M1W - Make 1 Weird and the Elder Tree Shawl

Hey knitters -


So I realized that when I wrote the Elder Tree shawl I talk about a Make 1 without specifying what kind of make 1 I was talking about. This is because I thought Make 1 meant just grabbing the bar underneath and knitting into it without twisting it. It makes this nice little lace hole as if you'd done a yarn over on the other side. I swear someone taught me that but I can't remember who and I can't seem to find anything on the internet about it.



So I've made my own little tutorial video to explain it to folks who are asking.

I'm calling it a Make 1 Weird because I'm weird and I use this to make 1.

Honestly all the hundreds of projects out there that have been using twisted make 1s in the Elder Tree all look absolutely beautiful. A twisted make 1 is great for this pattern too - but I just wanted to let folks know what I was talking about when I was saying Make 1 and here it is!

I'm designing another shawl which uses this increase as well. It's a really good increase for increasing along a lacy spine because it doesn't stop the yarn over looks. I'm a bit in love with it. It also helps with fitting leafy shapes into a triangle shape. It's really been a lovely invention of sorts. Here's a picture of the side of the Elder Tree chart so you can see what I'm talking about. It's the M nestled next to the two yarn overs.

So let's just pretend I made it up so I can have a very own stitch! I feel a bit like Elizabeth Zimmerman right now.



Oh speaking of Elizabeth Zimmerman...

You can buy this print here!

2 comments Elder Tree, Elder Tree Shawl, elizabeth Zimmerman, Make 1 weird, sylviabobilvia, The Elder Tree Shawl, The Lonely Tree Shawl, What make 1

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Whoa what!? Knitter Punks, the front page of iTunes, and 100,000 blog pageviews!

Hey everyone! This week has been pretty great, lots of fun stuff has been happening in my life and I'm feeling like making a little blog post about it might be a good idea!

The Knitter Punks Podcast (of which I am half of) made it on to the front page of iTunes under the New and Noteworthy heading! We were up there alongside Lena Dunham's new podcast! Which personally was kind of mind blowing.

Here's a screen cap of the big event:

Front page! You didn't even need to hit the "See All" tab to see it!

And then I realized that I hit 100,000 pageviews on this humble little blog! Wow guys! You all seem to like what I have to say!

I want to thank all of your for listening, reading, knitting along and just being awesome supporters of my little knitwear business! 

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Tutorial - How to use Instagram to edit your photos!

Me and my friend Tarot Card the crow are going to help show you three-and-a-bit tips to using Instagram to edit your awesome photographs! This ended up not being specifically about editing knitwear photographs - but it will all apply. Imagine Tarot Card's lovely feather patterns as a beautiful black beaded shawl.

My tips go as follows: 

1a. Ignore the filters -

As tempting as they might be, the filters are a trend which will likely pass (has already passed?). Things are popular and then fall out of fashion, just like clothes. Instagram filters did that really quickly. The filters which were SO COOL when they first came out are now dated and our eyes gloss over them. They’ve been overdone (for now). Of course they keep updating with new filters and I’m sure there are lots that are sweet and might fit perfectly with your image. Just use your discretion, if everyone uses the same filter all the time, they will get boring. 

Dear Mayfair. I love you but we can't be together. Signed, Sylvia.

1b. Oh wait don’t ignore all the filters -

This of course doesn’t apply to the few black and white filters - Those are functional filters that will turn your images black and white.

Moon filter

Inkwell filter

There are many forms of black and white filters, ones that turn red to black, ones that turn blue to black, etc etc.

You can imagine how different those would look.

Especially with people’s faces. Red lips turn black or white depending on the filter. It can be an interesting thing to see. 

Just keep that all in mind when you're using B&W filters!

1c. Nevermind. Don’t ignore the filters -

There’s an option for choosing how intense the filter is on your image. Just click on the filter and then click on the filter again and a slider will show up. This was such a cool feature. If you have a filter you love but that’s just too intense for your taste you can bring the levels of the filter down so that’s it’s more normal and less intense! 

Rise filter at it's full capacity

Rise at a much subtler and more attractive (to my eyes) level!

Have fun play around. Remember photography rules are absolutely for breaking! I have to remind myself that all the time. 

2. Play around with exposure

If you read my last post on photo editing the next two points are going to be the exact same. A higher exposure level is going to give you a brighter, clearer, more optimistic looking image (if that’s what you’re looking for). It’s great for just increasing the natural light aspect of photos you’ve shot outdoors or by the window. It’s going to just bring to life your images.

