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FUZZY GALORE |
I'm just heartbroken. First real outing since I broke my foot in late January, and I went all the way downtown to the movies, which I enjoyed well enough and I managed to walk all the way from BART and not get stepped on or anything, quite a success considering. But then I took off in a bit of a hurry and left my wonderful granny squares scarf under the seat, and some jerk swiped it within half an hour. It's gone and I'm in shock. Why is it that it's always my hand-made stuff that gets stolen?? Can't they just be content with my wallet? What kind of scum can tell that something's nice enough to be handmade, and then goes ahead and takes it? Certainely not a knitter.
So I'd gotten some wonderful medium blue/olive green merino yarn from Nancy Finn
(Chasing Rainbows, Willits CA), hand-dyed and handspun.
I contemplated it a while, then spun and dyed
some merino to match, mine was a slighly brighter blue, solid but heathered.
Sara Lamb in her excellent dyeing class thought that it'd heathered that much
from my being heavy-handed with the
vinegar (this was regular acid dye), it wasn't the effect I was aiming for but I really
liked it when it was done. And it was my first real attempt to match a specific
color, not to mention my first dyeing done for a real project,
and I'd done so well
The scarf kind of globally horrified the weaving guild, which tends to really look down on 70s stuff. But it got a lot of admiring looks and compliments in my neighborhood, the lower Haight :-). And I even got lots of compliments at Stitches, the big knitting conference. All this to say I wish I had at least a scan of it, but nothing. Wait, I do have a small bit of Nancy's yarn left, about 5 yards. Think I'm going to put it in my bag, so I can prove I made the scarf if I run into the sleezebag who has it on. Might keep me from getting arrested when I try to throttle them with it :-). I have heard several stories of people wearing stolen handmade stuff and denying it, saying they'd bought it themselves. A good argument for knitting initials into a discreet part of a sweater, in a nasty update of the traditional stories of doing it so the body of the fisherman can be identified when it washes ashore. I'm feeling as desolate as if I was washing ashore myself...
Made a blankie.
In the spirit of using up the fiber stash, Rose and I decided that our first real
weaving project would be a largish blanket. After all, it's the middle of winter, and
we spend plenty of time cuddled up on the couch under the down blanket that Mom donated
for Christmas. Only it's a bit too fragile to allow for a lot of cat hair, which is
rather antisocial in our case, so washable wool would be an improvement.
We started with a warp chain that Rose painted at a great dyeing workshop that we took from Sara Lamb in the spring of 2001. We were working like maniacs at that point, so instead of spinning up something we had a quick order from Woodland Woolworks and got some Boracco Wensleydale knitting yarn for me, and some 'Navajo' wool warp for her. She made a rather large warp chain 5 yds long and painted it greens, then measured out the rest in the same length and made a much smaller one in reds. Alas, the red one got mixed up with other things and must not have gotten steamed, because when I rinsed it later all the color ran out and it turned out really icky pinks. Some pinks would be good, but these were really revolting. But the problem here was that the green warp chain would have made quite a small blanket, as it was we were going to have to make it in 2 lengths (just as well considering the narrowish looms available) but the total would have been 40" before washing, which seemed inadequate. So I took a good look at the pink chain, and overdyed it with small, increasing quantities of dark green. It turned out a reddish brown, which Rose has been kind enough to say looks like kelp, and it works in the general scheme. So we warped it with a Fibonacci sequence of kelp along one side, wasting a bit of it and therefore of width. Silly, because if I'd thought about it I'd have realized that I'd probably do what I did later, finish the blanket with a fat row of single crochet, so I could have had nearly an inch more width, but it's all hindsight.
