Maker Goals 2021

On Instagram, I saw nicolespdesigns make a sort of bingo card for her 2021 knitting goals. I thought that was a really good idea and decided to make my own. Feel free to save this and fill it out yourself.

To see mine follow me on Instagram..

WIP Wednesday: Yellow Vintage Cardigan

I was trucking along, finally I had the desire to get some knitting done on this cardigan. I started it almost a year ago and I was ready to get it off the needles. It came to the time for me to measure my front piece to see if I was almost done, how much longer I had to go before starting the next side of the front. "Cool, I've already knit four inches, so I just had three more to go." That’s when I realized, “wait… did I forget to do the neckline shaping? NOOOO!!!” I did, indeed, forget the neckline shaping. I went through all of the three stages of grief:

Stage 1: I should probably just start the whole thing on fire and pretend like it didn't happen

For about a good half hour, I thought seriously about scrapping the whole thing. Maybe even throwing the thing in the fire pit. I hadn't put a lifeline in and didn't want to go through the hassle of either trying to put in a reactive lifeline, or ripping it back and trying to pick up the stitches.

Stage 2: Pretend it was intentional

After talking myself out of throwing the whole thing in the fire pit, I decided it really wasn't that big of a deal and I'd just continue on with no neckline shaping. But the little voice in the back of my head kept repeating "are you sure this is what you want?" Until it was screaming "ARE YOU SURE THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT?!" Until finally…

Stage 3: Rip back and fix it

Yep, so, in the end I decided I needed to actually rip out those four inches and do the neck shaping. Since I didn't have a proactive lifeline, I had to do my best to put in a reactive lifeline. It was a little difficult with the yarn overs and the decreases and I did flub up a bit, but I still managed to not drop a single stitch.

So, are you happy you did that?

Nope. I think the neck shaping looks stupid and idiot me didn't learn from my past mistake and I didn't put a lifeline back in after all that trouble. Soo..., the neckline is staying how it is. I'm sure someone with more experience with different neckline shapes would have been able to foreseen themselves not liking the shape, but you don't know what you don't know until you know. So, I'm just taking this as a learning experience.

Anyway, if you want to get real time updates on my knitting failures (and successes too!) follow me on Instagram.

Freebie: Printable Hang Tags for Gifts

Up your handmade gifts with these free printable hang tags. These are perfect for anyone who gives a lot of hand knit or crocheted gifts. Whether you make birthday, Christmas, Mother's Day or Father's Day gifts, these hang tags are just what you need.

If you like this printable and find it useful, please consider buying me a coffee so I can continue to bring you guys free printables. For more information about what it means to buy me a coffee click here.

Annual Christmas Sweater: I won't let myself be great

In 2016, I planned out a much more complicated sweater than I actually knit. In 2017, I planned out a much more complicated sweater than I actually knit. Am I becoming predictable?  If you’ve missed my other three sweaters, check out this handy tag I made to get all caught up, then hop on back here to read about another sweater that wasn't exactly as epic as I had wanted it.

No color work? What gives?

2017 was going to be the year. I was finally going to go all out, big Intarsia Christmas tree smack dab in the middle of my chest. The ornaments were going to be bobbles, maybe big, themed buttons. It was going to be awesome. But guess who had to nix that idea because she hasn’t learned Intarsia. Yeah. That’d be me. Why won’t I just let myself be great?

But Mandi, that still doesn’t explain the one color sweater. I’m talking in circles because I honestly don’t know. I think I had it stuck in my head that I needed to knit something out of my Bernat Handicrafter Book 538 (I was today years old when I learned that it was Handicrafter, not Handcrafter). I soon realized that none of those sweaters were my idea of Christmasy. It didn't matter, though, I had my heart set on a vintage inspired sweater and this pattern was the only one that had an overtly Christmas theme.

So what pattern did you use?

I ended up going with Style No. 53 (such a sexy name for a knitting pattern, no?). I heavily modified it. It was originally a cardigan with the design panel centered on each side of the front. All I did was center that panel on the front to make it a pullover. The pattern called for set-n-sleeves, but I wasn't about to try and figure out how to shape them in pattern so I converted them to dropped sleeves. I have to be honest, I do this too often. I really don't think a dropped shoulder is the best look on me. But it's the easy option so this is what I lean to most. I need to fix that and step outside my comfort zone. Maybe next year.

