|
FUZZY GALORE |
This is another of those 'do as I say but not as I do' things. I have a perfectly nice jacket, which I wear constantly. Grey supplex with black lining, so nothing thrilling but perfectly serviceable no matter what else I have on, and particularly good for Paris and New York. Neutral but not grim, and doesn't show dirt when traveling, repels stains even. Zippered pockets so I never lose the important stuff, although imho I could have used lighter zippers and put them in better, still they're not horribly offensive. Hood so if I'm stuck somewhere in the rain/snow/sleet it's not entirely tragic; a drawstring would help on very windy days but make it too much sportier looking. Baggy so I can wear even the Humongous Orange Mohair underneath, but not too 80s, drapes well enough so that it looks fine with a shirt and a scarf, its main use. A nice balance of je-ne-sais-quoi without calling too much attention to itself, a big yoke which is generally good on my big-butted self, an interesting design from a Burda magazine when they were still good. A light wind shell, portable, water-resistant but breatheable, which is mostly what I need in the temperate windy places I like, but helps a lot if I get caught in more extreme circumstances.
So what's wrong with this paragon, you ask? Well, what's really wrong
is that I made it on a whim in 1995, and I'm still wearing it.
The raincoat I made in 1988 is still going strong, partly because I don't wear it
nearly as much, but mostly because I put a lot
of thought into durability and fabric compatibility.
But this poor jacket was hare-brained to
begin with, and now it's really showing it. See how the cotton/poly
ordinary piping in the yoke seam just shreds?
How about that white batting visible across a whole subway station?
Would you want to be caught dead in this in Paris??
What was I thinking?!? And the piping goes
all around the yoke, and is caught in every topstitched seam,
it'd be a huge pain to take it out and replace it.
It would be much better for instance to have one in reflective
material so those statistically elderly and blind US/European drivers
see me before they mow me down at night. It'd also last longer than
my expected lifetime, and not look bad against the still perfectly good Supplex.
I just threw this one in there because clearly it'd give the jacket a bit of
structure, and be a nice little visual thing, a balance to the big zippers,
an emphasis of the unusual yoke. All that was the right idea, but really,
the implementation...
And that's not all - I got the lining for $1.99/yd at Joanne's or something, that should give you an idea of its quality. It's polyester, so it's still in very good shape, no shredding there, the inside of the jacket is just fine, and I'm not even having any static problem. But the hood hangs down most of the time, and especially when it's sunny. So now the inside is this kind of icky rust color. And we're not talking about arty-looking I know how to discharge shibori rust design, but I left this out in the sun for nearly 10 years, maybe the cat peed on it, kind of rust stain. Sigh. That one isn't getting fixed either, needless to say. Neither is the shabby hardware, the turning-purple snaps, the flaking going-grey zipper pulls. I retrospectively plead supplies from the middle of Connecticut, but I didn't make any effort.
The problem with this jacket is that for an experiment it wasn't that easy to make, which is why I haven't yet shut up and made another. Lots of potential puckers, the very visible zippers, slippery layers that don't go gracefully together (my personal nemesis)... Chances that I'd be able to make another one in the next 3 days are about zilch. Which is a shame, because it's clearly what I need for my trip - Paris has been between 60 and 75o degrees the last couple weeks (!!! that with 80o in fog-less San Francisco! tell us again about how global warming doesn't exist?), with only the occasional shower. Anyway, what am I doing about it? I'm shaving off the fuzz, getting out the black marker, and hoping nobody gets close enough to notice it's basically batting in most places... Sigh. We'll have to hope for those proverbial galloping horses.
I'm about to take off for a sisterly visit to France, and it's more than time to worry about the wardrobe. Especially since I'm scheduled to meet the gay friends working in couture, the usual inspection will be even more intense :-). I would normally worry about it anyway, if only because I worked on one of the earliest automated luggage sorting systems and I never willingly check anything. I won't name the airline in question, because I understand that this is far from the worst system (hey, I worked on it :-)), but all this anti-terrorism nonsense about confiscating nail clippers is a catastrophe from an efficient packing point of view. It's also particularly stressful to retrieve your luggage from a planeful of French people, aside from the custom dogs making a special effort to ferret out the inevitable runny camembert and raw ham, because they all travel with steamer-trunks of stuff, even the straight men. But traveling light is not a problem, once you fill a carry-on you can live out of it for months on end. You may never want to see any of these clothes again because you're so bored with them, but you can definitely manage for an indefinite period once you get past the first week.
