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At Blackbird's request:
Here is the view from where I sit, during the summer. Me peeking out over the top of the monitor. Her peeking in...and eating the last of the leaves of the hops vine trained over the west facing windows to shade this room from the afternoon sun. For the first time this year, after 3-4 years of having the hops growing there, the deer discovered it, and the vines had covered this window completely, more than in the picture on the right.
No longer will I have to brave 50 miles of treacherous highways like this, when I need some of this:
Ten years ago when we moved here, I never could have imagined a yarn store would EVER open in this bitty little town. Apparently everybody's jumping on the knitting wagon. Only a few years ago the nearest (decent) yarn was a 3 and a half hour drive away. Things like this helps make me feel less like the knitting geek that I really am. I get to buy local!
The swatch is Nashua Handknits Wooly Stripes, 100% wool, for another pair of Wendy's Fingerless Mitts.
I had forgotten how much I like knitting colorwork, especially at 19 sts over 4 inches. Fast and fun!
Just purely having fun playing around with the camera in the car at dusk.
The poor camera has finally succumbed to duct tape.
Last week I picked up a copy from the library of Close Range: Wyoming Stories, the book of short stories by Annie Proulx that includes Brokeback Mountain as the final story. So far I've only read the first one, "The Half Skinned Steer", but looking at these pictures is, for me, evocative of that strange and sad story.
These mitts feel about as organic as the green blob thriving in one of the ponds on our place right now. I like the pattern which I found through this post, especially the fact that they are interchangeable so that they'll get even wear on the "fronts" and "backs". I also like the decreasing in the first row after the wrist ribbing which keeps them from bunching up too much right around there. One thing that I think could be re-worded is the line after Row 1 and Row 2:
Start thumb gusset: Repeat these two rounds, making a stitch just after 1st marker and just before 2nd marker in Round 1, until you have 11 stitches in between the markers. Knit 3 rounds further.
It's not much different than what is already there, but just clarifies where the increases (I think) are intended to be made. It's not a big deal for a fairly experienced knitter, but not so obvious to a newer knitter.
I swore I'd never knit with Kureyon again. I've found it too scratchy, but these mitts require less than one ball, so I thought I'd give it a second chance. This is #164, minus the brown sections I was just about to start knitting into. It's still a bit itchy around my wrists when I first put them on and I certainly wouldn't want it touching my neck or forehead. Same goes for Silk Garden. Maybe they'll soften up with a washing or two. However, this is a quick knit (maybe around 4 hours, give or take, of solid knitting for the pair?) and a couple of friends have already expressed interest in them, so it looks like my gift knitting is dictated for awhile. Too bad I don't have a local source as thorough as the one in this post.
As for the boot shot, these are my trusty Sorels. I hadn't been in Crested Butte, Colorado for more than a day or two when I realized I'd never make it through the winter without a pair of these. (besides, all those pretty, mountain girls wore them with long flowing skirts and sweaters) They've seen me through almost 13 winters since then, and with a new pair of felted woolen liners, they'll likely last as many more. If you live in a place with four seasons, you have to have four season's worth of footwear.
The idea for this project the boys and I did comes from many sources: first and foremost, a friend of mine did this with her kids and she got the idea from a book. This post also inpsired me. Ultimately, it was the pictures inside this book , above, a reprint of the original published in 1951, that I recently picked up at a kids' consignment shop that finally jump started me into actually pulling out the posterboard and giving it a go last week. There are many other wonderful illustrations in this book, and the poems are classics.
Had I read up on the illustrators before having done this project with the kids, we probably would have drawn together on the same length of posterboard as more of a collaborative effort, in the style of Alice and Martin Provensen themselves, a married couple who worked together:
There is an exhibition of their work together, and an animated film series of his work, at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, MA right now through March 12th! (Just one of the many kinds of things we miss out on by living in the boonies. There are plusses and minuses to living anywhere.)
So, we didn't work on this project together in true Provensens' style, but on the other hand, we all have such individual ways of doing things, even if that means copying or being inspired by somebody else's ideas, that it's fun to do the same project side by side and see what each of us comes up with. It looks like they're all connected, but they are, left to right, mine, E's, and R's, as if it isn't obvious. ;0) I certainly had fun drawing these fantastical row houses, even if E was done in about 30 seconds or so and I had to insist that R sit and finish his with me.
