4H Clothing Camp, Pillows and Blankets
We didn’t know what to expect from the Erath County 4H Clothing Camp this morning. By the afternoon, Eva declared it “Fun. Really fun. More fun than basketball camp!”
Here she is, sewing. I helped her thread the machine and recover from small sewing setbacks. At the end of the day, she said, “Mom, I’m addicted to sewing!”
Over thirty girls came to sew today. Their first project was a picture pillow. Participants e-mailed a photo ahead of time. Donna White, our coordinator, printed the photos on paper-backed cotton, made especially for going through an ink-jet printer. Eva sent in a photo of her cat, Izzy.
The girls pulled the paper away from the fabric photos, chose coordinating fabrics, and pieced a pillow top. Then they backed and stuffed the pillows.
When pillows were done, the older girls pieced squares for a quilt. The younger girls sewed together pre-cut pieces of fleecy fabric, to make fringed blankets. They’ll probably finish tomorrow during their free time.
Tomorrow, they’re sewing chemo caps and making buttons from polymer clay. I am looking forward to leading the button-making session. Next time I’ll post button pics!
Stone Solstice
Today is the first anniversary of Ian Boyle‘s Pillar Project. Ian built a dry stone pillar in our front yard, which looks to the sunset through a pipe embedded in the stone. He positioned the pillar to catch the summer solstice sunset. Here is this year’s pillar’s-eye view.
This is last year’s solstice sunset. Last year, the Indian Blanket flowers were still in bloom. We have had so little rain this year, they are already gone to seed. The trees have fewer leaves this year. But the pillar stays the same.
Ian envisioned an international pillar project, with pillars in New Zealand and the UK. My husband and I photographed our pillar throughout the year, and I hope to have an online photo album ready to view within a week.
Click here to read about the Pillar Project. Check back, because there will be more Pillar Project posts as I continue to reconstruct my blog.
Crochet Treasures and Tape
The Joneses, who live near us, recently opened an antique store in Dublin, Texas, across from the Dr. Pepper Museum. We were already acquainted, because Mrs. Jones’ granddaughters were on the same softball team as my daughter. My mother, my girls, and I had a very pleasant visit at J and L Antiques. Mrs. Jones had a good collection of old sewing things and bits and pieces of crochet and embroidery. I found a tin of old crochet that was very much to my liking. Here is a sampling.
There were trims, odd-shaped pieces, practice pieces, a couple of less-than-perfect doilies. I feel there’s a wall hanging waiting for me to collect just the right number of oldish crochet pieces. As soon as I have enough, the wall hanging idea will spring fully-formed into my head, and then–oh no!–I’ll have to make it.
We had a moment of crafty harmony in our house today. My daughters sat together in the easy chair. One was crocheting a big flouncy flower, and the other was making a glove by fitting paper to her hand, cutting it in place, and taping it together. Designers in the making!
I used to cringe every time I saw tape being used up by children. Then I saw how much my children learn by exploring the properties of various tools and supplies available to them. They figure out more interesting construction techniques than I could ever teach them. It’s well worth the cost of the tape.
Snowflake Gets Buttons
We had a button planning session today for the Snowflake wall hanging. I arranged buttons. Eva gave advice. We moved buttons around. We added more buttons. We took buttons away. Eva took pictures. Ella jumped over everything repeatedly.
Here is the arrangement we agreed to be the best. There are a lot of buttons, but not too many, we think. The dark ones at the yellow tips and the yellow ones between the flaps really give contrast and definition to the piece. So I have quite a bit of button sewing to do during the next few evenings.
Eva photographed an oblique view of the piece, which I really liked. Here it is.
This same Eva a had a moment of brilliance this evening. She made a comment that, for me, encapsulated the attitude of an entire generation. Let me set the stage for you. She and her dad were midway through a game of Pente. Eva made a play, and her dad said, “You’re so predictable.” Eva said, “Some girls I know at school say that, but they can’t use long words like ‘predictable.’ They say, ‘You’re, like, so…whatever.'”
Now it took me a few minutes to record this moment accurately, and I kept distracting Eva from the game to verify certain quotes. In response to this moment of clarity, this profound insight into an entire generation, Eva’s dad, my husband, Charles, said, “Let’s play. I’m bored.”
After read the last paragraph out loud, Charles says, “No, this isn’t accurate. It was five minutes of you saying, ‘Eva, what did you say, exactly?’ and Eva saying, ‘Uhhhhhh, you’re like, whatever?’ Then you would say, ‘Yes, but what led up to that last comment?’ and Eva would say, ‘Uhhhhh.'”
I can barely type this, because I’m laughing so hard that tears are streaming from my eyes. Come on. We don’t have a TV. We have to take our entertainment wherever we can get it.
Updated November 2016 to fix formatting problems and add Eva’s website, now that she is a journalist, with an eye for interesting and profound stuff.
