Textile Collecting—Andean Hat Inside
This hat is just beautiful. The gauge is 18 stitches per inch. The workmanship looks flawless, and includes pretty details, like the tassels and this tiny knitted ripple. I was much impressed at the subtle colors of this hat. Could they be naturally dyed?
Nope. Take a look at the inside of the hat. Those are the original colors. They are gorgeous, too, and a lot brighter. The outside of the hat must be sun-faded.
This knitter combined stranding with intarsia. One white stitch separates the bright color patches. That white thread carries all the way around the inside, while the bright colors stay within their own bounds. You can see the intarsia color change where the bright colors meet. It takes a great deal of skill to combine stranding with intarsia successfully.
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Thank you to kat kat-knits.blogspot.com and woolwinder woolwindings.blogspot.com for your compliments on my hat model. She’s quite a show-off, and loves to be in photos. You would like her in person, too, because she is a sweet and smart and funny person, who loves yarn. And now, she’s FOUR! She’s so excited about that.
The Last Poncho Installment (for now)
A gorgeous, deep, glowing, burgundy microfiber chenille was in my yarn collection for about 15 years before the perfect project came along. The yarn would be gorgeous in the pink and black poncho I was making. Even though the last project I made with chenille grew ‘worms,’ this chenille was of much better quality (well, it was a lot more expensive, anyway). It would be fine.
It wasn’t fine. The chenille grew worms almost immediately.
In the meantime, Eva made a couple of ponchos with Lion Brand Fun Fur in the last couple of rounds. They looked so good, I decided to do the same on my poncho. Luckily the chenille round was only third from the end, with two mohair rounds after it. If you’ve worked with mohair, you know the impossibility of ripping it out, so I cut off those rounds.
This was right after Christmas, and Michael’s ran a sale on a number of wonderful yarns, including Lion Brand Fancy Fur and Fun Fur. They were $2.00 per ball—an absolute bargain! Two rounds of fuchsia Fancy Fur and two rounds of black Fun Fur later, my poncho was finally done.
Miss Poncho at the Fair
After yesterday’s chilly wind, it was a relief to go into the Erath County Livestock Show and Junior County Fair arena. But the path between us and the County Fair check-in area was perilous indeed. With one eye on the ground and one eye on the look-out for raised cow tails, we threaded our way between nervous young showmen and -women on the left, and the rear ends of their Holstein heifers on the right.
We made it, unscathed, to check Eva’s poncho into the fair. We spoke to several of Eva’s friends from school, which is one of the very nice things about living in a rural area and going to small schools.
We ran a couple of errands around town and then watched cows parading around, back at the arena. They are so pretty, when they’re all clean with mohawk hairdos up their backs. And the kids looked nice in their white shirts. Some wore white jeans, too. Very brave of them, I thought.
At noon, the County Fair prizes were awarded. Eva’s blue and white poncho won first prize in the junior textiles division, where she edged out a pretty cowboy-motif quilt for the win. The judges liked her poncho so much, they awarded her the 2007 Erath County Youth Fair Grand Prize. We are very proud of her!
Poncho Gal
Eleven-year-old Eva admired my pink and black poncho made of yarns from my collection. ”Mom, I want to make a blue and white poncho. Can I use your yarn?” she asked.
We pulled a bunch of bluish and whitish yarns from the collection, and she got to work. She graciously accepted advice on color arrangement. We looked for alternatives to fringe, and came up with working beads into a crocheted chain.
It looks great and Eva is going to enter it into the 4H Youth Fair next month.
Eva’s friend Jasmine loves green and black, so Eva crocheted her a poncho, too. This is Lion Brand Homespun with an eyelash yarn for a border. It looks great, too! Hurrah, Eva, for deciding what to do and then doing it!
We’d Make Terrible Druids
Someday we’ll have a new house, and so we hope that Ian Boyle will build us another solstice-catching pillar. (Lots of pics here of the pillar in our yard now.) “Charles, the winter solstice is coming up, and we need to measure the angle of the sunrise, so Ian can orient the pipe correctly,” I said, more or less.
