Revelio!

The Unofficial Harry Potter Knits issue, put out by Interweave, is now available (in the US only, very unfortunately), and I can finally TALK about some things!

One design I have in this issue is an amusing little bit of a thing that suddenly came to me as I was trying to come up with ideas for the submission call. I thought of doing Dolores Umbridge's black velvet hair bow, which from the sound of things is about the least disgusting thing she ever wears in the books. (If you can't tell already, I despise her. In fact, I think she's arguably even more evil than Voldemort - he did horrific things either because he was overcome with rage or to further his own ambitions; whereas she wreaked havoc on other people's lives because she got delicious thrills out of it. Sick.)

Anyhoo, a little fiddling with some velvety-ish yarn (I couldn't find anything actually velvet-feeling and black, unfortunately, so I went with the closest thing I could find), and I had myself a sample in a ridiculously short time:

(It's fuzzy at the edges there because I used fun fur to do the bits at top and bottom.)

They sent me some really nice stuff to work the sample in - Plymouth Angora Glitz, which is mostly angora with just a hint of nylon and metallic glitter. Very soft, with a lovely halo of fuzz and a sparkle, too. I held it doubled to get the right fabric density. I think it turned out great:

And modelled on my darling middlest:

The other design I have in this issue has been years in the making. When the child pictured above was just a year old, I had the idea to use fair isle technique with variegating yarn to get the look of stained-glass windows. I used the now-discontinued (of course, thank you Murphy's Law) Schoeller+Stahl Sockina Colori for the variegating yarn and I adored the result:

I sat on the design for a long while, though, because I wasn't confident yet about writing up the instructions and I wasn't sure what would be a good publication to send it to. But flash forward about four years later - I had much more designing experience under my belt, and thought it would be an interesting thing to submit for a Harry Potter collection. (I didn't count it towards my 12-in-12 challenge though, since I hadn't designed it in 2012.) It's certainly not overtly Harry Potter, but it's very thematic to the books. They sent me Plymouth Happy Feet to do the sample in. The choice was terrific, as far as I'm concerned. I think I might like the effect even better than the Sockina Colori:

And the model they put it on is a Ginny lookalike; she looks fantastic in it.

So I'm very, very happy with all of this! (Except for the not-sellable-in-the-US part, which is a copyright/licensing issue, I gather.) I hope you like these designs, too!