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FUZZY GALORE |
After the usual welcome excesses of Thanksgiving,
both culinary and musical,
I got yesterday to have a good time hanging out with Priscilla
at the great yarn store her sister Lynn manages, Creative Hands
in San Carlos. Way too far for me to drop in regularly, but always
fun when I'm there. Priscilla had made a point of bringing to the West Coast
her Probability Pullover
so we could photograph it as a whole, and not just show a piddly swatch.
I made an attempt when we had breakfast on
Wednesday morning, very nice background I thought with Debbie and Abigail's
weathered door and lush wisteria. Unfortunately, the wisteria turned out
perfect but you could barely distinguish too-sunny Priscilla's features, much
less a single cable on the sweater. Back to Photo 101. This time,
we tried several lightings and conditions and finally there were
a couple suitable to illustrate the article. And I got to fondle
every new yarn in the store in the process! For some unaccountable
reason, nobody seems to be buying the neon green interfacing tube with
the bits of thread caught inside, can't imagine why people have so little
imagination ;-).
Meanwhile my back is still recovering from another day on the loom.
I almost got to finish the first dishtowel, but I was ½ inch short of cutting
it off when we got shooed out of the building. So I'm not getting to
wash it and fondle it till next week. Sigh. Still, I think it looks fine,
if you don't pay too much attention to the selvages, I like the color progression
with the central contrast. I still don't know what it is about me and selvages.
I observed with all my concentration's worth, and as far as I can tell
I do a little tug with the middle and ring finger of my right hand
that I can't handle with my left hand, after each shot and without letting go
of the shuttle,
and that's probably what makes the
left selvage so much better than the right. So I tried practicing,
and naturally over-compensated. Sigh.
Perle cotton is probably the most stupid material for me to be practicing
on, since it shows every variation, but we can consider it a Learning Experience.
At least it's a pleasure to be using a boat shuttle again. I completely agree with not requiring the beginners to spend more money than a simple stick shuttle requires. But it seems to me if they already own a boat shuttle, it's almost cruel to make them go back... Amazing how every fiber variation has a huge amount of expensive gizmo-ism, especially in the US, given to that in general. But some technological advances, like floor looms with treadles, clearly make production so much easier that it's well worth using them. Even if we should all know how to use a backstrap loom...
Today was the annual Blacksheep guild trip up to Petaluma, and the treasure trove of Unicorn Books's warehouse. Yumm! That and the traditional barbecue orgy afterwards were very enjoyable. Not exactly being in a rolling in money phase :-), we were moderate, and concentrated on a book Rosemary Brock had kindly lent us, but which is definitely on the permanent keeper list. This is "Knitting for Anarchists" by Anna Zilboorg (of Turkish socks fame), distributed by Unicorn, ISBN 0-9669153-7-2.
This is way up there in the tradition of Elizabeth Zimmermann, a book to explain in depth what's going on and to encourage you to take control of what you're knitting, so you need never be dependant on a pattern again. She shows clearly what gave me the most difficulty when I was starting, what is a knit stitch and what is a purl one, how to recognize them and how they're formed. She's amazing and unique in recognizing that people knit in very different ways, and very clearly telling you how to adapt the requirements of what you want to do to your favorite method. I've never seen any other US or European book that speaks to people who knit like I do, with an Eastern slant to the stitches, much less treats them as equals, She goes way beyond EZ's introduction of the continental method, and she also talks about knitting 'backwards' (left to right) without making any fuss about it. Aaah.
She explains clearly various easy methods of casting on and off, and shows the esthetic effects of means of increasing and decreasing, something which mere catalogs of them don't do. She encourages you to do cables by eye rather than by instructions, which is bound to work much better. Well, I'm not so sure she ought to be using a metaphor of encouraging illiteracy in the middle of a Dubya presidency :-), but I like the idea of making you critical of what you're reading. And I do enjoy very much the short but very clear introduction to anarchist principles and history. For an applied example, she rightly points out that weaving in ends is the surest way to discourage people from knitting in colors, and by no means necessary. Her approach is very encouraging of whatever you're doing, and her aim is to allow you to experiment a bit in order to make sure you knit what you truly enjoy. She's entirely right, life's too short for the other stuff.
I have to confess that I'm not really fond of the strip-knit sweaters she gives formulas for, possibly because of a too-different color sense. But the book's format is definitely very good - she uses pictures judiciously and always to vastly increase the comprehension of her text. And she uses the best compromise for knitting imho, photos with the relevant part outlined so you can really see clearly what you're supposed to notice. I'm prejudiced in thinking that I can always find more inspiration, so I don't collect picture books much. But this book is the best and most original theoretical one I've found in decades, and any beginner in my radius is going to be reading it :-)..
We also picked up something else very satisfying: You can weave! projects for young weavers, by Kathleen Monaghan and Hermon Joyner, Davis pub. Worcester MA, 2000; ISBN 0-87192-493-5. It's intended for Rose's niece, who took to using the small Ikea loom we brought last year like a duck to water. This is a good introduction to what to do with simple homemade looms (carboard, backstrap, popsicle-stick rigid heddle etc). The instructions are clear, and the pictures really nicely mix examples of complex historical inspiration with items done by grade-school children, without any of the usual condescension. It may be a bit more complex than the niece is ready for at this point, but we're hoping that Mom expands her interest too.