Charles took his compass outside at sunrise and measured the direction of the sunrise. “Hmm,” he thought, “this angle seems familiar.” Well, it’s exactly the same angle that our pillar’s pipe is oriented in order to catch the summer solstice sunset.
Okay, we should have been able to figure that out on our own. But we didn’t even think of it. And I thought we were sort of in touch with nature. Obviously, this is the kind of thing you miss, when you spend all your time knitting and crocheting.
Textile Collecting 5—Andean Hat with Alpaca
In the comments about Textile Collecting 3, a reader said that she thought these hats would be made of alpaca. I think they always were in the past, but most of the hats I have are not natural fibers. The one shown here is the only one that has any natural fiber to speak of.
This one doesn’t show the best technique of the bunch—the stranded threads seem to be pulled too tightly. But the cream-colored yarn feels wooly and soft, like alpaca.
The ear flaps look a little different from the other hats. Here’s a close-up, so you can see.
The little balls at the end of the ties are cute. They’re embroidered, maybe on felt?
Textile Collecting 4—Andean Hat with Buttons
Do you love these buttons?! They look so great, and they probably help keep the ear flap down. This is a lovely hat, worked in a fine gauge of 17 stitches to the inch. The straps are woven, with beads along the edges of the tape.
I love the stranded garter pattern just above the ear flaps. Those Andean guys sure know their knitting.
Textile Collecting 3—Andean Hats
This cute hat fits close around the head, and then it has a long, narrow tube at the top, ending with a tassel, similar to a hat knitster posted recently (and here).
The knitter apparently substituted colors, whenever the original color wasn’t enough. You can see it in the detail photo, in the lower, center diamond.
Of the hats we have, this has the coarsest gauge, measuring in at 12 stitches per inch.
Textile Collecting 2—Andean Hats
Men are responsible for these fine-gauge, highly detailed knitted hats of the Andes. They knit them for their little children. You can learn a lot about them from Cynthia Gravelle Lecount’s book, Andean Folk Knitting: Traditions and Techniques from Peru and Bolivia. It’s out of print now, but you might be able to find it online or at a library.
Thanks to a friend who worked for an airline, we had a long weekend in Ecuador about 18 years ago. A street vendor in Quito had this hat for sale. My husband acted as interpreter for me. The vendor asked whom the hat would be for. Charles said, “It’s for my wife.”
“But it is too small for her,” said the vendor. Charles said that, yes, his wife knew that, but she wanted it anyway. “Why?” asked the vendor. He couldn’t think of the Spanish for ‘she collects stuff like that,’ so he said, “She wants to own it.” It was clear at this point that we were a few bricks short of a load.
The vendor quoted a price of around $35.00, which seemed like a great price to me. She explained that it was a good price, because there is a lot of work in one of these hats. “My wife um, makes things (he couldn’t think of the word for ‘knits’),” said Charles, “so she knows how much work is in it.” We paid, and I was one happy turista.
Charles loved the patterning and the fineness of the knitting, too, so we now have a good collection of these knitted hats, which I’ll post these next few days.
A Charming Gift for the Knitter Who has Everything, and for Anyone Else, Come to Think of It
Sea Cat’s mother knits. No one on land or sea knits more beautifully than she does. She sits down one day, with several balls of seaweed wool and interesting treasures from the sea, and knits and embroiders Sea Cat a ”closely fitting, elegantly tailored, wonderfully complicated, waterproof, decorative, scintillating catsuit…”
He looks great. Someone becomes jealous: someone really old and important and powerful. Knitting saves the day.
Besides the fact that the heroine of the story is a knitter, Sea Cat and Dragon King, by Angela Carter, is charming, clever, and sweetly illustrated. Every knitter should have a copy. Every son and daughter of a knitter should likewise have a copy.
To read it aloud takes about 45 minutes. I read it to my 3-year-old, Ella, when she was under the weather one day, and too tired to fidget. She was hooked, and since then we have read it many, many times. The pretty line drawings by illustrator Eva Tatcheva keep young eyes occupied, while their ears listen.
The language is beautiful; no word is wasted. The story moves well, with rich and amusing detail. I enjoy the book immensely, and I think anyone (even non-knitters) who loves a good story will like it.
There are a number of copies available at amazon.com. You can still get it in time for Christmas!