Next Week

So, that concludes my backlog of Christmas sweater posts. This whole process has been fun to see how much my sweater knitting has improved. Next week… well, next week I'm supposed to have this year's sweater done, but procrastination has set in and we're not celebrating Christmas until the middle of January, so we'll see what happens.

Wanna see if I finish my current Christmas sweater by Christmas day? Follow me on Instagram to see all my work-in-progress shots.

Annual Christmas Sweater: Round Yoke Redemption

My 2015 sweater was riddled with fit issues and poorly thought out color substitutions. The following year, 2016, I set out to be far more ambitious than I ended up actually being. Here I go trucking along sharing my annual Christmas sweaters if you’ve missed the previous two sweaters check out my handy tag here to get caught up.

Round Yoke Redemption?

In 2015 I knit an ill-fitting round yoke sweater. I could say the reason I knit this one in 2016 was because I wanted to redeem myself and show that I could knit a round yoke sweater that actually fit me. But that’s not exactly the case. That’s not the case at all, actually. What I had really set out to knit was an all over colorwork sweater with dropped sleeves. Once I got going on the all over patterned sweater, I realized it was going to be too much of a chore to knit, and I wasn’t about to do any stressful knitting on a tight deadline. So, I opted to change it to a simple round yoke.

My original idea for the all over pattern.

I wasn’t overly happy with the decision though. I love the sweater and it turned out great, but to me, at the time, it felt like a cop out to do two round yoke sweaters two years in a row. I low key wish I could revisit this one year and do the original all over pattern I was planning on. But I’ll probably think it’s a cop out, too. (haha)

Leftover Beads

When I was still planning on knitting the all over pattern, I ran into the dilemma of the snowmen’s faces. I’m not too keen on knitting with three colors at a time, I had done that in my previous Christmas sweater and really I had no desire to do it again. My two options then were to knit the whole thing leaving the faces blank and then duplicate stitching the eyes and nose on later. Or using beads to act as the coal and carrot. Since I’d rather adopt a pack of opossums and raise them as my own children than duplicate stitch anything, I decided to go with the beads. It was perfect, I had a ton of leftover beads from my first Christmas sweater so I would finally be using up those beads and I wouldn’t have to duplicate stitch.

Fast forward to after I swatched, the beads were transparent, I tried to pretend I liked the look, but I really didn’t so I had to buy opaque ones. Keep in mind, at this point, I was still knitting an all over pattern. Needless to say, I have a whole new set of beads that I don’t know I’ll ever use. Haha, I’m the worst.

Did I meet the deadline?

Every year I set a deadline to have my Christmas sweaters blocked and wearable by Christmas Day. Every year I’ve made that deadline. Every year except the year I knit this sweater anyway. I don’t remember exactly why I didn’t have it done on Christmas Day, but I do know that was when the tradition of going to my grandpa’s house to celebrate with family on Christmas Day ended and we all got together at a later date. I’m guessing when the actual get together date was set I was like, “Screw it! Now I got a whole ‘nother week to finish this thing.” I ended up casting off on Christmas Day and had it blocked maybe the next day. But in my mind, that doesn’t count as meeting the deadline even if I didn’t need to wear until a week later.

Next Week

To date, this was my most successful Christmas sweater. It fits just like I had intended it to fit with the one exception that the sleeves grew A LOT during blocking. The sweater also taught me another important thing. I do not care for round yoke sweaters. I don’t have any real reason for it, they’re just not my cup of tea.

Next week, I’ll be sharing my 2017 sweater. If you don’t like spoilers stop reading. The 2017 sweater is by far my subtlest Christmas Sweater.

Don't miss my progress on my 2018 Christmas Sweater(vest)! follow me on  Instagram to see all my work-in-progress shots.

Annual Christmas Sweater: Black Santa... Gnomes

Back in 2014, I started a tradition where I knit myself a Christmas themed sweater to wear every year for my family’s Christmas get together. If you read this blog regularly, you’re probably thinking, “Yeah, you knit that one sweater that one year and then abandoned the idea.” While that may be more characteristic of me, I am happy to inform you all that I have indeed knit myself a Christmas sweater every year since 2014… I just haven’t posted about any of them on the blog. But this December, that’s going to change. Each week this month, I’m going to be sharing each of my sweaters on here, finally.

The Concept

The only thing I knew going into the 2015 sweater was that I wanted to incorporate a black Santa. I was first thinking about an intarsia Santa smack dab in the middle of my chest complete with 3D pom pom on his hat. But I don’t know how to do intarsia so I scrapped that idea and decided on a round yoke sweater instead.