Then we went home and spent the rest of the weekend working on works in progress in need of much attention. Rose is spinning up a storm, grey corriedale on the new spindle. I spun more Lincoln for the elusive upholstery project, hoping I could be ready to steal some time on some loom in the near future. We're still working on some of the scarf presents we started a couple weeks ago.
I'm happy with the way the mohair dyed in lichen turned out. The mohair was
ever so slightly too dark grey for my original aim, but the final product still
has some good bright chartreuse, and I'm liking it enormously. Now to massacre the
rest of that fleece practicing so this small bit is spun perfectly ;-).
We just layered the fleece and wolfbane lichen in a crockpot as per Judith
McKenzie. It simmered on
for.. about a week, by the time we stirred and decided to add some more
lichen every day. Interesting smell, not bad but not really compatible with
a kitchen, we're so grateful to have that new well-ventilated back porch,
although who knows what the neighbors thought...
And I've had this scarf sitting practically done for more than a month,
while I dither about what to do to it next. I want to full it, not as heavily
as the fuzzy bag but more like the
gold Crystal Palace scarf I like so much. Rose
argues that fulling it will make it 1) too small and 2) too stiff.
But meanwhile, you know, I could be weaving a few ends in and
wearing it unfulled, to see whether I like it :-). I need a red scarf
no matter what. So there it is.
Feel like I've been rinsing my mouth out with color at every opportunity.
That hideous weaving sampler was still feeling very
traumatic, every time I saw it I just wanted to spit... I've passed it on to
my loomate, who wants it for reference, so fortunately I don't have to see
it in the house any more. Peggy was really encouraging people to do very small final
projects, 4 inch wide scarves and such things which I'd consider unwearable,
even when they were already experienced weavers.
So I thought I should do a small bit of upholstery, except I ran into
missing drum carder problems and didn't have enough already spun. Back to the
rainbow cotton idea.
I'm still a bit iffy on the whole rainbow idea,
but it's definitely
growing on me as I work. I like the arrangement I picked, where
colors blend in only at the edges and contrast is stronger in the middle.
I've found that it leads easily to
looking only at one color at a time, and that I like every one of them
individually. Certainely it's nice to have someone tell you what the sett
should be, and the stripes lend themselves to easy checking at every step,
a big plus on the simple mechanic side.
I'm afraid I regressed to really childish behavior there. Well, maybe junior high since I was a really good girl in grade school :-). I snuck in to the classroom on the day the other classes meet so I could start warping without Peggy realizing what I was putting on and stopping me before it was too late. It worked, since she only walked by and saw me working on it when more than half was already threaded. And she couldn't see the 6-yard warp neatly beamed, the entire kit. I figured I'd never want to do this project again, and that it was perfectly OK with me if I had to cut half the warp off at the end of the class. After something like 8 weeks wasted on the dog, which is why the projects are in such a rush, I've had all the samplers I'm going to have for a long long while. Someone from my guild wanted 3 dishtowels, was persuaded to warp only for 2, and is all done already, 3 weeks before the end of class. I didn't want that to happen to me, I would have been too mad to end this semester without anything concrete to show for it.
So this was really back-breaking labor. Nothing has ever made me feel so much like an old lady before my time. I figured I was already getting away with something here, there was no way I could attempt to warp front to back on top of everything else, that really shows ;-). And I did want more practice warping back to front by Peggy's method, which was after all the point of taking the class. But the old Leclerc loom I'm on is built to accomodate threading from the front, the back beam comes off easily, and it has no adjustments for the front. I tried to be ingeneous about sitting right in it, but I'd have been on the nigthly tv news, they'd have had to pry me out with the Jaws of Life. So I ended up with my arms stretched out beyond comfort point, and generally leaning on the beater to get to the heddles (and I'm not short), squinting hard the whole time. My chest was bruised by the time I was done, not being accustomed to being used as a weight-bearing body part. And I won't attempt to describe the shooting pains in the neck... I was very disciplined about breaks too.
I understand the reasoning that leads to putting the advanced weavers on all the best looms, and to spread the beginners among the ones that are less than ideal. Like the ones that aren't built for this method, and the old WPA ones, respectable antiques which are a horror to tie up and adjust. But is this a good way to encourage people to keep weaving? This reminds me of what Rita Buchanan says is the way everyone learns to spin: with a not very good fleece that's been compacting for at least 5 years in a friend's garage... This rang so true to me that I'm careful to give beginning spinners a decent spindle and some good fleece, and to steer beginning knitters away from the vilest of acrilycs, even if it's equally important not to have them start with bungling up $150 worth of cashmere.
Anyway, I've also been having bench problems with this loom from the start. I've been discussing loom types with every tall person in my guild, and one who'd started on a Leclerc says she thought that the shooting pain in the lower back was possibly due to the wrong bench height rather than the loom. I have no reason to think I would possibly have a bench that was meant to go with this loom, everything has been moved around too much on this donated equipment, but what I have definitely feels wrong. Never mind it being positioned precisely on top of an electrical groove. There doesn't seem to be any real variation in bench height in the room, so it's not like I can swap with someone else. The kindergarden chairs provided for warping don't do a bit of good for a loom where you can't get close to the heddles. There are a couple plastic institutional chairs that actually I think work better for me, they're lower than the benches, but they aren't often available.