My main problem on this particular trip is going to be the transition from rainy end-of-winter Paris to sunny almost-summer South, much warmer than Northern California. All I'd need would be to add an opera date and a hiking trip, and I'd have the perfect setup for packing from hell, where you can only have a single thing for each of too-disparate circumstances. Sigh. On the whole, I think I'd better deal with Paris with some wool scarves and extra silk undies, and plan for mostly warm weather.
So I made the perfect summer shirt. I realize it's not perfect at first
glance, or at least it's not stereotypically perfect. But one of the
most delicious
pleasures of sewing is that clothes can conform to your own idea of perfection
in every detail.
This one started with some Japanese seersucker, in suitably juvenile print
for goofing off in the sun. At least it's very different from Rose's pants
in the same fabric, which is a lot.
There's something very sad about contemporary American
seersucker - it's not fashionable, so they only do it in 50s midwestern stripes,
which are even less fashionable. Then since you're being seriously dorky
by then if you're still considering it, they
punish you further by making it only in polyester blends. This is a heinous
oxymoron, since seersucker by definition is wrinkle-proof, so it never
needs polyester for anything, except for sweat enhancement to emphasize our
bad taste I guess.
The Japanese in this case make nice prints on a lovely crisp cotton that does
its thing very well, never sticking to the body and acting as a little
low-tech air-conditioner.
Then I like my summer shirts to have long sleeves, and collars that can in a pinch get pulled up all the way to the hair. My mother pointed out to me early that people who live in hot countries don't run around sunbathing, and that desert people are always wearing a lot of portable shade in the form of loose, long clothes. I've since figured out that humid climates are different, and there you truly want to be wearing the minimum - poor Cubans, who get slutty reputations just because they wear things well adapted to their climate... But it's true that in dry climates sun protection is the main priority. While I understand the South of France, like Phoenix, is getting more humid these days because everyone who's anyone must have a pool, it's still your basic desert. In this case I used my sloper to try and come up with a better-fitting shirt, but I gave it plenty of ease to catch any stray breeze. Perhaps a bit too much ease, but let's not quibble since I'll be wearing it first in the Land of Cheese and Chocolate, I might need all the extra ease I can get.
I also did something unusual for me and closed it in the regular western girl direction (ie the Asian dead people direction, left-handed, right over left). That's because when I was done I decided that the buttons would look weird unless they were right on the red fish circles. And the left side had the circles in a position that would have been extremely revealing to say the least, especially in crisp fabric, so I had to adapt and use the other side which actually had them positioned just right. Ah well. We'll call it a design feature.
Granted, shirts like this are probably part of the reason why nobody thinks I'm as old as I am, beside the obvious lack of grandchildren. I'll no doubt get cruised in English on Blvd St Michel, especially if I stay with my usual Birkenstocks. But then people my age in France take themselves way too seriously :-). And I won't have to wear it in front of people who'd mind, my sister's already way broken in to my eccentricities.
I'm proud that for once I did the correct thing, and laid out all the clothes in piles on the bed, and made sure everything pretty much went with everything else. All I need is to make a pair of tropical wool pants and I'm totally ready. I even already have the 'free' pair of black silk pants, free because they weigh less than underwear and there is no reason ever not to take them. This is a nice surprise, I guess I must be doing better at not making too many oddball things that are just experiments and don't fit in with anything else. Took me long enough to learn that...
Finished the Mali hunter shirt and helped setup the EBHQ
ebhq.org quilt show.
I'm pretty happy with the dress - the base fits nicely, the fabric
is good (purposefully didn't iron), the decoration is kind of fun.
Rose watched me at work on the amulet bags separately for a good while before
she broke down and asked mildly 'so what are the little pillows for?'.
I like that all the fabrics, while they kind of match, are from
previous successful projects (wouldn't be so lucky otherwise),
and so are all the handspun dangles. The pocket is actually recycled
from a project that never happened, but it was good to experiement with
detached pockets. The buttons are perfect for the fabric, but clearly
I shouldn't have been lazy and should have made buttonholes for the
pocket so they wouldn't droop.
