Independent Knitting News

My husband is a garage sale junkie.  I prefer estate sales.  On most weekends you can find us hitting the estate and garage  sales found in the newspaper or posted on the internet.  Sometimes I get really lucky and find some good knitting material – old needles, magazines or acrylic yarn that I use for charity knitting.

This past weekend, however, I  hit a gold mine!  This sale had knitting pattern books from the 1970’s and 1980’s.  I randomly packed three cardboard magazine holders and negotiated for a bulk price.  Bonus, the magazines did not smell musty!  I also scored some Anny Blatt mohair yarn at this same sale.

When I arrived home and started going through the boxes, I found not only the old knitting patterns, craft magazines and torn-out patterns; but I found the first and second published Woman’s Day Crochet Annual.  Did I mention that the first Woman’s Day Crochet Annual was printed in 1947 and the second in 1948?  These magazines are in very good condition – no rips or tears but the covers are a little worn at the binding edge. The pages are yellowed and the pictures are in black and white, but I am very excited with the find.  Each booklet is marked with a price of twenty cents and contains over 70 patterns.

I can’t wait for the weekend to begin; I’m sure there are more treasures waiting for me at the next group of estate sales.

Have you developed patterns that you would like to compile into a book, or perhaps offer on the internet?  Many people dream of the great American Novel, and would like to someday write that novel.  Now,there are ways to get a book published without hiring a publishing house or an agent.  You can self-publish your ideas without mortgaging your house!

The term “self publishing” produced over47,000,000 hits at google.com.  Here are just two that I looked into, including one that is use by blogger and knitter [tag]Nanette Blanchard[/tag]. Nanette blogs at [tag]Knitting in Color[/tag].

One self-publisher is[tag] Lulu.com[/tag] The Lulu website offers many options for the self-publisher, including templates, methods of binding, and marketing if you so desire.  You also can set up a storefront to sell your books or patterns electronically.

Another company that offers publishing services is called, appropriately,[tag] Self Publishing, Inc[/tag].  Self Publishing offers different services than Lulu, including packages that use the help of Graphic Designers.  Self Publishing also has an online book store for the self published authors called[tag] Just Bookz[/tag] where your book is listed for sale at no cost to you after you use their services.

Whatever choice in publishing you make, I hope it is both profitable and enjoyable for you.

AN INTRODUCTION TO MOSAIC KNITTING

---

Copyright 1997, 1998 Esther Smith Bozak. All rights reserved.
Please read full copyright notice at end of document.

---

Part of the accompanying materials for a presentation to the Twisted Stitches of Central New York Knitting Guild, by Esther Smith Bozak on December 6, 1997. Mosaic knitting patterns were first identified and categorized by [tag]Barbara G. Walker[/tag] in the late 1960’s. She is credited with coining the term as well as collecting, designing, and exploring the possibilities of the knitting technique. Hundreds of patterns, mostly in chart form, appear in many of her books. Today’s knitters are enjoying a renewed interest in mosaic knitting, as seen in the Fall 1997 issue of [tag]Interweave Knits[/tag] and by the reprint of Ms. Walker’s [tag]Mosaic Knitting[/tag] by [tag]School House Press [/tag], for example. Don’t overlook older pattern stitch dictionaries; mosaic patterns can be found in many of these volumes, although they are usually not labeled as “mosaics.” Instead, look through the slip stitch patterns sections for patterns which follow the principles and rules of mosaic knitting.Thus begins an excerpt I found in searching for more information on mosaic knitting.The rest of this article can be found at this website, maintained by [tag]Ester Smith Bozak.[/tag] (more…)

Surfing the internet can be loads of fun, and sometimes you find things you aren’t even looking to find. I was looking for baby nutritional sites to help my out of state daughter start my six month old grandson on the road to spoon feeding. Amazing what you can find.

Along the way, I found a [tag]cupcake hat[/tag]. How a knitted hat popped up in a food search, I don’t know. It could have been the combination of baby and food, and the cup cake is food especially if it’s [tag]chocolate[/tag] – right?

The cupcake hat is adorable and is a free pattern from [tag]Becky “Bex” Veverka[/tag]. Becky has a blog called [tag]Chilie Con Yarne[/tag]. I first found the pattern at [tag]The Naked Sheep[/tag] site and it had Becky’s web address. However that sent me to a page that isn’t really working well, but I noticed that she has another “food” baby hat – a pineapple.

What a couple of cute hats to make for little ones!

According to [tag]Wikipedia[/tag], [tag]Amigurum[/tag]i is the [tag]Japanese art[/tag] of knitting or crocheting small animals or [tag]anthropomorphic[/tag] creatures. Amigurumi are typically cute animals (such as bears, rabbits, cats, dogs, etc.), but can include inanimate objects endowed with anthropomorphic features. Amigurumi can be knitted, but the vast majority of amigurumi are crocheted. They are also worked with a smaller size needle in proportion to the weight of the yarn in order to create a very tight-looking fabric without any gaps through which the stuffing might escape. Amigurumi are usually worked in sections and then joined (some amigurumi have no limbs whatsoever and the body and head is worked as one piece). The extremities are often stuffed with plastic pellets to give them a life-like weight, while the rest of the body is stuffed with fiber stuffing. The pervading aesthetic of amigurumi is cuteness. To this end, typical amigurumi animals have an over-sized spherical head on a cylindrical body with undersized extremities. Pattern for a little spider or Kumochan is found on Katies blog, [tag]All in a day’s . . .[/tag]

Knitted patterns are hard to find, but [tag]PlushYou[/tag] is a blog for a toy store that has both knit, crocheted and felted amigurumi creatures, and where to buy them. Many are sea creatures and don’t really look overly anthropomorphic.

Holiday season is right around the corner and maybe someone on your list would enjoy one of these cute animals. This is also a good way to use up those left-over bits of yarn from larger projects