I've been wondering all along why people don't just use good old secretarial chairs, since they're meant for real sitting, and a well-placed little pneumatic squirt would certainely take care of this needing different heights for different tasks. I was thinking maybe there was a problem with needing to brace yourself somehow that'd make the wheels unsuitable. Fireside, which makes the most incredibly yummy looms, has a very expensive bench which slides sideways back and forth on gliders, it's actually very disconcerting. But Sandra Rude now tells us that she uses a secretarial chair herself, and that there is no drawback to that. Aaah. Really looking forward to that. Guess people are really into matching benches, from a furniture point of view, kind of like they used to use those spindly little spinning chairs, the ones where my knees are in my chest and half my butt fits on? I'd much rather make nice handwoven upholstery for a chair that doesn't kill me.
I didn't do too badly with the warping otherwise, all 560 ends of it (twice as much as I'd done before, sharing the task at that). There was not a single threading mistake, but I got 3 crosses going between the heddles and the reeds and broke 2 threads (one by stepping on it as I tried to balance between the loom crank and the warping boards that stick out from the wall right above it). Had fun trying to figure out the wrong amounts of weights to hang the new threads with, it was a good rite of passage for me to do that, like one's first dropped stitch. I do think that it's easier to make inadvertent crosses when you're warping back to front, but I don't want to stir up any arguments about the virtues of that method :-).
So see the little extra heading I wove so I could bring it home and wave it around
while bragging :-). It's only a beginning, but it sure felt good.
I wove half a towel in 2 hours, including heading and retying and a fair amount of
dithering about how to organize the colors, and a lot more hesitation
about how much thread to put on each bobbin for one section. It'd be nice to have
20 bobbins to fill up with each color, so I wouldn't be getting back to the winder
every 10mn, but I had such a hard time finding even
these (too common I guess) that I doubt I'll be able to.
But maybe this is Athena's way of telling me to get up and stretch my back
more often.
I had some serious selvage problem at some point. My resolution and focus stink, but
I think you can see what I mean :-). Unfortunately I solved
it unscientifically. That is, I both spread out the warp over the back beam
because it had become unaccountably narrower in the warping tussle,
and started giving each shot
more slack. I suspect that the former was the real problem, but I'll have
to try getting back to my original amount of slack to prove it to myself.
Next time, when I'm fresher...
[Friday] OK guys, I've already had enough of this one. While it's indeed quite fiber-related in some ways, the tale of how Lily Chin claims that she thought of my Vegan Fox first is too sordid to take that much more space here. I've moved the entire text and all related news to a separate page, because let me make it clear that I'm not in any way retracting my complaints. Do read it and weep, but let's clear things out here for the real topic, what my yarns and I are up to.
A ton of presents are in the offing within the next couple weeks.
A birthday, an anniversary, a get-well...
Naturally, knitting seems the most appropriate in all cases :-).
So I've been taking advantage of this to explore all the great reversible
scarves designed by
Esther Bozak. I've liked the ones I've seen
very much, but I'm a bit lacking in imagination so I think it'd be
helpful to everyone to see them in the yarn, so to speak.
Part of this is that, because as presents, some of them will end up..
in a word, dull. Can't very well undertake to reform people's tastes in color just
because you want to give them something :-).
So we may as well try to entertain ourselves with a more interesting pattern, eh?
We're killing 2 birds with one stone, and writing up
the patterns while making the presents. Mmm. I hope that's not
too crass. But meanwhile I adore the one above, colors and texture
and pattern and all...
Today's walk to Tartine for a great pain au chocolat, and to Imagiknits, the great knitting store on 18th and Sanchez, yielded a nice bonus: a truck with nice loud band, very dressed up. Banners: "funk the vote", "pretty girls vote", and my favorite "vote, you idiots". Run, if you haven't done your civic duty yet, there's still time :-).
Got thank you notes from Zoya's kids. Aaauw!
"Ms Rosey and Mrs Hemsley:...You are great woolers and sewers.
Are you going to come again to room 3?...
I would like to give a complement to you two because you are spontanieous, mature and nice...
Why does sheep wool have oil on them? How old are the sheep when you save them?" Lots
of artistically rendered sheep to go with that, including one with a perfect Pokemon
face and a very well-done, sheep-like butt. Well, I think mostly our timing was good,
we may of course have been fascinating (and mature, and how!), but meeting the actual sheep
a few days later would make the whole enterprise hang together much more in their
impressionable little minds. Now to answer them suitably, and especially to talk about the
burning question of why sheep wool is so oily. We looked for a nice sheep poster for them
at SOAR,
endangered breeds with huge locks would have been good, but didn't find anything suitable alas.
I'm sure we'll think of something to make sure sheep stay on their minds.