The setup was a long, hard day of work. I usually white-glove at these shows because many of the old ladies can't stand that long, and because I love the opportunity to fondle everything. But it was the first time I did the setup. On the whole, the thing was extremely well organized- somebody had visualized the whole thing in advance, we had very precise maps of which pole was where and which size, and exactly how much hardware was needed on each etc, and the quilts came in ordered bundles which made the actual hanging a snap (apart from dropping poles on each other's heads, teetering on ladders, getting tangled in muslin and such). On the other hand, I had to switch myself to another team because my original one was driving me absolutely bonkers, taking much more seriously the social part than actually doing anything. I was lucky in the end to find myself with someone I knew, who said 'I'm a lawyer, I don't have a problem telling people what to do' :-). And we were indeed quite efficient, even though we had a nice leisurely Vietnamese lunch in the middle and lots of fun besides.
Lots of great quilts. My only nit to pick was that my dress was labeled as being from Bali... That must have confused some people :-)!
Alas, the project is far from finished, but the kitty is :-(.
We've been disconsolate.
Juliette was my closest sister, so obviously
inheriting all the happy traits of my mother that it was
uncanny, and she was much more like her than any of her
biological offsprings, alas. She had a hard early life as
a victim of abuse (a guy with boots and glasses) and
as a single teenage mother living on the street, a very good mother
at that. My mother
identified with all that very much, and did her best to help
her recover from the traumas, even reconciling her to
glasses eventually. In turn Juliette repaid her
affection in spades, and provided the main comfort of her
daily life for a decade, sleeping on her head and purring loudly
at the slightest provocation.
I was lucky enough to inherit her,
and to benefit from her affection too; we consoled each
other as best we could from our common missing of my mother,
it would have been much harder without her.
We progressed slowly from rushing into the closet at every movement,
to her falling asleep in my lap, which made me very happy.
It's hard not to reproach oneself for something or other
in these sad medicalized circumstances, but hopefully we managed to make her
feel happy and secure in her last years too, she had a lot of
good kitty karma to collect on.
So we're having a hard time cooking, lots of empty spots in the kitchen. And we're also not doing well at knitting, usually done curled up together on the couch. When my previous kitty died, I sobbed for years every time I started to cut a pattern, because she adored pattern paper and would always come and act as a weight, crinkling the tissue ever so delicately as she watched me work. It was heartbreaking to be able to adjust the grainline without brushing off the kitty first. Juliette was the most reserved of knitting companions, saving her murderous urges for furry mice, and never slashing me even as I sometimes ripped entire balls of yarn over her head. Sigh. Hopefully she's in kitty paradise, which in this case ought to be sort of a Muslim one, definitely a big garden, fountains and lots of bushes for napping under, only with lots of birds and crawling things. And 72 fat, limping mice.
Whew, that was -some- Stitches. Hordes of people, lots of booths... The financial damage wasn't too great, as both Rose and I stuck to really small exotic tidbits from Habu. She got paper linen, and bamboo to spin. I got silk and steel wool for my CNCH project, but also fell for some of their new wool and steel wool mix which has just divine texture, crepey and crisp at once.
Met all the old friends, including our much-missed Min Moore who left the Bay Area a couple years ago. She introduced me to a fascinating woman - Cat Bordhi, the author of "socks soar on two circular needles". Now that was an inventive enough idea, but she also used to be a math teacher, and she now has in the works a whole book of wild moebius strip ideas, way beyond the usual lacey scarf. I'm not going to give away the secrets of bi-directional moebiuses before the book comes out in July :-), but I'm holding my breath till then, we had a ball with talk of topological possibilities. What a delight to see such imagination! I hadn't had so much geek fun since Priscilla moved away...
In the middle of long-drawn out earthlink disconnect (may all their
fingernails fall off from fungus and/or leprosy), and frantic preparations
for Stitches, I've posted this little pattern for a
handspun zigzag scarf.
I'd thought it up when I was examining the
Anne Blinks
collapse boxes -
everyone's figured out how to get a natural zigzag using
2 directions of overtwisted singles, but it makes a
stockinette fabric and you know how I feel about
patterns that aren't reversible :-).
