Tag Archives: lengthen knitting


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Happy Birthday Sweet Seventeen

Seventeen years ago, on September 7 2004, I started this blog. Yes, this creative passion project of mine is officially old enough to be in college and donate blood. It began on Blogger in the boom of knitting/craft blogs that fed blogrolls and Yahoo swaps and RAOK groups.  We’ve seen the onset of Ravelry and Worldwide Knit In Public Day, and welcomed pattern sources like Knitty, Craftsy, Twist Collective, St Denis Yarns and others before having to say goodbye to some of them.

With YouTube, Instagram and TikTok flooding the internet with video-based creative content, running a blog feels almost antiquated. I’ve been asked by friends and family why I don’t switch to another format but the truth is… I don’t want to. I love video tutorials. I follow a TON of craft-content YouTubers, and have saved a huge amount of “try one day” crafty TikToks to my favorites list too, so it’s not a critique of the other formats. They absolutely have their place, especially for some techniques or tutorials that can really only best be shown in video. That said, I still think there’s a place for blogs and photo-based project/pattern support.

My “blogaversary” this year falls on the first day of Rosh Hashana, which is the Jewish New Year.  I think that makes it perfect timing for a long-overdue blog restart. (I know, I know, I’ve said this before. Shhhh!) Coincidentally I was born on was erev (eve) Rosh Hashanna (we won’t say how long ago!) so Happy birthday to the blog, happy sort of birthday to me, and happy Jewish New Year!

To celebrate 17 years in the public craft domain I’ve scoured the site, my notes, folders, and metadata and picked 17 fun, interesting or long-forgotten items from my blogging history.

1-7

Numbers 1-7 are from the archives.  These are posts even I forgot about!  Some are helpful tips, some are free patterns/tutorials, and all are added to the How To section above.

8

Even when I don’t post regularly I get a steady stream of visitors (thanks!) and I’m always curious to see what search terms bring people my way.  So number 8 is my top referrer keywords from back in my Blogger days.  Funny enough it’s a tie between two completely random things that have almost nothing to do with my site: “cute japanese cartoons” & “hangman”.  I’m guessing the former is related to the time I knit a Japanese boy band, but the latter?  NO idea.

9

Number 9 is the results of my top search terms after migrating the blog to WordPress.  Unfortunately/fortunately Google has been encrypting the vast majority of search terms since 2013 so 9771 of my results are “unknown”.  Of the list that remains the top three terms are: “Toothless”, “pocketbook slippers”, and “pocket book slippers”, likely linking back to these two projects (Toothless, slippers).  Wanna know the lowest search result that brought someone my way?  “Long hair cut feet”.  I wonder how disappointed the searcher was to find my post was literally about a long hair transformation??

10

Number 10 is a really cool fact- I’ve had visitors from 170 different countries!  The majority are, unsurprisingly, from Canada and the United States, but rounding out the top 20 are the UK, Australia, Germany, Brazil, the Netherlands, Mexico, France, Iceland, Spain, Italy, the Philippines, Israel, New Zealand, Poland, South Africa, Argentina, Hungary and Denmark.

11-14

Numbers 11-14 are my the top 4 posts since switching to WordPress.  I had a hunch what these were because they keep Pinterest flashing up on my phone.  What I didn’t expect was that the top post would outrank second place by more than double!

15

I’ve spent the last few months poring over my unshared projects and planning out a blog schedule for the year.  For number 15 I thought it would be fun to look through my folders and see just how old my oldest unshared project truly is. There was a lot to wade through but I found it!  Coming in at over a decade old a crafty hack that you’ll see on the block next year dates all the way back to February 2010!

16

Looking through all those projects was a fun trip down a creative memory lane.  As number 16 here’s a little teaser of a post I can’t wait to share in full…

Any guesses?

17

And finally, for making down this far: number 17 is a picture of me at the same age as this blog.

Whether you’ve been here since day 1 or day 6204, thanks for being a part of my creative adventures. I run this blog for me, but I love sharing it with you. ♥

*All search terms and other totals above were accurate as of the date of preparing this post.


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just a typical saturday night

Any major knitterly repairs had to wait until tonight, since we had a birthday party this afternoon. One of my best friends’ son turns 2 this week, and our little family was invited to his party. I’m not going to post photos of them since I forgot to ask permission, but I am going to post a different photo (hi Debbie!) to my friend Debbie who is one of the very few non-knitters who reads my blog.

Jakob’s friend Taylor was at the party too, since we’ve known her father since high school, and her mom for the last few years. Taylor is exactly one day older than Jakob.
Hey baby…come here often?
After supper tonight I decided to brave the Superman repairs. I took photos and will break down what I did, step-by-step. It turns out that while I’ve councelled others to do this same repair, I don’t think I’ve actually done it myself before. It was much easier than I’d thought!
First I took a circular needle and wove it through the stitches, making sure to pick up the left bar of every stitch, and verifying that I had the correct number of stitches on the needle. You can also pick up the right bar, it doesn’t matter as long as you consistently pick up the same side of each stitch.
Next, I grabbed a dpn and “picked up” stitches 2 rows below the one on the needles. I only picked up 6 sts at a time so the fabric wouldn’t pull too tightly. Once I had the first 6 sts on the needle, I CUT one stitch on the middle row…the one in between the two rows on needles. I used a spare needle to unpick the yarn from those 6 sts, then took another needle and picked up the next 6 sts, unpicked the middle row, etc… (Yes, I left the scissors in the photo on purpose. Looks ominous, huh? LOL).

Once I’d done that all the way around the row I had the two parts of the leg separate. I was then able to add another 12 rows (1.5″) in length to the foot part of the leg.
With the knitting done, I “tidied” up the two parts by arranging them on 2 dpns each, making sure that I had the front and back aligned properly (wouldn’t want to sew the foot on crooked!). I left a really long tail for grafting, then cut the yarn.
Finally, I Kitchenered (grafted) the foot part to the leg. You can kinda see here how much length was added. I’m breastfeeding (and don’t drink anyways) so I had a cup of Earl Gray as my fortification instead of the typical glass of wine. 😉 I was about to do the second leg when Yannick suggested that I wait until after Jakob wakes up tomorrow so that I can try it on him first and be sure that I didn’t add too much…or need to add more.
So there you have it. One leg lengthened by an inch and a half, with my first not-too-sucky graft. One more leg to go.

You can use this type of repair for any knitting that’s too short and you want to add length, OR you can use it for knitting that is too long.  Follow the same steps to separate the work into two pieces and then unravel the side that goes in the opposite direction of your knitting for the required length, plus one row.  If using my costume leg as an example, I wouldn’t be able to unravel the top piece without picking out each stitch one by one, as I’d be unravelling in the same direction as I’d knit and it would be very time consuming.  I would unravel down the lower (leg) piece as that would be going opposite the knitting and would frog easily.

So if I had a leg that was 10 rows too long, I would separate the work onto two sets of needles and then unravel until I’d removed 11 rows.  The grafting row will account for the difference, “putting back” one row as it joins the two halves together.