Monday, March 30, 2015

Tah-Dah!

Presenting: 
“Turnabout Is Fair Play” – a cigar box guitar collaboration.

Turnabout

I think it turned out very cool! And the best thing? It sounds really nice when played. Sorry my strap is really tiny in the photo so you can’t really distinguish the pattern that well. Plus the kumihimo braid I made for the neck tie. Those leather ends gave me conniptions though so maybe I’m glad you can’t see it too closely! The guitar is to be submitted on Wednesday so we just made it under the wire. The display is entitled “West Coast Synergies: fibre + wood + metal + clay” and will be at the Roundhouse Community Centre, Vancouver, from May 1 – June 30th, 2015. And no, the guitar is Not For Sale! If you’re local we’ll be at the opening reception Sunday, May 3.

You may be wondering about the title. It came about while I was supposed to be sleeping one night. Here’s our Artists’ Statement:

About the guitar. Turn the wood, cut, drill, sand and polish. Turn the weaving tablets and turn them some more. Turn the bobbins on the braiding stand. Turn the guitar (it’s a lefty!). And hear the fair music as you play.

Does that help at all? Artist’s statements are kind of silly anyhow.

Now that that’s done (yay!) it’s on to new pastures. Firstly, another FO:

Little Black Cardi

LittleBlackCardi

Begun:  January 14, 2015
Completed:  March 28, 2015

Yarn:  elann.com A-Series F05, superwash wool/nylon, white and hand-dyed semisolid black by me. 229 yds = 50g. Used 6 balls with only a small bit left over.

Needles:  Addi Lace Clicks, 3.5mm. Clover Takumi Velvet dpns, 3.5mm.

Pattern:  Trellis by Lili Comme Tout.

Mods:  Made the body 1” shorter and the sleeves 3/4-length.

Comments:  This sweater must have actually been knitted twice for all the pulling out and re-knitting I did on it! Some of it was my fault (knitting black in winter, doh) and some was not. There was an error in the pattern for where to begin the chart for size L. I tried to message the designer but never did hear back. Oh well. I figured it out anyhow. I also managed to miss the one row of garter stitch after the bottom ribbing so I left it off the sleeves as well. The i-cord finish on the neckline and fronts was tedious but I quite liked the look when it was done. It was easy to leave the right size buttonhole for my Maiwa bone triangle buttons.

I had been worried that there wasn’t enough of the dyed yarn to finish but I still had a wee ball left at the end. It helped that the body and the sleeves were shorter than the pattern. Now that it’s done I love the fit (close but not too tight) and hope to get a lot of wear out of this cardi.

So of course I immediately got started on a new cardi! Several of my friends and I went to the Sweet Georgia yarn sale on Saturday and I immediately found a BFL sock yarn in the semisolid colourway “ginger”. It apparently was a mis-dye so half price but you couldn’t tell it by me. I think there was too much red on it which only makes it better in my opinion:

SweetGeorgia ginger

Even though it’s acid dye of course, the colours resemble cutch with a splash of madder. Sorry, I had it already wound up in balls before I remembered to photograph it!

The sale was quite crazy and Felicia, Sweet Georgia herself, was shocked at the line-up outside the studio. Her face was so funny! Mr. Sweet Georgia was manning the door and letting only a few in at a time. (Also feeding us brownies to quiet the masses.) I think half the yarn was gone by the time we got there and squeezed inside the tiny space. But I found the yarn of my dreams right away so I was happy! It’s already on its way to become a Candelia by Cecily Glowik MacDonald:

I didn’t actually copy her original colour on purpose but it sure looks like it, doesn’t it? What I love about this sweater are the cute pockets and the peplum on the back:

Adorable huh? I think I’ll make it a smidgen longer though. And I have the perfect clasps and buttons in the stash. I think this must be some kind of speed record for me buying yarn and using it. Here’s how I spent Earth Hour on Sunday night:

EarthHour

Winding skeins and knitting a swatch by candle light. Earth Hour makes me appreciate electricity soooo much! I did cheat a little though. I didn’t turn off the lights on my wee seedlings:

GrowOp2015

I’ve already cast on for the sweater and am cruising down the yoke. Hopefully this goes faster than the black cardi did. So how many sweaters does a damselfly need? Not nearly as many as she wants! I’m obviously on a roll. More on the spinning project soon too - which will be yet another sweater. Ha!

