knitting

Knitting designer series: Making knitted lace buttons

by kath_red on November 7, 2012

in Guest series Knitting 2012, knitting+crochet+yarn

Knitting designer series: I invited a few of my favourite knitwear designers to discuss their design process and inspiration and to share some tips and ideas too.

Miriam Felton lives in Salt Lake City with the love of her life and a rescued Siamese named Ekho. You can find her on the web at Miriam Felton. And Make sure to check out her class on Designing Lace Shawls.

Hi all! I’m Miriam, and I’m a maker. I love knitting (and do it every day), but I also love crochet, sewing, weaving, paper crafting, bookbinding, screen printing and much more. I came to knitting when I was a teenager, started blogging about my knitting in the early days of knit blogs and as I made up my own stuff found that other knitters wanted to make my patterns too and the whole thing slowly blossomed into my career.

Assemblage Mitts from the Convergence collection

My design philosophy is pretty rooted in the Arts & Crafts movement – I most enjoy making functional things that are also beautiful and well constructed. I think of knitting as architecture. You build one row on top of the other like a mason laying bricks, and each row feeds into the next and must support what you’re going to do in the next row to make a cohesive whole. The process of knitting has never stopped being intriguing in its possibility and scope.

I started designing knitting patterns with lace and I explored a lot of ways to make lace stitches flow seamlessly and organically one into the other. Every piece was different and I had a lot of fun with it, but when I got down to writing Twist & Knit, I got a taste of what it’s like to have a guiding hand in my design process and I found that I enjoyed it more than designing stand alone pieces. It’s very different to create multiple designs that have a cohesive theme running through them, and equally difficult to source the right yarns in any given color scheme. But since I realized the difference, I’ve been working mostly in collections. I enjoy the challenge of creating a wide variety of pieces that together tell a story, with coordinating stitch patterns, motifs and echoed shapes.

Furrows shawl from the Chevron collection


To start a collection, first I usually pick a theme or a story I’m trying to tell. With the Chevron Collection that theme was (ah…) Chevrons. I have pieces making chevrons in lace, with cables and even making the fabric into a chevron itself using stacked increases and decreases. The Confluence Collection was exploring cluster groups using Bramble or Trinity stitch, little increase decrease pods, and smocking.

I recently finished another collection that I can’t say much about at the moment, but it has a recurring lacey stitch pattern that shows up in a few of the pieces, and when I was stuck trying to find the perfect buttons for one of the pieces, it struck me that I could not only make the buttons, but I could make them tie together with the rest of the collection by covering them with little swatches of the lacey stitch pattern. You could knit little swatches specifically for the buttons, or you could use swatches from old projects.

Making knitted lace buttons

Materials: 

  • Fabric covered button kit (including the mold and the plunger) plus enough button parts to make your required number of buttons
  • scraps of background fabric
  • knitted and blocked lace swatches

Note: background fabric pieces and lace swatches need to be about 1″ larger all around than the button you mean to cover. For instance, these buttons were 1.5″ buttons, so my swatches were blocked to about 2.5″ square. It may require a bit of trial and error to get a swatch that will block to the right size, but bigger is better in this case. You can always cut it down before you finish the button, but you can’t make it bigger.


Cut yourself some fabric to hang out behind the lace pattern. If you didn’t have a fabric backing behind the lace swatch, the shiny metal of the button form would show through the lace. The button making kits usually come with a circular template, but I was lazy and just cut squares and then cut the corners off them to reduce bulk inside the button. Make sure you trim the tails on the lace swatch so they don’t get in the way. There’s no need to weave in your ends though, as the edges of the swatch will be stuffed back inside the button.


Make a sandwich, with the lace swatch on top, right side up, with the fabric underneath it, then flip that whole part over so the lace is facing down and place the rounded part of the button form (the part without the wire shank loop) on top of the fabric, curved side down.  Your sandwich will now look like the photo, with lace swatch, fabric, and then the button form sitting on top like a cup.


Carefully stick this whole sandwich into the flexible mold from the button kit. Make sure that you can see lace swatch edges all the way around the button form.


Tuck the edges of fabric and swatch toward the inside of the cup and place the back piece of the button (the one with the wire shank loop) into the button mold, making sure you get all the fabric edges tucked underneath it.


Then cover it with the harder plastic plunger portion and push down hard. This snaps the back of the button into the cup shaped part, securing your fabric edges along with it.


