Stitches Shopping
These beautiful clouds above Baltimore set the mood for the heavenly yarns and designs at the Stitches East Market.
I stopped by several times to visit a shaded pink angora by Prism, color-way “Carnation.” Likewise, a gorgeous thick-and-thin rose and moss green yarn by Schaefer kept me coming back. In the end, I thought of my backlog of projects and didn’t buy either of them, but I still remember them fondly.
Word-of-mouth turned out to be the best kind of advertising for a couple of vendors, thanks to a lady in my Dotty Knits class. She had bought a skein of glow-in-the-dark yarn, something that I’ve wanted since the early 1990s! It’s not the softest yarn ever, being made of nylon, but it really does glow in the dark.
The same lady showed me some square knitting needles, which are meant to be easier on your hands. I bought the straight needles, a square crochet hook, and the square circulars for testing. Square circulars! That makes me chuckle every time I hear it.
The needles are round at the tip, like regular knitting needles. Where you hold on to the needle, they are square. Since they fit into the angles your fingers make when you hold on, it seems logical that they would be easier to hold. I’ll test them and let you know.
Finally, there was the pink knitting needle gauge that looks a little like an ammonite. Pink and fossil-like was a combination I couldn’t resist.
The people who took my Pleasing Pleats and Seveness Knitting classes knitted great samples. My favorite part of the Seveness class was seeing the beautiful color combinations people put together, which I would never think of.
Too bad my camera was in my hotel room the whole time. Aaarrgh!
(“Nightlights” glow-in-the-dark yarn sold by Woolstock Yarn Shop. Square knitting needles, crochet hook, and needle gauge sold by Yarn Bazaar. Needle photos styled by Ella with yellow flowers.)
Books are a Team Effort
Authors get a lot of glory for the books they write, but the true story is that 99% of published books are the result of a team effort that also involves editors, designers, marketers, and family. Crochet Bouquet belongs in that majority.
Thank goodness for technical editors! KJ Hay took my crochet instructions and improved them a lot. She formatted everything properly, determined the skill level for each project, added technical information for the yarns I used, and altered the instructions to conform to conventional style.
Most importantly, KJ made sure my patterns worked. She did a lot of testing, as you can see from the pile of flowers and leaves on her desk. She called the photo “flowerchaos,” which describes my home during the time I worked on Crochet Bouquet.
We had a great working relationship, even though our only communication was by email. I look forward to working with KJ again someday!
Dotty Knitters at Stitches East
Thank You to the Ladies who took my Dotty Knitting class at Stitches East! Here are some of them, posing with their samples. It was a happy class, where everyone quickly understood how to read the special charts, and many went on to practice charting on their own.
Dotty knitting is a way to knit with color, where you carry only one yarn at a time. It’s a slip stitch color knitting method, often known as mosaic knitting, as it was labeled by Barbara Walker. The difference is the scale of the designs.
Barbara Walker designed many stunning, mostly geometric motifs for this method. In my Dotty Knitting class at Stitches (and elsewhere), participants learn how to knit from the clever charts that Ms. Walker devised. Then they learn to chart Dotty Designs on their own. That opens the design field to things like children’s drawings and motifs with personal meaning.
I’ll be teaching Dotty Knitting again at Stitches West in Santa Clara, California, at the end of February 2009.
Reader Project
Susan, who blogs at humblethreads loved the idea of decorating greeting cards with crocheted flowers from Crochet Bouquet!
She made this one as a thank-you note for her daughter’s swimming teacher. She crocheted “Petal Arches,” “Large Fancy Five,” “Small One-Row Leaf,” and a couple of “Millefiori” from embroidery floss. Floss is a great choice for such small motifs, because of its wide range of colors.
After experimenting quite a bit, Susan settled on this attractive arrangement. On the inside of the card, she stamped “Thank You” with a rubber stamp from Michaels.
Susan has several other creative projects in the queue, including a crocheted flower bouquet, which she will put into a beautiful carved frame, and a bulletin board ‘picture’ which features changing combinations of flowers around the edge.
