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FUZZY GALORE |
Crystal Palace came out with a real winner of a free pattern -
this interpretation of the scarf Martha wore to court this spring.
Vegan Martha! What a concept. Great for the Queen of Barbecue :-).
That was what she was doing last time we saw her on tv, condescending to some poor black guy, sticking her finger in his barbecue sauce and licking it 'naughtily' in a vain attempt to emulate Julia Child. This is so alien on so many Connecticut levels that it's hard to know what's the most boggling. Now you could see Julia herself being very matter-of-fact about killing and skinning the cute wittle wabbit before she put it on the grill, and tanning the skin for the next winter so as not to waste anything. But Martha?? Still, we were so taken by the whole idea that we had to put up a kit.
After a bit more mathematical struggle (what's up with that?? early Alzheimer?),
I made another capelet. This one is for us, and in the new
Poof that I adore, it's so soft, it's
so light, it's so warm!! It's like wearing a compliant kitty
on your shoulders. Without the claws that real kitties
I've known would use in the circumstances.
So yes, I posted the pattern for you. Now I'm torn about what to do next. The bag, the poncho, the hat?? I hate that indecisive paralysis, will try to make first the project for which I can find both yarn and needles and get it over with. Time for a bit of crochet for comic relief I think. Meanwhile Rose, who is much less angst-ridden for some reason, is working on another Poof item, a poncho in great colors. Hold your breath.
Our friend Zoya came to visit before the school year starts again.
She's not just a great painter, she's a very versatile artist,
among other things we keep gushing to everyone about her wonderful garden,
with pottery and mosaics nestled in with the native plants.
Not only that, but she's the
only person we know who didn't have a nervous breakdown while
doing major work on her house, but instead she had a huge spurt of
creativity. Now that's the way to deal with stress - break a bunch of china
and make furniture with it! Of course as a painter she had more
than the usual angst about picking paint colors, but we love
how her house is always evolving, and the touches like the
small shells hand-sewed to the sheer curtains.
Anyway, she's started for real a project that she'd been mulling over, making incredibly beautiful doorknobs and drawer pulls from river rocks, and not just for her own kitchen. After looking around for ages, she finally had the attaching hardware specially made, so it could be stainless-steel and strong enough. We understand, since we spend quite a lot of time looking for hair clips ourselves, ingredients of the vegan fox kit, even though we both have short hair...
While Zoya was here we did a sweep through the hip clothes stores of course.
Ha! It had the usual results - a chorus of 'we could do that!'
accompanied with cries of horror at the prices. So the upshot
was that we made her a lacey summer
capelet. Like that stuff a lot... and it was a piece of cake,
once I detangled from my mathematical errors (oops! Poor Rose,
who had to rip). I think we managed the
correct ratio so it wouldn't be too floppy, but one could still
scratch one's nose if necessary. After the 'Fashion Victim' thing,
I was a bit put out by the restriction on arm movement implied
by this Fall's hot items.
I read a really great textile book:
Fashion Victim by Michelle Lee.
This is from the point of view of a real-life fashion victim, who
confesses to having been trapped into the awful (but all too common)
cycle of endless attempts to keep up with fashion, in NY no less,
with attendant damage to wallet and self-esteem.
This could easily have been one of those boring, self-pitying confessionals
with trite psychological views that the publishing industry churns out daily.
Instead she turns it into a great expose of the fashion industry,
and goes on to analyze thoughtfully the many ways in which fashion
victimizes all of us.
She starts with an expose of how fashion works in general, how advertisers and magazines work together with designers and manufacturers, with an insider view she can only have acquired in her work at fashion magazines. Her explanations of how the cycle from first glimmer of a fad to discount-store ignominy has sped up recently is one of the best I've ever read. Alas, our beloved web is largely responsible for making sure people in the furthest reaches are aware of what's in and most importantly what's not, even when they cling fiercely to remnants of local standards. Unfortunately, the consolidation of media outlets that has recently accelerated is also contributing not only to political censorship but to fashion uniformity.
She talks at length about what she calls McFashion, both the dumbing down of clothes and the homogeneization of the offerings. This is particularly interesting to me after my long conversations with my French sister this spring, who explained that after a brief fling with cheap and disposable fashion, the French recoiled in horror at the fit and quality, and went back to paying a lot for a few good things as they've always done. Apparently some teenagers give in to the lure of McFashion, but usually only as a temporary measure, and the over-30 fuddy-duddies ignore the whole phenomenon resoundingly. This is what leads French women to wearing so many scarves, they liven up the eternal 3 black outfits considerably. But seriously, If often long for good fit, quality fabric, and good construction these days, that's why I'm sewing so much.
