Alpaca Direct Blog

Vests are good entry projects into sweater knitting. You use a lot of the same skills for vest knitting as you do in sweater knitting. Kelley knit the Calidez Vest this week, which is a super-quick project.

Learn two techniques for making your sweaters look professional: using backing buttons and adding a phony seam. All sweater knitters should have these skills in their toolbox.

Kelley just finished a pair of Skimmer Socks by Sheila Toy Strombetzg. These are great when you don't want your socks to show very much, because they're almost invisible under your shoes. I especially love this style because I'm a clog wearer, and these come up lower on the top of the foot, so they don't show. Yay!

These and the Turkish Bed Socks are my favorite knit sock patterns to wear with clogs.

Short socks, or footies, as some like to call them, are great for summertime (or anytime, really) knitting. They're a small, super-portable projects, and there are so many designs to choose from.

Kelley is working on the Rose City Rollers pattern by Mara Catherine Bryner. Make them two-at-a-time like Kelley did, and you'll have a pair to wear in now time at all!

Kelley has almost finished her darling version of Susan Hickson's Candy Bear. She featured it on two episodes of Technique Tuesday, and it is the cutest.

This week, Kelley demonstrated picking up stitches to attach the bear's head to her body. She used this method instead of seaming the head to the body.

Kelley's has a new granddaughter, and she's busy knitting her all kinds of little treasures. The latest is the Candy Bear by Susan Hickson. 

As always, Kelley has lots of useful tips and tricks for knitting this project. One of them is particularly great—how to avoid some of the seaming, using Judy's Magic Cast-On to on the feet and ears of her Candy Bear.

There seem to be a million choices for binding off knitting, and I almost always gravitate to the "regular" bind-off, passing one stitch over another. But sometimes you just want something with more pep, and the picot bind-off fits the bill!

This bind-off is pretty and versatile—you can change the look to fit the project and your mood. Kelley's here to teach you how to work two versions of this bind-off. 

I absolutely love knitting cables. The texture they provide is unparalleled, and they pack such a punch and they're WAY easier to knit than they seem. In Kelley's Knit Club project for April 2020, the Love and Hope Shawl, has a cable running up one of the edges.

There are a few great tips for knitting cables easier, and Kelley demonstrated one of them, keeping track of rows between cable crossings, this week during Technique Tuesday.

Stitch markers can be a knitter's best friends, and Kelley shared a few great ways to use then while knitting the Joji Locatelli's Odyssey Shawl. Markers can help you keep track of your knitting in so many ways, including stitch count and pattern repeats.

If you haven't joined the Odyssey Shawl knit-along, it's not too late!

Like many of you, I was researching various masks to make for my friends and family and wanted one that could be made quickly, had a nice fit around the nose, and provided an option for a replaceable filter to provide a little more protection for myself and others nearby. So I fired up my sewing machine and started experimenting! 

I finally came up with a mask that I was happy with, so I thought I'd share it.

Handknit gloves are so special, and Kelley has whipped up a great free pattern for an easy pair, knit from our exclusive Bravo yarn. These gloves are soft and luxurious but also very practical. Alpaca is warm and light, so these gloves will be light as air.

One of the challenges of knitting gloves is avoiding the holes that inevitably appear between the fingers, usually because enough stitches weren't picked up or they were picked up too loosely. Kelley has solved that problem!

Sometimes you just need an easy project to work on, and Kelley's new free pattern, the Simple Ribbed Hat, is the perfect cast-on for times like these.

We debuted this pattern on a recent Technique Tuesday on Facebook Live, and Kelley used it to demonstrated how to fix a few common mistakes knitters make all the time (even a pro-level knitter like Kelley!).

You'll learn how to fix dropped stitches, turn purls into knits, and fix incorrectly oriented stitches.