Also, I only had one direction available when I was thinking of it,
so this got us a natural zigzag with the lone direction and made
it reversible to boot, and not curling. A big improvement on all
counts, and it's only knitting a rectangle so it's a good
beginner's pattern as well.
The reason I needed to do this before Stitches is that I knew that Afghans for Afghans would have a booth there, and would be selling the handpsun yarn they've been importing from Asia Minor. Sadly, they're sort of apologetic about it, like it's not 'up' to commercial standards, and trying to convince the women to upgrade to stuff that's.. just like what we get here. But where else can you buy overtwisted yarn handspun on a spindle, naturally dyed, and for a reasonable price? It's not available at all anywhere. This stuff is priceless, it's a unique chance for all the non-spinning knitters to try their hand at those wonderful twisty patterns that just can't be done with millspun. They should at least double the price imho :-). Write Anne at afghans4afghans@aol.com quickly before she runs out...
Was feeling a bit stuck about buttons. I got a new torch, much better than
what I'd been using, only part of 'better' was getting much hotter.
Consequently, all the buttons I made for nearly a week were burned at least in part.
Sigh. Add to that the new super-duper clip-ons, which are making me
re-learn everything about color, and I've been non-functional.
Now I'm not entirely complaining here, because just the clip-on factor has
been a huge improvement - no more torching with my mouth hanging open
like a dimwit, with big goggles choking off any nose airflow,
sucking in hot toxic gases right into my lungs.
And my eyes are definitely less dry even after a long session, no
doubt from being better protected. And the clip-ons don't rub on
my real glasses and scratch them, causing enormous financial heartache
in this era of health care access comparable to Jane Eyre's boarding school.
But it is disconcerting to have all your colors shift drastically...
Anyway, at my wits' end, I decided to make a few beads for a bit, just to loosen up without fear of mucking things up, since they're so much easier. I'd already figured out that with a consistent color scheme you can make pretty much anything and have it look like it belongs together (see freeform knitting on December 30th). I had in mind a picture of a very old Chinese stacked-eye bead, which I'd seen in a magazine. So I chose cobalt blue and caramel, instead of white which I personally find a bit stark, and a scheme which should be simple enough for the new clip-ons to handle. The central bead is my attempt at reproducing the Chinese one, which came out much less refined, but you get the idea. And I practiced other techniques I like, trying to keep the size consistent which is interesting in and of itself. Didn't turn out too badly, at least I got a passable set.
So I trotted home with it and Rose dug out a string of lapis that we'd liked at Ashby BART flea market a while back. She made me the usual hippie silver wire closure, which actually works well for me. And I like the results. It's a bit... blue :-). Lacks orange, in other words. But it's perfectly respectable, and it's growing on me. I like how the higher-oxygen flame gave a metallic sheen to the cream. And it was good to place the beads in an asymmetrical way, but I'm getting a bit tired of the straight layout, 'whew I got them all strung', the next rev is going to need something more interesting. I have to keep the real glass people at arm's length from this so they don't see the details, but fiber people seem to like it. On the whole, we'll call it a success.
Went to San Diego, for my first real button show. Very friendly and
hospitable people,
and what an array of amazing stuff! Beaded marcassite 50s knots, incredibly detailed
carved wooden frogs from China, hunks of art-deco bakelite...
I think the women next to me,
Byson Buttons,
impressed me most - not just that they had lots, or had lots of incredibly
rare and expensive buttons :-), but that they clearly choose them with
a good eye for esthetics as well. I could have spent the whole time
with my head in their display.
All this gave me the sewing itch on a big scale. A nice thing about buttons is that they're easy to collect while traveling, it's very easy to bring a card back from wherever you go, without taking up much space or necessitating another suitcase. You can also keep them for a very long time, they don't get thrown out when the garment gets worn. So I still have some of my grandmother's buttons from the 30s, which have served 3 generations now, I really like that very modern art-deco style.
I learned many things at this show, from being careful of celluloid buttons conservation, to the maker of 20s fruit buttons, to how to classify and name my own. But this trying to sell at buttons shows could be a dangerous proposition, I could easily have come home with a lot more buttons than I left with.
