Crazy Knitting, Sane Sewing

Posted on November 14, 2014November 14, 2014 by KellyAnnD

McCall’s 6963…again

This top turned out well and I plan to wear it tomorrow when I go…fabric shopping! Will post the results of my first purposeful fabric shopping trip in ages. I’ve been in and near fabric shops over the course of the reduction program and have resisted adding to the stash, only buying what was needed for any current planned project and then using it up before getting back to stash reduction. This lightweight knit is again from the stash, I think it came from Fabric.com. There were other fabrics ahead in the queue but I finished knitting the sweater below and thought I might make a top to wear with this crazy sweater since the colors were so lovely together. I know, crazy idea. The best thing to do with that sweater is probably wad it up and toss it into the charity bin. But more on the sweater in a minute. This pattern has become my go-to cowl neck pattern. I’ve got others, but they droop too low. This one is just right. Not sure how many 3/4 sleeve cowl neck tees I need, but I might make one more for winter and then will switch to spring/summer sewing and might need a few short sleeve or sleeveless versions for next year. This time, I added a (an?) FBA to the pattern and that fixed the snugness all around. Fit is good. Even in this lighter weight, stretchier fabric, the sleeve cap wouldn’t set in without being cut down so I will do that to the pattern permanently now.

Note to Palmer and Pletsch: yes, a set-in sleeve with a higher cap gives a more snappy appearance to a plain t-shirt, but what’s the point if the cap is SO high you can’t set it in without either gathering it or cutting it down in knits?

Okay, now on to the sweater:

Crazy Lace Sweater, aptly named

Well it’s hard to say whether the yarn choice or the knitting instructions were the biggest culprit in this case but 2 lessons learned:

If a Craftsy Class combines the words Lace and Crazy in the title, whatever results is probably not going to be my cup of tea. There were a couple of sweaters posted on the class boards by students in this Crazy Lace Sweater Class that were really cute, but I didn’t like most of the students’ sweaters or even the sweaters knitted by the instructor for the class and that should have been a huge clue. The one or two successes were very experienced knitters who completely altered the pattern. And I know Lace is not crazy. Lace is lovely and serious, requiring attention to business at all times and deserving of a certain class of yarn, not craziness, which is for socks. I do enjoy a little craziness in my socks now and again.
Singles yarns can be lovely, but the “textural” ones are declared forever off the table for me. This yarn varied from fingering (sock) weight to nearly super-bulky weight randomly as you knitted along. I hated knitting with it and do not like how it looks. I will look more closely at yarn in future. This is Manos Del Uruguay, worsted weight in Cornflower, which you’d think would be blue, but is really quite as purple as it looks in the photo.

So, there’s countless hours of knitting down the tubes. Good thing knitting brings other rewards. This thing came out so huge I had to basically do some half-fashioning and treat the knitted fabric as just that, fabric, and sew up the side seams, taking out about 4 inches per side after completing the sweater. I’m not much for un-knitting a whole sweater and you really can sew knitted fabric on your sewing machine easily, it won’t ravel if you do it right. The sweater is so lumpy and bumpy because of the inconsistent weight of the yarn and it will not settle down with blocking, I tried that. To make matters worse, the dye is inconsistent as well so the sweater really had no hope. I should never have tried even a minimally structured garment out of such unstructured yarn, but I only noticed the lovely color and thought the variations might add interest to the areas of plain knitting but not overwhelm the lace. Not the first time I’ve gone this wrong, but the first in a long time. I’ve got several successful sweaters knit from Jacquelyn Fee’s book, The Sweater Workshop. Next time I’ve got the urge to knit a sweater, I’ll head back there and get some less capricious yarn. Meantime, I might make some fingerless mitts out of what I’ve got left since the color goes so well with this top. On fingerless mitts, I don’t think the yarn variations will be such an issue and although they are structured, they are quite small. Or even better, a loose-knit open scarf pattern would serve, but I’m not sure this top needs a scarf. The neck has enough interest on its own without adding a scarf, plus I don’t trust this wool against my neck. I’ll think about it a bit longer before committing this time. For the now, I’m back to knitting socks, and not even crazy ones, just plain brown superwash wool. Winter’s coming.

Using the old noodle

Posted on October 11, 2014October 11, 2014 by admin

Well, the folks at Golden Grain have upped the ante on sliced bread with their pot-sized spaghetti. Best idea I’ve come across in ages but why did we have to wait so long, always breaking spaghetti in half over the pot of boiling water and having little bits of it end up everywhere while risking a nasty steam burn?
What WILL they think of next?

