Fencing and Snowflake
This is the walk-through gate on the west side of our new place. When I saw the finished gate, unexpected feelings and insights came to me. Before the gate, we had some clumps of trees with a couple of little glades here and there. Now, the gate separates two glades and it actually beckons one to walk through to the next place. Last week, one place. This week, two places, one on each side of the gate.
I saw the gate as a portal, like the lone doors or openings in thin air that I’ve read about in books or seen in movies. And I had the sense that the gate was a portal into unknown opportunities or places. It was moving.
As a knitter, I’m used to creating a new thing from string. Building into the earth is a whole different feeling. People study this phenomenon, you know: trying to understand the culture and thought involved in carving out personal spaces.
On the textile front, I’m making progress on the snowflake quilt. I’m almost done quilting it. Quilting hasn’t taken that long. Don’t know why I didn’t just get on with it before. Probably some other deadline reared its scary head.
Speaking of deadlines, I sent off my latest INKnitters article today. It is about my friend Suzanne Correira, who is the owner of Fire Ant Ranch, and purveyor of fine fleeces, yarn, and finished goods from her own happy, well-cared-for sheep. Look for it in the fall issue.
INKnitters Magazine Review
I Googled INKnitters reviews magazine the other day, and found lots of reader comments and reviews. Here’s one. They were fun to read. No surprise that most knitters loved the articles. That made me proud to be one of the long-standing article contributors to the magazine.
One lady commented: I like the articles, but when I look at some of the samples, I wonder “What were they thinking?” I had to chuckle. Some of my own samples are a little odd, and certainly not to everyone’s taste. The important thing is not “what were they thinking?” but “Hurray! They were thinking!”
Creativity requires lots of thinking. I come up with tons of ideas. I explore some of them beyond the thinking stage, with samples or sketches. But only a very few turn out to be great ideas. It’s the knitting version of the saying “You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince.”
I was very pleased to see how many readers get ideas from the articles, even if they don’t like the particular samples shown.
FeltedBagKAL Done
I finished my little felted bag—the first one I’ve ever made. It was fun to see the how knitting changed in the felting process. I tried a decorative sewing stitch on it, but found that it was too hard to regulate the feed of the felt through the machine. Obviously, machine stitching on felt requires stabilizer on top and bottom. Here’s my sampler of several stitches.
I’m calling it done, even with uneven decorative stitching. It’s cute, and I’m happy with this first effort.
We drove a long way to visit family over the Labor Day weekend, but I didn’t bring any handwork with me. My poor old hands have been so numb and tingly lately, I decided to give them a rest. Instead, I brought my computer along and digitized a couple of designs for the embroidery machine. I’m building a collection of samples of machine-embroidered sweater knits, which I will share as it grows.
Snowflake and Fencing
This one’s called Snowflake Dreams of Spring , and I started it last year in hopes of entering it into the Spring International Quilt Festival in Chicago. Time slipped away, and I didn’t make the deadline. Also, I felt I had to redo some of the quilting and that put a damper on the project.
Looking at it today, after several months have gone by, the quilting wasn’t as poor as I thought. May have to pull out a few inches and straighten it up, but not nearly the wholesale undoing that I dreaded.
My goal is to get the quilting done by the weekend, so I can start sewing on my crocheted trim and lots and lots of buttons.
Last week was the first week of school, and I managed to sew one pair of Capri pants for fifth-grade Eva.
It was also the week that we started in earnest to build a fence around our new place, where we will be building a house. My Dad and his helper did most of the work on it, and I did a little. All the metal posts are set in concrete, and now a welder is attaching braces and so forth. Next week: stretching barbed wire to keep the cows out. You’ll be reading a lot more about our house over the next couple of years.
Ladybug Wall Hanging Done
Today I sewed the last of 89 buttons on my Ladybug wall hanging. Probably everybody knows this trick already, but I learned it only recently from Sue Hausmann’s Sew Fast, Faster, Fastest. Double your sewing thread, and thread it into the needle, so that you have two threads going through the eye. Knot all ends, giving you four threads with each stitch. A couple of stitches through the button, a couple of tacking stitches, and you’re done!
Here’s a tantalizing detail of the wall hanging. I want to write about it for a publication that doesn’t want a project to have been splashed all over the internet (or even modestly published on a little-known blog) before it is published with them.
The piece is knitted on the Ultimate Sweater Machine (but could also be hand-knitted), pieced, machine-embroidered, quilted, embellished. It has a bold red ladybug with black spots, surrounded by this green and yellow background. Wide red borders and yellow corners finish the piece. The 89 black buttons, in a wide range of diameters, are spaced randomly all around the border, to pick up the dot motif from the ladybug. This photo was taken before the buttons were sewn on. I’ll let you know where to see the whole thing as soon as I can.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, the use of 89 buttons barely made a dent in our button stash.
Hill Country Weavers, Austin, Texas
My husband went down to Austin earlier this week for business. Eva, Ella, and I tagged along. We stayed in the Holiday Inn at Town Lake, and I would recommend it if you’re planning a visit to Austin. Go ahead and pay $10 extra for a lake-view room. It’s worth the extra money. It is practically downtown and, more importantly, it is within quick driving distance to Hill Country Weavers, a knitter’s paradise.
I am proud to say I have been a customer from the 1980s. Then, weaving and spinning supplies were much more in evidence. Now, knitting yarn has taken over the store. And what a wonderful selection! Words won’t do justice to the hundreds of yarn choices: imports, domestic yarns, novelty yarns, all colors of the rainbow and more. Hand-painted furniture doubles for yarn display, and there are some wonderful finished scarves for sale.
