It's Giftalong time!

The ninth annual Indie Design Giftalong has just begun! If you haven't joined in before, here's a quick introduction: the Giftalong (or GAL) is a multi-designer craft-along held in a Ravelry group with dedicated threads for different project types, chat threads, games, and more. You can also join in on Instagram by taking part in our photo-prompt challenge and/or using the event hashtags - @indiegiftalong on Instagram has all the details.

Each designer has a selection of their patterns on sale during the first few days of the GAL, but projects made using any and all of their patterns can be entered in the project threads and FO thread. Just be sure to use a paid-for pattern if you have your eye on the grand prizes.

The GAL runs from now until midnight on the 31st of December. It's a big, busy event but you can participate as much or as little as you like - enter a project (or several!), discover fabulous new patterns and designers in the searchable bundles, dip in and out of the chat threads, play the games, join the Instagram challenge, etc etc. I’ll be co-hosting the Hats thread in the Ravelry group as well as making a project or two - this year I'm going to try to stick to smaller things instead of adding to my collection of large WIPs, but temptation may strike! We have a number of new-to-the-GAL designers this year with really spectacular patterns, and I’m having such a hard time deciding what to make first.

New pattern: Leadlight

It's always exciting when I can finally share one of my secret projects! Today Leadlight gets its big reveal, as part of Brooklyn Tweed's Wool People 11. This is my third Wool People outing, and the third of my designs in Brooklyn Tweed's wonderful yarn (the first two being my Amarilli and Kea shawls).

Be sure to browse through the WP11 lookbook, which is completely gorgeous! I like to save them up until I have a little uninterrupted time to soak up the inspiration. :)

Leadlight, photo by Jared Flood

Leadlight is a rectangular stole in laceweight yarn, featuring large-scale geometric lace. I was inspired by the image of sunlight streaming through glass panes, and the memory of a small geometric stained-glass window I had in my room which my Dad had made (picture framers are good with glass, after all).

(Photos by me, before I sent Leadlight off to the USA.)

The lace is simple to knit, while the construction and finishing methods keep things interesting: beginning with a circular cast on, the centre of the stole is knit in the round as a square. After placing some of the stitches on hold, the two ends of the stole are each knit flat to create a rectangular shape. Finally, a garter stitch border finishes off the edges.

The centre of the stole, worked outwards from the pinhole cast on

The garter stitch border keeping things crisp

Vale is a new laceweight yarn from Brooklyn Tweed, a springy, plied yarn that's light and soft, but substantial and full of personality. It blocks easily and drapes beautifully, which makes it just perfect for lace knitting.

I knit my Leadlight stole in the colour Heron, which is a calm, neutral, mid-toned grey with a subtle sheen to it. The whole Vale colour palette is beautifully subtle - I definitely plan to use this yarn for more lace projects!

A close-up of the centre

Features:

• an all-over geometric lace pattern

• constructed from the centre out, with two sides extended to form the rectangle

• a circular cast on (instructions for the Pinhole Cast On are included)

• a garter stitch border all around the edge

• a stretchy bind off (instructions for the K2tog-tbl Bind Off are included)

• easy to alter the length by working a different number of repeats

• requires 3 skeins of Brooklyn Tweed Vale, or 1170yds of laceweight yarn

• the lace instructions are presented as charts only.

Drapery studies...

You can purchase the pattern for Leadlight on Ravelry, or from Brooklyn Tweed's website. Their Summer of Lace KAL is coming up very soon, beginning later this month.

It's Makealong time!

I've teamed up with nine other knit and crochet designers and five indie dyers to produce a collection of summer accessory patterns, the Progress, Hope, and Happiness collection. My contribution is the Budburst shawl, a profusion of leafy lace in a pretty speckled yarn which was dyed specially for the occasion (you can find out all about it in my previous post).

One of the designers, Denise Voie de Vie, created a beautiful look book for the collection. You can read about the inspiration behind the event and our journey in putting it all together on Denise's blog here and here. The designs are individually published by each designer, but you can see the whole collection here on Ravelry: Progress, Hope, and Happiness Designs.

I'm co-hosting a Makealong on Ravelry for these designs from June 1st to July 16th, complete with prizes and even some surprises. I hope you'll join us!

These are a few of my favourites from the collection (all links are to Ravelry pattern pages):

Breeze of Happiness by Tanja Osswald

Dusk On TheMoor Shawl by Solène Le Roux

Chiguroo by Lana Jois

From Dusk To Dawn by Christelle Nihoul

This has been so cool to be a part of, and the Makealong is just beginning! Hope to see you over in the Ravelry group. :)

Insulate 1,000!

My INSULATE! Hat has reached 1,000 projects on Ravelry - that's a huge milestone for me, and I'm thrilled that so many people liked my hat enough to knit their own! You can see a few of these fabulous projects (in an amazing array of colour combos) on the pattern's Ravelry page.

The INSULATE! Hat was one of my early-ish knit designs from mid-2012, and I offered it as a free pattern to other knitters who share my geeky love of Daleks. Its stranded colourwork design is nice and simple, and every now and then I receive a lovely comment from someone who used this hat as their gateway to knitting colourwork, which really warms my designer heart!

If you'd like to make one of your own, you can download the free pattern on Ravelry or Payhip.

A perfect pair of socks

The Gift-A-Long on Ravelry has been an absolute whirlwind so far, with a whopping 13,000 finished projects as of this morning! I've been busy hosting the Hand & Arm Things thread, plus giving out prizes for project photos each Thursday.

I even managed to finish a GAL project of my own, a pair of Grellow Love socks (Ravelry link) knit in leftover Vintage Purls Sock. Just to make things tricky for myself, I experimented with making a stop-motion video of my second sock, snapping a frame after each half-inch (very roughly) of knitting:

I made a stop-motion vid of my second Grellow Love sock to help push me along. Yay for trying new things! I used the OSnap! app on my phone to create the video. There will definitely be more experiments to come, but I'll probably go slightly less ambitious next time. 😁 The excellent sock pattern is by @knitsharelove. ✨ #newtoy #stopmotion #sockfootage #sockknitting #toeupsocks #knitsharelove #vintagepurls #giftalong2016 #secondsocksyndromeisnotthebossofme

A video posted by Amy van de Laar 🎄 (@amyvdlaar) on Dec 12, 2016 at 3:34pm PST

It came out pretty good for my first stop-motion attempt! I did have a bit of trouble with consistent lighting, since I recorded it over the course of a few days and at different times of day. I used the iPhone app OSnap!, which can also be used to make time-lapse videos. I can tell I'm going to have a lot of fun with this app. :)

Back to the socks, here's what the finished pair looks like - I really love the contrast toes and heels. I have plenty of odds and ends of sock yarn left, so I'm keen to make more pairs using this pattern. It's a nice easy one, especially once you've knit the first sock.

A triumphal shot of both socks. 🙌🏼 Except for the fiddly toe-up cast on, this was a very straightforward knit for this semi-newbie sock knitter. I liked the Fleegle heel construction (which I hadn't tried before), and they fit bloody well too! The pattern is Grellow Love by @knitsharelove, and the yarn is Sock by @vintagepurls. 👌🏼 #giftalong2016 #sockknitting #knitsocks #knittingfromstash #knitsharelove #vintagepurls #grellowlovesocks

A photo posted by Amy van de Laar 🎄 (@amyvdlaar) on Dec 14, 2016 at 1:18pm PST

I'm not sure I'll have time to tackle another Gift-A-Long project, since I still have one-third of a giant lace shawl to knit this month. But if you fancy jumping in with a project or two, the GAL is still on until December 31st!