the melbourne knitters guild is putting together a wildflowers afghan rug, with each square knitted by its members. here's ours:
we tried doing the picture knitting thing of having multiple colours on the go, and got tangled and confused pretty quickly. in the name of getting the thing done sanity relatively intact by the first sunday in may, we've elected to knit the whole back, then embroider the knitting stitches in different colours over the top (just like that charmingly dodgy header above). almost there.
about halfway there - the mighty felted fuzzy feet:
the yarn is bendigo woollen mills wool/mohair mix - we choose this for the felted result. it's quite positively the most luscious felty goodness we've had the pleasure of working with. it's meant to be a present, however the receiver's birthday (rosie, who lent, then donated her old washing machine to us) was quite some time ago - by the time they're done, it'll be her birthday this year. shame, shame, shame.
after a lace knitting workshop, we went gung ho into a pi shawl, but kinda lost interest. in the name of using all that white wool that we purchased at last years mini wool festival, we reckon we'd better at least have the shawl done before this years fest on the 1st june. a little lost at the moment with where we're up to:
it's probably a case of rip it back a few rows, find our bearings, and get cracking.
another one to play with:
it was an experiment with the roving (clean fleece ready for spinning) that we'd bought from bendigo sheep and wool show last year. those needles are huge 20mm or so babies that we thrifted, with the end result being one enormously thick chunk of knitting. it feels and looks lush, but it's a little over the top. time to frog that one back and have another lighter shot at it.
the lincraft ramie stash:
it's not that we need this stuff right now, but it was so cheap, and it'll keep until the warmer months.
the colinette shadecards and test yarn for debbie new's dress turned up from the incredibly helpful sarah durrant:
it's a tough call choosing shades from the cards, because each yarn takes the colour differently, and without seeing and playing with a ball, it's hard to tell what the finished project will be like. if it was simply a matter of choosing a colinette pattern where you see how the yarn knits up, and taking a punt on the colourway, maybe it wouldn't be so tough. something we noticed - sarah has a special orders service where it's possible to order a small amount, so we might just do that, and try out the castania colourway in athene. then again, those tape yarns like giotto and tagliatelli are so callin' our name...
we saw tina's progress over the weekend at the cafe banter meeting - she's done about half of the ribbing before hitting the sleeves. we've finished the cast on for the sleeves, and now it's mindless ribbing for a few inches:
as you can see, there's a very nifty design feature going on here - the whole thing is knit in one piece with the lace added on afterward. the yarn from whiteliesdesigns - a mohair/wool mix - has been a total joy to knit - it's incredibly soft and buttery, and has none of the shedding and sometimes scratchy feel of mohair - if only australian companies sold stuff like this!
tina need not fear. methinks she mightn't have the amount of ballwinding we do (she has none, lucky soul...) and the amount of other projects on the go (then again...). so we have a little standstill at this point - at least, at the time of writing we do. it's getting mighty cold outside though, so we're tempted to speed angelina along for something a little warmer to wear.
rowan's latest venture, a youth/high fashion oriented knitting mag - R2. (we're a sucker for their more classic gear such as panama in cotton braid).
there's a few things coming up that we'd like to do scarves for - a scarf issue of creative knitting (check loobylu's entry), the scarf festival, and the mini wool fest (more details in a month or so...). erin showed off her new creation of a cabled scarf recently, her first cabled project. couple of months, and she'll be contemplating the coat from norsk strikkedesign...(!).
whatever the pink-red thing (surprise, surprise) on the cover of simple knits with a twist is (a "patchwork" rug? check the image), we love the look of it.
wouldn't mind seeing what's in the anny blatt book - patterns that we've seen advertised in vogue knitting have been beautiful looking.
amazon. what a boon (or bank account bust, depending on which way you look at it) for crafty types. a few things one might just find helpful - amazon's new search engine. featuring google results for websites, amazon results for books and other amazonly features - a9 is particularly handy when searching for info about types of knitting eg modular knitting.
other handy chunks of amazon for knitters - new releases and top sellers.
