A Sudden Fascination

I've developed a sudden fascination for patterns which depend on proportion, actual measurements of the person for whom the item will be made, the gauge of the yarn being knitted up on the favorite needles and the room to improvise.    I found a perfect Beret pattern online and you can check it out at  Beret Recipe - A Kirsten Kapur Design.  I have been so delighted with its versatility that I've been knocking them out these past few weeks.  Here is one for which I specifically spun yarn.  

The two-ply used to make the body was lightly spun english long draw.  Then that yarn was dyed with un-spun roving which I used to make the thickNthin two-ply for the brim.  It's just been through the washer and is now drying on a plate.

Here is a detail of the yarn texture so you can see how the mild variation of the body yarn, knitted stockinette, works with the greater variation in the brim yarn which is purled for bumpy effect.  

In addition, on this beret, I've knitted in ribbon holes around the bottom of the brim because there is no ribbing to adjust the size.


I'll be running some gold ribbon through that later, and I can see that this version of the beret will be excellent for dour colored men's berets of the Scottish military variety.

For the most part, though, I've realized that it is far more time and cost effective for me to use commercially prepared 100% wool for the body of these berets and  save my hand spun for detailing, like the brim above and this slip-stitch detail to the right.

The  dark brown is Lion Brand Fisherman's Wool and you can see the glossy sheen of the lanolin they leave in this yarn.  The orange-yellow-red is the last of the roving I space dyed in a roasting pan with Scarlet and Sunshine Yellow Jacquard Acid Dye and then spun worsted and Navajo Plied. 

I found this slip-stitch pattern from my copy of Homespun And Handknit which is so old and used that I've had to put it in a 3-ring binder via plastic page protectors.  I believe this slip-stitch pattern was first documented by Barbara Walker in her knitting stitch treasury as a "honeycomb" type stitch.  When off the mannequin the colored squares do recede.

With the rest of the Dark Brown I'm knitting up matching fingerless mittens that I will be adding a small picot edging to at knuckles and thumb using the last of the Navajo Ply. I'll be offering them as a set on Etsy.  And where did I get the Hobo Glove pattern? The web of course.  I like to have my thumb knuckles covered so it was necessary for me to find a good generic pattern for mittens and I did with the Forepaw Socks  pattern designed by Judy Gibson.  Who, I might ask, with monkey toes can possibly resist a pattern called Forepaw Socks?  They WILL fit me and any other medium pawed woman.

I feel as though I'm finally armed with a great pair of patterns that provide a decent canvas on which to display novelty and art yarns in the future.   Next post will be of my simple patterns on wrist watch bands, sometime next week.

She's Gone MAD, I tell you, MAD!!!

I just threw caution to the wind and registered for a spinning class with Jacey Boggs at the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival next month.

Caution to the wind?  Yes, I work every Sunday so actually asking for a Sunday off during this recession is as close to "Oh MY God SHES Jumping OUT of the AIRPLANE!" as I can get and I'm extremely uncomfortable about it right now. And a Sunday off to do what?  Spin Thick and Thin yarn and then COIL IT?  Jeez!  Talk about crazy.

But seriously, I gotta go to the Sheep and Wool Festival for the smell of sheep and dogs and people as obsessed with fiber as I am.  I need to find sheep dairies in driving distance so that I can pick up Pecorino Romano and Feta when I MUST HAVE IT. I must see the latest in this, that and the other. And I must take a spinning class.

I'm spinning some thickNthin right now for use as an accent on a hand-spun, hand-dyed, hand-knit beret.  And I'm feeling insecure about it because I don't know if what I've learned from reading books is really enough for this.

Insecure in my work insecure in my crafts or insecure in my arts.  Which is the most tolerable ache?

None of the above.

Utilitarian Watch Band

And following up on my previous post about a different itch I wish to stop scratching, here is a utilitarian watch band, which I whomped up and I will be happy to share the pattern if anyone is interested.

That's it for today though perhaps not for the week.  Later!

A Stitch in Time

My wrist broke out last week, AGAIN, from a watch band.