We did go to
SOAR,
and had a roaring good time. Rose was in Kathryn Alexander's 'energized singles'
workshop, where she learned to make boingy yarns and knit with them (with
a lot of cursing, at least after hours). Part of her problem was that she was
the only continental knitter in a class
full of throwers, and she basically had to learn to throw before she moved on to arcane
considerations of clockwise and counterclockwise wraps, S and Z twists.
They did several variations of stockinette and ribs, alternating twist finely or in blocks.
Then she learned how to make every
possible variation of entrelac, although not yet the regular kind. That's OK with me,
I'm an entrelac nincompoop myself and am looking
forward to someone making me learn anything.
Think in exchange I'll teach her to knit backwards
though, it's indispensible for all those 5 stitches back and forth maddening
moments. As a wonderful bonus we got custody of a couple of Kathryn's sweaters overnight,
so we feel quite penetrated with the many possible variations of stitches
which she so ingeneously puts together. I really like how asymmetrical
her designs are, and need to incorporate more of that to wake myself up.
I didn't get my first choice but took a fine workshop instead, about making vests. Now I have no intention of making any vests beyond my first one, the one where I ran out of natural colored fleece for the sleeves... The same general principles apply. But we had a good balance of teachers, Rain Olympia Crow who has been taking a lot of tailoring classes and who's very oriented toward embellishments and showed us interesting finishing techniques, Sarah Swett who does amazing color works and was very good at making people think through the global design, and Deb Mentz who did her usual mind-boggling color stuff. Much as I enjoyed the whole thing, it was Deb who really got me fired up, with lots of samples of color mixes, demonstrations of the old Kaffe Fasset principle of adding more colors to anything, only with some rhyme or reason, if you see what I mean.
I didn't go in with any design idea at all, but fell in love with one of Sarah's inspirational photographs, a grey gnarly fence-post on a background of dry winter grass, with some fluorescent lime lichen on top. Had to try 4 times to get the right color mix for the lichen, which was very educational. Finally realized that the electric green was dominating too much, and that all I really needed was electric yellow. I told Deb how disappointed I was that after all that I only came up with 5 colors together :-), but she tried to reassure me that if 5 colors is what it takes it's OK, even though 8 would be more complex, basically told me to go mix that electric yellow with other colors to get more variations of it.
Now this was kind of a silly exercise, since there happened to be tons of lichens on the ground right around the place, and I came home with enough to make a very good natural chartreuse :-), I'm going to go put it in the crockpot as soon as I upload this. And I have some light grey mohair which will make the finished product much more interesting than color alone. I must learn to spin Judith McKenzie's 'wolf yarn', where you end up with complete mohair locks caught in the yarn, it's the perfect texture for this. I have a workshop with her in 2 weeks, long enough to massacre enough mohair on my own beforehand and to get her to spiff up my technique before I get into the serious dyed one. I didn't even try for the grey, since I knew that I had a natural-colored fleece at home that'd do perfectly. All I'll need is to knit vertically, so the color streaks mimic the cracks in the bark better.
But I also came up right off with a good mix of colors for
the background winter grasses.
Only the problem is that background is by definition kind of
a large area, and after talking with Sarah I decided that I don't want any
of it - not my kind of color, very blah, and while I'm happy
I could figure it out I certainely don't want to wear it. I think my group-let
was a bit shocked when I said that, because they liked it :-), but they
were polite about it. Sarah also helped me think of ways to make the design
less symmetrical, which is hard when you have a front opening. I think
it's silly to make anything but cardigans to wear in San Francisco, if
anything because going up some hills requires serious ventilation,
but also because you might run into any new variation of climate at any street corner,
and tangling your glasses in a pullover after ripping off a jacket
and backpack isn't practical.
And most asymmetrical collars or fronts hang really funny when they're open,
which is often enough that you have to think of it seriously up front.
So a big lighter-grey area at one side of the top, echoing a bark-less area
on the post, would help. And rather than make the band all chartreuse mohair,
I'll have to be better at mimicking the placement of the tufts of lichen.
All in all, it was well worth going, even with our usual catsitting problems. There were some organizational hitches like no communal space so you didn't get to knit or spin and hang out with the interesting people you met in class, just fought for a spot to toss down the airplane-quality meals and tried to have a quick chat at breaks. And my class was huge, nearly 40 people, so we ended up having more of a retreat format, where you spend ½ day with each person in turn, which was emphatically not the idea of signing up for a 3-day workshop ;-). But we feel super-inspired... the gallery had amazing stuff, we kept leering at what everyone was wearing, it was all quite something. One should definitely see one's betters in action once in a while, especially when you can get a mix of far-away ones.
However when we came back I got to rush back to weaving class, get a good grade
on my midterm (woo woo! it's been a long while...), and cut the sampler off the loom.
Mercifully. Ever seen anything so butt-ugly? Oy veh. It boggles the mind,
and we are not getting converted to the joys of sampling.
All right, let's not even get into the actual mechanics of weaving, the
fact that yours truly can't do a selvage to save her life, the regular
mis-treadlings, or that we alternated 2 people with very different beating philosophies.
What we have here is a color catastrophe. We had our warp chains done before
we got assigned to double up on a specific loom, so we had no chance to pick colors
that would remotely work together. My navy and peach was a good contrast,
and so were Tony's white and green, and they'd be fine on their own.
