Recent Acquisitions

As is usual for art museums, the museum where I work to occasionally has Recent Acquisitions exhibitions to showcase works that have been newly acquired and accessioned into the permanent collection. I went to Stitches West yesterday, and acquired a few treasures of my own, so I felt it was appropriate to hold a sort of Recent Acquisitions blog post, if not exhibition, of my own.

I had in fact resisted for some time the idea of going to Stitches at all, as I am so weak in the face of all the delights that are there that I spend too much money every time. All my ploys to control my spending have much proven too fallible to defeat my ability to circumvent myself and overspend, so I didn't go at all last year. It was hard to give it up for 2 years running, but my budget restraints combined with the other commitments I had for the weekend convinced me to forgo the pleasure once again. But then I found out that it was my only chance to catch up with Vickery, who is here on a visit from Wyoming, and and I couldn't resist that temptation, too. So off I went.

And what did I find? My first acquisition was my very first, very own skein of Socks that Rock yarn. I've seen it on so many blogs and have never been able to see it in the flesh (wool?) before, so I jumped on the chance to acquire my own skein at last, and to pick out the colour by seeing it in person rather than through the distortions of a computer monitor. I chose Purple Rain in the lightweight version; it's a gorgeous combination of blue violet, grey and fuchsia. I'm planning on making the Monkey socks by Cookie A, with some of the modifications Cara has made, such as a slightly shorter leg and a picot hem at the top.

I also found the single item I was actually looking for - it's intended as a gift for a dear friend, and as she reads this blog on occasion I won't show a picture as the colour will be a clue that it's for her and I prefer complete surprise in this case. I'll just tell you that it's a skein of Tilly Thomas's Plie yarn, a hand-dyed silk with glass beads. (sorry; I couldn't find a website to link to for this one).

My "big" purchase was from Brooks Farm Yarns - I got three skeins of Acero, a superwash wool, silk, and viscose blend in a sportweight. It's deep teal, with an intriguing heathered quality due to the different fibres taking the dye differently. It's one of those yarns that's not as splashy as a mutli-coloured handyed yarn, but has a quiet elegance that I anticipate being absolutely beautiful when knitted up. Each skein has 420 yards in it, so even three skeins is a lot of yarn. Not sure yet what this will be, but I look forward to experimenting with it very soon.

Other, non-Stitches additions to my collection (unlike the museum, I hope the collection is not permanent in the sense that the yarns never get used; I just hope that the stash remains an intact, if fluid, entity) were the result of my sweetheart, TW, giving me a generous gift certificate to the LYS, Benicia Knitting Circle, as a Christmas gift. I decided to use it to get yarn for Norah Gaughan's Hex Coat, from Knitting Nature (which was also a gift from TW last year). The pattern calls for Lopi Lite, which I don't care for, and I couldn't find a substitute that was exactly on in gauge, so I decided to wing it and use Cascade 220, even though it knits up to a different gauge. I'll have to rework the pattern a bit but I think it can be done without too much grief. Even if it just didn't work out I still have a full 10 skeins of a luscious ruby heather Cascade 220, and how bad can that be after all?

To finish off the full gift certificate, I also got a few skeins of Silky Wool to combine in some way with the cream I have leftover from an earlier project. This might be another sweater, or it might be the beginning of a log cabin blanket a la Mason Dixon Knitting's blanket, using the same yarn.

And that concludes our show for today. Please stay tuned for future exhibitions arranged along the theme of New Work.

Spring is in the air

I know the weather for folks back east is still deep winter, but in California we're having a brief glimpse of spring that so often appears in late January or early February. Temperatures were close to 70 degrees F last week, and while they're back down to a more seasonable 60ish F the skies are still clear and crisp. If one can get out of the city and suburbs into the more rural areas it is so beautiful this time of year. Mustard flowers are blooming under bare orchard trees; sheep and cows graze on the lush green grass; the air is cool but the sun is so warm. It was a great day today for a drive to enjoy all this bounty, so that's what TW and I did today. We put the top down on the convertible, bundled up, and took off for Tomales Bay for a drive and lunch. My photo of the mustard field was taken while driving so it's a bit blurry, but the glorious colour should come through none the less.

So while the rain is due back in a few days and there's still winter weather to come for e few more months, I feel the urge to focus on spring knitting. I am well on my way with the lace and cable cardigan - this is the body done almost to the armholes; I'm going to finish the pattern repeat I am on and will begin armhole shaping at that point. The sleeves are already done to the point of starting in the caps. One I stop working across the entire body as I am now and just focus on the back and fronts separately the rows will feel like they're flying by. The front will continue straight up the neck, and there will be a seed stitch collar to finish it off - the cardigan will almost be a shirt in style when it's done. Or at least, that's the plan.

