At its simplest, an Aran sweater is a heavily textured garment, decorated with combinations of stitch patterns that most often emphasize intricate cable patterning, sometimes also embellished with bobbles, and frequently worked in creamy or white yarn.
Category Archives: Old Blogs
Is your knitting a hobby, business, or clothes you make for your family? Do you have a hobby? Some of the most common hobbies include reading, cooking, exercising and watching TV, butthere’s also military re-enacting, geocaching and cigar band collecting. “Hobbies are what people do when no one is telling them what to do,” […]
The Norwegian sweaters we think of today — with snowflake motifs and lice patterning — originated in the Setesdal region of Norway.
In Stories In Stitches™ 2, Ava and I featured some amazing knitted samplers, all of which are lace. But samplers can be made in texture stitches too, and even in color. Look at this amazing knitted sampler from Estonia: This sampler is in the Estonian National Museum. (Of course as soon as I post this, […]
Here is a list of knitting books by authors other than me that can take you on an armchair tour of the world. Even if you don’t plant to knit lace in all of these styles, you will enjoy the history and stories about the knitters and their traditions. They’re not all in English, but they all include lots of photos and charts.
There’s still room in my free webinar to introduce ”Travel the World with Donna Druchunas,” my new iPad & iPhone app. https://www.knitcompanion.com/designer-series/travel-the-world-of-knitting/ The webinar will be July 27 at 2PM EDT (Other time zones: 1PM Mountain, 11AM Pacific, 7PM London, 4AM July 28 Sydney) The webinar will feature an introduction by me, a tour of […]
I had to do a little soul searching this week, after going away for a funeral, seeing the news about Boston and Texas, and getting into a tiff with a friend over something business related. With all of that going on, I found myself taking a closer look at my personal and business values to […]
My grandmother taught me how to knit before I learned how to read. I’ve read voraciously for my whole life, but I didn’t keep knitting as I grew up. Every year, it seemed, I learned a new craft and left the others behind. Knitting came first, followed by crochet, embroidery, needlepoint, weaving, beading, decoupage, and candle making.
Here’s an article about Kelly Bridges from the Elegant Ewe yarn shop in Concord, New Hampshire, and her experiences with qiviut. Like me, she has fallen in love with the fiber and has recently been using qiviut from Greenland.
Deborah Robson has been working with textiles since before she could read. She spins, weaves, knits, crochets, and otherwise finds endless intrigue in the numbers of things you can do with fiber, and the multitude of ways in which you can manipulate it.