5) No, so the point is really not implementable at all *laughs*.

6) Ha! That's as far as it goes!

7) Good idea! Give away or raffle my clear stock would perhaps actually be an alternative. Then there would be room for new things again.

In a post called "Why we stash" Felicia describes very well which mechanisms seduce us to superfluous material purchases. She even went so far as to subject herself to a "Stash Challenge". You can find all posts of the entire series here, one or the other time I felt very caught!

How do you do it? Do you have a large supply of yarn or none at all? Do you choose projects based on the yarns you have in your stash?

 

Recently I came across the hashtag #knittertools on Instagram, I love it always to look at what others have so for tools and stuff for knitting. Since has accumulated with me now of course so much. I'll show you a few things, without de I now no longer like to knit.

Accessories knitting

Prominent in the middle and always there, my needle and gaugefrom Lana Grossa. Of course, I use this very often, because the marking of the needle sizes on my wooden needles disappears after two rows at the latest, so I have to constantly check the strengths of my many needle tips. This needle gauge is at the same time a ruler and gauge for counting out the stitches in my swatches. Very practical and therefore constantly in use.

I use the stitch holders(this safety pin in the upper left corner) from time to time, but mostly I put stitches on a piece of yarn of a different color. But for shorter stitches these holders are very useful. The purple discs are the end pieces to my needlepoint setand they are extremely important when knits are paused and I need the appropriate needle size for other projects (for this reason I also bought a few extra ropes to be able to leave a project sometimes).Under the needle gauge are three rope connectors, so that several ropes can be connected together, for example, to try on larger projects once and to be able to distribute the stitches evenly over several ropes.

Wool needlesare, of course, indispensable for sewing the threads. No question about it. The crochet hook is needed to fix mistakes in the middle of a row, so I like to drop a stitch a few rows down to fix mistakes.

Ialready reported about my enthusiasm for my new pompom makerthe other day in the context of my new lift-it hat. Really great, the things! Below the tape measure, also pretty much always with me. My stitch markersaren't the prettiest, but they serve their purpose. I often just use different colored yarn scraps for that too, but having a few markers in the bag doesn't hurt.

At the bottom a few T-needles from KnitPro, I have a pack of 50, they don't rust (that's important!) and are great for blocking (stretching) the knits. By the way, I do that on these play mats, it doesn't have to be the expensive mats from KnitPro, you should just check beforehand if the mats rub off, mine don't.

And now tell me which tools you can't do without anymore. What are your favorite accessories? Maybe you also have some tips for nicer variants of knitting tools?

I have thought about a new category and I am very curious how you find it! "How do you do it?" will be a series of topics around knitting (at irregular intervals), in which I ask you questions and of course hope that you chat here quite numerous from the knitting box. There are so many - soooo many - topics I would love to know how others do it. Five knitters, five opinions, isn't it? Sometimes a question suddenly pops into my head while I'm knitting, and I'm already frantically googling around to find out how others do it. So why not just ask? Are you with me?

UFO knitting

Today, for a given occasion, it's about the subject of UFOs. Namely, when I cast off my diamond scarf a few evenings ago, I suddenly stood there with empty needles. I didn't feel like making the second sock, so I ventured to the closet with the unfinished objects. I have a few of those - not too many, but still. It should be nothing complicated, something without much thinking. No calculating and above all no reading the pattern. That's when the raglan-on-top sweater for the prince came to mind, which I made freestyle last winter.

Meanwhile, the sleeve openings were dangerously tight (the small vegetables grow too fast) and somehow I had no more desire to freestyle and calculate myself. So I ribbed a part and went in search of a suitable tutorial for the yarn. Ravelry is a dream for such projects: At Filatura di Crosa Zara (which I bought last winter at Mylys in Hamburg) I found a long list of suitable pattern under "Pattern ideas". Swoosh, gathering stripesby Veera Välimäki landed in the shopping cart and two evenings later I'm already almost at the sleeve openings and am cheerful to knit the part soon finished.

So sometimes you just have to ribbon UFOs to get back into the swing of things. How do you do that? Do you also rib a half-finished piece without mercy? Do you then use the yarn a second time? How do you work through your UFOs? Do you have a system - something like one UFO a month or so?

Tell me about it, I'm curious!