Now, I've been finding myself looking more closely at the illustrations of houses and buildings in children's books in the past couple of days, including Dr. Seuss' McElligot's Pool, and Come Over To My House, among so many others.
More online fun here, through Littlest Flower, here.
The joke's on me.
It didn't take long to realize that this idea was a bust. The yarn is made up of 6 tiny cotton strands that ARE NOT twisted together. Not at all. So it quickly becomes a stringy, tangled, useless mess. Imagine unravelling an entire sweater's worth of kinked DMC embroidery floss.
Oh well. Only $2.00 wasted. Good thing I didn't buy a yarn ball winder. Maybe someday.
I think I've gone and pulled a Kay.
It all started on Monday morning when we managed to get up, eat, get dressed and do a little homeschooling about Martin Luther King Jr., all before 11:00 a.m.(!) and then we headed out the door for story hour at the library, only to find it closed for the holiday. (Do we still brownie points for effort, anyways?)
Instead, we ended up at the thrift store and that's where the real trouble began. I was innocently poking around for feltable wool sweaters when what to my wandering eyes and fingers should appear?
"Hmmm. This looks like denim. 100% cotton. The tag reads 26125-INDG. Indigo? It sure does look like a slightly faded pair of jeans. Man, this is soft! Not like the unknit Rowan Denim I've felt. Let me see how it's made. The body is knit in the round with no seams! The sleeves are seamed but set nicely into the arm hole in a "fully fashioned" manner, whatever that means. This sweater is huge. I bet there's a good bit of yarn in it even without the sleeves. $2.00? SOLD!"
So, there you have it. Upon further examination at home, I think that maybe the sleeve was knit back and forth and then seamed together, so there is probably even more salvageable yarn than I had thought. I've tried it on and it reaches well below my hips, the sleeves extending down past my wrists. Here is how it measured when laid out flat: 30" from shoulder seam to the hem with the rolled hem flattened to it's full length, the circumference is 40", and the sleeve length is 24" from shoulder to extended rolled hem!
It's not a bad looking sweater just the way it is, if only it was shorter. The cables and details are beautifully done. There is less cabling and more plain ribbing on the back of the sweater. The most fading is on the inside of the forearms where it has probably seen the most contact wear. The inside is distinctly darker than the outside, so I'm assuming it's been washed right side out, but now, thanks to me, it has been given a run through the wash inside out. It didn't change it much.
So, what do I do with this? It appears to be machine knit at 7.5 sts x 11 sts to the inch and weighs in at about 25 ounces. A lot of fingering weight yarn! I wonder how it would knit up with the yarn doubled? The body below the sleeves would make a fine cushion cover just the way it is, still leaving a fair amount of yarn to work with. Or how about that groovy denim bean bag in Simple Knits With a Twist? Or it could make a lot of blue socks. Or I could just ship it off to Kay. Kay?
On the other hand, this is my very first thrifted-sweater-unravelling-adventure so it would be fun to see what I could do with it. It would be just the excuse I need to finally splurge on a ball winder. (Suddenly this sweater is getting expensive.) I suppose the first thing to do would be swatching once it's been taken apart, skeined, washed, and dried. Since it's already been washed and dried, it wouldn't be necessary to take shrinkage into account in designing or choosing a pattern.
Kay, you are a dangerous woman, but I'm sure you already know that. I never would have given this sweater a second glance if it weren't for you. So, thank you. I'm assuming there are denim patterns in your and Ann's soon to be released book? And thank you, Jane Seymour. And thank you to the women and children in the sweatshop in Taiwan. And thank you to those who buy everything new (clothes, cars, etc.) so that I can buy them used and cheap!
What could be more All-American than denim and a holiday honoring freedom and equality?
So, I'm finally getting around to answering some of the questions Larissa tagged me for a week, or two(?) ago. I answered a similar meme that covers some of the same things awhile back so you can go here if your interested. Here are the rest of my responses:
What were you doing 1 hour ago?
