Knitting on Impulse

Just One More Thing

I've been thinking about the lace thing - the number of grams and all (see Friday's post).  Nobody has said anything (unless you count the heated conversations I have with myself in the shower, thus amusing and slightly unnerving my husband) but it doesn't feel quite right to say there was a discrepancy (albeit small) and not follow through with doing something about it.  And just because the industry does something, doesn't mean that I do it.  (Though it is quite illuminating to go about weighing various yarns in my stash...) And so what if it is eccentric to label the weight in other than 50 gm increments?  Here's what I came up with: they all seem to be between 48.7 and 49.5 gms, which means that 48 should be a safe number.  Which works out to 88 cents worth of yarn.  So.... I will drop the price by $1 and refund the same to everyone who has bought the lace-weight to date.  I don't think the difference in yardage estimate would be significant enough to make or break a project, though if anyone has any issues, do please contact me.  There.  Now I can sleep. 

Balance

Today is for... nothing.  The best kinds of nothing:

Hot strong coffee on the patio (the sheltered bit), watching the mists and rain drift over the mountains, inhaling the fragrance of damp earth and forest.

Cheering on the fledgling wildflowers (shhh, don't tell the strata) in our wee strip of garden, hoping against hope they're not all weeds.

And knitting.  Pure process, pure bliss.

Showers Of Green And Flaming Tulips

You know, this new life of mine is, by and large, pretty low stress (at least compared to the unmitigated hell of the Before Times), but I have to say, I am extraordinarily glad to see the end of this particular week.  After that little crisis of confidence, I settled down to finish formatting photos for the final application.... and the monitor promptly died.  It took half a day on the phone to ascertain that it was fully covered by warranty... and we could expect to receive the replacement in a week or so.  (If we filled out the form which they kindly emailed to us but couldn't comprehend why there might be an issue reading it!)   More frantic phone calls and $75 later, we had a rental to get us through the week.  Then there was the jurying for a certain other venue which took place this week, and once again, reason and common sense fought a pitched battle with small minded nepotism.  We squeaked through in the end, but this is apparently destined to be an annual event.  All's well that ends well, and the last of the portfolios are safely delivered, but I do have a bit of a post-adrenaline let down at the moment.  Thank heaven for fibre! 

On to the good stuff - buoyed by the enthusiastic response to my initial offerings, I have jumped in the deep end of wholesale sourcing... and I have two new and luscious yarns that will be regulars now.  Firstly, a new sock yarn: a sturdy but divinely soft and squooshy 3 ply in an 80/20 superwash merino / nylon blend.  Secondly, one of my favorite yarns in the whole world: Bluefaced Leicester in a fingering weight 2 ply - plump and springy, robustly wooly, yet fabulously soft to the touch.  I am in love.  The BFL is not superwash, nor is it blended with nylon.... but the yardage is right for socks, and I plan to assuage my frayed nerves by knitting a pair this weekend, after which I will wear them hard and report back on their sturdiness.  Whether or not it will make hardy socks, it is superb for lacy scarves and shawls, as well as stranded colourwork.  (I have a few design projects up my sleeve in that regard, just as soon as I, ahem.... finish up all the other languishing design projects.)

Also, before I get to the pictures (sorry for rambling on so long) - a word about the lace-weight.  I had reason to check the precise weight of my new yarns, and while I was at it, popped one of the lace skeins on the scales.  (And then checked a bunch of my undyed stock to corroborate).  Disconcertingly, it appears that this particular manufacturer errs slightly on the lean side - somewhere between 0.5 and 1.5 gms on each skein.  It really hadn't occured to me to disbelieve the 50 gm label, and further research leads me to believe that it is considered an acceptable margin of error by the industry, but now that I know, I don't feel right not disclosing that.  After some consideration, I decided that posting the precise 10ths of a gram for each individual skein would be overly cumbersome and obsessive, and that this would be a reasonable form of disclosure in lieu of that. In any case, I am experimenting with some other lace yarns for the long term, but I will continue to use up my stock of this stuff because the baby alpaca / merino is just so incredibly lovely to work with.  (The format of the sock yarn and the BFL allows me to err on the side of generosity, by the way, which is much the way I prefer to do business.)