I had assumed that since I'd worn the watch for some time without incident that it was okay, but then I hadn't been sweating then. Now it is summer and something about my sweat eats away at any plating or other barrier between my skin and nickel iron. Once that plating is gone I develop a rash of small oozing pustules that look a great deal like poison ivy. Though I've not told the Dentist this, this is why there will be no partial dentures, or implants or hip/joint replacements for that matter.

I've had ear lobes puff up to twice their size from "surgical steel" posts on pierced earrings. If it's not 14 carat gold or sterling silver, I can't wear it without repercussions in the form of weeping open sores.

So, I finally decided to stop looking for those great $5 plastic watches from Walgreens and am making my own watch bands.

This is the product of a day and a half of searching for a good lace insert pattern, turning it into a color coded graph (which you'll find below), starting to knit it three times and pulling it out twice. I used size two needles and some J&P Coats "Luster Sheen" acrylic cabled yarn which would normally be used for a crocheted Shell blouse or doily or perhaps a filet crochet curtain. I found the $2.50 ball at Goodwill for 49 cents. That price is perfect for experimentation, and that is what I was doing.



I'll probably be adding my Lace Graphs as free downloads to the Prodigal Sock site ... let me know if you'd be interested.

This particular lace wristlet, while lovely, is too time consumptive for sale, so tonight at work I'm going to be whipping out some 6 stitch wide garter-stitch bands that I'll be adding crochet edging to them later to make them saleable. Garter-stitch because I can do it without looking and it gives my hands something to do while my eyes are working for a living.

This is all just biding time, of course, while the yarn and roving that I dyed scarlet dries. I'm hoping that tonight I can spin some scarlet and gold thick-and-thin and then tomorrow I can start a new top down Beret. I am so excited by the look of one I knitted for my niece for her birthday that I can't wait to start putting these on Etsy. And now, this isn't a picture of the one I made for the niece. This is a beret pattern that is gorgeous but is more work than I care to spend on something I'd sell because I simply cannot charge what it costs me to make.

More Experiments

A while back I wanted to show a friend a strange phenomena I had noticed while spinning.

In each creative step, as the artist applies more constraints to the materials being fashioned into art, the natural beauty of the material is diminished. I believe it is diminished because with each manipulation the number of possible potential uses for the material is diminished. I think that humans can see potential and that is part of what they consider beauty.

First I showed her some raw wool that had only been washed, then roving that had been industrially prepared for spinning in a mill, then the roving that was space dyed in a roaster pan (and it was still breathtakingly beautiful). Then the yarn which is pretty darn special and now the beret. And the beret is something. Well, she liked the beret best of all ... so much for my theory.

I've also started using more than two needlework techniques at a time on a piece. Usually I just crochet and perhaps sew to finish, or knit and perhaps sew to finish. In this case, though, I've spun some white and some green yarn. I knitted a ribbing and then extended that into 5 repetitions of Double Leaf Lace and bound off so that the zigzag of the lace is retained. I then used the green yarn to crochet a small leaf, attach it to a point, single crochet down on zig and up one zag ... then single crochet the zig and zag together.

While I like the five points at the top of the hat and believe that I'll be using the crocheted leaf motif in other ways in the future, I've decided this combination of circular and Lace knitting is best presented in a single color (or a subtly variegated yarn that is created by hand). In this way, the lace and the hair beneath it are the true stars ... and that's what it's all about isn't it?

Enhance the person who wears the piece ... because the piece is at the end of it's potential and the human that wears it is always in the process of self-creation, has limitless potential and so is the beauty to be framed.

What's New?

The 'Psychedelic Mennonite' and other caps, that's what's new.

There are large Mennonite, Amish and other Anabaptist communities in south central Wisconsin. The farm land is rich and so makes the minimally mechanized life-style possible. While I don't envy them their hard work or "simple" attire or strict religious practices I do find the small mesh/net hats the women wear on the back of their heads to keep their hair buns from flying away intriguing.

