Knitting. Cooking. Baking.: Hat

Friday, March 30, 2012

Favorite Pattern Friday - Jared Flood

©Jared Flood Photography

This FPF will be dedicated to one of my favorite designers, Jared Flood.

Jared Flood is a Pacific Northwest native, founder of Brooklyn Tweed, knitwear designer and photographer. His outstanding designs are clean and strong and focus on quality, texture and detail.

Another thing I like about his patterns is that they are mostly worked in the round. As a fan of Elizabeth Zimmermann, who was big on easier, more adjustable 'recipes' rather than line by line patterns, Flood tends to use her construction styles and creates most of his designs to be as seamless as possible.

There was a great two-part article, titled "Going Seamless," by Jared Flood in Vogue Knitting about converting flat-knitted and pieced sweaters to a seamless version, specifically with bottom-up construction. You can read parts of his tutorial online in Vogue Knitting's article archive.

Martina Hecht, a German knitwear designer and writer, had really inspiring interview with him last year; it's available on her website MaschenGold.

Enough said. Time to share some of my favorites!

Tinder

Published in BT FALL 11

Autumn Leaves Stole

Published in Brooklyn Tweed

Umaro

Published in Brooklyn Tweed

Brownstone

Published in Brooklyn Tweed

Pavement

Published in Brooklyn Tweed

Irving

Published in BT FALL 11

Rock Island

Published in Brooklyn Tweed

More of his designs ..

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Easy Last Minute Presents

All my relatives and friends are excited about getting handmade presents, but we all know it takes a lot of time and effort to make them. Most of the time I also don't have the money to buy multiple skeins of yarn or order patterns I would only use once. As a solution for all of us busy present crafters, I created a little list of great last minute presents.

All of these patterns are free and use less than 400 yards of yarn! Depending on your knitting skills and available free time, they should all be relatively quick and easy to make.

Each picture is linked to the patterns' page on Ravelry and details about its name and designer are below.