Watch this space for more Crochet Bouquet Reader Projects.
Seamless Argyle Sock Survivors
Here is this year’s “Argyle Sock in the Round” class from Stitches East. We not only survived the grueling workshop, we triumphed! Lots of participants finished knitting their sample sock. Others came very close.
In response to requests from people in other seamless argyle workshops, I made the sample sock smaller, so knitters would have a better chance of finishing. This was a fairly major alteration in my handout, so there were bound to be mistakes. The Stitches East sock-knitters found them for me. Future classes will benefit.
These are some of the finished sock samples. They’re so good!
Flowery Gifts Feature in November Crochet Along
Personalize the gifts you give this Holiday Season with crocheted flowers from Crochet Bouquet! Flowery gifts are the focus of our Crochet Bouquet Crochet-Along for November and December 2008.
Your job, if you would like to join in, is to embellish a purchased or hand-made gift with a crocheted flower.
Remember to share your creations in our Crochet Along groups on Yahoo or Ravelry or in the comments to this blog. (You can use html to insert a photo into a comment.)
I hope the handbag and slippers you see here will give you some ideas.
Rose Handbag
You will need
- Crochet Bouquet
- Metallic yarn, like Twilley’s Goldfingering (available at herrschners.com)
- 3.5 mm crochet hook (size E US), or size needed for a firm gauge
- Purchased handbag
- Sewing needle and thread
- Crochet two Shelly Roses (page 68) and two Corrugated Leaves (pages 109–110).
- Arrange the flowers and leaves onto the handbag. Sew them in place.
Luxurious Slippers
You will need
- Crochet Bouquet
- Super Fine weight (1) yarn, very soft. I used Jojoland International’s 100% cashmere.
- 3.5 mm crochet hook (size E US) or size needed for a firm gauge
- One pair plush terry cloth slippers
- 12 oblong cultured pearls
- Sewing needle and thread
- Beading needle and pins
- Crochet two each:
Large Sweetheart Rose (pages 93-94)
Small One-Row Leaf with One Leaflet Pair (page 120)
Small One-Row Leaf with Two Leaflet Pairs (page 121) - Arrange flowers and leaves on each slipper, using the photo as a guide. Pin and sew in place. Sew a pearl above each leaflet as in photo.
Thanks!
Handmade Halloween
“Mom, what should I be for Halloween this year?” asked Eva.
“I’ve always thought the Patchwork Girl of Oz would be a fun costume to make,” I said.
We love all the books about Oz, more than a dozen in all, written by L. Frank Baum. One of the many interesting characters in the Land of Oz is the Patchwork Girl. Her name is Scraps, and she was made and brought to life by a woman in some remote corner of Oz, who didn’t know that Ozma, the rightful ruler of Oz, had banned the practice of magic for everyone except herself and Glinda the Good Sorceress.
Eva quickly agreed with me, remembering her success with patchwork last summer. We couldn’t find our copy of The Patchwork Girl of Oz, but we did find several pictures of her online and in a wonderful book we have called All Things Oz.
Eva made a great big piece of patchwork and I turned it into a skirt. We had fun shopping for crazy socks and button-boots. We used the leftover patchwork to decorate a thrift-store shirt.
Most people didn’t instantly recognize the Patchwork Girl, so Eva spent a lot of time explaining. She didn’t mind. Here she is with Ella, the Queen Bee. I made Ella’s costume for Eva when she was six or seven years old.
Unfortunately, their little sister wasn’t able to come. It’s difficult to go trick-or-treating when your body is a clothes hamper. She’s a bit air-headed, as you can see from the photo. Little Sister is Ella’s creation. Charles and I don’t mind having another daughter in the house, especially one that is so quiet.
Wrapping Up Taos
Here are a few more things about our trip to the Taos Wool Festival.
