Habu Textiles in Chicago This Month
I first ran across Habu Textiles at the Quilt Festival in Houston last year. Habu imports Japanese yarns, which are unlike any yarns I have found in the US or England.
Habu will be at booth #1753 in the International Quilt Festival in Rosemont this month. If you’re close, it’s well worth going just to see their booth, and the great bonus is that you will get to see the quilt exhibits, too! My TextileFusion Cherry-Picking Vest is in the Small Wonders exhibit. Yay!
Here’s what I bought to experiment with:
Starting with the red, and moving clockwise:
- Red: 100% linen shosenshi paper with viscose sizing.
- Dark gray: 100% bamboo and oh, so soft and smooth and cool to the touch.
- Beige: 1/10 paper moiré, 50% linen and 50% ny core. I’m guessing ny means nylon. The core is spun very firmly and very thin, and it has tiny strips of linen paper spun into it. Close-up below.
- Light blue: ladder tape yarn, 70% silk and 30% cotton. Close-up below.
- Variegated with black thread wrap: tsumugi silk combination, 100% silk. The yarn feels like it has a rectangular cross section. Close-up below.
- Shiny stuff on the spool: fine silver wire.
- Blue with white flecks: 100% polyester eyelash yarn, and the eyelashes have little white flecks on them. Looks to me like some kind of sea life in miniature. Close-up below.
Read more about Habu Textiles here.
Fair Isle Talk Tuesday Night
I’m looking forward to Tuesday night. My parents will take the kids while I go to give a talk to the Dallas Handknitters Guild. I always enjoy going to their meetings, because they are dedicated, enthusiastic, productive knitters. If you’re in or near Dallas, please come by. DHKG welcomes visitors and new members.
My talk is about using color in Fair Isle knitting. Color is one of my favorite knitting subjects. The photo is from another workshop I do, called “Color Cross Training,” but I will be bringing the Fair-Isle samples pictured there (and more!). And I’m bringing a big bag of yarn, so we can design some colorways right there at the meeting.
I’ll also bring some of my knitted, embellished quilts. You can see them here at my web site.
My husband is out of town, doing archaeology, or else the girls would stay at home with him. (I saw that there’s a web ring for Digging Knitters–archaeologists who knit.)
Latest INKnitters
The spring issue of INKnitters mag arrived today, and I couldn’t put it down until I read it through. Beyond-beginner knitters, if you want information, inspiration, and interesting patterns, INKnitters is the magazine for you. It is truly a feast for the eyes and brain!
I’ve been writing for the mag since it started, but this is the first issue that I was able to get my daughter Eva involved. She drew the original which inspired this rug. Instructions are in the magazine.
My own article “Knitting Around the House,” features ideas and tips on knitting for your home, including a kitchen rug knitted from plastic grocery bags. Here are a couple of the ideas, illustrated:
Subscribe, subscribe, subscribe! (So I can keep my writing/knitting job!)
Update: It’s 2016 and INKnitters has been out of publication for several years. You may be able to find copies on Ebay.
Book Tapes and Sleeping on the Job
Last two nights, after everyone else was in bed, I worked on the Salt and Pepper Jacket, accompanied by Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, read by Stephen Fry. The package says he is the Potter-perfect reader, and I agree.
The weather has been chilly here, so I covered up with a down blanket and one of my husband’s quilted shirts. It wasn’t long before I leaned my head back, just to close my eyes for a moment. The moment stretched into more than an hour. Somewhere in there, the tape player clicked off at the end of the tape. Side 2B may be worn out by the time that jacket is done.
Luckily, two-year-old Ella is at the point where I can sit outside and knit while she plays. The jacket progressed much better outside today, until she wandered out of my sight. I heard “Maaaaaaamaaaaaa! Maaaaaaamaaaaaa!” I jumped up and ran toward the sound of her voice, catching the yarn around my ankle, and dragging the jacket front along with me.
She had stepped into a stickery patch and wanted me to carry her out. We have a lot of sand burrs here.
Anyway, back to book tapes. I think they are the best invention ever for people who love to read and knit or do any other kind of craft. I’ve been listening to books on tape since the early 1980s, buying a few abridged ones, renting from a mail-order company, and checking them out from the library.
I was very spoiled when we lived in England (1996-2003). The library had a large selection of tapes. The readers are usually good, sometimes great. I loved the detective novels, and my favorites were by Ngaio Marsh. I loved the stories about Jeeves, by P. G. Wodehouse. And believe it or not, the Sheffield libraries carried Westerns, including recordings of books by Zane Grey. I’m not sure I would read Zane Grey, but I enjoyed listening to the stories of cowboys and ranchers, love and honor, etc.
I’ll try to work on the jacket again tonight, maybe with a cup of coffee nearby. Back and sleeves are done. Left front is almost done. Need to decide about buttonholes before I start the right front.
Distracted
These beauties came in the mail yesterday. I can’t wait to get them around my needles. Got some sample color cards, too. So instead of knitting on the Salt and Pepper Jacket, I sat down with the sample cards and dreamed up possible projects.
I really like the Fancy Fur “Jungle Print,” which has pumpkin and dark coral bumps spun into a black fur yarn. The Fun Fur sample card has Peacock, Copper, Champagne, and Chocolate colors all next to each other. They would look great together in a project.
Fabulous Girl
This is my daughter, Eva, swirling around in the poncho that she crocheted all by herself! She’s nine years old.
She learned to finger crochet several years ago, and made miles of chain stitch. In 2003, I finally convinced her to crochet with a hook. Her technique got a big boost last year, when her wonderful third grade teacher set up a crochet learning station for the kids in her class. All the kids learned to crochet.
