March 20, 2008

POST-MADRONA COOL-DOWN

I know the blog has been looking like I've fallen off the face of the earth . . . or, at least, fallen out of cyberspace. It's been a month since the Madrona Fiber Arts retreat, and I am overdue in posting photos. Without further ado, here are a few shots that are designed to show you the booth in all of its glory:

This photo courtesy of Michale. That's me, standing in the booth ready for business, wearing the Autumn Rose sweater.

This photo courtesy of my DH Scott. He took it Sunday afternoon, when things at the retreat were winding down. It looks like we have no customers! But the whole four days of the retreat, we were hopping -- it all went by in a blur. It is true, though, that Sunday afternoon there was less traffic. That's me at left, and Arlene (from Guild and Nihon Vogue class), who graciously volunteered a couple of afternoons of her time to help me out.

Another photo courtesy of DH Scott, to show you the booth from the other angle. Two Swans has a lot of yarn! The booth showcased the Spindrift, front and center, plus J&S 2ply, Kidsilk Haze, Nashua Julia, Satakieli, Simply Shetland's two yarns (Silk & Lambswool and Lambswool & Cashmere) and a random assortment of sock yarns . . . but there was a lot of yarn that I had to choose to not bring to the retreat. Wow, has my little shop grown over these past four-plus years.

I learned so much from the booth that I had at last year's retreat. This year, as you can see, I signed up for a space that was twice the size. This meant more shelving, and at least twice as much yarn. (I have to pass along this remark that I think is so cute: One of my volunteers said to me, 'You have more yarn here than any other shop!' 'Naaah,' I said, 'that's not so.' So I sent her out on a reconnaissance mission. Truly, there were a couple of other shops that had brought in more yarn than I did . . . but only a couple.) But aside from the larger scale of this booth, I planned better for easier access into and out of the booth. This year, there were at least three retreatants who were in wheelchairs, and any of them could easily come in and get to the yarn on the shelves -- something that was just not possible last year.

To close this entry, let me extend my overdue thanks to all of the people who helped me put this together:
To my daughter Jennie, my friends Amy, Dan H., and Steve S. for setting up the booth with me,
To Anne, June, Andrea, Jeane, Karen H., and Sirkku for their knitted sample garments,
To Lori, Arlene, my sister Shirley, and Jeane for volunteering their time to help staff the booth,
To my DH Scott who helped me with the big picture of planning, who spent an evening assembling the new shelving, whose company produced that awesome sign, and who just generally strives in that impossible task of keeping me organized.

January 30, 2008

HIRED GUNS

I'll be having a booth again this year at the Madrona Fiber Arts retreat in Tacoma in mid-February. And I was longing to have some new and different shop sample garments this year. But, you know those blues I've been singing, about how I'm already so overwhelmed with knitting homework for Nihon Vogue class, on top of all the other things I need to do to keep Two Swans swimming, that I just didn't see how I was going to fit in the knitting of sample garments, too.

Time to call in the hired guns.

After Anne made the Duxbury Point pullover for me, she was willing to finish knitting the Autumn Rose that I'd started. No trip to Portland could be complete without seeing her, and so last Sunday we met for dinner and she handed to me my Autumn Rose.

(Pardon my clenched-teeth expression -- I was trying to smile through my shivers and keep my hair from blowing into my face -- it's cold enough to snow!)

I had felt some attachment to this project. It was hard for me to hand over Autumn Rose to another knitter, after I'd already started her. But, realistically, I knew I wasn't going to get it knitted by the time of the retreat.

Anne was a really good sport about it, too. She picked right up where I left off, matching my gauge. She kept on with the DK weight in the solid rows, as I had done when I'd started, even though that meant switching balls of yarn more often, and more spit splicing. I requested a higher, more modest neckline, and she indulged me in this request, even though that threw off the stitch count for picking up the neckline and also meant that, once the raglan sleeves were attached and she was knitting the top yoke, following the charts was more difficult because she was now in a different place than the published pattern. (Notice how my sweater's neckline begins after a full repeat of the rose, whereas the original sweater has the neckline beginning in the middle of a repeat. Starting in the middle of a repeat bothered me, visually, and I am glad to have a higher neckline, too.) After trying the neckband using graduated needle sizes as per the written pattern, Anne ripped all of that out because it seemed to pull in too much, and just went with knitting the neckband on size US 2s. You can see that the neckband lies nicely flat on me.

