A Review and Some Mangling

Last week a reader said they wanted to know what I thought of KNITTING GANSEYS by Beth Brown-Reinsel. I got mine for less than $10 and I think I got an amazing buy. There are patterns in the book, but they aren’t what I bought the book for. Half the patterns are for kids, which is nice for me since I have a couple. I wanted the book for a reference when I design sweaters. The sampler sweater that the author instructs you with through the chapters will make a great baby doll sweater. ( It just occurred to me that the percentage system could work for dolls, too…) In my opinion the best section of the book is the chapter on planning and designing your own. There is a page of regular graph paper and KNITTERS GRAPH PAPER that I intend to make copies of when I need graph paper for projects. That chapter also has some charts giving measurements for sizes from 6 months on up. Running close seconds after the knitters graph paper, the design chapter has 2 pages you can copy and put in the numbers for your project. It is a great book. I bought mine through amazon and it took a while to get, but is well worth it.

Anyway, I have my husband’s sweater all figured out, so now I need something else to think over. This sweater designing is very addictive. I am going to design myself a Scandinavian sweater. Last night and this morning I did some reading up on it, and I’ve decided I will use fingering weight yarn rather than worsted. I am going to try to be as traditional about it as I can. One of my books said that the sweaters used to be knit at a much finer gauge. AND I will get to steek again.


Just for fun, I thought I would show you how I mangled, I mean altered some pants last weekend. I am the model. They are some used jeans from Seattle’s Value Village that I acquired last summer. They were those ill fitting beasts called “Mom Jeans”. Now they are cool jeans.