Now I’m off to buy some fruits and veggies.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Fishies

I have been busy. There’s some actual weaving to show you today! See?

Pisces tabletwoven band

And here’s what it looks like on the back:

Pisces back side

No fishies there! But the waves are still flowing. The band is only about 7/8” wide which I think is just about perfect for a cigar box guitar strap. I’m not finished yet but I’ve woven about 15” so far which is a good start. The guitar isn’t done yet either! We only have until April 1 to finish this combination project so we are putting it on the Top Priority List. We also have to photograph the piece and write bios and an artists’ statement which is going to take some work to get right. I hate Artspeak! It will be in plain English, so there.

Tablet weaving (often referred to as card weaving) is something I’ve dabbled with in the past. It’s an extremely simple and inexpensive setup. All you really need to get started are a couple of clamps, a deck of cards, a hole punch, a ruler, scissors and some crochet cotton. If you don’t already have these items about you could get everything you needed at the dollar store! On the other hand, the weaving possibilities are pretty much endless: from the very easy to the very complicated. As these things go, my Pisces band is on the easy side. Here’s my setup:

Tabletweaving1

Thom made my lovely oak shuttle but you could use a small ruler instead. You can purchase ready-made cards but I like the size of the playing card ones and they really only take a few minutes to make. One end of the warp is attached to a peg clamped to the end of the table:

Tabletweaving4

Here you can see the messy end where I was getting the tension smoothed out and had to fix a tablet that got turned around. You can pretty much see exactly where things came together and my hands remembered how to move. That end no longer looks like this because I’ve woven more of the band length. It’s now wrapped around the peg and secured with a large safety pin. The other end of the warp is weighted:

Tabletweaving3

Those are knitting machine weights hooked on. You can attach the end of the warp to a peg as I did on the other end and just shift it forward as the warp takes up but this system is more flexible and takes less fussing. The second peg system clamped there is just to raise the warp off the table so the tablets don’t all flop over. In this photo also you can see the twist already beginning to build up on the opposite side of the tablet deck from the weaving. I periodically need to reverse the weave direction to untwist or else I would have to work the excess twist down to the end with the weights and allow each tablet’s warp to untwist individually. I prefer to let the fishies swim backwards sometimes!

Note the coloured pebbles:

Counting Stones

This is my mnemonic counting system. The pointy arrow shows in which direction I’m turning the deck. The turns are FFFFBBBBBBBB so the lower row of 4 is the forward row. I move one pebble at a time as I weave each forward pick. When I get to the last pebble, I turn the pointer and begin the 8 backwards picks. It really helps me remember what I’m doing when my brain starts wandering! If I was only doing 4 forward/4 back I would probably only need one row of pebbles.

The trick with getting the band’s width consistent is to leave a little loop of weft sticking out the edge, turn the tablets, insert the shuttle and beat, then gently tug the loop up snug, leave a new loop and repeat the sequence. You can see this loop in the photo third down from the top of the post. It also helps to measure the band every so often just to make sure you aren’t pulling in too tightly or getting too loose. Yes, the going is slow with tablet weaving but I find it rather fun. More on our Combined Crafts Project soon. The guitar is a knockout so far!

What else? I got tired of weaving so I tried spinning up a sample skein of the blue-gray alpaca roving that I bought at Fibres West. So so disappointing! It’s VERY full of neps and noils – much more so than I originally thought! See?

Alpaca fibre noils

It was not particularly cheap either. Yeah, I know. Buyer beware and all that. I have contacted the seller and suggested that she needs to consult with her mill on better ways to process her fibre because this is really unacceptable. Either the carding cloth is too coarse or they are going too quickly which causes the noils to spring back. It’s still usable but I get more of a tweedy yarn than I was expecting and I can’t spin it very fine. I was hoping for a 3-ply but that would be thicker than I want. This little 2-ply sample skein is about DK weight:

Alpaca yarn sample

In its favour the yarn is quite soft and lofty and a gorgeous colour. I’ll be knitting up a sample swatch as soon as I wind this into a ball.

Well, it’s raining today and I have to go weave my daily quota of the Pisces band before the weavers’ guild meeting tonight. More soon!

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Fibres West & More

Well. What has damselfly been up to? Last Friday I went with 3 friends (2 old, one new) out to Cloverdale to Fibres West, a celebration of all things woolly and wonderful. You know I don’t need anything to add to the Stash but that didn’t stop me from falling in love with a few things. Nope. Not at all. I surprised myself though by not buying any yarns this time but got spinning fibres in roving form instead.

