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| The Beginning |
I received my first commission as Knoontime Knitting! I am making a scarf for a friend in two colors of purple, Royal Purple and Lavender. Here is the beginning as it sits on my design pad after the starting swatch.
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| The Middle |
Here it is after a bit of knitting. It knits up quickly. I am using 30 sts cast on for width.
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| Still the Middle |
This is how far I got before I called it a night.
I’m looking forward to seeing how this shapes up.
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| What’s In YOUR Wallet? or Bag? |
Happy Monday, Dear Reader! I’ve gotten some of my design mojo back and have been playing with some different knitting designs. This morning, as I waited for the bus, I checked the Bus Tracker tool. It said the next bus wouldn’t be there for 27 minutes. Aside from making me late for work, that meant I had time to get some knitting done.
Then, mid-row, what do I see but a bus? Holy crap. Try stuffing size 10 needles in an already over-stuffed knitting bag and grabbing everything to get onto the bus.
MONDAY!
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| WIP |
This is what I’m making with my size 10 needles. One of my books has an afghan on the cover that’s made out of triangles. I decided to take a twist on that idea and using a base of 35 stitches, make a sampler with leftover yarns and different textures.
This is a Turkish Stitch done in Lion Brand Homespun. It’s a boucle-type of yarn and difficult to see stitch definition; however, I like the less dense look of the fabric. I find the juxtaposition of the bias pull of the stitch with the decreased edge for the triangle to be an interesting opposition.
What are you working on?
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| The Sun |
Every year, I struggle with Christmas and the holidays and what they mean to me. Much like my forays into 3-D, my forays into what the holidays “should” be like are colored by the past and by expectations. I remember when my parents separated when I was ten, and I believed my mother “ruined” Christmas. The magic was gone. I couldn’t understand why my father couldn’t be there and we couldn’t just celebrate like we had in years past.
Tolstoy said that every happy family is happy in the same way, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Melanie Beatty said that in alcoholic families, everyone’s angry: Mom’s angry, Dad’s angry, even the dog is angry. That last one stuck with me – even the dog? She’s right; my dog knew something was “up.”
Why do I bring that up now? As I learn how to make the holidays mine after all these years, I’m finding that the past is much with me. Which brings me to the Ojos de Dios, or “Eyes of God.”
The Huichol people believe that these amulets bring blessings and luck upon the person for whom they’re made. When a person is born, an ojo is made for them in the central temple. Ojos are also made at the inception of new business projects, marriages, and other beginnings. It’s a way to attract the benevolent attention of the deities onto one’s own life.
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| Enlightenment |
A friend of mine suggested some years ago to make the ojos using cinnamon sticks and embroidery floss. The idea caught fire in my mind and I love the shiny effect of the weaving. By varying the weaves, you can create more complex structures; but just by using a simple overdyed yarn you can achieve beautiful effects with relatively little effort.
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| Water |
I made these ojos for my office. I wanted to bring blessings on our work, and to remember that it’s the holidays. I’m trying to capture some of that sense of magic they had when I was little. I’m not sure what made it magical, which is part of the challenge; I don’t know what I’m searching for.
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| Fire |
One year, my cat Marina kept batting down all the ornaments I’d put on our tree. She broke several of them and made a mess. By end of the holiday, all the ornaments were grouped in the top 18 inches of the tree, leaving the rest to the lights. The next year, I made ojos for the whole tree – a whole canister of them. It made me incredibly happy to do.
That’s part of the magic, then – making things. I think that we humans are crafty creatures and that making things with our hands is part of what satisfies us. So our holiday this year has centered around handmade things – from food to decorations.
So, I’ve been on a major yarn hiatus. I’ve been doing calligraphy like a madwoman; I’m filling notebooks with the stuff (and no, that’s not a typo; yes, I mean more than one). Let’s just say I had to order a second set of practice markers because I used up the ink in the first set. See what I mean?
But I’m feeling the bug again. I’m beginning to see that this is part of my normal pattern (which only took me fourteen years to figure out, but let’s not go there, kthxbi). I seem to set knitting aside around May or June and pick it up around September or October.
We celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary this year – yay! – and went down to southern Illinois and St. Louis to poke around. One of the shops had some lovely Lana de Oro and I had to get some. I’m thinking socks. 50% wool, 50% alpaca. Michael picked heather grey, I picked heather lavender:
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| The lavender has bits of other colors in it, more as shading than a true ombre. |
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| The lighting is weird because I took these outside. I tried to get a close-up and the camera changed the coloring. Sigh. Must.learn.Photoshop. |
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| Can you tell I’ve been playing with the grey hank? ~blush~ But this is the grey with the lavender; I’m thinking that I’ll use a small mosaic in the cuff of each sock in the opposite color. |
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| It’s really not as pink as it seems in this picture. But I’m excited. I may even use the toe-up technique, though I think I should do the first set with practice yarn first. We shall see. |
So I’ve been playing with knitting from the top down. I started a sweater and have been wrestling with it (which I’ll share later), but for now I want to share my newest creation: a hat!
My first hat was almost a decade ago. A friend asked me to make a hat for her friend. I did so. It was large enough to fit her, her friend, AND me – and not just our heads. It was not, shall we say, a success.
Since then, I’ve successfully mastered all kinds of things in knitting: sweaters, sleeves, socks, lace, design… So why not hats?
I asked myself that and then gave it a shot.
This one is fun because the increases are one-off from each other so that they swirl around the head. I did the crown with a merino wool, then the sides with an alpaca and mohair blend that’s fuzzy and whisper-soft.
I even like how it looks on me.
And you can see it from the back.
I want to try making another hat that’s a little smaller, so it stays tighter on the head. In fact, I started one, but that’s a post for another day! 🙂
This picture is a bit yellow, and the middle of the bag is beige and not lemon. But behold, my friends, the Ugli Bag.
The top is super soft, fuzzy furry overdye with a thick central filament of a bulky yarn. I didn’t have much of it, so I couldn’t at first figure out what to make; then I decided on a gift bag.
Then I ran out. What to do?
The beige stripe is the leftover marino and alpaca blend that I used for a lovely scarf wrap that I’ll feature in an upcoming article.
Then I ran out of that. Uh-oh.
Enter the blue.
Hrrrh? The bag is a mixture of browns, pumpkins, and beige. blue? BLUE?
Well, orange’s complement is blue, and so it’s a natural choice.
Sort of.
Then it hit me – do the strap in blue, too. The prior picture shows the top of the strap so you can see the texture. This one shows the bag.
I didn’t realize, though, when I put in a 2-stitch edging of garter stitch that I would cause the strap to fold in on itself. It worked to my benefit, actually, because instead of being ultra wide, the strap is now just the right width and the double-thickness means it will be stronger.
You can get a better idea of how obnoxious the blue is next to the orange, though, in this shot. It’s not quite as neon blue as in the image, but it’s somewhere between muted and neon (how’s that for precise?).
I’m going to line the bag with muslin to give it some strength and I’ll show pictures once that’s all done.
Knit on!
