And YOU get a pattern! And YOU get a pattern!

Guess what I just did?

I felt like giving away some patterns.

In celebration of releasing Tiny Dancer - my favorite pattern yet - I decided to play "Pattern Roulette" with a random number generator on the web.  I gave the generator a range of 1-250 because that's the number of people who have done something in my Ravelry "user activity" feed in the past 48 hours.  (This includes favoriting or queueing a pattern, uploading a project page or pictures linked to one of my patterns, commenting on a pattern/project, or posting about one of my patterns on Ravelry.) I decided that I'd let the number generator pick five numbers for me, then I'd use those numbers to gift whatever pattern a person was referencing in the winning spots.

So.....the winners are......

Which means that SingingSanja
gets to be among the first people
(besides my precious test knitters)
to knit Tiny Dancer!

       

 Atopbing is going to be making
        a Sock Monkey Hat.

Restless-Knitter gets to knit the
Charlotte Dress for her favorite
little girl.

              
slvano gets the
Tiny Dancer pattern....

....and frankiesaysrelax gets to be a
Tiny Dancer this fall as well!





I hope the winners enjoy their free patterns!  I hope all of you in the US have a lovely holiday weekend. :)

This Might Be Fleeting....

...but when I looked at Ravelry's "Hot Right Now" pattern list this morning, I saw my own Tiny Dancer at #9!  I don't think any of my patterns have made that list yet (or, if they did, I didn't notice it), so I'm having a little moment of designer delight! 

Thanks for sharing it with me!

New Release: Tiny Dancer!

 Looking for something new to knit for this fall?  Something that is comfy and still makes your husband take a second (and third, and fourth) look at you when you wear it?  Tiny Dancer is just what you're looking for.  It has gentle, body-friendly shaping - I've had two kids, and this belly ain't flat...but you'd never know it when you see me in this top!  It has lots of mindless social knitting (plenty of stockinette) with just enough "other stuff"(a bit of ribbing, decreases, increases, picking up stitches, kitchener stitch) to keep you awake.

This pattern is written for adventurous beginners, which means if you know how to knit, purl, work in the round, and are willing to google you tube videos for things like "kitchener stitch", "K2tog", etc, you'll be fine.  But really, it's for anyone who loves beautiful sock yarn and wants a new sweater that she'll love so much that she'll wish her office would designate it as her uniform.  I'm not kidding.  I wore this puppy every chance I got this summer (and these pictures were just taken this past weekend after more than a dozen wearings and at least 6-8 washings).  It may have been a brutally hot summer in my neck of the woods, but every time I heard that the high temp was going to be below 90 degrees, I was thrilled to wear my new purple top!

This pattern is written for chest sizes 32 (34, 36, 38, 40, 42)" (measuring around the fullest part of the bust), with little to no ease at the bust, a few inches of ease at the waist and little to slightly negative ease at the hip.
Waist, hip, and a dozen other measurements are given in the schematic, so this is an easy pattern to modify if you tend to change the fit of patterns to better suit your figure.

You can purchase Tiny Dancer on my blog (click on the "Patterns" tab), on Ravelry, or on Etsy.  If you're not already a Facebook Fan of Trappings and Trinkets, you might want to check it out before you buy....I posted an exclusive deal there this morning that is open to anyone who has "liked" my Facebook page.

Happy Knitting!

Almost time for......

 I've had this top complete since May or June.  I've worn it probably a dozen times this summer (pretty much every opportunity I could find where the high wasn't going to be over 90 degrees!)  But all summer, we hadn't made time to go out and have a little photo shoot with it.  So that was our big goal this weekend.

Saturday evening, we finished dinner, I got all fancied up, then we piled into the car.  Makeup bag?  Check!  Hairbrush?  Check!  Lint remover? Check!  (Our daughter, who loves to play stylist, is always on the ball with her equipment!)  Tripod?  Check!  (Husband was there to play photographer and I had insisted he bring the tripod this time since he tends toward the shaky when he fills this role for me.)  White foam boards? Check!  (Our son was going to play "prop guy" and we sometimes use the foam boards to reflect light on dreary days.)

Anyway, we load up into the car and drive 20 minutes down to the Riverfront.  There is an Irish Festival going on, so we cruise for a while looking for a place with the magical mix of available parking and a place to shoot where we won't have an enormous audience.  We finally make a decision and get out of the car.  I tell the kids to bring all their stuff and see that Jason has gotten out of the car without the camera so I ask him to grab that.....  The camera?  Huh?  Didn't you bring the camera?

Yeah, that's right.  It was back at home on the computer desk where I'd left it for Jason to pick up, and he'd assumed I had gotten it.

A 20 minute drive back home meant that we wouldn't make it back to the Riverfront before the light was gone, so it was a bust for Saturday night.