Eva has crocheted lots of scarves and other bits and pieces. This is the first big project she has finished. Hurray! I am very proud of her. What a Fabulous Young Crocheter!
Variegated Yarn is Fun!
I’m making a girl’s jacket with Lion Cotton, “Salt and Pepper,” which is black and white with very short gray transitions between the two. Here’s a sleeve. When the first white section came along, I just knitted it. But when the second and third white sections appeared, I knitted a lambstail. It’s just a short cast-on and bound-off section. My idea was to use up the white section in the lambstail, which would concentrate the black in the background.
Instructions for lambstails are in Barbara Walker’s Second Treasury. In her pattern, the tails are regularly spaced. Mine just show up based on the color that comes up in the knitting. Here’s a detail of de tails (I’m easily amused).
Look for the jacket pattern in INKnitters magazine. It will most likely be published in the summer 2005 issue, along with an article about having fun with variegated yarns.
UPDATE: It’s 2016 and INKnitters magazine has been out of print for several years. Look for copies on Ebay.
Welcome Yarn and Fabric Lovers!
When I was a kid, my dad, Alan Thompson, would shake his head and say, “There’s a right way, a wrong way, and a Suzie way.”
I sure didn’t want to do anything the wrong way, and usually we already knew how to something the so-called right way. I wanted to try something new. That ended up being the Suzie way.
The Suzie way costs me a lot of time, as I often have to go back and do things the right way after all. But the Suzie way has led me to some good and interesting places. The knitted quilts I make, like the one above and the ones you can find by clicking the the Works tab above, are a result of doing things the Suzie way.
I know there are a lot of people out there like me, only you’re doing things ‘the Jane way,’ or the ‘Nancy way,’ or the ‘Eva way.’ I hope our ways will converge at this blog.
2022 UPDATE: For several years, starting in 2005, my blog banner was this bit of pink knitting with my dad’s quote on it. The buttons are handmade by me with polymer clay. Polymer clay is so much fun! I can play with it for hours and not notice the time passing. It lured me away from knitting and crochet for a while, but not too far. I always come back.
First Blog Post Ever
“Hurray! I can finally post to WordPress.”
That was what I wrote in my first ever TextileFusion blog post in March 2005, and I feel the same way in March 2021, after a year of my website and blog being lost in the ether. Thank you, Jungo Solutions, for getting TextileFusion.com back up and running.
Over the next months, I’m going to retro-post the best of my old blog, going back to that very first post, sixteen years ago.
Here’s more from March 2005, about an early TextileFusion piece, Iced Water at the Café Rouge:
Spinning Iced Water
A member of The Hallamshire Guild of Weavers, Spinners, and Dyers, in Sheffield, England, issued a challenge to the rest of us. She would give us ramie fiber. We had to spin it and make it into something. This was the beginning of Iced Water at the Cafe Rouge, though I didn’t know it at the time.
I spun the white ramie by itself first. I carded it with varying amounts of gray or black and spun different shades of gray. I plied plain ramie with gray, too. Here’s the range of colors I got.
Knitting Iced Water
Once the spinning was done, I got out my trusty Ultimate Sweater Machine (formerly the Incredible Sweater Machine, as seen on TV! And before that, it was known as the Bond Knitting Frame). I knitted a long piece of fabric, which shaded gradually from light to dark. This is it, in progress. For shaded knitting, I knit one to three rows of one color, then change. The USM carriage is designed to make changing colors easy.
I washed the finished knitting, pinned it out to dry, and then ironed fusible interface to it.
Piecing Iced Water
I spun the yarn, knitted it, and stabilized the knitting with iron-on interfacing. Then I cut the knitting into irregular patches and pieced them together onto a foundation of light cotton fabric. The yellow paper blocks out the space where I would put the vase.
Once the pieces were arranged to my satisfaction, I machine sewed them to the foundation with a zig-zag stitch. Finally, I quilted the piece, embellished with embroidery, applique (netting or tulle, and crochet), and buttons, and bound the edges.
Iced Water on Display
The Guilford Handcraft Center in Guilford, Connecticut, will be exhibiting the Mixed Media Quilts Show starting March 13, 2005, and my knitted quilt Iced Water at the Cafe Rouge will be in it! It is one of my best pieces ever and I’m very proud of it.
If you live up that way, I hope you’ll go and see the show.
A Button Thrill
We love buttons. We sort buttons. We sew buttons. We make buttons. So we were really happy when we found out about the Texas State Button Society Show and Sale, March 23 to 24 of this year, near Dallas! It’s only about a three-hour drive for us! We’re going!
Could anything be more thrilling than that? Yes! The National Button Society Show will be in Dallas, in August! Eva and I are already planning a trip.
And speaking of buttons, we had a polymer clay session a few weeks ago. Ella made a fashion girl. Eva made earrings. I made buttons. Eva used school colors for her earrings, and she wanted to decorate them with shamrocks, which are the logo of our small town. “But Mom,” she said, “we don’t have a shamrock-shaped cutter.”
“No,” I said, “but we have a heart-shaped cutter.” She got the idea right away. I love it when the solutions are simple.
We have a bagful of scraps from previous projects, and I’ve been using those to make buttons during these sessions. The nice thing about using scraps is that if the button turns out badly, you just squish it back into the scrap pile. There are uses for the muddiest of scraps, so none is wasted.
But sometimes scrap buttons turn out wonderfully! This one was my favorite of the bunch:
