There’s holiday sale madness going on over at etsy. Many sellers will be offering Free International Shipping until Monday November 30th. And some sellers have special sales as well.

Just mosey on over to Etsy and use the search terms etsyfreeshipping or etsyholidaysale along with your other search terms like soap, card, toy or christmas ornament. Try it, it’s fun and the bargains are awesome.

Natty Knits has free international shipping, which for the Christmas Tree at the top of the post means a saving of up to $6.

There’s also a new permanent sale section in the Natty Knits shop, where you’ll find this little lady, amongst others. This bunny is only $10 with free shipping.

Happy shopping!

This is a pattern, for a beginner knitter. It’s for a 2.5″ square knitted patch which can be attached to a card and given as a greetings card. It’s unusual, quirky and very handmade. And best of all the pattern is free from this blog, just download it as a PDF from the side bar on the right. This really is a simple pattern, but here are a few hints and tips, just in case:

Yarn Type

You could knit this pattern in any low gauge yarn, I can imagine that you would get some great results using sock yarn scraps, although using yarn any higher than worsted weight is going to make the patch too heavy and the card will fall over a lot.

Intarsia (or colour knitting)

A little square like this is an excellent first project to try out intarsia. I’ve blogged about intarsia techniques before, here . But for a complete beginner’s tutorial I recommend knittinghelp.com if you scroll down the page you’ll see the heading “How to knit with 2 colors at a time” and below that a video for “intarsia method”.

Making the Ribbon loops

When you sew the ribbon on to the gift, make a little bow at the top by making a loop of yarn and then sewing it into place with a few small stitches. Then repeat with a second loop. The small stitches actually look like a knot.

Blocking?

It’s knitting sacrilege to say this, but these patches don’t really need blocking if you sew them to a felt backing. Of course my patches are living proof that without blocking they still end up a little uneven and less than square, but I actually find that quite charming. You may disagree and you may have a toddler free household where knitting with pins in it drying flat on the floor isn’t a hazzard. In which case, I say block away!

Attaching the Patch to the Card

I was astonished to learn that there are plenty of glue dots on the market that will glue fabric to card very successfully, ask for advice at your local craft store. However, if you wanted the patch to be re-usable you could sew it to the card and then glue a slightly smaller and contrasting coloured insert inside the card to cover the stitching.

Just over a week ago I was wondering how I could improve my somewhat amateurish looking holiday cards. And thanks to your suggestions I think the cards look much better now.

I wanted to cover over the unsightly stitching where I sew the patches to the card and then I got a tweet from a nice lady in Colorado who advised using colour stock card with a white insert a 1/4 inch smaller all around the edge. She was right, it really does look more professional. She wasn’t the only one to think of layering though, so thank you to my regular readers Theresa and Donna, who also sent me thinking in the right direction.

Then I got into an in depth conversation about glue dots with FabricGreetings on the etsy forums, who was so generous as to offer to send me some! So I can still use the white card stock I had, by just sticking the patches directly on to the card.

And as soon as I’ve finished writing this post I’ll be writing up the pattern for one of the patches, I’ll add it to the free patterns side bar on Wednesday, then you can try these techniques out for yourself.

I’m dipping my toe into the water of craft shows once again, this time I’m armed with Christmas trees and Holiday cards.

It’s actually more of an open studio at Jered’s Pottery in Berkeley, but those folks sure know how to make you feel welcome, so who could resist? Here’s the details:

Saturday, November 21, 2009
12:00pm – 6:00pm

Jered’s Pottery
2720 San Pablo Ave
Berkeley, CA

If you’re in the neighbourhood, drop by for some hot punch, cool ceramics and maybe one little knitted card?

I’ve already shared some short row shaping hints and tips with you, but those have always been for garter stitch fabric. It’s also possible to do short row shaping in stockinette stitch, although the results can be more uneven as you can see in the above photo and unless you are a knitter with tension like steel, you’ll need to do some adjustments.

Wrapping the Stitch

In order to turn your knitting mid row, you will need to wrap the stitch you are turning on, so that there isn’t just a big hole in your work. In stockinette stitch, the wrap goes like this:

(In a knit row) slip 1 purlwise, yarn forward, turn the work, slip 1 purlwise, yarn forward and purl

(in a purl row) slip 1 purlwise, yarn backward, turn the work, slip 1 purlwise, yarn back and knit

As you can see from this photo, that basically means that you are wrapping the yarn all around a stitch and you’ve transferred it from the left needle to the right and back again in order to do this.

Picking Up the Loops

When you knit back across a stitch you have previously turned the work on, you will need to pick up the loop made by wrapping the yarn around the stitch. Unlike with garter stitch short row shaping, where this stage is optional, stockinette stitch needs these loops picking up so that you don’t end up with little bars across your stockinette stitch vs.

These loops look different and need to be treated slightly differently in a knit or a purl row.

In a knit row, the looped around stitch will look like this:

You can see the little bar very clearly, you will need to knit into the loop and also the stitch above it at the same time, like this:

In a purl row the looped around stitch is less clear, you may have to rely on the look of the stitch, just as you get to it, it will look like this:

You will need to purl into the loop and the stitch at the same time, which will look like this:

And that’s all you need to know to make short rows in stockinette stitch.

Just a quick word of warning, the short row shaping patterns I’ve made available will only work in garter stitch. Stockinette stitch and garter stitch have completely different sized stitches plus the different methods of wrapping mean that the stitch counts will be wrong. That being said I am working on some stockinette stitch short row shaping patterns, they should be ready early next year.

This is the first knitted thing I ever designed. I made it to practice garter stitch, sewing together and picking up stitches. It was quite a mammoth undertaking at the time.

And now as my son transitions into his big boy bed, that blanket is finally getting used!

Of course it has it’s flaws, the sewing is terrible and if I was designing this again then I would change the orientation of the smaller squares so that the blanket would keep it’s shape better. But all that being said, I couldn’t be happier with it.