Luckily, Eva and Ella distracted me from spending hundreds of dollars. But I’ll be back! I spotted a pile of Manos del Uruguay yarn in one room. That yarn has always appealed to me, and I can still hear it calling my name, even though we have been at home for two days. One color-way in particular will draw me back—rich, dark autumn shades and black, with flashes of brilliant color.
Last time I was at Hill Country Weavers, over a year ago, it was a weekend, and this porch had knitters draped all over it. The store was full of them, too. This time, on a hot Tuesday afternoon, the store was moderately busy, but there was room on the porch for these two beauties.
If you’re in Austin, make time for a trip to Hill Country Weavers.
A New Project
My favorite things to order from the Herrschner’s needlecraft catalog are felt Christmas ornaments with lots of sequins. They are so cute! It’s so fun to cut along the pre-printed lines and sew the sequins on the dots provided, with the pre-measured thread. Oh, the wonder of having all the necessary supplies (other than stuffing) included in the kit! It’s relaxing.
I loved this snowman latchhook rug from the first time I saw it. The shading is nice. The kit went on sale a couple of years ago, and I bought it. The box has been sitting on my shelf since it arrived at the house. Until now, that is. I decided to get started on the rug, which incidentally made room on my shelf for more books.
Since this photo was taken, I have done several more rows. It turns out to be a good project to do while listening to book tapes. My current tape is Miss Julia Hits the Road , by Ann Rice. The reader, Claudia Hughes, is worlds better than the reader for the first Miss Julia book I listened to ( MJ Throws a Wedding , can’t remember the name of the reader). She makes Miss Julia sound irritable and opinionated, rather than whiny—a great improvement. Miss Julia is a well-off southern widow woman who organizes solutions for other people, like weddings and new homes.
At first glance, Miss Julia is pretty conservative. But if you stick with the book, Ann Rice slips in a few wry and fairly blunt criticisms of church, politics, society. Here’s one, paraphrased: “Pastor Ledbetter got the whole congregation worked up about the evils of gamblin’, but I can’t understand for the life of me, why he forgot to mention the stock market in that sermon.”
ThinkPink/NotYarn/ReKAL Project Done
This little bag used to be my favorite pink t-shirt. When it got too holey to wear, I cut it into a long, one-inch-wide strip, starting at the bottom and cutting around and around in a sort of spiral. When it was cut, I stretched the strip and it curled in on itself to make t-shirt not-yarn.
It wasn’t enough to make a bag the size I wanted, so my stash offered up some pink yarns, which I knitted two strands at a time. The fuzzy stuff is Lion Brand Fun Fur.
How?
Handle: in t-shirt not-yarn, cast on 2. Knit every row until handle is desired length (about 8 inches in sample). Cut yarn.
In t-shirt not-yarn, cast on 3. Place one st on each of 3 double pointed size 13 needles. Arrange needles to knit circularly.
- Round 1: (knit 1, make 1) on each needle.
- Rounds 2 through 7: (knit across all but the last st, which is the m1 from the previous round, then k that st through back loop, make 1) on each needle. After Round 7, you should have 8 loops on each needle.
- Round 8: (knit across to last st, which is the m1 from the previous round, k that st through back loop) on each needle.
Continue knitting on 24 sts. If you want garter rows, purl every other row. Add new yarns as needed for desired length. For a fuzzy top trim, use Lion Brand Fun Fur, and (knit 1 round, purl 1 round) twice. Bind off. Darn in ends. Make a tassel and sew it to the bottom of the bag. Sew handle in place.
KALs—I love them! They keep me focused on projects, and so I finish stuff. Hurray! Oh, that’s the Gulf of Mexico in the background.
I Just Love Looking for Shells
It’s been years since we had a vacation on Galveston Island, but I hope it won’t be so long next time. We were there last week with my husband’s family in a lovely house right on the beach. The kids (including my husband) built sand castles and swam. I strolled along the beach and looked for shells.
Hermit crabs occupy most of the entire shells, and that’s fine, because I like shell fragments just as well if not better. These are broken moon shells. Don’t they look nice all grouped together?
Here are stripey fragments, which I feel certain are destined to become a piece of art for the bathroom. Same for the worm-eaten pieces below.
The grouping exercise reminded me of Seveness Knitting. The principle is the same: putting similar items together (like colors, patterns, shapes) results in a pleasing composition. The composition is pleasing, because the variation makes it interesting to the eye, and because the similarity gives it continuity, which makes our brains happy.
Now I have another bag of stuff to add to my stash of crafty stuff. Collecting is so much fun!
Crafty Daughter
Have I mentioned that I’m proud of my daughter? She will be 10 in about a month. Even as a small child, she amazed me with her ability to observe and her eagerness to try new things and test her own ideas. We were cleaning out her room recently, when we found this little felt crab she made when she was probably six years old.
It’s a gem, isn’t it?! She is good at capturing the essence of a thing.
Lately, we ran across the idea of decorating flip-flops with Lion Brand Fun Fur. We bought the necessary supplies and even found free instructions.
“Says here that you can wind the yarn around the straps or crochet over them,” I said. We agreed that crochet would be better. She figured out, on her own, how to single crochet over the straps, and decorated flip-flops for herself and her little sister.
“I’ll do some for you, Mom,” she said. Alright! And here they are.