Going with that downward trend in the offerings is the current mixing of Hollywood and fashion, the successor to the fame of supermodels which gripped the world in the 80s. And Michelle points out how this is partly responsible for the extreme thinning of actresses lately. It just hadn't occured to me that of course an actress who wants to easily borrow designer clothes better fit into designer samples, which are also getting smaller and smaller. Well, there goes that career possibility :-)..
Michelle then goes on to explain how sweatshops are an integral part of the modern approach to fashion, even in the rare occasions when the labor actually stays in this country. And then she addresses the classical 'victim' issues more literally, talking about the many ills that can befall people who disregard comfort too much. I loved the study about how adding 2" to pants waistbands cured most gastro-intestinal complaints, Priscilla our in-house epidemiologist (recently advanced to PhD candidacy!!) will appreciate that one. And since I've been pondering the flammability of clothes a lot lately, trying to find the perfect outfits for making glass buttons with explosive gases and 1500oF melting point, her discussion of flamability standards horrified me. I just want to point out here that I did formal experiments with running my sacrificial wool sweater right in the torch flame, and while the smell was unpleasant it didn't catch on fire at all. Anyway, I was also quite amused at Michelle's documentation of the radical gyrations that the fashion world has gone through on the topic of fur in the last 20 years. Harumph. We'll keep using eyelash yarns, thank you very much.
Did I mention I think this is the best book since 'sex and suits'? Get it! My local library has it, yours probably does too...
I've been doing a lot of yoga lately. I even spent
much of August at the teacher training from
IYT.
Some of it was too much like boarding school, like being scheduled
every minute.
Hated getting up before dawn. Did not enjoy one bit the
bland, garlic-less food. And we won't mention what my knees thought of
the whole thing. But I'm feeling more stretched out than
I have in years, and in a good state to teach, which was entirely
the point. Teachers were on the whole great, and things were
generally very well organized, it as entirely worth the pain.
I'm still totally amazed that I survived at all :-).
And of course, I wrote up for you my deep thoughts on the
relationship of yoga and knitting.
Naturally, I found a few fellow knitters in the bunch, we're everywhere now. I only had to tell one person to rip; in a funny coincidence, she was working on the Crytal Palace Choo-choo poncho, but one can get confused about anything in my experience. I got to compensate by helping someone else catch straying stitches, which hopefully will cancel out the bad karma from the first one. In the middle of all this, I even managed to finish a couple projects of my own.
This
scarf
came about because I really wanted to do more
with that great new perky Tingle I used for the
Freedom Caterpillar
(which I've been wearing incessantly). I mixed it with
my old favorite Merino Frappe and got something lighter
and warmer than it'd be by itself. Yumm.
I also finally got to a project that had been simmering for a long while.
This weird hat
is not a product of my own sick imagination, but that
of a 19th century Peruvian (a previous incarnation?).
I'm sure I could do a version in
handspun alpaca at 60 st/in too, I just wasn't in the mood for
exactly that. So I doodled, and got pretty close to what I wanted.
It looks strange all right, and I really like it.
It reminds me of an article I read somewhere (and promptly forgot the reference to). It was by a European woman (Scandinavian?) who explained very seriously how one should take advantage of babies being too small for self-defense, and make sure they wear totally silly hats as long as they'll put up with them. The idea is that they get the impression that the world is an extremely friendly place, and that their every appearance is invariably greeted with screams of delight and big smiles from everyone. By the time they get consciousness and demand to dress themselves, it's too late, the subconscious is already imprinted with an unrealistic but lasting optimism. It makes a lot of sense, in its own way...
Yeah! Another summer shirt, this one dedicated to Frida Kahlo.
Went back to the same sloper, and I still
think there's something a bit off. Can I really be getting too much ease in
the butt? Seems impossible :-). But I'll sew up the sloper and
seriously try it on
again before the next rev. If nothing else, all this yoga lately has
definitely changed my shoulders, and I need to address that.
All the same, I'm now feeling that between the great $2 Goodwill linen shirt, the Japanese seersucker, and this one, I can now face a summer-full of outdoor events, all my fragile parts well protected from the sun, and my thermic equilibrium in close to perfect state. Aaah. Or to put it more crudely I can now go to 2 different things in a single weekend without facing the choice between stinking and burning... Even if I weren't properly grateful, my friends are.
