Having You Tube at our fingertips online is such a great resource. You can see just about anything! Music, TV shows, people doing stupid things, and tons of how-to videos. Today’s post sends you over there to check out the video by Randy Comer, showing you how to fuse glass. This video provides some really cool information such as cutting glass, assembling it for a firing, a quick bit about pattern bars, using all the different components that were previously made to assemble a new piece and slumping that piece once it’s been fired. He also gets into why he would fire something more than once, which was after he fired a piece that was draped and then slumped to change the piece a bit. Randy is very good at conveying this information and I think you can get a lot from this. He doesn’t get into actual temperatures that he’s firing at or firing schedules, so I do recommend maybe checking out some other videos on You Tube to find out other information. But do remember that firing schedules for pieces do change and are not the same for every project.
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Gather Your Scraps for a Fun Wrap
Are you all tired of scrap knitting projects yet? I hope not, because I probably never will be.
This is one of those that was actually designed to be worked with scraps, though I’m sure you could use whole or partial skeins of a few different colors if you want a less scrappy look.
The Rock Salt Wrap by Nick Davis is mostly made with mitered squares (which is a fun technique to learn if you don’t already know how to do it). Make each square a different color, or alternate colors, if you don’t want to make it fully scrappy. The pattern actually suggests places where it would make sense to change colors and includes line drawing you could color in if you want to plan it out more carefully.
Because it’s mostly made out of squares you can easily alter the size by working more or fewer squares, or making them smaller or larger. The borders are worked in garter stitch and you could also make those wider, narrower or add more of them depending on the size of shawl you want and how much yarn you have to use.
Nick says their version took about 520 yards/475 meters of worsted weight yarn to make a shawl that measures 58 inches or almost 1.5 meters long and 14 inches/36 cm wide. This same technique would be fun for a scarf if you made it a bit narrower, or you could make a bunch of strips of squares and make a blanket.
Another thing I love about this pattern is that it calls for worsted weight yarn. So many scrap projects are made for lighter weight yarn, which is fine, but the vast majority of the knitting I do is with worsted weight so I always love seeing options that are made for using those leftovers. Of course you can also use lighter weight yarn if that’s what you have on hand.
You can get this pattern from Ravelry.
[Photo: Nick Davis]
Take Your Scrap Yarn on a Voyage
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