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In Hot Water Again

Monday, December 14, 2009

There’s something about fulling knitted things that just thrills me. (When I’m doing it on purpose, that is – we’re not going to talk about that lovely cashmere sweater that now fits the dog.) The transformation is magical – you start with a big floppy wool sock that would be at home inside a clown shoe, add some hot water and suds and a bit of scrubbing and what do you get?

slippers

A dainty little pair of slippers.

Yarn: Lion Brand Fishermen’s Wool

Pattern: just a monstrous big sock foot, with some short rows added behind the heel and an I-cord bind-off

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… And More Than Three Is, Technically, A Collection

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Last week, Himself got me up at the crack of dawn to go to an auction with him over the border in Clarence, New York. I didn’t really want to go – I’m not an early morning person, and I’d already scrutinized the online auction catalogue and not seen anything that thrilled me. But marriage is full of little compromises, and if he really wanted my growly, caffeine-starved company, then who was I to stay in bed? (My nice, warm comfy bed…) So we drove out into the cold rosy light of dawn, me grumbling into my take-out coffee and picking through the Timbit box for the good ones.

Ah… but when we arrived at the auction, what did I see? Wait, this wasn’t in the catalogue! And there weren’t any other spinners there to bid against me… oh, frabjous day!

kilbournwheel

And another antique wheel has found a home here with me. It’s a lovely creature; it has a distaff, though I didn’t include it in the photo. It’s marked on the side of the table “W Kilbourn” and I suspect that it hasn’t travelled very far; its design is very common among 19th and early 20th century wheels made in the northeastern United States. If I were to take a wild guess, I would say it’s from New York State – perhaps the Albany area? – and possibly dates somewhere in the mid to late 1800’s. More research is needed.

It badly needs to be taken apart, cleaned and rebuilt; the flyer hooks are gone and will have to be replaced. I rigged up a very crude woollie-winder (a bent paper clip – ah, MacGyver would be proud!) and spun up a bobbin or two – just for testing purposes, right?

jacob-spun

A lovely bit of carded Jacob fleece, dyed by Dan of Gnomespun Yarns in shades of red, brown, gold, and green – I bought it at Rhinebeck; I think it was called “Pheasant”, and the name suits. (Digression: Dan has just successfully defended his dissertation and can now claim to have Piled it Higher & Deeper, and call himself a Doctor of Something That Probably Couldn’t Be Explained To Me Even If He Used Small Words. Congratulations, Dan!)

And now, I’m off to ply.

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Something Done

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Somebody reminded me that I’d never shown any pictures of the vintage cardigan I was working on lo, these many months ago.

vintage-cardi

Naturally, I can’t do any pattern without messing with it – in this case, I substituted seed stitch for the ribbing at the hem and cuffs, and knitted the shawl collar on instead of doing it separately and sewing it on. I’m quite happy with it – it’s a warm and snuggly cardigan, though it looks a little ratty in this picture after a month of constant wearing – I’m terrible for not taking photos of things when they’re freshly blocked and looking their finest.

It’s a great pattern, and I’m seriously thinking of re-working it in a one-piece top-down version for people who abhor seaming. The sizing is a bit smaller than we’re used to – I made the size 14, and there’s not much ease in it. (It’s also shortened, because I’m – well, short.) It’s a common thing with vintage patterns – I’m a size 12 in modern sizes, but manufacturers cater to our vanity much more nowadays and I suspect I’m closer what they would have called a 16 in the 1950’s.

I love vintage patterns. Sometimes the language is not what we’re used to, and the pattern writers didn’t do a lot of hand-holding – you were assumed to have a certain basic skill set, and it certainly wasn’t their fault if you needed more direction than “Make left side as for the right, with shaping reversed.”  If you’re the kind of  knitter who wants a little adventure and challenge, you need only to dig through some dusty boxes in your local second-hand bookshop to discover a piece of the past to breathe some fresh life into. Where else can you find as much fun for 50 cents?

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To everything (turn, turn, turn)…

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

… There is a season (turn, turn, turn)…

And apparently, it is blogging season again.  I seem to have a finite amount of self-discipline, and I squandered it all on home renovations and business stuff over the last while, leaving my poor blog to languish. In apology, I give you this:

The Big Wheel

…the latest addition to the wheel collection. I picked it up at a scandalously low price at an antiques sale a couple of weeks ago. I’m pretty sure it’s Canadian, and suspect that it was made  in the Brantford area of Southern Ontario – its turned bed resembles some other wheels known to have come from there. It’s marked with the name of a maker – “W.DINNIN” – and sometime soon I’ll have to get in touch with some local furniture collectors and see if I can find any history on him. It appears that this wheel has not travelled far from its birthplace.