Remove the hard plastic plunger and pop your new-made button out of the flexible plastic mold. Voila! lace covered buttons to accent all your knitted pieces!

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Right now I am …

by kath_red on October 5, 2012

in my life, Newsletter

  • Enjoying a quiet interlude after an early start … I went to the farmers market with a friend then we did our family house clean for an hour.
  • Loving that it is raining outside … just a drizzle and it won’t stop me from hanging the clothes on the line.
  • Waiting for a load of washing to finish so I can put the next one on … it’s washing day today … hoping to get all the towels and sheets washed, they’ll enjoy the rain too.
  • Listening to talkback radio on the ABC … actually just turned it off, it was a bit dry and I couldn’t concentrate properly.
  • Researching the next Action Pack {Family Apothecary … so luscious} … just hopped online to buy some seaweed powder, kaolin clay and some essential oils.
  • Eating strawberries and drinking fresh mandarin juice from the markets … such intense real flavour!
  • Sketching, scanning and fiddling in illustrator.
  • Hoping that two of our ducks are enjoying their new home … we still have two left and we need to find a home for them before next year.
  • Making silly faces at my daughter … and she is making faces at me.
  • Thinking and planning for next year {the link leads the Action Pack blog where I discuss our family’s plans for next year}.

What are you doing?

Knitting Designer series [link to whole series HERE]

More at Whipup

 My Pinterest boards

Reading and watching

  • We watched the movie Eragon for the second time the other night, since we are all reading the series of books (separately –  and then discussing it in a book club sort of way) we felt we needed a refresher on the movie – just to see what was different {quite a bit actually}. We are all loving this series the Inheritance Cycle (some of us are further ahead in the series than others) - and are fascinated by the author Christopher Paolini, he wrote the first book in the series when he was just 15, his parents helped him to self publish it and it was picked up by a publisher a couple of years later.
  • One of our family read-aloud novels earlier this year was Holes by Louis Sachar, we loved this book — adventure, boys daring escapades plus a touch of the ridiculous, and so when we discovered that a movie had been made from the book a few years ago we had to watch it — it was pretty good (not as a good as the book though – but pretty close) — read the book!.

Don’t forget to grab your copy of the latest Action Pack magazine for kids (Go Tribal Issue)

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Book :: Cast on, Bind off {blog tour}

by contributor on July 24, 2012

in Books, knitting+crochet+yarn

Leslie Ann Bestor comes from a long line of knitters, weavers and seamstresses and has had a lifelong love of fibers and textiles. For many years she designed and made custom knitwear for sale through her business Carpe Yarnum Designs. After the arrival of her daughter and a move from a rural mountain town in Washington to semi-urban western Massachusetts, she settled into a new life as teacher and assistant manager at WEBS, America’s Yarn Store, a job that combines the best of both worlds – a steady paycheck and daily immersion in fibers and creativity. Leslie is the author of Cast On, Bind Off published by Storey Publishing (June 2012).

I can trace the inception of this book back to my mother in so many ways. Creatively, she instilled in me a love of working with my hands and making things both useful and beautiful. She sewed all of our clothes and knitted and tried just about anything crafty. And she taught these things to me and encouraged me to create. She was also a reference librarian and surrounded us with books, showed us how to find out what we wanted to know and nurtured a lifelong love of learning.

My journey to writing Cast On Bind Off begins there and follows a long and circuitous path through learning and experimenting with yarn and the creative process. Although I learned to knit as a child, I didn’t stick with it (I have hazy memories of a scarflike piece of knitting, misshapen and full of holes). I picked up crochet in college and returned to knitting a few years after that, but it was several years before I discovered (uncovered?) my passion for knitting.

Largely self-taught, I knit daily, designing garments and trying out ideas. I announced to my parents that I wanted to make my living as a knitter and my mother promptly sent me a reference library of knitting books. I studied and marked pages and knit, learning all the things I had been doing wrong and figuring out how to fix my mistakes. I spent many years designing and knitting, selling both garments and patterns, a much different proposition 20 years before the advent of Etsy and Ravelry.

Fast forward to 9 years ago when I traded my life as an entrepreneur for the excitement of working in a huge yarn store, teaching classes and selling yarn. It is a fertile environment, surrounded by yarn and creative people all day. Between the staff and customers, I see so many inspiring, beautiful things and have learned so many different ways of doing things.