Similarly, I wanted a pair of the Rovaniemi fingerless mitts for display in my booth. And who better to hire to knit them for me, than Seattle Knitter's Guild member Sirkku Bingham, who is a native of Finland and learned the Rovaniemi technique in elementary school?

Did I mention that it was cold enough to snow, here? We've been having intermittent snow showers, followed by rain to wash it all away, followed by snow again, since Sunday.

Sirkku sent me a sweet note with the finished mitts, saying that knitting them had brought back memories for her. And the mitts are charming! The blue and green colors go well together. I especially like the lines of the gusseted thumb. (I'll try to get a picture of that, tomorrow.)

I had sent Sirkku a set of yarns that I'd kitted up:

and she sent back the leftovers along with the mitts. And there were a lot of leftovers! I'm thinking that a knitter could get two pairs of mitts out of one kit . . . but I don't want to guarantee that! I am kitting up the yarns by weight, winding off one-quarter of the colored skeins and including one whole skein of off-white, because that seems the most efficient way for me to prepare a kit. Do with the leftover yarns what you will.

Behind the scenes, I also have Feral Knitter June working on a pair of fingerless gloves, and Sirkku is working on a vest. My booth this year will be wonderful, thanks to the contributions of all three of these knitters. And I'll be wearing my simple stockinette top-down raglan -- so if you're attending the retreat, stop by and say hi, and I will be accepting compliments on my plain little sweater, too!

If you have a knitting project that you're ready to hire a professional to help you finish, you can contact Anne Berk at the yarn shop where she teaches and does finishing work in Portland, Knit/Purl, or Sirkku Bingham at Pinchknitter.com.

January 29, 2008

FIVE, SIX, SE-VEN, EIGHT

It was another trip to Portland for Allegra and me last weekend, this time so that she could attend the NYCDA dance convention.

Ballet class. Allegra is just to the left of center, in the long-sleeved black shirt. The boy ahead of her in the white T-shirt and black pants is Colin, and behind Allegra in the green tank top is Claire, both from Allegra's dance school.

There were easily 200 teenaged girls at the dance convention, maybe even 300 or more. And there were only about 11 boys. Oh, and Sabra and Jaimie from the television show So You Think You Can Dance were there as part of the troupe of demonstration dancers -- and those girls can dance, "and they're really funny," Allegra says.

Allegra took all of the classes, jazz, tap, and ballet. They danced six hours a day, with only the shortest of breaks to get a sip of water and eat a quick snack. She would be in our hotel room at night saying how tired she was, and go to brush her teeth before bed. Then she'd come out of the bathroom with her toothbrush in her mouth and dance around the room, practicing her combinations one last time.

Kind of like her mom saying, Just let me knit one more row - !

I thought of the trip as my own private knitting retreat. I popped in and out of the dance classes to check on Allegra a little bit, but spent most of the time in our hotel room, knitting. My goal was to finish the second sleeve of the top-down raglan that's an assignment for the Nihon Vogue class, and I daresay I succeeded:

Yarn: Rowan Felted Tweed, color Midnight - approx 6 balls
Needles: Size US 5, with US 3 used for the ribbing

I still have a few ends to weave in, and to block it, but the knitting is over with and the sweater fits.

