Starter Tab for Devil’s Lake Shawl shows how I set everything up. If you’ve done a couple of shawls you’ve probably come across Starter Tabs before – they are excellent. I am particularly fond of loooooong Starter Tabs, and Devil’s Lake has one. The video shows the pick ups for the Starter Tab – which are a bit different – and sets the Short Rows. It’s explained in the pattern, but I do think that video helps clarify things.

Weaving in Ends as You Knit is a bitty little trick that I picked up here and there a while ago and I find it useful for anything I do with stripes. It’s not specific to the Devil’s Lake shawl but has lots of uses. I also show how I hide ends across rows of Yarn Overs, something I think is very fun.

I hope the videos are useful! Let me know if you have any questions!

The Fiber Factor

The Challenge this time was called Color Inside the Box, and the assignment was to create a boxy sweater that featured color in some way. In my video (second from the bottom) I talk a little bit about my process and inspiration and show off the sleeves!

I’m really nervous about this one, if I’m honest. I LOVE my piece, but it’s going to TNNA to be judged in person and I’m full of worried anticipation for the judging video. I do hope you all like it.

The Fiery Cross

It’s kind of wonderful because most of the main characters are together, in the past, (the 18th century stuff is always much more compelling than the 20th century) and they’re having their fairly standard adventures.

This book really shines in the every day. The author has really managed to create something wonderful for me – I’d happily read about Claire and Jamie castrating pigs or Roger girdling trees and consider myself quite contented. It’s not just that she gets the details so right – it’s that the characters are just so beloved, dark, delightful, and heartbreaking that you want to spend time with them.

The main four are fantastic, absolutely, but I also love the second tier people – Wee Ian (he’s maybe a Main Five) Fergus and Masali, Lizzy, Duncan, Lord John (Main Six?) Josiah and Kezzie – I love them all.

I love the way Jamie is with Lizzy, his daughter’s former bond maid. Lizzy is a tiny, delicate, blond mouse, with a tendency toward dramatics, but he treats her with the gravest respect. I love watching Roger and Jamie’s relationship change over the course of the book, as well as seeing how Roger is about Brianna and Jemmy. I love Claire’s increasingly sophisticated surgery and the war between Mrs. Bug and Mrs. Chisholm.

I would like for bad things to stop happening to Roger. I love him and all of the peril is not doing my nerves much good.

I love too that most of this book is a basic historical fiction/adventure, but at the very end, in the last hour or two, we get back to the overarching questions of time travel. It’s a bit of a bridge book, I think, getting all of our characters together and having the North Carolina Regulation War as a dress rehearsal for the American Revolution, and the ending really nailed the sense of exhilaration and unease needed to set the stage for the next book.

On pieces with both Cast On and Bind Off worked Tubular it becomes very difficult to tell which end is which; you have to refer to the rest of the knitting for clues. For someone like me, who LOVES fussy details that make knitting perfect, these two techniques are some of my favorites.

I use a Tubular Bind Off in the Harvest Moon Mitts pattern, and really love how it looks.

The class shows how to use Excel to get all of your numbers when grading (writing for multiple sizes.) When designing sweater patterns you don’t just write the pattern for the size you’re making, you also write for all of the other sizes as well. It helps to be very organized, and if you can learn how to set up formulas in Excel to do auto-complete calculations it makes the process that much easier.

I already used Excel (actually Numbers, the Mac version) for grading sweaters, which I starting doing after reading this Marnie Maclean series, but Faina’s class is great for a step-by-step-by-step process of absolutely everything. As a bonus, the sweater she designs during the course of the class has a set-in sleeve, so you get to see her figure that out in a very logical way.

The class really worked for me but it was extremely dry. That’s not a complaint, just a fact. She takes you through a whole sweater and grades it for many sizes, showing you every single step on the spreadsheet. The class is a great value, with much more information than the price implies. It’s not scintillating entertainment, but it is extremely, extremely useful and definitely worth watching if you’re interested in learning how to grade.

The book opens with the wedding of the son of Prince Manfred of Otranto. The sickly, unappealing boy is heading to the wedding when a huge casque (big-ass helmet) falls out of the sky, crushing him flat. Manfred is at first devastated and then desperate – he has the throne of Otranto under spurious conditions and it has been foretold that the line will end with him. He decides at once to marry his son’s fiance and get her pregnant at his earliest convenience.

The fact that he’s currently married and Isabella is terrified/disgusted of/by him is of little consequence to Manfred.

Long lost sons! Secret chambers! More gigantic objects falling from the sky! Marriage contracts! Priests! Excitable maids! The Castle of Otranto has it all.

It’s a bit hysterical and there are lots of speeches by the “good” characters (for “good” read: anyone but Manfred) about how they all understand and are willing to trust Manfred even though he doesn’t do 1 trustworthy thing in the whole book, but I actually kind of loved it. It’s quite well-written and fairly hair-raising at times.

The foreword says that the book is written as “a true tale”, and after reading it people wanted to travel to Otranto to see the place, read more about it, wondered if it was haunted, and they were devastated to find out that it was just a book. There hadn’t really been much in the genre beforehand, so they didn’t realize that it was a rhetorical device. It rather made me think of The Princess Bride and all of the people who looked for the original book by S. Morgenstern afterwards, not realizing that William Goldman made the whole thing up.

