Welcome to September and the Vineyard MKAL Clue One!
By now, you should have already received Clue One if you purchased the Vineyard pattern on Ravelry, and I hope you’re having fun.
I’ve recorded a few videos and added them to my aknitica YouTube channel. I love to add tips and tricks to my patterns, and this shawl pattern is no different!
You can find videos showing you:
- How to use Backwards Loop Cast On as a directional increase in your fabric, instead of M1. I like BLCO (or e-loops, as Elizabeth Zimmermann called them in her Knitters Almanac) because the loops don’t tug at the stitches on either side of them and distort the fabric they way Make 1’s do.
- How to Join in New Yarns and Weave in Ends as You Go — because having to sew in a million ends is one of my personal nightmares. It’s so nice to reach the end of a project and only have to sew in the starting and ending tails.
- How to Hide Carried Strands in an I-Cord Edging — so you can knit a project with lots of colours and never have to cut the yarns and reattach them later. (See above hatred of sewing in ends.)
These are features built in to the Vineyard MKAL shawl pattern. We’re using 7 colours, so I definitely wanted to give everyone the option to keep their balls of yarn intact.
We had an in-person launch for the Vineyard Mystery Knitalong on Wednesday night, at KIN Vineyards in Carp. It was so fun and pretty! There was wine tasting, gourmet pizza, yarn-kit distribution, and a little murder mystery story that Wendy of Maker Savvy adapted for us as a bit of extra fun.
Here I am at the vineyard, with the sunset behind me, feeling a bit awkward about taking a selfie in public. 🙂 I’ve posted a few more photos on my Instagram @aknitica.
There’s still lots of time for you to join in the knitalong with us. The Vineyard MKAL pattern is available on Ravelry, and I’ll be adding a new clue every week, on Wednesdays, until all 6 are available. If you’re holding off until you’ve seen what it’ll look like, spoiler photos will be coming out soon.
For those of you knitting along, you can start posting photos of your progress on Ravelry or Instagram or wherever, and use the hashtag #VineyardMKAL so you can all find each other’s posts. Feel free to use this image as a cover to hide your spoilers:
(Those images are all my paintings, plus one photo I took of my SIL’s garden.)
Happy knitting!
Amanda
