Studio Marlowe

Well, clearly this posting every day for a month thing is going nowhere fast.  I’ve been busy!  But, some of that busy has been knitting, finally.

My current project is a pair of sample hats for a class I am teaching in December.  This weekend I took a train trip to San Francisco, so I had loads of time to work on them on the way up:

The pattern is one of my own, and you can find it in the 2009 Gifts issue of Interweave Knits.  For the class samples, I’m using the recommended yarn (Canopy fingering), but we’re mixing up the color schemes a bit. I am really loving working with this yarn so I think I’m going to have to find more reasons to use it in the future!

And of course, I eventually had to come back from San Francisco, which meant another round of knitting (unfortunately every time I thought to take a photo we were bumping like crazy, so apologies for the blurring):

Believe it or not, I have actually found some time to knit while working on the chaise lounge.  My main project at the moment is the navy wrap I mentioned a few posts back:

This is a very simple, top-down pattern with just a bit of cabled edging to add some visual interest.  Overall it’s been pretty simple and mindless knitting, which is about all I’ve been able to handle since I had such a huge other project ongoing.  I’m loving the way it’s coming out and the yarn is still incredibly soft–I can’t wait to finish and wear it!

Yesterday kicked off November, which, it is starting to seem, is National Everything Month.  I think NaNoWriMo was the starter, but I’m no way writing a novel anytime soon.  I thought I could, however, try to blog everyday.  Although I’m off to a flying start with having missed the 1st.  Ooops.  But, for the rest of the month, I am going to try to post on a daily basis, at least during the week.

And I’ll kick things off by announcing that I am finally FINISHED with my huge sewing project!  That’s right, I am now the proud owner of one espresso brown corduroy couch:

Final verdict: It is awesome and I love it and I’m not sure I’ll be doing it again anytime soon.

And now that’s finished I can get back to knitting!  More about that tomorrow.

This was the project that dragged on forever.  Parts of it were stolen (!), then I just stuck it in the back of a drawer for a while, and then finally I dragged my feet on the embroidery.  But!  I finally finished:

Totally worth it. I love this top and I’m getting lots of wear out of it (and now that the weather is getting a little cooler I’m planning to get even more wear out of it, awesome).

I really love how the embroidery turned out, don’t you?

The weather suddenly took a turn for cool here a couple of weeks ago, reminding me that I really need to get more lightweight sweaters into my wardrobe rotation.  To that end, I cast on this little number:

Navy, of course, is one of those colors that is impossible to photograph, so this will be an interesting project to blog about.  The end goal here is a fairly simple wrap sweater, with a little cable edging to keep things interesting.  I’m using a top-down raglan construction, which has the advantage of being quick and mindless–I want this sweater done and out and about soon!  The yarn is a 25% angora/75% lanbswool mix.  Soft.  Super soft.  I’m pretty sure it’s softer than a fair amount of cashmere I’ve felt over the years.  The fabric itself is fairly fine, with a gauge just a shade short of 6 sts/in.  And so far I’m loving it!

I know, it’s been a long hiatus.  The summer was pretty so-so on the knitting front: I made one cardigan (for a class, and which I failed to photograph), one bath mitt, and assorted afghan squares (but no finished afghan).  My excuses are myriad: I was travelling, I was incredibly busy with school/work, and I was just plain lazy.

Also, a lot of my crafting time in the past month has been eaten up by this:

Yes, that is a chaise lounge covered in muslin. I’ve apparently taken up sewing. A little. Just this one project. This one very large project. The eventual goal is to recover the entire thing in dark brown corduroy (the muslin is just a mockup). A goal which I’m pleased to report I’m making progress towards:

It’s been an interesting project, to say the least. More on that (and my knitting, which is picking up pace as the temperatures drop), in a later post.

The very beginnings of the next pullover, in green for St. Patrick’s:

Annie Modesitt wrote a pretty awesome post this morning about Soho Publishing (aka the people who put out Vogue, Knit1, Knit Simple) and their new plans to release patterns from past magazines for sale via online downloads.

While I don’t have a personal axe to grind with Soho (not having been published in any of their mags), I think this kind of treatment is pretty shabby.  For a $5-$7 knitting pattern, the fees to Paypal are ~10% (varies slightly, paypal charges a set minumum fee plus a small additional percentage of the sale).  So basically Soho is saying the designer is on par with Paypal (although to be fair, I am guessing that whatever checkout/payment feature Soho plans to use, they’ll be getting a much better deal on the fees than I do….so I suppose that would make the designer a *little* more important than the checkout/payment software).  Now, that wasn’t intended to disparage the checkout/payment program–for online sales they are pretty integral.  But you have to have something to sell first.  And if you’ve made the decision that a certain item (pattern) is worth selling, well, it seems that the person who made that item available to be sold in the first place (by designing it) is a REALLY integral part of getting the item to market, and so they ought to be valued at a slightly higher rate than 10%.  On top of which, the other major print knitting magazine offering online downloads (Interweave) DOES offer substantially more than 10% to the designers.  I don’t know if Soho just failed to research the practices of the competition or figured it didn’t matter, but either way it seems like they don’t care much about retaining quality designers or promoting a feeling of goodwill with their designers, especially it 10% is also going to be the policy for all future contracts–any web savvy designer can figure out via the interwebs that another publication offers a better rate and can opt to take their designing prowess there.  I know Soho has to make money, but if Interweave can offer a higher rate and still maintain profitability…

Anywho, at the moment I have approximately zero clout with Soho as a designer, BUT, I have been known to occasionally purchase their magazines.  However, I’ll be abstaining from any Soho publications for the forseeable future–until they reconsider their non-negotiable 10% policy.  And if they do come knocking on my designer door, I’ll be holding out for a fair cut along with Annie.   I’ll also be contacting Vogue Knitting via their website to let them know how I feel about their new compensation policty and I’d encourage anyone reading this post to do the same (I would email SoHo directly, but their website doesn’t list an email address.  However, Vogue is their flagship publication so it seems like a good second-best).

Amazingly, a good chunk of my garden survived for the two weeks I was on vacation in December.  Admittedly, there wasn’t much going on to start with, and December *is* one of the rainiest months of the year, but it was still nice to come back and see that nothing had died.  And something had even flowered!

I planted this little rosemary in September when my mother was visiting (she got it for me at the Botanical Gardens) and it has really been thriving since I put it in.  Which is more than I can say for the decidedly lackluster basil plant…

I’ve always meant to get some tags to attach to gift knitting but it hasn’t ever happened.  Instead I wind up waiting until after the recipient has opened their knitting and then being all “Oh, handwash only!”  Which of course allows them to forget and then felt their beautiful handknit _____.  Well, problem (somewhat) solved:

I recently received these awesome care tags.  Aren’t they nice?  So now recipients will also have to lose a piece of cardstock as well in order to abuse their gifts.