Knitting on Impulse

Back in the Saddle

Blogging.... right..... I used to do that didn't I?  The cousins have gone back to Vancouver, the first installment of the boy's birthday celebration is complete, the house is sort of almost back to normal, the week's dyeing is underway (DD just walked in the door from school, complaining loudly that she could smell hot vinegar for miles), orders pulled for mailing, shawl pins tumbling to a burnished glow....

That's what I wanted to say.  Today is the last day for the "free shawl pin with every yarn order" offer - the cut-off will be midnight tonight my time (Pacific standard).  It has been great fun, and very successful, judging by the number of pins that have gone out and the lovely thank-you notes.... so successful in fact, that I have a significant repetitive strain injury brewing in my wrists and thumb. I will be adding copper shawl pins to the webstore for sale over the coming weeks, but at a much slower rate of production! I've got some other cool ideas for the coming months, though April's will be significantly less wrist-intensive.

Oh, and the other thing - I put up the back-stock of sock yarn and Silken Mist (50/50 wool/silk lace-weight). 

I'm loving the comments on last post, even though I'm still too scatterbrained to come up with a clever response. If I waited for a bolt of cleverness to strike, though, I would have missed the window of opportunity to tell you about the other stuff, so you get this semi-lame post.

How about a picture?  I've decided to try a less daunting route to fitness, starting with just getting out the door in some fashion on a daily basis.  Once that feels normal, I'll slip in an actual movement goal of some sort.  Since it was warm and sunny, and there was fresh snow overnight, I took an hour this morning to do this while the yarn was pre-soaking:

 

It didn't feel like too much of a hardship.

What I Meant to Say Was...

So I guess I should clarify a wee bit, lest we re-enact one of the myriad Ravelry threads on "why non-knitters don't get it": I do know this woman, and I don't think she meant to be insulting, but the gist of her comment was that hand-knits are an indulgence borne of a hobby - a specialty item that you might wear to accessorize your "regular" clothes, and that multiples would be a little odd and frumpy - like carrying three handbags or throwing a coat over your pajamas to drag the kids to the bus.  In essence, one just doesn't make normal, practical clothing by hand.

I honestly wouldn't say my feelings were hurt, and I am more and more comfortable in my skin with the permission granted to artists for eccentricity, but the interaction illustrated gave me an excuse to write about a topic that increasingly fascinates me: the Western cultural disconnect from the processes of Making Stuff. 

Whatever did our ancestors do for warmth before Polar fleece?  More to the point, how is it that the self-sufficient knowledge to create one's own clothing (and for that matter, food and shelter) has become not only rare, but somehow indulgent - an oddity that isn't just impractically time-consuming, but ought to be practiced sparingly?  When did our society abdicate the skill sets for Everyday, and Practical, and Necessary to corporate-owned machines and poor people in Other places?  And in light of the current world economy, was that really a good idea?

Take food, for example. "Organic" is rapidly becoming a meaningless adjective, and legislation surrounding it merely a playground for corporate lawyers on the hunt for loopholes. Increasingly, it seems that the very best strategy for obtaining safe food is to buy it from people you know and trust - locally where possible. To that end, it helps immensely to understand how food is grown - even to acquire the basic skill set to grow one's own. If giant agribusiness has its way, the world's food supply will depend on a handful of monocultures, leaving us at the mercy of a single clever virus - hence, the concept of heritage seeds, and seed banks - a repository of foundational knowledge that we can rebuild with when cheap and easy comes crashing down.

Is it not also so with clothing and textiles?  Shouldn't any civilized society work to retain within its populace the fundamental knowledge and kinesthetic skills for Making Stuff, even if machines, extruded petrochemicals, and offshore slave labour are cheaper and easier at a given moment in time?  That's not to say that specialization isn't a valid concept, but if we stop respecting and preserving the foundational skills and knowledge on which our cheap and efficient solutions are built, we will find ourselves dangerously ill-equipped to adapt to sudden or catastrophic change.  Technology does not spring forth from a vacuum - it builds step by step, layer by layer on a foundation of hands-on knowledge of how the world works, how materials behave. 

I guess I'd like to see a society where the ability to feed and clothe yourself with your own two hands is normal, where the skill set to create textiles is honoured and passed on, where clothing is no longer a consumable.  A society where we are connected to the sources of our Stuff - who makes it, how much work and skill is involved, where the materials come from.  A society where we participate fully in the fabric of our lives.

(See what happens when you make an off-handed comment to me in the early morning?)

Chaos

Thanks to a snarky remark about my knitwear intensive attire at the bus stop this morning, I was partway into an Abby Franquemont-esque blog rant about the importance of basic kinesthetic textile knowledge to the health of modern society, with parallels to slow food and heritage seed repositories... when there was a knock on the door. 

It was FedEx ground, with - well, box doesn't quite do it justice.  You know how I confessed a while ago that there were yarn boxes lining the front hall, narrowing it to single lane traffic?  Well, this cube is pretty much the full width of the front hall, which is SO not what I needed the afternoon before guests arrive. I'm all for saving the planet by cutting back on cardboard, but honestly - I'm a little worried next time they're just going to offload a sea container in the parking lot and have done with it.  On the plus side, I have sock yarn to dye next week.