At Knit Night last week Giovanna brought a hear-shaped sachet she was working on from an Interweave Knits pattern, using mitred squares knit at a tight gauge to form the heart shape. Very pretty. I've wanted to make this for a long time so she gave me the kick in the pants I needed to try it. I used stash yarns that I had in small bits and pieces to make the mitred squares. This is definitely addictive and I am not sure how many I will end up making before I get sick of them. As can be seen in the photo, one is done and stuffed with rose and lavander petals and a little wool; the second one is almost done; it just needs the last 2 squares to make the points at the top and then finishing. This is a great way to use up small bits of yarn. I believe the original pattern was done in Koigu but my yarns are rayon ribbons, silk noil, cottons, etc.

And I've been spinning - I know have 2 full bobbins of the brown Perendale top that my Dad brought me from New Zealand last year and am ready to ply them up. I'm guessing I'll have about 300 yards out of these 2 bobbins. Next I'll spin some of the white merino top that he also brought me, and once I have enough of both yarns I plan to make a pillow for him using an adaptation of the Intricate Stag Bag from Knitscene's Fall 2007 issue. That should keep me busy for a while, don't you think?

Is it a bad sign when....?

I was away from home visiting my mom all weekend, and am feeling a bit of a cold is coming on, so I haven't taken any pictures of my knitting for a few days and I don't really feel like doing it right now either. But I've had a few random thoughts in my head and now seems like a good time to put 'em out there, picture-less.

Is it a bad sign that perhaps I am overly obsessed with knitting when:

• I get really excited, thinking I have spotted other knitters, when I see people on the ferry or walking around town that seem to be untangling large amounts of white yarn? Only to be bitterly disappointed when I realize that it isn't yarn they're untangling; it's their iPod cord?

• I create a valentine for my sweetheart TW in which I intent to write "I love you" over and over, only to discover that I have in fact written "I love yarn" over and over?

• I seriously start to think that it would be a good idea to expand my yarn storage area into the trunk of my car?
  

• I don't count my hand-spun yarn when I inventory my stash, because, somehow, it's "different"?

• Or that I think it's perfectly normal to reveal my failings in public via the internet, having faith that everyone reading this might actually not consider any of this to be weird?

And if any of you out there have other symptoms of over-obsessiveness with knitting, I'd sure love to hear about your "bad signs"!

So now it's really done.

OK, it really is done now! I finally got the bias strip knitted, blocked, sewn around the cording, and sewn onto the pillow, and the ikat pillow is at long last finis, done, all over. I thought I had knit about 6 inches more of the bias strip than necessary, but ended up needing to knit about 4 inches extra to make the ends meet, but that was quickly done, especially since I had perfect knitting TV going on - football's Super Bowl. I find sports, especially football, to be excellent knitting TV and I do like to watch football anyway, so I get a lot done when there's a game on.

So what am I up to now? I'm still working on the multi-stitch, blue cotton cardigan but haven't taken pictures of it yet. The sleeves are done to the armhole, and the body (which I am knitting in one piece) is about 1/3 of the way to the armholes. It's a great project for the ferry so that's going along well, as I have 2 hours per day to knit on it.

I am also planning a major project in the form of Norah Gaughan's Hex Coat from her Knitting Nature book. Thomas gave me the book for Christmas a year ago, and this year gave me a generous gift certificate to my LYS (Benicia Knitting Circle) so I am spent a long time there yesterday looking for the yarn I wanted to use. The pattern calls for Lopi Lite, and since I am not fond of Lopi I wanted something else. I've swatched with Cascade 220, but it's too lightweight to get gauge.

I did find a new yarn - Cascade Pastaza, which is 50/50 Llama and wool, which comes in gorgeous colours. Upon swatching with a few needle sizes I find I can achieve the appropriate gauge, but the yarn makes a dense, heavy fabric that would make more of an outerwear coat then the lighter indoor cardigan I am after. So it will be back to the drawing board there. Normally I have little fear of adjusting patterns to suit the gauge and yarn I want to use, but given the complex hexagons and shaped fronts in the Hex Coat I am less secure than usual. It appears that much more swatching is in order on this one.


And last but not least, my Knitting/Spinning group has taken up the felted Bunad Mukluks as a new challenge project! The pattern, from Folk Style, is a great one to adjust to one's own taste and personal style so it will be great fun to see what everyone ends up doing with the pattern. I am using Cascade 220 (there seems to be a theme in my yarn choices, lately!) and as the colour in this photo is atrocious, it will be in a heathery light turquoise and black, with a little marigold colour as an accent. I had toyed with using stranded colour patterns in my first pair and have decided to go with that this time around. Not sure yet what the design will be, but I'm looking forward to playing around with some ideas.

Nearly a pillow.

The ikat pillow has now been sewn up and is technically a usable pillow. The front is all in the ikat stripe pattern, with two different patterns on the back. The backs overlap with vintage mother of pearl buttons closing the envelope.




