Stitches and California
Stitches West was fun! I met my roommate, button-maker extraordinaire Gail Hughes, at DFW Airport and we flew to San Jose together, talking the whole time.
I went with her to Pleasanton, California, on a sales call. Well, she went on the sales call and I had breakfast and went to a bookstore. Then we drove over the Oakland Bridge into San Francisco and visited Chinatown for a couple of hours. I loved this Chinese-style bank nestled among the brick buildings.
Back at the convention hotel, I sewed flowers onto my book-advertising cape. The goal was to wear it at the market and banquet on Saturday. I wouldn’t have gotten much sleep, if Gail hadn’t helped me sew flowers one evening.
Here’s someone cute, modeling the finished cape. Instructions for crocheting all the flowers are in Crochet Bouquet. Let us say, it is noticeable.
In fact, when Erica and I arranged to meet in person (we’ve known each other online for a couple of years), I said, “I’ll be wearing a pink and black poncho or a flowery cape.” She recognized me right away, and from a distance. We had coffee and a good talk about kids and knitting, before we went to the market. See us here!
Crowds of people admired yarn, knitting accessories and jewelry, and books. Several popular booths had long lines at the check-out. I bought some buttons and trims, which I’ll show next time. Then it was off to my Dotty Knits class, and later, to the banquet.
My plane didn’t leave until Sunday afternoon, so we went to Santa Cruz for the morning. We went down to the beach, but the damp wind and cold and spray from the pounding surf quickly drove us back to the car. When Charles and I were here over twenty summers ago, we loved the ice-plant covered hills. The succulent leaves were red then. In the coolness of February, they were green and blooming. These little black birds liked them too.
We had a delicious breakfast at Kelly’s French Bakery in Santa Cruz–I recommend it! A kind lady at the restaurant told us where we could find a good used book store downtown. “It’s wonderful,” she said. And it was, with two big floors of used books (and some new). We could have spent hours there, but I had to get back to the airport.
I love to take pictures of clouds, when I’m traveling by plane. This time, we passed over large patches of cloudless desert, and it was just as fascinating. The afternoon sun threw everything into sharp relief. These hills remind me of knitted cables. Charles often talks about ‘braided streams.’ Could these be braided hills? This image makes me want to knit a wall hanging. The Oakland Bridge does, too.
Getting Ready for Stitches West
Stitches West starts in four days!
I’ve been revising my Seamless Argyle handout yet again. When I taught this class in the early 1990s, some students complained about the gaps at the edges of the diamonds. Last summer I revised the handout to fix the problem, but the cure was worse than the disease!
I went back to my original sock pattern and improved it. I figured out a simple, effective way to close the gaps–sew them closed with the cut yarn end. Sounds simple, but I was really stuck on the idea of not cutting the thread between certain diamonds, to avoid having more ends to weave in. Sometimes my own rules cause me a lot of trouble. But if I can make ’em, I can break ’em, and that’s what I did.
Thanks to the people who take my classes, my handouts continue to get better.
There’s one more major thing I need to do before I go west. I’m going to sew a cape and applique flowers and leaves from my book onto it. I’ll wear it to the Stitches banquet for sure, and give out slips of paper with book-ordering information to the hoards that will fall in love with the flowers. Just a little shameless book promotion!
Crafty Valentine’s Day!
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Ella’s Cardigan is Done!
As we sat at our favorite coffee shop yesterday, watching cartoons on the television, I darned in the last few threads and sewed the buttons on Ella’s pink cardigan. She put it on right away. She wore it for over an hour, which is about 58 minutes longer than I expected her to wear it.
She wore it again today, several times! I was thrilled and thankful that the weather turned cool. She likes it just the way it is, and doesn’t want me to crochet a bunch of flowers to applique on it, as I had planned.
Our favorite coffee shop is The Coffee Bar at Frames Etc., Stephenville, Texas.
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Knitnana was kind enough to include me in her list of ten excellent blogs. Thank you, Knitnana! Her blog is excellent, too. She knits, she sews gorgeous project bags for sale, and her blog includes commentary by the incomparable Meezer. Who is the Meezer? Tsk, tsk. If you don’t know, you should visit her blog to find out.
Amoebae, Sweater Insides, Tag
Inspired by the stuffed creatures on the cover of the most recent issue of Craft: magazine, Eva made these felt amoebas or, if you want to be correct about it, amoebae. “How do you pronounce that?” we asked each other over and over. So I finally looked it up: uh-MEE-bee.
While looking in the dictionary, I found a word to describe their shape: amoebiform (uh-MEE-buh-form). I just love dictionaries.
Ella was thrilled with the two brothers and the mama amoebae. The daddy is still in the works. Last night she made them a bed, tucked them in, told them stories, read to them, and kissed them goodnight. It was so sweet!
I promised a look at the wrong side of Ella’s sweater. I thought you would be able to see how the wheat ear rib is made over three stitches, even though it looks like only two from the front. Now that I look at it, I can’t see the three stitches, either. But believe me, that rib is three stitches wide!
Diana, knowing me to be a book-lover, tagged me for this game. Rules are: To open the book you are reading, turn to page 161 and copy the fifth sentence on the page.
The last three books I read, The Case of the Fenced-In Woman, by Erle Stanley Gardner (my favorite author), Gideon’s Men, by J. J. Marric, and The First Mrs. Winston, by Rae Foley never made it to page 161. So I picked a book by Hulda Regehr Clark, that I’m reading little by little. The sentence in question is:
“She was told to repeat chemotherapy.”