Back to the Stash

Posted on October 10, 2014October 10, 2014 by KellyAnnD

Once again, what looked to be ugly fabric turned out to be a very wearable garment. This is a test of McCall’s 6963, a Palmer/Pletsch tee with 2 cowl neck options. I made view C with the higher neckline and 3/4 sleeves in a straight 12. It fit perfectly when I used 3/8″ side and sleeve seams. This fabric is a tight knit with minimal stretch. In a stretchier knit, the 5/8″ seam called for in the pattern would probably work. I might also do an FBA rather than the narrower seam, but since the sleeves needed the same amount of alteration as the body, I think I’ll hold off on that FBA. I will be making this in another knit from the stash that coordinates with a sweater I’m knitting. It’s a great pattern and it’s hard to believe there are only 2 reviews of it on PatternReview.com so I might bestir myself to add a review. I haven’t done that in ages because every new pattern I’ve tried lately has had plenty of reviews and I’ve had nothing useful to add. This time I could mention I lowered the sleeve cap, which neither of the other reviewers seems to have done although one mentions how high the cap is. My sleeve would not set in without that minor alteration.

Who are these people?

Posted on September 21, 2014September 21, 2014 by KellyAnnD

So genealogy has never been my metier, but lately I have become somewhat interested in it. Pictures like this are apt to do that. Ever since I was a child I have been fascinated by these photos which floated around in a collection of old family mementos primarily because no one seemed to know who these folks were. They could be Bidwells (no near relation to the famous General John who had no issue, my Bidwells are descended from John Horace Bidwell, a very distant cousin to the famous Chico scion) from Shasta County California, they could be Clines from Canada, they could be Corbetts from Ireland, they could be Morgans from Wales; when you get back that many generations, the possible permutations begin to boggle the mind and you start to have an appreciation for the concept that the human race is really one big family. In any case, do your descendants a favor and write on the back of every photo in your house, the date, the location and the names people in it. I have another collection of old family photos for which this was done and I thank the organized person who attended to this detail. I think it was my great-grandmother Harriet Teel Cline, otherwise known in the family as “Hat Creek Hattie.” I’m planning a trip to Hat Creek one day to meet some of my long-lost cousins and see the sights that are depicted and named in these photos: the Pit River, Burney Falls, the towns of Cassel, Hat Creek, and the Millville cemetary where everyone seems to be buried.

It’s good to be back to the blog after a lengthy hiatus. More postings should come along in short order.

Cartooning

Posted on May 13, 2014May 13, 2014 by KellyAnnD

This year I somehow managed to get a few more illustrations done in the spring section of the Nature Poetry book. This first page was done a while back in Three Rivers, if not in a covert then certainly in a meadow after walking over a clear stream strewn with mossy stones. And there were birds singing. 2 out of 3 spring-ish poetic allusions covered, not bad. Unlike Christina Rossetti, I am averse to sitting in coverts and lingering near mossy-stone stream beds with the ticks, mites, fleas and mosquitos. Decidedly unpoetic of me, I know.

The second is of our olive trees in bloom. There will not be follow-up illustrations depicting the development of the fruit since we (again, most unpoetically) sprayed the trees shortly after I finished the drawing below to prevent a crop from setting.

Like most commercial orchard crops, olives grown in a backyard are not properly cared for to produce anything that will rival what a pro who knows how to control the critical variables can grow, but that doesn’t mean the crop won’t be abundant and cause no end of nastiness come fall. If you want to press olive oil, you must withhold water for 3 weeks prior to harvest. I expect some similar admonition applies if you are trying to create olives with interesting flavor profiles for curing whole. Well, the rest of your landscape would not appreciate the stress this watering strategy causes and your HOA association might call on you to make sure you are not neglecting your landscape in violation of the CC and R’s. So, no olives are to follow the bloom.

Many years ago, I had an old olive tree situated between my garage and the adjacent orchard that must have been treated with just the right amount of benign neglect because come fall, the elderly Armenian ladies I didn’t even know would come knocking at my door toting buckets and asking to collect the olives from my tree. Silly me, I didn’t even think to request a lesson in the processing of olives from them back then and now, of course, they are all gone and their descendants never learned the fine art of home curing olives. There just might be a poem hiding in that situation.

Any road, the olive drawing really belongs thematically (for me) to the poem on the facing page where it would not fit visually: In a Spring Still Not Written Of, by Robert Wallace. So, at “double nickels,” I guess I have become one of those he mentions who has time for poems that really are not written for me, sigh.

Why do I refer to these illustrations I’m doing here as “cartooning?” One of my instructors in the Filoli Botanical Illustration Certificate Program refers to the linework in drawings like these as “cartoon lines” in a very dismissive way and points them out as something to avoid at all costs. That certainly doesn’t stop me from doing work in this style of colored drawing I enjoy so immensely, it only stops me from showing any of the work to them, ever again.

