Day 4 - A Knitter and Crocheter For All Seasons?

As spring is in the air in the northern hemisphere and those in the southern hemisphere start setting their sights for the arrival of winter, a lot of crocheters and knitters find that their crafting changes along with their wardrobe. Have a look through your finished projects and explain the seasonality of your craft to your readers. Do you make warm woollens the whole year through in preparation for the colder months, or do you live somewhere that never feels the chill and so invest your time in beautiful homewares and delicate lace items. How does your local seasonal weather affect your craft?

I am terrible about recongizing the change of seasons and my crafting seems to follow the whims of the weather, and my mood, rather than any sort of order.

I never seem to "prepare" for the season, once winter starts I realize I need/want hats and mitts, but sometimes it is a freak snow storm in April that sends me fleeing back to winterwear despite the fact that summer will be in full force in a couple of weeks. But then again I don't make sweaters, and living in Ontario I never put my hats, mitts, cowls and scarves too far away because cold spells are not unheard of here in the summer.

One trend I have noticed is a general downswing in knitting in the summer, this may have to do with the fact that for many years I felt quite absurd knitting mittens in July and lace wasn't the thing for me to be knitting at work. However, this year may be different, in my discovery of sock knitting.  Magical, wonderful, adored, socks that can be knit and worn year round and are fun and engaging knits.

So I am terrible for matching up my knitting to seasons, however this may be as much about being a process (vs. product) knitter, I am more interested in actually making the item, rather than wearing the item I am less tied to seasons and more to ooh, shiny, fun pattern and yarn.

Maybe I will be proactive this year and get some winter knitting done in advance, but that is very unlikely, I will just keep knitting the ooh shiny patterns, weather be damned.

Day 3 - My Knit and Crochet Hero

Blog about someone in the fibre crafts who truly inspires you. There are not too many guidelines for this, it's really about introducing your readers to someone who they might not know who is an inspiration to you. It might be a family member or friend, a specific designer or writer, indie dyer or another blogger. If you are writing about a knitting designer and you have knitted some of their designs, don't forget to show them off. Remember to get permission from the owner if you wish to use another person's pictures.

I have a whole bunch of respect for so many crafters out there, but there is no one single hero. One of the thing I enjoy about the fiber community is while there folks who are often considered knitterati, it is quite the egalitarian group.  Any knitter can publish a pattern that could become a runaway success, someone who runs an Etsy shop out of their basement can create for themselves a livelyhood by hitting on a target market.

I think my Heros are all the knitters, crocheters, spinners, weavers, designer and dyers who are helping to shape the community.  Without them, and places like Etsy, Ravelry, Twitter and blogs I would just be a person who knits with acrylics and Patons yarns using pattern booklets available at my local fabric store.  I wouldn't know the difference between MCNs and BFLs and when to use alpaca yarns.

I wouldn't have ever started spinning, (thanks to the Phat Fiber crew), or weaving (thanks to the Yarn Harlot) or desireing a drumcarder (thanks to Interweave's videos).  I wouldn't use handdyed yarn, or have interchangeable knitting needles (or do magic loop for that matter), I wouldn't know how to use handcards or why it is fine to have both a turkish and top-whorl spindle.

Thanks to the community we have created for ourselves, not only can I make a sock pattern designed by a PhD in Hamilton, when I run into a problem I can send her a tweet about that pattern and have an answer within minutes.

Or perhaps my hero is the internet, because it is the glue that holds my fiber world together and provides me with friends, patterns, yarn and a community of likeminded people.

So thank you to all of you who are reading and writing in KCBW, you are my heros by providing the content that make our fibery world go round.

Day 2 - Photography Challenge Day

Today challenges you to be creative with your photography, and get yourself in with the chance to win the photography prize.

While this picture is not particularly special, or well staged, for me it tells a story, a story of connection in the fiber world.

I took this picture with my phone on Saturday night to let someone, whom I have never met in person, see the cloth I had just taken off my loom.  She is a friend, and purveyor of fine yarns, and despite being hours away I was able to instantly respond to her with a photo within minutes.

It's not the best picture but it captured a moment that was important to me and one that had it not been for my iPhone I wouldn't have been able to make a connection with another person across the province and the world.

Photographs have power beyond their perceived quality, they can capture a moment, and now that everyone has cameras in their pockets with instant connection to flickr, facebook and twitter there are more of these little moments that everyone can capture in the future.  I am not a picture snob, the more the better!

Day 1 - Colo(u)r Lovers

Note: I am participating in Knitting and Crochet Blog Week, so for the next seven days you will be working from prompts (which are given at the top of each post). To learn more, visit Eskimimi who has planned the event.

Colour is one of our greatest expressions of ourselves when we choose to knit or crochet, so how do you choose what colours you buy and crochet or knit with. Have a look through your stash and see if there is a predominance of one colour. Do the same with your finished projects - do they match? Do you love a rainbow of bright hues, or more subdued tones. How much attention do you pay to the original colour that a garment is knit in when you see a pattern? Tell readers about your love or confusion over colour.

Color is one of the things I suffer a bit of mild anxiety.  Not about enjoying colors, but about picking and pairing colors, I have no idea at time what goes with what and what goes with my skintone.  I just wear colors I like and have family who will sometimes lean over and mention that the top doesn't really, go, and not to wear it in future.

However, I took this post as a challenge to haul out my stash and put it in a color wheel and see what colors I have in my stash, and these are the results.

I'm not overly surprised to find out that green is the most prominent wedge of the wheel in my stash.  Green has always been my favorite color, from the mint green color of carpet I picked out at age 3, through to my favorite bags, and even my car, oh and my nickname for the blog.

Stretching from yellow-y grass green through to turquoise/tourmaline blue-greens, it is a great section from the colorwheel, that I LOVE.

However, purple seems to be coming in a close second, with coppery/tan/pinky groups coming a distant third.

What is most shocking is the absolute lack of blues in my stash.  I currently have a couple of skeins, most notably and beautifully, Frost from the TFA club last year.  And considering that blue is Tanis's favorite color to but dye and use, I haven't picked up any of her gorgeous skeins.

My finished projects seems to be the same with purples and greens making regular appearances amongst a range of other colors.

As far as tone, I seem to like clear tones, although heathers and "muddier" tones also make regular appearances.

As far as picking colors, I will be inspired by the original item, but more often than not I don't pick yarn for a specific project, I buy yarn for stash and pick from that stash for projects, so I am pairing a yarn that is fixed in color with a project. So while the original of the item may inspire me to a certain family of colors, rarely do I have the option of matching it exactly.

For me color is exciting and I am desperate to learn more about it, I would like to start dyeing yarn and maybe one day I will own a carder, which excites me very much.

So I am still very much confused about color, however that doesn't keep me from wanting to enjoy color.

Yay, Knitting and Crochet Blog Week is back for 2012

Last week, while in the midst of too many meetings and chaos, I got some great news, Knitting and Crochet Blog week will be happening again this year April 23-29 (and overlapping with Knitter's Frolic in Toronto).

I have participated in the past two years of the blogfest, and it has been so much fun.  You can find my previous posts from 2010 and 2011 by clicking HERE.

It was what got me to start my first version of this blog.  For more information about event visit EskimimiMakes to learn more about the week, tagging policies and PRIZES (this is the first time with prizes).  The topics are going to be announced on April 2nd, so I will start planning my posts then.