My own invention

I seem to be venturing off on my own more in the world of knitting lately. For Christmas, I made a caplet for my eleven year old sister with no pattern and only a vague notion of what I was doing. She loved it and wore it the whole time I was visiting for the holidays. It turned out so well that I think I may make a second one and write down what I'm doing this time. 

For my other sister (closer to my age) I made a chunky multi-colored button up collar. For one of my brothers I'm still working on a hat made of pyramids. It's a take-off from Lisa Anne Auerbachs' Bucky-Fuller-inspired hat in the Knit Knit book. It's not very difficult, but involves so many little pieces and a specific way of attaching all of them that it is taking me quite a while to get it finished. It should be pretty impressive once completed. I might try to find a way to do it more efficiently. 

It's been fun working on my own designs. I like the problem-solving aspect of it, but I think I need to get better about writing down what I'm doing. I've got a ravelry.com account and they have a way to share patterns for free, so that would probably be a good way to get some feedback. This new year, I'm going to try to pay attention to my crafting practice more and quit neglecting my etsy shop!

Etsy-tastic

I've finally spent some time photographing and prepping for Etsy several items I made months ago. I always tell myself it will take no time at all, and then, of course it takes all afternoon. Part of the hold up on some of these things was that I told myself I was going to make 10-15 of them for the sake of experiment and design exploration. I stuck to this plan for about two weeks before it began to taper off with a grand total of four completed. I told myself repeatedly that I would continue with the rest, but that hasn't happened yet, so I decided to put what I had up on Etsy since I'm satisfied with them thus far. 

This series of mine is several felted "nest" shapes, akin to an oriels nest, attached to a branch of grape vine curl. The wool is a smokey mix of several fibers and doesn't felt as smoothly as the usual roving. The effect is more organic and I like it. I've been stitching little bright beads into it hoping they'll look like little spoors or seeds or eggs... or.... something like that. They're interesting as necklaces, but I'm thinking of putting them on hair pins as well so it would be as though something had nested in ones hair. 

The woodworking items on Etsy have been taken down at the request of their maker, Chuck. I worked with Chuck at his wood shop, but he's out of business for the time being. I haven't had a chance to talk to him about what happened yet, but I hope it's good news and not bad. 

In reviewing the remaining items, I find myself getting critical of my writing style again. Apparently, writing the product descriptions is the tricky part for most people. In mine, I try to balance candor about how I feel about what I've made while making it interesting and not coming across as patronizing or glib. I'm probably more guilty of over-thinking them! 

Rita has lately had me processing some dyed-in-the-grease wool. I like this sort of thing and how it feels very close to the material. I like the terms for the tools; the doffer, the picker, the flicker, the carder. I also seem to be able to focus for long periods of time on stuff like this-- I get particular about pulling burrs and dense short bits out while carding. She let me take the pulled out bits with me, so now I have dyed wool that is still rather raw in every other way. This will probably be quite interesting to work with...

Follow the Yellow Brick Road

In my quest to know everything there is to know about making stuff, I've begun to learn how to spin. I got to go along to the Michigan Fiber Festival this year with Rita of Yarn Hollow. I already had a neglected drop spindle and had bought a bunch of spinning-roving and used much of it for needle felting (which is a pricey way to do needle felting). I finally got a book, in violation of my usual I'll-figure-it-out-as-I-go method of learning things. This is pretty much how I learned to needle felt, and hang dry wall. I think it was okay with the needle felting and less efficient with the dry walling. 

The book has been quite helpful and I've got one quarter of my roving spun. I was even able to two ply it, which had been a bit of a mystery to me. I understood the twisting in principal, but I didn't understand how one got all of the yarn to do it at once. The Andean method involves a particular way of wrapping  ones hand in yarn and then spinning the two lengths together. 

I mean to get the rest of it spun up soon, but I'm also making socks for a friend of my who's currently in Iraq (and obviously needs socks), and I've got a great idea for a hat (because I obviously need another hat), so focusing on one project at a time is getting tricky. 

Initials inscribed

I packed all ten skeins of yarn for my Dallas trip. On the way down I was very ready for some alone time and, for a while, soundly ignored my fellow passengers attempts to make conversation. I was listening to Naomi Wolf's Give me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries and feeling good about watching the plains go by. Eventually I did get chatty with the other passengers and made a few texan friends. This turned out to be a good thing since my suitcase went missing part way through the trip. I didn't have much in it that I cared much about losing, except for a book I borrowed from a friend and most of the yarn for my sweater. Luckily, one of these new pals of mine discovered it had just been moved into another area- whew! 

By the time I got to my friend John's place, the sweater was about here...

Much of the rest of the sweater was completed at John's apartment during slow quiet mornings and on our road trip to Austin once he finished with work for the week. 