Snowflake Gets Trim and Binding
The true secret of being a productive writer, quilter, or knitter is known as “butt in chair.” For some odd reason, the work doesn’t get done if you’re out shopping, daydreaming, playing with your kids, etc. Yes, I know that knitters can sometimes walk around and knit, but the knitted quilt I’ve been trying to finish is definitely a butt-in-chair project.
Since you last saw it, I have made a good deal of progress on the Snowflake Dreams of Spring quilt. Its edges are bound. The white crochet trim is sewn in place. I have added buttons. Here’s a close-up, so you can see these details better.
I started the project with six weeks to finish it, so I could enter it into an exhibition. I was in a hurry, and the work is not as neat as it could have been.
So I had to confront the profound, artistic question: “How can I cover up these messy joins?”
The white trim does double duty, covering joins and very attractively adding definition to the snowflake. But another set of joins looks particularly bad. My first idea was to cover the joins with these spring-green crocheted leaves. Short of crocheting six of them, I am trying to visualize how the green will affect the overall look of the snowflake. Digital technology may be able to help–I could scan the leaf and paste it six times onto a digital photo of the quilt.
Daughter Eva loves them. “They look great!” she says. But she loves yellow-green, and would turn most of the world that color if she could.
The leaf looks really green and noticeable in this close-up photo above. (Someone told me they couldn’t see the flaps of the quilt; I think you can see them in this photo.) Below is the quilt from afar. I can see the green leaf, but it doesn’t seem so glaring. Any comments?
ReTreat Review 3
After a yummy Sunday breakfast of eggs and pancakes, we went off to our last morning of classes at the Iwannaknit ReTreat. My workshop was Recycling Old Sweaters into Tote Bags.
We had a good variety of sweaters from thrift shops and personal collections. Soon we were ironing on interfacing and cutting into the knitted fabric. As often happens in my classes, people take my ideas and improve on them! I learn a lot from my students.
This is Rebecca’s tote bag in progress. She enhanced the flowers embroidered on the sweater, by adding yellow buttons to their centers.
Many of us who use machines also knit by hand, but this year, we welcomed lots of people who exclusively hand knit (though we convinced some to add machine knitting to their repertoire). Why this influx of hand-only-knitters? Cat Bordhi, author of several books, including two Treasuries of Magical Knits, taught classes on Moebius scarves and containers. She left a bunch of happy knitters in her wake.
Knitting Today sponsors a web board for people interested in hobby gauge and standard gauge machine knitting, hand-knitting, and crochet. ReTreat participants will be posting photos of our weekend on the board. Check it out here.
After our farewell lunch, I had to pack. My stuff grew to 1-1/2 times its original size over the weekend. I only bought two books and a magazine, so how could this be? It’s one of the unexplained phenomena that happen at knitting conventions. Then Mary K. and I headed toward the airport with a little side stop at PaintBrush Farms, where we found Alpacas of Many Colors.
Kathy gives all her alpacas interesting and original names, but I can’t remember a single one. She brought us a baby to pet. It was soft as a cloud. Its mama clucked at it a little worriedly, but seemed to think it was in good hands.
These have been shorn of a year’s growth of fur, about six inches. The shearer leaves fur on their tails (helps them flick the flies away), on their legs (more relief from flies), and their heads (fashion statement).
Don’t you love all their different hair-dos!?! The black one didn’t have much of a topknot, but he had beautiful, long eyelashes.
Now here’s a handsome, regal male. The illusion of royalty was shattered, though, when I saw him rolling in the dust with one of his buddies.
These males are still waiting for their summer haircuts. It’s hard to imagine the delicate, slender animals hidden under all this hair.
Here’s the sun setting on my Indiana adventure, as I flew south to Texas.
ReTreat Review 2
Our Iwannaknit ReTreat location was formerly a convent, which might explain the presence of a church attached to our convention building. The church portion of the building must be at least 100 years old, judging by these beautiful details. The smooth plaster finish on the ceiling was decoratively painted or stenciled. The size of the place made it hard to photograph the impact of the painting. We’ll have to settle for this detail of a ceiling rose around the fixture for a hanging light, and a portion of a painted arch.
The stained glass was painted in a style that reminds me of English churches. I think that the brilliant colors are the color of the glass; the heavy curves and straight lines are lead; and the black details, like cross-hatching, facial features, and curlicues are baked-on paint.
The second day of ReTreat, I taught the Garden of Design workshop, which has taken up so many blog posts in the last month. Cindy, Cathy, Liz, and Fern, the four brave souls who joined the class, spent the morning knitting their backgrounds on machines. I was ready for hand-knitters, but none took the class.
Cathy worked on a garden scene with lots of greenery behind a border of rocks. Most of her flowers will be added as buttons and beads. Fern combined a couple of photos with flowers from her own garden. She devised a way to knit irises. Unfortunately, it meant she had many ends to work in, and a lot of applique work to do.
