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FUZZY GALORE |
Pretty low-key knitting time... Mostly finished presents for a couple friends.
This set of reversible
Esther Bozak scarf and hat from an ancient VK pattern was made for Betty,
who loves indigo. She fed us the most wonderful sushi dinners for years, her
restaurant functioned as a neighborhood center, and we always got a
nice chat about knitting besides :-). The new owners immediately ripped
out the personal things that made the restaurant so homey, the
postcard collection from customers going back 20 years,
the wallpaper collage of kittens and puppies in the bathroom, the
hand-lettered signs all over the counter wall which made us never even look
at the official menu (we learned to watch out for 'yummy!', that's how
we found the garlic scallops for instance which still make me swoon just to
think of them). Needless to say, we haven't seen more than 3 people
in there at once, it's so 'cool' and sterile people must be reeling right back
out on the sidewalk, unagi-less.
So we hope this will keep her
warm.. while she's bald and recovering. The super-softness of the
Merino Frappe seemed like a good idea for new
sensitive skin, and we didn't want to send her just a hat, a matching
scarf would probably make her feel more normal-looking. Sigh. Anyway,
we hope she's OK.
Also my old friend Ann wrote and said she hadn't looked at the blog
in a while and was amazed how much I'd done. Ha! If she wasn't wasting
40hrs a week on non-fiber rent-paying work, we know she'd do a whole lot more
than me :-). But she's going soon for another trip to her beloved Ireland,
and she was wondering if I'd do a quick commission of the
v-ery easy crochet scarf,
in Tekapo and Fizz. So, what with her birthday coming up, it
seemed ideal to try and whip one out over the weekend. I love
friends who know what they want! You know they'll love it when
they get it, it's so restful... And of course, when you're doing
rev 2 the making goes a lot faster, not at all like the rip-intensive
tests we've been having so much of lately.
I had a couple days hesitation before starting, as I was looking all over the house for my good bamboo crochet, but finally I gave up when I found a kind of nasty metal version in the right size instead. Sigh. Those little tools are so hard to find - I looked in every couch crack, in piles of paper, in every yarn-related plastic bag. I know exactly what I'd been doing with it, and what bag that was in, but I still haven't been able to get my hands on it, it's my fault for not putting it right back into the proper crochet bag. There's a French creature called the Opoponax - it sneaks behind you and takes your keys/palm/crochet and hides them, and a while later puts them out for you to find in the fridge/ the mailbox/the underwear drawer. Mine's always been particularly active...
Fortunately, Ann and I have been sewing companions
for a very long while, so I have a pretty good idea of what colors
she likes and wears, it was easy to find a combination that'd work
with what she'd be taking to the wetlands.
But while I was at it, I thought I should
whip out another quick project bag. We're a bit short of ziplock bags
right now, and they aren't really big enough for scarves anyway.
Since I lost the hand-dyed in progress socks, I hate to keep projects
in opaque plastic bags which can be easily thrown out. I had leftover
from an earlier Gay Shame
event a little flag, hand-printed on revoltingly ugly fabric :-). Liked
the sentiments, but didn't really have a good place to display it.
It was too small to make a bag alone, so I pulled out one of the abundant boxes
of fabric, and found some hallucinatory purple swirls that I thought
would be just the thing with the pastel 50s flowers.
And I wrapped the flag around both sides so some of the original idea remains.
I kind of like the result, 'so ugly it's cute' says Rose, and I think Ann
would approve too. At less than half an hour, including picking out fabric
and patching, that's a project anyone can tackle.
We're also making slow, plodding progress on the class inlay weaving projects. We spent all of last week's session adding heddles to our looms. Seems the covert territorial battles leads the beginners' teacher to have them remove heddles when they're doing their 60-ends samplers, and she doesn't teach them to put them on a string. A heinous thing, because we had to thread something like 800 heddles each, one by one. More than we needed incidentally, but the immensity of the task ahead sort of shut our brain down as well. Then this week we managed to beam and get threading, which does feel like a lot more of an accomplishment.
We're both using small Harrisville looms, about 24" wide. Don't like the feel of them too much, they're a bit clunky and flimsy at once. Such a little loom has some good sides, for instance it's easy to reach forward to thread, I just took off the beater and I'm quite comfortable. It's much better than the big Leclerc, the pain in the neck is strictly virtual. But it's a bit strange to beam when you have to wrestle the loom in place, in fact I ended up standing on the frame so it wouldn't scoot around the room as we were trying to shake out tangles. Well, in this case it'd be more like playing bumper looms, it's really hard to have enough room to do anything, but you get my drift. The good news is that the printed designs seem to be aligning quite well as we're putting the warp on the loom, we have hope that this will come out somewhat close to what we had envisioned ;-).
Took a great workshop yesterday. Our guild is lucky to
include Gudrun Polak, who's been studying cardweaving (aka tablet weaving)
intensely, apparently for only a couple years (although that's hard to
believe if you look at her stuff). She was feeling lonely, seeing how
there apparently are only 3 cardweavers in the SF Bay Area, otherwise
home to millions. So she decided to do something about it, and is offering
a series of workshops and talks to see who she can work up. We were
lucky enough to sign up early, and we're very glad of it.
So we did some stubby little bands, full of mistakes, but we're very proud of them. Most of us went with bicolor designs, except for the woman who already had a lot of inkle band experience under her belt, so to speak :-), but much of that was inspiration from seeing Gudrun's beautiful samples. One thing that really attracts me to the technique is that it seems very easy to get strikingly 3-D effects. I love that no matter what the medium...