Am having a bad case of thwarted desire on this shirt... I found this fabric far from home and snapped it up. I love it, really. But then I saw someone who had on a shirt made from it in a blue background... And then I found that blue fabric at Stonemountain. Things got really difficult then. I had a hard time making myself sew this one. I might still have to go and get the end of the blue, reasoning that this one will wear out and some day (far in the future, after moving it 3 times) I'll be very happy to have more to make another shirt, and I'll be even happier to have it be the one I really want in retrospect. There must be some Zen perspective on this, but it escapes me at the moment. Sigh.
The Knitty book is finally coming out!
So fun to be a published author on paper, as opposed to the usual ;-).
And I have to admit the pictures are much better than anything I ever
do here. Ah well, there's always room for improvement, eh?
I like the book very much on the whole. It's got some of my favorite knitty projects, like the surfer short/eyelash skirt, and some interesting new ones (although the ice cream cozy could be a dangerous object). And I really like the format: good typography with none of that unreadable over-busy nonsense so fashionable lately. Lots of white space to give you psychological room to breathe. And a very clever foldable thingie so you can stand it up and refer to it quickly, without digging it out from under the yarn or taking up a whole lot of table space when you're just crashed out on the couch. A great job! Get it :-).
Susan Druding went to NY for a show and came back enthused about one of those
super-expensive French yarns, although earlier this Spring
I couldn't find a single
store that sold anything nearly that interesting in Paris, but that's
another story... This one seemed like an easy one for us:
a mix of Crystal Palace Iceland and the new Whisper. We tried it,
and yumm! it feels even better than the original
because the Whisper is microfiber.
Funny thing about this microfiber thing... we buy merino wool by the micron count, and demonstrably the finer stuff feels softer than the coarser one. Micron count also is the legal definition of cashmere, if it's coarser it turns into mohair. It seems to be true in the case of nylon as well. I think the reason is that our nerve cells don't have that much power to discriminate. There are interesting experiments about how fingertips can distinguish bumps quite close together (that's how Braille came about), but our back for instance can interpret as a single touch 2 fingers as much as 6-8" apart. It seems that below a certain fiber thickness even our fingers interpret a feel as 'soft' and that's the end of it.
I've gotten some nice raincoat fabric in microfiber in the past, and the stuff has been sporadically available for a decade or so, with varying degrees of fashion presence. I do think that it makes a difference in fabrics, because the finer yarns means the fabrics can be more tighly woven, which leads to better water repellency without the need for more or less toxic coatings. It can also improve breatheability, defined as something which allows single molecules of water vapor to escape without letting the larger liquid drops of water to penetrate, and which is a tricky proposition at best. It also makes fabrics a real bitch to sew, in my opinion, necessitating finer sharper needles and fine polyester thread, and causing no end of puckering (and swearing in my case). So on balance rainwear is about what you want to use it for. As a yarn however, we have a lot more scope for softness...
I thought that this yarn combination would still show off stitches almost as well as plain Iceland, the Whisper only contributing a sort of halo that's much lighter than other eyelashes. I was right (for once...), so I really like this smallish scarf in a reversible stitch, Esther Bozak's mistake rib. I might have to fight Rose for the opportunity to wear it...
On the way back from Blacksheep, we meandered by Redwood National Park.
I was actually shocked at how few people were there - this is one of
the amazing sights, and I highly recommend you go and check these out these
trees before global warming finishes them off! Anyway, we saw lots of
animals on this trip. Beside the adorable muskrats in Eugene itself, we
had a mutual surprise encounter with 3 very large elks, a first for both of us.
But I also enjoyed the caterpillars. They were large, very fuzzy, and
had starling contrast with a very bright acid yellow stripe down their whole length.
I just had to make a redwood memorial scarf... And since chenille
was an obvious natural material, I'm naming this one
Freedom Caterpillar.
In the endless quest for the perfect pattern, I made this t-shirt directly from
my sloper. I think I had added a whole inch to the sides of
the pattern, which had been sitting around for a while,
probably since before I figured out that half an inch was enough...
But it's not bad really, certainely it's better than what I could
buy in a store. Which, I know, isn't much to say :-(.
I had a bit of trouble - I didn't have quite enough thread left on the serger and was too lazy to rethread from scratch. Then when I first tried it on I'd veered much more than I thought at the darts and they were terribly asymmetrical. I know most women don't have symmetrical breasts, but more than an inch off?? Of course it's stupid to do darts on the serger, not only do you have little steering control but it cuts off the seam allowance so you're left with very little to do repairs. The one that was too short was definitely the best one, both boinged but boinging not quite at the center is definitely better. I don't look that much like Gina Lollobrigida otherwise... So I finally screwed up my courage and redid enough that I don't think it's too noticeable now. And hems didn't go quite as badly as they usually do in knits for me, maybe I'm getting the hang of them at last.
