Knitting in the Wind
The last two afternoons, I’ve been outside with three-year-old Ella. She plays in the tree or with the cats, and talks and talks to herself. I love to hear that sweet talk. I worked on the yellow vest. It is about six inches long. That doesn’t sound like much, except that it includes the back and the fronts, worked back and forth on a circular needle.
In one of my December posts, I wrote about three young raccoons, who were trying to eat the frozen broth in the cats’ bowls, in the middle of the night. They were making such a racket. I caught one on film. Here he is.
Christmas Yarn Indulgence
My daughters and I visited the fabulous Bluebonnet Yarn Shoppe (Cedar Park, Texas) before Christmas, and I gave in to temptation. “Silk Garden” by Noro caught my eye, in shades of purple, silvery gray, olive, and touches of ochre here and there. To enhance and stretch it, I got Cascade 220 in a heathery eggplant shade. Reynolds “Odyssey” had a colorway amazingly like the Noro, so I added it to the mix. There’s enough for a big shawl or a cardigan.
I’ve been considering wavy lace patterns, Fair Isle possibilities, intarsia, and color stitch patterns. Can’t decide!
Ever eager to encourage knitting and crochet for my girls, I got Eva some eyelash yarn for a scarf. Ella, newly turned three, couldn’t bear to be left out. We bought some yarn for her frequent companion and fashion advisor, the Pinky Bug.
Naturally, the Pinky Bug loves pink. She talks in a high voice, and lavishly compliments Ella on her pink clothes, pink cheeks, pink fingernails, or pink shoes. The Pinky Bug can convince Ella to do whatever needs to be done, much better than I can. She is a great conversationalist, and, almost instantly can stop Ella from crying.
Other friends of Ella and the Pinky Bug are the Ring Bug (loves sparkle and shine), the Tall Bug (loves spots and dots), the Index Bug (loves red), and the Shy Thumb Bug (loves yellow).
The Case of the Yellow Yarn
The posts about the knitted Advent calendar, originally published in December 2005, will be featured in December 2021.
Thank you all for the comments on my Advent calendar. It was fun to make, and I feel happy about it every year. I have done a number of felt ornament kits, a felt snowman wall hanging, and of course my snowman rug. It’s great to have and make Christmas ornaments, but can a family have too many? My excuse is that I will off-load some of them to my daughters when they grow up.
After a holiday marathon of reading Perry Mason novels (I bought some and my daughter gave me more), I was ready to knit again. The yellow vest is started. It’s an abridged version of the Seveness technique, using only five different yarns instead of fifteen or more. Here’s the progress so far. The yarns are from Lion Brand.
I have several projects that need immediate attention, including administrative work. Even Perry Mason reluctantly dealt with his correspondence from time to time, though he had Della Street to help him. My personal goal is to send off my tax return by the first of April. Better get going.
Pretty Pictures of Stone and Scarf
Now that we have Ian Boyle’s stone pillar in our front yard, my mission is to take photos of the pillar in all kinds of light, at different times of day and different times of year. Here is the pillar on one evening earlier this month.
Ian was particularly interested in photographing through the pipe that is embedded in the pillar. The summer solstice sunset shines right through the pipe, as you can see in my original post about Ian’s stonework in Comanche County. The sun has moved to the south since then. I still take pictures through the pipe, but I also like to photograph the ruggedly constant pillar against the sky’s changing colors, clouds, and light.
Moving to a softer subject, my 10-year-old daughter has always loved bees of all kinds, so I wasn’t surprised when she laid claim to this little scarf. It is stripes of Lion Brand Fun Fetti alternating with Wool Ease. “It reminds me of a buff-tail bumblebee,” she said.
I started the scarf last night, while listening to the last tape of The Fugitive Pigeon, by Donald E. Westlake. The reader was Nick Sullivan. It was a comic murder mystery, with a little romance thrown in. It was good.
Intarsia Revisited
This is part two of Intarsia How-To, in response to several questions and comments. Thanks for those!
Two common ways to prepare yarn for intarsia work are bobbins and yarn butterflies. Here’s an empty bobbin, a bobbin with yarn wound around it, and a yarn butterfly. The slit in the bobbin is so narrow, the yarn cannot unwind by itself. You unwind as much as you need, knit, and wind the extra back up. The bobbin hangs neatly at the back of your work.
The yarn butterfly is a sort of center-pull skein that you wind between your thumb and little finger. Take the last few windings around the middle, and tuck the yarn under itself to tie in place. To knit, pull the other end from the butterfly.
