Poco Rojo ("Little Red")

"Once there was a dear little girl whom everyone loved. Her grandmother loved her most of all and didn't know what to give the child next. Once she gave her a little red velvet cap, which was so becoming to her that she never wanted to wear anything else, and that was why everyone called her Little Red Cap."

-Grimm's Fairy Tales

Last year it took me until after Thanksgiving to finish knitting Annie a winter hat. This year I wanted to get it done early so my own daughter wouldn't have cold ears while I spent my time making hats for other people's children. A knitting design contest hosted by the yarn company Manos del Uruguay gave me the perfect opportunity to design and knit Annie a hat well before the first frost.

I designed Annie's hat to be reminiscent of the cap worn by Little Red Riding Hood from Grimm's Fairy Tales. However, since it was designed around yarn from Uruguay I named it "Poco Rojo" - Little Red in Spanish. It is both whimsical and practical - perfect for a little girl!

Annie hates to have hats constrict her ears, so I chose the vintage "pixie" style for this design. It is looser than most stocking caps, but still fits well around the head and has a chin strap to hold it on securely. Plus, it has an adorable curl in back!

The hat itself is a simple rectangle, grafted together at the back and with a neck band attached to the bottom. The red Manos Del Uruguay yarn was perfect for this project. The semi-solid coloring really highlights the cables, and they seem to shine even when there isn't any direct light on the hat. And the deep red really brings out the blue in Annie's eyes!

If the hat wins in the contest, the pattern will be available through Manos Del Uruguay. Otherwise, I might publish it as a free pattern here on my portfolio.

Suggested Retail: $25.

The Plarn Collection: Poppy Hat

How's this for something different? "The Poppy" is a cloche-style hat made out of plarn from white shopping bags, red newspaper bags, and VHS tape! It was inspired by the crocheted pattern by Teresa Wooley, and makes for a really unique and fun fashion statement.

This hat will be one-of-a-kind, because to be honest, I hated working with VHS tape. It hurt my fingers and squeaked SO LOUDLY that you could hear me knitting from across a really big room. But I'm glad I soldiered through! VHS tape offers unrivaled sparkle, plus there's just a certain cool factor of wearing something made from so unlikely a material.

I really love the flower on the hat. I made it on a little flower loom, which I'm especially proud of because I made it all by myself. The loom itself is hideously ugly - it was a plastic jewelry case which looked nice until it got all ripped up when I drilled dozens of holes in it. I'll probably only put up pictures if Collin decides to build me a nice one and then I can show you how ugly the one I made for myself was. But it works, and I really like the resulting flower! It totally completes the look of this hat.

It is an adult-sized hat and doesn't fit Annie at all, but she was so adorable when she tried it on that I had to include pictures. Besides being a fun around-town hat for a woman, it would make a great dress-up hat for a girl!

Suggested retail: $30

Guitar Straps

The first time I saw guitar straps woven on an inkle loom I was inspired. Guitar straps are both useful and a perfect place to showcase your unique style. They also are a fairly simple shape that allows for a lot of variety in pattern and material. I wove the following four guitar straps to try out a few different techniques and yarns, and I love them all! Check them out!

This fiery strap is woven from recycled, hand-painted cotton yarn from an old sweater. I dyed it in stripes while it was still knit up in the sweater pieces, then unraveled it and wove this guitar strap. It is lightweight, flexible and smooth, yet still with the strength that comes from a warp-faced weave that you get on an inkle loom.

A more bulky version is this guitar strap woven from t-yarn. That's right, this one is made from recycled t-shirts! Unlike the other straps, I didn't have to dye the yarn to get these vibrant colors - each color came from a different t-shirt.

This close-up lets you see the texture of the woven t-yarn. It's very sturdy, and has a small amount of stretch that makes it comfortable to wear. Like all the other guitar straps, the end tabs are made from a recycled black leather jacket. Only the hardware is new!

This extra-long strap has two very neat features. It was card-woven, so it is a little thicker than the other cotton straps and features in intricate pattern unique to card-weaving. It also has a variegated yarn that was dyed in a rainbow, which makes the pattern shift from red to orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple as your eye travels down the length of the strap. It is made from recycled wool yarns, and is perfect for taller guitarists who need a longer strap.

Finally, my favorite one is woven from hand-dyed recycled purple and green cotton/acrylic blend yarn along with cassette tape. The cassette tape gives the strap a really fun retro feel, as well as an amazing sparkle. I love the effect and am looking forward to using it again in another guitar strap with a different color combination.

(By the way, when I say this one is my favorite, I mean that I couldn't bear to take it off my guitar after we were done taking photos this morning. It's still hiding in my guitar case, and I'm seriously considering weaving another one to sell, just so I can keep this one. It's so cool.)

All the guitar straps are 2 inches wide, and all except the rainbow-patterned one are the standard size of 30-60 inches. The extra-large size gives you another 6 inches, adjusting from 36-66 inches.