Eating lunch with the boys and C and the crew of 4 people who are working with him at the shop. They come over and have lunch with us at the house at noon most weekdays. It's a nice break in the day to spend time with other adults. Meanwhile, I ran to the laundry room in the shop to throw a load in the dryer and got the seats arranged in the van so we are ready to take C's sister, her husband, and their son to the airport later this afternoon. They're off to Jamaica for two weeks, as a late "honeymoon"!
Five (or so) creative things you want to achieve this year.
1. Knit less. 2. Knit more. 3. Work on the afghan pictured above that I started making with my stash of plant dyed yarns (pattern is the Community Afghan from Handknit Holidays), and another patchwork blanket recently started out of felted sweaters. 4. Find more fun and interesting ways to approach homeschooling. 5. Learn to use the Dremel tool given to me by my in-laws at Christmas. 6. Knit lace. I have the yarn for a Flower Basket Shawl in my stash. 7. Read more, mostly fiction, in hopes of fueling creative endeavors. 8. Build a tree house with C and the boys. That isn't five, is it?
The next 5 movies you'd like to rent.
1.Wedding crashers. 2. Frida, again. 3. Sense and Sensibility. 4. Brokeback Mountain. 5. ?
I know that some of these are still in the theater but, since I can be fairly certain they will never show at our dinky local movie theater, I'll just have to wait until I can rent them.
Why has this taken me so long to get to this meme? Honestly? I quote myself from my previous meme responses: "Scattered." "Lollygagger." But there is another reason: I have this tendancy to become a bit mute when reading Larissa's blog. Hers is one of the first few blogs I ever placed in my Favorites folder, long before I started blogging, so she's one of my blogging heroines. Not only does she knit, but she's a "real artist". You know, the kind with installations in galleries, the kind that I have so much admiration for, the kind who does "important" work. You know what I mean. And she writes these articles for Knitty, highlighting other artists. Only somebody way cooler than me does stuff like that, right?. It's a bit intimidating being asked such questions, particularly ones relating to my own creative goals. How can mine ever compare to hers?
But, then I remember that she's another person out there living her daily life, trying to find balance between raising a child and having a family and still having the time and energy for her own endeavors and ideas, and figuring out how to make it all work for her in her own way, AND she's doing a great job of it all, from what I see.
I quickly realized after the birth of our first son that ultimately, one of things raising a child does, above ALL else, is challenge your creativity in new ways. How do I/we soothe a colicky baby, especially when almost nothing works and what works one evening doesn't work the following evening? How do I accomplish even a small portion of what I used to in a given day? How do we wean a baby? How do we parent our children together? How do we maintain a relationship with eachother when we can hardly even hear eachother over the ruckus and constant questions? How do we teach them to be good people? How do we get them to eat dinner? How do I stay sane? I could go on and on.
I've never fulfilled my duties with any chain letter yet. I'm afraid it stops here. Let lightning strike as it may.
So, to change the subject a bit but still remain on the subject of Portland knitting bloggers, We Heart Yarn is the relatively new site of four Portland women blogging together. They're doing their very own Jaywalker knitalong together within the bigger knitalong. Shannon is the only other blogging knitter I've actually met in person, and she's also the only other person I've known to knit in the dark wearing a headlamp, only she knits like that in the bar (bold woman!) while I've only knit that way around the campfire.
Yet another long-winded post.
"Drops/Garnstudio has now translated a large number of their free patterns into English." -from Norway Needles.
Warning: Before you click on over there, you'd better brew a cup of tea or coffee. You could be there awhile.
Above are a couple of the free patterns I've seen on their Norwegian site that I've considered asking my mom to help me translate. Now I can knit them myself from the Enlish translations! If I had a girl, I'd knit the one on the left in a heartbeat. The one on the right I've wanted to knit for E, so I'd better get on it before I wake up one day and he's 12.
Thank you, Strikkelise!
O.K Since it's near impossible, it seems, for me to only post one or two pictures, here are a few more patterns (not all translated yet), but there are many, many patterns for women, older kids, and men, too, apparently with more being added daily. You can see the others at their Scandinavian language sites.
So many cute kids!
Added: I just clicked over to Camilla Engman's STP entry for today. She and her sibling look just like these kids!
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