There was little chance that they'd be fine together however, and we're quite
OK with the ultimate goal which was to cut them apart lengthwise.
Where we could have helped it would have been in using white and navy wefts,
but we blew it. We'd have had lots of contrast so we could see what we were
doing better, perhaps cutting down on the mistreadlings,
and each stripe would have looked like it really belonged on at least one half
of the sampler. Instead, we have 2 wefts of the same value, one which greys
out the otherwise better colors as you'd expect grey to do,
one which interacts sickeningly with all of them and which you never really
get to appreciate by itself, and not enough contrast anywhere.
Sigh. This makes the first one I ever did, the one that looked like it
belonged in a 70s gynecologist office, seem like a winner.
Better put this one behind us...
Well, it's not like we forgot the camera itself, but we didn't manage enough breath to take a single picture all day. Imagine 18 cute kids all learning to spin together... Our friend Zoya's 2nd grade class was the scene of the crime, and we got everyone into fleece enough that some serious hand-washing had to be done before lunch and then before birthday cookies. This was quite different from when we go to demonstrate at Slide Ranch, in that there weren't 300 kids :-) of course, so we got to talk to the same ones over and over again, learn some names, figure out who was doing what, whose mom had knitted an eyelash shawl, whose had a sewing machine, who'd seen this before in 1st grade etc. Several really quick learners in there, as could be expected. All this was tied in to Farm Day which is happening later this week, where they'll get to see real sheep sheared and talk to them.
So we made a couple mistakes. One was to bring only enough CD spindles to have one group-let at a time working, we should just have brought 18 and left it at that, there was definite disappointment that they couldn't take them home and show their parents how well they were doing. We also tried to have everyone not only spin on a spindle but have a turn at the wheel, and didn't quite make it through every one of them, alas. But I think it was good to try, as we got to talk about how the process was the same, draft, slide, hang on to the twist. And we got a couple of enthusiastic little helpers to learn to treadle in the process. The other problem is that even the carded rolags should have been pre-drafted, and in smaller bits. It's all too easy to take an entire rolag, get the twist into it and bam! 'it's broken' :-). There was a lot of interest in the carding process, and much disappointment that we didn't let them do it. That's because we figured we couldn't very well ask for proof of tetanus shots, and even if they were up to date nobody likes to get their kid back looking like they've been dragged in thistle. So next time we bring small dull combs...
What we did right was to talk about how in Peru it's the 6 year olds who do the bulk of the spinning for the whole family. Much interest in that part, and in how they teach each other. And we kept talking about how wool is just like hair and kept up the comparison through the whole process. And we told them how long people've been doing that, and how good spindles are, and how useful baskets are because you can carry more food (an exceedingly interesting point, even from our side), and comparing the wheel to a bicycle, which they all understood very well. Even better to bring knitted samples so they could see and feel what the finished product was. "You make your own socks!!!" And it was good that Rose bit her tongue on explaining how much longer it takes to make socks for me, whose feet are so big...
Did we mention before that teachers are saints?
Hardly have been having time to knit, but swatching hard at lumpy sweater.
Not entirely lumpy, one strand of even Iceland, with
one strand of lumpy Labrador, I like this.
Good balance of texture, because of the Iceland there are no really bare
spots, and because of the Labrador it looks a lot more
interesting than even yarn. And I like how the solid makes
it more unified, while the print makes it more interesting, especially since
the lumps end up different colors. Balance is good.
Good gauge too, 2st/in, I don't need to be balanced about that at all ;-).
My main fiber accomplishment lately has been spinning. Finished all the
lovely green/brown stuff from Nancy Finn. I had a hard time with the silk,
had to kind of ration the spinning time, as
teasing the stuff from the silk cap is hard on my hands, especially
as I was trying to make it fatter than it wanted to be. I now see the point of
expensive top, which does kind of spin itself, even if it's so unforgiving of
bad technique... I'm looking forward
to putting it all together, emphasizing the lumps I already made in the
merino/silk mix by holding them at 90o and wrapping them around the
much thinner silk binder.
We banged our head too long on trying to get together a pattern for
a formal Priscilla's Probability Pullover,
but with no success in sight.
Well, mostly that's because we're lazy, no-good bums, just like our parents think.
This sweater works well at the kind of gauge that Priscilla is willing to take on
for an entire sweater, 6-8st/in. But we weren't really willing to go above 3/in.
So here is the sorry result. No doubt it'd be more exciting in orange :-).
But we can't fix this with a printed yarn, you'd lose sight of the cables.
And the real problem with it is that when your gauge is
too big it gets boooring..
Priscilla also had the advantage of being bigger, so while there was more going
on per inch, there were also more inches to keep the eye occupied.
This
miserable swatch would be about half a front, and there is not enough cabling
going on here to keep one from going to sleep. I know I blather about how
this is only a statistically even swatch, and a real one would have clumps of
cables, but even a clump wouldn't be much here, and might look odd rather than
interesting if it happened. Back to the drawing board.
I still think a wide-ish scarf would be the best thing to do this in,
for a lazy big-gauge knitter...