Anyhow, I've got chaos to organize, so you get the rant another day.

But seriously, do I look that eccentric?

 

I mean apart from the fact that my boot lace is untied, and I'm squinting into the sun, and slightly tense about the fact that the extremely impulsive girl child is holding my precious DSLR.  (I think she did a pretty decent job though, and this is good practice for publishing photos of myself without flinching. I've got 2.. almost 3 FO posts outstanding.  Maybe I'll let her do the photos....)

Pasque Flower

I was reminded of this lovely Robert Frost poem by Cathy-Cate at Hither and Yarn, and it seemed perfectly appropos for the colourway (never mind that spring doesn't come to the high alpine until July or thereabouts.)

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.

This is one of my favorite "gentle" colourways, drawn from the most enchanting of alpine wildflowers:

 

Feathery dove grey melts into pale creamy yellow with just a hint of chartreuse.

Showcasing meltingly gentle transitions, there is Bluefaced Leicester in fingering, sport, and worsted weight; here's the fingering:

 

The merino-silk is particularly luscious (as usual):

 

There is pure merino in fingering and worsted; here's the worsted:

And some mohair-silk laceweight that perfectly mimics the delicate, feathery fronds of the flower:

The Cruiser sweater pack has been nabbed already, but there is still a sweater's worth each of the sport and worsted weight BFL, or you could combine this colourway with a darker one for some colourwork. I'm still brainstorming how best to handle sweater quantities, knowing that one size does not fit all, so to speak.  I'm open to suggestions, including a limited amount of custom dyeing in certain colourways.

This week is shaping up to be pretty full, with company to entertain for most of it, so I won't be able to do another full dye run until next week, BUT... I still have a tub of back-stock of sock yarn and another of laceweight, much of it Silken Mist, so I'll have my voice activated skein winder working while he socializes and put that yarn up next Sunday.

 

Spring Arrives

Friday - a little rain: (OK a lot of rain.  Then a dump of wet snow, followed by a bunch more rain.  And wind).

 

Today - a little sun:

 

We mounted an expedition this afternoon to search for signs of spring, but there's not much awake yet, with the notable exception of our own stir-craziness!  Exhausted and befuddled pretty much covers my state of mind at the moment - Rob has been away at the sliding track every afternoon and evening all week, we haven't done half the cool family stuff we meant I hoped to, the girl child has a cold, the kids go back to school Monday, but we have company for the better part of next week, and a birthday, and the house is trashed and I still haven't finished that application, and, and.....

I think I'll go knit.

Speechless

I did attend the event in the end, and it wound up taking the better part of the day, but I am very very glad I did.  It was profound and moving and left me with an overwhelming array of images and feelings to process and therefore not a whole lot of words that are ready to do it justice. 

In a nutshell though, it was a dedication ceremony held by the local First Nations bands, and I was one of a handful of non-aboriginal folk invited to attend.  It was deeply emotional and joyful and gave me rare insight into a culture that does not exist merely as historical re-enactment for tourists, but is real and vital and daily - recovering and reconnecting to its values and spirituality in the aftermath of near-extinction. 

I could go on - there are elements that are unexpectedly vital to my personal journey and artistic direction, but things need to gel first.  Something is waking up, some new understanding is just around the corner, and it needs to unfold as it will.

Time to get my head out of the clouds and rinse some yarn.

Spring Break... What Break?

I really really appreciate all the helpful comments and suggestions about shoulder shaping... and I presently totally suck at responding to them in a timely fashion. As per usual, having the kids home from school all week has not multiplied the number of hours in the day, and as usual, I completely failed to take that into consideration. 

Just today, I've been making more (and more!) shawl pins, reskeining, labelling, packing, mailing. Squeezed in a full dye run between starting supper and .... midnight.  Also began reknitting the Leafy Hat for the umpteenth time, planned and replanned a birthday party (you don't know stress until you have party age kids), and wrote the first draft of an application that really ought to be mailed by the end of the week. (It's the time of year when deadlines come due for adversity-laden... stuff. I do a pretty good job of ignoring Adversity (name changed on account of this being a small town) for the better part of the year, but every spring I have no choice but to run the gauntlet and hope to make it into yet another Summer.) Debated whether I should go to an important and seriously cool event tomorrow morning or just give the kids some overdue attention.  Wallowed in maternal guilt and professional indecision for a while.  Fretted about a completely untenable proposed solution to some IT issues with the site. 

Thank goodness for Nature's playdough!

(Though my son batted his baby blue eyes at me this evening and asked mournfully why an internet business means I never come out to build the snowmen with them. Guilt attack!)

PS - I'm not sure, but it might already be tomorrow by the time I finish and publish.  In which case pretend I'm writing this yesterday.  Maybe I should go to bed.

   

Knitting Dark Water

My goodness, this works up quickly - I'm loving my little stockinette break. 