Gudrun gave us some interesting technical pointers that never show up in books. Being an old computer person too, she's as given to ergonomic ideas as we are. We'd taken Peruvian band stuff where a skinny little belt cuts you in half around the waist. Gudrun uses wider bands, a couple inches (5cm), and ties them more diagonally around the butt, so you're practically sitting on them. No more suffocation, and just as good tension. Ha ha! She also makes a half-hitch around one end of her shuttle, so that when (that's not 'if') you drop it you don't have to crawl on the floor to retrieve it, or unwind half of it as you try to fish it back up. I like that one. And she also setup her floor loom to do cardweaving on, since she's got the ergonomics of that already worked out. She puts a stick through the front loops and ties it to her front beam, as usual. Then she makes an overhand knot a bit before the back beam, and hangs a heavy bag from it via a loop, so she gets all the tension she needs and can weave in her accustomed position. Very clever.
We also very much liked her scarf storage/display idea - a floor to ceiling pole that reminded me of bike storage, with side dowels so the scarves can be shown flat, very much like some French laundry dryers. Don't you love going to people's houses and seeing not only what they've done but how they cope with the sheer mass of stuff all fiber people accumulate?
Apart from that, we've been plodding on in knitting. Finished a couple
pink pieces for CodePink. Finished my hairy crochet scarf, whose pattern
I posted for you.
Mid-green Tekapo and earth Fizz, a combination
I love so much I'm getting obsessed :-).
Ripped and redoing the hat I was making for
a friend, whose head is really not 32" around...
Speaking of that, the Curse of Ripping seems to have let up
a bit for me, but to instead have been transferred within the household.
Rose had been working on a summer t-shirt for me, and had already
ripped 3 times. It was hard to get the gauge right, because this stuff
stretches a lot, and adding a 'lace' stitch to it made it really sag,
the flat swatch bore no resemblance to the larger piece hanging on me.
She had stopped for a while, just as I do when I'm beginning to get that
sick feeling that something's amiss. So we took a look, and agreed that
the hip shaping was wrong. I do have a big butt, but adding more than
8" is a bit much :-), and increasing in the lacey bits caused some interesting
but not really wearable boingy effects.
And we also agreed that the lacey bits
were bordering on obscene. The original pattern had size 13 needles, and she
used size 15 because that's what we have a lot of lying around the house.
But that was just too out there. And that was right, we found the size 13s
and this rev is looking much more wearable. Yes, I'll pay attention to
a nice but neutral-colored bra when I'm wearing it. But that one millimeter
did make even that a pretty hopeless measure, interesting...
And we also had some dyeing success this week. We went to weaving class
and printed our warps. Aren't they great :-)?
Very encouraging-looking even if strangely reminescent of spaghetti, right :-)?
Well, we're pleased because we did print, and it showed up nicely,
even if nobody will ever see it quite that way again. We didn't even have
that much trouble untangling Rose's washed warp, it went on the
table without causing us the expected hours of grief.
And best of all, hardly any dye washed out when we rinsed 24h later.
Now you could quibble that I didn't use dark enough dye to begin
with, being too taken with the teacher's bronze descriptions,
and that clearly mine's going to be weird because only half the
yarns got dyed. But it's a major breakthrough to have it come
out so close to what we intended.
And alas I think I've figured out at least some of my Procyon problems.
A big reason for our success in class was that we used proper soda ash.
I'm too cheap not to try and substitute chemicals whenever possible.
I use blue Dawn for synthrapol, vinegar for acetic acid,
ordinary table salt etc. But I was off in my baking soda for
soda ash tries. A closer look on the net helped straighten me
out on a couple important points. First of all, washing soda
is the same as soda ash (sodium carbonate), so I should have started
with that. There are a lot of dire warnings out there about how
it can come with optical brighteners and similar icky stuff, but
I'm pretty sure my local groovy organic store's stuff in the bin will be fine.
And another problem was that I thought the ratio of baking soda
(sodium bicarbonate) to substitute for soda ash was 2:1, but
it seems 4:1 would have been a better idea. Ah well, live and learn...
It's not too late to get to your needles and pink yarn, and make a bit of
peace scarf for
Code Pink's
International Women's Day demonstration. I'm doing it with just
one skein of lipstick chenille... Something simpler would also be
perfectly all right, or crochet, and all lengths are fine :-).
Contact Rebecca and Abigail, Code Pink Student/Youth coordinators
at codepinkgrrls@planet-save.com
Our most heart-felt condolences to the readers who've been buried in snow for nearly a week. Been there, done that, and it's no fun at all - eeeck! I hope y'all had plenty to knit, as well as plenty of woolies to keep you warm :-).
I've been having a better time this week with the fiber stuff. In fact, I think we could call it a major breakthrough. Years ago, I'd been dyeing fabric with Procyon, having mild but sloppy sort of fun without too much stress, but I ran into a particularly bad patch. Trying to paint fabric for quilting, over and over again, and everything I did just ran right down the drain. All I could get were icky pastels. I just could not figure it out. Vicki Neff finally told me what was probably the matter, that I'd bought a pristine-looking bit of white fabric that was probably impregnated with the latest in stain-repellent technology, and that it was repelling away all my efforts. But by then I was spooked, and it was a couple years before I tried dyeing again, and that mostly because I discovered the simplicity of acid-based dyes on wool. And also a lot because Judith McKenzie showed me that you could dye like I like to cook, tasting as you go (so to speak, don't take me literally!). That's pretty much all I've been doing since that traumatic patch.