This 'Psychedelic Mennonite' is mosaic crochet and I'll be making more and offering them on Etsy. Since I'm using different grist handspun to make these, there are 'air-holes' to make it wearable in the fall or spring. It also makes securing the hat with bobby pins possible. Other pill-box type caps will be more along the lines of a "Big Pill to Swallow" and I'm working on getting some important dimensions to investigate a man's cap.

All in all quite a bit of experimentation is going on in my workspace but I will be blogging more regularly with smaller blog posts. If you want detail on anything I'm doing, let me know.

Pre-Halloween Projects

An Overview of October Chaos

A little bit of this and that is one way to talk about the second half of September and the first five days of October but "scattered" is a more accurate description. I have several projects in the works right now and folks are volunteering new ideas daily. My biggest problem is how to tell this one or that one, "No, I can't devote a week to knitting you a pair socks for free. Sorry." I do need to figure out how to do that though, without offending. The only thing I can think of would be to start up a knitting class and make people pay me to teach them how to do what they'd like me to do -- I just don't have the time or the credentials. I swear. If you want to breathe these days you better have a certificate from an accredited junior college proving that you've been instructed on how to pull a breath in and blow a breath out.

On the Needle-Felting Front

I've finally decided what to do with a hat I knit and felted a couple of years ago. I used some of my bulky black hand spun and added a novelty yarn of sparse white fringes and gold flecks to the brim but wasn't happy with the result . I've pulled the hat out of the mothballs and I'm in the process of making a snowman bas-relief above the fake-fur snow. I'll post a picture when the tableau is complete and the hat is named.

Below the hat is a sock-monkey Halloween mask set. I'll have the pattern for this below, in case you have a little sock monkey in the house or are interested in dressing up a friend as something that should adorn a lady's bed.



Fairies and Angels

When I mentioned to a friend of mine that I was playing around with needle-felting brooches, she mentioned that while the market for vampire bat brooches is understandably small, there are always people willing to plop down 5 or 10 bucks for an Angel or a Fairy. And what luck ... they're basically made the same way with the exception that the latter is usually more colorful than the former. Using some silk I picked up at the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival and some alpaca roving I bought on eBay I spun a single of each to make a two-ply. I happen to have the Hazel Rose Tiny Weaver triangle and square looms and from her Nativity Tutorial it occurred to me that I had just the right tools. I'm not sure if I'll be using the triangles and a pompom for the body, or needle felting something to attach to the wings when I've spritzed them with enough fabric stiffener. I may also try to make some wings solely from the silk singles.

The hand-dyed silk hankies were from Kindred Threads. I had a lot of fun learning how to spin the pink and gold silk on the high-whorl bobbin I bought from Nels Wiberg, inventor of my favorite spinning wheel - The Babe. Yes, he was at the WS&WF too.

Suri Alpacas

I finally had a chance to visit PaceSetters, a local Alpaca Ranch, and then go back to buy some of their rovings and raw fiber. In the past I've always purchased low quality fiber on eBay. The alpaca that I'm using on the Fairy/Angels was one such buy -- scratchy and full of VM -- Not something you'd really want to put next to your body. Dennis & Christy Pace, on the other hand, have incredibly superior Suri Alpacas on their ranch and there is something other-worldly and regal about those camelids.

I have a couple of ounces each from the Alpaca named Privateer and also from Loca Mocha. I purchased their fiber raw and there is so little VM in them that they will be a delight to spin. In addition I picked up 4 oz each of processed roving in white and black. It is so soft it's like touching a baby's hair. The black and white are destined to become a modular black and white scarf. Though the roving is made up in pencil roving width, I'm hoping to be able to spin it woolen. We'll see. All of the Llama Locks will not end up in yarn either. Part of that will be adorning felted Brownies.

Prodigal Socks for the Face

The whole sock-monkey mask and face sock explosion you see to the left, is a direct result of my year long battle with the short-row heel. Since I hand spin I'm never quite sure exactly how much yarn I have. I regularly spin a yarn till I get bored with it and then cast it aside to start spinning something new. That means I have vague idea of how long I can make my socks and that idea is usually treacherously incorrect.

Knitting both socks at once, from both ends of the ball, toe up, is the logical way to deal with any skein of yarn I spin. Knitting in this fashion, I stop knitting the cuffs when I run out of yarn or they are as tall as I want them to be or I get tired of knitting them.