Like my previous year’s sweater, I used a mix of patterns to achieve the results I wanted. For the overall body, I used Winter Doldrums by Carla Pletzer as a jumping off point. It’s a great free pattern in multiple sizes that did exactly what I needed it to do. At that point, I had never knit a round yoke sweater so, me being me, I also bought a Craftsy class with Amy Detjen just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything big. And then for the colorwork, I used a modified version of Nisse by Tasha Moss for the Santas and I made up my own color pattern for the trees.

I wanted to keep the overall feel of Tasha’s pattern the same. I wanted it to look like the Santas were standing on snow in front of a blue sky. I knew I didn’t want the original carrots that Tasha had in her pattern because what the hell do carrots have to do with Christmas? Carrots, in fact, do not have anything thing to do with Christmas. But if I’m calling the white part of the sweater snow, and the blue part of the sweater sky, then why the hell are there evergreen trees underground? I don’t have an answer for that but whatever.

Still not considering the logistics of the evergreen trees, I trucked on to the Santas which I figured would be simple enough. Swap the blue jackets for a nice Christmas red and swap the peachy skin color for the dark brown skin color and I’d be good to go. Fast forward to me showing the sweater off and a person saying, “Cool! I want a Santa Gnome sweater.” Well, I don’t but that is indeed what I knit for myself and I’m going to have to live with that regret for the rest of my life.

The Fit

Ufdah. The only word I can think of to describe the fit of this sweater is bad. First, I knit the entire body too short. If I remember right, I wanted it to be a little more cropped because I have a 50s inspired skirt that I wanted to wear with it. But in order to get the color pattern to fit, I had to give it too much positive ease for the look I was going for. In hindsight, I should have cut one of the repeats in half and I wouldn’t have had to fudge to get the fit so much. But hey, the oversized crop top is kind of back in style. I guess I’m a trendsetter. Is it trendsetting when it’s unintentional?

The second issue is that I knit the sleeves way too long. I don't know, I must have thought I was knitting this sweater for Kevin Garnett or something because there is no other explanation for why I knit such long sleeves. With the freakishly long sleeves and the cropped body, the whole sweater looks ridiculous laying flat after I wash it.

The third issue I had with fit is the neckline. As I was decreasing, I was getting more and more worried about it fitting over my head. This was mostly because when I switched over to the 16-inch circular needle, it made the whole thing look super small, which is to be expected. The more I decreased the more nervous I got about it. I was knitting on a deadline and I wasn’t about to knit it too small, not be able to get my head into the thing and then have to reknit it. So, I stopped my decreases too early and ended up with a neckline that’s too wide, which coincidentally, is sorta in style right now, too. I really am a trendsetter.

So, You Hate the Whole Thing, huh?

You might be surprised to learn that I don't hate this sweater. Fit issues and color pattern blunders aside, I’m still really proud of it. It still amazes me sometimes that each year I’ve set out to knit a Christmas sweater and each year I actually do. That’s some character development I never expected from myself. And you know, maybe the Santa Gnomes have grown on me over the years.

Next week, we’ll take a look at my 2016 sweater. Spoilers, it’s another round yoke and there were no ill-fated color changes that were made.

Don't miss my progress on my 2018 Christmas Sweater(vest)! Follow me on Instagram to see all my work-in-progress shots.

This Gal's Gift Ideas for the Knitters in Your Life

Tell me if this sounds familiar. The holidays come along and you're making gift list ideas for all the people in your life. It's going great, one person is getting their favorite superhero apparel, another person is getting that book they've been talking about. Gift cards for another person to their favorite store. Then you come up to that one person who has a highly specialized hobby, let's say knitting. You have no idea what to get that person. Well, don't worry because this gal's got you covered. Below are 7 budget-friendly gift ideas for that knitter in your life.

1) Novelty Stitch Markers
(from left to right; DIY charm: $12, Charm from Sucre Sucre Miniatures: starting at $8, DIY charm: $11)

2) Small Scissors $7 to $10

3) Emergency Fix Key Chain $2.49 via Knit Picks

4) Needle Threader $1.79 via Joann Fabrics

5) Darning Needle $3.59 via Lion Brand

6) Locking Stitch Markers $5.99 via Joann Fabrics

7) Ring Stitch Markers $4.99 via Joann Fabrics

Still looking for more ideas? Check out my comprehensive list of ideas for gifts for knitters.

If you're a knitter yourself let me know what you like to get as gifts.