Grey Lacefield Knits back in stock!

Grey is always a very popular color in the Neeka Knits shop. And I know why! Of all the neutrals, it's my fave - not quite as sleek as black but not as earthy as brown - it looks great with all the bright colors in your wardrobe. And I think we all know how I feel about bright colors.

I've been out of grey yarn for quite a while now, but I finally have some back in stock. Just in time for some lacey knit legwarmers....

Conceptual Knitting

I've been running into some cool conceptual knits online recently. Like this awesome Sky Scarf project by Leafcutter Designs. It's made by knitting the color of the sky each day for a year! I have a feeling I would end up with a very grey scarf.

Slightly less cozy is this giant knit credit card by Dimitri Tsykalov that is slowly unraveling. If only debt, like knitting, could be erased by frogging.

These projects definitely make me think about what I would knit if I saw knitting as a way to communicate ideas rather than the usual cute, cozy, fun wearables. Maybe upcoming International Yarn Bombing Day would make a good debut for a little knitting installation art!

Circle Time...

With the warm weather a-coming, it's time to start knitting pretty little headbands again. I'm looking to get a good color palette going for summer. Let me know if you have any color favorites!

Happy Love Letter Day

I'm not the biggest fan of Valentine's Day - a fact I commemorated in video last year. I think it's silly to devote only one day of the year to loving somebody. So while I've long ago removed the pressure or need to be romantic on February 14th, I've decided it's not a bad idea to use today to celebrate things I actually have taken for granted the rest of the year.

While I'm not a fan of heart-shaped chocolate boxes (really, those chocolates are so nasty!), I am a huge fan of love letters. In the age of Facebook and texting, the love letter might quickly become a lost art, so why not celebrate today with a love letter, a written by hand on actual paper love letter. It can be written to anything that you love but take for granted. In fact, I've chosen a rather unconventional recipient for my love letter today and wrote it in my journal for safe-keeping. I've transcribed the letter below because I'm thinking there might be other recipients out there to whom it applies. Enjoy!

To my sweet and lovely Hands,

I am so grateful for everything you do for me.

I love the way you squeeze exactly the right amount of toothpaste on the brush in the morning, and how quickly and effortlessly you circle a spoon in my mug to stir my tea, or pinch the edge of a book to turn the page.

With you, I can cook dinner for a friend, or plant a tree in the garden, or draw a silly picture, or knit a scarf to keep me warm. You don't just make all these things easier, you make them possible. So thank you.

I promise to protect you from the cold and wind, to keep you safe from knives and scratchy things when I can, and nurse your wounds when I can't, to wash you with sweet smelling soap and pay extra money for the good moisturizer instead of the cheap kind, and to give you breaks and let you rest when you are tired. Mostly, I promise to stop taking you for granted and to tell you more often, as I'm telling you now, how amazing you truly are....

Love,
Your Brain

Webbing a Web

I've been working on a spiffy new official website for Neeka Knits!

The kind with the plain old www.neekaknits.com thing going on, instead of a www.neekaknits.blog.etsy.tumblespot.sortofthingy. You know what I mean. 

Because I'm always up for a challenge, I'm creating it myself! Yay for skill acquisition! So far, this is what you see on the home page. I think it does a good job of explaining where I'm at....

Lacefield Boot Toppers

Remember when I said I had some new designs to share? Well, this isn't quite a new design, as much as it is a new addition to an already existing design family. But I love them nonetheless. Please welcome the Lacefield Boot Toppers, a new member of the Lacefield Collection!

In addition to mitts and headbands, the "lacefield" pattern has now found itself on these cute little legwarmers, perfect for peeking out of your nicest pair of boots, like the lovely Frye Veronica Shorties I have on in the picture above. As a fellow Shorty, I feel a lot of love for these boots, even if I don't wear them as much as I should in the winter.  So I knit up some extra special friends to go with them! 

These leg warmers keep your calves cozy, while the tight fit shows off the pretty lace. I especially love the contrast of the feminine lace with some nice rugged worn leather. 

If you're interested in knitting up a pair of these for yourself, you can find the pattern on the Neeka Knits Etsy Shop....

And as part of their coming out party, readers of my blog can use the coupon code "LACELOVE" when you checkout to get all 3 Lacefield knitting patterns (headband, mitts and boot toppers) for the price of one!

Happy Daylight Savings Day!

Today is my favorite day of the year. Strange but true. And it's not just the whole extra hour that I love. For some reason, Daylight Savings Day always brings with it gloriously breathtaking fall weather. Sunshine. Crisp Air. Leaves crunching underfoot. And today is no exception. I consider today my own special holiday, complete with gifts and rituals and a coziness all its own. So I present to you my Daylight Savings Day traditions:

Tradition #1

Take a nice lazy autumn walk somewhere with pretty trees and a nice view and a yummy snack. 

Tradition #2

Don't turn your clock back the night before!! I treat my extra hour a little differently. I pick something that I have to do that I really don't want to do - when I was young it was homework, now it is cleaning my house - and I spend one hour doing it. Only then, as a special reward, do I get to turn the clock back. Poof!!! It's like I never did it at all! So magical.

That's it for the traditions, I guess. Maybe I need to do a little more work on the holiday before it'll take off. But it does always make me think about time and how strange it is, this collective agreement of ours. Most days, I never pay attention to the time.  I don't have a watch, my clocks are always wrong, and I hardly ever know what time it is, and this makes me feel much more lost and disorganized than it should. Sometimes I think Time is a big, mean teacher and I'm just a really bad student. Which brings me to this knitting clock from Norwegian designer Siren Elise Wilhelmsen.  

This ingenious clock actually marks time by knitting. It will knit a 2 meter long scarf over the course of a year, and the unknitted thread shows you how much time is left to knit in the year. This makes more than total sense to me. This is the form of time I've been living under! No wonder I'm such a bad student. I live in a totally different time world, and judging by my yearly knitting output, it's a warp-speed, light-speed, crazy fast kind of dimension. In fact, even though I do feel like a knitting clock most of the time, honestly, no matter what dimension I'm in.....I'm completely cuckoo....