Yana Knits

After 4 months of work, I’m launching a store, selling hand-made knitting needles. The idea came to me when I was perusing knitting magazines in search of nice-looking needles to give as gifts. A few pairs came very close to what I wanted - wooden needles with fancy metal, glass, or carved wood tops - but they were not quite what I had in mind. Then I read a number of blogs where people described how they made their own needles using wooden dowels, baked sculpey, and even acorns. Inspired, I decided to make my own too.

I had the perfect source for the tops of the needles: a glass artist friend of mine agreed to create a number of different colored glass tops for my needles on his torch. Deciding on the colors turned out to be really hard: when you’re presented with a few dozen choices of glass that can be combined in so many ways it’s nearly impossible to narrow your choices down to 5-6 basic color combinations and patterns. I finally picked my favorite styles and moved on to experimenting with making my own needle bodies out of various hardwood dowels. I found that for the right amount of slipperiness regular pre-fabricated bamboo needles worked best. It was just a matter of disassembling them and attaching the glass tops before the new needles were ready. And they looked awesome!

I set up the store using Google Checkout, which works admirably for small online stores. It puts customers who already use Checkout just a few clicks away from purchasing the needles.

I’ll be happy to hear your comments on what you think about the needles. Can’t find the exact needles you’re looking for? Please let me know and I may be able to add them to the store in the future.

New project: knitting a realistic looking soccer ball!

When I came up with an idea of making a soccer ball, I thought it was going to be pretty simple and straight forward. However, I failed to consider the following fun facts about a traditional soccer ball:

• it consists of 32 panels (20 white hexagons and 12 black pentagons)
• there are 90 seams connecting these panels

Knowing this helps you realize that you may be signing yourself up for a bit more work than you expected. On a positive note, the panels you need to make are only a couple of inches wide (or if you want to be more technical - 4.5 cm to a side), the seams are short, and when you start sewing it turns from an ugly monster to a real beauty after a few dozen stitches.

It’s surprisingly hard to find all the necessary information about the dimensions of soccer balls online. For example, even the wikipedia article about “Football (ball)” failed to tell me how big the panels have to be. I could have tried to infer it from the given circumference of the ball, but it was so much easier to ask a colleague - avid soccer fan - to bring his soccer ball for examination.

All sides and angles measured, it was time to knit some sample panels, which took a few tries to get exactly right. Hexagons were a bit easier to make because once you figured out how to knit the bottom half, the reverse of it would give you the top half (hooray for the x-axis symmetry). Pentagons were a bit more of a challenge, angles being slightly more acute and symmetry running only along the y-axis. But even than it didn’t take more an an evening of fiddling with stitch increases and decreases.

I finished most of the panel knitting on a 10-hour flight to Europe and then another one back to the US. It turned out to be a very convenient project to bring on a plane: you can use very short needles because none of the panels are wider than 16 stitches, you don’t end up dragging something bulky half way around the world in your carry-on, and you can take a break every 15 minutes when a panel is finished and still feel like you accomplished something. The only drawback was using really tiny dull scissors, since you can’t bring a real pair on board.

Sewing the panels together was probably the most fun and the most tedious part at the same time. Tedious - because this is just a lot of sewing and I’m not a huge fan of it. Fun - because I took it upon myself to figure out how to stitch the panels together using the least number of seams (there are a total of 90 seams, but you can stitch a couple sides at a time with the same length of yarn). I was actually surprised that sometimes my plan to stitch 3 consecutive seams wouldn’t work, or that I would end up with a lonely unfinished seam among the stitched panels. It took a full 3 evenings to finish stitching the ball, stuff it, and weave in the yarn ends.

The ball turned out looking relatively realistic (except maybe slightly larger than life-size). The biggest difference between my ball and a real soccer ball is the weight - no matter how much fiberfil I stuffed in it, it just didn’t want to weigh 400 g.

Will other balls follow, you ask? Perhaps, but not in the forseeable future.

I had been eying a brioche hat design for about a year and a half before I actually tried to make it. I had made a few plain looking hats before and was ready for something new, so I got a book that described how to make a brioche hat, which looked completely different from what I had previously made. And then … I sat on it for over a year. The description just looked so complicated that I didn’t even bother trying to wrap my brain around it. So, the hat wasn’t happening.

Last February I was going to be on a plane for a few hours and wanted to bring a small project to work on. I got the book with the brioche hat out again and decided that I will give it a try. For real this time. Airport environment didn’t prove very conducive to following complicated instructions, but I had hours to knit and unravel what I knitted until the first 4-5 rows started looking like the picture. I think at that point I was more excited that I finally got around to making it than about the hat itself. I can follow instructions and figure things out on my own pretty well, but it’s hard for me to get motivated to do things.