Instagram’s exposure slider is great. Play around with it! Depending on the images you have you might want to have them all cloud-like and very lightly exposed or maybe you want them moody and you can pull the exposure down as well. 

Here's Tarot Card trying to eat my keys with no exposure editing at all.

To get to the exposure slider click on the little wrench icon on the right. It will show you all the non-filter editing tools under that icon. Very clearly marked!

 

Click on the "Brightness" button to get the slider to pop up. Now slide and play around! Here's the image of Tarot Card brightened up to my liking about about +60.

3. Play with the warmth slider.

The warmth slider is a lovely little invention. Because most images are shot looking kind of dull this slider will warm them all up to closer to what-the-eye-can-see levels of colour. Plus they just look so much livelier! 

Most shots only need a little bit of warmth added, this shot with Tarot Card did a 360 with the warmth slider all the way up to 100pts! Even if it feels like it's going to be a lot, try it out! Because of the brown of the leather and the ground and the green of the grass it really looks fantastic warmed up this much. 

Play around! Get a feel for it!

 

Here are the unedited version and the finished product for you to see!

 Thanks for reading my tutorial on how to use Instagram to edit your photos!

Leave a Comment editing photos with instagram, how to, how to edit, how to edit photos, instagram, Knitwear photography, tutorial

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Tutorial - How to edit your knitwear photography using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3!

Hey everyone!

Here’s a little tiny tutorial on how to get awesome shots using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

When someone asks me how I get the shots that I get I have two answers. 

One - make the people you're taking photos of laugh, having your photo taken is painfully stressful, make it as enjoyable as you can and if you need to tell them to act like a marmot for a couple of minutes to get them to laugh then it’s worth it.

Two - use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to edit your photos.

Now I’ve got an old ancient copy of the program - but most of the tools I'll be talking about will be transferrable to the newer version. Maybe once I upgrade (haha yeah right - when some money falls out of the sky) I will do an updated one but for now this is a Lightroom 3 tutorial specifically for getting your knitwear photos to look awesome!

Whether you’re a knitwear designer or you just want to show off your beautiful finished object on ravelry these tips will help you out on your way to getting the shots you want.

Brighten it up -

DSLRs these days are built to produce images that need to be thrown through a post-processing program (like Lightroom). The images straight off the camera often have dull colours and low contrast and they’re dark. It’s actually intentional so that you can have more control over the final product when you move it over into post-processing.

With Lightroom almost everything is in sliders - it’s wonderful. 

 

Slide the “exposure” slider to the right to make it brighter. If you’ve got bright photos you want to darken you can slide to the left to make them moodier and darker.

For this image you can see the original on top there, and my edits done afterwards. I've just added +1.20 exposure. So I've just dragged the little slider up until it looked right to me. 

There, that’s like 75% of my process. 

Depending on the image you’re going to want to brighten it quite a bit - probably a little bit more than feels comfortable to you. as long as you don’t have any patches of white where all the detail is gone, then you’re good with a very lightened up image.

For photos you’ve taken with diffuse natural light (read: cloudy day or window light) you can push this quite a bit. Have fun and play around!

Warm it up -

This is the second most used feature for me on Lightroom. The "Temp" slider! (it's up at the top! of all the sliders for good reason!)

Most photos can be warmed up by 5 or 10 points. If you’re outside shooting in greenery (like a forest or even a park) you can warm up even more, like 15 or 25 points!

This feature is lovely and gives a lot of life to your photos, just make sure to keep an eye out for white things in your images turning yellow. Like if you’ve started to get a yellow tinge to people’s skin, eyes or teeth you might want to slide it back down to a slightly less warm alternative.

Here's the before/after of this image after bringing the exposure up as well as adding warmth. 

Here's another one of my images with the exposure up and warmed up. You can really see the difference!

Straighten your image -

So when photographers tell you they don’t straighten or crop because they want to take the photo “right” the “first time” then they are a strange breed of photographer. To each their own, but I have found that it’s unreasonable to think that straightening out an image would be such a taboo that they would risk a beautiful shot if it just needed a quick straightening out.

What do I mean by straightening?

Well if there are any lines in your photo that should be straight (say, a brick wall or a landscape or a fence) our eye notices. The only things in the photo that need to be straight are things our mind knows need to be straight. So things anchored to the ground, or say, the ground itself. Things which should be straight if you’re looking at them should be straight in your photo. Not to say that unstraight photos are the worst thing ever - it just takes our brain a little bit more time to “see” the image. And for clickability’s sake it’s best to just straighten the image out.

Here's an image of Savanna I have straightened. In the first one she looks like she's leaning forward or standing on her tippy toes because the horizon line is uneven. It just looks a bit off (which you might not notice right away) but when you see the straightened version your eyes go "ahhh, that's better!" 