Meanwhile we had Alfred over for dinner and picked his brains about
a project for my weaving class. I've got some rainbow perle cotton
which is a present from Paula, and which I should use, if only because one
less box of fiber in the sweatshop would make me very happy,
there is no question of buying more fiber for the next decade.
This one is from an outfit called The Lunatic Fringe in Florida,
who could resist a name like that :-)?
Although the rainbow theme has been so overdone for so long
that it's hard to feel enthusiastic about any results, if you see what I mean.
But they explain several ways to do color studies, you can either arrange
the colors in straightforward rainbow order, way boring,
or you can alternate each color with its complement, too violent and still boring,
or they suggest something where you blend reds or greens at each edge,
and have more contrasting yellow/purple bands in the middle. I think
I'll go with the latter, if only because it seems less...usual.
Peggy Osterkamp, my current weaving teacher, talks eloquently about how she thinks "structure people" can be happy never really doing anything else than swatches, while "color people" have this compulsion to make something useful every time. This was very interesting to me in part because it confirmed the actual existence of swatch people :-). But I think she's confusing 2 issues, I'm sure there are structure people who want useful stuff, she just happens not to be one. Meanwhile of course I'm squarely in her stereotype of color people, although of course as ambiguous about structure vs color as I'm ambidextrous, just more color-ed than her. But there are several members of Blacksheep for instance who make a beautiful scarf every time they get a new idea, all of them lovely. I don't see why it's so much more work to make a scarf rather than a swatch... and you don't have to wear the dogs, but you can't wear the successful swatches.
But I truly am suffering through this ugly sampler of ours (OK, there is one pair in the class who's making a sampler I wouldn't mind looking at later, but one..). So I think this color study is going to have to be dishtowels. Partly because since Alfred gave us a handwoven dishtowel it's been in constant use and I've become obsessed with them. Partly because I like the Sharon Alderman approach of one warp, one threading, and then a variety of tie-ups and treadlings giving a set of towels that look good together without being the same. Seems a lot more.. lively that trying for 5 yards of the very same fabric for a shirt, it would keep me from ending up gnawing at the front beam in frustration like some deranged daschund. So I think I'll go with twills, and see how many I can come up with. The other good part about dishtowels is that they make good presents ;-). Even when they're made of mercerized perle cotton, and therefore not as absorbent as they should be. The next set will be more functional, if I can still stand cotton afterwards.
Finally, I at last got some pictures of the Knit-Out up... Sheesh, it's a wonder the camera batteries didn't give out first. Sorry!
Today we get to see the long-awaited inaugural issue of
knitty.com, a new online
knitting magazine with fun designs. And yours truly got to publish the
Vegan Fox
pattern (that we were working on in mid-August)!
We're very, very happy. Feeling very accomplished,
and unnaturally lucky :-).
And also happy about the very existence of knitty.com, which is one of the
most exciting things to come along in a good while. Check it out!
For a shameless plug, we're offering a kit for the fox too. And having a good time coming up with alternative colourways. I think the silver fox version would be opera material...
Meanwhile Rose has rediscovered the soothing properties of spinning, she's been at it all week every free minute. Not that there were many of those. She's almost through with that entire bag of Jacob, which was larger than the original sheep to begin with. She says she's too tired to think of what to do with the yarn though... And my hands have been too beat-up with the hours of scrubbing the old place to even think of anything like that. I'm consoling myself with rearranging the fiber library. Look forward to an annotated bibliography soon.
Found circuitously via knitty this very fun site: color concepts for memorable women. Very interesting choice of women, but I don't fully agree with their interpretations. Babe Didrickson for instance ought to be in 50-ish US pastels, while Edith Piaf belongs solely in black! I assure you she was never seen in anything else, I believe she was even buried in black. You might have a slight bit of charcoal mixed in, but nothing else :-). Lucille Ball however is spot-on. Mmm. If I were memorable, what would my color concept be? Foxy I guess, it's probably why it so inspired me.
Eager to escape the remaining cleaning and boxes for a bit, we stumbled on a really fun thing to do with one's Saturday. The 3rd Saturday of the month, actually. There's something called Elkus Ranch near half Moon Bay, a UC program of mostly introducing the kiddies to farms. And a group of spinners meets there regularly. Alas, this used to be run by Min Moore, who we adore, but who moved to the Sierra foothills the same day we moved here ourselves. So we didn't get to see her, but there's all the same a very nice group of people, many of which we already know from the Blacksheep guild. And it was -so- fun and so relaxing to be sitting outside on the porch spinning away, not to mention the potluck lunch was worth the trip in and of itself. Since those wonderful Rippers Anonymous evenings in New Haven, I really appreciate fiber people who like food...
Rose got into the big bag of tricolor Jacob roving we got at the CA sheep and wool fest in Booneville in June. Let me see, everyone asked, that was from Robin Lynde at Meridian Jacobs in Vacaville. Jacob sheep, a rare breed, are very cute short little sheep with multiple sets of horns and a white coat with usually dark brown spots, kind of like the Holstein of sheep, very unusual effect. The roving is striped, with some white, some brown, and some grey. Rose didn't have too easy a time of it, since the colors draft at slightly different rates, but Judith McKenzie had given us good advice on spinning top and moving your elbow to change the angle and get to different colors.
