Looking for Knit Christmas Stockings??

Well you've come to the right place.  I will be releasing all of my new Christmas items over the next couple of weeks.  I am so excited to share them with all of you!  Many of the items are made with recycled sweaters and are available in limited quantities.  Don't wait because your favorites might be gone.

A little information about my recycling process.  I shop for sweaters year round from some of my favorite thrift stores.  Each sweater is carefully chosen avoiding stains, holes and hard use.  Each sweater is then taken apart one stitch at a time, wound into skeins, washed with eco-friendly detergent and allowed to dry in the sun.  Each skein is them rewound into a ball which I can then use to knit all my goodies.

All of my stockings will last and be enjoyed for years to come.  I use a button loop so the height of each stocking is adjustable.

Last night I learned how to jog..

Jog in knitting that is.   Just a little trick that I picked up from a book last evening and I thought I would share.

When you are knitting stripes and it's time to change colors I am sure that you noticed that they colors do not always line up perfectly when knitting in the round.  I find that rather annoying and unsightly being the perfectionist that I am.

So, here is how you "jog"-

change colors and knit until the first stitch in the color change.  Pick up that stitch and the stitch below and knit them together (K2tog)  By knitting these 2 stitched together it levels out the color change and all the colors line up properly.

So for example,

I am knitting in RED and I want to change to Blue.  I change to blue like normal.  Once I have completed one round and just before I knit that second row of Blue, pick up the blue stitch you started your color change in and also the red stitch from the row below.  Knit the red and blue stitches together using blue.

Voila!  A perfectly lined up color change...

The Fibonacci Sequence and Knitting...

In mathematics, the Fibonacci numbers are the numbers in the following integer sequence:

Sunflower head displaying florets in spirals of 34 and 55 around the outside

The first two Fibonacci numbers are 0 and 1, and each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two.                                                     

A little history according to my favorite online reference "book" -        
                                            Wikipedia

The Fibonacci sequence is named after Leonardo of Pisa, who was known as Fibonacci.  Fibonacci numbers are used in the analysis of financial markets, in strategies such as Fibonacci retracement, and are used in computer algorithms such as the Fibonacci search technique and the Fibonacci heap data structure.  They also appear in biological settings, such as branching in trees, arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit spouts of a pineapple, the flowering of artichoke, an uncurling fern and the arrangement of a pine cone.

Some pictures of this seqence occurring in nature

  

Sunflower head displaying florets in 

spirals of 34 and 55 around the outside

                               

Now you may ask what the heck does this have to do with knitting??  Well I'll tell you..  The Fibonacci sequence is known to be pleasing to the eye.  Why?  I think, in my opinion, since this sequence happens so often in  nature it naturally looks pleasing to us.  Make sense?


I am going to use this in my most recent project: a Christmas Stocking

(Yes, I know that winter is almost over but I am trying to get ahead this season.)  I will be using this sequence to determine when the color changes will occur.  I will be using 2 or 3 colors.  I'll keep you posted and we'll see how this really turns out.