This sweater and I have had a long journey (and I don't mean just to Portland twice) since class met in November. In November, I had completed the body and one sleeve, and I was deeply disappointed in the fit. The sleeve was like a dolman sleeve at the upper arm, but then skin tight from the elbow to the wrist. (Okay, I exaggerate -- not exactly like a dolman, but there was a lot of extra fabric across the shoulder and at the upper arm.) Overall, the body was larger than I would have liked, too. That was a sweater I would have worn once and then relegated to the depths of my closet. Note that I had followed the directions we were given in class, to the letter, to the number, to the centimeter -- you name it, I had done exactly what I was supposed to do. So back in November, before I set out to knit the second sleeve, I consulted with Jean about the fit. And she discussed with me what I needed to do to make the armhole less deep and the sleeve, overall, fewer stitches in circumference. This essentially meant ripping out the sweater to a point about six inches below the neck. And in November I had a big heart-to-heart talk with myself, over four days, about whether I wanted or needed to do that much ripping and re-knitting. Was I a knitting martyr, or did this really make sense to do?

In the end, I chose to rip and re-knit, even though the consequence of this was that I am even further behind in my homework than my classmates.

But the class is not a race. I have learned good lessons about raglans, about ease and about how much depth I like in an armhole. (Less is more, for me!) And in the end, I have knitted myself a sweater that I will actually wear.

A footnote, in the "how much knitting can you get out of one ball" category: The first sleeve took exactly one ball of yarn, supplemented by a few yards more to complete the last four rows of ribbing. This was true of the first permutation of the sweater that I had completed back in November, and of this current version of the sweater, too. The second sleeve took exactly one ball of yarn and I have a few yards left over! Yes, the two sleeves are the same number of rows. I chalk up the difference to a slight variation in the put-up.

January 28, 2008

JANUARY 28, 2008

Felix models his Elephants vest. Wendi, his mom, made my day the last time Feral Knitters met. I'd just arrived, hadn't even pulled my knitting out of my bag yet, and the first words out of her mouth were, "I love the vest!" She also has reassured me that it goes with everything and that he wears it all the time.

Given how frustrated I am with knitting right now due to the homework in the Nihon Vogue class, I am savoring this success.

January 20, 2008

JANUARY 20, 2008

My dear friend Anne finished my Duxbury Point sweater! And it fits perfectly. I wore it to Nihon knitting class last weekend, and it was duly admired.

The main subject of class was: sleeves. I am so far behind in my homework that I didn't get a sleeve knitted, so there was no seaming for me! But here's a picture of my seatmate, Arlene, and her sleeve pinned into her sweater and ready to seam. With all the bamboo pins sticking up, it looked like shark's teeth! (That's Shiori and Andrea in the background, looking as if they've never had a moment of stress about getting their homework done.)

Using Arlene's sweater, Jean demonstrated how to crochet the seam:

* * *

I got a new computer in November, and subsequent events are something that could be right out of the pages of the children's book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. One thing leads to another. The new computer and my old camera weren't compatible. (My old camera was a mere 5 years old -- and already obsolete! Harumph!) I got a new camera for Christmas. Until then, every time I wanted to upload a photo to my blog or to the Two Swans site, I had to go the long 'way 'round. (I resorted to taking the old camera to the camera store and burning CDs of the photos; then I could load the CDs into the new computer....) And now that I have the driver on the new computer able to work with the new camera, every time I want to upload photos, it feels like I have to figure out how to transfer the images as if for the first time.

All of this messing around with cameras and drivers has put a crimp in my blogging and my listing of new products on the Two Swans site.

But here are a couple of things I have listed recently:

Light Blue, a new-to-Two-Swans color of Satakieli. It is meant for Lene's Rovaniemi fingerless mitts, about which she wrote an article and pattern that appear in the current issue of Piecework :

I'm kitting up the yarns for these mitts.

Soon, Susanna Hansson will be publishing a pattern for Rovaniemi mittens, and I'll be selling kits for hers, as well. Stay tuned!

And also making a long-overdue debut on the Two Swans site is the new yarn from Crystal Palace, Panda Silk.
I am carrying most of the colors. It comes in solids and variegateds. Only today did I begin successfully taking pictures of the yarns and uploading them, so continue to check back over the next day or two and see what colors I've added most recently. This is a particularly lustrous yarn; it would make gorgeous socks but it is so drapey and lustrous, it just begs to not be hidden under pant legs or inside shoes but instead to be shown off as a lacy scarf or shawl.