If you're wondering what shawl she's wearing it's my The First Few Fallen Leaves shawl! You can see the rest of my shots on Ravelry! 

Well, those are the tips! Stay tuned for more! And feel free to ask questions in the comments and I’ll answer them to the best of my ability! If there’s interest generated I’d love to do a couple of posts where people send me their untouched images and I can touch them up and go through my explanation as to why I do what I do!

Sylvia’s Public Service Announcement:  Everyone’s way of editing photos is different and there’s no ‘right’ way. If we sat down with the same image and were just asked to brighten it - we would both end up with two results because our ideas of what a nicely brightened photograph looks like are going to be so completely different. Take my advice or find your own way to getting the most out of your photos!

4 comments Adobe Lightroom, editing photos in Lightroom, how to edit your knitwear photography, Knitwear photography, Lightroom 3

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KPM - Knits Per Minute!

Just for fun today I timed myself for 2 minutes and counted how many stitches I could knit!

I worked 102 stitches in 120 seconds in just plain knitting.  I made sure not to rush (partially because the reason the thought popped into my head to do this was because I want to try and gauge how quickly I can finish these three garter stitch and stockinette projects I have on the go!)

So at this rate I could knit a stockinette version of the swoon hat in just over 51 minutes!

Wow dorky moments over here. Also if I knit that quickly I think my hands would actually fall off.

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Knitter Punks Episode 12!

We've done twelve of these things! We're rocking things over here in Knitter Punks land. The podcast is so fun to do man I feel so lucky to be doing it! Go have a listen! 

The Knitter Punks Podcast! 

Also Jocelyn is awesome and totally finished her amazing Magrathea shawl! It's beautiful and I was eying it the entire time we were Podcasting! Shawls based on Douglas Adams fiction are THE BEST. Love it!

1 comment jocelyn maffin, josiejose, knitter punks, knitter punks podcast, knitterpunkspodcast, softsweater, softsweater knits

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Softsweater's Sweater!

It's dry! Thomas took a couple of photos of me in it today! 

2 comments knit, knitting, softsweater, sweater, sweater knitting

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More Every Stitch Has A Story stuff.

I almost applied for the Story Hive grant... But then I decided not to! 

(storyhive is this awesome BC and Alberta grant you can apply for for short film makers. 

Take a look at www.storyhive.com) 

Instead I'm just going to use this video to promo the project that me n Nicola are working on. You might have seen the other video I embedded on here! This is the same footage, but it's my dorky voice you'll hear talking about the concept. Personally it gets me all excited to start thinking about making videos like this! So I'll share the Pitch video I made.

Click through to make it a bit larger! 

Thanks for taking a looksee! 

Leave a Comment Every Stitch Has A Story, knitting documentaries, knitting documentary, videos of hands knitting

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A history of softsweaters soft sweaters!

Oh I have SO much knitting to do! So instead I'm going to write a blog post about all the sweater drama I have had in my short sweater-knitting life! 

My history of sweaters!

The first sweater I ever knit I didn't do a gauge swatch on. I got it wet to block it (lie it flat to dry) and it stretched so much it wouldn't even stay on my shoulders. I totally quit knitting for like a week I was so mad. 

I'm just so stoked with myself. Poor pre-blocked me. 

I'm looking so hopeful here! Little did I know...  blocking was about to happen.

The sweater was out of Malabrigo sock - which is gorgeous! But it's superwash and it's got no nylon content to spring it back... so goodbye adorable sweater! 

There are no photos of the big baggy thing post block.

The second sweater I did I did a gauge swatch! I was so proud of myself! I did a few and thought I was all smart because I even got my swatch wet and lied it flat to dry because "that's what I'm going to do with my sweater when I'm done!"

The thing I hadn't put into consideration is that when you're a 2x (and probably any size for that matter) the weight of the sweater is usually pretty heavy. You've got four or five skeins of yarn on there and it could weight like, 500grams.

When you get that wet it stretches itself to hell. It doesn't matter if you're lying it flat to dry, the step from removing the sweater out of the water and onto the towel will stretch it out. 

I took some photos of the finished product - because it technically did stay on my body - but it wasn't a very good fit on my frame. 

You can see the same problem again - the shoulders weren't staying on because the back piece had stretched out so much! 

All the gather of fabric is to keep it staying on my body. It just slipped off my shoulders the whole time.

Okay Third try worked out pretty well.

I knit a sweater for an ex boyfriend - but we broke up. Big surprise there... 