I started on the hat as soon as I got back home from my trip a few days later, and was surprised at how much easier it was to make it in the round than to knit the brioche pattern back and forth which I was doing as my sample. Stitches just came together on their own and I didn’t even feel like I had to keep track of them. Shaping the crown was a bit more challenging, but here instead of mindlessly following the instructions I paid very close attention to how the stitches were reduced and what pattern they formed, and after about 6 rounds I could figure out how to reduce the rest of the stitches without consulting the book. The one problem with this approach was that I didn’t bother checking if what I was doing closely matched the instructions, so when it was time to write the description of how I made the hat, I was unsure if I could get it right. Guess what I did to proofread myself? I made another identical hat carefully writing down instructions for each crown round. I added a fleece lining to this hat to make it a little different and meant to gift it to one of my friends (who didn’t really care about which hat he got, but was very adamant about the fleece lining). Unfortunately, this hat, outfitted with the lining and ready to be given away, is still at my house. I’m waiting to take pictures of it so I can’t let it go yet. When you see a post describing how to add a fleece lining to a hat, you’ll know that this duplicate hat finally found its rightful owner. It may have to wait till the ski season.

One more thing I really ought to mention: don’t try to learn to knit using this hat as your first project. I gave my friend some nice yarn and needles for her birthday and she was interested in learning to knit by making that particular hat (well, I think I was more interested in her making that hat since after two tries I fathomed it to be super easy). We tried long and hard to make the needles and the yarn behave and it just wasn’t working out. So we ended up settling on a two-color scarf instead that’s still work in progress. Brioche hat - not a good starter project! But once you comprehend how it’s made, it’s a lot of fun to knit.

A little over a year ago I was invited to my co-worker’s baby shower. I wanted to give her something special - I could have gone to Pottery Barn Kids and picked up some overpriced newborn essentials, but that wouldn’t have been memorable either for her or for me. An idea of giving her baby a handmade piece of clothing was far more attractive. Besides, I wanted to get more seriously into knitting so that was my chance.

I poured over at least 2 dozen websites and numerous baby knitting magazines looking for ideas, but nothing I found was all that appealing: little hats and tiny baby sweaters looked alright, but it was summer and no sane baby would have wanted to get stuck with a wardrobe of warm clothing in July and grow out of it by winter time. Cute but impractical. And then I came across a few baby blankets that had a more versatile outlook: with the air conditioning cranked way up during the summer months it could come in handy. Besides, this was something that could be used for many months provided I make it slightly bigger than the size of a newborn. That’s how the Pink Baby Blanket was conceived (pun intended).

I called it “pink,” but in reality it’s actually very pale purple. My co-worker wasn’t into the whole “pink only for girls” trend. In fact, she would have preferred if it was yellow or green. Not wanting to deviate from the traditional girlish pinkness too much and not wanting to offend my co-worker’s tastes, I went with purple. It also happened to be a nice color to look at while knitting the blanket for many hours on end.

Having never made anything like this before, I didn’t know how much time it would take to finish. I was glad I started a month before it was due because I was working on it until 2 hours before it was delivered. I only had a few hours a day, if that, to dedicate to knitting the blanket, so it probably ended up taking about 50 hours total. If I wanted to get paid at least $20 an hour, this would have been a $1000 blanket - not bad for a baby shower gift, huh? I found that knitting the blanket itself wasn’t all that bad: switching between different types of squares kept me somewhat entertained. However, finishing it up was really tedious - it took a long time to fill in the groves with a different color yarn and then tuck all the loose ends (and there were A LOT of them) in.

Once it was all finished, I was amazed as how well the blanket turned out: it was very pretty and soft and a perfect size to last a baby for quite some time. I was even tempted to keep it for myself as a lap blanket - after all, it was sitting on my lap for almost a month in its various stages of development and I grew attached to it. In the end, I did decide to part with it, and the moment of giving the blanket away to my co-worker was priceless. It was worth all the time and effort I put into it to see her and all the guests completely stunned and awed by the fact that the gift I brought was handmade. I didn’t realize how easy it was to impress people with something knitted by hand. I’ll have to remember it for next time.

Welcome to my knitting site! I would like it to be is a place that knitters of all skill levels can visit and find something useful: beginners should be able to come here and browse the tutorials to help them get started and more experienced knitters would find interesting and fun projects that can inspire them to create their own things.  My plan is to add more sections like “Tutorials” and maybe even a “Store” but for now, check out some of the projects and subscribe to this blog.