Yes, it really is a Ravelry app for the IPhone!

29 Jun 2012 2 Comments

by crystal in Handy Accessories, Knitting, Reviews, Technocrafting

And it works with Voiceover!!

 

I’m pretty sure I’ve been saying there needs to be a Ravelry app since I first got my IPhone. Just a little over a year later my dreams have come true. Yay me!

 

Wooly is a new app for Apple IOS. It’s definitely a work in progress but it looks like the developers have the potential to make this a great app. I’m already impressed. We all know about the trepidation every time we have to buy an app. Is this going to work with Voiceover or not? At first glance this app is almost completely accessible. The only thing I had a problem with was something called Happiness. First of all I didn’t even know this feature existed on Ravelry. Apparently it adds descriptive words based on how high you rate a project on the Happiness scale. My Petri Shell now says it is an Uggh! On the Happiness scale. I must have done this with the app but I can’t recreate the action. This project would have actually been something like 90% which is a lot better than Uggh! Other than that I could edit all the things the app says I should be able to edit. One very exciting thing is that I could adjust the progress percentage. I can’t do that on my PC. I tried to explain how awesome this was to my husband and it just went right over his head. Poor darling probably thinks his wife is crazy. So far though the most totally awesome thing about Wooly is its photo uploading feature. You can take a photo from within the app and upload it directly to Ravelry. Had previously mentioned husband take photo of me in Petri and I had it uploaded in about 30 seconds. We all know how long it takes with the usual digital camera to computer to Ravelry to project method. The app has the photo option from within each individual project so it eliminates that step. There are also photo editing features right in the app.

I’m really excited about this app. It has a lot of great features and the potential for many more. I’m going to contact the developers about the one issue I had with accessibility. Oh, and the edit button says 14gear. I think they could fix that without much trouble. Wooly costs $2.99. I would have paid more so this is a really great price.

 

For more information:

 

Wooly in the ITunes store

 

Ravelry group for Wooly

 

There are also Ravelry apps for Android and Windows users. Check out the article on apps for Ravelry on the Ravelry homepage. You might need a Rav ID to see the article.

 

One last interesting thing is that Ravelry developers are creating a mobile site. It can be found at m.ravelry.com. From my windows PC this site is totally inaccessible. From my IPhone it appears to work fine from a quick glance over. It looks like you can use it to browse all your project information plus a few other things. The developers say they are updating it as they add more features so it’s not finished yet.

 

 

Plano Organizer

29 May 2012 Leave a comment

by crystal in General, Handy Accessories, Knitting, Reviews

A few of the knitters I know have been using little plastic organizers for their knitting accessories. I thought they were just really organized knitters and that was too much for me. I would just continue using my little bag system. This involved putting all the little bags of markers and things into a larger little bag along with all the other little odds and ends I need. So of course I’m spending a few minutes at a time digging through this little bag to find one or another of these little things. I thought I was being organized by having everything in one place but now I know the error of my ways.

Last week I decided to check the little plastic organizers out at Wal-Mart. The first nice surprise was that they were only a little over $3. I just love prices like that. Especially when I’m not entirely sure I’m going to like something. I still open one up in the store and investigate. The organizer has two identical sides. If you opened both lids they would open opposite to each other like the front and back covers of a book. I wouldn’t open it like this though; all your stuff would fall out. Each side has 5 long sections and there are little dividers you can insert wherever you want and create up to 10 sections. The whole thing is about 6 inches by 4 inches and a little over 2 inches deep. Not really too large for a knitting bag. I should also mention that these handy little organizers can be found in the fishing section at Wal-Mart. I did have some trepidation about having my husband take me into this section but he behaved himself and it didn’t take us long to get in and out.

After putting the baby to bed and feeding the rabbits and all those things that just have to be done before you can relax at night I was finally able to sit down to see just how organized I could be. At first I was disappointed that my folding scissors wouldn’t fit. I left the center slot open just for them. Then my husband pointed out that the side slots were longer because of the space needed for the latches to close the lid. So I moved the open slot to the side and the scissors fit. I put the things I use the most in one side and put a braille label with my name on it on that side just so I would know which side was which. They are identical otherwise. It’s made of clear plastic so the contents can be seen but that doesn’t help me. I put the less often used things in the bottom. The only things I couldn’t put in were things like larger cable needles crochet hooks and stitch holders. These went into another plastic case and I have everything I could possibly need all together.