But this does leave the larger issue of darts in knits. These ones just boing in the most disconcerting way. It's probably a combination of the fact that the fabric is pretty heavy, has a lot of lycra, and that the serger finish made the dart much thicker and harder, and so harder for the fabric to fold over. I'm not sure however that they would work in other knit, like the wool jersey this was supposed to be a rehearsal for. Maybe I really need to plan to do them on the regular machine, with a slight zigzag to control breakage. Or better yet I should develop a pattern that doesn't have any darts at all for knits, if I can. I believe the darts improve the fit, but I wonder whether I'm fooling myself over that - after all, the whole thing has a tendency to rotate back just as if there was no attempt at bust fitting. I noticed this on the dressform as I was trying to evaluate it, and while it's true that I can easily fix it by counter-rotation, I wonder how good it is to have a shirt that needs to be tugged into place. But maybe I'm being too harsh, and any shirt would do that because it's loose, it's just a bad habit and it'd stay in place if I got dressed correctly in the morning? More scientific research is needed...
However, darts or no darts, these days I do prefer woven shirts that have waist darts. Maybe the next t-shirt should have a more accentuated waist in the side seam? I know that can look strange if overdone though, especially if the t-shirt isn't skin tight. On the other hand I've already cut out the next woven shirt, and I rotated out the upper darts into the waist, because I like better the shirt that has them from my previous experiments. This is a difficult issue, I definitely feel like if I'm going to have both upper and waist darts I may as well shut up and make princess seams. And I like the fit of the few things I have with them, but I still feel they're indelibly associated with boring clothes in my mind, something about that grey jumper I made for boarding school uniform when I was 13. But maybe the price I have to pay for not having a 13-year-old body any more is dorky princess seams in everything? I don't bitch to myself about pants with elastic waists, maybe this would work equally well? After all I don't think that I scream 'elastic waist' in appearance because the pants fit well and have interesting fabrics, so maybe princess seams would have the same effect, help the fit so much that nobody would perceive the underlying dork? I need to make an effort in design, clearly, and see what I can live with. I do remember Sandra Betzina cautioning people not to overfit things just because they know how :-).
In any case, this was fabric that I got for under $1 at SCRAP (total, not per yard!), so I'm feeling pleased at the French housewife-level of economy :-). And since I wouldn't have been totally pleased, I'm also glad that I spared the wool jersey. Now for the next try...
We modestly came home from Blacksheep with a couple of small churro fleeces, one soft beige kitty/Juliette color and one wildly tan and grey, very craggy looking. We valiantly resisted the lure of the huge Dorset, which would have made such a good blanket, if it wasn't for the fact that we already have a couple in the hall closet. I also brought home a mohair fleece, because I will learn to spin those wild locks uncombed, and soon. I love the grey fleece I've already mangled at my last attempt, so I wanted something I could practice on without tears. Alas, this one is turning out so nice that I may have difficulties mangling it enough in turn. Judith in her judging pointed out that mohair comes in 2 basic varieties, both perfectly legitimate: waxy and not. And in our opinion waxy is divine, so there you are.
Rose was very efficient about it all, she washed both churros within a couple days of returning. But the mohair proved to be more of a handful. It took nine separate washes to make a dent in that amazing filth, before you could even vaguely distinguish the drain at the bottom of the dark soupy mess. These were not wimpy baths but full-strength, Dawned-out, nearly boiling cauldrons that would normally strip a merino down to the nubbins in a hurry. And this is a tiny cute little kid fleece, barely 3lb. Whew. I guess the trouble is that while sheep are filthy animals, goats being so much smarter get themselves into a lot more filthy trouble?? Also, it's very silky, and the locks are incredibly lustrous, and so slick and sticking together madly so that it's taking days and days to dry. Those of you with more humid climates should carefully choose the weather in which to attempt a mohair washing if you don't want any mold problem to develop.
Had a great time at the Blacksheep Gathering in Oregon. This apparently started as a sheep fair, then expanded to selling the fleece, and naturally all our usual yarn-ey vendors followed. It's a good place to buy fleece because there are lots of choices, and it's still fairly early in the season so the choices are all good. Lots of sheep petting available, and many of them fall into the cute little Shetland category, or the humongous Romney. Our cousin who wasn't terribly familiar with sheep got fascinated with shearing, and really enjoyed the huge cafe au lait Romney who topped off the demonstration, probably 300lb of restive ram very competently handled by the (female, older) shearer, a fleece that unfurled to 10ft square, probably well over 10lb. Aaaah.