Finally finished my project for the upcoming knitty.com book, the birdless boa. I had gotten away so far with making a foot of it and taking a picture of that hanging over my shoulder. Alas, push came to shove, and I had to produce a couple yards of it... What can I say, it's truly a beginner's project, you don't need to worry about increases or anything. Or it'd be good for a long boring meeting, something to keep your hands occupied while your mind attempts to pay attention. But as a sole project, let's just say it was less than fascinating. I listened to a lot of radio, some of which compensated. Amazing how often something pales after you figure out how to do it. La donna e mobile, I guess :-).
This Fall I went to a talk at the Textile Arts Center, sometimes of the de Young
Museum (currently in earthquake-related demolition). This was about
the art of Barbara Shapiro,
one of the great weavers of my guild,
Blacksheep.
This was very interesting in that it showed clearly her artistic evolution,
always something to think about no matter what the field, especially when
presented by an engaging speaker. I remember an excellent talk
along the same vein by Allison Bechdel, even though I have no personal interest in
drawing comics, it's quite fascinating to see how people get into things
and evolve as they keep at them, and few artists are articulate about it.
One of the things that struck
me in Barbara's instance was in her discussion of the baskets she'd done lately,
the 'hand basket' seemed to me to just scream out for a bright red velvet lining
and a little devil figure, or at least a discreet pitchfork.
But Barbara seemed kind of.. shocked when I suggested
it later, I guess that's more my kind of thing :-).
The other item that really struck me was her interpretation of a hunter's shirt from Mali. She explained about the practice of hanging amulets off it, accumulating more tokens of (presumably successful) hunts as you go, so you can tell the experienced hunter by the quantity of stuff on his shirt. Now Barbara did this in her more grown-up way, wove proper linen bands of the canonical width, dyed them, made real amulets out of distressed paper... She is a great dyer, having worked a lot on reproducing archeological artefacts, she can make something look like it's been buried hundreds of years, or in this case has several decades of sweat and dust ground in. It's not something you think of off-hand as a dyeing skill to attain, but I really wish I could come close to her mastery of verdigris for instance.
I had kept this in the back of my mind, and already allocated a piece of linen that I scored at SCRAP, which unaccountably came already pieced in bands. I was propelled off my butt by an approaching deadline, having to enter some sort of photo for the upcoming show of EBHQ, my local quilt guild. I thought though that I'd make this a real shirt, not just a 2-dimensional representation like Barbara's, in keeping with my resolution to stop quilting and get back to wearables. Fortunately, the guild does accept wearables, and in fact has several people who do quite nice work. The most notable is Mary Mashuta who wrote 'Wearable art for real people', which defined the staggering concept of FQ, the Flamboyance Quotient, as a guide to making wearable art you can actually wear. But that's neither here nor there, and as usual I was after something much less arty than Barbara's original concept.
What struck me was that my game is really fiber (pun intended, dedicated to Anne :-)). Sewn, spun, knit, woven, felted, you name it, I pursue it. And what else could lend itself any better to hanging off a shirt? If I did this right I could probably even make the whole thing washable, which would suit my take on art better. As I looked at it, a dress emerged rather than a mere shirt. Not because I have so much stuff to feel un/lucky about, but because I didn't want to waste the fabric that's so obviously meant for that, and which came in dress-size hunks. And I immediately gravitated to an old pattern, McCall's 5314, because I really like the dress I already have from it, it's loose and comfortable and perfect for hot African weather. It also has the advantage of requiring buttons, which works well with the current obsession. And the slightly high waist means that I can concentrate the amulets high on the body, where I won't have as much damage from sitting, and where the Mali hunters seem to also, without being too artificial about it. Not to mention if I run out of time before the show I'll have a natural place to stop, always a merciful thing. I used some handspun for the dangly things, which works well in theme but might not be practical for wear in the long run, I might make them detachable so they can go after the show. It also occurs to me that I can be more overtly quilt-y by adding one of those nice external Diane Ericson pockets, patched in this case, and in the process using up the 2 extra buttons from the set that I really like with the dress.
So can you tell the waist is merely pinned? Probably, but the guild jury is forgiving about those things... At least I have the important part of the dress all done, the top only needs buttonholes. I might well hack it off to the knees as we progress, that's what I did to the original. Also, I worked on the fit a bit - added a bit of front length to the yoke, hid some bust darts into the existing seams, it really is much better. Since I was winging it, I cut the skirt wider than I meant to, and I think instead of adjusting with darts (or gathers, not the least bit African), I'll sew some long seams to emphasize the band idea, since the original bands are a lot narrower than what I have here. Altogether, this is project that's going well. Now let's see about finishing it...