Suggested Retail: $30

Polka-dotted Alien Hat

Sometimes I dye yarn for a specific project, and sometimes I just come up with a fun color combination and the yarn tells me what it wants to be. This alien hat was the latter. I was trying out some new dyes, and the yarn came out brighter and darker than I'd expected. It was a really fun kid-themed colorway that screamed, "Make me into a polka-dotted alien hat!"

The hat is knit out of recycled, hand-painted wool warn. There are short pieces of a bamboo chopstick completely enclosed in knit tubes to stiffen the eyeballs. The eyeballs are ping-pong balls, securely glued into the wool eye sockets.

This hat will fit a toddler or a young child, with a head circumference of approximately 18-19.5 inches. My glass model has an adult head circumference of 22 inches and the hat is too small for it, I just had trouble getting Annie to model a wool hat for more than a minute in the summer heat. But come winter, this hat will make some toddler a very cool (yet very warm) winter hat!

Suggested Retail: $20

My New Inkle Loom

I am so excited to finally be able to share these pictures with you! This summer my husband Collin built me a really gorgeous inkle loom so that I can weave straps and bands. Like I mentioned a couple posts ago, straps are one of knitting's weakest points and inkle/card weaving is a perfect complement to knitting. The straps are all tightly woven, strong, and beautiul.

Collin based the design of this loom on one built by British woodworker Michael Williams. If you were going to buy a loom like this you'd need about $300, and since that wasn't really in our budget (and because Collin likes a challenge and something he can build with his hands), Collin agreed to make me one himself.

Collin used some beautiful hardwood scraps from my Granddad's wood shop: cherry for the main crescent shape, and walnut for the base and the inkle shuttles (not pictured here). The dowels are oak and the tensioner and support pieces are hickory. He used walnut wedges to firmly secure the dowels, since they can be under significant strain during weaving.

I'm using this loom for two different but related weaving techniques: inkle weaving (the traditional use for a loom like this) and card weaving, an even older technique which can be done without a loom but works a lot better on one. Both techniques produce very strong warp-faced bands, which means that the only strings that show are the long vertical ones. Card weaving uses a set of square cards to separate the strings, and can produce a huge array of thick, intricately patterned bands.

Inkle weaving, on the other hand, uses string "heddles" to separate the strings, and results in a slightly lighter-weight woven fabric. This is very important when you're weaving with a heavier thread, like t-yarn, or something more delicate like the cassette tape in the guitar strap above.

The shuttle in all these pictures is an old one Collin made for my frame loom. He made me some new inkle shuttles from walnut that have a sharpened edge for beating the strings open, but I haven't been able to get pictures of them yet. Before he finished the inkle shuttle I had to borrow Annie's toy chef knife to do the same job!

In a couple days I hope to be able to show you some finished guitar straps that I've woven on my loom. I also recently bought the hardware to make some dog and cat collars, so watch for some very neat pet collars to show up soon. I can't wait to work more on my new loom and show ya'll the results!

Meet Laurel Catherine!

Meet Laurel Catherine, our baby girl! She was born last week, August 11th, at 9:24 in the morning, weighing 6 lb 14 oz and 19 in. long. We are praising God for her safe and uncomplicated arrival!

Almost-two-year-old Annie loves her baby sister Laurel! It's so sweet to see them together.

Laurel is named after her grandmother Catherine, and after the beautiful mountain laurel flowers that grow in the Smoky Mountains. My husband and I have loved the name ever since we honeymooned in the Smokies, and decided we'd name our second daughter Laurel when we were vacationing in Tennessee again this spring. After she had a name, I wanted to make her a hat inspired by a laurel flower.

Photo by Sylvia W. Forward

To save you the trouble of Googling to find out what a laurel flower looks like, here is the one on which I based my design. I also made Laurel a matching set of booties that should fit this winter (look for pictures of those later), and I am planning on making a pacifier clip in the same color scheme. The pacifier clip was one of the things still on my to-do list when Laurel showed up a week early. Since baby snuggles are sweeter than having everything checked off my list, I'm not complaining.

Suggested retail: $15 for a newborn-sized hat like this one. I could make it to resemble a variety of cup or bell-shaped flowers. You'll have to supply your own baby, though, because I'm keeping this one!

Uzbek Napramach Bag

I had a lot of fun making this bag! I had a whole pile of brightly dyed recycled yarns and I wanted to find a project that would allow me to show them off to their best advantage. I adapted this from a design by Vicki Square, published in the very inspiring book Folk Bags. She called it "Napramach" which is an Uzbek word for a type of bag used to store household supplies. I shortened her design a bit to make it work better as a purse, lined it with a deep purple silky fabric, and added a very neat woven strap.

The lining is stiffened with interfacing to give structure to the bag. This makes for a really lovely combination of textures: The tightly-knit wool/silk yarns on the outside, the stiff interior, and the silky lining.

Handles and straps are one of the weakest points of knitting. Frequently knitted handles stretch way out, are too skinny for comfort or else have a less-than-ideal texture. In my quest to overcome these weaknesses, I've been exploring the technique of card-weaving on an inkle loom. My amazing husband just built me a gorgeous inkle loom for this purpose, and this bag handle was my first card-woven strap.

Card weaving allows for beautifully intricate patterns and produces a very sturdy product in the end.

One other note about this bag: It's made entirely from recycled yarns, and four of the colors (blue, green, yellow and pink - the four in the strap) are a wool/silk blend that I dyed with Easter egg dyes! The red and purple are wool yarns dyed with black cherry and grape Kool Aid respectively. All of them are really great semi-solids that worked beautifully into the colorwork patterns of this bag.

Suggested Retail: $40

The T-yarn Collection: Market Bags

T-shirt yarn makes really excellent heavy-duty market bags. They don't collapse down as small as a cotton yarn or plarn bag, but they're even better suited to hauling around a watermelon or a small pile of pumpkins. The stretch of the t-yarn and the structure of the net bag expand to fit a huge variety of shapes, and the handles feel good in your hands or on your shoulder.

The sturdy construction of these bags starts with a square base, comes up with netting on the sides, and finish with thick rolled handles.

Many of the t-shirts that went into these bags came from my closet, ones that were too old even for Goodwill but were either too-well loved to just throw away or simply had a bit of life left in them. It's a lot like the patchwork quilts of previous generations: making sure to get the last bit of use left from a nearly worn-out piece of fabric.

Currently I have two of these t-yarn market bags available: one in gradient shades from navy to sky blue, and one in greens, grays, and dark purple.

Suggested Retail: $20

The T-yarn collection: Seussian Bag Caddy

No matter how good our intentions are about always using re-usable shopping bags, collecting plastic shopping bags is inevitable. I'm generally pretty good about remembering my re-usable bags on regular shopping outings, but there are always spontaneous trips when I find myself without my bags. And that's ok! Plastic shopping bags are useful for so many things, not the least of which are trash can liners and packing my husband's lunch. But you need an attractive way to store all those bags so they don't get all over the place and so they'll be handy when you need them. Presenting: The t-yarn Seussian bag caddy!

T-yarn is yarn made from strips of cut-up t-shirts. Just like plarn, you can find lots of tutorials on how to make it. Basically, you cut a seamless t-shirt in a big spiral, pull on it so that the edges roll in on themselves and prevent any raveling, and then knit it like any other bulky yarn. It's super-strong, and can come in as many bright fun colors as the ubiquitous American t-shirt does. I used several colors of t-yarn to knit the bold stripes of this bag saver, and the end result reminds me of a Dr. Seuss top hat, hence the name "Seussian bag caddy."

This bag caddy can easily hold 30 regular-sized plastic bags. It probably can hold more, but I only had 28 to try it out. Just stuff the bags in the top. . .

. . . and pull them out the dispenser at the bottom. Hang the bag caddy in your utility room or in any handy location, and you'll always have bags ready for whatever new purpose you've got for them!

Suggested Retail: $20

The Plarn Collection Blue Rainbow Chullo Purse

A chullo hat is the traditional Peruvian earflap hat worn up in the Andes mountains. This bag was originally designed by Mary Jane Mucklestone, who looked at a chullo earflap and thought, "That would look great blown way up and turned into a purse!" I loved the idea, and adapted it into this colorful plarn purse.

Five colors of plastic bags went into this purse, four of them from newspaper sleeves, with the green from the large-size Goodwill bags. Thanks go to a neighbor and a friend for saving bags for me and helping me collect a full rainbow of color!

The purse closes with a loop and vintage-button closure.

It is fully lined with an upcycled woven cotton shirt, complete with the shirt pocket for storing your wallet or cell phone.

More than almost anything I've knit recently, people have asked me about this bag. Whether I was working on it at the park or at the doctor's waiting room, people have stopped to take a look and then brought their friends over to see what I was working on. It's a real conversation starter when you think about the new uses you can put to seemingly useless materials!

Suggested Retail: $35

The Plarn Collection: Farmer's Market Bag

I love string market bags. They expand to hold large quantities of oddly-shaped purchases, yet collapse down into something you can easily stuff into your purse. They're deceptively strong, and very pretty with their eyelet lace structure. And, of course, re-using your own bag is better stewardship of our resources than using disposable plastic bags. Here's a new take on a traditional string market bag: one made entirely from recycled plastic grocery bags.

This plarn bag appears small before you fill it, but can actually hold a watermelon (our Saturday farmer's market prize from today) or about a dozen ears of corn. Try doing that with a regular flimsy plastic bag and you'll end up with a torn bag and corn on the ground!

The bow is decorative and entirely removable if you want to give this market bag to a man.

Suggested Retail $20