lincraft has a sale on filatura di crosa ramie at the moment - $1.50 a ball. we're guessing that the reason why it's died on the oz market is that people don't know what the hell it is or what to do with it. that was our problem, anyway. given that ramie is a plant derived fibre intended for summer (hello pals linen and hemp) we think we've found the solution with lanaknits patterns. we love the skirt idea, but figure we could probably just make something up similar, with an elastic waistband. another one we thought of was cindy taylors "swell sweater" featured in the latest issue of interweave knits. thanks to google, a little backdoor into IK gives their spring 2004 projects including the yarn breakdown and meterage for any pattern including the swell sweater - love that.
"Issey Miyake saw the future of fashion. So he gave up haute couture to become a softwear engineer."
miyake (a japanese designer of interest to knitters due to his interesting cuts and shapes when he designs clothes which also tend to flatter) in the latest issue of wired. we've seen some of his APOC gear for sale at londons v&a museum (who are currently hosting punk rock queen of knitting vivienne westwood - check the liberty flowers dress) which recently held a event hailed as "knitting casts off its old image". that's not where it ends for the knitting done by anyone but old women (what is it with these articles?), there's also the wrestling champ, martial arts expert, and the standard s'n'b bonding story.
swings and slides unfortunately had to close up shop - taking the punt to open a cafe is a huge one - we're sorry to see it go. the northern knitting group will be moving to cafe banter, which is at 462 lygon street, brunswick, and trialling meeting every 2nd sunday of the month from 2-5pm - first meet being sunday the 18th april (which is actually the 3rd sunday, but the second is easter, so a little sidestepping is necessary). to get there by public transport - number 01 and 22 trams depart from swanston st in the city, and there's a mcdonald's at the end of lygon street (this being the east end, not the swank italian drug lord underworld killings end), so plenty of parking.
so much for hitting a slump with angelina. a little gusset secret - every so often we get the urge to stay up and get something done. so, we checked the schedule for rage on saturday night/sunday morning, and it wasn't looking so bad - lemonheads, peaches, nirvana special. we knew that skeining and dyeing the yarn for angelina would take a while, but there were a few things that perhaps we shouldn't have rushed - read and learn, friends.
before dyeing - yarn really needs to soak in water a long time. longer than an impatient hour. as a result, putting the yarn into the dyebath (a good 18 litres or so, which obviously didn't get hot enough) came out with a lacklustre, streaky, patchy result of a colour that was more along the lines of a weak bloodwood (pale plum/mauve/blue colour). there was a chunk of yarn that did come out more the colour that we wanted. so, the knitted sample was thrown into the dye bath for the duration of nirvana, and at 4am, we had our answer....need to put the yarn back in. end result - 9am, water still hot, yarn the perfect colour. take yarn out. dye bath still a very, very strong colour.
in the name of not wasting dyebath, skein a couple balls of op shop white and put that in. dyebath still strong. repeat with all op shop white. we like this colour, really we do, but we've done enough yarn. moral to story - digital scales would be very handy to weigh both the yarn, and the dye and get accurate results. we went a little over (obviously) with the amount of dye, and mixing by weight of dye, rather than by eye would have been a better way to get a good result. it's all done:
duh. we realised another of our errors (can you tell we haven't been knitting for eons?) was not reading the pattern - it's a 2x2 rib, not 1x1, so we reswatched, and maybe someone was smiling down at us, but we got gauge, and we got it continental! alright!
so now it's pretty much all systems go - there's one ball wound, which is enough for knitting this week, and the rest can be wound with a proper ball winder next week. after all this knitting and skeining, the hands are a tad sore, so here on in, we're taking it easy - and giving tina time to catch up and send in her report... ;)
it's something that we picked up from the "weldons encyclopaedia of needlework" - assume the position. we just love the old funky vintage feel to the whole thing.
