Knit Bits: A Look at a Fashion Design Pro, Stylecraft Seeks yarn Line Input and How to Be a Good Knitting Student

The New York Times recently ran an interesting profile of Vladimir Teriokhin, a former ballet dancer in Russia turned sought-after high-fashion knitwear designer. He makes sweaters for the likes of Oscra de la Renta and Marc Jacobs, as well as his own line, called Spencer Vladamir, which retails for $800 to $2,500 per garment at Barneys. Gwyneth Paltrow has called him the Sweater Whisperer, and he’s known for using chunky yarns and large-scale designs with lots of cables.

British yarn manufacturer Stylecraft Yarns is looking for help picking colors for the expansion of a couple of its yarn lines. The company has more than 80 shades in its Special DK weight yarn line, and it wants to add some of the colors in Aran and DK weights, with the help of fans. They’re taking nominations for favorite yarn colors through the end of February, at which point the 12 favorites will be announced. Then voting will take place to determine the six favorites that will become new colors in both lines (check Facebook for more details). Voting will run through the end of March and the new colors are expected to be released in October.

Red Heart has a new free collection of 10 knit and crochet patterns for the little ballet dancer in your life. From little sweaters to leg warmers and bun covers, there’s lots of cute stuff here.

CouponBox recently did a survey in which they asked people about the indoor hobbies they most wanted to try in 2016, and knitting ranked number one, with 16 percent of the 3,500 Americans surveyed saying they’d like to give the hobby a try. Second place was rock climbing, followed by reading, yoga and soccer, which I didn’t realize was an indoor hobby, but still. Hooray for new knitters! (Click the link for the full range of responses.)

Finally, Franklin Habit has been a popular knitting teacher for years, and before that he was a student, so he has lots of thoughts about how those of us who enjoy taking classes, whether at a festival, conference or our local yarn shop, can be better knitting students. I won’t give you the whole story (and this is only part one, focusing on what to do before class), but it amounts to knowing what you’re getting into and bringing what you actually need for the class, including any homework the teacher asked you to do. Seems simple enough, right?

[Photo via CouponBox.]

For years now Berroco has been releasing a tiny set of Christmas ornament knitting patterns, often modeled on human-sized clothes, called Minutia. The ones for this year haven’t come out yet, but somehow I missed last year’s so I wanted to share them, as well as a fun little twist they offered.

The general 2025 Minutia patterns include a circular yoke sweater, a two-color stocking and a ribbed earflap hat. They’re super cute and perfect for using little (or should I say minute?) amounts of yarn left over from other projects. Make them in Christmas colors or whatever you have on hand. Even if you don’t have exactly the same yarn weight, you can still make these cute additions to your holiday decor.

But what really caught my eye while I was on the Berocco site was the Team Colors Minutia, which are actually different patterns so I’m not even sure when they were released, but they are definitely worth talking about.

These patterns include a little raglan sweater with stripes and a stocking cap with contrasting pom pom.

They call for sport weight yarn, but again you could use sock or DK if that’s what you have in the right colors. And here the right colors are important because you’re stitching your team colors.

Or anyone else’s team colors.

I immediately thought that this would be an amazing holiday gift for someone who you never know what to get but who also happens to like sports. Or has gone to a university that has colors.

Another option would be to leave off the stripes and add a number in duplicate stitch if you or the person you’re knitting for has a favorite player. Or stitch a letter or a tiny version of the team logo on the front. There are lots of options!

If you make these, I’d love to hear what you did with them!

[Photo: Berroco]

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