Once I got everything where I wanted I really started to like this new organizing plan. I can just put the organizer on the table and leave it open during those times when you find yourself needing a lot of little odds and ends. For me, that’s when I start and finish a project. One major downfall I can imagine is leaving the organizer open beside me on the couch and forgetting it. It would be entirely too easy to sit down in the wrong place and spill all of the nicely organized stitch markers and things. I feel confident that this is bound to happen one day. It really seems inevitable for me. I just have to remember to close it when I’m through using it. For now, I’m just going to enjoy being super organized. At least with my knitting; we won’t talk about the rest of the house.

Interchangeable Needle Sets

06 May 2012 3 Comments

by crystal in Handy Accessories, Knitting, Reviews

I’ve been hearing about the Knitter’s Pride interchangeable needles for a few months now. I’ve also heard about a few other sets recently. I don’t think they are all new but the only ones I knew about when I started knitting were Knitpicks and Denise so I thought I would spend some time and do a review of some different sets. But, alas, another blogger has gotten to it before me. No surprise there but here is the link to her post listing all the different sets. There are definitely more than I thought.

 

The Knitluck Guide to Interchangeable needles

 

I’ll give a couple of thoughts on the two sets I have. The first set I acquired was the Knitpicks Harmony needles. I love these but it helps to have a tube of super glue around. Maybe it’s just that I’m hard on needles but I’m pretty sure they have all been super glued back to the metal joining at least once over the years. I’ve had my set for about 4 1/2 years. The cables did start coming apart and this is a little harder to fix. I chalked that one up to them being old so I just replaced them and the new ones are fine. It was pretty irritating when I dropped a lot of stitches because my cables broke though. Knitpicks is really good about sending you replacements if anything is wrong.]

I also have one set of the nickel plated tips. I love the way stitches just glide on the needles. I’m seriously considering a set of metal interchangeables. When I was a beginner knitter the metal needles were a little harder to manage but now I think the knitting goes faster with these.

I am not an acrylic fan. A lot of people love them but I’m just not one of them. I have a couple of Knitpicks Zephyr tips. They are fine for acrylic and the price is one of the best selling points.

I also have the Denise interchangeable needles. I really liked these for a while but the longer I knit, it seems I like the acrylic needles less and less. The Denise set has fatter cables which can make it harder to maneuver your work. They also come apart easy if the cable gets worn out. Also the flexibility of the acrylic sets has started to hurt my hands a little.

One important thing to note is that I’m a tight knitter. This makes the drag on acrylic needles much worse. If you are a loose knitter it might not bother you as much.

That’s all the ones I’ve tried for now. I’ll just have to decide which metal set I want. I have a feeling I’ll be sticking with Knitpicks but its fun to shop around. Also the metal tips are one solid piece so I don’t think I can break them.

 

So, go check out Knitluck’s wonderful guide to interchangeables. I found her articles very helpful and I hope you do too.

Cardigan Fever

01 May 2012 2 Comments

by crystal in General, Knitting

I finished the Mr. Greenjeans Cardigan last week. While I was trying it on I realized that in five years of knitting, this was the first sweater that I have made for myself that I’m actually going to wear. This makes me really happy. This sweater is a top down raglan with a cable and rib section on the body and on the sleeves. I think it will be a great casual sweater to wear with jeans.

. I made this same sweater a few years ago out of an acrylic yarn. I wasn’t happy with the button band and the whole sweater needed serious blocking. In my beginner state I didn’t know that acrylic is basically impossible to block. This time I used Boroco Ultra Alpaca. It’s 50% wool and 50% alpaca. It has a much better drape than the acrylic sweater had. I also used a larger needle for the cable and rib section instead of the smaller needle it called for. It just didn’t make sense to me that I should use a smaller needle that would necessitate more blocking when I could use the larger needle and do less blocking. Now I’m just hoping for some cooler evenings so I can actually wear this cardigan before this fall.

I immediately cast on another cardigan. I was so pleased with the first one that I thought I would try another one and see how it went. This time I chose the Sitcom Chic Cardigan. It’s mostly stockinet with a garter and eyelet strip around the yoke. It has ¾ length sleeves and one button at the center of your chest. It was a fairly simple knit and worked up pretty quickly. I had a lot of knitting time last week since I skipped all the housework and knit instead. It’s just too bad I can’t get away with that every week. I’m done with all the knitting for this cardigan. I just have to do the finishing work and I’ll have a cute little cardigan to wear over summer dresses. It should be a little cooler than the other since it’s made out of a 75% cotton and 25% acrylic yarn.

