Green Socks and Blue Bonnets
Sock season is almost at an end in our part of Texas. It was cool enough this morning for me to wear my latest handmade pair while out running errands and grocery shopping with my mom. After that, I had to change to flip-flops.
The yarn is Coats & Clark’s Heart and Sole with Aloe. It’s lovely to knit and seems to speed my knitting along. It also feels very nice on my feet. Maybe the aloe is responsible. The colorway: Green Envy. Eva has already succumbed to the green envy. She ordered a pair of her very own for her next birthday.
The bluebonnets are in our front yard. It’s such a pleasure to go outside these days.
Flip Books for Easier Pattern Reading
Crocheters! Let’s borrow a trick that knitters have been using for years. When column after column of printed instructions overwhelm them (lace patterns are often the worst), knitters copy the pattern onto index cards: one row to one index card.
They punch the corner of each card, and hold them all together with a binding ring or a loop of yarn.
You can do this with crochet instructions, too. As you copy the pattern, break the row up into manageable chunks. For instance, write any instructions in parentheses on a line by themselves.
You’ll be amazed at how much better you understand a pattern after you write it out.
As you crochet, look only at the one card that has instructions for the row or round you are working on. As soon as you’re done with that row, go to the next card.
In the photo, I’m in the middle of crocheting the Pomegranate pattern from Crochet Garden. It is not difficult to crochet, but its instructions are long. With a single row written on each index card, I can focus on that one little bit of the pattern.
The paperclip is to keep my place in the pattern, since I couldn’t finish the motif all in one sitting.
Daughters’ Advice Proves Invaluable
Ella’s hand hovered over a pile of buttons, ready to sort. From Eva’s position in the armchair, she could oversee our work while also texting, facebooking, and doing homework. A box of crocheted flowers stood nearby. It was time to embellish the quilt.
Choosing embellishment is my favorite part of making any wallhanging, because of the sheer potential and unpredictability. I also love having my daughters’ advice, because they help me see things differently.
For instance, I imagined this Valentine’s quilt as a dream in pink, red, and cream. Then I found the applique daisies inherited from my mother-in-law. They had yellow centers.
“Yellow?!” I thought at first. A few minutes later, I was thinking, “Hmm. Yellow. Ah, yes.”
We took great care selecting yellow buttons. Some were way too bright, some were too big (but tucking them under the edge of a flower reduced their impact), a few were just right. We added crocheted flowers with yellow in them. Suddenly the quilt took on a spring-like, gardenish feel, unlike the straight-up Valentine-colors theme I had envisioned.
Ella supplied me with many pink and light pink buttons to surround the heart, and red and purplish buttons to hide in the background. She found every single red sparkly button in the pile.
“Mom, it needs some green,” said Eva from on high.
Ella got busy finding green buttons and I looked for crocheted leaves.
The flowers, leaves, and buttons cascaded from top left to lower right, looking like a pretty garland. Yes, they were pretty, but kind of dull, just slashing through at an angle like that.
Ella, inspired by all the buttons, ran off to find some fabric to make a quilt of her own. I searched for an element to counterbalance the diagonal garland, rushing across the face of the quilt.
“Eva, what do you think of this pomagranate?” I asked.
“It sure is big,” she said.
I took it off. “Well, when you take the pomegranate away, the quilt looks all empty and sad,” said Eva.
I put it back on. “That’s better,” said Eva.
A Quilting Ladies’ Valentine Project
This year, Valentine’s Day fell on Tuesday, which is the day our weekly quilting/crafting group meets. To celebrate, we were all to make a small quilt, using embellishments or other supplies from everyone in the group.
One member made fabric flowers for everyone, others shared crafty charms and Valentine buttons, and two ladies gave us all little quilted hearts. My contribution was a small collection of beads, buttons, and a bit of ribbon for each member of the group.
I’m making my usual TextileFusion-style quilt. The first step was to knit some fabric for the quilt top. A few hours at my trusty Ultimate Sweater Machine resulted in this length of knitted fabric in pinks, creams, and reds. All the yarn is from stash—love that!!
The first photo shows the fabric already stabilized with fusible interfacing. Then I cut it up and pinned the pieces on to a fabric foundation. Since the foundation fabric doesn’t show in the finished piece, I used some leftover fabric that has been lying around for years.
Here it is, all pinned and ready to sew.
I zig-zagged between each and every cut edge, sometimes twice. The zig catches the edge of one cut piece, and the zag catches the edge of the piece next to the first cut piece. At the same time, they are both attached to the foundation fabric.
It takes a while, and it’s kind of messy because the cut knitting sheds little bits of yarn. Finally, all the pieces were attached to each other and the foundation. I added rickrack to the quilt top.
Next post about this will be my favorite part of the process: choosing embellishments!
Kids have Great Ideas
Every student in my daughter Ella’s class decorated a small box for collecting Valentine’s Day cards and treats. Ella painted a box, inside and out. Then she said, “Mom, may I use some of your flowers?”
Of course she might use some of my flowers! She chose a pink mohair “Large Fancy Five,” an angora “Oval Center Rose,” a cotton “Small Fancy Five,” and a “Petal Arches” flower—all from Crochet Bouquet. She glued them to the box flaps for a lovely finishing touch.
Kids can think of all kinds of cute things to do with crocheted flowers. So if you have been crocheting flowers for fun and challenge, but don’t quite know what you’re going to use them for, give them to a child. They’ll know what to do.
