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?
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.
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.
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…)
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.
(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:
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.
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: Knitting Techniques & Patterns for One-of-a-Kind Socks, by Cookie A
ISBN: 978-1-59668-109-5
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.
(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.
The world economy is in the dumpster, and probably isn’t going to start looking up for a long time – maybe years. Times are tough and getting tougher; fully half of my extended family members are laid off or had their pay cut back… including yours truly. Worries about the future abound; people are saving, not spending.
So, naturally you have to ask yourself – is this really a good time to start up a new online yarn and fibre shop? Are people going to be interested in buying luxuries with the money left after putting food on the table?
I don’t know. And maybe now isn’t the wisest time to take the plunge… but sometimes, you just have to follow your dreams, take a firm grip on your courage and Just Do It.
So – my new online shop, ACME Fibres, has gone live. Head on over and visit, see if there’s anything you like over there. I have spinning fibres of various sorts – only natural colours right now, but I’ll soon be adding my own hand-dyed and hand-combed top. There are a few hand-dyed yarns; just light sock right now, but more will be coming during the next week… a goodly amount of the base yarn I was expecting was delayed by the mill.
By the end of the month, there will be a selection of knitting needles and crochet hooks. I’m a Louet dealer, so I can also supply anything that Louet offers – spinning wheels included. Oh! and here’s a special promotion on until October; you’ll receive a free yarn swift with the purchase of every wheel.
Free shipping until the end of March. And – I accept Canadian Tire Money.
Wish me luck.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
My mother (who is the best mother on earth, in my not-so-humble opinion) gave me a Chapters gift card for Christmas… she knows me so well. There’s nothing that gives me greater joy than a slathering orgy of book-ordering on Christmas Day. And then, there’s the eager waiting for packets to arrive in the mail, and the woohoo! when they arrive – really, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
This year, I splurged on knitting books. I’ve already received The First Book of Modern Lace Knitting (outstanding), and Color in Spinning (chock-full of information – more than outstanding). And finally, today, at long last, after weeks of back-orders and excruciating delays, Poems of Color: Knitting in the Bohus Tradition arrived.
Clicky on that cover picture to get a closer look at that sweater yoke. My jaw dropped somewhere around page 16. I started to twitch and go OMG! on page 37. And when I got to the beginning of the patterns on page 77, my poor brain imploded. I’m so frantic to knit some of these incredible patterns that I don’t know where to start. I’m not even sure I have enough colours to start with, I may have to drop everything else I’m doing and pull out the dyepots. I have websites to build, I have home renovations going on, I have a list of important things that must should really ought to haven’t got a prayer of getting done today.
Don’t bother knocking. I’m not home to Mr. Reality today. I’m in Sweden.
I recently upgraded my computer’s operating system, from Hardy Heron to Intrepid Ibex – yeah, I know, those people over at Ubuntu love giving their releases funky code names. Upgrading is a pretty painless affair nowadays; you certainly don’t have to be a rocket scientist to run a Linux distro anymore. Yet… there’s always something that seems to get broken when I upgrade. This time, it was my podcatcher that bit the dust.
I loved Rhythmbox, but sadly it became an unstable piece of crap after my upgrade and began crashing constantly. I truly tried to give it the benefit of the doubt, re-installed it and trouble-shot it, and tried a few different ways to solve the problem; but eventually I just had to admit that it was beyond my modest hacking skillz to fix. So – out with the old, in with the new. Eventually, I settled on Banshee. I tried a half-dozen different programs, but this one seemed to have the simple podcatcher interface that I wanted – sometimes the simplest things are the hardest to find. And of course, now that it’s all set up and I’m used to it, I love Banshee even more than I loved Rhythmbox – fickle, fickle thing that I am.
Now I am back in podcast heaven – I have my Stash & Burn, my Knit Picks, my Lime & Violet, and (most importantly of all!) my Sticks & String… I adore David Reidy, and missed him terribly while I was podcatcherless. And with this new lace project I’ve started, I really don’t have the concentration to watch TV or Ravelry Radar while knitting – listening while counting yarnovers is about as much multi-tasking as I can handle.
Lace really looks like arse before it’s blocked, but I’ll give you a progress picture anyway – it’s the Knitted Veil (from Victorian Lace Today) in 50/50 silk/wool that I dyed this summer – a charcoal grey with purple undertones. Lovely, lovely drape – I’ve been knitting on it like mad, neglecting housework and renovation projects, and staying up half the night. Not that I need excuses for neglecting the house anyway. Click to embiggen:
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
May your new president guide you well, and may your future hold great things.
I thought the performance by Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Gabriella Montero, and Anthony McGill – “Air and Simple Gifts” – was outstanding; it moved me deeply.
If you watch closely, you knitfans will spot the fingerless gloves…