I got into some lovely merino/silk blend roving
(note the roving part again, our drum carder is en pension chez Alfred while we move...)
from Nancy Finn of Willits, soft greens and browns and blues.
I spun it as fat as I could on
the Jensen wheel, and tried conscienciously to make regular lumps. Not as
successful as you might think, I guess I've been practicing even yarn too
much, but still, I got the hang of it as I went. Now I have to spin a fine
silk yarn from silk caps dyed to match by Nancy, and sample a bit to decide
whether I'll ply the merino blend together first, or maybe Navajo ply it to
preserve the color separation, and overply so I can cable back with the silk.
Maybe I could just ply the silk and merino together. Maybe I could slub the merino
around the silk a bit, to emphasize my inadequate lumps, and re-cable it
back with another ply of silk.
I only want a scarf, not too large, so I'd probably need a total of 100-150 yds,
but I have
Wow, look at that! What progress :-). Well, I don't want to hear any complaints,
at least we're connected... Let me see, the real power cord needs an adapter so
I've got 3 extension cords looping over boxes to get behind the bookcase,
and the phone extension goes all the way to the kitchen at the other end of the house,
about 50 feet. Something about the jack in this room, and we can hardly splice
directly into the line when we can't get to that side now can we? But I'm so
glad it works at all. If you have to move, always move with a sysad on hand
is all the advice I'll be giving today :-).
Oy veh. Well, the Big Day is almost upon us, and as you can see we're ready. Sort of.
As close as we're going to get :-). But don't worry, the connectivity is all taken
care of, we should only be offline tomorrow, and that mostly because it's unlikely
that we'll have the strength to crawl around and plug all this stuff back in
right after we're in the new place, surrounded by towers of boxes. Better to go drown our sorrows
in croissants at the nearest net cafe. It seems fully
half our stuff is either fiber, or fiber-related books. It figures :-).
We have kept up a steady stream of talks, collapsed on the couch,
where we resolve to sew up entire wonderful wardrobes
in the next couple months, or at least pants we can fit into, and to donate all the rest to the
Depot for Creative Reuse,
our favorite place to shop. And learn to use the knitting machine so we can use up
all that fleece quickly. Hey, at least we'll be able to sew and spin at
the same time now!
And for those of you who worry about these things, our old Juliette is doing quite well
through it all. We've kept her corner just the same, and while she seems at times
a bit annoyed at the amount of Extreme Housework we've been doing lately, she
doesn't seem so worried about it that she can't nap just as usual.
She can sleep right through those tape riiips, and sneezes less than us when
we kick up dust. Good thing she's gotten so mellow about the vacuum that we have
to pick her up and move her to get to the hair underneath her...
We've arranged for good company for her during the event itself, our mellow
friend Eric (need a good DBA with 20 years of experience, much of it in biotech?
write him at slobluz@pacbell.net),
and hopefully she'll adapt to the larger territory without any problems.
Especially if we carry her around with us as we move around for the first few days.
And yes, I've packed all her stuff, the food, the comb, the pills, the
can opener, the fur mice, in a single box...
Of course I promptly packed away the 2nd ball of Rose's current pair of socks. Shit happens. It didn't occur to me that she didn't have both balls together. But it's not like she's got a lot of energy, even for idiot knitting :-). In solidarity, I have hardly done anything to my own scarf-in-progress. No doubt we'll be all too happy to knit instead of unpack in a few days...
So I finally finished fulling the hairy bag. I'm now such an expert with the toilet
plunger, you could call me The Arm... One would almost wish for a major plumbing
disaster so I could demonstrate my skills, my stamina :-).
But, bitching apart, I really like that method,
it's the first time I use it for anything major (and not just for a little dyeing
or yarn abuse),
and it's really good. No distortion at all, even fulling all through the piece, it did a much
better job than most washing machines I've seen. And it took some elbow grease, granted,
in fact I spread it out over 3 days. I'm moving you know, so I'm already getting plenty of
exercise :-(. But I'm amazed that something that size came out so well.
My only bit of unhappiness with the project is that I used double-crochets, and if I had to do it over again I'd single-crochet. The reason is that even with a lot of fulling there are holes in there, distinct ones. I'd prefer a bag where I can carry knitting needles and pens without having to think about it. I'm just going to line it, I certainely have many lovely orange fabrics that'd be suitable. But if I were you, I'd try to full single crochets instead... On the other hand, the Fizz really pops out incredibly well, if I say so myself, and it's really soft. I think we'll definitely declare this one a success :-).
And in the middle of all this, there is a lot of progress on the move.
We seem to be awfully tired all the time, and competing for the ice
pack a lot, but a whole lot of the packing is done, and
much of the fragile stuff has already made it over. See how
the big spinning wheel just seems to belong in there :-)?
