September is here...

 

...and there is a Knit-a-long for the Farmer's Market hosted in my group on Ravelry or anywhere you happen to be knitting. It's just for fun, a toy to give to someone, and also perfect project to use up all those remnants of yarn from your stash. 

In this blog post you can find the links to the pattern where you can purchase it:

Farmer's Market

In the picture bellow you see a behind the scenes when I was working on the Voyager Sweater few years back.

See the blog post about the sweater here: Voyager Sweater 

Over the past few months I have been busy with work that has yet to be published by a variety of third parties, or has been published and I have not had time to post about these projects, yet. At the moment I am busy with two other projects that will be published at some point in the future and I don't have as much time as I wish to work on my independent work in the meantime. 

Sometime this month I hope to send out my first newsletter, for which you can subscribe on my website: 

https://stanascrittersetc.com/

In the meantime, thank you for visiting and reading my blog. 

Farmer's Market

 

Farmer’s Market is a knitted version of our shopping bag filled with fruits and vegetables bought at a local farmer’s market. The fruits and vegetables are nicely stored in the knitted shopping bag. 

You can buy the knitting pattern in my Payhip store: Farmer's Market 

or in my Ravelry store: Farmer's Market

or by clicking on this button:  

In the picture bellow you can see all of the fruits, vegetables that are in the bag.

The pictured sample uses Knitpicks's Brava Mini Pack in Jewel colorway. In the picture bellow you can see that there are still plenty of leftover yarn from that Mini Pack. 

All of the items in the bag use small amount of yarn and are ideal for using up scrap yarn.

Here is the list of the fruits and vegetables in the bag:

Finished Measurements:
Shopping bag 9.5” wide x 10.5” high; handles 27” long
Fruits and Vegetables:
Apple 3” diameter
Beet 5” long
Blackberry 1.5” long
Blueberry 1.25” diameter
Carrot 7.5” long, including the leaves
Cherry 1.25” diameter
Cucumber 5.5” long
Eggplant 8” long
Grapes 5.5” long
Pear 5.5” long, 3” diameter at widest point
Plum 2” diameter
Pumpkin 3.25” diameter
Raspberry 1.5” long
Strawberry 1.25” diameter
Swiss Chard 5.75” long
Tomato 2.75” diameter

Thank you for reading and visiting.

June 2021

 

June is all about freshly picked strawberries. The sweet taste of freshly picked strawberries brings back my memories of the time when we would go with my parents and collect the strawberries from our small community garden. It was a way for my parents to assure that we have fruits and vegetables to eat as the selection in the stores of that time was rather limited. These days, we have a small strawberry patch and even though the squirrels and birds are getting to some of our strawberries we still have few to snack on each day for a few weeks in June. 

Bellow are some of my knitted versions of strawberries, like those Strawberry Sandal Motif, which were published originally in June 2019 of I Like Knitting:

photo by I Like Knitting.

Or my basket of knitted strawberries, an art piece for an exhibit, or a little strawberry hat: if you want to see how I made the hat see the original post here:  Strawberry Hat 

Thank you for visiting.

September 2020

 

September is one of my favorite times of the year. The heat of summer fades away, our garden continues to give us back and I can start thinking about what kind of knitwear I will wear in the upcoming seasons.

This September is a special in a way that I have several knitting patterns published by a variety of third parties.

In my last blog post I wrote about four of the patterns that were published by I Like Knitting; link to these patterns here:  New Knitting Patterns

I also published one independent pattern; which is a playful variation and addition to my previously published knitting pattern by Knitpicks, in one of their knitting patterns book collections;: link to the pattern here: Meg and School of Fish

In the next few weeks I have three other patterns coming out with a three different publishers. It is very exciting and I do feel like a real knitwear designer. 

Stay tune for those patterns as they are all so different in a way, yet they all are product of my imagination and creativity.

Sometimes I write about gardening. I have been gardening pretty much most of my life. And I had a different outlook on gardening throughout the years. I always loved the fresh taste of fruits and vegetables, and I have learned the hard work that comes with it to actually get that fresh fruits and vegetables on your table. 