I have to share this, too. Ella made it for a friend’s birthday. I thought it was a dragonfly, but Ella told me it is a flower. She made it all by herself. I’m so proud of my crafty daughters!
Socks for Ella and Me
Ella asked me to knit her a pair of socks. “Blue, please,” she said, very sweetly. She preferred a turquoise hue.
We already had the yarn: Patons Stretch Socks in colorway “Kelp.” The socks were finished in time for her birthday.
Since then, I finished another pair for myself in colorway “Plum.”
Here we are, modelling our hand-knit socks. Our feet are almost the same size, but hers are only nine years old.
I will soon have the smallest feet in the family. Yay! They won’t be able to borrow my sneakers anymore!
Crocheters, Knitters Do Essential Work
Crocheters, Knitters Can Make Radio Tubes!
Pennsylvania has a great online resource called the Access Pennsylvania Digital Repository, where you can find the actual pages of old newspapers, among other things. The best part is that you can search for specific words in these old newspapers. Amazing!
I was searching for biographical information about an old-time crochet designer, when this war-time ad appeared on the search list.
In the April 27, 1944 edition of The Ambler Gazette, page 3, National Union Radio Corporation of Lansdale, Pennsylvania, offered “Good Money for Girls and Women” for “Light, Clean, Easy, Interesting, and Essential Work.”
I love this part:
If you can sew, crochet or knit, you can learn to assemble radio tubes. It’s easy but a skill which will always be valuable to you. The tubes you help us make may save the life of some boy you know who has gone to war.
Employers of today should take notice! Knitting, crocheting, and sewing are skills that prepare people to save lives.
Valentine Project from New Book
For Valentine’s Day, Lark Crafts is offering a free crocheted Van Wyk Rose pattern from Crochet Garden. They’re hoping to make you fall in love with the book and buy it when it is released in May 2012.
The Van Wyk Rose is inspired by a painter named Helen Van Wyk. She made gorgeous flower paintings and taught her technique to others. She encouraged artists first to sketch the basic shapes in a flower, then add the petals and other details over this foundation.
Van Wyk’s sketch of the basic rose shape looked like a set of bowls nestled together. “That reminds me of a rose, even without the petals!” I said to myself. I hope you enjoy this easy-to-make design, named after Helen Van Wyk.
Quilt Fest Fun
When was the last time I was able to sit at my desk long enough to write a blog post? November, I think. We’ve done a lot since then! We did our usual December things, like school parties, a quilting ladies’ party, a band concert, and preparing for Christmas. And we also caulked and painted the inside of an entire house, organized lots of repairs and improvements on it, and filled it with furniture and other things one needs to live there. Unfortunately, it wasn’t our new earthen house, but it looks great anyway and it deserves its very own blog post.
So here I sit at my desk, and what do I see, but a pair of lovely earrings I bought at the Quilt Festival. Meg Hannan of Rag Sky Art Studio in Seattle made them with fiber millefiori. It’s the same idea as glass or polymer clay millefiori. For her earrings and pendants, she makes a roll of different color fabrics, fiber, and beads, soaked with liquid glue. When glue sets, she cuts the roll in cross-section to reveal designs that look like tiny, colorful fantasy worlds.
I’m planning a pinkish and salmon-colored sweater that will look great with these earrings.
Dusty’s Antique Linens and Buttons had baskets and baskets of vintage buttons that would have taken two hours to look at properly. For some reason—possibly that I’m planning a sweater in orange with teal, green, and other rich colors—I was drawn to the orange button baskets. These swirly fabulosities were cabochons from the 1970s or so, which were converted into shank buttons.
I have a sweater of moss greens on the drawing board as well. Thank goodness I already have a great selection of green Gail Hughes buttons and buttons to choose from, from a previous visit to Dusty’s.
Looks like a busy knitting year!
A Book Opportunity for YOU!
“There are so many wonderful flowers in nature, why would you want to design fantasy flowers?” asked a Crochet Bouquet Along member on Ravelry.
It’s true. Natural flowers are many and varied. I mean, look at this Antelope Horns milkweed that grew in our yard. What a strange and wonderful plant! Someday it will be the inspiration for some interesting and pretty crochet.
I love natural flowers, but I also love decorative flowers and fantasy flowers. Even as a kid, I was fascinated by artists’ interpretations of flowers in paintings, on greeting cards, on chinaware and tinware. A few brush strokes or a few simple shapes are all it takes to depict a natural flower.
Completely made-up flower designs give me a happy flower feeling, just like a natural flower would. Designing a fantasy flower is not a case of trying to improve on nature. Instead, it’s using nature as a jumping-off point for a flight of imagination.
Crochet Bouquet has a mix of natural-looking flowers and fantasy flowers; same with Crochet Garden. In fact, on the cover of Crochet Garden, the “O” of “Crochet” is my fantasy Samarkand Sunflower. A woven design on plate 31 of Treasury of Historic Folk Ornament (by Helmuth Theodor Bossert, Dover Publications, 1996) inspired it. It’s a woven interpretation of a flower, reinterpreted in crochet.
Having said that, I’ll bet that if you look far enough, you will find a natural flower that looks a lot like the Samarkand Sunflower.
Since I’m never going to stick exclusively to natural flower designs, here’s my suggestion:
- If you want lots of natural flower crochet designs, design them.
- After you have made a few samples, prepare a book proposal and start sending it to publishers, pitching it as a book of natural flower designs.
I think there’s still room for crochet flower books on the market, but not for long, so you’ll have to get going on this soon.