 

Ana and Crystal are on Viewpoints!

04 Apr 2012 Leave a comment

by crystal in Basics, General, Handy Accessories, Knitting, Row Counting, Technocrafting

Ana and I did an interview for the Viewpoints Podcast. We talk about knitting with visual impairments and share some tips and advice for other blind and low vision knitters.

 

Please check it out:  ViewPoints 1214 4-4-12 Knitting for the Visually Impaired

 

Also, check out  ViewPoints

A weekly, half hour radio program for people living with low vision

Find out more about the show and get links to the podcasts at:

www.ViewPointsPlus.net

 

The never ending Project

09 Jan 2012 Leave a comment

by crystal in General, Knitting

Most people who know anything about what I’ve been knitting lately know that I’ve been working on a sweater for my mother for a while now. Since May of 2010. I wrote another post about it here.

After a mistake last November I decided to take the advice of friends in the BlindStitchers group and put the project away until I wasn’t so frustrated with it. Just before New Year’s I pulled it back out with the intention of going into eat, sleep and knit mode so I could finally get it done. Well, I knit like crazy for a week and a half. I got quite a bit done. So much done that I was having daydreams about handing it over to a friend of mine to be sewn together.

That’s when my needle broke. The cable just came loose from the needle and there goes about 20 stitches. 20 stitches in the diagonal ribbing section. With size 3 needles and fingering weight yarn, I’m just not looking forward to trying to fix it. Nevermind that I knew I should put a lifeline in. I was just too lazy to do it. Nevermind that I knew the needle was weakening in that spot. Oh, it won’t break. I’m just being paranoid.

All this makes me think that I’m bringing the problems with this sweater on myself. There’s a point where you just have to face the facts and admit that bad things do happen to good knitting. If I can manage to fix this sweater again without having to knit practically the whole back piece over again, I’ll be inserting a lifeline immediately. Lesson learned, finally.

New Group For Blind Spinners

15 Nov 2011 1 Comment

by crystal in General, Spinning

There is a new group for blind spinners on Yahoo Groups. The blindstitchers list is such a wonderful resource, another blind spinner and I thought it would be great to have a list just for spinning.

 

To join, go to The Blind Spinners Yahoo Group page.

One Thing Leads To Another

13 Sep 2011 1 Comment

by crystal in General, Knitting, Spinning, Yarn Dyeing

Since I’ve been spinning yarn I’ve discovered two things. One is that I don’t have enough time to knit all the yarn I’ve been spinning. That’s not really a problem; I’ll just have a stash that includes handspun yarn. The other thing I’ve learned is that roving isn’t really any cheaper than buying commercial yarn. That’s not really a problem either but I can’t buy nearly as much roving as I wish. I think we’re almost all in that boat whether it’s roving or yarn. One solution to this problem is to buy bare roving from Knitpicks and dye it myself. I’ll still be buying dyed rovings but the prices at Knitpicks are too good to pass up as usual. It’s also really fun to dye your own yarn.

Yesterday my sister-in-law and I went to a workshop through the local knitting guild. I died two skeins of sock yarn. I am told that they turned out beautiful. I used a medium brown, a forest green, and a color called deep maroon. I think the yarn is going to turn into the Multnomah shawl. You can find it on the designer’s blog. Skip through the hedings until you find the list of patterns. The shawl will be the third one down.

At the workshop we learned how to dye yarn in the microwave. It’s surprisingly easy. I had to have a little help to make sure the dye covered the entire skein but I can already think of ways to solve that issue. One idea I had is to dye the entire skein a light base color and then over dye it with darker shades of coordinating colors. I’m still working out the best way to pull that off. I’ve ordered a hot plate and I’m going to turn my canner into a dye pot soon. Then I’ll be able to compare both techniques. My thought at the moment is that both ways are going to have their advantages and disadvantages in regards to both the results you get and visual impairment issues. The bottom line is that I think it is entirely doable for a blind person to dye their own yarn. We just have to be a little more systematic about it and we’re all used to that already.

Wool Diaper Covers

24 Jul 2011 2 Comments

by crystal in General, Knitting, Spinning

Diaper soaker that Owen was too big for at birth.

As most of you know, I have a 9 month old son. My husband and I chose to cloth diaper for a variety of reasons. Namely it’s better for the environment, better for the baby and also better on the wallet. Well, better for the wallet if your baby doesn’t go through 4 sizes in 8 months but that’s another story.