So as I was plodding on my happily mindless crochet scarf, which would have been finished by now if I hadn't foolishly run out of yarn :-), I was thinking of Spring (my apologies to the ones still buried in snow). My mind was meandering to an old crochet top pattern which needs a bit of sprucing up (bottom ribbing, sagging armholes, yecch). And wandering further to our new rayon ribbon, just begging to be tried out. I was further encouraged (vicariously) by Rose's recent success with dyeing her cotton warp, and that big smile and flushed face as she announced 'I put it in the water, and it changed color!!'. Surely, the Curse of Procyon could be over by now?
I took a couple hanks of the undyed ribbon, gave it an overnight
bath in detergent, and soaked it further in
alkaline water (baking soda, since we didn't have soda ash around).
I made thick dye solutions with 'avocado' and 'cobalt blue',
using a generous couple teaspoons each, and a tablespoon of salt for
good measure, as per Susan Druding's advice to spare the dye and
use the salt. I drizzled it all on the hanks on the plastic-ed kitchen counter,
making the color bits irregular, letting them mingle, smooshing it
with the fingers. Let it cure for 24h, and took it out all black looking.
When I got the willies at seeing so much dye had run out, I soaked it
some more in a stronger baking soda solution. And I have to say,
I rather like the results :-).
But I'm also glad that this is a pattern with a big yoke, because I can change hanks when I get to that point, and have the differences be a Design Feature, instead of chewing my fingernails about how they show. And I'm also pleased to have done this now, in time to go to Stitches with something under my belt. Just as one doesn't want to go grocery shopping when starving, it's wise to dye a bit of yarn before orgies of woolies.
We came to weaving class this week all ready to print our warps, holding
umbrellas over the sleyed reeds
I thought it was interesting that after she'd complained of the excessive bleeding on several warps, someone pointed out to her that she could stop the bleeding if she dried the warp before painting it. And her answer was, after a thoughtful pause 'but I wouldn't get that nice bleeding then'. Clearly a woman who appreciates a good Design Feature when she runs into it.
We'll print next week, being all the better inspired...
Still feeling rather surly about all this ripping I've been doing. Sigh. I certainely have developed more tolerance than I ever thought possible for ripping though :-). I remember being absolutely aghast at seeing my roomate rip entire sweaters apart when I was still a baby knitter, and taking 2 months to finish a scarf myself. She was right, on many levels, talking about how what she enjoyed was the process, as important as the finished product. And she pointed out that she was better off with a pile of 'fresh' yarn than with an unwearable sweater taking up room in the dresser. I just used to feel like I was the one needing the proverbial glass of wine from Elizabeth Zimmermann when I watched her do it. But I can't help thinking also that one can be too masochist about this, and that perfection just looks bland, the main thing is to try to have charming mistakes, if such a thing is possible. Or maybe mistakes that only I can see :-).
So I'm trying to soothe myself with some mindless stuff, crochet in this case. I've got an old pattern I've been using for eons, from an old Mon Tricot, which I can do in my sleep with my eyes closed. Of course I had to rip the first couple rows, because I didn't know this gauge and also I forgot to add more stitches to the initial chain. But now I'm going along in a most satisfying way. Aaaah. We all need something we can really do, once in a while...
Apart from that, we're slogging through the projects for our new
weaving class. New and much improved, this teacher's m.o. is much
more congenial, and she's having fun and even experimenting right along
with us. So the idea is to do some Theo Moorman inlay stuff,
but first to stencil the warp. Janis has tried to paint the warp
before, but found that while one can (up to a point) keep the design
aligned in subsequent warping, the threads will roll and you only get
some of the design in a visible position.
So we're trying this using thickened dye,
and hoping that it penetrates so much more than the paint that the
design becomes visible from all sides. I have my private doubts
about all that, I've peered carefully at the warps of the few
people together enough to already be done printing, and it seems
to me the bottom isn't colored. I think I'm going to thin the
goop a bit more next week when it's my turn. No doubt I'll probably
mostly accomplish to have my dye run sloppily out of the design :-).
But hey, at least I'll have tried something different.
The funny thing is that both of these techniques would lend themselves very well to subtle effects, shadowy things floating in several layers etc. That's mostly what Theo was doing with it. But of course that's not what I want :-). While looking for inspiration I was very taken with some raffia weavings from Zaire, where a smooth golden ground is interrupted with tufted areas. So I'm using a soft yellow cotton for my ground warp, some fine grey for the inlay warp, and will spin myself some really hairy boucle for the inlay weft. I'm going to stencil my background design with really dark stuff, since much of it will be lightened by the yellow ground weft. Maybe I should be good and try for a range of inlay effects - I could start at one end with some light weft for a transparency, transition to heavier stuff, then work myself up to a frenzy of boucle? And why stop there, maybe I could have the last rev be outright knotted pile?
At least I'm happy that I think I'm making the most of the technique in making things easier for myself :-). The main inspiration had a straight-on grid, and some tufted lozenges in the intervals. So I thought I should print a diagonal grid, and I could weave some straightforward square inlays, to get the same effect without stressing myself out too much weaving sideways. I carefully made the screen as a cross with 4 different branches, not so different that you don't know they belong together, but enough to be definitely not machined, and I'll turn the screen as I print to get even more variety. The only hitch so far is that the only thing I can imagine doing with the finished product is to make a pillow, I've got plenty of wall stuff already.