We have a small size backyard garden in comparison to what my parents and grandparents had while I was growing up. In those years we practically did not need to buy any fruits or vegetables, except some of the exotic fruits that didn't grow in our Central Europe climate. We did a lot of preservations and canning, and pickling. All of this experience I had as a child have helped me when we started our backyard adventure when our kid was small. 

I hope that the lessons learned will stay with our child into the future and will allow our child to appreciate it as an adult. Pictured here are our backyard gardening adventures. We have planted the blackberry bush and this year it has given us plenty of fruits. In the second picture our dog watch the vegetables I picked this morning, some kohlrabi, parsnip, celeriac, carrots, and butternut squash. We grew everything from seeds, event the butternut squash. Though that was an accidental. We have a compost, and last year I put some seeds and peels from squash and other vegetables and fruits. Apparently it has survived the winter and it started to grow from the compost pile. See the last picture. These are our not seeded and planted pumpkin and squash vines. When it started to grow, we just let them grow and now we have butternut squash and some kind of pumpkin. 

I will use the vegetables to make our meal today. It is a wonderful to know where our food is coming from, and that it is healthy and fresh.  

Thank you for visiting, and don't forget to see the upcoming new patterns. 

Summer 2020

As the pandemic continues its rampage through the world I am trying to adjust to what is happening around me in the real world and online as well. 

Under a normal circumstances I would be visiting my mom and friends in Europe. I would be sitting on my mom's balcony and knit, while the two of us would be talking. I would call my friends from the time I lived in Europe. We would get together and sit on a sidewalk in one of those little cafés, catching up on our lives. 

I miss that this year. 

But, whenever I am away I wonder what it would be like to spend the summer at home. This year is the year I can experience that. I am spending my summer at home. I have the time to watch my garden grow. I get to enjoy fresh berries and incorporate vegetables from our garden into our meals. It is exciting to sneak in a kale and create meatballs that turns green and cause raised eyebrows and musings about "What is wrong with those meatballs?", "Why are they green?". 

And a huge bonus is that I get to talk to my mom on daily basis on Skype. I love it. I know it is not as seeing her in person, but it is a joy to be able to talk to her. 

Aside from working on few knitting patterns that will be published in the future by a third party I also get to work on some fun knitting projects. 

Remember my pattern for One fish, two fish, three fish?

Blog post about it

I am revisiting the pattern and have fun with creating more fish and play with the idea of a food chain and who gets to eat who. I will be posting an updated pattern for this fun food chain sometime next week or so and if you are on Ravelry and a member of my group you can join the Knit-a-long hosted in my group. Otherwise the pattern will be available on Lovecraft, Ravelry. 

Recently I have opened a store on Payhip where you can purchase some of my patterns. I am slowly adding more patterns to that store, so check it out. Payhip store

Thank you for visiting.

Leonard and Lola, toy mystery KAL

As I mentioned in my previous post, the new toy mystery KAL is about to start.

Leonard and Lola

Leonard and Lola is the new toy mystery KAL, starting with clue one this week. The pattern will be released in four clues with the final pattern available June 9th.
Pictured is the yarn I used for Leonard. I have used Knitpicks Palette, fingering yarn held double. I will be using slightly different yarn (worsted Cascade 220 Superwash) for Lola. I have already knitted another sample about a year ago for a colleague from work. For her sample I used some random worsted weight yarn from my stash, held double to make the toy a bit larger.

More details and the pattern to download is here:
Leonard and Lola

Don't forget to join my group on Ravelry where you can find the coupon code and where you can participate in posting the work in progress pictures and chat with fellow knitters.
Stana's Critters Etc group

In my small stay at home world I continued on my baking adventures path. I baked my tried and successful recipes, some comfort food, and I tried few new thing. After many years of being asked to try and make the sourdough bread I have gone down the rabbit hole of sourdough baking. It is a challenge and I am not sure how successful I have been. I followed the book The Bread Baker's Apprentice  by Peter Reinhart and started my sourdough adventure last Monday morning with the Day one for Seed Culture, I continued with the Barm and yesterday evening we had the first sourdough bread. The sourdough bread didn't rise as much as my usual bread I bake using the commercial yeast, but it tasted good. I guess I just have to continue and I am sure with time and practice the bread will be better and better. Just like with knitting. My first attempts were so much different from what I am knitting these days. And it also took practice and perseverance.

