Suzann’s Textilefusion

Like my fellow knitters and crocheters on Ravelry, I have a Flickr account to host the photos that I post to Ravelry. The following story probably wouldn’t have happened without Ravelry and Flickr. Thank you to them!

The Café Rouge is a nice place to eat on Eccleshall Road in Sheffield, England. I used to meet my US-American friends there. I always ordered iced water to drink, and loved how they served the water in a faceted glass with a slice of lemon and black straw.

In fact, I loved it so much I made a wall hanging about it, called Iced Water at the Cafe Rouge.

Well, imagine how happy I was when Shmap, an illustrated online map that shows stuff to do and places to go in Sheffield, asked to feature my wall hanging with the Cafe Rouge entry! Naturally, I said yes.

You can see the Shmap web page here.

In the earliest days of my blog, I posted some step-by-step photos of Iced Water at the Café Rouge. If you would like to see them, go to my sidebar, find the “Archives,” click March 2005, and read the posts from March 6 (two of them on that day), March 11, and March 16, 2005.

I’m re-crocheting a poncho with a border of pansies, using Plain & Fancy Sheep & Wool Company’s yarn. It stretched a lot when I blocked it the first time. I didn’t like the finished garment. I redesigned it. The second time around, it required more yarn. The unraveled yarn was already blocked, so I figured I would have to stretch the new yarn before using it.

Wool Winder commented on an earlier post about the poncho, “I have no idea how you are going to stretch the yarn before you crochet with it. This should be interesting, indeed.”

Yes, interesting indeed, because I had now idea how I was going to stretch the yarn, either.

After much procrastination, I decided to get on with it. Today was the day. I thought, ‘Okay, since the original yarn was steam-blocked while it was still crocheted, I should probably steam block the new yarn.’ I dampened the hanks and steamed them with my iron. So far so good.

But how would I stretch it out and keep it stretched long enough to dry? I put away the iron and collapsed the ironing board. Then I blinked. I pulled the ironing board back up. And collapsed it again. Hmmm!

I up-ended the ironing board, looped the yarn around the foot and the ironing surface. The moment of reckoning was upon us (me and the yarn, you know). Would the yarn stretch far enough to allow the ironing board to “catch” and hold?

It did! You can see the yarn stretching contraption in the photo above.

Progress so far: pansy trim finished except for darning in some ends; three rounds of poncho complete. It’s a start!

We went out to check on some wild pig bones, which lie in a culvert down the dirt road from our house. We hoped they were bleached and clean enough for us to take home and add to Ella’s collection.

Too bad–they still had fur and other stuff attached to them. Recent rains have partially buried the rib cage and apparently washed the skull away. They are fossils in the making.

Undaunted, Miss Ella spotted the skull of a carnivore, maybe a fox or a small dog. We picked up pieces of armadillo shell, too. Ella wants to study bones someday. Preferably dinosaur bones.

Then Eva spotted a piece of broken china along the roadside. It was a piece of a willow pattern plate, of all things!

It was a little like our life in England. We were always on the lookout for broken china, especially in places that the earth was disturbed, or where old houses were torn down, or even in our own back yard, where previous owners dumped and burned household trash. We collected boxes and boxes of broken china for making mosaics.

I was so inspired by the china we found in England, that I made a wall hanging about them. In addition to actual pieces of broken china, it has a knitted and embellished willow pattern plate on it. Read more about it here (scroll down to Shards 1: Willow).

“What is the story behind these broken pieces of china?” I asked myself. It became the theme for my wall hanging. You can see that the knitted plate is “broken” (the dark blue lines). You can look behind the flaps of the plate to find the story.

And all that started with a trip to look for bones! As Eva said, “Well, it was probably bone china.”

Stitches East will be November 6-9, 2008, in Baltimore—with perfect sweater weather, I hope!

One of the classes I’ll be teaching is called Seveness Knitting. Seveness stands for Suzann’s Sensational Similar Shade Scrap Stripe System (seven s’s).