I have been lucky too in my choice of yarn: cotton Baby Georgia from the usual Crystal Palace. It's a bit fatter than what was recommended, but I'm a fatter yarn kind of person anyway. And it's behaving very nicely, not tangling too much, will go in a 16 epi without causing too much threading-related hair-ripping. Rose decided to use up some thrift-shop recycled stuff, being needlessly self-sacrificial, and wow! She dyed it with Procyon, something which I regularly flub myself and so can't be any help with. Fortunately, I remembered about Susan Druding's good instructions. And while the other warp she dyed at the same time took the dye very well, this one didn't. Some kind of finish problem, probably, since she seemed to do things correctly. But it's OK, it's not that over-blah grey any more, it's sort of washed-out indigo which can be emphasized with printing in real, dark indigo, and it'll pass.
At least we feel happy we have reached a visible milestone, and are all sleyed. Only problem is that it was kind of struggle, because of course everything shifted while Rose was stirring her chemical stew assiduously, and her warp's a real rat's nest... It's not just the iffy yarn, because the other warp, while a perfect color, is in the same state. And we helped someone with a lovely newly-green cotton to comb it before printing, and she ended up throwing away at least 1/2 yard to the tangles that got pushed to the end. In fact, the teacher (Janis Sullivan) says that she's never managed to dye a warp and keep it straight.
Seems that the warp painting we did a couple years ago with Sara Lamb had more than one reason for being. Not only did the warp lay there nicely while being painted, but we rolled it in plastic and steamed it as is, it never got immersed before being put on the loom, like these will be again (even the ones that were the right color to begin with). Ah. Guess we'll be doing more warp painting in the long term. In fact, we saw some smashing fabric that came from that same workshop last night, stripes of swirly dark purples with a nice solid weft design overlaid, and I'm getting a serious case of fabric fever.
Meanwhile, there's much untangling in our near future I'm afraid. Now if I could just convince myself that it's very different from ripping...
Seems like every project I've been working on lately consists principally of ripping... It's not like I don't usually rip some, but this week it's been totally out of control.
I adored the 'loopy & luscious scarf' by Natalie Wilson published in the Winter 02 issue of knitty.com. That easy lacey background contrasting with those fat varigated loops, yummm!! Luscious indeed. I knew as soon as I saw it that I'd have to try and make it.
Only I wanted it with what I had on hand, some Crystal Palace
Labrador which was obviously perfect,
and some Merino Frappe which I thought
could work, and which I've really liked in other scarves.
The Frappe behaves just like mohair, but there would
be obviously a difference with the yarn recommended because of the
silk in the original which would make it stretch a lot more.
So I thought it'd be a good idea to put a couple more rows
of Frappe in between rows of big loops, to compensate for the lack of stretch.
And I also thought that since the Frappe is a bit
heavier than the original yarn, it'd help to make the big loops
stand out better with a Bohus knitting trick: I purled the
row right after the big loops instead of knitting it as instructed.
This is a very useful trick in many circumstance - people often think
that you need to purl the very row that you want to stand out, but it works
much better when you purl the following row. Then the
contrasting yarn makes loops in front of the work, which tend
to stick out even more on a stockinette ground. Anyway, I hope you agree
that it worked well enough :-).
But I still wasn't happy... I have this hangup about reversible scarves. Possibly it's because most scarves I've made and worn in the last decades since Elizabeth Zimmermann came up with the concept have been Moebius scarves. That's partly because they're much less likely to slip and fall off unnoticed, even if they're slick. And partly because they wear much more evenly in the long term, you don't get the skinny-neck and -fat-ends effect. Not to mention I like the wearing options, even if I mercifully am spared the unexpected snow storms now, so I don't end up using the hat option so much, at least I do have it for those late foggy nights. Maybe the real reason I'm so hung up on reversibility because non-reversible scarves require careful draping for the wrong side not to show, and that I feel like I can barely get dressed enough to go out the door, careful draping is just out of the question :-). And scarves are obviously better than shawls for all those same draping reasons. But anyway, it seemed to me that I could somehow come up with a reversible variation that would give the same general impression.
I had obviously not counted on this much work. Just following the pattern with substituting garter stitch for the mohair stockinette yielded entirely too subtle results. I guess the inability to drape scarves also comes with a need for stronger sartorial statements... Part of the reason this didn't work so well is that every other loopy row was either knit or purl, and so every other row disappeared almost completely in the background, and the interval between loopy rows that showed was then too long. Shortening the interval between loopy rows didn't work either, because then the impression was of nothing but loops and too much confusion, and I like how they're clearly separate in the original.
Then I thought about trying seed stitch to avoid having the
loops be so extreme in their presence or absence. This wasn't
too bad an idea, in that the passing of the yarn back and forth
resulted in packing a lot more loopy
yarn in a single row, which did show. But what really worked
in the end was using seed stitch in the row following the loopy row,
for a sort of half-Bohus effect. Don't know how to call it,
but the principle discussed above worked - half the stitches
have a big obvious loop thrown to one side, and the other side
looks the same. Which makes it reversible :-). Whew.
(I wrote up the pattern of course)
Meanwhile, when I wasn't ripping the scarf, I've also been busy ripping the knitty bag. Not the bag itself, but the eyelash part which was deemed... too out there :-). So this has been heavy going, with a sewing seam ripper, and lots of plucking since naturally I didn't figure this out till after it was fulled. Fulling does make a fabric hang on for dear life to all the bits in it. I do note, from a purely scientific point of view, that the presence polyester eyelash kept those parts from fulling as much as the others. It won't be a problem, I'll just give it a touch-up with a fulling board, I'm sure I can localize the corrections just fine. But it goes on and on...