On to the colours!

It has been a late and chilly spring this year, but the breathtakingly new green has at last begun to dust the bare gray branches.

From left to right: reeled silk (this skein is for me to play with, but I may carry it in future if there is interest), BFL, superwash merino sock, alpaca/merino lace. 

A closer look:

I couldn't resist the start of tulip season, either:

From subtle shades of pink and gold and salmon:

to fiery crimson with hot pink highlights:

and a dash of pure flamboyant joy:

Here's the line-up:

The sock yarns:

The BFL:

The lace:

They're all available in the photo album in the right hand sidebar.  Have a great weekend - I've got a skein of BFL calling my name....

Teaser

Spot the artist's patio....

Confidence

Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you for the wave of support and thoughtful comments!  It really did help.  Truthfully, I am OK with the idea of the self-taught creative, but it seems to me that there are certain disciplines (I suppose most notably the ones that are generally classified as "fine" arts) in which a basic level of formal training makes the distinction betweeen professional and amateur glaringly obvious, and painting is one of those.  And while the primitive / naive look is a legitimate genre, it's not an identity I am striving for.  Also, this particular venue features a number of amazing painters, and rightly or wrongly, jewellery and textiles tend to be on the fringes of what many folk call legitimate art, so.... I didn't want to be any more blatantly a pretender than I already fear I am.   Not that anyone has ever so much as insinuated that, come to think of it, so this may well be all in my own imagination, based on tales of critics I have never met, of work I have never seen.  I'm rambling.

To make a long convoluted story short, I think that the scarves are good enough to enter.  Well, three of them are (according to my instincts), and I have plans for a couple more which I will finish up tomorrow (curse those extended deadlines and their prolonged agony).  There are no guarantees with ArtWalk anyway - it is a series of retail stores who participate by displaying local artists' work for the summer, so acceptance of functional art depends more on an appropriate location being entered and interested, since display is a little more complicated than hanging a picture on a wall.  I got a wholesale account for my jewellery and notecards out of last year's entry, so it is well worth the effort.  Regardless, the scarves will be in the Farmer's Market and (eventually) on the website.

Enough of that.  How about some photos?

It was warm and sunny today... at last!  Which, happily, means I can turn the patio into a dye studio.

What Else I've Been Doing....

I sure hope this insistent need to explore new territory is some sort of an artistic virtue, rather than a sign of a complete inability to focus...  In any case, it turns out that I love painting textiles, and I adore silk scarves, but spending 8 hours a day droning away at seed stitch for 50 cents an hour was not especially fulfilling.  (Though I learned a lot in the process, and I do have plans to add silk to the yarn line up in the near future.)  Hence these:

The deadline for deciding whether to include these in my submission for ArtWalk is tomorrow (actually they have just extended it to Friday, so I now have a few more days to obsess).  And I am torn, because while I think instinct has served me well to date in terms of basic colour sense, I fear it is inexcusably audacious/naive/just plain stupid to display an actual painted design in public without a Fine Arts degree.  Or at least some sort of formal training.  Or maybe I should do this for a couple of years before I show anyone.  Please be honest here - I don't want to make a fool of myself in public.  (But sort of kind about it at the same time, so Rob doesn't have to suffer too badly put up with any more than he already is.)

Crocuses and Dancing Moss

I couldn't settle down to a single theme this week, so I chose my two favorite subjects from last week's photos.

First, the dancing moss (I believe these are sporophytes, part of the reproductive structure. Actually, if you compare the diagrams in the link, the red stalk that caught my eye is termed the seta, which also happens to be the Italian word for silk.  I choose to see it as a sign that this colourway would be dazzling in silk.....)

I love the translucent purity of the reds here, and most of all, the way the stalks appear to be lit from within by the morning sun.  I followed that idea into the dyeing process, beginning with a base of brilliant sunshine and layering the reds over top.

I painted a full range of sun and shadow into the sock yarn:

The lace-weight however, focuses on the pure brilliance of the reds, trusting that the open structure of the knitted fabric will supply the shifting shadow and contrast that makes the original so magical.