But really, I feel like I've got to do a lot of sewing and spinning as soon as we settle in, because I've got too much fabric and fleece, entirely too much. It's easy to get into when you don't have enough time, it's fantasy substituting for reality, but it's not a good thing. Sandra Betzina is the one who pointed out first in the sewing world that it's a nice feeling to get some great fabric, rush home and sew it right up, and that you can't do that if you've got your weight in fabric in the closet already, at least you can't do it without some unnecessary guilt. And Judith McKenzie, who's a wise woman, points out that sheep grow fleece every year, and they're growing more good fleece as we speak, there's no need to get into a scarcity mood over such an abundantly renewable resource...
Priscilla escaped the grad school salt mines for just a weekend, and I managed to spend some time with her. It's always a really good idea to pick her up at the airport to prevent any later panic about not enough time ;-). This time I didn't do as well as my best pickup so far, which included being whisked right to Fengari, the super the yarn store in Half Moon Bay, and lunch at Barbara's Fish Trap in Princeton. Ah well, we can't always be perfect, and I'll be lucky if I live to top that one. But I did get to hang out with her at length at the very nice store her sister Lynn now works at, Creative Hands in San Carlos.
So I should have mentioned this at the time, but guess what I got from her for my birthday?
These socks are from cheater yarn by Opal, and really cool. What I mean by cheater
yarn is that all those stripes and elaborate fair-isle areas are all printed
in the yarn, a person just knits on and on in plain stockinette and it all
does itself. Addictive... And no problem with different thicknesses, or tighter spots
during color changes, or with weaving lots of ends in when you're done.
There are other versions of cheater yarns, mostly by Regia, the main
difference I think is that Opal sells you a 100g ball that makes a whole pair,
rather than a 50g ball that makes a single sock, and the Opal repeats are
longer, sometimes it seems more than half a sock's worth.
So the weird part of this is that Rose had been working on some Opal socks of her own,
and look at that, they're darker but they're definitely similar. So much for
making fun of people who wear matching jackets and get their hair cut by
the same person ;-). Ah well, I'm certainely not giving up mine, and I'm
quite sure she isn't giving up hers, we'll just have to try and coordinate
dressing in the morning.
While I was hanging out with Priscilla, I did something I hoped wasn't too offensive.
Rose had made me those incredible socks. The cover design from the little square
Vogue Knitting book (first volume of socks), the pop-art ones.
They were the ones I had been working on
in hand-dyed handspun when I lost them somewhere in NY three years ago, and I'd been feeling
wistful about them ever since. So she took this odd assortment of colors
we'd gotten, all Jacques Fonty yarns from the Straw Into Gold closing sale
(vultures! shame on us!), and made me a pair. I was very happy. But it turns
out she hates to weave in ends, and these are not cheater socks, there were
a lot of ends, and the almost-done socks were languishing in the basket by the couch.
I didn't want to get demanding about it, it seems really ungracious to be
stomping around making someone do something she hates to finish your present...
So I hoped that if I just sock-napped them and finished them in private she wouldn't mind.
Turns out she's relieved :-). Whew.
I should add that Priscilla and I gave a very careful look to the new "updated" edition of the Vogue Knitting reference book. Ha! Everything is exactly the same all the way through, with one exception: they changed the designs in the last chapter. Ditched the leaping reindeers that we're kind of fond of, and replaced the ugly fair-isle by one that's so cosmically ugly it's almost funky. But really, what a scam! This was a book that was mis-marketed to begin with, they used Elizabeth Zimmermann as consultant for shaping, Kaffe Fassett for color, and Barbara Walker for stitches, and you just can't do any better than that, these are all the geniuses of the 20th century in their domains. But do you think they bragged about it? Nooo. They thought the VK name was all we needed to know, and positively concealed the names of these people. I guess that was more justified back then before they were stupid enough to get rid of Nancy Thomas, who is the epitome of style (and now working for Lion Brand, where she is editing some of the coolest free patterns on the net). So I guess the VK printing finally ran out or something, and they noticed knitting was getting cool again, so they changed the cover, reprinted the whole thing with a reprehensibly sloppy printing job, and just changed those few final designs. Harumph. No doubt some poor sops will be rushing out to get a new copy on principle, so we recommend that you keep and eye peeled for the first edition on ebay or at your local bookstore, and snap it up for cheap.
Don't get me wrong - the Vogue Knitting reference is probably the one knitting book I'd take to a desert island. It covers every major topic in a very rational and helpful way. Some people might have the brain capacity to learn half a dozen cast-ons for different circumstances and retain them, but I can barely manage my favorite. I think it's great to have them all handy, with hints about what to do in what circumstances. When I struggled through 5 revs of casting off the Cabled Sweater From Hell, 4 years in the making, 400 stitches around, it was VK that finally told me what cast-off to use that would retain full elasticity on 2x2 ribbing, and let me tell you that a yarn-needle castoff would never have crossed my screen spontaneously. The thing that makes the book worth its weight in gold is the chapter where they show you very clearly how to make each kind of neck/sleeve/opening, and let you make up your own modular sweater. Anyway, there are other books I love, but this one is definitely the one.
And finally, so you get the full flavor of Priscilla's visits, let me give you a link to the other birthday present from her, celebrating the ancient art of spinning and the ageless beauty of women If this was from California, we'd never hear the end of it. But hey, more power to the ladies of Maine :-). The favorite on this coast seems to be pretty unanimously the one we call "the bouquet of butts".
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