My major problem was the heel. I was having a lot of trouble finding a backwards Dutch Heel, or more precisely, a formula for figuring and completing a backwards Dutch Heel. Instead I kept running into blogs singing the praises of the short-row heel.

I Googled short-row, sock heels, toe up heels, etc. ad nauseum and read and read and read and tried and tried and tried and still could not knit a short-row heel without holes. I finally gave up and found a pattern for a toe-up gusset heel that I really like, and have been using for my personal socks.

And that would have been the end of that if it hadn't been for a Harriet Carter catalogue and my love of walking in the winter. The biggest problem I have with winter walking is lung freeze when it gets really cold. You can layer your body against sub-zero temps, but the whole scarf rigmarole to protect your lungs from the nose-hair freezing air is always faulty. And the need to have several scarves available because of pesky frozen snot was also a major impediment for me. I balked at allotting that much time to making that many acrylic (machine washable) scarves.

One day, paging through ta catalogue I saw a face mask touted as the perfect thing for winter outdoor exercise. I realized it was nothing more than a short-row heel translated into a polar fleece sewing project for slave labor manufacture in the far-east to be sold to us to sabotage our economy.

The face sock was born.

I can knock-out a face sock in a couple of hours from left-over machine-washable yarn. Since it attaches to the face via a couple of crocheted ear-loops, there are no infuriating attempts to adjust and re-adjust a scarf while wearing two pairs of mittens. The face-sock does its job. Once home, into the clothes hamper it goes.

The sock monkey mask pattern below is for a Child Size Stocking Cap and an Adult size Face Sock. I'd double the number of stitches for an (adult size cap) and halve the number of stitches and short rows on the Face Sock for a (child size). The numbers in parenthesis are approximations. I leave it up to you to stop and check the size of your piece as you go, and make necessary adjustments.

You will need one skein each of Lion Brand Jiffy yarn (or any 5/Bulky machine washable yarn) in White, Brown and Red. One size 11 circular needle suitable for magic loop (or double-pointed needles size 10.5 to 11) for the hat. I used 10.5 straight knitting needles for the Face Sock. A darning needle for finishing.

Sock Monkey Hat - Child

Approximate Adult size in ()

Using size 10 magic loop circular knitting needle and with brown cast on 48 (96) stitches -- or any multiple of 4 stitches you prefer.
Join.
Knit 2 Purl 2 for 2 (3 or 4) inches.
Change to stockinette stitch and knit for 1 inch.
Change to White yarn and continue knitting in stockinette 2 (4) more inches.

Place stitch markers every 8 stitches on next round for child size. (Divide number of stitches by 6 and place markers appropriately for adult sizes. If you have 'extra' stitches, as in [9,9,9,9,9,12], parse the extras out as evenly as possible between the markers [10,9,10,9,10,9] and eliminate the extras via K2Tog in the first row after the marking row.

K2Tog before each marker, each round, until you are left with 6 live stitches. Leaving a long tail, break yarn, thread darning needle. Dropping the stitch markers as you go, run the yarn tail through live stitches twice to bind off. Cinch up the 6 stitches and sew the yarn through the cinch a couple of times to secure.

Make one large pompom from Red yarn and sew to pinnacle of the cap.

Sock Monkey Face Sock - Adult

On 10-1/2 single point knitting needles cast on 30 (15) stitches in brown.
Row:
1. K1P1 to end.
2. K1P1 to end.
3. K to end
4. Change to White and Purl to end
5. Knit up to the last stitch (knit 29). Yarn to front, slip 30th stitch, yarn to back, turn work, slip first purl stitch. This completes the first wrap.
6. Purl across to the last stitch and wrap it (yarn to back, slip, yarn to front, turn work, slip wrapped stitch). *Please check online tutorials regarding short row heels if this is confusing.*

Continue working short-row heel in white for 7 WRAPS EACH SIDE.

Begin picking up wraps, the first left and right wrap in white.

Join Red and work the 6th through the 2nd wrap portion of the heel in the red color. Break red and rejoin white and work the final two wraps in white.

