With any given luck, Mary and I are hanging out at Rhinebeck right now so while I’m gone here’s a little blog post I wrote for her 🙂
I first started listening to the Kino Knits podcast about a year ago. I quickly became a fan and worked my through the back episodes. I also joined the Ravelry group so I could enter contests and keep up on all things Kino Knits. When Mary put out a call for test knitters I was in!!
The first test knit I did was for the Rybka (Wee Fishie) pattern. With Mary being in Africa, her e-mails often arrived early in the morning. She sent out on the call on what ended up being a very snowy day at my house, perfect for settling in for a long day of knitting. Note – this project did not take up an entire day of snowy knitting, unless I had made an entire school of wee fishies. It’s a quick knit and I love that you can use whatever scrap yarn you have hanging around. I think it’s cute on its own as a little gift or I could see knitting a number of them and making some type of bunting or mobile or other decoration. I used worsted weight and it still came out in a wee size so using sock yarn would totally make them easy to use for decorative purposes.
I just finished another test knitting a pair of fingerless mitts for Mary last month. The pattern is not released yet so I won’t go into a lot of details but here’s my brief preview.  They are designed for a long gradient. I happened to have a lot of extra gradient yarn that I had intended for another project. In the end, that turned out to be a bad yarn/pattern combo. So I was happy to put it use in a much better yarn/pattern combo. It was perfect for these mitts. While I usually find mitts with sock yarn to be a slog, I felt this really kept moving with the pattern stitch and with the work of involving the thumb which was a little different than I had used in the past.  Keep your eye out for this one, especially if you love all the great gradients that are out there right now.
I love the Kino Knits patterns because they are easy, yet interesting and I always learn something new, which for me is the perfect recipe for a good pattern. The Rybka used Judy’s Magic Cast on, a new to me cast on so it took me a few minutes to get that down. She also uses a slightly different version of increasing stitches than I’ve previously used. Even with all that I think it took me a couple of hours, at most, to knit up. The mitts have a very interesting stitch pattern that was new to me. Again, it’s a fairly easy pattern once you get it down but it’s nice to be doing something just a little different. I think this is something you can see in all her patterns – she tries to make them just a little more interesting. If you’re tired of knitting just plain socks, cowls, or hats check out her Ravelry store for something to spice up your knitting!!!