Kary asked: How do you know how much to wind on the bobbin? If you want to count stitches, you can estimate how much yarn to wind Figure out about how many stitches you can make with one inch of yarn, and calculate how many inches you need for the stitches, plus about 8 inches for yarn tails and peace of mind.
I am not a fan of bobbins. I don’t like the weight of them hanging near my knitting needles and dangling around, bumping into each other. It throws off my balance.
Furthermore, being a lazy knitter, I don’t want to wind a bobbin, only to have to unwind it again so I can knit. And of course, the bobbin will probably run out of yarn, six stitches short, which means I have to add another length of yarn for the last six stitches, making two more ends to sew in.
I like to knit straight from the skein when possible. For smaller areas, I make yarn butterflies. If the design has two of the same color area, I often knit from both ends of the skein.
This can be a terrible, tangly mess, but with some planning, it is possible to knit neat and successful intarsia straight from the skein. Here’s how. Put the yarns in a basket or box, roughly in the order that you will use them. Work a couple of rows to get the colors established.
At the beginning of a knit row, make sure all the yarns come straight from the skeins, without crossing, as in the first photo.
Knit across, changing colors correctly as shown in Intarsia How-To. They will cross each other as in the second photo.
So here you are at the end of the knit row. Grab the right hand needle point in your left hand. Rotate the other end of the needle toward you (clockwise) and around so that this becomes the left hand needle.
Purl across, changing colors properly. As each new color taken up, the old color will untangle and hang free of the previous yarn. At the end of the purl row, all yarns will be uncrossed, but they will be twisted by half a turn.
Now you’re at the end of the purl row and the yarns are spiraled halfway around each other just once. So, grab the right hand needle with your left hand. Rotate the other end of the needle away from you (counterclockwise, anticlockwise, widdershins, whatever you call it), and around so that it becomes the left hand needle. Voila! The yarns are all straight again!
If you live in a house where you can knit whole rows without having to put your knitting down, you can go on like this for hours: crossing them all on the knit row, uncrossing them on the purl row. You have to switch the needle around correctly for this to work.
Sarah asked, “How do you add in a new color?”
When the intarsia chart indicates a change, start knitting with the new color, leaving a three inch or so tail of yarn. Finish the row.
On your return row, at some point, you will be using the new color again. When you’re finished with the new color, drop the yarn.
When you change to the next color, reach under the new yarn you dropped, as well as its tail, and pick up the next color. he next color will then cross both the tail of the newly added color and the newly-added color coming from the bobbin. Look at the photo, where the hot pink is crossing the blue yarn and its tail (circled in red).
Darn the new tail back into its own color area.
If the yarns get messed up as you knit, just wait until you’re ready to start a knit row. Then, with the knit row facing you, untangle the yarns so you can start fresh.
Color Weirdness
I posted earlier this month about how some workshop leaders have steered students away from using yellow because it is supposedly “difficult.” Woolwinder and Furrworld commented, saying that they had never heard that about yellow. I’m glad this folly hasn’t gotten all the way around, and hope I can stem its further spread by addressing it in my next INKnitters article.
Using and enjoying color is a problem for so many people, because they have 1) had creativity squashed out of them from an early age by peers, parents, and teachers; and 2) had foolish sayings and pronouncements drilled into them before they knew better.
For example, have you ever heard this bit of idiocy? “Blue and green should never be seen.” Please, don’t tell the bluebonnets and forget-me-nots!
This saying is really a political warning. I think it started in Scotland, one of the places where Catholics and Protestants were at odds. Blue was associated with one group, and green with the other (I don’t know which was which). Parents and peers told children that blue and green should never be seen, because they didn’t want Catholic kids and Protestant kids to be friends.
Unfortunately, the slogan made it into the mainstream, where the political associations of blue and green weren’t as well-known. So hundreds of kids thought it was incorrect to wear the colors blue and green together, or to use them together in decorating. All because of a mistake! It’s enough to drive a person distracted.
Here’s another pronouncement that I heard about ten years ago, from a well-known knitting and art-wear designer and workshop leader: “You can’t make art with blue.” Her justification is that blue is too common in our decorating and clothing to be valid as an art color (huh???). I say, maybe she can’t make art with blue, but the rest of us can, and should.
Snowman Latched
Thanks to Bob Dollar, Nero Wolfe, the Dallas Cowboys and the Texas Longhorns, the latch hook snowman rug/wall hanging is completely latched. I listened to tapes of Annie Proulx’s That Old Ace in the Hole (Bob Dollar is the main character), and a couple of Rex Stout novels, featuring the fat and sedentary detective, Nero Wolfe. I took the rug to my parents’ house the last few weekends. We watched Longhorn and Cowboy football, while I latched. What a great way to escape from real life!