Baking Week VII

 In my collage picture are: My first sourdough breads, Linzer cookies, Bread, Bread (I baked another), Focaccia (This time I added few thing on top to make it more interesting), Bundt Cake, Tortillas (my first time making them from scratch, they taste different from the store bought tortillas, and they were harder to use for Fajitas, but still tasted good), Ginger Bread (my mom's recipe, fast, easy and good tasting), and my Monday adventure of starting the sourdough seed culture, my bread (I baked it three times this week) and our comfort food of Chocolate Brownies (it's so good to bite into a warm, and soft chocolate brownie).

This week proved to be challenging for our garden. Last week we planted two Pear trees, Blueberry, Currant, and Raspberry bushes, and then this weekend we had a freezing temperatures overnight and it snowed. We will not know if the trees will make it through this temperature change and produce some fruit or not until late in the season.

Pear tree bloom

We also had our first crop of the season. We seeded the radishes early in March, in our new cold frame, and now they are maturing, and are ready to be picked and eaten.

Radishes

Yesterday, on my walk with our dog through the neighborhood I looked up and saw for a brief moment this wonderful heart shaped cloud.

Heart shaped cloud

I see this as a sign of hope, that we as humans will make it through this pandemic and learn to be better and kinder to each other and to the Earth especially.

Thank you for visiting.

Food KAL

In the past few weeks I was busy picking up fruits and vegetables from our garden and preserve them for the winter. Even though our plum trees produced only two plums, we are having some yellow raspberries and alpine strawberries to snack on and we still are having an abundance of cucumbers. I have been pickling them at least twice a week.
Our friends and family might be receiving homemade pickles as their Christmas presents.

Dog approves

I cannot really share the recipe for my pickling liquid as it seems to be every time slightly different. I am following the recipe my mom gave me when we started to do our own pickling.
She said: "I use water, vinegar, pickling salt, a bit of sugar, spices (All Spice, Black Peppercorn, Bay Leaves, Cinnamon, Clove), try how it tastes and add what you think is needed. In the jar put some mustard seeds, fresh dill, sliced onions, garlic, peppers, carrots and cucumbers. Fill the jars with liquid close the top and boil in a pot with a kitchen towel on the bottom for about twenty minutes."
We have been using her recipe for some time, experimenting with variety of flavors, adding hot peppers to some jars, etc. Each batch that I make tastes slightly different, and that is what I enjoy about it - the unpredictability of what it will taste like when we open a new jar of our pickles.

Apples

I was also thinking about the next KAL for my group on Ravelry. I decided that we should knit anything that is food related. Aprons, dishcloths, knitted food, knitted parts of a food chain...…
The Food related KAL will run from now until the end of October, when I will pick the grand prize winner and some more winners to win other things as well.

To start the KAL I am offering  a 25% discount on many of my food related knitting patterns. The coupon code is valid until September 25th midnight EST.

Bowls

Use the coupon code Food to receive the discount.

Joint the fun and a chance to win my group Stana's critters etc on Ravelry.

photo by Knitpicks

Thank you for visiting.

Fruits of our labor

Plum tree blooms

All my life I had an access to fresh fruits and vegetables. I know the difference of taste between fruits and vegetables bought from a store and freshly picked from the garden. I had learn how much work it requires to grow the fruits and vegetables.

One side of my family were farmers. Even though their land was confiscated by the communist party during the totalitarian regime, their were allowed to have a small plot of land near by their house that they were allowed to live in. As a child I remember to visit my grandparents and being able to pick fresh fruits of the trees, or vegetables from the small garden. I thought it was normal for everyone to have this opportunity.

I do not want to bore you with my family history. When I had my child, I wanted to offer the  opportunity to try fresh fruits and vegetables. Our small garden is nothing in comparison with what my grandparents and parents had, but it let my child experience the process of growing up your own fruits and vegetables.