I find that this envelope style is easy to put on and take off, and looks good flat, but often pulls open and gaps when a pillow form is stuffed into it. So I like to use several buttons to keep the flap more neatly closed - 3 buttons minimum; preferably five. I've got oodles of these buttons so I might as well use them with abandon.




The pillow isn't quite done yet. I like having some sort of welt or cording around the edges of the pillow, somewhat like a frame around a picture. I've used I-cord in the past, either in a plain colour or striped, but since this pillow has a very strong striped pattern to it already I didn't want horizontally striped cording around the edges; it just seemed too potentially discordant with all those stripes that didn't line up.


So I'm knitting a long stripe of bias knitting in stripes which once it's sewn around a cord and attached to a pillow the stripes will be on an angle instead of horizontal. I've got the bias strip a little over halfway done; it's the last thing to be knitted for this project. Once it's sewn in place the pillow will be done. Oh, yeah. I still need to make the pillow form to go inside. A flat pillow isn't much of a pillow, after all. Ok, so it'll be almost done!

Newly almost-finished UFO

In spite of my resolution to post more consistently on Sundays, I simply had to wait until today so I could get some better pictures of a newly almost-finished UFO project. It's now being blocked, and just has a little finishing left to be done, so as far as I'm concerned it's done.

In my post on April 29 I mentioned a Kaffe Fassett-like vest project I was thinking about. I actually got most of the back done before it began to languish in a most serious manner.

Now, UFOs are not usually a big problem for me - there aren't piles of them lurking in dark corners around the house and studio. Usually, if I don't finish something in a fairly reasonable length of time it's because there is a good reason - I don't really like the pattern I am knitting, or I don't like the yarn, or I made a bad decision in combining pattern and yarn. The trick is to realize why a project has become a UFO - once I figure that out the project usually gets unraveled and returned to the stash rather than becoming a fixture in my life.

Recently, after pulling the vest out and mulling it over on several occasions I finally realized that I wouldn't ever wear a vest that was as heavy and , well, woolly as this one was going to be. I realized it wanted to be a pillow much more than it wanted to be a vest, so I unraveled the beginning end and the slight amount of shaping that I had done, put the newly-live stitches on a separate needle, and got started again a week or so ago. And at long last I have the knitting done for the body of the pillow.

The pillow is knit in a single long strip beginning with the original vest back in the middle, which will become the pillow front. In the photo it's the center section with the broadest stripes, which were knit in an ikat-like pattern adapted from Kaffe Fassett's book of charted knitting patterns. the ends of the strip will become an envelope-style back for the pillow - it will have a flap at the top that will button closed over the lower end. The patterns for the back sections were invented ones of my own, but all the way through I drew off of Kaffe's approach - changing colours often, and not necessarily just at the beginning of a row.

Almost all of the yarns are handspun- mostly my own, with a few from friends. The browns, greys and whites are primarily test samples that were spun as part of my Sheep to Shawl team's practice sessions with various fleece types and preparations. I always love knitting on projects that I rely only on what I have on hand, and that use up lots and lots of little bits and pieces that are too much to throw out but not enough to do much with on their own. Once the blocking is done I'll sew up the sides and add some sort of border or i-cord piping, and then it will be a completely done UFO!

A new project.

Now that all the holiday knitting is done I can turn my thoughts to bigger projects. I'm really looking forward to starting something that will take a lengthy amount of time and that I can just work away at. Since I do a lot of my knitting on the ferry commuting to work I need to plan ahead enough to be sure I have a project that is in a suitable state for such knitting. I get a lot done on my commute and so am while doing my small holiday season projects I am constantly needing to find new things to start. I am now ready to luxuriate in a slowly unfolding project.

So what will it be? A long-awaited start on a cardigan sweater. I had a well-loved blue wool cardigan done mostly in seed stitch with some lacy edgings. I loved that sweater and wore it to death, and sadly, finally realized that it was time to let it go. In preparation for this sorrowful turn of events I had ordered some blue mercerized cotton yarn from Elann some time ago but hadn't quite come up with what the design should be. I wanted something similar but not the same as my old sweater.

Over the holidays my mom gave me a Debbie Bliss book, Nautical Knits for Kids, that she loved but knew I'd be more likely to make something from than she would. In looking through it I found one design that, while it was sized for small children had panels of 2 different lace patterns and a seed stitch/cable panel that I knew I could adjust into something for myself.

So I've swatched and measured, figured, and fiddled, and am well into the first sleeve. As each pattern knits up to a different gauge I am using the sleeves as more accurate swatches before launching into the body, especially as I plan to knit the body in 1 piece (no side seams) and I'd like to be really sure what the multiple patterns are knitting up like before I commit to all those stitches. I'm really enjoying having a lot of knitting to look forward to!