December 24, 2007

BLESS MY BRASS BUTTONS

New Year's is my favorite holiday, and, with 2008 on the horizon, I've started looking around at what needs to be wrapped up before 2007 ends (besides the Christmas presents, I mean).

From time to time I've alluded to a Secret Project I've been knitting. Maybe not so secret; all of my friends have seen me knitting on this thing over the past year. Well, bless my brass buttons, I got it done -- and here it is, in its completed glory:

This was one of those things that I just was not going to take with me into 2008. Or, as my DF Lizabeth would say, "Haven't you finished that yet? That kid's going to be in college!" I'd intended it to be a gift to welcome a new baby, but it's turned out to be a gift for his first birthday. I'm just happy to have sent it off before Christmas.

The knitting of the vest wasn't hard and didn't take any appreciable amount of time. But the finishing -- ach! After I'd cut the steeks, I'd sit down to knit on it, and think, "Just give me an hour, and I'll have this buttonband done." And of course the buttonband took days. And then I'd think, "Just one hour, and I'll have the armbands done." In fact, picking up the stitches of one armband took about an hour, never mind the actual knitting of it. And so it went, for months, with me thinking, "I'm just an hour away from finishing this," and that hour, once spent, bringing me only slightly, incrementally, closer to the end. Seriously, I believe the finishing work took as long as the knitting of the body.

I cross-stitched down the steeks on the inside of the vest, but my next Fair Isle project is going to have crocheted steeks, a technique that I learned from Janine's class last May. I don't think crocheted steeks take any less time, but you do them earlier in the project, before you cut the steeks and move on to the next step (whether that's picking up stitches for sleeves or bands or what-have-you), and so I'm thinking that, psychologically, crocheted steeks make the project seem to be going faster. You don't have the tedium of cross-stitching at the very end, at a point when you are impatient to be done with it.

The pattern is, of course, the Elephants Vest from The Children's Collection. This is one AS project for which all of the original (albeit discontinued) Campion colors are currently available in the Jamieson's Spindrift line. The brass buttons coordinate really well with the yellow ochre and burnt umber yarn colors, and give a complementary East Indian sort of flavor to the vest.

Postscript: I received a very nice thank-you note from Wendi, letting me know that the vest does fit little Felix now, and she expects he'll be able to wear it for some time.

December 14, 2007

IT'S BEGINNING TO SOUND A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS

I'm so proud of my handiwork, decorating these socks with these bells, that I just have to blog about it. Allegra's dance school puts on holiday open house performances where the students get to dance for their parents, and for younger children at the school. For the most part, costuming involves embellishing or re-configuring dancewear the students already own, and purchasing a few items; the teachers say, "Buy this hat and put a red or green ribbon on it," and so forth. Allegra's jazz class will be dancing to JIngle Bells and the dancers will have a retro-50's look: Black, knee-length pants ("Clam diggers," Allegra says), a white shirt, a small silk scarf tied around the neck, a red ribbon on her ponytail -- and white anklets with bells.

So Allegra and I went to the fabric store to buy bells. I expected to find a couple of different sizes, and was thinking that they'd be silver or perhaps brass color. When I saw red bells, we both got very excited. I whooped as I pulled these off their hook, there on the aisle in the fabric store, and a little boy in the same aisle who was helping his mommy shop looked at me just a little alarmed.

Once we had the bells, the question became, How to attach them to the socks? (The teacher gave us no direction on this point.) I recall Janine saying, with respect to knitwear patterns that someone likes this or that element of, but cannot understand why a certain part of the garment was done a certain way, "The designer made a choice -- and there's no saying that the designer made the right choice, and there's no saying the designer made the best choice for you."

My initial idea was to crochet an edging around the sock's top, and incorporate the bells into that crocheted edging. With this in mind, I bought some #20 red crochet thread.

