Osborn Fiber Studio

It’s Book Release Day! You can officially order Migraineur: Poems and Patterns on the Experience of Migraine in both softcover and digital editions.

Here are all the links:

Buy Migraineur softcover book on Amazon.ca (also available in other Amazon marketplaces)
If you want a complimentary ebook with your purchase of a physical book, forward your receipt to osbornfiber@gmail.com with your ravelry name. Offer good untill December 31. Please allow 24 hours for your request to be processed.

Buy Migraineur ebook on Ravelry 
If you want the ebook but do not use ravelry, contact me at osbornfiber@gmail.com for more information.

Today is still pattern reveal day, and there is no better time to share with you the pattern on the cover of Migraineur, a giant shawl / blanket called Toast.

Because it is, in fact, a giant piece of toast.

This was a project born of a vision and a whole lot of stubbornness. It’s not fundamentally difficult to make, but it is difficult to communicate, which is sometimes puts a really interesting pattern onto the chopping block. It took a lot of passes with Frauke, my excellent tech editor, to whip this pattern into shape. In the end, I got the piece I wanted: a giant piece of toast, made of clamshells.

Nominally it’s a shawl, but it is very large. However, being knit in a fingering weight singles yarn, it isn’t too heavy to fold in half and wrap up in.

That’s what the Toast series is all about: comfort. Giving your body what it needs, what it can take, doing the self care that you can, when you can’t do much. Buttered toast is often all I can stand when I’m down with a migraine, and my husband dutifully makes me a couple of slices.

If you’d like more of an actual shawl-sized object, you could instead make a half-slice of Toast.

With less than half the knitting of the full-slice, you can make the bottom-left half of the slice, as if it were cut diagonally. Instead of a rounded puffy top, you get a diagonal border filled in with short rows. If you like a more colourful knit, directions for the Allfruit colourway is included for both sizes.

I won’t lie to you: it’s a lot of knitting. I do, however, love a large project with several distinct chunks. There’s a bit of fiddling at the beginning of each clamshell as you increase more at the start, then you can relax through longer, plainer rows to finish each one off. Instructions are given to use locking stitch markers to keep your place at all times. And while exact stitch counts have been carefully worked out and triple checked by Frauke and myself, there’s a lot of room for fudging.

Will you take on a giant piece of toast?

Thanks to my mom, Linda Jennings, for taking on the Allfruit half-slice sample. Thanks to Stringbean for modeling, and inventing the Toast Ghost.

If you’re still reading, I have a final note for you. If you’d like another way to help get this book seen by folks, when you get a chance to look at the ebook edition or your own edition, would you consider leaving a review on Amazon? It does make a huge difference in getting the magic Amazon algorithm to spread the word. Thanks again for reading, and for your incredibly kind support.