Hello stitching friends,

There are new pictures in the gallery! There's a beautiful completed "Christmas Rose", a brand-new "Luncheon of the Boating Party" (Renoir), and great progress on "The Lacemaker" (Vermeer)! Be sure to have a look!

Cool Tool: Knit Picker

Maybe this has happened to you: you discover you've made a mistake stitching, remove the incorrect stitches, and now another color which used to be anchored under those stitches has a short, loose tail which is no longer anchored. Or how about this: you get a knot in your floss, one of those tiny hard knots, and can't get it out. Maybe you muscle along stitching despite the knot, but when it comes time to run the floss under other stitches to anchor it, the knot won't go under the stitches. Of course when you cut the knot off, the remainder is too short to tie or get back onto a needle.

Knit Picker to the rescue! This is a nifty little gadget made by Dritz which sells for under $2. It's really intended to fix (or at least hide) snags on knitted garments. It has a tiny latch hook with which you hook your snag, then pull it to the inside. What makes it great for needlework too is that the hook is flat. You can slide it under existing stitches, grab that loose floss tail, close the latch, and pull it back out, bringing the tail along under the stitches, and voila! Your loose tail is anchored again! It comes with a cover to protect the hook which can be attached to the handle to extend it, making the whole thing about 5 inches long (or about 12 cm).

We will admit, it isn't always terribly easy to get that little hook under your stitches, but it's no more time-consuming than trying to catch the tail under new stitches and turning your work over constantly to see how you're doing.

You probably won't find Knit Pickers at needlework shops (unless they also have knitting supplies) -- it's more something you would find in the notions section at a fabric store. Many online fabric stores have them, if you don't have a fabric store nearby, and so does Amazon.com.

People ask occasionally if we can't have more small (or small-ish) patterns. (Oh, really? we hear you saying!) We have experimented with patterns that have no blended colors and just can't get the kind of look that our blended-color patterns have. Someone recently suggested that in that case, maybe we could do some "detail" patterns (just a portion of the full picture). We thought that was a good idea and have a couple of new patterns this month in that category. And by the way, if you are looking for a smaller project, you can always follow the Quick Cross Stitch link at the bottom left of our home page. That will take you to the patterns that stitch up fastest (because they're small or less complex or both).

New patterns! Clink any picture for a closer look.

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