Isn't it too cute??. This started in a kind of weird way - we were ambling down
the street in the neighborhood on a dark and stormy night,
and came upon an untidy pile of clothes on the sidewalk. A nice
black coat with fur collar, a great suedey shirt, and an adorable little Italian skirt.
I loved the skirt fabric, linen, perfect colors, nicely embroidered to
emphasize the great print, everything one could possibly wish for.
But a size in the single digits? Not since our
age was in the single digits too :-). I brought it home all the same,
thinking quilt as a justification even though I've decided not to quilt any
more so I can have more clothes. This was a difficult decision, I have so
many so good quilt friends, but it seems like there is a finite amount of
time at the sewing machine, and unless I wanted to wear someone else's idea
of what clothes I should like, I just had to give it up.
Anyway, I'd noticed Vogue 7812 and its nice bags. I had in stock a pair of lovely orange tortoise-shell handles that were just what was called for. I had an old, beloved and tattered, silk shirt, grey leopard, also in the so-called quilt pile. All I needed was a magnetic snap, some overly-stiff interfacing, and both were within easy reach at Far Out Fabrics. Then I needed a bit of time, which was more of a problem.
But finally here it is, the lovely bag of the moment. OK, so it's not that big (12" at most, 30cm). But that was as big as it could get since it took up all the fabric. There was a reason straight skirts were mandated during WWII, sizes that small would only take 1/2 yd. It's practical enough, having not only the aforementioned magnetic snap but a clever recycling of the skirt's invisible zipper into a pocket so invisible that I can have trouble finding it myself. And it's big enough to carry the Socks In Progress, or maybe a scarf, along with all the indispensibles. Granted, the 50s approach to bags which requires you to have them in hand is absurd. But one feels so utterly cute with this particular one that it's hard to hold that against it :-).
Inspired by the handspun passport bag, I thought I'd write up the
pattern for it. Used
Deco-Ribbon, which I think is just about
the perfect bag yarn. Not that we don't have plenty of other patterns
for it, but I'd set aside
one of my earliest buttons, a big red one that I like a lot and...
Seemed easier than making a coat for it.
Still somewhat filled with a (ahem) surplus of energy from the holidays,
I thought I'd tackle a fulling project I'd had in mind for a while,
fulling seemed just the thing, up there with kneading bread but less fleeting in result.
Rose claims to have enjoyed living in Denmark a lot, but I notice
a definite unwillingness to wear jackets, which she says dates back to that period.
It takes nothing short of
a howling blizzard to get her into any coat at all, and she absolutely never wears
anything heavy. But she's been claiming for a while that she'd wear
a shawl, as we've pawed a lot of the newly-available Indian ones,
so I thought I'd take her up on it, provide a warm one
and see what happens next.
So I had scored this nice wool knit from one of the local discount fabric places. It's double knit rather than plain jersey, and it was $1.99/yd, I figured I couldn't go wrong... I had my doubts about its feltability, especially since the staff was enclined to say at first that one could machine wash it. I cut off a piece and washed it, and it sure didn't seem to shrink much, but I figured that half an inch over 4 inches was a reasonable proportion, and that I should go for it.
The principal inspiration was the work of Jeung-Hwa Park, who does fascinating stuff with 'fulling shibori', she knots wool around small balls and fulls it, giving permanent un-fulled bubbles. So I tied a bunch of flower-arranging marbles into a piece of wool about 3yd x 30", with cotton string. Then I decided that I didn't have enough going on. A nice Sunday afternoon walk on the beach yielded many small pebbles which I thought were more interesting, not being so uniform. I also have a little problem with the Park approach, since I'm a reversibility fanatic, and so I decided to tie my bubbles in both directions. I pretty much made lines with this, in a kind of branch arrangement that curved a bit.