But that began to seem like a lot of work . . . for socks she will wear for three performances and a couple of dress rehearsals . . . and I couldn't find either of my two steel crochets hooks.

The simplest choice would have been to sew a single bell on the center of the cuff right above the ankle. I would have "anchored" the bell -- that is, made it look like it belonged there -- by sewing on a red bow with the bell hanging from it. But that seemed too simple, and Allegra was sure that she wanted a lot of bells on each sock.

I could use that same red crochet thread to embroider a simple blanket stitch and sew on the bells that way. I had her count the number of ribs in the sock cuff: 84. We had about 14 bells, so that gave us 6 bells per sock, attached every 14th rib, with a couple of bells left over to add to her hair ribbon. It took me about an hour -- and she was so pleased, she wore the socks around the house the rest of the evening, and, I swear, slept with them on that night.

It took only about an hour, while watching one episode of Project Runway. This was a blessed relief. I still vividly recall the six hours -- essentially, a whole day! -- I spent sewing sequins on her jazz pants last year. Now, I hope the teacher is as pleased with my design choice as we are. And I want to see the design choices the other kids (and their moms) made.

* * *

Scary numbers: Last month, I turned 48 years old. Today, Scott and I are celebrating our 24th wedding anniversary. I have been married to the same man for half my life! And I wouldn't have had it any other way.

My dear husband said to me a few days ago, spontaneously and of his own accord: "I am no longer surprised when I open a drawer and find either candy or yarn." I guess we've gotten used to each other.

December 11, 2007

There's been a whole lotta knittin' goin' on

There's been a whole lotta knittin' going on -- two sleeves and a sweater back's worth, to be exact:

Alas, if only I had more time aside from my Nihon Vogue class homework to knit on fun projects like this. My responsibility for all of this knitting is limited to commissioning my dear friend Anne to knit the Duxbury Point sweater for me.

Anne squeezes in a few minutes of knitting while in her kitchen after breakfast, before leaving for work. She's wearing a Wicked Kidsilk Haze wrap called "Glad," that she made her own by incorporating a lace pattern into it. The pattern for "Glad" can be found in Rowan 39; the original version in the magazine is stockinette.

We think the sleeves will fit me -- although now that I think about it, I didn't try them on, myself. D'oh!

A note about Duxbury's color: I like the color shown for Duxbury in the Silk & Lambswool yarn, a color called Glenbuchat (Glen-book-at). It's a sort of a teal green that's got black tweedy flecks in it If you look at Simply Shetland Book 4, you would be misled into thinking that the color is more of a pale blue-gray. (I know there can be problems with color separations when going into print production, and I think the Rowan books are notorious for this.)

Allegra and I had a quick overnight trip to Portland, Oregon, to visit Anne, as part of a fun side trip during a homework assignment Allegra was working on. You see, Allegra came home from school a few weeks ago with a huuuge homework packet. Her social studies teacher had assigned his students to get out and do college visits. How many college visits? Six hours' worth. I knew the assignment was coming because he had talked about it when I met him at the open house at the beginning of the school year. But even though I knew it was coming, that still didn't prevent me from getting pissed off when I saw the size of the packet and the detail of the questions that she would have to answer (questions that ranged from "What kinds of clubs are there at this college?" and "How are dorm roommates chosen?" to questions that related more to the acadmics of the college). She's only a freshman in high school, for pity's sake.

To be fair to the teacher, though, I do think it is a good thing that he sees his job as mentoring his students toward a college education. Part of his point in giving the assignment, as he explained it at the open house, was that the college of your dreams might have an admission requirement of three years of a foreign language, but if you wait until you're a junior and taking the SAT to find that out, it's too late. And although he did not explain this at the open house, I am fully aware that there is a hidden curriculum: The state and the school district put pressure on teachers to give assignments that will involve the parents. I know this because it was not that long ago that I was teaching high school. So I think her social studies teacher had found a very clever way of creating an assignment that would involve the parents.