But there's always Sunday, right?

Well, our Sunday was a monsoon.  It was gray and pouring rain almost all day.  There are a few covered areas near the riverfront, so I figured our worse case scenario was that we'd shoot there.  But after we ate dinner Sunday night and drove down to the riverfront, the rain gave us about a 10 minute break, then another 10 minutes where it was just lightly misting.  So we actually got to shoot quite a bit outside.  636 pictures, to be exact!  And we ended up with about 8 that I'd love to use!  (That's the ratio you get when you're not a professional, and you have to edit pictures of yourself - does anyone enjoy that??)

Anyway, that's the saga of getting this pattern photographed.  My goal is to get the pattern edited early this week and have it released by Tuesday or Wednesday!

Playing around

I'm about 70% done with my evil sweater, and I'm kind of saving that for a "knit night" project. 1. The parts I gave left are very easy "social knitting" type stuff and 2. It's the only project I have right now using yarn from the shop that hosts the knit night. I don't know if it's actually bad form to bring in yarn from a different shop, but it feels weird to me, do I'm going to stick to shop yarn for now.
Anyway, I have 2 new projects I've been swatching for. The one pictured above is a color work hat. I'm not exactly sure of the design yet, so I'm just playing. Since it's worked in the round, I have to swatch in the round, so right now I'm basically making a full-size crazy hat while trying out the possibilities I have in mind. Once I see what looks best, I'll rip out the entire hat and do it all over again.
I know that to some knitters that sounds like a tragedy, but to me it's part of the fun!

Sweater del Diablo Goes to the Pool

My kids will be back in school in less than a week. We're trying to squeeze on a little more fun before summer break is over. My daughter has been begging to go to the pool, but my son claims to have 'already done enough swimming for one summer'. So, we picked up one of my daughter's friends before we headed to the pool.
I'm having one of those 'I've already showered for the day and don't want to do it again' moments, so I'm supervising from the sidelines with my little friend, the blue sweater.
We were getting along so well lately - I had the body complete, shoulders seamed up and one sleeve done as of yesterday afternoon....then I admitted to myself that the arm hole was too big. So I ripped it back down to the arm hole bind-offs and started again. It accompanied me to knit night and I've done a bit more today, so I'm about 20 rows away from seaming the shoulders for a second time. I like how it looks even better this time because I'm alternating skeins to lose most of the single-row stripes I had last time and I'm getting more pooling instead (which is what I want). Two sleeves and ( I think) a hood might take me another week or two, but I'm already itching to start something new. I hope I don't get too distracted with other projects so I can finish this before the weather cools off!

Sweater progress

The blue sweater and I have kissed and made up. It's being so cooperative now that I've spent a few afternoons on the patio working on it. It's always hard to rip back when something isn't exactly coming out as you planned, but always so worth it when it starts looking exactly right!

Wanna See My Office?

The weather here has calmed down a little bit; it's finally in the under-95° range. This makes me happy for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I can get back outside to my "patio office".
One of my favorite summer pleasures is sitting outside on the patio with my knitting, listening to the birds, and watching something on Netflix. So here's a picture of where I've been all afternoon... at the patio table with a test dress I'm working on, the sweater from h-e-double hockey sticks that I've had to rip back twice, and a little Foyle's War on the iPad.
Where's your favorite place to sit and knit?

Ok, I may have gone a little overboard...

 If you follow me on Facebook, you may have noticed that this weekend I was on a Yarn Crawl.  Well, officially it was a "romantic weekend for my husband and I while our kids were visiting their cousins", but my husband (who is awesome) was totally on board with driving me to seven different yarn shops over the course of two days.  I got to pet all the yarn, plenty of which I'd never seen before, and take some home with me, too!

When we got home from our weekend away, the Knit Picks order that I had placed last week was waiting for me.  So I got to add a few more things to my vacation haul!

First, a ball winder to go with my new swift.  I will feel very fancy while knitting from my cakes, rather than having balls rolling all over the place!

This Felici sport yarn is so fun.  It is eventually going to be a sample dress for a pattern I have in my head.  But, since I'm already releasing a child's dress pattern in a couple months, this one may go on the back-burner for a bit.  The colorway is "recess".  How cute is that??

Last, I have two skeins of the Capretta fingering weight wool / cashmere blend and 2 of the Gloss DK.  I wanted to check both out for future reference.  I have an idea for a pattern I may pitch to Knit Picks Independent Designer Program and I wanted to feel out a couple of their yarns before I told them what I wanted to make this new pattern out of.  This Capretta is really soft and if it is at all durable (as in, doesn't pill like crazy) I think it will be at the top of my "I Love To Knit With This Yarn" list.  That list is getting longer and longer!