Anyway, there we had that nice looking warp, and it was kind of scratchy, being meant for a rug warp and a weft-faced rug at that. Sigh. But we didn't want to hide it, there's no point in using a hand-painted warp and then hiding it completely. The solution seemed to be a fancy twill from Madelyn Van Der Hoogt's pattern book (Complete Book of Drafting for Handweavers), which would show the warp well enough without giving too long floats so the blanket wouldn't be able to take the abuse that was surely coming to it. We went to Stitches in Oakland and looked for suitable weft, and didn't find anything - everyone had expensive fancy yarns, nothing plain, and nothing in the range of blue we wanted. So we went home and got out Sarabande, a lovely Corriedale from Jan and Eva in Sebastopol, and started spinning. This took a really long time, a couple weeks of constant work, and we had to do all kinds of gyrations to get the yarn even - it was Rose's first spinning project and we have different tendencies (she's a naturally fine spinner), so we ended up carefully plying my first bobbin with her last and conversely etc etc. Then late one night we tossed it in the pot and tried to get an indigo blue without the real indigo, and got there by a mix of mostly sky-blue and a small bit of navy blue acid dyes (Jacquard). It came out nicely heathered, and quite the kind of sea color we were aiming for, and even enough. Whew. it was a queasy moment, I felt rather a lot of responsibility there..The actual weaving was surprisingly fast. We alternated doing it and had to whack each other into checking the picks per inch often, restraining Rose's overly German beating and evening out my overly hippie one. The pattern shows unevenly, there are spots where the blue almost completely melds in with the warp color, and places where it stands out vividly against the chartreuse. But since it's all hand-painted, it comes out very organic looking and very harmonious in general. We were very disappointed when we got it off the loom and it felt like cardboard, we figured the warp was just too scratchy to begin with, it'd be a blanket to use with all your clothes on (and socks and a turtleneck and...). But Alfred said everything's like that when it comes off the loom, and we should wash, even full it. I'd read how you must attach the ends together to keep the edges from flaring, so I serged the ends together. However, I chickened out at putting it in the machine, and tossed it in the bathtub where I proceeded to make washing-machine like motions with my hands, accompanying myself with a 'woosh woosh' that puzzled Juliette no end. It shrank, as expected. It shrank mostly in width, since I guess the corriedale was less stable than the commercial rug warp, even though I'd already abused it before dyeing. But hell, it's big enough :-). And then I used leftover weft to single-crochet around the edges (over some preliminary serging), after making as unobtrusive a center seam as possible. It's very obvious from the colors that there is a center seam, but it's not as bad as all that, there's nothing wrong with textiles in bands (see kente cloth for a good example). I don't like fringe in general, and I didn't think it'd wear particularly well in this case, so the crochet is better, stabilizes all the edges while looking good.
We're feeling extremely accomplished...
Buyoed by my previous successes and sniffing at a hint of spring in the air,
I decided to make myself a spring shirt. This lovely radish fabric (cotton sateen)
from Stonemountain & Daughters
in Berkeley
seemed like just the thing, and I'd gotten it in part because I needed something to
go with a great series of garden buttons from Danforth pewter, every one different.
Don't laugh, many of my clothes start with the right buttons.
Anyway, I've taken 3 patternmaking classes in the last couple of years now, and with very little results to show for it. There was the incredibly nasty one at the Sewing Workshop, where an anorexic twit taught a strictly by the book method of sloper making, while making a constant stream of fatophobic remarks to the largely un-standard-bodied audience, some about her own mother no less. And did I mention that she would not budge from the requirement of starting with a skirt, even though I have worn a skirt once in the last 20 years, at my sister's first wedding, and of course she let the guy who started late work on a shirt? That's when I quit. Then there was the much cooler and friendlier one at Harvey Milk Institute but which was taught by a guy who also does production patterns and so the individual adjustments weren't very much more forthcoming, although we did learn a good solid method of sloper making. The promised follow-up classes haven't materialized though, I'm very disappointed about that. Finally there was the one at Stonemountain taught by a woman who wore her clothes skin-tight and didn't want to answer anything about loosening things up :-). Her method of sloper making was rather sloppy but that's because she's amazingly talented at draping, her business is custom clothes, and that sloper fits me best in the end.
So I'm getting a bit discouraged about the patternmaking, as you can imagine. Nobody anywhere seems to be teaching step 2, what to do with the damn sloper, without getting accepted at FIT or something, which no doubt I'd consider trying if I won the lottery, that is if I could remember to play. But anyway, I decided that I should shut up and just learn it myself, clearly I'm not going to get outside help here but surely I'd get somewhere if I made a real effort. After all I spent my teenage years happily wearing my original creations, it wasn't till my mid-twenties that I discovered interfacing and Burda patterns and started making more mainstream clothes, that didn't scream "homemade!" from across the room. And if someone else had made my early clothes for me and forced me to wear them, I'd no doubt be spending thousand in therapy whining about it. But as it is I still feel a happy glow of pride over them. So why not try to recreate some of that early enthusiasm, and put up with a few oddball creations while I get my hand in? As is my natural tendency, I've been throwing a lot of paper at the problem, checked a bunch of stuff out of the library, raided the used bookstores, and I think I'm ready to try.
To get to the point, I partially chickened out and started this shirt with a Burda pattern, but altered it quite a bit with the help of my sloper (the 3rd and best). Even made an original collar inspired by one I had on a 40s vintage jacket way back when. And you know what? It looks great. A lot more fitted than what I'm used to wearing, but great all the same. Maybe it also looks even more fitted because it's more shaped like me? I don't care one bit. I hate wearing bought clothes, but I have to say that wearing self-designed clothes is even better than just homemade :-).
Made a pair of Valentine boxer shorts for Rosie.
Far Out didn't have their
usual assortment of cheesy heart and kisses fabrics, probably because I was rather late
in looking for some. But I thought flaming butts were just as appropriate to the occasion,
considering... She liked them, and they do look great on her. Having a spasm of wondering
whether I'm getting boring with the boxer shorts though :-).