The purple crocus:

The challenge here was to maintain the sweetness and delicacy of the flower in the face of such a fierce contrast of complements - I chose to restrain the orange highlight to a single very short interval.

The sock yarn:

The lace-weight:

Finally, the stripy crocus:

 

I was fascinated by the delicate shades of grey and white against the lavender, but concluded that in this case, the orange would just be too busy.  Being by nature a high contrast colourway designed to stripe and pool like the original, I decided that this was best interpreted as a sock yarn.

Altogether there are 8  0 skeins of lace and 8 5 lots of sock yarn this week, and they may be found and purchased in the photoalbum in the right hand sidebar.

Bamboo

I just realized I haven't posted for a couple of days.  I think.  This week has been a blur.  Thankfully the last of the big deadlines winds up this coming Monday, after which life will return to a more sane and measured pace.  (Tempting fate with that little pronouncement, I know.)  Perhaps I'll even knit again, which reminds me.... Thank-you Laurie!  The lacy object shall henceforth be known as a mananita.  Which I choose to believe is Spanish for "buttonless shawl that is in no way a poncho".  (Though a bit of Googling suggests that it has several meanings depending on context, including "bed jacket" and "early morning".)

I did dye (all day) yesterday, and the new yarn will be up tomorrow morning (as it was last Friday, except Bloglines hates me and didn't update my feed until Saturday.  Grrrr.)

Not for sale is this:

Four hundred plus yards of worsted weight superwash wool / bamboo, a little experiment which I think will be enough with which to knit a Baby Surprise Jacket for a friend's little guy.  It is wonderfully soft and silky, and despite the fact that only 65% of the fibre was actually taking up dye, the colour is quite lovely. 

Seconds

One of the side benefits of a yarn dyeing business is that sometimes, some very lovely yarn turns out not absolutely perfect.  Not so much as to be unattractive, just not quite up to the standard for saleability.  And then I am of course, obliged to keep it for personal use.

As the red ribbon lace scarf was nearing the end (no, I still haven't tackled blocking it), I decided that I rather liked having an easy lace project on the needles.  I'm not an expert lace knitter, so easy for me needs to be really easy - no squinting at charts and messing about with lifelines.  I decided to try a Pi shawl and toss in a few simple motifs as the mood struck:

So far, so good, I think.  Now for the confession.  I began with a, um... head sized hole in the middle of the circle.  Which means that one could technically call this a poncho.  Now I am painfully aware that present day fashion has deemed it to be the most uberly uncool garment that one could possibly commit to the needles.... but I want to make it nevertheless, because I have a vision that excites me.  So I will be referring to it as buttonless cape.  Or something.  There will also be a custom designed shawl pin.

Monday

We're home from Vancouver.  Kids are home from school (pro-D day or some such). Hubby has been hogging the computer all day (OK he was finishing up the last finicky details with QuickTax and I love him desperately for it).  Thing one and I have been for a long walk in the rain to visit the library, followed by the acquisition of rainboots that don't precisely match her existing raincoat but they are All That Is Left in town despite the fact that this is the first day this year that it has rained (rather than snowed).  At forty years old, I am still taken by surprise every year that all the spring clothes are out of stock by March because I should have thought to look in January when there were still four months of winter left.   

Enough whining though, because the appointment on Friday went as well as it could possibly have gone, and my daughter has been granted the least pejorative and most useful of diagnostic labels, which unlocks a host of resources that could make all the difference between success and marginalization.  This is a very very good thing, and I am enormously grateful for all the good wishes you sent our way last week.

It was sunny and warm on Saturday.  That was also a very good thing.

For the record (because my SIL wants royalties should get credit) these tulips were photographed in her garden in Ladner (ie. Greater Vancouver).  They're a little farther along with the Spring thing down there.

On the knitting front, I finished the Ribbon Scarf, and now have to find 80 uninterrupted linear inches that have a remote possibility of not being leapt upon by the cat, the dog, the kids, or the husband before the scarf dries.  It could be a while.