 

To answer a couple of questions from earlier: up to the current point, this is a pretty basic shape-as-you-go seamless bottom-up sweater.  (I'm using Essential Merino Worsted in Dark Water, with a wee bit of Enchanted Forest for contrast.) I started with garter ribbing, a form I've really come to appreciate: take any basic knit/purl ribbing and make the purl sections garter instead of straight purl. You get a nice elastic, non-curling edge that pulls in ever so slightly - just enough to make a tidy, non-flaring border, but not so much as to make the fabric above the rib "blouse" unattractively around one's midsection.  I swatched for gauge and knit to my actual measurements plus an inch of ease.  That was the simple bit.

The sleeves are meant to be short, with a simple colourwork motif decorating the border.  The aspect of seamless fit that I still haven't fully mastered though, is shoulders; more specifically, the shaping sweet spot that permits unrestricted movement without excessive fabric about the upper arm. I plan to have a go at EZ's version of the seamless set-in sleeve - the thinking and experimenting bit will come as I attempt to modify the standard formula to fit my (apparently unusually?) square-ish shoulders.

Here's what I've worked out about shoulders thus far from formulaic seamless raglans:

My shape:

 

The formulaic top-down raglan increases until it is long enough to divide the arms and body:

That's an awful lot of extra fabric.  I have a couple of unwearable sweaters waiting to be frogged.

The formulaic bottom-up raglan decreases steadily from the armhole divide up to the neck:

If you already have a fair bit of ease in the arms and body, the natural elasticity of the knitted fabric will help out, but every version I've knit tends to be pretty tight in the shoulders.

What works for me:

Working up, I maintain the full width of body + arms until about the level of the ball of the shoulder before starting the decreases.  Working down, I increase until I've achieved my total desired "body + arm x 2" circumference, then proceed straight down until ready to divide.

The challenge? To translate that to a new shoulder shaping, which I suspect is based on the inherent anthropomorphic assumptions of the raglan formula.  Stay tuned.....

Blackberry

I find my inspiration in nature for many reasons, not the least of which is the sheer beauty of the subjects and my profound sense of connection to them.  Entirely apart from that, however, one of the chief reasons I create colourways from nature photographs is that it pushes me to live up to something, to strive and reach and never stop improving.  It keeps me honest, keeps me from the stagnation of confusing happy accidents with skill.  When I studied piano, my teacher would ceaselessly demand more and better - ruthlessly it seemed at times, but I was never permitted to settle for "close enough", for the lazy ways out, for the quick gratification of a thoughtlessly shaped phrase. It drove me to tears at times, and it also made me better than I ever could have imagined on my own. 

I don't have a physically present teacher-critic for my current creative disciplines, nor is it really practical to acquire one at present, but every time I put up a photo and the colourway I dyed alongside, I put my present skill level on public display. I say in effect: "this is what I wanted.... and this is what I got."  Sometimes I'm pretty proud, and sometimes I know I fell a little short and even though it is attractive in its own way and perfectly knittable, and you all are almost always much kinder than my piano teacher, I know, and making it public forces me to face it, pushes me to search for new and better ways. 

When I first tried Blackberry, I achieved a result that was very pretty, but not nearly as dark as I envisioned, a limitation of my dyeing techniques at the time.  Someone (I don't recall whom, nor does it matter) actually said that in the comments - that it wasn't as dark as she would have expected, and I felt a little squirmy inside and though I did not go to pieces or anything, I knew I was going to have to try again one day.

 

Well - here's Attempt No.2 (picture heavy, but I guess you know to expect that on Mondays!):

Bluefaced Leicester - in fingering weight:

 

and worsted (the sport has already been nabbed for sweater glory):

(These really dark hues are difficult to photograph - the ruby undertones glow like fire when the sun hits it!)

Pure merino fingering (worsted's gone - again, to sweater heaven, I presume)

 

Summit sock:

 

and merino-silk (velvety juice-slick berries rendered in silk? Perfect.) 

 

The Cruiser sweater pack was snapped up by a dedicated lurker, and Glowing Hearts is also gone. At this exact moment there's still a skein of Fraternal socks left, but by the time Bloglines gets around to noticing me... You never know.  Speaking of Fraternal socks, I might as well confess that I had a bit of a D'oh moment with regard to inventory - more precisely, I failed to consider that inventing something popular that resulted in using up a base yarn at approximately 3x its previous rate might require a wee adjustment in the reordering schedule.  I'll dedicate a whole dye week to fraternal socks when the shipment arrives - promise!

Saturday Sky

First day of Spring Break:

 

As much as I'd like to get on with spring, when you live in a ski resort during a struggling economy, this is actually a very good thing.  There may even be some family ski shots in the coming days - just praying now that it doesn't turn to rain.

Pretty as it is, it is not exactly a hue I'm drawn to at the moment, and I had a sudden urge to try something different:  What would you like to see as the next (ie. the one I dye next week) colourway? Reinterpretation of something from the past year,  maybe a photo I posted once that caught your eye?  (The only constraint is that it needs to originate with one of my own photos, so that I own the copyright.) What are you craving, with spring drawing tantalizingly near?  If there's any sort of consensus, I'll run with it, and if not... I'll do as I always do and please myself!