We tend, over the years, to gather yarns in many variations of our favorite colors. Seveness is a way to use those yarns together for a lovely effect. It looks sedimentary, agate-like, interesting to the eye.

So you can use scrap yarns, stash, sale yarns, or all three, to make subtly beautiful color combinations, like the pink samples here. They remind me of the stunning stone rhodochrosite. We saw a polished slab of rhodochrosite at a rock shop during our Colorado trip–I want one!!

Best of all, because you go for an overall gauge, you can use Seveness technique with any printed pattern.

In the workshop, I will show you how to plan ‘random’ color changes and add accent colors. You knit a sample, then learn to measure for an overall gauge.

You’ll see how to incorporate Seveness with other techniques, like the brown Seveness and Fair Isle sample here. I’ll suggest some finishing tips to deal with all the ends. And I have a couple of other tricks up my Seveness Sleeve. Hey, that’s Eightesses. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

The knitting techniques we use in the class are simple, so an advanced beginner (can do k, p, stockinette st, seed st) will feel comfortable. Intermediate and advanced knitters will enjoy the ideas and the possibilities presented by Seveness Knitting.

Here’s the cardigan I made after the pink swatches at the top of the post. It has faded some, but I’ve worn it a lot since it was finished in 2001.

Eighty leaves. That’s about how many my Roses Cape will need. Just thinking of crocheting eighty leaves made my shoulders droop. When I broke the job down to four leaves a day for 20 days, it didn’t seem so bad.

And now, I’m over half-way through!

The Roses Cape is going to be made exclusively from stash, which is why these leaves vary so much. All the leaf yarn is from fellow textile lovers.

Several of the greens are from a lady who colored them in a dyeing workshop—”Take it! My husband will thank you!” she said. I don’t remember her name, but Thank You, Lady!

Others are from a friend I met at the Hallamshire Guild in Sheffield. Thank You, Betty!

Yet others are from a friend I met at the Taos Wool Festival. Thank You, Randi!

Fiber people are truly generous.

Eva loved Ana Paula Rimoli’s Amigurumi World. She brought it on our Colorado trip in June and spent hours crocheting cute little projects (the pear, which we named Solo, a coffee cup, an octopus). We had to make a special stop so she could buy stuffing for her amigurumi creations.

It wasn’t long before she struck out on her own, creating Bob and his beady friend. Eva agonized for days over Bob’s hairdo, finally settling on a neon orange mohawk. She worked out on her own how to crochet beads into Bob’s pet. Here they are, in the treehouse.

Bob was part of our household for several months before we ever saw him. He’s a bit of a rascal. Charles and I often say, “Eva, did you leave the lid off the pickle jar?”

“No. I haven’t had a pickle in weeks and weeks,” Eva says.

“I’ve never even opened the pickle jar,” Ella chimes in. Must have been Bob, we say.

“Who turned the thermostat up to 84 degrees?” I asked one day last winter.

Eva said, “Not me! I never mess with the thermostat.”

“I can’t even reach it,” chimes in Ella. Must have been Bob.

As you might imagine we were glad to meet him in the flesh. No, that isn’t right. We met him in the wool. Yes, that’s better. Mainly, we wanted to keep an eye on him.

During our photo shoot with Bob, his pet visited our cat Izzy. Bob recognized the danger. He’s sneaking up next to Izzy, hoping to rescue his pet.

Oh no! Too late!

Ella recently decided to make shoes. She tried paper first, but found that paper shoes don’t hold up well. Then she tried making shoes from felt.

After tape, staples are Ella’s favorite means of holding stuff together. She molded the felt around her feet and stapled the edges together. Voila! Shoes for Ella!

Ella has a five-year-old’s vision and spontaneity, which is so much fun to watch. I was thrilled at her little sticker guy. He looks like he’s going places! Thank you, Aunt Sue, for the stickers!