This was my first ebook – I think it was $2.00 – and it was money well spent. Tessa from Infernal Devices also recommends Vathek, and I think I’ll look for that next!

Ladies, let me know your addresses and I’ll get the book out to you post-haste!

Thanks and Congrats!

I am in love with this new pattern. I got the yarn down at Kid n’ Ewe last fall and thought of nothing so much as autumn in the birch forests in northern Wisconsin. Devil’s Lake is actually central WI, but the crescent shape in combination with the colors made me think of how the shore and the mountains curve around the lake, clinging to it with all their colors on those incredibly blue fall days. Devil’s Lake is one of my favorite places in the world.

The shawl is a riff on the Combination Shawls I have been obsessed with designing for a few years now. It has the same basic structure, but the numbers are all much looser so I was able to play with big swathes of stripey goodness.

I started with a longer than usual starter tab, then picked up stitches and went to work on the short rows. This action is what causes the stripes to be large on one side of the shawl and tiny on the other.

The short rows are all simple Wrap and Turn style short rows and as the shawl is worked entirely in garter stitch, the wraps don’t even need to be picked up. It’s very simple to knit once the pattern is set and you have the hang of the short rows.

The yarn is Alisha Goes Around Zeal of Zebras and I have to say without exaggeration or reservation that it is one of the most wonderful yarns I have ever worked with. It’s an absolutely divine blend of 75% Superfine Merino, 15% Bombyx Silk, and 10% Fine Merino. It’s a proprietary blend that the mill does only for Alisha, so she’s the only person who has it. Skeins have an amazing 500 yards per 115 grams, so it’s classified as a Light Fingering.

The Zeal of Zebras is extremely soft and drapey, but one of my favorite characteristics is lent it by the presence of that silk – it’s just the tiniest bit sticky. I think that’s the best word for it, though I don’t mean it in a gross way; it’s more like really great Shetland wool, but much, much softer and with more drape and less stiffness. And it’ll only stick to itself. I am basically dying to get my hands on some more so I can binge on fair isle!

The pattern calls for one 100 gram skein each of four different colors. To make the sample I used:

Main Color: 375 yards

Contrast Color 1 (Yellow): 245 yards

Contrast Color 2 (Brown): 310 yards

Contrast Color 3 (Green): 360 yards

Of course, if you get a different gauge you’ll use a different amount of yarn, so watch yourself! There are lots of 400+ yards skeins of sock yarn out there – now you just need 4 of them!

The only part of the pattern that may be a little tricky is the pick ups at the end of the Starter Tab. I’ve made a short video showing how this is done, and it’s on my YouTube channel, and posted here in the Support section of the website.

I also went ahead and made a video showing how I like to weave in ends as I go. There aren’t too terribly many of them, but whenever I join a new color I like to go ahead and capture the tail so I don’t have to come back later. I think it’s a useful sort of video, and it shows to how I capture when I have to cross a line of yarn overs.

Please let me know if you have any questions about Devil’s Lake! You can see more about it in the patterns section of the website or on Ravelry.

It’s available for $6.00!

After the events of Voyager they’ve ended up in North Carolina, and after a certain amount of casting about and not being sure what they’re going to do – after all, is there anything waiting for them back in Scotland? – they decide to stay. The Governor offers Jamie a huge grant of land in the backcountry and he and Claire and the rest of the household move up there to start scratching and chipping a living out of the mountains.

Meanwhile, back in the 1960s, Brianna and Roger are circling each other cautiously and from a great distance. She’s finishing up her engineering degree at MIT, and he’s still teaching at Oxford, though they do take frequent opportunities to see each other.

High points of this book include Wee Ian’s new wolf/dog Rollo, Claire’s wariness of Jocasta Cameron, Jaime’s only surviving Aunt, Roger and Brianna at the Scots’ Gathering in upstate New York, and Lord John, with the measles. There was also amazing Lord John, without measles.

There was a certain amount of horrifying upsetting-ness towards the end (and before the end), which made me finish the book all the faster. It’s probably a good thing that I’m listening to them on audiobook (aside from the fact that the performance is amazing) because when I’m really upset about something in a book my eyes skip unbidden to the bottom of the page – the more worried I am the more disjointed my reading becomes. It was excruciating not to be able to do that, but I do quite like stewing in suspense, on the whole. It was just a matter of overcoming a sense of gnawing dread.

This is Enchanted Rock, a huge pink granite rock in the Hill Country near Fredericksburg. When my folks were here a few months ago we drove out there and climbed up to the top of it – it’s a pretty easy and fun walk, and it was a beautiful day, but fortunately we were early enough that it wasn’t too crowded yet.

It was lovely, in a completely different way from the beauty in Virginia and it was really nice to see mountains again.

And now for a confession. You may remember my sweater pattern from Prairie Bliss 1, Enchanted Rock.

I named it after this place without ever actually having been there.

I know, it’s a terrible thing, but I didn’t have time, at the time, to make it out to Fredericksburg. I am so glad I’ve gone now though – and even more glad I named the cardigan after it!

And now, for the contest!

I have two copies of Prairie Bliss here, and they would like to go live with two of you. Leave a comment on this post before Midnight on June 4th and I’ll put everyone through a random number generator to pick two winners.

Let me know which patterns you’d like to knit from the book or a favorite hike of your own!