thegiddystitcher

Been back at work on my Eskarina Socks and I almost had them finished off yesterday but then realised the bit of knitting I'd done at the dentist was all wrong and needed to be redone. Woe.

Will probably get that redone and the toe finished off tomorrow though so prepare for gratuitous sock pics soon!

Last week I set my crafting goals for the year, and one of them is to make a shawl. Now, that's a big deal because I've been self-banned from making shawls for about two and a half years, but it makes sense for...reasons.

So to that end I picked up the Big Damn Heroes pattern that I've had bookmarked literally since it came out in 2013 and have started some good old-fashioned swatching. Oh shawl knitting, how I missed thee.

What's everyone else up to this week? Knitting yourself some emergency mittens to get through the cold snap? Or alternatively for our southern hemisphere friends, maybe resenting all yarn-based activities due to heat and humidity?

Either way, here's your opportunity for weather related knitting complaints.

Hi all, merry 2024! It looks like my instance is back to federating properly so to celebrate, an update post!

I've been gently reminded (thanks, whoever that was in my YT comments 😅) that while I was going about my new year business, catching up on work and doing the hoovering and generally feeling like a real on-top-of-stuff adult, I'd actually forgotten to update our monthly knitting theme 🤷‍♀️

So, first of all, apologies for that one! Please accept this sock yarn porn as partial repayment .

I thought I'd wait a couple days into January to do it, until lemm.ee federation was fixed, and then forgot. Which is maybe slightly better than completely forgetting. Sort of. In a way.

Anyway. Given that we're somehow halfway through the month already, my body and mind are a mess, it's Saturday evening and also I see you're still enthusiastically posting socks, I've made an executive mod decision to just extend the sock theme and move "knitting fails" to February instead.

I hope nobody is waiting in the wings, desperate to post their fails, and now super disappointed. But if you are, just post them anyway, let's face it these rules are more like guidelines and I promise you'll still get counted 😀

Hope everyone's having a good start to the year, and you can probably expect me to be this disorganised every January so if anyone wants to be co-moderator of this place to avoid it happening again...well...my DMs are open!

The title makes a bold claim, I admit. But go with me here.

This is the Tea Rose Slip On by Retro Claude, knitted in Stylecraft Special XL which is super chunky 100% acrylic yarn. Definitely not what you think of when you think knitted jumper!

I only tried this as an experiment because I happened to have the yarn lying around after buying it for an abandoned wedding-related idea at the start of the year. Figured I had nothing to lose!

It was an EXTREMELY quick knit, the yarn is incredibly soft and lovely, and the colour. Be still my heart 😍

The pattern is free and the designer is honest about only having tested the size S. As a result, the neckline in my size L turned out to be waaaaay too wide even for someone who loves a good wide neckline. So I just grabbed a crochet hook and slip stitched around and problem solved! Albeit in a slightly sloppy way.

So yes, conclusion, super bulky jumpers CAN work and not be frumpy and awful to wear. One day I'll post a photo of me actually wearing it to prove that last part but, as Aragorn would say, it is not this day.

(Sorry to anyone who saw this on Mastodon already for the repeat. Crossposting between the two is temporarily broken, because of course it is 😅)

#SkipTagginator

Everything about this is wrong in every way.

Shame on you, Sainsbury's.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/17097990

Behold the socks that created my obsession! These were actually the third pair I knitted but the first ones that made me understand why knitted socks are so great.

The pattern is the classic Hermione's Everyday Socks, and the yarn is a special blend of all kinds of things including silk and bamboo, bought as a souvenir from a shop called Yarnia in Portland during a big US road trip we took in 2015. You can sort of see the different strands in it in this pic here.

These are my lucky socks. I wore them to job interviews, I wore them the day I got accepted into uni, and I wore them for confidence whenever I was doing something scary.

Alas, after years of heavy use, one of them has a hole in the ball of the foot and I expect the other one won't be far behind.

So given that for once I've managed not to overburden myself with Christmas crafting this year, I think my project for the holidays is going to be to learn how to fix these. At least they'll be usable for wearing around the house, and given they're 8 years old that's pretty good going really!

(Please excuse the wildly different colours from one image to the next, this was a long time ago and I did not know how to camera)

Behold the socks that created my obsession! These were actually the third pair I knitted but the first ones that made me understand why knitted socks are so great.

The pattern is the classic Hermione's Everyday Socks, and the yarn is a special blend of all kinds of things including silk and bamboo, bought as a souvenir from a shop called Yarnia in Portland during a big US road trip we took in 2015. You can sort of see the different strands in it in this pic here.

These are my lucky socks. I wore them to job interviews, I wore them the day I got accepted into uni, and I wore them for confidence whenever I was doing something scary.

Alas, after years of heavy use, one of them has a hole in the ball of the foot and I expect the other one won't be far behind.

So given that for once I've managed not to overburden myself with Christmas crafting this year, I think my project for the holidays is going to be to learn how to fix these. At least they'll be usable for wearing around the house, and given they're 8 years old that's pretty good going really!