This has not been the best knitting week, in terms of production. However I am about ready to turn in my knitty.com project on time :-). I'm very pleased with the way the Iceland fulled. It was amazingly fast and painless, even with the gentle bucket and toilet plunger method, I'm glad I didn't give in to the washing machine temptation because it would have been totally mashed while I blinked. That is, I'm glad that Rose thought I was too tired and too sore in the neck to do much on it, and volunteered to do some of the grunt work herself so I really didn't throw it in the machine... And she's blow-drying it for the photo shoot as we speak, isn't it nice to have project cooperation :-)? Makes everything both easier and more pleasant, and stops you from the stupidities you know you shouldn't get into but do all the same when left to your own devices.
We did get to experience at great length the soothing effects of knitting though. Got tangled up into helping a friend's law office recover from the devastating effects of a major upgrade by the proverbial Son In Law, who left them with an early version of Windows XP crashing through their work, before running out. This involved us learning all about XP's quiks, not an easy undertaking since most of our friends are too smart to run this crap themselves and we couldn't ask them for help. And a learning experience it was, compounded by classic late-night pizza heartburn. So after the first day we wised up and knitted frenetically while enduring those 45mn downloads from microsoft.hell.com. That is, crocheted miles of pack straps for myself mostly, totally idiotic and calming.
Rose whipped through a Fibonacci
improvisation sock for me, out of old Socka I had lying around, in all my favorite
colors. While we
had Fibonacci on the brain... I'm afraid the pattern gets kind of lost
when the socks are on, as they're wont to do in such heathered yarns.
But who cares? It keeps the knitter entertained, and is a nice thing
to look at for the wearer, kind of like a secret Japanese lining.
Nice not to be doing this at a real job, where they might get uptight about it :-). Although my friend's niece found out when she got to college on the East Coast that her aunt was transcontinentally famous not only for introducing female pants to the San Francisco courts, but for wearing sandals there as well in all seasons. The best kind of pioneer, in my opinion. Way up there with the famous knitting judge who even had a yarn shop open briefly (pun intended) in Berkeley.
I was really upset when my last job forced the introduction of video conferencing for the weekly meetings with the mother company on the other side of the SF Bay. Previously, we only had to endure the droning octopus of phone conferencing on the table. The guys (all guys) raised eyebrows at first when I showed up with my knitting in progress, but I got to quickly point out to them that I was the only one not openly asleep by the midpoint. We had to put them on mute not only so they couldn't hear the sarcastic opening remarks, but so the later snoring wouldn't carry back. I even got to point out a couple important things for our group that had been slipped in toward the end, having heroically noticed. But the video really killed that, I couldn't knit in front of 300 strange men, all of whom were trying valiantly to keep the drooling in check, they wouldn't have understood. Sigh.
Not a whole lot to report this time. Still working away on the fulled bag, which is taking shape. I like it, but I think it'll be much improved when it's fulled, since it'll keep its shape better. Much thought about straps, since both Rose and I get very annoyed at stretchy ones and think they really deter from a bag's usefullness. I had contemplated matching ultrasuede, but a prolonged bout of Britex, otherwise thoroughly enjoyable as usual, yielded a 100% increase in price since the last time I looked, and no match close enough. So much for that. We'll be using matching yarn then, and try to keep it as firm as possible. At least I have a good stretch of fulling ahead of me, something I really enjoy even more than knitting.
All I really managed this week was to finish my latest moebius scarf. I'm still feeling a bit iffy about it, although I've been wearing it and getting compliments about it. It's not nearly as nice as the one we made for Zoya's birthday. The problem is that I love the acid green, and I love a green/pink combination, but I'm not fond of this particular pink, it's a bit too dull for me. So when I wear the scarf with an acid green or olive shirt, that's what shows most, and I like it. But with something else on it gets borderline blah.. I knew how much color makes a difference in how I feel about a project, but I really had to kick myself along to finish that one, nice as it feels.
Worse, these colors turn to an unappetizing grey when the light is low, to the point where I feel it really should remain a daytime scarf, much less practical. And while I haven't had any dressup evening do to attend lately, I've actually been working on the scarf... in a bar. I know, those of you who know me well are probably falling over right now :-). But we found this very congenial group of live knitters, and they meeet in a bar. So what's a girl to do? We go. We bring idiot projects. We knit and chat, and enjoy ourselves. I think of learning to play pool, finally. We usually recover by the next morning from the ear whistling induced by loud very bad music, and the sore throat from trying to out-talk it. Not to mention we rip almost everything since we can't concentrate enough to do anything with any complexity, even though we pull old-lady priviledge and try to get a spot reasonably near the one lamp. I managed about half an hour's worth of work this week in over 3 hours, if you look at what was left after I ripped and ripped again...
It all makes you wonder. In future knitting histories, will there be something explicit about that? Will another as-yet-unborn British bishop write about the wave of khaki and austere dark knitting designs caused by WWII, and then about the wave of light-colored simple-minded knitting in the early 21st century caused by the knitting in bars phenomenon?? Will younger knitters manage to push their skills to a realm beyond what bars allow? Stay tuned :-)...
Since this seems to be a very "stack" sort of period,
let me talk about my Christmas stack of pajamas, finally finished today...
