When I was in Albany for the Black Sheep Gathering the last weekend of June, I taught all day on Friday, then hung out with my bestie Maria from A Needle Runs Through It for much of Saturday. I helped in the booth, visited with friends old and new, and started a new wee weaving project on the Mini Looms …
Put a Hexie on it: add EPP to everything for a more colorful life!
I have a LOT of English Paper Piecing blocks and motifs and projects started and small shapes I’m playing with and samples for classes and this, that, and the other. I mean a LOT. What to do with a zillion half-finished EPP projects? Put them on a garment/bag/journal! (It’s like that old Portlandia sketch, Put a Bird On It, but …
An ode to low-stakes crafting
I love a craft that doesn’t ask much of me… There’s this whole process vs product crafting debate that comes up every know and then in the crafting community. Are you a person who crafts to craft, or are you a person who crafts for the thing you’re making? As with many binary structures, the truth is often “a bit …
Making as response to the world
Maybe it’s not an antidote, but it sure does help I have found myself scrolling so much more lately… it’s like a physical compunction, and I can’t for the life of me find an actual justification for it. There are a million reasons: the world sucks; DT is breaking everything; I have had a weird shock/loss that I don’t quite …
A Soup Formula(ish) for Soup Season
Soup is one of my favorite I-don’t-know-what-to-make-for-dinner makes. I use a general formula to make most of my soups (and I will admit that I am a semi-intuitive cook, and for soup especially, I don’t really use measuring cups or spoons. This is a formula, an outline, more than anything). You can make this soup into any theme/flavor profile you’d …
Let’s Talk Personal Curriculum…
Lisa, idea-haver-extraordinairre, shared something amazing she saw on TikTok, and I have been working on mine ever since: it’s a Personal Curriculum, self-built, self-directed, and self-focused, with the sole purpose of advancing one’s own personal knowledge. When she shared the idea with Lorajean and me, our immediate thought was, HELL YES, THIS IS EVERYTHING! I’ve started one component of mine …
Mango Rice Bowl recipe
This is seriously such a fantastic and fairly quick meal that my family absolutely adores! Ingredients: 1-2 blocks of baked tofu (I love the method found here, with my only changes to press then tear the tofu into chunks instead of slicing it) jasmine or brown rice, cooked (my family LOVES rice, so I usually make 2 cups dry in …
Looking for ShannaJean Patterns?
In December 2022, the ShannaJean website was the victim of a catastrophic malware attack, and we fought it valiantly, but ultimately realized that the site had to be deleted (yikes and ouch). SO! If you purchased a ShannaJean kit from your LYS in 2022 or 2021, please email us at hello@knittedwit.com, letting us know what kit you purchased, and we’ll …
Adventurelands for everyone!
I am obsessed with the Adventureland Quilt pattern. There are so many reasons for this obsession, but the biggest one is that it hits my favorite crafty buttons: Uses fantastic supplies (read: Jelly Rolls! They are such a fun precut, and are used to such fantastic effect on this quilt); Easy to make (there’s not a lot of fussiness to …
Socks & Hats on Vacay 2022
Even though some of us are still contending with very non–summer weather (snow! hail! cold!), we are mere weeks away from our favorite time of the year: Socks & Hats on Vacay time! We have oodles of fun things planned for this summer, but one thing I’m doing differently is I’m not releasing a new pattern collection. Designing has become …
Make the most of your yarn!
I’m getting real excited about this Spring KAL (and that’s something, because knitting has definitely been taking a back seat for all of the other crafts I’ve been obsessed with these last few months), and I’ve been working on adding more information to the Spell Shawl pattern (in fact, I just published the update a few minutes ago!) The 2022 …
Spring KAL Spell Shawl options
I have been in deep deep love with the Spell Shawl pattern since I first released it in 2016. I have lost track of how many I’ve made, and have done so many different variations, I can hardly remember them all. The first many versions of the pattern were all made following what is now the Original version in the …