Happy New Year! And, Best Blog Entries, 2011

It's a beautiful New Year's Day here in Austin, Texas!  After another whole year of machine knitting blogging (and almost all my posts are about knitting, not my husband, dogs, kids, job, or whatever), I've had a good look back through the year.  When you write a machine knitting blog, there's not much danger of losing track of what you knitted last year!

Here are MY favorite posts of 2011.  I'm not sure what YOUR favorite posts are, so chime in if I missed a good one.

January:  A Baby Blanket video  A fast, short-rowed, 2-color pinwheel baby blanket in worsted weight yarn that you could easily whip out in an evening for a baby gift.

February:  I refilmed and reedited a Mattress Stitch Video, determined to make it ridiculously clear and simple.  I even got one angry commenter who said it was too slow and I must be assuming people are stupid!  I took that as a compliment, since mattress stitch is really a little difficult to learn, but so worthwhile, and I wanted to make it completely clear for all the beginners out there.

Also in February, I wrote Click! A Small Big Improvement in Machine Knitting.  It was basic, but several knitters found it helpful.

In March, I wrote an article about what to do when you can't get gauge - that is, how to rechart the project.  It's my personal fave for the month, but I was prolific in March.  Don't know if it helped anyone else, but I wrote an article about starting and maintaining a knitting club.  Then there was my Do a Better Cast-On article and my Rippit article.

April was the month I went to Colorado and taught.  How fun!  Also, I wrote an article about yarn weights and my heart-broken report on my dear friend's house getting hit by lightning and her knitting machine ruined. 

In May, I was playing around with old notes, looking for a demo for club, and retried a trim that I liked so well, I made a video of it:  Easy Ruched Heart Trim.  I also wrote a piece with lots of photos about measuring a gauge swatch.

My favorite June item is a pattern from Barbara Deike, an afghan to knit for the troops.

In July, Tom sent me the recipe, detailed instructions and photos of his Amazing Machine Transformation.  This is a safe way to take the yellow out of your old plastic machine, and his before-and-after pictures will blow you away.  It appearss that July was the Tom Month, since the other don't-miss post was a video of how to make Tom's seamless hat for the troops.

In August, I designed a fast slipper pattern to knit for the soldiers, and here's the video.

In September I wrote Things the Ribber Manual Didn't Tell Ya, an article about gun oil for machine knitting, and published my microwave brownie recipe, which is about proper nutrition for MKing, I suppose.

In October, I wrote an article about the upper tension unit.

In November, I did some "time lapse" pictures of a shaped Entrelac project.  I'm still working on that book, and I'm knitting them from the neck down now.  But check out the photos!

Who has time to blog in December?  I did it anyway.  I wrote out instructions for Knitting a Necklace.  I re-ran all the old project videos that I thought would make great, fast gifts in a pinch:  child's sweater, bulky lined slippers, very quick afghan, warm child's hat, socks, hand knit dishcloth, felted slipper, and mitten.