Blast from the past

 Almost a decade ago now (oh my gawd), there was a fibre arts challenge that went 'round the Internet called "The 12 in '12 Challenge". The idea was that you would pick something to make twelve of during the 2012 calendar year, and then go do it. What you picked depended completely on what would be a challenge to you personally. I saw people committing to make twelve pairs of socks, twelve sweaters, twelve completed projects in general, etc. etc.

I've no idea why this challenge captured my imagination, but it did. I wanted to do something, but I couldn't think of any item that I genuinely wanted to have twelve of at the end of the year that would be an actual challenge to me to do in twelve months. So as a fledgling designer trying to get my name out there, I spun the challenge on its head a little bit, and decided that I would submit twelve proposals to magazines, for brand-new designs, in twelve months.

I met the challenge (actually I think I did 13 or 14 in the end), but this design - which was accepted, to my giddy delight! - was the very first one I came up with.

© Christa Tippmann, Jane Austen Knits, used with permission

This is the Beloved Baby Bonnet. It was published in the second edition (summer 2012) of Interweave's Jane Austen Knits magazine. It represents the first time ever that my work appeared in a print magazine, and an incredibly popular and high-quality issue at that. It was a thrilling experience, especially since the pattern came out exactly how I wanted it, I was so pleased.

© Christa Tippmann, Jane Austen Knits, used with permission

After the magazine went off the shelves, Interweave made it available as a single pattern purchase through their independent revenue program, and I got royalties off of sales of the pattern there. When Interweave restructured to avoid bankruptcy, the rights to sell the pattern got bought by Long Thread Media, and I got royalties off of sales of the pattern there. However, LTM has recently decide to change their business model a bit, and are reducing the number of royalty-incurring patterns in their online store. As a result, I now have the right to sell the publisher's version of the pattern myself!

Thus, I'm absolutely thrilled to make it available here on my website. To my knowledge, there are no errata contained in the publisher's version (there were issues with the first version published in Jane Austen Knits, but I have compared that with the version I'm selling and the errata have been corrected in the PDF, so yay). I have reduced the price from what LTM was selling it for, to bring it in line with my own product pricing structure. If you'd like to view more details about the pattern, I have a Beloved Baby Bonnet product page.

Buy now $4.99US

Some progress

So in my last post, I called my dad's hat the eighth of thirteen knitted holiday gifts on my to-do list. Welllll...turns out I can't count very well. Because although I do have thirteen gifts planned, the hat was only the seventh completed one. Then I brought myself down to six when I gifted my BIL's socks to him for his birthday. Arg.

But things are picking up. Because I've finished my younger BIL's dress socks:

Hat heels, of course. :)

I'm really pleased with them. Of course it's hard to tell because they're black, but they're very tidy around the edges of the gussets. I've been using a different method for the gussets lately - I use a combination of short rows and increases when knitting them so that when I go to do the leg and the foot parts, virtually all the stitches I'll need running up the gusset sides are already there, no picking up needed, except for just a few right at the top of the instep. This produces a stretchy gusset edge, which was lacking in the original version of the pattern, where the gusset shaping is done by decreases and the stitches are picked up at the side edges later.

But I digress.

I also started another pair of hat heel socks as a replacement for the ones I gave my older BIL for his birthday. I've gotten as far as finishing the hat part (no earflaps yet) for the first heel. No picture yet, but I'm using this Stroll sock yarn that I got from Knit Picks a while back:

That's the same yarn (but different colour, obviously, called "Caper") as I used in those black socks above. I love it - it's deliciously squishy and smooth. Really gotta get myself some more of that.

I also finished the knitting on our daycare provider's mittens, and now just have to block them and weave in the ends. I did the second mitten a bit differently from the first one to make it a bit taller and the thumb a bit wider, to (hopefully) fit better. That means I had to rip back bits of the first mitten and re-knit it to match the second one, but the result was worth it. One of the women at my office (also a knitter, so she knows what she's talking about), who has large-sized hands, tried one of them on with the new sizing, and she said they felt perfect. Hooray! I cannot begin to describe how giddily happy I am with this design. Whether it's accepted somewhere or I self-publish it, I am going to be so excited once I get to share it!

At any rate, I am now definitely finished seven of thirteen gifts, with the eighth very close to being done. I've also been swatching for my brother's hat, and am just waiting for him to measure his head circumference so I can know how many stitches to cast on.

My 12-in-12 challenge is going rather better, in terms of progress, than the holiday knitting. As promised, I sent off my tenth submission this week (not on Monday as I thought, but still, it's now on its way), which means I have just two more to go, with three designs pretty much ready to write up and send off once the issues I want open up. I've also got a fourteenth idea for a submission call I just found out about, and I'm planning to go yarn shopping for that later today.