Teaching is a joy because I love introducing people to the craft of knitting and watching them take off. It is also a learning experience for me as I learn how to present things. People learn things so differently, some can hear it, some need to see it and trying firsthand is always great. I learned that I had to have several ways of describing a technique, that ‘under’ and ‘behind’ sometimes mean different things to different people. I still get so amused listening to my students coming up with their own descriptions of the motions – two people can be sitting next to each other and one says “over under over” and the next one says “under under forward”. It’s all about how they see the strands of yarn in relation to each other.

One thing that I love about knitting today is the curiosity and thirst for knowledge. People are wanting to know more about techniques and how to adapt and design patterns. We saw this at the store in the requests for new classes, which led to my class in cast ons and bind offs. I had a file of techniques I had accumulated over the years and distilled them into a series of step-by-step instructions to present to my students. I didn’t set out to write a book, but suddenly one day that was exactly what I was doing.

The process of writing the book in some ways was like a big research paper – lots of information gathering from all kinds of sources. This felt easy and familiar. So was the endless swatching as I tried out different techniques. What was trickier was writing the instructions, because of what I described about the different perceptions people have. I knew the photos would help with that, but still I wrote and rewrote, had friends test knit, and rewrote some more.

As the book came together, I hit my biggest block of all, something I’m sure all writers confront at some point – what if people didn’t like the book? After all, who was I to be the expert on this? This really stopped me in my tracks for awhile until a good friend put it into perspective for me. She said that I wasn’t trying to be the expert, I was merely compiling the information to share so that others could learn. And I realized that she was right, the book is an extension of my teaching, a way of bringing information together. I don’t have to be the best or know it all. Whew! What a relief that was! More recently, someone remarked that I am like a curator. I love that image as it conveys the sense of bringing together and presenting and allowing others to take away what they find useful/compelling.

The journey to the published book continued through all the minutiae and details of the publishing world – photo shoots (more swatching!), edits and more edits. The result is something that I hope will be the resource and tool I set out to create. I am sure there will be more discoveries and inventions in this world of cast ons and bind offs and I look forward to learning them.

Find out more about Cast on, Bind off on the Blog tour: 

7/9  Picnic Knits :: 7/10  Knit and Tonic :: 7/11  Zeneedle :: 7/12  Rambling Designs :: 7/13  Rambling Designs :: 7/14  Neo Knits :: 7/15  Knit & Nosh :: 7/16  Knitting at Large :: 7/17  Rebecca Danger :: 7/18  Lapdog Creations :: 7/19 Nutmeg Knitter :: 7/20       Yarnagogo :: 7/21  Weekend Knitter :: 7/22  knitgrrl :: 7/23  It’s a Purl, Man :: 7/24   Whip Up :: 7/25  Knitspot :: 7/26 Under the Humble Moon :: 7/27  Knitting Daily :: 7/28 Knitting School Dropout :: 7/29 Hugs for Your Head :: 7/30 The Knit Girllls

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Guest post | Book: Knits for nerds

by contributor on March 13, 2012

in Books, Geek Crafts, knitting+crochet+yarn

Joan of Dark (a/k/a Toni Carr) is an avid lover of all things knit and crocheted. She has been featured on two DIY Network shows, Uncommon Threads and Knitty Gritty. She’s the author of the book Knockdown Knits (Wiley), and her patterns have been published on KnitPicks.com and in Vampire Knits (Potter Craft). Her sense of style was also profiled in Indianapolis Monthly, Nuvo, and Intake Weekly. With a science fiction writer for a mother, and a father who made sure that her comic book collection was always stocked, she had no choice but to grow up a geek! She can be reached on line at www.joanofdark.com

Tony Carr has recently published Knits for Nerds (Andrews McMeel Publishing, February 2012), which includes 30 knitting projects inspired by her love of science fiction. She discusses the book here.

Coming up with the concept of  Knits for Nerds  was surprisingly easy. I’m a big nerd, I always have been. I preferred to read on the playground instead of swinging on a swing, my summer vacations and spring breaks were spent at sci-fi conventions instead of Daytona Beach, and one of my coolest memories from childhood was getting to see K-9 (from the classic Doctor Who series) in real life!

Actually deciding what patterns got to be in Knits for Nerds? That was the hard part! Some of my initial ideas couldn’t be done because of copyright concerns. Then there was the difficulty of making things that would never be seen outside of a convention, and while costumes are cool, as a knitter I want to be able to wear what I knit all the time!