High Anxiety

Posted on May 3, 2014May 3, 2014 by KellyAnnD

Just a few thoughts on why it is that I’m always feeling anxious when working at the computer, and why I’m not alone. I thought about this quite a bit recently when my trusty laptop died and I had to upgrade to a new version of Sibelius music scoring software, a program I’ve been using for years, because the old version on which I am quite competent just doesn’t run on the Mac platform. With the death of the old laptop, we are now all Mac, all the time with a new MacBook Pro Retina 15″ laptop replacing the last link to the PC world in our little world of computing.

Consider knitting for a minute. I learned to knit when I was 10. I wasn’t very good at it at first, but I got better through practice and now I feel confident I can knit anything if I just follow the instructions. There are new and better tools now and lots of interesting techniques out there of which I was completely unaware back when I learned, like circular needles, Entrelac and Moebius knitting for example, but if you gave me those same needles and yarn from 1968 (or 1668 for that matter), I could still knit with them successfully and make something useful. Also, after a knitting interregnum of almost 20 years, I was able to take up my needles and start knitting again as if I had never stopped. K2tog still means knit two together.

How different with computers: I first started working with computers at 16 in high school and did some simple programming, first in Fortran on CARDS and then Pascal in college. The language, tools and techniques I used then are of absolutely no use to me now and probably would be unrecognizable to anyone under the age of 50. After I took about 8 years off from computers between college and working in a library, I was unable even to start up a computer and make it run a program, much less do anything useful. Unless you use computers every day, you are constantly out of date. Even if you use them every day, you are out of date if you don’t upgrade every program at every opportunity. The new skills required don’t build on the old skills in the virtual world in same way they do in the analog world. Old tools have no utility. There is no mastery built of long experience, there is only the constant fear that the small world of utility you have created for yourself will collapse at any minute if your computer crashes and you will be starting all over again at ground zero in a new world that is several magnitudes more complex than it was last time your computer crashed, taking with it all of it’s comfortable software. This creates a sense of dread looming in the background at all times as you work with the certain knowledge that your skills are woefully out of date and when the inevitable crash comes, you will not be able to do at all what you can easily do now.

This is one of the reasons I prefer knitting, which, by the way, I often describe as the original binary code. Just knit and purl. That’s all there is. Everything is built upon a base of knit and purl, from the simplest cotton washrag to the most complicated Estonian lace shawl. So, I’m going to take a deep breath, shut down the computer, and go finish my latest knitting project, the instructions for which I admittedly downloaded from the Internet, and very easily from the lovely Ravelry.com site. Slip one knitwise and call me in the morning.

Sweet Violets and Healthy Vegetables

Posted on May 3, 2014May 3, 2014 by KellyAnnD

One of the requirements of any new home was that it have a place to grow violets. I guess the new house passes muster. This is the second display of this magnitude we’ve had since we moved here in February and some of these plants are still sending up new blooms stalks!

Another requirement was a place to grow tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans and zucchini.

Check, check, check, check and check. As you might guess, there are a few other things to check off the list, but vegetables and violets are a very good start. We got the white raised planter boxes from New England Arbors. We’ll see come July how they perform for raising vegetables. We know the Tomato Boxes can raise great tomatoes because we’ve used them before. And there’s always the Farmer’s Market in case of crop failure on any front, but I do love putting vegetables on the table at noon that were still growing on the vine at half-past 11.

Forbidden Fabric

Posted on May 2, 2014May 3, 2014 by KellyAnnD

These new crops could use a press, but I just pulled them out of the dryer after wearing them today and it’s late and I’m lazy, so there you are. You’ve seen this top before. Now there are crops to go with. Really, this is a test of a Burda pattern that I want to use for some nice solid twill in a deep khaki/taupe from the ever-diminishing stash. Okay, I confess I bought some t-shirt fabric when I went to buy the zipper(s) for these 2 pairs of crops, but that’s still an overall reduction and if I sew the t-shirt fabric right away, it won’t ever add to the stash. And it’s so rare to find a decent t-shirt knit at a local fabric store I buckled under the pressure.

The reason this post is titled Forbidden Fabric is that when I moved and sorted the stash, I had help and my help declared this fabric out of bounds and tossed it into the charity box. In fact, the last two projects I’ve sewn are of rescued fabric I was forbidden to sew/wear. Since the garden of Eden, forbidden things are the hardest to resist.

Tourshee

Posted on April 15, 2014May 3, 2014 by admin

It’s been a while since we had Tourshee, but I’ve been craving it lately. Last time I made it I burned my hands so severely while pouring the boiling brine over the vegetables that I had to go to the nearest urgent care center and they slathered the second degree burns with cream and wrapped my hands in gauze. What happened was that the brine sloshed over one hand and then my reaction caused it to splash back over the other hand. Then I dropped the pot. I was lucky it didn’t splash back into my face, really.