 One of the more interesting things I learned while doing endless hours of cloth diaper research involved the qualities of wool. It turns out that with the addition of natural lanolin wool is both water resistant and antibacterial. These are very useful properties when it comes to diaper covers. Lanolin comes from sheep and is a wax. It is water resistant and this combined with the fact that wool absorbs%30 of its weight before it feels wet makes it a great material for a diaper cover. Lanolin is also slightly antibacterial so the diaper covers don’t need frequent washing like you would expect. When urine touches the lanolin it creates a soap like substance. It’s almost self-cleaning. Wool diaper covers only need to be washed every 2 or 3 weeks; very convenient for busy parents. One last quality that makes wool great for diaper covers is its breathability. If you think about it, none of us walk around in plastic clothes. That sounds like it would be miserable. I would rather have wool any day so I think my baby would too.

In the midst of all my diaper research I came across commercial wool diaper covers. They were all around $30 or more. I’m sure they are wonderful but that’s way out of my price range for a diaper cover. Especially considering the fact that I would need half a dozen or so. Then it occurs to me that I am a knitter and I knit with wool. I’m sure you can see the light bulb going off in my head. I am obviously not the first person to have this idea. Not to mention all of the women throughout history, there is actually a whole Yahoo group for users and knitters of wool diaper covers. “Lucky me,” I think, “Someone has already done the work of designing a cover for me.” There are actually quite a few diaper cover patterns out there. I’ll provide links to a few at the end of this post. I could knit a whole diaper cover with yarn to spare for less than $8. This sounded like a much better deal. Plus I love knitting practical things.

For me the maternal nesting instinct took the form of knitting wool diaper covers. They didn’t take long to knit and it was very satisfying. I knit a few newborn covers and some in the small size. Owen was born at almost 10lbs so that ruled out using the newborn sizes right off the bat. Then he gained a pound a week for the first month so there went another size. To make a long and repetitive story short, he’s just now slowing his growth down to a point where it’s actually feasible to knit some covers that he might be able to wear for more than a month. There was no way I was spending what little time I had knitting covers that he was going to grow out of so fast.

Most of the diaper cover patterns I’ve tried have been pretty good.
They probably fit great on most babies but they just don’t fit right on mine. The best cover I found was the Warm Heart Woolies Wrap. It works great but it involves either sewing on Velcro or buttons. I would rather have a pull on style, especially since the baby is learning how to pull the Velcro and take his cover off. Another pattern I liked was the Snap Dragon Soaker. It’s knit from the top down in the round. It uses the Kitchener stitch to seam the crotch so it is seamless when you are done. The crotch is a bit narrow and you have to pick up stitches around the legs to make the cuffs. I crocheted cuffs so it was a lot faster. It seemed as though there was one little thing wrong with each pattern I tried and they were all different things. So I got to thinking that it would be really nice to combine elements from both of these covers into one. Now you have me designing my own diaper cover. I’m on the third incarnation and I’m hoping that the changes I make to this one will make it perfect for my baby. Unfortunately, the changes include short rows. It’s about time I figure out this wrapping thing.

One really awesome thing about the cover I’m working on at the moment is that I’m knitting it out of my own handspun yarn. I had it died a pretty blue and the places where the yarn was tied aren’t died as deeply or not at all. Even my husband commented on the really nice effect the color variations make. It goes from a blue to a lighter blue to white. This is the first thing I’ve knit from my handspun and I’m really enjoying how it’s knitting up.

Here are a few diaper cover patterns. When making these to use with cloth diapers it is important to use regular feltable wool. If you’re making a cover to go over a disposable diaper just for looks, you can use whatever yarn you would like.

 

Warm Heart Woollies Wrap

Snap Dragon Soaker

Down Under Diaper cover

 

More Information:

More than you ever wanted to know about lanolin.

How to wash wool diaper covers

Just in case you were wondering the history of diapers.

Written Charts

22 Jul 2011 Leave a comment

by crystal in General, Knitting

 

I am very happy to announce a new page on our blog. It’s a page where we can collect written versions of charts. We all know how frustrating it is when there is a pattern we would love to knit and it has a chart. On the page you will find a link to the original pattern along with a download link to an accessible pdf of the written out chart.

 

We will continue to take requests for charts to be translated so the next time you run accross a pattern with a chart that you would love to knit, just let us know.

 

The new page can be found at the top of the blog under the link labeled “Written Charts.”

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