Finally my publisher, agent and I decided that the book should be a mix of slightly “out there” patterns and wearable pieces. Some things were easy to come up with. Star Trek mini dresses and a cadet sweater were a natural inclusion. Firefly was a little trickier. It’s one of my favorite TV shows, but the only really memorable knitwear is the Jayne Cobb hat. I thought about including my pattern for that one, but it’s a pattern that’s been done over and over again by many different designers, so why muddy the waters? Instead I decided to simply do some items inspired by my love of the show. My friend Laura Hohman is a brilliant sock designer, so I begged her to whip up a pattern for a beginner pair of socks in the classic Jayne Cobb hat colors. A good pattern for a newer sock knitter and perfect to pair with the Jayne Cobb hat that probably already exists in most knitters closets! The scarf was another natural fit. We were having so much fun with the yarn when testing out the sock pattern that we decided to make a scarf to match, complete with pom-poms and fringe, thinking that is the way Ma Cobb would have made it. A brown coat inspired pattern was next. Lacy, delicate, and perfect for the girlie Firefly fan.

Other patterns I plucked straight from my favorite books. American Gods and Alanis Boys by Neil Gaiman described the character Mr. Nancy at one point, yellow gloves, and another wearing a green fedora. As a knitter I couldn’t resist making these! I was really lucky to bring on some other designers to help me out with some of the projects. The above mentioned Laura Hohman handled all the sock designs in the book, while Ashley Fay, created the lovely Light of Earendil Shrug. Marilee Norris designed a cute little robot loosely inspired by Doctor Who, Genevieve Miller, who I had previously worked with on Vampire Knits, made the fabulous Space Princess Hats inspired by Star Wars, Callie Need contributed the Cat Woman hat, my own sci-fi writer mother Linda Dunn made Padme’s battle cape, and of course Rilana Riley-Munson and her incredible lace shawl, inspired by the book Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr.

I like to think that overall we came up with a nice mix of patterns for the casual nerd who still wants to wear their knits during the week, and the uber nerdy convention attendee who wants to rock the Princess Leia bun hat.

Shooting the photos for the book was a fun nerd fest of its own. My friend Lorraine (who is the gorgeous model with the chessboard laptop bag) works for Neil Gaiman, and offered up his house to us for one weekend. We piled into a 15 passenger van with models, a make-up artist, two photographers, equipment and lots and lots of knitwear. When we weren’t dressing the models, setting up shots, beseeching Lorraine to make us more tea, or shooing dogs out of the frame, we got to geek out in the library over the first edition books, drool a little on the original Dave McKean art in the kitchen, and check out all the limited edition toys in the attic. After we wrapped up the last shot we made snow angels in a field while talking to Neil about roller derby. I like to think that those pictures, shot with friends, in a cool house, with dogs occasionally tipping over photographers, and cats cuddling up on a models lap to take advantage of her warm sweater help make the book what it was meant to be. Warm, silly, sometimes beautiful, but definitely not taking itself too seriously.

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Books: The best of Interweave crochet + The best of Knitscene

by kath_red on November 28, 2011

in Books, knitting+crochet+yarn

November is book month at Whipup.net

The Best of Knitscene: A Collection of Simple, Stylish, and Spirited Byy Lisa Shroyer. Published by Interweave Press (November 8, 2011).

20 most popular knitting patterns and expert advice from the first five years of Knitscene magazine. Knitscene is an Interweave publication and started out in 2005 with a mission to showcase new designers and unusual yarns. The designs are simple and stylish with this compilation of patterns showcasing designs that have been popular with real knitters – these include some of my favourites: Central Park Hoodie by Heather Lodinsky, Equinox Raglan by Debbie O’Neill, the Geodesic Cardigan and the Riding to Avalon sweater by Connie Chang Chinchio, the Berkshire Dolman Sweater by Melissa Wehrle and the Opulent Raglan by Wendy Bernard. The patterns have been restyled and reknit and re-photographed and tweaked a little to incorporate current yarns and colours.

The Best of Interweave Crochet: A Collection of Our Favorite Designs By Marcy Smith. Interweave Press (September 13, 2011).

A collection of favourites from Interweave crochet including the extremely popular Babette Blanket by Kathy Merrick and my two favourite crochet sweater designs: Northern Dreams pullover and the Big Bow Cardigan both by Julia Vaconsin. As well as patterns you will also find a series of “Beyond the basics” articles including Tunisian Crochet Primer by Kathleen Power Johnson.

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