* * *

On the crochet front, I’m done with all the roses and blue flowers for my Roses Cape. For some reason I dreaded crocheting the leaves. I even resorted to weaving in ends to avoid starting the leaves. It was that bad. Yesterday, I made myself start the leaves, and of course it wasn’t so difficult. The problem was all in my head. So the Roses Cape progresses on schedule.

These leaves are the ancestors to the Rose Leaves in Crochet Bouquet.

* * *

Hurray for Flower Crochet Alongs! I’m hosting the first crochet along from Crochet Bouquet. We’re doing the Columbine this month. Participants meet at the “Crochet Bouquet Along” group on Ravelry. For more information, please click on the Columbine Crochet Along badge at left.

My friend Cari Clement, the Director of Fashion and Design for Caron and NaturallyCaron.com yarns, is also running a flower crochet along. The project is a stunning sunflower, designed by her assistant, Liz Walsh. Check it out at Cari’s Naturally Caron blog.

We’ve all heard that every journey begins with a single step. It’s true, sometimes actually, but often metaphorically, because many journeys do not involve moving from one place to another.

It would be more accurate to say, “Every journey begins with a single step, and the traveler must continue making single steps until the journey is done.” But that doesn’t sound as good, and it takes much longer to embroider.

My Roses Cape journey began with a single stitch back in summer 2006. I knew it would take a long time to make. Some things distracted me from working on it steadily. I’ve been back at it for about six weeks now, with a checklist in hand.

I broke the tasks into manageable chunks, so I could keep up with my daily crochet tasks and still be able to have a life.

On May 22, I still needed to make 46 roses (2 per day would take 23 days), 80 leaves (4 per day), and 140 blue flowers (10 per day). I figured I could reasonably darn in ends of 20 flowers per day (25 more days). It would take about 4 days to pin out all the flowers on the cape pattern, and 49 days to sew them all together.

I made a list of days with checkboxes by them. The check marks are piling up, and so are the flowers! I can almost see light at the end of the tunnel! At the planned rate, the cape will be done on October 14, in plenty of time for me to wear it to Stitches East.

This post was brought to you by Crochet Bouquet, the book that has patterns in it for the flowers in the Roses Cape: “Oval Center Rose,” “Simple Five,” and “Rose Leaves.”

My polymer clay button classes are always wonderful, but in Estes Park my button class was wonderful and large! They had great fun making buttons and it shows in these pictures.

Marilyn was in my Slip Stitch Color Knitting class at Taos a couple of years ago. She knitted her class samples with the most beautiful variegated yarn. She dyed it herself! She was in my button class at Estes Park, too. She travels around with an RV and her doggies, selling her home-grown hand-dyed yarns at fiber festivals.

We bought these beauties from Marilyn, whose business is called Black Hills Woolies. We don’t know yet what we’re going to make with them, but you will be among the first to know. I told Eva we could buy two skeins, so naturally, she said, “Three! Please, Mom. Please? Pleeeeeeeeeeeeease?” Her pleas worked this time, and we bought three.

Marilyn’s yarn colors are so vibrant! Look for her when you go shopping at your local wool festival.

I have been looking forward to seeing the Plain & Fancy Sheep & Wool Company, so I could buy enough yarn to refinish my pansy capelet. Yes, I meant to write “refinish.” I wanted to finish in time for last year’s Taos Wool Festival, so I hurriedly crocheted this little cape.

Then I put it on. It looks terrible on me! Really awful! The solution is to crochet a bunch more pansies, and make a longer, poncho-style cape. In spite of the amazing yardage on this yarn, I needed more.

The problem now is that I have already blocked the cape, and the yarn stretches like crazy! I think I’m going to have to stretch the new yarn before I start crocheting. This could be interesting, so stay tuned.

Don’t feel badly for the capelet. It saw the Rocky Mountains before it was unraveled. With any luck, it will see them again in its next life.