But I also have seen and enjoyed a lot of work by Jean Cacecido, so I had a hard time not thinking of slashing the wool. Why not? I slashed it some, eyeballing in roughly the same direction with a rotary cutter, and threw the whole thing into the washer. It didn't shrink much. I looked at the preliminary results, and decided that a few slahes just make things look like you've had an accident and ripped something. Kind of like making slightly off kilter quilt blocks makes you look like you don't know what you're doing, you have to make those blocks firmly out of whack to demonstrate that you meant it. So I took out the rotary cutter out and really had a chainsaw massacre moment. More washing and drying. I finally thought it was enough on that count.
Not one to leave well enough alone, I still had in the back of my mind
that I had bought this light brown because it was close to the natural
color that I think makes the best basis for a good Tibetan red.
So into the pot it went, and got overdyed. I tried to make it slightly
tie-dyed looking as my blue shirt, hot water and lots of vinegar,
but found that this didn't work for such a larger piece of wool,
with necessitated a longer simmer, and gave up on the idea.
I was also a bit too heavy-handed with
the burgundy, and it turned a bit too purple for my taste. So after
some pondering I added some orange, and was finally happy. I took the
thing out, drained it, put it in the dryer,
and presented it in great ceremony to the recipient.
Alas, once she had it on and we were both looking at it in the daylight it became apparent that my dye job was worse than a bit irregular. It was all well and good to abandon the tie-dye attempt, but I hadn't been good enough at compensating with more evenness, and particularly at keeping it stirred, and some parts were really too light. Worse, the afterthought orange had really not spread very well at all, and had caused some definite stains. The final effect was like the cat had peed on it, something so plausible in this house as to give us both the willies. Also, in retrospect I'd dye the fabric before I tied it altogether, as the resist effect around the bubbles is a bit strange, prompting Rose to some rude comparisons with parts of kitty anatomy, while we were thinking about that.
Back into the pot, and for another round of dryer. This time, I was happy, and finally untied it. By then it was really getting good and fulled. The final size is only about 2 1/2 yards, which is rather short to me, but seems OK on a more regular-sized person. And it is definitely both warm and soft. Nobody else than Rose seems to like it much, I guess it's too weird, but in this case it's perfectly OK :-).
Had a great time in a workshop with
Prudence
Mapstone. She's a very lively Australian woman, a guru of
freeform knitting and crochet. I made the happy decision to nab
her book a few days before the workshop, and feel very lucky about that
because it's quite good standalone, and a great reminder.
Now one could very well wonder about the wisdom of taking a workshop in freeform anything :-). So did I, but I've been kind of peripherally interested in freeform since my early 70s days, and I figured maybe this would get me off my butt, if only by its absurdist framework. It turned out this was the right idea. Yes, freeform does imply a large degree of improvisation. But in this case, when one is stuck inspiration-less, having some simple exercises to get going is a good thing. Prudence took us all through a few simple motifs, and that got us all working in a cohesive way.
I'm not pretending the result was staggeringly beautiful in this case... But just sitting down and working through some easy possibilities in turn did give me a real object. I had a happy inspiration here - I had a hat kit that had been sitting around undone for years. Nice picture, a good array of multi-color yarns, but I loathed the process. You were supposed to make wedges, one big peeve up front, rather than work circularly. Then you were supposed to break off the yarn regularly, and make idiot cords with the ends. Nice 3-d effect, but it drove me batty and I got through about 2/3 of the first wedge before it dropped into the UFO bin. I think most of what's wrong with this freeform effort is the not really with-it yarn that I used that wasn't part of the original kit.
In fact, with just the kit and milder extension choices I think I'd have something quite nice, and this is clearly the way to go to get this finished satisfactorily. I really liked the process too, with variety built in. I was quite interested to see Prudence's samples, I'd heard they were worth the workshop in and of themselves and that's quite right. My analysis of why her stuff is better than what I remember of the 70s comes down almost entirely to this: she uses lots of texture variation, but she sticks pretty closely to one color. That is, she does have some shots of wildly contrasting colors, but the bulk of them pretty much match. The final color effect could be described as tweedy rather than varigated, if you see what I mean.
Another excellent point of Prudence's technique is her mix of knit and crochet. She does most of the grounds in knitting, which preserves a light and stretchy fabric best, one that drapes well for garments. And she uses crochet to add very 3-d accents, something which crochet does much better than knitting ever would, and much easier to boot. Note for instance the green doodle on blue garter-stitch on bottom right, doesn't that look better than just plain knitting? Wouldn't it be a huge pain to try to pick up these stitches on one needle? And yet doing it in crochet is infinitely flexible and amazingly easy.
