Oolong knits

From what I could gather from the literature there are only two types of short-row heels, then there are many variants of these two types. They vary mainly in construction and to distinguish them I'll name them † the standard short-row heel and the boomerang heel (the trapezium when stretched looks like a boomerang). The figure shows their respective constructions schematically (the standard method is on the left). † A small disclaimer: as far as I know there is no standard naming for these two classes of methods. As most often in the world of knitting terms, there seems to be some confusion with people using the same term to name different techniques and different terms for the same technique. I don't claim the terminology I've chosen to be either the correct one or the best one in any way. The standard method is obviously symmetric and therefore it can be used in socks worked from the cuff-down or the toe-up. The good news is that the boomerang method can be ...

Dark green on a man is my favourite sweater colour. Fort , another design by Jared Flood, is not quite dark enough or quite green enough, but you get the gist.

Now the Rio Olympics are over, I'd like to add my two pence (more like one penny) to the whole debate over sexism in sports. In particular, sexism in media coverage of sport events (which leaves out other important subjects such as education of girls, fair pay, etc.). I'm not really interested in this subject per se, but more on the way it highlights the more general problem of sexism in media and the way it affects "normal" people in their everyday lives and not just the famous people that feature in it. If you doubt there was plenty of sexism in the media coverage of the Olympics, you can read this Telegraph article (it concentrates on tweets, but this leads to a good amount of general media coverage too, including TV and press). If you have no doubts on this subject, read it for laughs, some of the stuff there is hilarious. My favourite is the one where a random guy decides to give some advice to an Olympic cyclist on Twitter. His post starts "First lesson ...

Jared Flood is one of my favourite designers and I can't believe I haven't included one of his designs in my Eye-candy series yet. I could wear anything this guys designs and anything he includes in his Brooklyn Tweed publications (which feature many other amazing designers). All of his work presents the same understated elegance that gives his brand a definite identity. Pastel colours, lots of cable work and some lace, the patterns Brooklyn Tweed publishes are usually quite sophisticated, involving careful attention to details. I confess I had a hard time deciding which project to choose, so I chose his latest project at the time of writing this post, pretty lame, uh? This is Caspian .

Have you noticed how the most popular patterns on Ravelry are for shawls and socks? The obvious reason for this is that most knitters don't have much time to knit. Hence they prefer to work on small, fast to knit projects, instead of spending months, or even years, knitting something big, like a sweater or (don't even think about it) a queen-sized blanket. There is however another and much less obvious explanation for this. I consider myself a knitter who above all else loves to knit sweaters. So I was a bit surprised when, looking at my projects, I found out that I have knitted more shawls and scarves, and as much socks and hats and even home decoration items (this last one really surprised me), as I have knitted sweaters. The reason for this is quite simply that even if I've spent a lot more time knitting sweaters, I've finished other items a lot faster. In addition, I have the habit of, whenever a sweater starts feeling frustratingly endless to knit, I stop for a...

Fantom Bohus is not a pattern, it's only a project. A beautiful one. Bohus always is beautiful, but this project in particular uses some truly beautiful hand-spun yarn. Have I said beautiful enough? The only down side is that neither the pattern nor the yarn are available for the modest knitter, so this is pure eye-candy. To look at and be inspired to create your own ideas. Beautiful colour combination, ain't it? Yes, I just wanted to say beautiful one more time. Two actually.

One of the ugliest faces of sexism is how men think they own beautiful women and that beautiful women exist only for their pleasure. I've seen many instances of this, for example, when men feel entitled to insult or be aggressive if a beautiful woman does not preserve and present her beauty as they think she should. I have a lot of white hair for my age and the first strands of white started to appear on my head when I was only a teenager. This is not as unusual as you might think, the reason why most people believe that men start to grow grey earlier than women is because women who are grey from a young age always dye their hair. Think Clooney and Gere are sexy, but can't name an actress, model or any female public figure who is grey and not truly old? Now you know why. I also have a funny story about why I started dying my hair in my early twenties. On a sunny day, I was insulted on account of my grey hair and ordered to dye it by a very aggressive, angry random man in th...

Olilia is a beautiful crescent shawl. You may find more beautiful shawls, but it's unusual to find a free pattern with this level of complexity. This is the reason I thought it mostly definitely deserved to be featured on my Eye-candy series. Don't get me wrong, by saying this, I don't mean to imply that its beauty is not reason enough to include it. It is. The fact that is free just adds to its awesomeness.

If you don't know what steek means, here is the short explanation: steeking is a technique that involves cutting knitted fabric and then doing your best to fix the awful mess you end up with. OK, that's not exactly what steeking is, it actually involves preparing the fabric first so that you avoid the mess. A lot of people are terrified of cutting knitted fabric and, no matter what you hear experts say, they have good reason to be. I've tried steeking two times and both times I've ended up with an ugly mess. So if you want my advice, never attempt it on an actual project. Steek some swatches until you get everything right, and then steek some more swatches until we're sure that you really have gotten everything right. Kate Davies (*) has written a wonderful tutorial on this technique. You can't get better than this, this tutorial is incredibly detailed and the photos are amazingly useful. It runs for 4 posts in her blog: the first post gives an introductio...