Two years ago we planted two plum trees. This year the plum trees bloomed wonderfully. I was looking forward to have some plums. Then the June drop happened and the green little plums disappeared, except for two. I keep an eye on these two plums and check on them frequently.

Plum I

Plum II

Not all of our gardening attempts are as bad as our plum trees. We had plenty of fruits from our berry bushes and our cucumbers and beets are doing fine as well. I have been rather busy with preserving some of the vegetables for later. Therefore my knitting time has been rather limited and my progress on various projects has been slow. This weekend I will be doing another batch of pickled cucumbers and some sauerkraut as well.

Berries

Pickling 

Thank you for visiting.

Knitting versus Deadline Knitting

I like to knit.

Playing with yarn

Ever since I learned how to knit I enjoyed the process. I have knitted all those years when knitting was not fashionable. My first ever finished project was a sweater. I actually unknowingly started my knitwear designer career with my first knitting project when I calculated the number of stitches to cast on and how many rows I needed to knit. I also used three colors and intarsia technique, without actually knowing how to cast on. My mom helped me with the cast on process, and I continued from there. I knitted the sweater and created an original design element, small holes in the place where the yarns should have been twisted around each other when I changed them. I didn't know that at the time. I finished the sweater, my grandmother helped me to sew the pieces together and made the crew neck around the neck opening. I had that sweater for years. Last year, when I visited my mom I found an old picture of me in that first sweater.  The picture was taken by my grandfather. He was an excellent photographer and writer.

First sweater

I kept on knitting all those years. I might have thought about knitwear designer career from time to time, but I never pursued that until few years ago. It was when a friend of mine mentioned the website Ravelry and I joined the knitting website when I realized that there is a possibility to be a knitwear designer. I was given the opportunity to share some of my ideas and projects, and I learned to write knitting patterns. I started to submit to various magazines and yarn companies and to my surprise my ideas were accepted. This whole thing is a work in progress and I am still learning.

Somehow my hobby turned into a part time job.  I can create and knit, and sometimes I earn some money. With the opportunity to have my work published by magazines, yarn companies, or in a various knitting books  the deadline knitting arrives as well.

Knitting is a leisurely process created one stitch at the time.
However when working under contract for a third party, knitting turns into a deadline knitting and the process is suddenly less of a leisure and more of a stressful event as the whole process needs to be finished on time and delivered to the third party by a certain date. Sometimes there is plenty of time to work out the pattern and knit the sample. Other times the process is more limited and has serious time constraint.

There have been moments when I am complaining about knitting. It feels frustrating, especially if something is not working the way it should, or if I make a mistake and have to rip out portion of my knitting and start over. Yesterday morning I emailed the finished pattern and in the afternoon I mailed out finished sample that will be published by a third party. Now I have to wait until the pattern is published to share the pictures of my work.

Today I spend my morning in the garden picking out the berries.

Berries from our garden

And because I like knitting, I already started to think about my next knitting project. But that has to wait, first I need to finish the final read of my Voyager Sweater pattern.

Voyager Sweater

Thank you for visiting.

Life.....

Fall colors scarf

This fall I have a class at school named Anthropology: Food and Culture. The two books that are assigned reading are quite interesting. Especially the book titled Earth Knows My Name, written by Patricia Klindients. here is  The link to book on Amazon page.
I have found the book fascinating due to several reasons. I live in a country that is not my birthplace. Also my father's side of my family worked the land as farmers for many generations.
Maybe the book fascinates me due to sentimental reasons, while reading it I think of my past and the way life used to be. I do not want to say that life before was better or worse. There are always two sides of a story and we need to look at them carefully. The convenience of modern life has its advantages and I do not wish to loose them. I love having the opportunity to use Internet and talk with my mom on a daily basis, even though there is an ocean between us. My father never had that when we were growing up. He talked to his mother only when we made that all day trip across the country to visit them.
However, one thing is sure, somehow slowly and at first reluctantly I have decided to continue in that tradition and started a small garden. Though my garden is very small in comparison with what  I have seen and worked on when I was a child it still gives us some vegetables and even fruits. It's awesome to see the plants grow from seeds, and care for them throughout the growing season. And yes, the salad from our garden not only looks delicious, it tastes better than any store bought salad package.