(Please excuse the wildly different colours from one image to the next, this was a long time ago and I did not know how to camera)

It’s happening, people! The theme for the month of December is officially 🧦 SOCKS! 🧦

Get your finished socks entered into the theme contest. Post your WIP socks just because. Ask your sock questions. Start your first ever pair of socks and see how easy it is. Post your sock-related tips and anecdotes. Socks! Socks! SOOOOOOOCKS!

Yeah I know it's the third of the month already, but if you'd seen how ill I've been for most of the last two weeks you'd understand that I barely know where I am nevermind what date it is 😭

Still, if there's one thing that can ease my pain, it's the comfort of a drawer full of knitted socks!

Congrats to @[email protected] for submitting our most-upvoted baby + toddler project last month, this cute little toddler cowl!

As well as the theme switchover I am also very late on opting us in to the Lemmy Tagginator as discussed, mainly because I made that thread while half-conscious with covid and forgot all about it. Seriously. So ill. I am currently a complete shambles.

p.s. soooooooocks!

I maintain that this sock pattern looks extra weird half-finished and unworn, even compared to other socks. But it's also been really easy to just pick up and do a couple rounds at a time during quite a busy week, and you know what I'll just even up those messy gusset stitches at the end.

Dug out another half done sock too from probably a couple years ago, so you'll see that one soon. And after the talk of suitable gift knitting the other day I'm thinking of doing a couple pairs of slipper socks too. So...yeah. Sock month ahoy 😂

How are we all doing this week? Let us know what you're working on, that we may ooh and aah appropriately!

Hi all! I'm not usually a fan of bots, but as per usual @[email protected] has come up with something that could be genuinely useful and I wanted to get your thoughts on whether we as a community should use it.

Basically the Lemmy Tagginator is a Mastodon bot that would respond to all posts in our community, adding hashtags (in our case, probably just the one tag #Knitting). More info on Github / in the announcement thread.

Why would this be a good thing?

Mastodon is so much bigger than Lemmy, and content from other Fediverse services genuinely does benefit from the discoverability there in my experience. Basically, more people chatting about your knitting.

Why might this be a bad thing?

You'd get a bot reply on your posts, that could be annoying for some people.

Also the dev has already added an opt-out feature to tell the bot to ignore a given post, but it's one more thing to remember how to do.

What do you reckon?

I'm not going to go opting you into something that the majority doesn't want, so this is your chance to yea or nay. Of course, we could always give it a whirl and stop if we don't like it or aren't seeing any benefit.

Community feedback, go!

Got myself into a bit of a pickle, same as basically every year, where I probably need to make something for my grandma but am out of ideas.

So I thought a thread about what sort of gifts we're all making might be fun but also might kick my brain into gear ideas-wise 😄

My mam has requested I sew her a draught excluder for her living room door, which is a sewing project so simple even I presumably can't muck it up. But so far I've got no real knitting plans beyond a vague "make some tiny last-minute baby stuff for new parent friends".

Dazzle me with your festive knitting plans!

Turned my sock heel today, and given how many people we seem to have here who fear trying socks because of the heel this popped into my head.

Shut up it's been a stressful day and I amuse myself...

Mod: if you want to steal bits of this for an official sticky thread of your own or whatever feel free.

Newbies: Welcome to lemmy!

Where am I and what's going on?

You're on a platform called "Lemmy", a collection of discussion groups ("communities") around particular topics. You can think of it kind of like Reddit, or like a collection of old-school forums that all share a login.

Is Lemmy the Fediverse?

You might have heard the term "fediverse" thrown around, it's the name for a collection of platforms like Lemmy that all talk to each other. So Lemmy is just one small part of the Fediverse, but there are lots of others for you to investigate one day too :)

What about the Threadiverse?

Another Fediverse platform that works a bit like Lemmy does is called Kbin. Since both of them use a forum thread type structure for discussion, they became collectively known as the Threadiverse.

People keep talking about "instances" and I'm confused

Lemmy as a whole consists of lots of different websites, all running the "Lemmy" software and talking to each other. For example this community is hosted on lemmy.ca, whereas my user account is on lemm.ee, but I can post here anyway. They're two different websites (usually called "instances" or "servers"), but all part of the wider Lemmy platform.

You'll learn more about what this means as you go, but for the most part it's not super important to get started.

I clicked a link and it logged me out

Remember what we said about Lemmy actually being lots of websites? Chances are, you clicked a badly-formatted link that took you to a different one of those sites. You're not logged out of your account, you're just looking at another site.

If you're on the web, you can follow instructions in the sidebar and search for the community address from your instance's search page (magnifying glass icon at the top of the page). But if you're on a mobile app they all work differently so I can't sum that one up for you, sorry!

To create links that should work for everyone, you can use the ! syntax like so:

[email protected]

How do I find cool stuff?

Two main ways. First you can check out the All feed on your instance homepage. This shows all the content your instance knows about, from all the other Lemmy instances it talks to. Subscribe to any communities that catch your eye!

Alternatively you can use a search tool like https://lemmyverse.net/communities. Use the home icon in the top right to set your home instance, and search for stuff you want to talk about!

And if you're a fibre crafter, well, check out my profile because I post in a lot of relevant communities 😉

It can be hard for someone who's been here a while to explain things in a way that makes sense to absolute beginners. So if any of this was confusing, please just ask me in the comments and I'm happy to clarify.

Welcome, enjoy, and see you around!