Liz picked a Hawaiian scene, which had a few flowers in the foreground, but was dominated by a palm tree and a sunset over the ocean. Here is Liz’s piece, very near completion.
I hope to post photos of everyone’s finished piece after next year’s ReTreat. In fact, here’s a finished piece from last year’s similar class, where we knitted an underwater scene. It was made by Dianne B. who lives in the panhandle of Florida. I wish you could see the background better, because it is a subtle mix of colors that evoke a feeling of coral, pebbles, and seaweed going off into the distance.
We spent the evening at Lea-Ann’s store, Knitting Today, where I invested in a couple of pattern books, including Vogue’s Stitchionary 2, which is about cables. Can it possibly go further than the wonderful cable patterns collected in Barbara Walker’s Treasuries? Yes it can, and it does!
ReTreat Review 1
For the first year, and I hope not the last, Iwannaknit ReTreat (formerly Camp Iwannaknit), sponsored by Knitting Today, met at the Sylvan Springs Center in Rome City, northern Indiana. What an interesting place! Here’s the outside; inside pictures later.
I joined the participants in my first workshop, Color Composure, going through magazines, looking for purple, orange, and red to make into collages. I was surprised at the number of red/turquoise/aqua/black pieces I found.
Mary H. got busy hand-knitting a sample based on her orange/brown/green collage. Ann Y. had so many pieces of purple paper (she started collecting at home), it took her a long time to sort them all into color families. She settled on a combination of “Easter egg colors,†for her sample, which she quickly knitted on her machine. Here’s her sample.
I will be teaching a six-hour version of Color Composure at the Taos Wool Festival in October. See my sidebar for links.
The afternoon’s Particolor Party class, where we played with variegated yarns, was so sociable, I forgot to take pictures.
After supper, many of us knitters, crocheters and spinners, sat in the big livingroom, to listen to the talk and work. I sewed crochet trim on the wall hanging I posted last time. Wow! A person can get a lot done, when she can sit down for three uninterrupted hours!
Tune in next post for part 2 of the ReTreat Review.
What Do Iwannaknit at ReTreat?
The traveling knitter’s two most important questions are:
“What shall I knit on the plane (or in the car)?”
“What shall I work on while I’m there?”
Once one settles on a project, one must be careful to bring enough yarn. Heaven forbid, the yarn should run out before the trip is over! Also, one must determine whether to bring a back-up project, because what if one finishes the original project before one arrives home? Horrors!
During our free time at the Iwannaknit ReTreat, I am going to work on a project which I started in the Fall of 2004. I made a good bit of progress, until one thing and another caused me to push it aside.
It is a knitted quilt, Snowflake Dreams of Spring, which I posted here several months ago. Last night, I spent a couple of hours quilting the last few unquilted areas (why didn’t I do that long ago?). Today, I trimmed the edges, to make it ready for binding.
Revealed here for the first time, is the snowflake’s center, surrounded by six bound flaps. They will remain open in the finished quilt (some of my other knitted quilts have opening/closing flaps are Shards 1: Willow, Shards 2: Sometimes, My Beautiful Dreams, and A Hopeful Glimpse into the 21st Century, which at some point you will be able to view in my Works page. When I pinned the flaps on the snowflake back, and saw how beautiful the center looks, I felt all the work was worthwhile. Now I want to finish the piece.
On the plane, I’m going to crochet more of these.
Iwannaknit Composition 2
The picture looks better with the newly knitted flowers in place. I had to bump off the leftmost flower (see photo in the last post) to make room for the others. It was useful elsewhere. I think it is funny how my mind made up how all the flowers were oriented, and they don’t look at all like the flowers in the photo. Minds often do not remember very well what eyes see.
In the next photo, the flowers are sewn on. I scrutinized the photo before sewing them in place. Still, I had to take out and resew some, because I would shift them out of place while sewing. Doing this is such a good mind-eye exercise. I have to work very hard to see what is there, instead of what I think is there, or what I want to be there.
Drawing teachers have a number of exercises designed to make students see with their eyes instead of their minds. A couple of really good books on this subject are: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and Drawing on the Artist Within, by Betty Edwards. They are for drawing, but the principles apply to any kind of representative artwork.
I narrowed the selection of buttons to the ones in this photo. The large green/light green button is covered with double knit fabric. I have never liked it much. But look how well it fits in this picture. My friend Helen Neale, who is a fine knitter and colorist, says, “There’s no such thing as an ugly color.†Some colors are meant to set the stage for other colors. Now we can add, “There’s no such thing as an ugly button.â€
I will probably be testing this hypothesis. I made a bunch of buttons a couple of weeks ago, from scrap polymer clay. They are on the razor edge border, teetering toward ugliness. Guess I’ll have to wait for the right project for them.