The first thing that caught my eye right away was this lovely blue-gray alpaca:

GrayAlpaca

It came from Alpaca Story Ranch, near 100 Mile House in BC’s interior. Joni, the farmer, told me that this natural colour is a blend of 3 different huacaya alpacas and that she gets her fleeces processed at a mill in Alberta. There’s a few neps and noils but I think it’ll make a lovely sweater. I got 500g so there’s quite a lot. Maybe even two projects depending on how fine I spin it.

Next I wandered up and down the isles of bright goodies stopping to chat with old friends and exchange hugs. That’s the best part of this festival! I was so happy to see my former lace teacher, Lenka Suchanek, and her handsome goateed husband, Libor, whom I haven’t seen in at least a decade. Her specialty is wire lace sculpture and she has just returned to teaching after a 7-year hiatus. I also visited with an old beading buddy, Ania from Turtle Beads. She was actually the person who taught Thom how to do lampworking many years ago. I wear one of her wee turtle beads on my Guild nametag at every meeting! It’s amazing to me how none of these people has aged a day. Not even me. Heh.

I visited Birkeland Bros Wool for old time’s sake (before the business was moved out to Abbotsford it was my LYS only 3 blocks away). I picked up some more dyed black Perendale which seems to be a handy thing to blend with other fibres:

DyedBlackPerendale

Their prices are always so reasonable. I have some experimenting to do some day soon! And as we were leaving my very last-minute purchase was some interesting tweedy Falkland roving from Knitopia (sorry, no working links). It’s a lovely mahogany red-brown colour but actually contains dyed fibres of many different colours blended together. Lynne had quite a few different blends but this one spoke my name:

FalklandTweedRoving

The photo doesn’t nearly do it justice. And that’s all I bought! Obviously I have sweaters in mind for my future spinning efforts. I really enjoy making and wearing the ones with handspun. Even though it takes 3 times as long to make anything, the yarns are so crisp and alive and personal! It’s hard to go back to commercial yarns afterward. I’ve started swatching for a new project but ran into a problem. More about that anon.

In other crafty news, Thom and I are working on our project for a multi-guild craft exhibition with a deadline of April 1. Yikes! He’s making one of his cigar box guitars and I’m supposed to be making a tabletwoven guitar strap for it. I finally have the pattern:

Pisces Tabletweaving Pattern

I’m calling it Pisces because it looks like 2 fish swimming in opposite directions. Here’s the yarn, or actually thread, selection:

Threads

That odd colour in the upper right is kind of a greenish tan instead of the brighter light green I would have preferred but it goes well with the cigar box. Now I have to wind a warp and thread the tablets and then we’ll see if it’s going to work. No point in doing a sample first. It would take just as long as setting up the whole thing so I’ll just add some warp length for testing and getting familiar with the pattern. This is one of the “threaded-in” type patterns with a simple turning sequence of 4 forward and 8 back. Since it’s uneven, twice as much in one direction than the other, I’ll probably have to reverse somewhere in the middle because I wasn’t planning to add swivels to release the twist build-up. I was trying to keep this whole thing simple. Right.

What else? I still need to plant more seedlings under the lights. I have all the cool weather things coming up: salad greens and reds, kale, cabbage, gai lan and some herbs. The parsley isn’t up yet. It’s soooo slow. I need to get the flower seeds and the Japanese indigo going, probably today. Then later in the month the more warm weather stuff can start. It’s an ongoing process.

The weather remains quite warm for this time of year, but yesterday and today there are drizzles. I’ve had an ongoing migraine thanks to the changing pressures. Blech. Hopefully it will go away or at least down to a slight buzz very soon. Still attempting to get things done anyway but with a muzzy head. Moving along s l o w l y.

Saturday, March 07, 2015

Oakmeal Cardi Refashion

Success! I finished fixing my Oakmeal Cardi (in my Ravelry projects here) and I’m very happy with the new updated version:

OakmealCardi refashion2 OakmealCardi refashion1

I like it much better now! Though it was really too warm to wear it. Heh. Note you can see part of my veggie garden waiting for planting and the nearly spent snowdrops that are attempting to take over my back yard.

