Long Lake Yarns

Ninety-three years ago, this young woman modeled fashionable knitted tennis wear on the cover of The Corticelli Yarn Book, “Lessons in Knitting and Crochet.”  The book contained an extensive assortment of fashions for men, women, children, soldiers and babies.  It was published by the Corticelli Silk Mills of Florence, Massachusetts.  Odd little crochet do-dads dangling [...]

Jared Flood‘s wonderful new knitting book, “Made in Brooklyn,” is filled with updated classic designs.  Some of them, like Quincy, seem inspired by Elizabeth Zimmermann (a knit designer Flood admires).  The regular reader of my blog knows I admire EZ too.  Quincy is constructed of garter stitch, “I-cord” borders  (we are too politically correct to [...]

Fletcher’s Pond, with a surface area of 8,970 acres, is one of the largest inland lakes in Michigan.  It is a flooding created in 1935 by the Alpena Power Company.  The pond is shallow (no deeper than about 12 feet) and weedy–just the sort of lake where big bass and monster pike hang out.  Every [...]

Knitting hats is pretty much instant gratification.  If you make a mitten, you have to make another.  If you make a sock, same thing.  A bored knitter, or for that matter an adventurous one,  can create mismatched pairs.  Still, such things must happen in twos.  But not hats. It also helps, paraphrasing Elizabeth Zimmermann, that [...]

It was 1917.  The Corticelli Yarn Book, “Lessons in Knitting and Crochet” published by the Corticelli Silk Mills in Florence, Massachusetts provided “instructions to help the women throughout the country who are at this time utilizing every available moment in the making of warm and comfortable garments for the boys who have responded to the [...]