I've heard people argue that every knitter owes it to herself to learn crochet in order to simplify finishing, which I pretty much agree with. But this is really another excellent argument for learning both: each has very good properties in their place, and putting them together gives you something much better than the sum of the parts. If you're stuck on one side or the other, I can't encourage you enough to give the other a try.
Back from one of those rather stressful family visits, I threw myself on yarn like a starved person. I had collapse on the brain, because Blacksheep my weaving guild had recently had a program on the Anne Blinks collection, and I'd ended up with the collapse boxes. I've been interested in that stuff since I saw Kathryn Alexander's work. I'd encouraged Rose to take a class from her at SOAR in 2002, and looked at the samples closely, but not really so far produced a finished object.
The Anne Blinks boxes were very inspiring - they're an assortment of samples with annotations, and with a neat summary of the litterature on the topic. Much of her collapse samples are woven, but there's no harm in my getting inspired by weaving :-). And I really love the wild patterns that even plain white mohair will make with a bit of overtwist, there's a scarf I must make. So in that wonderful enabling way that she has, Rose had spun me up a couple bobbins of Sandy McCabe's grey Lincoln when she'd heard me gush about all this, and they were sitting there begging to be used. The overtwist made the yarn feel a bit harsh, so I wasn't much in the mood for a scarf, and I wanted to make something using a button, so I though of a small bag, especially as I'm still recovering from the latest round of pickpocketing. I tend to crochet bags instead of knitting them because that makes a thicker fabric with more body, but I was also curious to see what overtwist would do to it since I've never seen a crochet sample from anyone.
I worked up this little bag amazingly quickly (OK, the pattern is really
simple minded...), in a couple hours. I held both plies of
the Lincoln together (one S, one Z) to see whether I'd get some
different effect from a plied yarn. I then went on to contradict myself -
I know that a large part of getting good collapse effect is to leave
things loose, whether you're knitting or weaving and probably crochet as well.
But I wanted to really use this bag, and I couldn't bear to make it so loose
that stuff would fall right out of it. So I proceeded to use a smallish
crochet (3mm) and pretty tightly use a plain single crochet. No surprise
that not much happened :-), the collapse thing was pretty much a resounding
nothing.
Still, I think it was worth the try - the fabric is definitely livelier than it would be with a plied yarn. I can't describe any better than to say it has an almost crunchy feel. This faded a bit after I washed it, but then the whole thing became soft enough that I think it would make a good scarf, except that it doesn't have that wishy-washy all-soft feel, it still feels like there's something going on in there. And I don't know whether you can distinguish that on your screen, but the fact that there are more plies doing the same thing in a semi-independant way makes the fabric look a bit more complex. Not much of that shows because of the dark color, but the Lincoln is lustrous enough to compensate for that, and then I like the color so I don't care.
So it wasn't entirely easy to work with the overtwisted yarn. I know there are a couple places in there where one ply forms one of those unruly little corkscrews you get when you're first learning to spin. But I have to look long and hard to find them ;-), so they don't count. It helped that I'd delayed so long, and that the singles had been sitting on the bobbins several weeks. I understand that one should never try using a singles that hasn't set at least overnight on pain of terminal tangles. I think it was better to do this with crochet than with knitting though, because I only had to worry about one loop at a time, but maybe it's because I'm prejudiced into thinking crochet easier that way in general. I think the long staple of the Lincoln helped too, because the singles weren't gripping each other quite so energetically. But mostly it matched my mood, where a bit more tension than usual against the rebelling fiber was just the thing to make me feel like I was regaining some control.
And then as for all natural browns I had a hard time picking a button since all colors looked smashing. But this weird subtle color looked really great, a button only a mother could love otherwise? So here it is, and this one I sewed on rather than giving it the usual safety-pin maybe-there'll-be-a-better-one-next-week treatment...
Back to current blog
Fall 03 blog <-- || --> Spring 04 blog
Blog archives
Previous Next Random List |
Previous Next Random List |
Previous Next Random List |
Previous Next Random List |
Previous Next Random List |
Previous Next Random List |
All rights reserved. © Fuzzy Galore 2002-2006.