It’s a frankenwheel, made from disparate parts – the big drive wheel is from another spindle wheel; the original one was eaten by a porcupine during the years that it lived in a barn. The accelerator head is historically correct, but came from upstate NY and wasn’t part of this wheel until I added it; it came with a crude bat-head spindle that someone had hand-carved at some point. With the accelerator head in place, the drive ratio of this wheel is about 310:1. Which, frankly, boggles me – that’s incredibly fast, and tricky for a modern spinner like me to get used to. You have to draft like a mad thing.

The invention of the accelerator head was surely greeted with great celebration by household spinners everywhere a century and a half ago. When you see someone spinning on a great wheel, people always go “Oh, how charming! so old-fashioned!”. Spinners often speak of the meditative experience, the dancing rhythm of stepping and drafting, stepping and winding on, back and forth, back and forth. The YouTube videos are invariably accompanied by soothing classical music. Me, I’m pretty sure the women who used these wheels to clothe their families weren’t thinking of the meditative aspects of spinning – they were just damned tired from the endless walking back and forth, cranking that big old wheel ’round and ’round. I’ve seen historical farmhouses with a valley worn into the floor where the wheel was; how many miles of walking would it take for a woman to wear a path in her wooden plank floor?

Every time I use this wheel I think of these women – they were my ancestors, and their endless spinning labour meant warmth and survival for everyone. They were as vital a part of the European exploration and settlement of Canada as the wheat farmers, fur trappers and railway men. (Some might argue that settlement wasn’t necessarily a good thing… but as it led to my very existence, I am unable to argue without bias.)

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Day One: Choosing

Saturday, July 4, 2009

One my problems when trying to set a goal for the TdF is the sheer poundage of spinnables that I actually have on hand – it’s been making me crazy trying to decide what to do. It’s just too much choice: I keep picking out fibres, sampling them, putting them back… it’s out of hand. And I’m out of time.

Eventually my eye fell on a bowl that’s been on the shelf for over a year now.  I bought this fibre at the Kitchener-Waterloo Knitter’s Fair in 2008, immediately dyed it, then piled it up in a nice dish and never touched it again. It’s a nice display fibre but it’s really not fulfilling its potential, you know?

silkystuff

So this is my start for the race: 210 grams of …. ah, this is a little embarrassing. I’ve forgotten what it is. I know it’s a silk blend, but I’ve no idea what the other component is. The staple is too long for wool, and it doesn’t have that sort of feel to it. It dyed like a protein fibre; I suspect that it’s Seacell. I’m going to go with that guess for now, unless the fibre tells me otherwise as I’m spinning it. (Note to self: make notes to self when leaving fibre on the shelf for a year.)

When you have too many things to choose from, you can’t go wrong starting with the oldest thing in your stash. Even if it’s not what you thought you’d be doing… at all.

Besides, I want the bowl back. It’s the perfect size for scrambling eggs.

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Dangerously Close to Panic

Thursday, July 2, 2009

What did I say about waiting until the last possible moment to make a Tour de Fleece commitment? Here it is, 24 hours away, and all the bobbins on my wheel are full and I am just now trying to decide what colour I want to dye the fleece I’m planning to use.

I perform better under pressure.

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Get on your bike and ride

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

I can’t believe it’s almost time for the 2009 Tour de Fleece already. For those of you that haven’t been touched by that sort of crazy, the Tour de Fleece runs parallel to the Tour de France bicycle race; spinners set spinning challenges for themselves and try to meet them during the course of the race.

I haven’t a clue what I should set for a goal – maybe spin enough yarn for a pair of socks? Or – seeing as I failed so miserably last year – maybe I should avoid setting a specific production goal, and instead vow to spin every day and see how much yarn I come out with in the end. I still have until July 4th to make a decision, and will probably wait until the panic strikes at midnight on July 3rd and make some insane commitment at the last second, thereby setting myself up for another embarrassing performance.

Whatever I spin, I think it ought to be RED… you know, just in case I end up being the lanterne rouge.

I’ve put a sale sign up in the store – 15% off all spinning fibres until the end of the Tour. I’m also hoping to receive a new shipment of drop spindles from Dave in the next week or so… maybe there will be a fiddleback maple one in there for me (oh please oh please oh please…)

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Remembering You

Sunday, April 26, 2009

A few days ago, I found an old Patons & Baldwins pattern booklet in my favourite used bookstore.  My bookseller has boxes and boxes of them; I treat myself to a rummage through one carton each visit.  Most of the booklets are from the last big knitting craze of the 80’s (oh dear, the hair! the dolman sleeves!) but occasionally I find a real gem to add to my vintage pattern collection.

patonsbook

(Click pics to embiggen)

I fell in love with the cardigan she’s wearing on the cover – it looks like one of the ancestral versions of the Must Have Cardi.  It features “the new shawl collar” (!) in an interesting moss stitch, and I think it has a certain style.  So I cast on:

cardi-start

Of course I can’t knit anything without messing with it.  That’s a provisional cast on there.  I’ve got a funny personal tic – I like it when the bottom of a cable twist flows naturally into the ribbing, and it’s easier to work out that effect when you’re knitting down from the cables; it gives you a chance to fiddle with the decreases so you can balance things out.  (Yet another nice thing about interchangable needles: you can start with Judy’s Magic Cast On, using the right size tips on two cables, then just abandon one of your cables until you need it again for the ribbing.  Right handy, that.)

