Get Shorty

Michael Sellick of The Crochet Crowd demonstrates how you can shorten long plastic knitting needles to whatever length you wish.

The Sweater Curse: Superstition or Reality?

Rocketboom's Mememolly (AKA Molly Templeton) discusses the possible root causes of the phenomenon known as "the sweater curse".

Elliot Lake's Knitting Lady

On June 23, 2012, the Algo Centre Mall in Elliott Lake Ontario, which had been plagued by structural problems throughout its history, suffered a partial structural failure on June 23, 2012. A 12m x 24m rooftop parking lot collapsed into the mall, crashing through an upper level lottery kiosk and the mall's escalators. More than 20 people were injured and two people were killed. The mall, which employed more than 250 local residents and represented 10% of Elliot Lake's retail space and 6% of its total area wages, had to be demolished.

The investigation of the mall collapse and class action lawsuits are ongoing, and the hearings have all been faithfully attended by one particular spectator, Heather Moyer, whom everyone involved with or following the case has come to know as the Knitting Lady. But as Global News learned when they interviewed her, Heather Moyer's not just in the courtroom to knit.

The Knitted Jewelry of Niiro

As some of you might have gathered from my knitting magazine reviews, I'm not often kind to designs involving knitted jewelry made out of yarn. It tends to look like something made during arts and crafts hour at summer camp, which is to say it's cute on children but is generally too naive a look for adults. However, knitted jewelry made from metal wire can be a brave new world for a knitter, and one designer who has tapped into knitted wire's potential is Rosanna Raljević Ceglar, also known as Niiro.

Niiro is a jewelry designer located in Slovenia. A graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, she finds inspiration in the forms and textures found in nature, and her work does have an organic quality to it, as though the pieces were rare species of sea creatures cast in metal.

To view more of Niiro's work, you can visit her website or check out her Facebook page.

A Socking Knitting Machine

To non-knitters, knitters may look like a monolithic group, but there are actually factions and camps within knitting because there are so many different types of knitting. One small but avid subset you'll find among knitters is antique sock machine enthusiasts. It's still possible (if challenging) to find, buy, and operate an antique sock knitting machine. In the video above, Shelly Hatton demonstrates how she uses her antique circular sock knitting machines at Maker Faire in Austin, Texas.

In a second video, Kenya Habegger, a sock machine enthusiast from Berne, Indiana shows us how her sock knitting machine works and also tells us something of the history of sock machines. During World War I, sock knitting machines were sold for about $11 and their operators were paid $0.05 for a pair. Habegger can make a pair of socks in 45 minutes. You can work out for yourself how much a machine operator would be likely to make in a day and how long it would take that machine to pay for itself.

For more information about sock knitting machine, check out this online sock knitting machine museum, or visit Angora Valley. And if you're very interested in sock machine knitting and would like to connect with other like-minded knitters, check out the New Sock Machine Society of America (which is an international organization despite its name), which has its own website and a Ravelry group.

Knitting Something Nice for You

Here's a song called "Knitting Something Nice for You", from the 2010 album Versicolour by British Columbia experimental folk singer Aidan Knight.

How to Speed Knit

Here's a Knit Picks-created video that explains how you can increase your knitting speed by learning from the example of Miriam Tegels, the Guinness World Record holder for the most stitches accomplished in a minute (118, if you're interested in knowing).