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.
Iwannaknit Composition 1
Here’s a preliminary layout of the Garden of Design workshop sample. The sample is square, so I cropped the photo, shown by the turquoise marks. I laid out the flowers (aka heart trim) and the puffs of greenery. There are a couple of shadows in the lower right part of the photo, which will be represented by some sheer dark material I have somewhere (brown lines drawn on the sample).
The proportion of the trim is just right for the flowers in the foreground. There’s plenty of room to represent most of the foreground flowers with the heart trim, so I’m off to the USM in a few minutes to knit them (separately, this time). They will go about where the yellow marks are. I will embroider some gray lines to capture the grasses shown in the photo.
The big question in my mind now is what to do about the flowers in the middle-ground. I’ll get the foreground done, and then show you a couple of photos of the possibilities, tomorrow, I hope.
I’m leaving for Iwannaknit ReTreat one week from tomorrow! With four workshops worth of samples and supplies, I won’t have room for the computer. But I will take a bunch of photos and post them afterwards, so you can see what a great time we have at ReTreat. You’ll want to start saving $$$$ for next year.
Iwannaknit: Broken Hearts
Tonight I was going to quickly cut those pieces of heart trim into flower-sized lengths, so I could quickly sew them onto the class sample and quickly write a post for the blog.
Ha.
The heart motifs are sort of interconnected. When I cut them apart, the motifs before and after the cut were messed up. It took ages to figure out how to rescue the loops that formed the heart shapes, in addition to the ages it took just to separate the pieces. I would have been better off, and further along, just knitting each one separately.
Live and learn.
And that is what this workshop is all about! We have to make mistakes so we can learn. It’s often frustrating. We need to be frustrated so we will think of new ways to solve problems.
During class, I am there to smooth out some of that frustration. The classmates often brainstorm to come up with design solutions. I love this kind of class. Keeps me on my toes.
The upshot of my little heart-break-trim is that I think there may be an easier way to make it. Knit a long strip of stockinette stitch. Use a length of yarn with a tapestry needle to loop up and down and pull the heart shapes together.
That will be another project someday. Maybe.
Iwannknit: Garden of Design Bits
I haven’t quite decided how to knit the way-in-the-background trees, but since that may take me another day or two, here are the other bits and pieces I have knitted for the Garden of Design workshop sample.
When I set out to copy a photo, as in this project, I try to understand how the picture is divided into background, middle ground, and foreground. The knitted background interprets color areas of the picture. Though it is the back drop for other design elements, it also represents areas of the photo that are in the back, middle, and foregrounds. It’s a flat, 3-D puzzle.
The wide pink strips are called Heart Edging, which I found in Rosemary Worth’s 301 Knitting Hints and Tips for the Ultimate Sweater Machine (formerly known as the Bond). I will divide the strips into smaller pieces and use them to construct the flowers in the foreground.
The narrow coral strip is Tuck Stitch trim from the same book. This size might work well for the flowers in the middle of the photo. The greenish strip is plain, unblocked stockinette stitch of several shades of green. It will turn into clumps of greenery.
I love to use buttons whenever possible. Usually I choose a lot more than I use. The brownish buttons at bottom right might represent a dark area in the photo, but already I have my doubts about this. They are too distracting. The pink buttons may do well as flowers; the dark greens might be good as background trees. They look so different, photographed in the bright sunlight, than they did in the house.
My favorite way to use buttons is to hide them in plain sight. There are two handmade buttons in this picture that won’t be obvious at first glance.
Let’s see if I can be more timely with the next installment! Check back here in a couple of days to see the flowers and greenery stitched into place.
Iwannaknit: Garden of Design Quilted and Bound
We’re going to quilt our class samples for “A Garden of Design, so we need to stabilize the knitting with fusible interfacing. It can be woven or non-woven, as long as it is firm. Here’s my sample, showing the knitted layer with interfacing, the layer of quilt batting, and the fabric which is the back of the quilt.
You can quilt knitting without stabilizing it. I’ve done it, but wouldn’t recommend it without the aid of a walking foot for your sewing machine. A walking foot is great because it doesn’t drag at the fabric. For workshops, I try to minimize any special equipment needs. So we just stabilize, then sew at a very low foot pressure.
Now we quilt with a few rows of stitching. I sew wavy lines on purpose, because if they are wavy on purpose, they can’t be crooked. Wavy-on-purpose quilting relieves the quilter of anxiety about having to sew straight lines.
I trimmed the sample using a rotary cutter and cutting mat. Rotary cutters are not necessary, but they make crafting a lot easier.
Notice that the ends are gone? Trimmed away by the rotary cutter, without a care in the world. Why so nonchalant? Because the knitting is stuck to iron-on interfacing and quilted. It isn’t going to unravel. Not only that, but the edges are about to be bound. And here they are.
When I’m making wall hanging, I wait much longer to bind the edges. Sometimes I want to catch an appliquéd element of the picture into the binding, to make it look like it is going out of the frame. This takes forethought and planning (or a lot of time undoing). We don’t have the luxury of time in the workshop, so some of the finer details go by the wayside.
By Thursday evening, I should have some knitted flowers and greenery to arrange on the picture. Hope you’ll check back then.
