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Posts mit dem Label Misc werden angezeigt. Alle Posts anzeigen

Samstag, 9. Dezember 2017

Bonus: Tannenbäumchen Christmas Cookies

Don't worry. I promise I won't become a food blogger :) But this recipe went so nicely with the Tannenbäumchen Potholders that I couldn't resist. So here - for the first time - is a recipe for christmas cookies.
These cookies are not too sweet and they have the fine Matcha taste, that I love. Furthermore, the green color makes them look like christmas trees (or Tannenbäumchen in german :).
Depending on the type of margarine and the white chocolate you use, the cookies can even be vegan.





Ingredients
  • 200 grams of flour
  • 10 grams of Matcha powder
  • 70 grams of confectioners' sugar
  • 130 grams of margarine
  • 2 table spoons of cold green tea
  • white chocolate coating (couverture) - plain white chocolate will do as well
The knitting pattern for the potholder is available here

Directions
  • Mix the dry ingredients (flour, Matcha powder & icing sugar together).
  • Add margarine and tea. Knead until it forms a smooth dough.
  • Form into a ball, wrap with clingfilm and let it rest in the fridge for at least one hour.
  • Preheat the oven to 180°C.
  • On a floured surface (or between two sheets of baking paper), roll the dough out to about 5mm thickness. 
  • Cut cookies with tree shaped cookie cutter - or cut your dough into triangles with an acute angle. 
  • Bake about 12 to 14 minutes - but keep an eye on them since they burn easily.
  • When the cookies are cooled, melt the chocolate coating and decorate the your cookies and wait till the chocolate sets.
    As you can see on all photos, my piping skills are non-existent - however, I melted the chocolate in a freezer bag and cut a small hole into one of the corners and decorated with this makeshift piping bag. So, the use of a real piping bag might have helped ... 


Montag, 22. Juni 2015

Tips to Knit A Striped Top-Down Sweater without A Pattern

When I'm planning to knit a sweater, I'm usually too lazy to search for a knitting pattern and too unconcentrated to follow a pattern through.

Even though most sweater patterns that I have knitted (e.g. Corinne cardigan by Crystal Erb Junkins) were great and beautifully written, I tend to be unwilling to really follow the pattern. Following a pattern seems to take more of my concentration than trying something of my own. (And I want to be clear that up until now it's never been the pattern's fault, but just me being me.)

This blog post is NOT A PATTERN (far from it) but a collections of tools, techniques and links that can help you when you're designing and knitting a similar sweater yourself.

In this post I assume that your already familiar with the general concept of a top-down raglan sweater. If you've never done this, here's a nice blog post by Knitting Pure and Simple that explains the idea or try to read this Raglan tutorial by Kirsten Tendyke - or knit a top-down pattern such as Buttercup by Heidi Kirrmaier or Gemini by Jane Richmond. (Here's a list of the free, knitted top-down sweaters on Ravelry; you must be logged in to make this link work.)



Creative Commons License
This work by Knitting and so on is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


Measuring, swatching and planning raglan increases

Usually, I don't like knitting swatches - for smaller projects (fingerless gloves etc.), it's just not worth my while. Even if it doesn't fit, I generally can see this early enough, i.e. after about the same time, it'd take to knit the swatch. However, everytime I skipped swatching for a sweater or another big project, I only ended up just knitting a bigger swatch, like half a sweater or two thirds of a cardigan. Therefore, I really (REALLY) recommend knitting a swatch in garter stitch for anything a big as a sweater.

The best way to take measurements is to use another sweater that really fits you well. The measurements depend on the type of sweater you want to knit (e.g. for a V-neck sweater, you'd want to measure the depth of the neckline) - the raglan calculators (listed below) require different measurements.

For the sweater in this picture, I measured according to this picture. A is the width of the neckline, and B the width of the arm part. I knitted in the round (stitches for A, stitch marker, stitches for B, stitch marker, stitches for A, stitch marker, stitches for B, stitch marker - join in round).

To know how to increase, you can use one of the following raglan calculators:


To be honest, I have never used any of these calculators, I prefer to do increases around the stitch markers - and stop increasing when I have reached the desired width (C or D) and then going on without increasing until the yoke piece is long enough (I). But if you want to distribute your increases evenly over the length of your yoke, you should calculate your increases.

After finishing the yoke part, I put the arm stitches on scrap yarn, cast-on a few underarm stitches and placed a stitch marker at the middle of my underarm stitches.


Increases and decreases for a fitted sweater

In order to knit a fitted sweater, I'd measured my chest (E), my waist (F) and the width at the sweater's lower edge (G) - as well as the corresponding heights (I, J and K). To fit the sweater to my size, I knitted increases and decreases at the underarm stitch markers, i.e. down the sides of the sweater.