Break and join brown.
Knit one row
Purl one row
Work two rows of k1p1.
Bind off. Weave in ends.

If you try on the face sock now, you will see that the heel turn fits over your jaw, with one side of the heel covering your throat and the other covering you face up to and over your nose. The raw sides of the heel go up and over your jaw joint and should nearly touch the lobes of your ears.

With size 10/G crochet hook and brown, single crochet 9 stitches around the raw right 'ear' side, chain 9, slip stitch back into first single crochet to make an ear loop. Repeat with the left 'ear' side. Weave in ends.


Approximate Child Size

I'd cast on 15, and follow the 2 row ribbing and 1 row stockinette in brown, one row stockinette in white described above. I'd then only do 3 rows of short-row in white. At the turn, I'd change to red immediately and work all short-row increases in red. Change to white for 2 rows stockinette, then brown for one row of stockinette before the top 2 rows of ribbing would finish the mask.

The ear loops might be problematic for a small child, in which case chain stitching Surgeon's mask ties to bow tie at the back of the head under the cap might be the answer.

That's it for today! If you have questions or suggestions, post or email!

The Needle Felted Sheep Look Up

Too much fun is still being had this weekend at the Wisconsin Sheep & Wool Festival in Jefferson. A little less than 60 miles away from Footville via Route 26, the Jefferson county seat fair grounds annually hosts shepherds, sheep and fiber enthusiasts from around the state. In the fair ground parking lot there were also license plates from Iowa, Indiana and Illinois.

I've been trying to make it to Jefferson in September for about five years. There's always been something in the way: lack of cash, lack of time or lack of both. This year I signed up for a couple of classes early and so forced myself to budget time and money in order to get there. I'm glad I did. Needle Felting was a delight and Beret Weaving Off the Loom was an eye opener. Next year I hope to take more classes.

This weekend was a lot like going to a Science Fiction Convention with a few extra species, and not just because it takes place in September. The people had expressions of child-like delight. The dogs were happy and hyped. The sheep were a bit worse for wear. Don't get me wrong, the ewes and rams and lambs were all fine specimens and obviously well-cared for and cherished. But I got the feeling the sheep were more than slightly suspicious of the goings on. The aroma of mutton on the breeze may have contributed to their skittishness.

The dogs, on the other hand, knew that they were a welcome, valued and honored part of the party. Sheep dog trials involving brilliant dogs, stubborn sheep and harried owners were ongoing. You don't really appreciate the partnership between man and dog until you witness a Border Collie convincingly pretend to be listening and taking direction from its owner while moving sheep into a pen. Those dogs exhibit multi-tasking and tact skills which far exceed mine.

Sheep milking demonstrations, sheep cheese tastings, spinning, weaving, rug hooking, shearing, skirting, dying, knitting, felting -- if it had something to do with sheep it was happening there.

The main reason this festival reminds me strongly of a SF Convention is that for a brief time I felt a little less "odd." It's a common phenomenon Fen experience at their first Worldcon. After spending years being treated as geeks, many discover at their first convention that they are FAR from odd. They discover that they will never be as odd as the guy dressed entirely in day glow orange or the girl dressed in a tiny pair of fairy wings and little else. At the WS&WF there were a lot of people who make their living solely from sheep. Wisconsin currently has the most dairy sheep farms in the country as well as being home to many meat and wool herds. All of those sheep mean a lot of people make their living by processing, buying or selling sheepish products.

Though I knit, crochet, spin, weave and now (thanks to a class I took yesterday) needle felt, there were actually people at the festival who are more involved with wool than I. I was less odd and it was such a welcome feeling. I knew I could open my mouth and say any woolly thing I pleased and be greeted with smiles and nodding heads.

I'll be going again next year, and I urge you to take advantage of any convention that coincides with your hobby, obsession or occupation. All of us spend way too much time defending our self-esteem from the constant assaults of the talentless and uninspired. Conventions and Festivals give us an opportunity to be affirmed and affirm. It gives us an opportunity to realize that even the goofiest of us isn't all that goofy.