Featuring: Asa Tricosa Designs

I'm being something of a lazy blogger. Between Blog Week and podcasting I've been nailed to my laptop every spare minute. So this week I've made others do the work- ha! The lovely, lovely Asa not only agreed to be featured but is also offer you gorgeous readers a chance to win a design! Also, excuse the formatting, I've got that early tingle and very painful tingle for RSI so I'm not fussing over the fact this isn't showing up how I want.

All you have to do is peruse her delicious patterns either on Ravelry, www.ravelry.com/designers/asa-tricosa or on her very own website, www.asatricosa.com. Choose your favourite and comment here with it to let me know you'd like to win!

But wait, there's more opportunities to win:

1. As above, comment, telling me which pattern you like best for ONE entry.

2. Comment again if you are a follower for TWO chances to win.

3. Comment to let me know where you have mentioned me or Tricosa on a blog, podcast or something similar for a THIRD opportunity o win. 

You ave one week- winners will be announced this time next week so comment before midnight GMT Thursday 14th April 2011. Don't forget to check back to see if you've won!

What are your favourite hobbies?

I bake enormous sourdough breads. I also love to sleep. Then there’s the extremely slow running.

Favourite Childhood Game? OR playful pursuit that you still can’t resist

I must have suppressed this. Maybe brännboll in forever-twilit Swedish summer evenings. Thwaaack!

Where do you find inspiration?

Other knitters.

Seeing a “problem” and working out a solution. For example, I dislike abrupt transitions from one stitch pattern to another unless used as a distinct and cool feature. I also like to minimize the tedious  tasks (fastening loose ends, seaming), so I try to make designs without tediousness and with interesting solutions. One problem I haven’t quite found a solution to is that what I most like to wear are fairly plainly knit things, so some tediousness may be unavoidable. As in life.

Beholding fantastic yarns in all their colourful glory is another important source of inspiration. Probably that’s where it really begins, often Posh Yarn (three shawl designs started with Posh Yarn). I also love Fyberspates, ArtFibers, Blue Moon, and, more recently, Yarn Addict, Alchemy Yarn and Sanguine Gryphon.  Mmmm…

Are you an early bird or midnight owl? 

Owl, definitely. I can see the beauty of early, quiet mornings, but they hurt.

Comfort Food of choice? 

Good bread with stinky, Danish cheese – all sorts of interesting cheeses, really.

When you dream or daydream, where do you tend to end up?

My dreaming takes place at night. Often filmic, lots of water and snow or waiting tables. I wake up exhausted, wondering whether I could perhaps sleep some more to recover.

How did you first start designing?

Illicitly. I mean, I was avoiding writing a dissertation (aka The Monster).

So I did two designs for p/hop, a fund raiser for Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders). I think that’s what made me actually write out a pattern about a year ago. Then there were two particular colourways of a sock yarn, Clan (a Yarn Yard yarn), that inspired a glove because I failed to make gauge with glove patterns I had bought. And then came the shawls. And that’s where I’m stuck at the moment.

What have been the highlights/ what’s your favourite design?

My life in design is too short to have highlights, really.  But OK,  I’m going to pick not my most popular pattern, but the one where I felt I was really on to something, and that was Galathea. I thought (still think!) I was a perfectly annoying clever-clogs smarty-pants with its unusual, cast-on, one I haven’t seen anywhere else. It keeps the symmetry of a traditional edging pattern – and with only two yarn ends to sew when done.  While on the home stretch of knitting my own Galathea I stumbled upon a Galathea statue in a park in Germany. A good omen.  (OK, I’m also inordinately pleased with the smartly designed baby kimono, stina.)

Finally, any plans for the future?

Yes! I have just (very) recently decided that The Monster and I had to walk our separate ways -- I’ve made the switch from being a stealthily knitting pseudo academic to a knitting designer who reads and knits openly and freely. So I aim to knit. Lots. And submit patterns wildly and incessantly to those cool & lovely online pattern sites we all know.