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Welcome to my knitting--no, fiber arts--no, artisan blog.
Other knitting blogs inspired me to start a knitting blog. But I also crochet, weave, and make jewelry, and I'm just learning
to make cheese. So I guess that makes this an artisan blog.
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Saturday, April 30, 2005
Weekend Jewelry Update
No artisanal activities today, unless you count making a spinach and mushroom quiche using Julia Child's formula from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. No, today is a work-only day. This afternoon I took a batch of
manuscript to Kinko's in Harvard Square so FedEx could deliver it to the publisher on Monday morning.
While I was there, I couldn't resist the force drawing me into Beadworks. Then I couldn't resist the force compelling me to buy some beads to crochet into ropes:
These are all size 8 beads except for the peach/blue ones at the bottom, which are size 6. I'm not sure how I'm going to combine
the colors. My plan is to fool around with some color combinations and then do some ropes. I have no idea how many beads I'll
need for a rope, so this will be a multiple learning experience.
I've also just realized that I was so busy working this week that I forgot to post about Monday night's jewelry class. We
did a little more soldering: edge to surface and surface to surface:
Then we practiced hammering designs into some of our copper slices:
This is a lot harder than you'd think. Well, it's a lot harder than I'd think. You can use the peen of a hammer; the ball
peens come in different sizes, and there are also oval peens. You can also make designs with stamps. Part of my problem is
being able to position the peen or the stamp exactly where I want it, and I'm also not sure I'm hammering hard enough. Anyway,
on Monday we'll learn another method, too. But ultimately, I have to be able to produce a design this way, partly because
we have to use it on our first project (a ring), and partly because I think this is how I'll have to apply the design to those
Biedermeier earrings. I kind of like the woven-looking one. That was done with the oval peen. Once I see how the other technique works, I'll try
to figure out what to put on the ring.
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Friday, April 29, 2005
Knitters' Night Out
Tonight, the Yarn Harlot read at Circles, a Knitting Salon, in Jamaica Plain. I managed to get the NBaT finished in the nick of time, although I'm not entirely happy with the sleeves (I think they need to be a little longer)
and I still have to weave in all the ends.
So somebody asked me if this was the Shapely T, and I told her no, it's Nothin' But a T-Shirt. And she said, "Alison's in
the next room." So I found Alison and showed her the sweater.
Stephanie told us about the woman in Ottowa who is cutting up plastic bags into strips, and knitting the strips . . . into
bags. Stephanie thinks this is very pure knitting because the woman's obviously not knitting because she enjoys the feel of
the yarn. And it immediately occurred to me that she also obviously doesn't do it because she needs bags. Then Stephanie took
questions while she knitted on the sock:
The place was packed:
 
After Stephanie got something to eat, she signed books. While I waited, I worked on the new deadline, the PowerBook cover.
On the way home, people kept talking to me about my knitting, and I kept having to explain that this ugly garter-stitch thing
is going to be felted. A young man on the Orange train said he'd never had a hand-knit sweater. A woman in the Downtown Crossing
station said she'd never seen knitting done on circular needles. A woman on the Red train said she'd been told that white
wool doesn't felt, although she'd felted some for slippers. Anyway, we now have 3.141 and about half of the 5:
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Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Frantically Knitting and Editing (not necessarily in that order)
I've said it before, and I'll be dead before I have a reason to stop saying it: A pox on authors who are
careless with their references. I know I get paid to fix them, but I'm also getting paid to meet my deadlines.
While I read, I've been knitting on the Spotlight NBaT, which I'm hoping to have finished in time to wear on Friday to the
Yarn Harlot's book signing at Circles in Jamaica Plain. I've finished the back up to the neck shaping, and I've got the front through the armhole decreases:
The part above the armhole bindoffs is a shock to me just as the sleeves are. I figure once I hit the underarm, I'm practically
finished, but in fact the part above the underarm bindoff is usually almost as big as the part below the underarm bindoff.
So I'm not letting myself be lulled into a false sense of security this time. If I didn't have a deadline, I wouldn't think
about it, but I do so I am.
And in crocheting news, one of my favorite people, the UPS driver, brought me thread this afternoon:
This is size 30 polyester thread on cones of 2000 yards each. That pink one is supposed to be "dark pink," and I believe they
sent me what I ordered, but I'd call it "bright pink." Honestly, it's much brighter than you can tell from the photo; I think
Elsa Schiaparelli might find it shocking. This must be why they included the sunglasses.