So I thought of a way to make this assignment fun: We would go to Portland and tour Reed and Lewis & Clark Colleges, and take advantage of Anne and her husband's hospitality while we were in their area.

Part of our tour of Reed included a stop in the thesis tower. Graduating seniors are required to write a thesis, one reason I was very impressed with this college. All of the theses, going back to Reed's beginnings, are filed in this tower in the library.

Another reason I was impressed with Reed:

This flyer on the bulletin board reads: "Sit 'n Knit with Librarians." Hey, I like knitting and I like books and libraries -- it sounds like a grand time, to me!

I didn't take photos at Lewis & Clark, but while in a neighborhood coffee shop there, I saw the headlines in the Oregonian predicting a storm of hurricane-like proportions slated to hit the Portland area over that weekend. Glancing at the article, I thought, "Oh, slow news day . . . they always try to make the weather storms sound so bad."

We made it home before the storm hit. At home, we had a dusting of snow on both Saturday and Sunday, and were deluged with rain in the early part of that week. What we had here in Kent was nothing like the devastation seen in Lewis or Grays counties here in Washington.

Our tours at Reed and Lewis & Clark were two hours each, for a subtotal of four hours. We rounded out the assignment with a tour of my alma mater, the University of Washington, last Friday.

"We" completed "our" six hours on this assignment. In the end, I was glad that we toured the colleges and university; in some ways, it was eye-opening, to find out about admission requirements and tuition fees.

November 25, 2007

OUR FIRST GLUTEN-FREE THANKSGIVING

My dear husband had been having digestive difficulties for a few months. He had lost so much weight he now weighs what I do -- yikes! He was recently diagnosed with celiac disease.

We had never heard of it before, but it turns out to be not uncommon. Celiac disease is an auto-immune disorder that is triggered by eating the protein (gliadin) that is in wheat. The body puts out an attack on the gliadin, but ends up attacking itself in the small intestine; your ability to digest your food goes . . . well, right down the toilet . . . and you can end up malnourished. The only cure is to not ingest gliadin, which obviously means avoiding breads and pastas but also less obviously means avoiding all sorts of processed foods that contain wheat. Scott has discovered Whole Foods and we are eating more consciously.

So our Thanksgiving turkey went unstuffed this year. At one point I was going to make a rice stuffing for it, but one of those new recipes Scott had experimented with was a brown rice dish that has you saute carrots and zucchini and a small amount of fresh tomatoes, and mix that with cooked brown rice -- it's delicious! And I love every excuse to get more yellow vegetables into our diet, even in our pre-celiac disease days. So we had that rice dish as a side dish; along with asparagus, green salad, yams, and mashed potatoes. My eldest sister stepped up to the stove and made our first-ever cornstarch-thickened gravy, which was very tasty. (And I'll confess that the next day, for leftovers, I whirled the gravy through a blender and added some chicken stock to it -- no offense, DSis! -- and it was even tastier.)

Here are two foodie blogs I recommend, that are authored by women who have celiac disease:

Karina's Kitchen

and

Gluten-Free Girl

On a local note, roughly a decade ago, the "Gluten Free Girl" was teaching high school English and Scott's niece was in her class.

Also, locally, the Sunny Valley Wheat-Free bakery is next door to the Maple Valley Post Office, which is where I go daily to mail Two Swans packages.

After the initial shock of finding out that you can no longer tolerate gluten as you have been able to for the past, oh, 50-something years, we are finding foods that he can enjoy. We've discovered some gluten-free pastas and crackers that we like, and there's always fruits and vegetables, meats and eggs and fish -- and pass the brown rice, please!

November 21, 2007

NOVEMBER HAPPENINGS

We're hosting Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, and so I'm brining the turkey this evening. While I'm waiting for the turkey to finish its time in its brine bath, I thought I could show you a few photos. (I mean, if you can't blog when it's going on 11 at night and the only reason that you're still up is that you're brining the turkey, when can you blog?)