Traveling jogless stripes

When knitting stripes in the round, the color change can be seen as a visible jog.

A technique to avoid this is called traveling jogless stripes, which is done as follows: When changing to another color knit one round of that new color; when reaching the first stitch of that color, slip that stitch purlwise and replace the marker that indicates the beginning of your round from before that stitch to behind that stitch. This way the beginning of the round keeps traveling as long as you keep changing colors.

A more detailed explanation can be found at techknitting blog or in this YouTube video by New Stitch a Day.



Carrying yarn up

If you're anything like me, you'd want to avoid having to cut your yarn everytime you change colors (and consequently to avoid too many ends to weave in) and at the same time to avoid long floats on the WS of your piece,

To do this you have to connect the yarn in the color that's not used every few rows, i.e. when you come to the end-of-round marker, wrap it around your working yarn before knitting the next stitch.

The technique is shown in this YouTube video by karin kelly-burns.

The photo on the right shows how the WS looks when using both the jogless stripe technique while carrying up your yarn.


Avoiding holes at the underarm stitches

I always pick up more stitches under the arm than I have cast-on after the yoke part. Usually, about 2 at the side (i.e. the gap between the last arm stitch from my scrap yarn and the stitches cast-on after the yoke), than the cast-on stitches and two more at the other side. In the next two rows, I usually decrease the stitches from the gap. This avoids the potential holes.

Here's a YouTube video by TheKnittingArts that shows this technique.


How to try it on while knitting

If you want to check whether the sweater fits you, you need to be able to try it on while it's still on the needles. This is easier, if you do the following:

  • Put all arm stitches on a long piece of scrap yarn - at least twice as long as the circumference of your upper arm (and secured with a slipknot). That way the hole is big enough to let your arm through when trying it on.
  • For the body part, it helps to distribute the stitches on two circular needles before trying it on (e.g. I have two 4.5mm circulars that I used for the pictured project - one 80 cm and one 60 cm). Afterwards, you can go on knitting with one needle.


Montag, 11. Mai 2015

Lovely Gift - Or Swingy Wingspan

If you search for shawl/wrap patterns on Ravelry Wingspan by maylin Tri'Coterie Designs will be among the Top 10 with over 10'000 projects. There are also quite a few variations and adaptaions
of it (as you can see on this Pinterest board).

Some time ago, I received and email from the Designer (maylin from Tricot Treat) with a gift of all her patterns. At the time I was really touched by this gift, because it was so unexpected.
And this morning, I found another receipt email from Ravelry in my inbox - with another pattern gift, her new pattern: a swing knitting version of Wingspan called Rigoles. Again, I am surprised and I honestly think, that it's a lovely, lovely present by a very gifted designer. Thank you so much!

I downloaded it. The pattern is written with much attention to detail, many illustrations and photos, plus there are some diffent versions included.

Unfortunately, I don't have a photo of a finished shawl, but there are some really nice ones on the Ravelry pattern page of Rigoles. I can only show a screenshot of the pattern's thumbnail.


P.S.: Three years ago, when I published the Mixed Wave patterns (cowl and fingerless gloves), I tried to do a wavy (or swingy) version of Wingspan as well. But at that time doing short rows within short rows was a bit to much for me - so I frogged it ... and I haven't tried it since :)

Freitag, 29. August 2014

Knitted Food

In one of the advertising "newspapers" (you know, the ones you get, if you have a store-card for the supermarket etc.) there was an article about a lady who creates knitted food installations. The article is available online (in german).


That made me google for her - and I found her website and her blog. I do love some of the photos there - there is even a free (german) pattern for a knitted sausage :)

I apologize that all the links are to german-speaking webpages, but really like the idea - and I like her knitting philosophy as expressed in the article: "[Stricken ...] helfe, ein Trauma zu verarbeiten, und tue auch Depressiven gut. Am besten sei Stricken ohne eigentlichen Zweck, .... Wenn man wie sie ohne Muster oder Vorlage arbeitet und sich das Objekt einfach vorstellt, fokussiert sich der Geist aufs innere Bild und lässt schlechte Gedanken vorbeiziehen."
Roughly translated: "Knitting helps to coping with trauma and is even good for depressive people. The best is knitting without a purpose ... When one works like her without patterns and just imagines the object, the mind focuses on an inner picture and lets bad thoughts disappear."

Sonntag, 16. Juni 2013

Earring Organizer

Only vaguely related to knitting and yarn ... This earring organizer is made of a cardboard cone, that was used for yarn.
I drilled holes into the cardboard and painted it with acrylic paint - voilà.