*cough* sweater curse *cough*

You can read more about this sweater here

Of course the one sweater I knit that actually turns out awesomely is knit for someone else. 

Oh god.. I don't think this quite counts...

Then FINALLY I figured out that my gauge in time for the fourth sweater. My gauge is loose and sad and I need to actually step down quite a few needle sizes to get good sweater style gauge and I quickly whipped up this beautiful thing. 

Which is an Andi Satterlund pattern called Miette and it's short on purpose! I mean I'm also SUPERTALL but it's short for when I wear dresses! 

I'm a big dork in this photo! 

The pattern didn't come in my size so I had to do some modifications but it just turned out really well and I still wear it (although it needs some mending now). 

Okay so on to the newest of the sweaters. 

This is a sweater I started after I had been dumped last fall. It's my sad feelings-autumn is hard-I wish I had a fall sweater-sweater!

From fall to fall sweater out of Briggs & Little worsted. 

Is it a hat? Is it a sweater? Knitting and chatting at my office (Bump N Grind Coffee on Commercial Drive!) 

I have notoriously ridiculous sweater gauge. Here's me being like "IT'LL FIT RIGHT? IT'LL FIT?"

Here's a photo of me trying to fit into a child's sweater. "It says ages 2 and up!"

 Oh I love this yarn. you can really see the tweedy loveliness of it here! 

FINISHED! Hey look, the left sleeve has some discolouration on it? Gee I wonder why? Maybe it's because I ran out of yarn and was too lazy to go back to the yarn store to buy more so I just used a bit of Brooklyn Tweed Shelter that I had lying around. It's cute right? A design feature! Not a mistake... 

1 comment knitting, softsweater, sweater knitting

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Knit City 2015 Day 2! And a Special Episode of The Knitter Punks Podcast!

Oh my god there's just so much yarn!!!! And amazing people!!!! And amazing stuff!!!

Knit City is THE Vancouver Fibre Festival! ...I mean technically there is only ONE Vancouver Fibre Festival - but it doesn't matter, Knit City is THE one.

Jocelyn and one of the Original Knitter Punks (OKP) Barth and me all have a Knitter Punks Knit City 2015 nerd out. We talk about ALL THE YARN we bought and all the lovely people we chatted with!

AND there's a promo code that gets you my newest shawl pattern Solarium for free! Only from now until Sunday October 4th at 5pm.

Solarium Shawl! 

Go pop over and have a listen! Look at our lovely faces!

www.knitterpunks.com

1 comment #knitcity2015, knit city, knit city 2015, knitcity2015, knitter punks, knitter punks podcast, knitterpunks

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A Lecture by the Lovely Clara Parkes! #knitcity2015

First night of Knit City 2015! 

I didn't even know that I was going to even get in to the Clara Parkes lecture. Me and Nicola showed up rushing right at 6:10 to try and get tickets. They weren't quite sold out and we dropped all our knitting out of our purses as we rushed to pay for the last remaining few spots.

I didn't know what to expect of the lecture, yarn production hasn't been the thing about fibre art that has really kept my interest. I have spun and dyed yarn quite a bit, but the types of sheep and styles of spinning (and all the mills part of it) hasn't really been anything that I've spent much time researching. I didn't know what to expect and that was great because Clara Parkes was just wonderful. She drew me right into the world of bales of wool and of her amazing adventure with them.

Honestly I won't do it justice to talk about it, I would instead recommend that if you're able to go out and buy her books to hear more about her stories. She was just a joy to listen to! I'm going to absolutely track her down and chat with her during the rest of the Knit City weekend. 

I can't wait to read her book! 

I've slurped this image from her pinterest page.

1 comment #knitcity2015, clara parkes, Clara parks, knit city, knit city 2015, knitting, vancouver, yarn, yarn festival

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The Graph Paper Cooperative and Every Stitch Has A Story

Dear lovely fibre people. Things are so cool right now!

Me and Nicola have been working on an idea of doing small videos to highlight awesome people in the community who are doing cool fibre related stuff. We did a test video for it today and I think it's pretty darn cool!

The sound quality is a bit low and the video quality got messed up by uploading it to YouTube. But darn it I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Especially because Nicola totally didn't have a script and we hadn't even fully worked out prompt questions. AND the audio was recorded using my iphone. So cool


OH AND

We've also been working on this idea for a while of starting up some sort of knitwear designer/fibre people cooperative where we can figure out ways to pay ourselves to help each other out! Honestly I'm still not sure if we've really figured out how this is going to work out - but we've done a website! So that must mean we're serious about it.

Here's the link! 

Keep an eye on there for projects we've been working on! 

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