Anyway, at the beaded ropes class, one of the students who does this all the time recommended Jeans Stitch, which is size
30 polyester. You want polyester rather than silk or cotton because it's sturdy and doesn't stretch, which silk and cotton
can do. The Jeans Stitch comes on 200-yard spools for about $4 each. So far as I can tell, you can only mail order it. I got
this thread from CTS, and the price is about $4 a cone and their customer service is good and the shipping is fast, so I'm happy so far. Naturally
I want to play with it, but I have some deadlines, so it'll have to wait a bit.
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Sunday, April 24, 2005
Progress
Our friend Kim was in town for a conference, and on Friday we took her to dinner at John Harvard's. There's a lot to be said for good company, a tasty dinner, ethanol, and chocolate for dessert. I'm feeling much better now.
The Spotlight NBaT is moving along. Only 15 more rounds to the underarm bindoffs.
I know all that stockinette (and on circs) is supposed to be painfully tedious, but I like it because I can knit while I read
or watch a movie. It's multitasking. Tonight I got quite a bit done while watching Finding Neverland. It was a pretty good movie. I liked how it was done.
This morning I started the new, improved PowerBook cover. Conrad picked out the colors; and he knows he wants stripes, but
he didn't have a plan for them. The Fibonacci sequence is sort of old hat now, and anyway, he wants them to be random, but
of course that's almost impossible unless you use a random-number generator. We could do that, of course. Then I suggested
the digits in pi. There's certainly no pattern there, and it's a pretty geeky thing to do, and pi is one of his favorite numbers,
so that's the plan. The prefelted thing is done in garter stitch, so I'll count ridges to correspond to the digits. So far
I have 3 blue, 1 red, and the first of 4 purple:
And I have four chapters ready to go to the publisher tomorrow. Woohoo.
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Thursday, April 21, 2005
So Much to Do, So Little Time
I'm not having a nice day, thank you, and that's the main reason. I feel so swamped with work and
everything else that I feel like I'm not getting anywhere.
However, one of the nice things about a blog is documenting your progress. It's easy to miss how well things are going when
they're going relatively slowly from one day to the next. The last time I took a picture of T-Shirt body progress, it was
a little of the Spotlight body; now I have progress on three bodies. The Spotlight body is into the waist, the light black
one is almost to the decreases, and the Rose one has a hem.
Deadlines help me focus, but they also make me nervous. So now I'm nervously focusing. First, the Yarn Harlot is doing a book signing at Circles, A Knitting Salon, on Friday the 29th, and I've decided that would be a good event for the debut of the Spotlight Nothin' But a T-Shirt. Then
we're traveling to the Dead Runners Society World Conference in Tucson, and I think I should have Dr. Science's felted PowerBook cover done for that. Guess I'd better
get it cast on, huh? Sarah the niece is graduating from NYU (I'm going to the May 12 ceremony), so there's my deadline for
the Stone Stone Cotton T-Shirt and the cardi and James's socks.
Notice I'm not mentioning any work deadlines here, which are much worse than the knitting ones because I can't miss
those.
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Thursday, April 14, 2005
Knitting Up the Ravelled Sleaves*
I can't help myself. I'm knitting three of these t-shirts in
nona's
Nothin' But a T-Shirt
knit along, so that means six sleeves:
I like doing the sleeves first. I like getting them finished so I don't have to think about them. Sleeves require shaping,
so you tend to have to pay attention to what you're doing (How many rows is that? Is it time to increase again?). They're
also bigger than I think they should be. I'm always surprised by how much fabric it takes to make a sleeve, so leaving the
sleeves to last, on the few occasions I've done it, is a bitter shock. I think, "It's just the sleeves, there's practically
nothing left to do, I'm almost done," and of course a sleeve takes as long as a front or back.
I also like doing sleeves first because it's an easy way of confirming gauge and getting a feeling for the yarn and seeing
how the fabric is going to look. This is an extension of my first knitting project, in which I taught myself to knit by knitting
a Jaeger sweater on 3 mm needles (US 3) in fingering-weight wool. (This isn't as deranged as it sounds. I'd been used to crocheting
with size 10 cotton thread, so fingering-weight wool felt chunky.) Getting the hang of manipulating the needles and yarn was
hard enough, but to start with single ribbing was worse. Working the ribbing on the cuff obviously goes a lot faster than
working the ribbing on the back or front. Plus the sleeves were plain stockinette, and the front had a cable pattern, so the
sleeves were easier.
So now I've had my sleeve-fest and it's time to make real progress on the bodies.