All I did to the sweater was to unravel a couple of inches of the collar and bind it off again. Then I unravelled the cuffs, picked up the stitches and continued the cable pattern down until the sleeve was 14.5” from the underarm. (I have short arms! A whole 16” total from wrist to underarm. T-Rex short.) Lastly I decreased one stitch and knit the 3/3 ribbed cuffs to 5” long so they could be folded back. And there ya go! They still should be wet-blocked again but I settled for steaming the sleeve ends until it’s time to wash the whole sweater. And I had about 3 yards of that cone of yarn left when I was done. Pretty good stash-busting I’d say. And I have a warm sweater that I will wear more often now. Success.

Still working on the Little Black Cardi. I’m beginning to feel like I need a more portable project though. It’s hard to knit with black yarn and follow a lace pattern plus armhole shaping while watching TV or chatting. Neither of us really needs any more socks, gloves, hats or scarves but I need to find something that’s simple and not too awkward to carry about. Especially after tossing that big Oakmeal Cardi around for several days! However the next project I want to make is another one with wool prep and spinning to accomplish first. working from the stash, remember? More on this when I have something to show.

Meanwhile, I now have no excuse not to start planting seedlings. We had a lovely time yesterday going out to lunch with Thom’s mom (Thai food, yum) and then taking her out to the gardening shop. I got seed soil and some new starter pots, new gardening gloves, and a couple of new African violets for my kitchen windowsill.

Thursday, March 05, 2015

Little Black Cardi Note 2

Just a quick one to say:

I should have washed the kinky yarn!

It looked awful. Dammit. So I ended up frogging the inch I had re-knit. Again. All that knitting wasted. (Those are some serious long rows!) I bravely broke off the yarn and then skeined it up and washed it. One ball was only partially kinked but I skeined the whole thing up anyway. It took some patient soaking to release the wrinkles but it’s all good now. I still have to rewind back into balls.

Let that be a lesson learned. Moving right along.

Wednesday, March 04, 2015

Little Black Cardi Note

The mystery of the armhole depth has been solved! Putting my poor Little Black Cardi in time-out for awhile gave me some clarity on solving the problem. I took it up to my studio cutting table and carefully laid it out. I measured and compared it to the purchased cotton jersey sweater that I’m attempting to replace. The armhole was indeed two full inches longer than it should have been. In fact, it was exactly two of the lace pattern repeats too long. Hummm…back to the instructions.

As I’ve mentioned before the pattern is Trellis by Lili Comme Tout (aka Julie Partie):

It’s quite clearly and professionally written (available in French or English) which one should expect from a paid knitting pattern. The size range is quite comprehensive: XS, S, M, L, XL, 2XL, 3XL. I’m making the L which almost exactly matches my body measurements with 0 ease. Apart from knitting the body 1” shorter than the stated 15”, I’m following – or attempting to follow – the pattern exactly as written. So why was my armhole so far out of whack?

Tracking carefully I think I’ve found an error in the pattern. There are two different lace bib charts, one for the smaller sizes and one for the larger ones. My L is in the middle and I think what Julie did was to write the directions as if one was supposed to use the smaller chart but instead changed her mind and put the size L on the larger chart. I agree that the scale of the larger lace bib works better on the L. But how do I know the instructions are for the smaller chart? Because it is 2 lace repeats shorter, the exact amount that I needed to make my armhole come out the right size. Oh look. A clue.

So armed with that knowledge, going back and extrapolating what I should have done was actually quite easy. I needed to begin the lace two pattern repeats earlier, before the armhole instead of after it. Which of course meant ripping back the right front (again!), the half-inch of the back that I had already knit, and about an inch-and-a-half of the body. Whew! Luckily I hadn’t gone any further thinking it was all going to work out because I had followed the instructions correctly! Instead I grumpily dropped it like a hot potato until I had the time and brain power to figure out what went wrong. I knew I could fix it somehow but who knew it was actually easy?

The sweater is back in progress again. I hope the kinky yarn isn’t going to give me tension problems because I can’t fix it while it’s still attached to the knitting. Meanwhile, I have a message in to the designer on Ravelry to see if she is aware of the problem. I’m curious to see if I hear back. Nobody else has reported a problem, including her test knitters but maybe nobody knit a size L. Or maybe switching to the larger chart for that size was a later development. One good thing about Ravelry is you can at least attempt to contact the designer directly with a problem. Whether or not they respond though is up to them though. For me at least it’s not critical because I’ve solved my problem myself. Might have saved a lot of frustrated frogging and reknitting however!