Now I need to get back to work. I have my articles to write for INKnitters, and I want to finish a book proposal I started about a year ago. And there are teaching proposals to prepare! Also, I need to do quite a bit of administrative work: filing, bookkeeping (Sallee, I can imagine you smirking), cleaning up the debris from several months of projects.
Quick, I need some sand to bury my head in! Or better yet—don’t I have a couple of felt Christmas ornament kits, which I must, must, MUST finish this year?
Now, a few comments about this rug kit. I enjoyed it, as you know. However, I am disappointed (not surprised) at the quality of the yarn. It sheds a lot. For all the work involved, I would love to have had wool. That would have probably more than doubled the price of the kit, though. It will be okay as a once-a-year display.
In this close up, you can see how the printed canvas doesn’t line up with the colors as latched according to the chart. The colors on the canvas were very helpful for about five rows, and then, because the print was slightly skewed, I couldn’t quite figure out the correct colors for latching the right side of the canvas.
I followed the chart, and quickly saw that the print on the canvas was compressed. By the time I reached the halfway point, the white dots in the background were two rows higher (according to the chart) than shown on the print. Well, it was a good thing I read this one sentence in the four-page instructional brochure.
All that considered, the snowman wall hanging is a hit with my girls. They love the colors and the shading. My two-year-old Ella asked me to put in on the floor so she could sleep on it. It’s cuddly.
Playing is So Important!
Yes, we were playing buttons again. I get a little desperate for change sometimes, after sorting through the button pile for ages. My eye fell upon my double-honeycomb swatch. “Look, Ella,” I said, “we can snuggle the buttons into the little nests on this knitting!”
She was not interested, and took away the buttons I kept trying to snuggle into the cable sample. Finally I put the sample where she couldn’t see it, filled each compartment of the honeycomb with a button, and took a picture. Wouldn’t have considered it yesterday, but today I can see button-enhanced cable knitting in my future.
Speaking of playing, I got these goodies from Lion Brand to play with for my next INKnitters article. I’m writing about yellow, which is a happy, lovely color. Unfortunately, I have heard of teachers who discourage students from using yellow in their knitting (or quilting), saying, “Yellow is a difficult color.” We’ll see about that.
I had to replace my computer’s hard drive, which has cost me a lot of time reinstalling everything. Luckily, I was able to back up all the information on the old drive, but the programs themselves mysteriously failed to restore to the new hard drive. My advice to all: back up your computer frequently, and save all your original program disks with any installation notes.
A Snake in My Knitting Bag
My two-year-old Ella and I ‘play buttons’ a lot. We pour the big jar out onto a blanket, sort the buttons, pick out our favorites, and make up stories about them. The biggest ones are the daddies, the middle-sized ones are the mamas, and the small ones are the children. She said, “Mama, I pickted out your favorite buttons.” Sweetie!
I usually sit down with some knitting or notes, because Ella goes off into her own button world, where she doesn’t need me.
So there I sat, playing buttons, when I noticed a box that had been sitting there a while. I could quickly clean it out and clear a spot on the floor. My red bag was on the top, full of knitting magazines I need to read. But what was that smell? Ugh. It was the smell of something dead.
I moved the books a little, and saw a scaly, flat, smelly thing in the bottom of the bag. “What’s the matter?” my husband asked. “There is a dead snake in this bag,” I told him.
He took my bag outside and dumped it. Oh, it was about a foot long, probably a young Glossy Snake or King Snake, broken in two. I must have left my bag outside long enough for it to get in. When I picked it up, the magazines and papers trapped it inside. Poor baby!
What?! Did you think I meant a knitted snake? I did knit one many years ago for my brother. Mom, do you know where that snake is? Maybe I will post a photo of it later.
The last few days, I have been preparing teaching proposals for the brand new DFW Fiber Fest (late April 2006) and the Wool Festival at Taos (October 2006), and Stitches in 2006. I’m developing a new workshop called “Cables, Bobbles, and Braids,” and I have started knitting the class samples. This is one.
Among other things, I plan to teach how to design a cable sweater and how to design a cable of your own! Should be good!
Construction Site Crochet
We were at our new house site. The foundation guys were finishing up for the day.
“Eva. see what he’s doing with that cord?” I said.
My daughter looked. “Yeah,” she said.
“What do you call that, when you do it?” I asked.
“Crochet?” she said.
“Bingo!”
It’s not finger crochet, it’s more like arm crochet.
Now you know. Burly construction guys crochet power cords. It’s quicker than winding the cord into a roll, and I bet the crocheted power cord stays neater than a rolled power cord.