Well that was sad, so I’ll end with my my favorite sentence in the whole book.
“The human species can no longer afford to make a business out of illness.”
There. Now you know more about me. If you want to play this game, too, consider yourself tagged. You have to find out the title on your own, if you’re interested.
UFOs in the Sky in a Book in My Totebag
The small town of Dublin, Texas, is primarily known as the home of the first Dr. Pepper bottling plant. Dublin Dr. Pepper is still made with pure cane sugar instead of nasty high fructose corn syrup. But now we’re in the news–local, national, even international–because several people have seen UFOs in our skies.
I like to imagine the skies filled with half-knitted sweaters, which is the kind of UFO I have in several totebags around the house, but apparently the Dublin UFOs are the ‘unidentified’ variety.
In honor of UFOs of all types, I offer a review of two books by Susan Docherty The Unlikely Flying Object and Lelooni. Both are illustrated with clever and funny three-dimensional knitted characters.
The Unlikely Flying Object opens on the Planet Intarsia, where a knitted Mothership learns that she can fly. She goes to Earth and picks up various people to replicate in knitting. The story is about how the Mothership populates the Planet Intarsia.
The replica people are Sweaterheads: headless figures whose faces are on the front of their sweaters. I love the eyes and the expressions on these characters. The knitted objects are photographed within scenes, or placed into space or earthly landscapes or computer-generated backgrounds. I know what kind of work went into these well-done illustrations–a lot!
Lelooni is the silvery moon of Planet Intarsia. This book is a series of situations that showcase the knitted moon, sun, wind, and the Sweaterheads of the planet below. It doesn’t have a plot, but I was distracted from this by the ingenious knitting of the character Lelooni. His eyes are expressive, his mouth is perfectly shaped. The north wind is fabulous, too, with his curly, cloudy locks.
These stories are cute and full of puns, but they occasionally get bogged down in unnecessary description, and the odd scene that doesn’t fit.
But five-year-old Ella wasn’t bothered. She enjoyed the stories when we read them yesterday. She giggled at the foolishness in The Unlikely Flying Object and asked for a ‘reading supper’ so she could study the pictures in Lelooni. Today she said, “Mom, let’s read Loony-Moony. He’s so funny.” When we sat down to read, she decided to read The Unlikely Flying Object first, saying, “Loony is funny, but the one with the Mothership is cool.”
I am glad to support textile illustrators by buying their books. I hope Susan Docherty will expand her portfolio by illustrating stories by other authors as well.
Ella’s Stocking
Here it is, in all its pink glory—Ella’s Christmas stocking! It’s very ‘Ella.’
The stocking was ready in time for Christmas, and Santa put lots of good stuff into it. After Christmas, I decorated the other side, so doesn’t matter which way the stocking turns.
The stocking’s pink Christmas tree is a crocheted fern leaf. We got out a bunch of pink buttons to decorate the tree. They looked okay. We added a white button as an accent. The white looked so good, we went with white for all the ornaments.
Ella’s fifth birthday dawned bright and foggy at the same time. Our original cat, our beauty boy, the king of the yard, took the van as his throne to acknowledge Ella’s birthday.
New Cover for Crochet Bouquet
Thank you to everyone who has pre-ordered my new book! It’s coming out in May, which seems like a long time to wait, but you know what? I thought 2008 seemed like a long way away, and here it is, already.
Lark Books settled on a cover design for my book, and I think it’s much cuter than the first one. It also gives you a better idea of what’s inside the book. My impression is that publishers come up with several cover possibilities, and decide at the last minute which one suits the book best, not to mention which one will appeal to the most customers.
The other book I wrote, Polymer Clay for Everyone, had a different cover for each of the three countries it was published in, and different titles, too: The Polymer Clay Sourcebook in England, and Pâte polymère—Pâte Fimo® in France. It’s all about marketing!
Stocking Done in Time, But First…
Woolwinder asked about our other Christmas stockings, so here they are! Charles’ mother, Gene, knitted his when he was a child. Gene is short for Eugenia, a beautiful name, though she said she didn’t like it much. It’s Ella’s middle name.
I made the other two, and they were among my early published designs. (“Christmas Stocking,” Knitting World, pp. 27 ff., August/September 1991)
When I was growing up, my family didn’t have a Christmas stocking tradition. Those two stockings came in handy for Eva and me, when Santa started bringing stocking stuffers to our house.
Ella’s stocking was done just in time for Santa. Picture next time.
Christmas Knitting Emergency!
Ella and I discussed Christmas stockings the other day. “We have Christmas stockings somewhere,” I said.
“Can you find them, Mama?”
Since we moved back to Texas, Santa has been leaving small gifts and chocolate and fruit in a set of pretty, hand-painted wooden bowls instead of stockings. Our stockings are in storage with so much of our other stuff. I would try to find them.
They were tucked into the bottom of a box of ornaments. But we only had three stockings, Charles’s, mine, and Eva’s. Ella was just a baby when we moved back to Texas, and I hadn’t made one for her. Oh no!
We went into emergency knitting mode. My pink yarn box yielded some balls I had rolled for a Kaffe Fassett-inspired project that never got any further. We had to borrow the needles from Ella’s cardigan sleeves. Here is the stocking so far.
Ella’s cardigan is on hold until the stocking is done. I finished the body, and it looks like it will fit very well. These two kittens, helping to present the cardigan as it is at the moment. That reminds me that no one entered my kitten giveaway contest—take one, get one free!