Salad

I also use up the extras from the garden and preserve it for later times. Pickling cucumbers and other vegetables is labor intensive and takes time, but it looks great on our table in the middle of winter.

Pickling

The time I spend in garden takes away time from my knitting, but I do not regret it. When winter comes, I know there will be longer evenings which I can spend by our fireplace with knitting needles in hand.

Thank you for visiting.

Knitting Pattern for Blueberries

Blueberries (or Grapes)
by Stana D. S.
Finished Toy: Approximately 1" diameter
Yarn: Small amount of blue-purple sport to medium weight yarn. If making the grapes, small amount of green color yarn.
Recommended Needles size: DPN US # 3/3.25mm (set of 4)
Notions: Yarn needle, scissors, stitch marker, polyester fiberfill (1 small bag)
Abbreviations: KFB= Knit in front and back of the same sts, this creates 2sts from 1st.
SSK= slip st, slip st and knit the 2sts together, this decrease 2sts to 1st.
I-cord= the sts are knitted from one needle to second needle, do not turn the needle with sts around, just push the sts to the beginning of the needle and knit again. This technique makes tube.
INSTRUCTION:
With the yarn and three double pointed needles cast on 9sts (3sts per needle) Place a stitch marker on the first st, and begin working in the round.
Row 1: Knit around (9sts total)
Row 2: *KFB, Knit 2; repeat from * around, 4sts per needle ((12sts total)
Row 3: * KFB, Knit 3; repeat from * around, 5sts per needle (15sts total)
Row 4 -6: Knit around (15sts total)
Row 7: *SSK, Knit 3; repeat from * around, 4sts per needle (12sts total). Thread the tail of yarn from the cast on stitches on a yarn needle. Stitch through all of the cast on stitches, pull up tight to close the hole and stitch to secure. begin to stuff the blueberry with fiberfill.
Row 8: *SSK, Knit 2; repeat from * around, 3sts per needle (9sts total)
Row 9: Knit around. Finish stuffing. Cut the yarn, leaving long enough tail, and thread the end on a yarn needle. Pull the end through the reminding stitches on needles, gather up and close the hole, stitch to secure.
First blueberry is done.
Finishing: If making grapes, sew the finished grapes together to form the cluster. I-cord short green stem, and sew it to the top of the cluster of grapes.

Copyright: This pattern was design and written by Stana D.S.
The pattern is for personal use only. The finished items may not be sold for profit, except for charity purposes.
Please acknowledge the author. Thank you.

Blueberries.....

There is something magical about going to the forest and pick fresh blueberries off the blueberry bush. Perhaps it's my imagination, and perhaps it is true that the blueberries picked by ourselves taste much better then those bought in store.

This picture is my tribute to endless days of summer, childhood and playfulness in all of us.

The knitting pattern will be available soon.

Thank you for visiting.

Strawberry Hat

I knitted this little hat just for fun.

There is not a real pattern for it. I cast on 60sts and knit in the rounds( I use four DPN), at some point I add the yellow yarn and switch the yarns while knitting to make the seeds. When the hat looks long enough I decrease 2sts per needle per row until 4sts are left. I switch to green color and I-cord the stem. To finish the hat I add tiny leaves to the base of the stem.

I can visualize a photo of little baby in this hat with knitted strawberries all around.

Thank you for visiting.

Strawberries

Few years ago I discovered the pattern for strawberries on Knitting Pattern Central. I liked the perfect shape. However I had to tweak my strawberries a bit, by embroidering the seeds.
Ever since I have made dozens of them. The basket of strawberries is the perfect gift for any little child's kitchen.

Thank you for visiting.

Fruits and vegetables

not all of these knitted creations are my original patterns. The banana, strawberry and pumpkin are not my original patterns. I have found the patterns for these on various web sites. I am still working on creating other knitted variations of fruits and veggies.

Thank you for visiting.