And finally, some lovely news - my "Beloved" baby bonnet pattern, which appeared in the Summer 2012 issue of the absolutely superb Jane Austen Knits magazine, is now available for individual purchase at the Interweave online store: linkie.

Where haven't I been

When last I blogged, I had had another pattern idea. Since that time, I have finalised the design, found a magazine issue that would be a great fit for the pattern, realised the deadline was today, panicked, knitted a prototype, mostly wrote the instructions, started a swatch, made great progress on the swatch, realised as I was approaching the end of the swatch that I'd irretrievably screwed up really early in the swatch, ripped out most of the swatch, finished the swatch, blocked it, measured gauge, wrote the pattern proposal, and, finally, today, sent the submission.

Needless to say, it's been a bit of a whirlwind (especially the last two days), and blogging got put aside.

Which is not to say that things were not happening! Heck, no. I've been getting mentioned on podcasts! :)

The Knit Girllls did a review of the latest issue of Jane Austen Knits in their Episode 112: Skein Winder Explosion (around the 22-minute mark). They mentioned some of their favourite patterns in it, and my baby bonnet made the list! Woo-hoo! So that was pretty awesome.

And then, Julia of the Sticks and Stones podcast talked about her Hat Heel sock project in Episode 5: Troubleshooting Knitting (around the two-and-a-half minute mark).

Also, Carin from Round the Twist mentioned in her last three episodes about the Jayne Hat Cupcake and Dalek Cupcake patterns I whipped up (see left sidebar), which is awesome, I'm so glad she likes them and I'm sure I'll be able to make a few more cupcakes between now and her wedding, too.

I also realised that the end of the school year is coming up, and that means it's time to get knitting thank-you gifts for teachers. DD2's teacher just gave a generic thank you to all parents for the Christmas gifts in one of the kindergarten newsletters, so I'm not really inclined to give him something else handknitted anytime soon, so that takes care of that (DH will find a nice wine instead). However, DD1 has two teachers, so I still have to get cracking.

I think I have enough of the leftover red Cascade 220 from the morning teacher's Christmas gift (a cowl) to do wristwarmers in the same stitch pattern. That'll be pretty awesome if I do indeed have the yardage to pull it off. (And if not...I have no idea what I'm going to do. I'll fall off that bridge if I come to it.) And for the afternoon teacher, who is new since about the March Break (the previous one had a baby), I met her the other day and she is young, vibrant, and energetic, with a fun fashion style. I'm going to take advantage of this to make one of the ruffle scarves that are all the rage at my LYS these days. Unfortunately (sorry, June!) the shop's summer hours, when combined with my schedule these days, are not conducive to being able to come in with DD1 for yarn selection any time soon, and this is time-sensitive, so we hit Michaels for the yarn instead. It's "Boutique Sashay" from Red Heart, and here is a horrible webcam shot of it:

It looks like a ribbon yarn, but the ribbon actually opens up into a mesh that you somehow knit into the holes of to make this spiralling scarf. The pattern is on the back of the label. I really want to give it a try but have been concentrating on getting that design proposal out the door instead. I'm looking forward to starting it, hopefully sometime today or tonight.

Finally, DH's birthday was this week and he loved his new socks!

He finished socks for himself, too:

At the moment he's working on finishing up a second pair for himself, and is also flipping through my Jane Austen Knits for project possibilities. I think he's going to go with the Marianne Dashwood Shawl for my mom for Christmas. He wants to make something for me, but realised that everything I would want is also something that I want to do the knitting of! :) Ah, well. I'm sure he'll enjoy making the shawl anyway. He wants to get his feet wet in lace knitting. I think it'll be a fabulous introduction for him! I'll just have to see if our library has a copy of No Sheep for You we can pore over, since wool makes my mom itch.

The challenge was a good idea

I was going to post this tomorrow, but Peyton seemed eager to hear about it. ;) And since I'm eager to talk about it, I'm delighted to reveal that the latest (summer 2012) issue of Jane Austen Knits has my "Beloved" baby bonnet pattern in it! At the risk of sounding like a total designer noob, this is my first print magazine publication, which is very exciting. Mind you, it won't actually come out in print form until end of May/beginning of June, but the digital version is available now, so I'm revealing!

The bonnet was inspired by this extant piece, and I am really pleased with how it all turned out. I was particularly jazzed with the sample piece I made for the issue - possibly the tidiest finishing I've ever done. Here's DD3 modelling it before I sent it off to the editor:

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In the actual magazine, the very sweet little model is the same baby who appears on the cover of the latest issue of Petite Purls. It was fun to be able to look at that other pattern and think, "Hey, wait a minute...I've seen that baby before!" :)

I was also tickled because this was the very first pattern I submitted as part of my 12-in-12 challenge. So it was pretty exciting to have a 100% success rate for a while there. (At this point though, I'm at 50%. But I'm sure I'll eventually repackage the design that didn't make it and submit it somewhere else.)