So here we are - another lovely but chilly day in Lotus Land! I got a little gardening done on Monday afternoon but The Hand was protesting somewhat yesterday so I’m still going to need to take it slow and build up. Thom got the pea nets put up so I can plant them soon. We had frost this morning though so I’m not in a huge hurry. If they go in too soon, they grow much slower than if I wait a few weeks. I also need to go to the garden shop and get some more seedling mix for my indoor starters and sea soil for the veggie patch. The kids already have their orders in to Mom’s Grow-Op! We’re still eating some of last year’s harvest, like the spaghetti squash we had for dinner last night. And some of this year’s harvest too: kale buds, chives and tiny lamb’s lettuce (aka corn salad or mâche). The rhubarb is coming up, you can just see the tips of asparagus and the garlic is about a foot tall. Moving right along here.

But back to my knitting. I’ve been alternating on the Oakmeal Sweater’s sleeve-lengthening and this cardi. At least I can see the black yarn in the good light!

Monday, March 02, 2015

Warm & Woolly

Yes, I know it’s pretty much spring here already. (Don’t hate!) But woolly sweaters are still welcome. Case in point: he’s barely taken this thing off since I finished it. It wasn’t even quite dry from its blocking session yet!

MusketSweater1

I think it’s a success! Despite the mistakes and the frogging and the fact that the gauge wasn’t quite right. Doesn’t Thom look handsome in his new pullover sweater? He insisted on wearing his leather Aussie Barmah hat with it even though the photo session was indoors because I wasn’t dressed yet. Heh.

Here’s a close-up of the thick wooden buttons that I dug out of the stash and the seed stitch button placket:

MusketSweater3

I had to wait until he was in his jammies to snatch the sweater long enough for another photo off his back! You can still see the shine of the NZ RomneyX wool through the surface fuzz, can’t you? It’s an interesting fabric, both crisp and drapey at the same time. The fuzz of the woollen-spun yarn traps a lot of heat yet it also wicks moisture away from the body. We’ll have to see how badly it might pill.

I think my neckline worked out well and fits him the way he wanted. Happily I also learned how to do a really great one-row buttonhole from Knitting On The Net, Barbara Breiter’s instructions here. It was a bit fiddly to learn but after I pulled out the row several times, it got neater and easier to do even without looking at the instructions. This buttonhole looks great on both sides and is nicely reinforced. It’s similar to others I’ve seen but not quite the same. The twisted purl cast-on is unique to Barbara’s version and makes a firm upper edge to the buttonhole. Those thick wooden buttons went through a 3-stitch buttonhole perfectly.

Sending some love out for Jared Flood’s Brownstone pattern (even though I changed the neckline and collar on this one). It’s so clearly written and easy to follow, even if you’re a beginner at sweater knitting. If you take a look at the finished versions on Ravelry, it looks great on every man – and a few women too. The two sections of short-row shaping in the back really help fine-tune the fit.

Another view:

MusketSweater2

Successful project. Yay!

Now to the not-so-successful. Yes, I’m still avoiding dealing with the Little Black Cardi, though not for long. Instead I dug out this sweater from 2012:

OakmealCardi original

I haven’t worn it very much because something is just off about the proportions on me. I’ve frogged a couple of inches off the collar, which I felt was overwhelming my small face and bound off again. And then I took out the cuffs and am currently knitting them longer. There wasn’t much of this wool left but hopefully I’ll have enough yarn to make them long sleeved with a long turn-back cuff. I did like the original version, Quercus by Julie Turjoman, but mine just seems like too warm and bulky of a sweater for short sleeves. As you can see in the photo I already had folded them down. Wearing long sleeves underneath helps but not enough for my taste. Or warmth.

There will be photos when I’m done messing with this poor sweater. I hope the changes will make me like it better or it’s going to go for a full dip in the frog pond! That would be very sad so I’ll do my best to refashion it instead.

So since it’s sunny and relatively dry, I’m planning to go out in the garden this afternoon and start the cleanup that I didn’t get to last fall thanks to the Hand Incident. The season is about 3 weeks ahead of schedule here so I should be getting some seedlings planted asap. However, I’ll forego the blissful spring photos in deference to those who are still in the icy grip of Old Man Winter. Sending clear skies and warm wishes to you all. Don’t give up hope! You’ll be complaining about the heat and humidity very soon, I’m sure.