*A "sleave" is a skein or a thread, not the arm-covering part of the garment, so I guess this is a pun. This is a paraphrase
of a line from Macbeth, Act II, Scene 2, in which Macbeth is bemoaning his insomnia: "Methought I heard a voice cry 'Sleep no more, Macbeth does murder sleep,' the
innocent sleep, sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care" (and so on). When I was reading this as a sleep-deprived
undergraduate, it was clear to me that Macbeth is, yes, about power and corruption but also about sleep and how wonderful
it is to get enough and how terrible it is not to get enough.
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Tuesday, April 12, 2005
The Metalsmith is Injured
Last night was jewelry class (none last week), and we learned to solder with a flame, which was pretty
fun. We had to cut up copper and brass sheets into squares and strips to practice on, and because we used metal shears (like
a big paper cutter), the pieces of metal curled. So then we had to beat them into submission. Unfortunately, I also beat some
of my fingers into submission.
Curly bits, beaten bits, and soldered bits
Fortunately, there's no class next Monday (Patriot's Day), so the fingers have plenty of time to recover. We'll be soldering
again, and we'll also be learning to beat decorative patterns into the metal, which is how the goldsmith decorated the Biedermeier
earrings.
Anyway, at least I can still knit. Right now I'm working on the sleeves for the three T-Shirts, and I'm into the waist decreases
on the Spotlight one.
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Wednesday, April 6, 2005
So Much Yarn, So Little Time
This afternoon the USPS package-delivery guy arrived with yarn: four balls of Patons Classic Wool for
the new, improved, properly felted PowerBook cover, and Plymouth Stone Cotton for two more Nothin' But a T-Shirts:
If I'm going to use it right up, does it count as stash?
The Stone Cotton was on sale and I got free shipping, so this works out to $13.23 per t-shirt. The gray (Stone, it's called,
so I guess this will be the Stone Stone Cotton T-Shirt) is for our surrogate niece Sarah, who is just finishing her bachelor's
degree at NYU. In fact, this will probably be her graduation present. Anyway, being a young person in New York, she tends
to dress in black. But I figure this is a summer sweater, so light black is appropriate. The red might be for me, as if I
need two of these, but it's such a pretty red.
Having learned my lesson, this afternoon I swatched the Patons Classic Wool on 24 stitches and 24 rows of garter stitch with
size 6.5 mm (US 10.5) needles. Then I marked 20 stitches and 20 rows with size 10 bedspread cotton and tossed the swatch in
with some towels and timed the process, checking every 5 minutes. After 15 minutes, the swatch had felted nicely, and I've
recalculated the pattern for this yarn for all three PowerBook sizes.
Now that's more like it.
Otherwise I've been knitting away on the second sleeve and the hem of the original Spotlight T-Shirt, and while I was
out this morning I got quite a bit done on James's sock foot (James is Sarah's excellent boyfriend), but these don't look
much different than they did the last time I took pictures of them.
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Monday, April 4, 2005
Catchup, or Is It Catsup?
I could've kept up with all this stuff while I was in King of Prussia, but the Radisson's "high-speed
Internet access" didn't work in my room. First, there was no ethernet cable. When someone got around to bringing one, it didn't
work, and he decided the problem must be my Mac and not his cable or outlet. So I had no Internet access while I was away.
More Conference News
Friday morning at the Fiber Arts Market (which is what Offinger Management calls the TKGA/CGOA conference) there was a fashion
show and breakfast. The fashion show was pretty good, but it was full of ponchos. Ponchos aren't my thing, and I'm constantly
amazed by how popular they are. Those and scarves. And vests. Anyway, they also had a drawing for door prizes, and I won one!
It's a BagSmith project bag. Fortunately, it fit in my messenger bag with my laptop; I really wanted to not have to check bags, which was bad when I had
to hike for miles all over Philadelphia International Airport hauling this stuff, but which was good when we finally got to
Logan and I could run right out to the cab ranks and jump in a cab and go straight home. Somebody won a bushel basket of Patons
yarn, wrapped in cellophane and tied with a bow, just like a fruit basket. That's a great door prize, but how would you get
it on the plane? I think you'd have to get a big box for it and ship it.
The Friday class was "Basic Overlay Crochet." Melody MacDuffee invented the technique, which is essentially Extreme Cable
Crochet: You work rounds or rows of single crochet (working in the back loops only), and at intervals you work longer stitches
and anchor them in the front loops in an earlier row. If you change colors every row (or nearly so) and work lots and lots
of "cables," you can make wonderful flower-like designs and other beautiful motifs; I have an idea for a flower vine motif.
We learned on worsted-weight yarn, so my swatch is fairly ugly (my colors didn't help, either):
In thread it's really gorgeous. Melody does a lot of jewelry with it. In fact, she'd displayed some of the jewelry at the
Thursday class
and I woke up Friday morning knowing that I'd be making the shawl collar of the Knit-Cro-Sheen pulli with this technique.
