Rosie McStrippit

At last, here is the next 'McStrippit' pattern!  Introducing..
.Rosie McStrippit!

Rosie McStrippit’s an A-line, square necked women’s tunic, in seven sizes with a trick up its sleeve. This is a bottom-up, simple sweater knit in pieces…eight pieces, to be exact. You’ll work towards a sweater that drapes and flatters while enjoying completely portable, simple patterned knitting that fits in a purse while you’re on the go!

Too tired to carry a top-down sweater project on your commute, to kids’ lessons or the doctor’s office?  These McStrippit designs are for you.

Rosie McStrippit requires knitting, purling, increases, decreases, and sewing up at the end. This design uses written instructions and a schematic. It uses a single strand of Aran yarn that knits at 17 sts sts = 4"/10 cm after blocking on a size US 7 needle.

You may wonder how I got all these photos...well, I had twin eight year olds and one very patient professor photo taking photos of me all at once on one sort of "warm" December day.  (They used an iPad, an ancient digital camera and a fancy camera that the Professor used to shoot all the photos for my first book,  Fiber Gathering.) There are also a couple photos indoors, and unless I am modelling, I took all of those.

I am very excited to release this sweater design, as it matches the dress that I made in the last post, AND I think it's a really useful concept for those of us who knit on the go.  I announced how long it took me to get everything online today---and how much I charged, per pattern, at dinner. One of my twins said, "But Mommy, that's not very much.  That's not anything like as much work as it took you to make it."

If I don't count any of the time I spent designing this, knitting it, grading the spread sheet for all the sizes, writing the pattern, editing the pattern, getting the pattern online (and it's here on Ravelry and here on Lovecrafts.com...) 

Well, I need to sell 13 patterns at full price just to pay for the basic supplies: yarn and the tech editor fees.

How much does a pattern download cost?

$7 US

Having a little pouch of knitting with you while waiting at the doctor's office, the playground, piano lessons, the school bus stop?

Well now?  That's priceless!

I hope you enjoy knitting Rosie McStrippit as much as I did.
(I'll explain the name some other time...)

Yak down and Dog training

 I've finished the tunic I was making for myself and am on to using some delicious Reywa Fibers Embrace yak down dk weight yarn that my brother-in-law and sister-in-law got me...a long time ago.  It will likely become a textured wrap design...and if you are at all interested in test knitting it and posting a project on Ravelry, do let me know! 

Knitting (and anything else that requires sitting down) has taken a back seat to some intense amounts of dog training.  Sadie is bright, eager, and active...and young.  She's also still forced to be on a leash for perhaps another week because she just got spayed.  She needs lots of exercise (we're doing three walks a day) and practice at following obedience commands, not tugging on her leash, not jumping--and being by herself.  If we do it right, she is happy to rest quietly indoors when we're done.

We've also had a big spate of "lost and found" problems here.  The blue Riverbend Garden Hat got left at school until I insisted on going through the very stinky lost and found bin by myself one last time.  HURRAY! We found it--but boy did it need a wash!

Then, it got warm out yesterday and this sweater did not make it home...we're still looking for that, we think maybe it got left on the school bus.

Finally, my professor headed out the door to administer a final exam (it's called "invigilate" an exam in Canada, as compared to "proctor" in the US) and discovered he'd lost his car keys.  He had them last night.  I have walked the neighborhood looking for them, and now I'm going to do more intensive searching in the house.  We seem to be losing things at an alarming rate here.

And this is why one occasionally needs exotic, sustainably raised yak down to knit, and enthusiastic young dogs--it keeps me from feeling discouraged!!