Last year, one of my most successful projects was a day-long orgy of pajama-making.
I'm sure I don't need to specify that pajamas must be flannel :-). But this latest
thing of working at home has led to a lot of pajama-wearing, and we always need more.
I know it's pandering to the worst sort of stereotypes, but I figure that if people
are going to assume I'm working in my pajamas, I'll be not only doing it but
wearing very cute ones indeed. So there. I do take showers though, in case you worry.
Last year's best offerings were the chinese takeout/kanji peace ensemble, and the
pink poodles and Eiffel tower pants, while Rose has been wearing her sushi ones
just as constantly and Priscilla loves her movie-theme ones with popcorn.
Now I used to be more of nightshirt kind of person, but that
was when I lived and froze on the East Coast, and needed them to sleep in.
When you sleep in flannel sheets, flannel pants just cause some heinous snarls
in the middle of the night, trapped nightmares and that straightjacket feeling.
In California, we're colder indoors during the day, and need the legs covered.
Rose's converted me to her Mom's concept of getting home from work and spending
the evening in pajama pants, since a variety of t-shirts is always available
(from failed dot-com jobs etc). Mostly I use variations on my old favorite,
an out of print McCalls.
I wrote up an article on
pajama pattern alterations
for you, but basically they need to be
baggy, which is great when you're trying to fit people long-distance and
have it be a surprise.
We raided our beloved Far Out Fabrics and found some new exciting stuff. I got the rubber duckies, Rose got the abstract thorny rosebush thing (if I must have poodles...), Rosita got the neo-aztec stuff, Priscilla of course got the outdoorsy pin-up girls (in flannel shirts, how 70s). There are also some duplicates you don't have to be inflicted with, I made a total of seven. I love the new appartment, there are still boxes in the corners but there's plenty of floor space to cut on, several spots even. And with a reasonable production setup I can whip out a pair in a couple hours. Try doing that by going to the mall :-). And the best part is that I had to rethread the serger and get it going again, so now there is no end to the projects I could finish...
So I've been knitting my fingers to the bone on a project for the next issue of
knitty. I should definitely
be more mysterious
about it than last time :-), although I don't think Lily's still lurking,
but it's going to be a bag. And as usual it's going
with lots and lots of ripping (3 times and still counting for the last section).
I think I should be a sort of one-woman Consumer's Report test
engineer for yarns. Rita Buchanan does clever things like knit a little cuff
and wear it a long while to see how a yarn is going to hold up to wear, or
stick a swatch in her jeans pocket. All admirable methods, and well worth doing
for the long term (besides the indispensible washing), if you're going to spend
a long time making something. But I don't
need to be so fancy - if a yarn holds up to my usual amount of ripping, it'll
take decades before it shows any sign of wear. Sigh.
The one's who's been really productive here is Rose. It never ceases to amaze
me what she can come up with 'just to use up the leftovers'. She'd made some
socks in three days as a Christmas present for her sister, she's
approaching Priscilla's sock-an-evening at this rate. And
she had apparently enough of the gold left to be inspired to combine it with
another varigated Opal leftover and whisk out another pair.
The sister's pair had a kind of more formal Fibonacci sequence pattern,
this one was improvised from scratch "completely random, whenever you
feel like changing colors". So don't be shy about trying this :-).
The base of course is
Elizabeth Zimmermann's
generic pattern in 'Knitting without tears', a pattern that's served me well for the
past 20 years.
This has got me inspired to try again to knit real continental, since it seems to be the secret to all this efficiency (never mind how much less industrious I am than either Rose or Priscilla..). I was showing something to a beginner, and of course had to fake it since it would be cruelty to show anyone how I really knit, stitches all a-twisted in a fetching Turkish manner which means you have to re-interpret all US instructions. I didn't even go to Turkey till decades after I took this up in case you wonder, but there was a significant lag between my one-morning class and the time I started really knitting on my first project, all alone, leading to some tortured twisting habits. And wouldn't you know, this time proper continental came almost naturally, possibly because I managed to use my usual yarn holding instead of trying the wrap-around-the finger thing that I can never quite swing. So I've been practicing away, giving my poor fingers time to adjust, and am now almost able to purl as well :-).
I'm always amazed at the power of time, and sleeping on things, to integrate motor skills (even in kind of klutzy adults). I'd read about a very interesting study on that in a recent Science News, but I was really struck by how much it works a couple summers ago when taking a cashmere spinning class with Judith McKenzie. The first day I was all thumbs, unable to make anything come out remotely well, my hands cramping up and my brains all in a snit. But on the morning of the second day suddenly it was all working, smooth as butter. I could not only spin cashmere, I could do it well and easily. It certainely wasn't the practicing I'd done at night, stuffing my face on Lloyd's excellent cooking and telling silly jokes instead. It could only be the sleeping! This insight has definitely led me to try and seek out several-day classes instead of the one-day or one-evening things that are more and more often offered. And to speechify to beginners about how they owe it to themselves to try again the next day, rather than conclude the difficulties of the first day will only disappear gradually...
Rose's also been working on figuring out domino knitting from Vivian Hoxbro. We'd gotten the book on patchwork knitting by Herr Schultz a while back, and it has many different kinds of possible patches, it seemed like a great way to use up the many small quantities of yarn that spinners are often saddled with. But we were feeling kind of blah about the results. When we went to SOAR this Fall, there were a couple people whose clothes were always a knock-out, the ones I'd start galloping behind in the corridors to examine :-): one was Kathryn Alexander, the other Vivian. She took some of the simplest patches, which she calls dominos, and made the most smashing designs from them. Well, it turns out they are truly easy to knit... So I'm not going to rip Rose's little spindle bag out of her hands while she's finishing it up, but stay tuned for a picture. And she's very much inspiring me to try it too.