The setting was very nice, we loved Eugene - an old-time friendly Berkeley with huge shady trees, lots of bikers, people hanging out on porches, and lots of good food. The camping was lovely - right by the fairground, so farmers could hear the baaing of their own sheep. We were under an enormous oak, on the other side of a natural creek, where we observed not only many ducky moms and their ducklings, but muskrats stuffing their cute whiskery faces with blackberries. Rose apparently didn't know that muskrats were real animals, and we had to be informed of the species by a passing teenager who took pity on us and kindly gave us a quick natural history brush-up, This is one of the few times where accents come in handy, so ignorance is taken for granted. Anyway, we got to camp with the usual Spindles and Flyers contingent, which always makes it so homey and congenial. The only drawback was that the fairground locked tight every single bathroom on both the first and last night they were taking reservations for, which was rather a problem as there was not even one outdoor water fountain. We broke in with a handy pie server and took extra-long showers to compensate...
The educational highlight of the trip was fleece judging by Judith MacKenzie, our Canadian friend. She's always very good at talking as she thinks, explaining desirable breed characteristics, how this fleece fits that or not, and most interestingly how it'd have fit better in another category and how it'd work very well for this or that purpose. She also very clearly distinguishes between genetic problems and temporary ones, so sheep don't risk the barbecue when their faults aren't terminal. Many farmers attend her judgings, understandably, I feel like I could take on sheep raising fortified with all this information (except for the icky bits like the upstream of the barbecue). More to the point, a spinner can learn which fleeces are helpful to her purposes without having to pay blue-ribbon prices, a very good point in our case. And Judith is also very good at embracing the whole sheep genus, not concentrating on the single quality of faddish softness which seems to be sweeping American farming, but reminding everyone that good socks and rugs should be strong too. Of course this falls most harmoniously on the ears of people who have rugs on the loom and want more in the future, as in our case.
Judith was there with her friends and neighbors from
Fiber Whorl.
We had great talks with their charming teenage daughter, another Rosie,
who graciously provided some lovely balls of tricolor Shetland roving
when Rose ran out of what she'd brought to spin.
We knew about their Shetland because we'd already sampled in in
Judith's classes, and were eager to get some more. And we're already
quite happy with the concept of tricolor roving, which gives an effortless
great marled yarn, because of the
Jacob we got last year from Robin Lynde (and which is now in the
loom queue for a great blanket). But best of all it turned out
that they had some mini-combs by
Andrew Forsyth, another
nice Canadian, and we grabbed their last pair.
Combs are kind of a weird thing. They are very convenient for straightening out a small bit of fiber quickly. They are indispensable for real worsted preparation, and they efficiently separate out shorter fibers to make your finished items more durable and less prone to pilling. But they're also a major pain in terms of extra time needed. You can card 10 times the amount of fiber you can comb in the same time span, 100 times if you have a decent drum carder. We don't much like worsted spun anyway, prefering our knitting yarn light and woolen, so we were ambivalent about the necessity to comb at all. Except that it's silly to shut off your options, and there's something enjoyable about the combing process, especially when you're kitty-deprived.
And then there's the problem of what kind of combs you're using. Several rows of tines much improve the efficiency, and so does heavy weight. Our friend Rosemary strongly favors the old English variety, 30lb of swinging power with 5 rows of huge tines, all the makings of a horror movie. But she's a big strapping woman, an ex-rancher, who'd think nothing of wrestling a large Romney to the ground. Our wrists ache just thinking of these combs, and neither one of us lasted long at our experiments with them. On the other hand, the small Viking combs generally available aren't very efficient at all, and some brands even have an unfortunate tendency to lose tines here and there. I'd used the Forsythe ones in Judith's classes and found them the only combs I could use really easily, and they're also reasonably efficient (the second row of tines is probably responsible for that?). The handles also seem suitable for both Rose's small hands and my big ones, an important ergonomic consideration.
Another general problem with combs is storage. Imagine reaching into a bag of fleece and finding out that you forgot to put them away - at this point we'd probably have to fly straight to France to be able to afford all the repairs needed, if we could manage to beat the infection. Worse, imagine our neighbor's visiting little niece and nephew, who were so interested in our fleecey things, reaching innocently into the same bag... Yes, you could also shred a menacing intruder in a blink without any effort, and play up the old lady defence in the same breath, but we have had many fewer of these than of potentially vulnerable visitors. There are various canvas holders you can buy to protect the combs and yourself, but they don't seem terribly reliable to me, never holding them really tight, and the combs can clearly pierce anything short of a cement slab given the right impetus. So I very much appreciate that these combs ingeneously come with an interlocking shape, the tines protecting each other without fuss, and with a simple canvas bag of the precise size to keep them well aligned.
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