This is the rug yarn I bought from Liesel Orend of Earth Arts. Liesel’s yarns are dyed with indigo, cedar, sage, cochenille, madder, and other natural dyestuffs.
Ellen of Ellen’s Wooly Wonders continues to produce realistic and whimsical knitted designs, like this basket of knitted cactus with a knitted lizard. My photo doesn’t do it justice. It’s much nicer in real life. Ellen designed a knitted wall-hanging of a desert mountain, which I hope you’ll check out here (better photo of the cactus basket, too). From a distance, the wall-hanging looks like a photo.
The Yarn Shop on Bent Street is under new ownership. I went in to have a look around and to promote Crochet Bouquet. The owner, who is called Granny G, said, “As you can see, I don’t have many books in this store, because I’d rather encourage people to design their own patterns.”
Wow! I never thought I would hear a yarn shop owner say something like that! It made me very glad. I replied, “They can design their own patterns, and then decorate them with crocheted flowers from my book.” She bought two copies.
Granny G wrote and narrated a CD called 7 Lazy Steps: Using Chakric Energy for Self-Healing. We listened to it on the way home. Granny G describes the chakras and their attributes, then leads the listener in prayers that ask for release from habits and thoughts that keep us from enlightenment. The sound of bells separate each step. I could feel them resonating in my bones.
Granny G’s voice is joyful and full of good humor. Listening to 7 Lazy Steps is uplifting.
You can buy a copy of 7 Lazy Steps at
The Yarn Shop
120B Bent Street
Taos, New Mexico
(575) 758-9341, (877) 213-7732
Or you can order from FarOutThings.com.
The day we got home, the skies were dramatic and stormy. We missed all the rain, but saw all the glory.
Plain Pansy Poncho Places
In an earlier post on Curious and Crafty Readers (now Suzann’s regular blog–2023), I gave instructions for how to crochet a linked up trim with the Plain Pansy (pages 63-64 of Crochet Bouquet).
There are over 40 Plain Pansies in the trim of this poncho, which I finished just in time to enter into the Garment Contest at the Wool Festival at Taos, New Mexico, earlier this month.
My little poncho won second place in the “Capes, Ponchos, Ruanas” division. Hurray for Flower Power!
May I encourage you to enter your crochet work in contests, too? Contests give you incentive to finish projects, and if you win a ribbon that’s a bonus. Sure, you may not win anything, but if you go ahead and enter, at least you have a chance!
The Knitting Nest, Austin, Texas
My family lived on Slaughter Lane, which was in the country on the southern outskirts of Austin, from 1969 through about 1975. My brothers and I enjoyed wandering in the woods behind our house and walking up the hill to visit our friend Andy, who lived on a dairy.
The dairy is gone now, covered with apartments and town homes. Our part of Slaughter Lane is now Ralph Ablanedo Avenue, named after a police officer who was killed in the line of duty. And at the intersection of Cullen Lane and Slaughter, where I walked or rode by in the car many times as a kid, is–¦
A Yarn Store!!!! Oh, if my kid-self could have stepped through a wrinkle in time to see the yarn in that store! By the age of twelve, I was a confirmed knitter and crocheter. Even then I would have sighed with pleasure!
The store is The Knitting Nest. You can knit or crochet, sitting comfortably on the couches and upholstered chairs. Or you can sit at the long table and spread out your patterns and charts under the hanging lamps. I was there to sign copies of Crochet Bouquet, and I covered that table with crocheted flowers. It’s a cheery place, and Stacy, the owner, serves refreshing drinks.
Aside from its generally good selection of yarns, The Knitting Nest has a complete selection of Cascade 220 wool. Yes, you read right–every single color there is of Cascade 220. Stacy orders weekly to keep her stock current. She offers mail order to customers who live far away.
The Knitting Nest was a stop on this year’s Hill Country Yarn Crawl, and probably will be again next year. In the meantime, be sure to stop by next time you’re in South Austin.
The Knitting Nest, 160 Slaughter Ln W #200, Austin, TX 78748, (512) 291-8866.