Took a great wokshop on Andean braids
from Ed Franquemont. He explained the whole
system of transmission of weaving in Inca society, which interestingly rests as much on
peer teaching and competition in childhood as on mentoring from older weavers later on.
And mercifully he treated us exactly like 6 year olds :-). We got to class and got to weave
on already prepared warps of very small width, only 6 thread designs. Then we
learned to warp for our own next project, and made 8 thread designs. Filled with enthusiasm
I got home and wove on, alternating the two 8-thread designs I had readily available.
Then I ground to a halt as I considered the prosaic but important question of what
to do with it. Too narrow for the obvious belts, which I generally don't wear anyway.
Turns out I had been having a crisis of sorts. Years ago I took a very good class from Marcy Tilton, founder of the Sewing Workshop, about quick methods of sewing. What has really stuck forever was the wearing of scissors around the neck so they're always on hand, and of a magnetic pin cushion on the wrist (magnetic is essential so you can toss the pins in the right direction rather than stick yourself when in a hurry). So I'd been wearing my scissors on a nice blue grosgrain ribbon donated by my good quilting friend Vicki Neff of Ann Arbor, and decorated with a safety pin beaded by her daughter Valerie. I was quite happy that way, until a fine morning recently I woke up to find that the ribbon had been cut! I knotted it back up, but the length had been perfect before, and I found myself pulling my entire head in the loom as I tried to snip stray ends, and having to cut by feel rather than by eye, which is not a good thing.
Ha ha! So now I have a lovely new scissor holder. The length turned out to be perfect by coincidence, the colors even match, and my really icky ending braids can even accomodate the beloved beaded safety pin. If you look carefully at the picture, you can see the touching hints of progress as it goes around, starting with the stray weft thread dangling out, the jarring change of pattern, and ending in a oh-so-debonnair pattern transition, right as I was running out of warp ;-). How nice to use your own handwoven, especially to get to use your first. I'm totally proud of it.
Made a Hawaiian shirt for Rose, with large dancing girls (from
Far Out as usual).
The theme could not fail to please her on both count, and I always make out of
season presents anyway:-). Nothing personal, almost all my own clothes are
also finished out of season. Well, apart from the time where I finished a raincoat in early October,
and started an 8-year drought. That February, my roomates came home to find me in the shower,
naked apart from the raincoat, testing the waterproofness I had so painstakenly built in
but not gotten a chance to see in action.
That raincoat got so little use that it's still going strong 15 years later, and it
is indeed very waterproof, in its own breatheable high-tech sort of way.
To tell the truth I'm getting
kind of sick of seeing it, I should make another, perhaps a wilder colored one.
But I digress. In this case I used a simple Burda camp-shirt pattern (from an old magazine), figuring that this would also serve as a muslin to try and work up a standard pattern for her, since she wears a whole lot of camp shirts anyway. I was pretty successful on the whole, I mean it looks better than most things you'd buy in a store, and I did well with the wide shoulders adjustment. I had the perfect tagua nut buttons too. But there was an interesting fit snag, she's swam a lot over the years and has a wide back and rather substantial latissimus dorsii, which cause pulling on the sleeve when she reaches forward with her arms. I narrowed the back armhole seam and that helped, but not enough. Next time...
Discovered that new eyelashy nylon Italian yarn with glee. Scored an affordable ball
at Straw Into Gold's closing sale (vulture..), and it turns out it's just enough
to make one of those smallish scarves everyone was wearing in Paris last summer.
Apparently Crystal Palace will come out with their version, Fizz,
in the spring.
The stuff is very stretchy, but very soft and surprisingly warm, I love it.
All my friends screamed
about grinch hair, and it seems like an accurate description...
So I made a half dozen for Christmas. Colors that other people
Made a moving-in present for Rose. She is very fond of some very old, very thin plaid
flannel boxer shorts as house attire. I have no objection to plaid flannel, nothing could
remind me of my wayward youth more :-). But it seemed like she needed an update,
especially since
So I tried out the Grande pattern, which turned out great. Accurate to size, easy to do, and made with that lovely bubble-butt curved double seam in the back. Sooo comfortable, and looks good too. I only have a couple cautions: they're not kidding about the yardage requirements, and it's a good idea to study the somewhat unusual layout directions.
In my enthusiasm I pulled out some insect fabric I'd succumbed to at Far Out's previous
sale, and made some for myself. They're indeed very comfortable to hang out in. And these
ones follow in the footsteps of my series of shorts with bright orange objects designed
to repel drivers when on one's bike (this works better when the butt is larger).
My only complaint is that they aren't suitable outdoor wear because they don't have pockets,
which of course is what makes them
so quick and easy to make :-), but I'm a freak about pockets.
While on this successful streak I then went on to make another pair
as moving-in presents for Rosa and Valerie, who seemed to like them too
(well, at least they were surprised). I regret that I don't
have them available for scanning, as you'd no doubt be as delighted as I was with the
6" high Guadalupes with gold metallic halos...
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