The first full week of November, I went to Tucson for a few days. My sister, who moved from our gloriously green corner of the country to spend her retirement years in Sedona, drove down to Tucson to meet me. We had gone out to do a little sightseeing, and when we returned to our hotel that night, the cacti flanking the driveway had been all lit up like Christmas. After spending most of her life around Douglas firs, Dear Sis just can't get enough of the saguaros. She ooh'ed and aaah'ed over the marvel of these lit up cacti. "You're never without your camera, Kar -- take a picture for me." So there was nothing for it but for me to stop the car, get out my camera, and crash around through the plantings and get stabbed by cactus needles, so I could get these photos.

I was seriously concerned that hotel security was going to see us crashing around in the underbrush in the dark and decide we looked suspicious. Dear Sis kept telling me I was paranoid.

For the trip to Airzona, I neglected to pack any of the million-and-one tote bags that I already own. But my everyday purse was just too small, and my airplane carry-on bag was too big, for carrying around my knitting. So I splurged on a new Brighton bag:

I love it! (I felt even slightly virtuous about this, since the price tag on this bag was a mere fraction of what the price was of that knitting bag that Naomi found while cruising the Nordstrom website.) And this bag was just right for carrying this project:

my Swallowtail Shawl, which grew by leaps and bounds. Even my sister (a non-knitter) remarked on how much progress I made. I'm nearly ready to start the first tier of the Lily of the Valley border.

More cheesy touristy photos:

Because I have a mail order business, I have some interest in the post office. Heck, I'm one of their best customers! So when I read that the Postal History Foundation has a museum in Tucson, I went there.

Here I am, playing Postmaster General.

If you are a stamp collector, the Postal History Foundation is the place you want to go! In addition to the 1880s post office storefront, they also have cabinets full of all different kinds of stamps and these can be purchased.

My tour guide shows me a drawer of foreign stamps; the sections are labeled: Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Portuguese India.

My days in Tucson were only too brief. And then it was back home, to real life and duties like homework knitting.

Earlier this week, Sandy came over for lunch. She also gave me a guided tour of Ravelry (she's blueheron, I'm KarenCampbell). I have not yet done much with my Ravelry account, because, frankly, it wasn't all that intuitive to me, but Sandy definitely has the hang of it and showed me the highlights. Oh, if only there were more hours in the day....

Sandy in her O-Wool hat. Pattern available from Two Swans, of course.

Sandy in her Bullseye Hat, knitted in Julia yarn. I'm ordering this yarn for Two Swans. I've been very impressed with how stretchy this yarn is, and it has a little bit of mohair content. I don't know whata it is about mohair, but I have always been crazy about it.

Another view of the Bullseye hat:

Sandy is the designer of the Midnight Sun tam and the Autumn tam. Several of us in the Feral Knitters group are planning to make one or the other (or both).

Well, the timer's going off, so I've got to go pull the turkey out of its brine bath. Here's wishing all my Ideaphoria readers a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday.

November 15, 2007

KNITTING TORTURE

Nihon Vogue knitting class met the first weekend of this month. Where last I left off on this topic, I was being tortured by what seemed like an insurmountable amount of knitting homework. I managed to get quite a lot of the homework completed, but not 100 percent of it. I had enough done that I could participate in most of the class activities, and I remain optimistic that I will get caught up by the time the class meets again in January.

Project 1 in this class is a vest, and the vest is required to have 1x1 ribbing. One of my classmates had knitted a very long portion of ribbing on her vest -- practically the whole vest below the bust down to the waist was ribbing. 1x1 ribbing tends to be wobbly, and this classmate remarked on that.

Jean said, "If you don't like it, I can show you how to fix it."

Jean had the most mischievous grin on her face. She picked up a piece of the vest, balled it up in her fists, and made a scrubbing motion. Scrub, scrub, scrub. "Now you can torture your knitting!" she said. She unfolded her hands, and voila! That portion of the ribbing was no longer wobbly.