Next day when I went to my own doctor, he declared all the gauze wrappings to be overkill and introduced me to Aquaphor ointment which quickly became a staple in the household first aid kit. I was ready to get back on the pickle horse right away, but the family was too traumatized and begged me not to make Tourshee anymore and I haven’t until now.

But enough about that, let’s talk about the actual Tourshee, a life-saving Armenian staple. Basically Tourshee is any pickle, but the way we make it, it’s a brined or marinated pickle. It could be a fermented one, or a traditionally canned one, depending on your choice of recipe.

I say Tourshee is life-saving because I remember when there was a terrible earthquake in Armenia I read about a man who was dug out of the rubble that had been his home and rescued 3 or 4 weeks after the event when the hope of finding survivors was virtually gone. He explained that he had been making pickles and carrying them down to his basement when the earthquake struck. He survived all that time by eating the pickles and as I recall, was in pretty good shape when they found him.

I’ve been craving them because they are a perfect low carb food as long as you don’t eat the onions or carrots and I’m bored with my usual fare. Trust me, there is nothing boring about Tourshee! Oh my, the vinegar burn and the heady garlic and onion fumes will knock your socks off. Nothing subtle here. The only other Armenian food I’ve tried that comes close in assertiveness is Basturma, a preserved meat that shares a common linguistic heritage with Pastrami, but let’s just say I’ll never be ordering a Basturma sandwich even though a nice Pastrami on Rye used to be my standard deli order back in the sandwich days.

Recipes abound on the internet for mixed pickles. Nothing too special about this one I got out of an old Sunset book on Canning and Preserving, the vegetables do all the work. So I won’t post the recipe. If you have a hankering for pickles outside of the ordinary, pick the recipe that sounds best to you and get going, just be careful handling that hot brine!

…and the quilt frame

Posted on March 30, 2014May 3, 2014 by KellyAnnD

This project was put on hold indefinitely for a few reasons. In the meantime, smaller projects have been finished on the frame and the problems/reasons for not working on this beast have been resolved. Namely, there is now space for the frame with this over-size quilt on it and I have learned to discipline myself to no more than one hour of hand quilting per day to avoid repetitive stress injuries.

What a happy surprise when I uncovered this quilt I hadn’t seen in ages. Why, it’s lovely! This project began as a case of “careful what you wish for.” Rarely do I win anything in a lottery-style drawing, but I had my heart set on winning these Block-of-the-Month entries back when I was a card-carrying member of our local quilt guild, Country Crossroads Quilters. It was an unusual project in that everyone had a small piece of the same theme fabric and each quilter was to add companion fabrics and use a block design of her own choosing. Those of you familiar with these types of activities know that generally participants are given a general color scheme and/or one theme fabric and a designated block design. So the winner gets a number of blocks that generally coordinate color-wise and are all the same design and she sews them together and has an instant quilt top. That’s the general theory.

Giving people carte blanche on the design of the blocks made for an interesting assortment and giving a theme fabric with so many colors meant that there wasn’t even really a consistent color theme as some quilters opted to bring out the Christmas theme of the fabric and others opted to showcase the purple.

So for once in my life, I did win the drawing. It may have been rigged by my friends in the group who knew I wanted these blocks and knew I had been a faithful participant in the Block of the Month project for ages and had never won the blocks whilst some had won multiple times or worse, some had won the single time they threw a block in the mix. Or, it may have been the universe out to teach me that careful what you wish for lesson. Either way, I “won” the oddest assortment of blocks. In the end, there were only 13 that were really useable. Yes, 13. Hmmm. So I took the 5 that went together the best (accent on Christmas, no additional purple) and made a medallion out of those, which you can see in the middle of the photo above. I confess I did add the Celtic Applique myself to the otherwise perfectly serviceable 9-patch block that just needed a bit of a lift and a shift of scale to be placed center front and play well with the rest of the Christmas themed blocks that had lots of white. The rest of the blocks were used “as is.” There were a few more that would not play well with the group no matter how I tried to make them settle in. I waited to set these blocks until the makers of the unused ones were no longer around to see that their blocks were not included. That took a while. And the quilting has taken even longer. Because of the medallion setting, the quilt got huge. It’s the largest I’ve ever made. Also because of the medallion setting, there is a lot of design space that cried out for hand quilting, although in retrospect, sending this off for custom machine quilting probably would have been the wiser choice. (Close-up below showing the block I contributed and some of the designs I adapted.) I am determined to finish this before my hands and/or eyes fail me. I’m currently more than half-way and it’s only taken me 15 years or so. And when I’m done I’ll have a HUGE Christmas themed quilt. But it will be gorgeous.