During the lunch break I did some knitting on the breast cancer stamp, which is a fundraiser for Win Against Breast Cancer.
You make a donation, and you knit as much as you want, and then you put your name on the back of the chart.
Nothin' but a T shirt Knit Along
Friday was April 1, so that meant it was time to start in on the T-shirt. I started on a sleeve and got through the underarm
bindoff. Saturday I worked on the cap at many gates at PIA and finished the first sleeve. On Sunday I decided I'd better do
the other sleeve before I started the body, so I got that cast on and worked to the turning ridge. Now I have to switch to
dpns, but I need to do some reading knitting, so I've cast on for the body and I'll knit a little of that while I proofread
some chapters that have to go out to the publisher today.
It's Baseball Season!
So why have I still not made a pair of Red Sox earrings? I know how I want to do it:
With red size 10 cotton and 5-0 dpns, cast on 16.
Work 5 rounds of k1p1 rib.
Work 18 rounds of stockinette.
Do not break red; pick up white size 10 cotton and work short-row heel.
Do not break white; pick up red and work 18 rounds in st st.
Break red. Pick up white and work toe.
Make second sock the same.
Gotta start this tomorrow.
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Sunday, April 3, 2005
There's No Place Like Home
I've been away at the TKGA/CGOA conference in beautiful King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. KoP is one of those
suburbs (of Philly) that's full of large corporate campuses; it's also home to the famous King of Prussia Mall. The conference
was held at the Valley Forge Convention Center, which is basically the windowless basement of the twin hotels Radisson and
Scanticon. I was stuck at the Radisson, which is a sorry excuse for a hotel. The service was terrible, the room was worse.
Fortunately, they didn't have a room for me for Friday night, so I stayed at the Sleep Inn down the road, where I had a decent
room.
Then because of the rainy weather yesterday, air travel was pretty messed up. My 6:30 flight was delayed 20 minutes, then
it was cancelled and they put us on a USAirways flight. From Concourse D we went to Concourse C to check in and get boarding
passes. Then we went back through security and hiked to the other end of the airport to Concourse A. The plane parked at the
gate was for the day's most popular destination, Rome. Every few minutes, someone at the gate would get a radio message that
more passengers were racing from another gate to catch that flight. Well, it turns out that's not what was holding up our
flight; our plane hadn't landed yet. Once it did, they sent us to another gate. Then they decided to put us on a different
plane at a gate in Concourse C. When that plane had mechanical problems, they sent us to try to get onto a flight in Concourse
B. When we couldn't get on that flight, we went back to Concourse C, where, after a 30-minute wait, they announced that the
mechanical problem was fatal. So then they set up our flight on a plane parked at a gate at the end of Concourse A. When we
got there, they decided we would leave faster if they rebooked us on a different flight out of another A gate. We pushed back
from the gate at 11:15, took off at 11:42, and landed in Boston at 12:30.
So I love the idea of the classes, but I don't think I'll ever travel to another one of these TKGA/CGOA conferences.
Okay, now for the good part. I actually went through all this hassle because Melody MacDuffee was teaching some crochet classes
that I wanted to take. She told me at the end of the third class (this was three consecutive all-day classes) that I was brave
to sign up for 18 hours of classes with a teacher I didn't know and who might've been terrible. But she's good, and her stuff
is amazing. She doesn't have a Web site yet, but when she does, I'll post the URL.
Thursday's class was Crocheted Beaded Ropes and Beads. Yes, beaded beads. The crocheted beaded rope is a technique that I've
wanted to learn, but it was pretty clear to me that I would be better off in a class than trying to get the hang of it myself.
BeadCrochet.com gives a good demonstration. Melody's a good teacher, and I picked it right up. First we practiced the rope with single crochet
and then with slip stitch. With single crochet, the thread shows between the beads and the rope is more flexible. With slip
stitch, the thread doesn't show and the rope is stiffer. The slip-stitch technique was tricky, but eventually I got the hang
of it. You can see in the swatch that the beginning (bottom) is done in single crochet and the end (top) is done with slip
stitches:
Beaded rope (left), and beaded bead (right).
A beaded bead is basically a beaded rope with increases and decreases to form the shape. You can do a whole string of these,
increasing and decreasing to form the bead and working a very small rope to form the links between beads.
Melody started the first swatch for us, and our second swatch taught us how to start the rope. The third swatch was the bead.
Those three swatches constitute six hours of work. Yow. I think it goes faster once you gain experience.
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