Naturally, I didn’t start with the sweater back either, like the instructions tell you to – working without a chart, I was having trouble figuring out which cables I was going to have to flip around.  Another funny personal tic (sigh); I like them mirrored on the different sides, and the picture only shows the left front, so I thought I’d start there.  After knitting the entire first pattern repeat,  I find the next instruction: “Work left front to same length as sweater back.”  Ahhh…. not very helpful, in the circumstances.  I crossed it out and replaced it with “Work left front to same length as last sweater you made that actually fit you.”  Crisis averted.

As I knit, I find myself thinking about the woman who wrote this pattern.  Who were you? There’s no name anywhere, so there’s no way to know.  The booklet was printed more than 50 years ago, going by the address given for the company.  You would be old by now… if you are still alive at all.  And here I am, with a pattern found in a dusty box, working the same stitches you made way back then.  My fingers follow the same movements yours did, and I pull out of thin air the same sweater you created in your imagination.  Whoever you were, wherever you went… with every stitch, with every row, I remember you.

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Innovate Me

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Confession: I’m a bit of a retrograde purist when it comes to socks.  I like ‘em plain… your good ol’ vanilla stockinette kind of plain.  Ribbed sometimes, maybe with a bit of stitch detail or some stripes… but certainly not fussy or too busy.  And – horrors! – never lacy; lace socks in a northern climate are just pointless.  Once sandal weather comes to Canada, my socks go away with the shoes and don’t come back out until my naked toes start to turn blue from the cold on morning dog-walks.

So, given my sockly prejudices,  I’ve never been a big fan of Cookie A. Her designs are either too far out for me, or impractical for my needs.  I greeted the news of her new sock book with a decidedly unenthusiastic “meh”.  I figured it wouldn’t be useful for me, and a waste of money when there are so many excellent and suitable sock patterns in my stash that I haven’t even got to yet.  However, I do admit I was vaguely curious at what sort of wacky weirdness might lurk between the covers of Sock Innovation, and when I saw it at the bookshop, I idly picked it up and flipped a few pages.

And that’s when Cookie A hooked me like a fish.  The first 55-page section of the book is completely devoted to design, and the delicately convoluted process of making creative stitch patterns work within the size and structural limits of a sock.  A dozen pages are spent working through the complexities and tribulations of charting, and converting different types of patterns and charts into different formats… and for those pages alone, I count my money well spent.  The technical information on shaping and sizing is clear and useful.  Her ideas on transitioning between stitch patterns to make the different sections of the sock  flow naturally and gracefully into one another are subtle and brilliant.

The individual sock patterns are written in an open and sensible style, with suggestions on how to resize and change the fit to suit your own needs.  The layout is outstanding, with lots of large photos of each side of the sock. The 15 patterns cover a satisfying range of styles, moving from the lacy patterns I’d expected through some wild cabling and out to a couple of nice masculine patterns that I’d bet even my husband would wear.

Maybe I’ll knit him a pair.  After I knit a few for myself, of course – sorry, he’s just going to have to wait.

sock innovation

Sock Innovation: Knitting Techniques & Patterns for One-of-a-Kind Socks, by Cookie A

ISBN: 978-1-59668-109-5

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Sock It To Me

Saturday, March 21, 2009

The humble sock is probably my favourite thing to knit – they are simple, useful and relatively quick to make.  Socks are portable; you only need to haul one skein around.  You can make them with subtle yarns or outlandish ones.  They can be as complicated or as simple as you like.

temagami spring sock

(click to embiggen)

This sock is as absolutely plain as you can get – 56 stitch stockinette, 7.5 spi.  It’s made with my own ACME Hand-Dyed Medium Superwash in the Temagami Spring colourway.  The base yarn is Louet GEMS Fingering.  I’m crazy in love with this base yarn – so smooth, so soft, so shmooshy.  Modesty should probably forbid me from raving on about it… but I can’t help myself.  You don’t have to buy my yarn – just grab yourself a skein next time you’re in your LYS, it’s widely available.

Such an easy yarn to love.

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