Why does 1x1 ribbing wobble? Back when I was knitting the lavender and white vest for the TKGA master knitter program, I experimented with all sorts of different ways to knit 1x1 rib. The ribbing wobbles because the left leg of the knit stitch is made in the same direction as the twist of the yarn; because of the energy in the twist of the yarn, the left leg of the knit stitch becomes prominent. If you are knitting a flat fabric back and forth, you'll get these alternating prominent left legs of stitches on the front and back sides of the fabric. It gives a wobbly appearance. In my O/C way, I knitted the ribbing for my TKGA vest many times over, trying different ways of wrapping the purl stitch or wrapping the knit stitch, to make that left leg prominence go away. I found that wrapping the knit stitch the wrong way makes the ribbing line up beautifully -- if you think about it, you are now wrapping the stitch in the opposite direction of the twist of the yarn, so there is no longer any tendency for the left leg of the knit stitch to get prominent. But the tradeoff in wrapping the knit stitch the wrong way is that you are using a fractionally less amount of yarn to create that stitch -- the less yarn in the stitch, the less elastic the ribbing will be. For my TKGA vest, I decided that I was better off having more elasticity in the ribbing, since it would have to fit around my middle, so I knitted the conventional way and just pulled my knit stitches as tight as I could to prevent that left leg prominence. Since I am already a tight knitter, I knitted that rib in a total death grip.

Now, I've learned from Jean another technique. I think the reason the scrubbing motion worked was that it released some of the energy in the twist of the yarn.

October 28, 2007

HOLD THE MARMALADE, PLEASE

If you haven't already heard of it, the Modern Quilt Wrap is a hot project right now. The MQW was designed by Mags Kandis and was published in the new book from Interweave Press, Folk Style. It's a very large rectangular scarf that uses modular knitting to create a sort of patchwork-quilt-looking block design. And, best of all, it uses what is probably my favorite yarn of all time, Kidsilk Haze. You can tell how fond I am of Kidsilk Haze just by glancing at the banner for this blog.

Now, I mean no disrespect to Mags Kandis or the folks at Interweave Press. But when I first laid eyes on the pattern, I wondered why it uses the set of Kidsilk Haze colors that it does. It uses an older set of colors . .. . the color Meadow being the most-recently introduced one and it dates from Spring 2006. It doesn't use any colors introduced in Fall of 2006, or Spring of 2007. And there were some great colors that were introduced at those times! And then there is the matter of Swish. The pattern calls for Swish; no color of KSH has been discontinued recently, except for Swish. I do have some Swish in stock, but I do not know whether I would be able to re-order any.

Here's the original set of KSH colors, as per the pattern:

Left to right, these are Drab, Swish, Jelly, Marmalade, Liqueur, Blushes, Dewberry, Trance, Meadow.

Now, one of the great things about KSH is that you can pick just about any nine colors of it and they'll work together in your MQW.

When I was temporarily out of stock of the color Swish, for example, I discovered that many customers were substituting the color Elegance. Although not as bright as Swish, Elegance works well with Drab and helps to set off the other colors. I had some knitters over to my house last weekend, and we had out the colors and discussed the relative merits of substituting Elegance or Bronze (a Kidsilk Night color) for Swish. (It was a dead-even tie, by the way.)

I've often been contacted by customers who want to make a MQW but one color or another of the original set doesn't appeal to them. (A lot of us are leery of Marmalade.) The photo below shows the color set that would be my choice for the MQW:

Left to right: Drab, Swish, Fern, Jelly, Trance, Candy Girl, Splendour, Violetta, Dewberry.

This color set makes excellent use of Fern with Jelly, which I think go so much better together than do Meadow with Jelly. And this also incorporates Violetta and Splendour (Violetta being one of my favorite colors).

If that is a little too bright, consider this set:

Left to right: Drab, Elegance, Fern, Jelly, Trance, Blushes, Splendour, Violetta, Dewberry.

That's the great thing about KSH -- pick any nine colors, and it's hard to go wrong.