Look what I got! Priscilla made me this great scarf, and it's a
reversible pattern I didn't know!
It's from Noro yarn, that great Japanese stuff, there's a lot of silk so it has a lot
of that yummy sheen and so characteristic crunch, but there's also a bit of cashmere so
that very different softness comes through. Lots of other things too, which I can't recall.
Interesting isn't it how fiber properties are additive, ie if you have some x and some y in
a yarn it gets properties from both. And usually the good properties too, amazingly.
For instance
linen/polyester fabrics tend to breathe fairly well and not wrinkle too much,
not like some evil offspring that'd feel plastic and wrinkle. This can be a drawback,
some people get carried away with this and you can get confused yarns that have
10% of everything and the kitchen sink. But on the whole it's a good thing to
remember when you're trying to balance out some overwhelming fiber property.
I can hardly take my scarf off, and I adore the color. It's funny how both Priscilla and I operate so alike about color and present-giving. That stems from an excellent principle, which I highly recommend sticking to: presents must be a color the recipient at least likes, preferably loves. No amount of time and care can overcome an icky color, and present-giving, especially handmade present-giving, is no time to try and stretch a friend's color palette. But Priscilla and I push that so far that we often end up selflessly working with colors we find kind of icky ourselves, out of trying to make sure we aren't lapsing into our own tastes perhaps? She worked through Zaji's 4-6 year old pink period with admirable fortitude. And we often do stuff for each other in chartreuse and dull roses respectively, in part because we're so amazed that each other look so good in colors that we'd look so awful in ourselves :-).
But while I'm giving unsollicited advice about handmade presents, let me add some strong one for the recipients of those presents. No matter what's going on, how public the occasion, whether you think it'll fit, how much what you're getting doesn't match what else you have on, YOU MUST trY IT ON IMMEDIATELY. Even if you have to endure stinky train bathrooms to change, or be seen in pajamas pants with your lame top. I don't care how experienced the maker is at what you're getting, there is always some measure of anxiety about fit, about color choice, about what it'll look like on you, way beyond whether you like the idea at all. Even more so if it's a surprise and there have been no previous fittings. No amount of gushing about how much you like it can compensate for viewing it on. It doesn't matter as much if you really don't like it and it's the last time you'll ever have this thing on, you must try it on. And you must make your kids try it on, if the present is for them.
Several people will no longer be getting handmade presents after this Christmas, from Rose at least, solely on the basis of their lack of reaction to them. We won't get into the matter of the well-know breakup backlash phenomenon, or into the Zen letting go that must happen so things get taken care of the way they're going to without frazzling the maker. And nothing's ever been as low as my Evil Stepsister's cri du coeur at the sight of her handmade Christmas stocking "but how much is it worth?!?". But it's perfectly possible to overcome something like my beloved little sister Emmanuelle's reaction at the imho lovely eyelash scarf in her favorite blue "eeeeuw! what's that?". Missing the mark just happens, we can learn from it and go on, without any relationship ripples beyond a future good laugh. But trying things on immediately is elementary, and should be done no matter what. I should write Miss Manners about it, and get her support to popularize the idea...
And I'd show you too the beautiful socks that Rose got from Priscilla, but I can't get her out of them long enough to do that, and by now they'd really need a wash before a scan, so you'll have to wait :-). I think Priscilla would agree that's the mark of an excellent present...
Happy New Year everybody. I'm so
I am happy to report that I did finish the infamous Rainbow Towels, in time.
And aren't they the most beautiful things you've ever seen ;-)?
This was truly an Epic Project. I'm thinking here of the concept put forward
by the wonderful Sandra Betzina,
and particularly of the great story entitled 'project burnout' in her (badly titled
but worth its weight in gold) 'More Power Sewing'. It's one of the best and funniest
fiber stories ever, only
in the same class as Diane Barlow Close's wrestling with her dressform
but that's another topic. Anyway, Sandra recommends tackling on a regular, but
not too frequent, basis an Epic Project, something which is clearly beyond your
current abilities but which makes you feel all fired up and so helps transport you
to a whole new level. One would get burned out altogether if one did it too often,
but it's nice to know that it's possible with perseverance to do something
truly staggering in scope, not to mention technical difficulty. The glow
from that accomplishment can pretty much carry you through an entire enthusiastic
year of more utilitarian sewing.
Now this project, while technically as epic as anyone would ever wish, was not staggering in the esthetic realm. In short, it's nothing that I'd dream of at night and show off to all the friends and be my usual obnoxious self about. But you know, it worked, I did it all, and I'm quite entirely satisfied about it. Selvages be damned :-). Some of that satisfaction no doubt had to do with the novelty of weaving, and with how right it feels for someone who's been sewing as long as I have to actually make her own fabric, and have it be a recognizeable and well-behaved thing. I cut the first towel off the beginning, hemmed it and washed it, examined it (beating was grossly uneven, 2x2 twill boring...) and started using it right away, which helped a lot to keep up the impetus of weeks of hard work. The little sample regime I had to endure at the beginning of the semester would never have sustained me like a good practical object that I could go home and use after a long day of hard labor.