Dallas? Eh. It's okay. When I arrived off the train, John instructed me to find a coffee shop to camp at while he came to fetch me. It was about 4pm and I was in the middle of downtown- and completely unable to find an open coffee shop! I was rather disappointed about this, it doesn't seem very big-city to me to not have some place to camp out at downtown on an afternoon. The district Deep Ellum had some cool sights to see. One could tell they had found Deep Ellum because of the sudden appearance of some very strange and wonderful murals. 

Austin was much cooler. My main argument for the coolness of Austin lies in the discovery that they have the largest urban bat colony in the country. It is a huge bridge that smells like bat shit and it seems to be a popular activity for Austinites to gather at the nearby grassy lawn and watch the exodus of bats in the evening. Other things to like about Austin- one is allowed to ride in the back of pick-up trucks and women are not required to wear shirts. Not that I took advantage of the latter option, but I like options, and I like Austin. We hung out at some very cool galleries/shops/bars/restaurants and went swimming in a river at Red Bud park. My friend Maggie was our lovely guide. I think it was good for John as well. He's based right now in Lawrence, Kansas and Dallas has not been very easy to get used to for the summer. We drove through rural Texas on the way back to Dallas, I knitted, and we talked about many things in a most refreshing way. 

When I got back to Michigan, I had a few inches on one sleeve to go, and of course it took me a week to knit those last few inches and another week to weave the ends in.

Sorry this isn't the best image of it... I learned a new thing about my camera- when one sets the timer, it will take about three or four pictures in quick succession, so as a result I ended up with about 16 pictures of me in various stages of sweater-posing/adjusting my hair/walking/looking at the camera somewhat puzzled as to why is was still clicking. None of them were very good lightingwise, but this one you can see the yolk okay-ish and I'm looking a little blankly confused about the camera, but at least I'm not waving my arms around. So, well, perhaps not the most triumphant imagery, but maybe I can coax a friend into helping me get a better picture later. It still needs to be blocked, but all the same - SWEATER! Ha! Did it! Woooo-hoooo! I don't even care that it hasn't transformed me into that pretty Rowan model. And now I don't feel as intimidated by those long winded patterns. 

Baby's first sweater

I have been knitting for several years now, and I like to think I'm fairly good at it. I've been bold about cables, socks, fancy ribbings, some lace, et cetera. But I've never tried a sweater. Not that they look difficult, they just look so.... big. I've been afraid of finding the right pattern and the right yarn and giving it a try only to abandon it in it's armpits, shuffle the mass of yarn around as I guiltily store the abandoned thing and never get it done. Or that I will finish it and it will suck. It's such a lot of time, energy and expense... How do you know when you've found the pattern that's just right? How do you know you've got the skills to tackle such a project? At what point do you have to admit that even if you do an awesome job, you are not going to be transformed into that pretty brunette who sometimes models for Rowan's knitting books upon putting it on? Upon braver reflection, I think I'm over-thinking this. And I think I have commitment issues. 

I'm also kidding about wrestling with these tough issues. The truth of the matter is more likely that I like small tricky projects better than I like the idea of slogging through 20 inches of stockinette. But I've begun to face my fears, or overcome my habits or whatever it is that will bring me to knit a sweater. 

I've chosen a pattern.

It's the "Retrograde Pullover" by Amy M. Swenson from the Winter 2006 Interweave Knits magazine. The photo attached to the link is different from the one in the magazine. It's designed to be reversible, and I think that's the reverse of the photo I've been looking at. And, yes, it's supposed to be a men's sweater. I still think it will look good on me, and having this guy model it takes the edge off not looking like that *Rowan model in all things knitted whom I mentioned earlier. 

Onto the other fun part- the materials! 

For my yarn I have gotten 10 skeins of a deep deep tursquoise from Yarn Hollow. I was helping Rita get ready for some shows she's going to be at when I found this yarn. I had been mooning over her color "moroccan blue" and wishing it were more green, which is pretty much what this is. I don't know if she has it up on her website, but I've been calling it "moroccan green". 

I've got a swift made out of a coat rack somewhere in the attic... I'll have to put in a movie or audio book sometime this week to wind all of this... 

My plan for the actual knitting is to do it on the train on my upcoming trip to Dallas, TX. It's over 20 hours of travel time. Upon which I may ironically arrive in late-July-Dallas with a wool sweater. If I don't finish the whole thing on the way down, there's always the ride back!

* Let me explain- This particular model is one that a friend and I have built a considerable and (we think) funny mythology about her "character" in the books she's in. We have a long running plan to make illustrated paper dolls to dress up in all the knitting patterns we'll never actually get around to making. We think this is funny, thus my exaggerated pouting. I don't have low self-esteem or a habit of idolizing models or anything like that, I just think it's funny. Just so ya know.