I was surprised about something, which I guess could only have come about because I had so much production pressure, had rather restricted in time access to the loom and had a very firm deadline with not enough time to reach it. In retrospect, I think this came about because we almost never get to see someone really weave, we just see them demonstrate slowly, while talking, or we see pictures. But I had this idea that weaving was a sitting occupation. And beside the fact that I've hardly ever had room for a loom, it had always stopped me, I felt that I needed another sitting down at home occupation like I needed another hole in the head, on top of my sitting work. But as it turns out I was wrong. When being efficient and in a good rhythm, weaving has only the sketchiest relation to sitting, in that your butt is kind of propped up. In truth weaving is running in place! It was freezing while I was working on this, I'd arrive with big sweater and scarf and everything, and in 10mn of work I was stripped down to a t-shirt and sweating. The back aches that accompanied the warping were replaced by the muscle aches that'd have been induced by running miles. I felt famished during the whole thing. I could hardly roll out of bed in the morning. This was quite a novel way to think about it all... Now I see why the old ladies can't do it any more, it's not just the warping that's the problem :-).
In a way it was the very epic-ness of the project that made me learn so much.
Not only about the aerobic aspects of weaving, but about the twills I was trying out.
I used the same simple threading of the 6-yard warp throughout, but I varied the treadling
with each towel. It turned out that they didn't look as different as I was hoping,
because I got stuck in feeling that patterns had to fit in the 28-shot stripes,
and I couldn't find any treadling divisible by 7, so I ended up using all the
4-shot patterns I could find. Nothing wrong with them, but they all look pretty
similar. Of course it would have helped if I'd had more time and felt that I could
dawdle more and pick patterns; I did try a sateen and loathe it, and switched to
something else before the end of the hem. And it would have helped if I felt that
I could devote more time to learning new patterns so I could attempt a long, complex sequence
and not mind the hours of unweaving.
It was still interesting to do these small patterns, especially in the final evaluation, you could
not see in the book samples alone how the broken and vertical skip twills were really
the same pattern, that the
pebble weave had a strong vertical rib, how the crepe could pack down much more than the
others. And it was very interesting to me to see how much quicker I could pick up
some patterns than others. I think the ones I took to the fastest were the ones that
were kind of like playing the piano, where the left foot always did the same boom-boom
thing and the right one caused a bigger shift in pattern.
I also liked how much upper-body work was
involved in this, especially as I was trying for a firm fabric after examining the first
towel/sample. And while I did pretty
much screw up the selvage all the way through, slipping back into horrors as soon as
I was tired or distracted, I think I got much better about it just from the sheer
repetition of doing the same thing for yards and yards, in a way I hadn't before
even while doing the blanket. I don't think I'll be afraid of cotton again.
I also found there were a couple things where I completely disagreed with the teacher, Peggy Osterkamp. One was that she wanted us to throw, beat, change the feet, in that order. I'd learned from Susan Spalding to throw, change the feet, beat. I went back to Susan's method after I finished the first towel, because I thought that Peggy's method leads to a much messier fabric for a much longer time, in other words when you beat on another draft your fabric behaves well almost instantaneouly. You can see what you're doing and catch mistakes much better, your beating is ultimately more even, and I think the resulting fabric is just more sound. Another thing she said was that she'd heard at some Convergence that mercerized cotton made better towels because it absorbed more. Now first of all this is the opposite of what I'd heard not only all over the place but particularly from Judith McKenzie, who's never been wrong in my experience. But also it makes no sense - the fuzzies (no relation) that get burned off in the mercerizing process would definitely seem to add to the ability to absorb water, especially in a water-loving fiber like cotton. I just want to report that I got to field-test our mercerized towels against Alfred's unmercerized one, and that the unmercerized is clearly superior as a towel. This is not exactly a double-blind test, as anyone could notice the rainbow clashing with Alfred's tasteful natural colors :-), even out of the corner of their eye, but it was the best I could do in the circumstances. Get unmercerized!
For you other beginners, let me explain my one original thought. It has to do with unweaving, a topic that's strangely not openly acknowledged in any book I've looked at so far ;-). I found that it helped immensely if I found the right treadling to undo (right being kind of misnomer), and then beat before trying to get the shuttle through it. Not -beat- beat, not hard, but bring the beater to the cloth gently - this opens up the shed so you're much less likely to end up with a snarled up mess. Maybe this was because I was trying to work with less warp tension than I'd have thought necessary, having read in several places that it was a beginner's mistake. Maybe it was because I was having a general problem of getting the shuttle through the bottom of the shed because my beater was subtly too low. But I kept getting the shuttle into ugly situations till I hit on the idea of beating first.
The final problem to solve was the giving away. My first impulse was to keep one and distribute the rest, one each to everyone I know who's remotely interested in fiber. But on second thought we're going to keep two, and give larger batches to fewer people. We're keeping the first, because one has to keep the first, not to mention that like the first pancake I think all the first ones leave a bit to be desired. And the last, in part because it's incomplete, there wasn't enough warp for the last color, in part because it's my favorite broken twill, in part because it's the last and I like to see progress (even though it was hurried, and the next to last is actually the best of the batch). Paula who gave us the kit will get one because she had the same initial impulse and gave away all the ones she'd made and now regrets it, they are useful color references. And because she'll be kind and not notice my selvages too much :-). And we'll give pairs to friend couples, both of which appreciate rainbows for themselves. Other friends will just have to get some of the next batches, which will no doubt be better towels. I have a feeling these will not be the last towels...
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