here's how the freeform skirt is going so far:
it's been necessary to add the band at the top, just to give a better idea of what shape we're aiming for, and make it easier to close in the gaps (not to mention try it on, once we get the waist right - we just made it fit around our neck halved, but we forgot we had to somehow get this waistband over our bigger bits -smart, eh?). something tells us this skirt is going to be a lot more knitting than what we initially thought.
we took the pink yarn off the skirt, and tried swatching for a design out of the knit stitch, a great beginners book with great projects of beginners, luscious mindless knitting for those a little more advanced.
it's for a simple summer top with an unusual construction - there's buttons on the front and back of the garment, so one knits from the middle front, past the armhole, to the middle back twice to create a sleeveless summer top. we really like the vertical slip stitch - initially we swatched a loose knit sample, with the idea of having the plain knitting vertical. there are issues with how stable the vertical plain knitted fabric is going to be and designing a garment ourselves versus having a far more talented and knowledable designer, a photo of a finished garment, and instructions for how to knit it...melville wins! it's a summer top, so we'll just shove it on the backburner for the meanwhile, after we get gauge.
we've been a good girl:
it's the swatch for angelina, just to make sure that our tension is ok before we embark on the project - we've learnt from experience - when it comes to patterns, it pays to do the thing. what we've done here is started out on the recommended needles (3.75mm) and knitted a sample in k1 p1 rib, as recommended. we tried knitting combined style first, which was way too loose (and a little messy). so we tried our normal throwing style. still too loose, but better. switch to 3.25mm needles. combined - too loose. normal - bingo. there's a garter stitch ridge between each section (bar the last one where the pin is - ridge on the other side) which helps keep track of what's going on, and also makes it easier to check and get gauge. until we're able to get the yarn skeined, dyed, then balled, we've hit a little slump with angelina...so tina will have a major head start on us.
as you can see from the stash pic - there's a slight issue in the gusset camp. it's blue. while it would have looked smashing on blue eyed tina, it's just not our thing. there's a woman whose fashion advice we dig - brenda kinsel. in her book brenda's wardrobe companion there's lots of exercises and thinking and practical ways of uncovering what you really love. leafing through an old newpaper weekend magazine, there was an image that took our breath away - a huge, beautiful, multicoloured moth (the pink/brown one on the first page of the article is similar), part of the photographs of joseph scheer, who has put a book together.
as weird as it might sound, dressing in the colours of a moth isn't too far off some of brenda's recommendations - such as to look at the colours in nature and in food (even though we'd baulk at doing it, we liked the dressing as a sundae bit - vanilla white, cherry red, chocolate brown...)
the pink and neutral colours go together so beautifully. so while going brown is probably pushing things a little, we did have a play with landscape dyes today, and here's the results:
the colours (which are quite a bit different to real life thanks to scanning and monitors and whatnot) were sampled from 3 landscape dyes - working from left to right, desert pea (orange red), grevillea (pink-red), bloodwood (plum), grevillea and bloodwood together, a mix of all three.
the winner is the mix of all three, which is a deep rich burgundy tone which will go with all our pink stuff and is kinda moth like into the bargain.
what's this? :
we've had a visit from the fairy yarnmother - tina initially bought the yarn and pattern direct from whiteliesdesigns for her own use, however she's gone with yarn from bendigo woollen mills, and donated the incredibly lush wool/mohair mix to the kyliegussetfoundation and in return we get to poke and prod her into completing angelina with us as part of the knitalong on patterns of the past- expect weekly updates from us both.
they just look like a fun bunch o' knitting fiends, with some useful resources (particularly if you're in america) - knitsmiths.
we'd like to coin a new term here - stash fear. no prizes for guessing that it's that completely irrational need not to use stashed yarn, for the fear that some other far more suitable project will come along. we thrifted a pack of yarn that looks like it's from the sixties - it's pink, it's got a weird band, it's just got that sort of flavour to it. we couldn't use it for a while - it'll be great for felting. for this. for that. we were going to hold out until monday night and get some white yarn (also thrifted) skeined and dyed to use for the freeform skirt, until we tried it out and sure enough, it felts. so...time to use that pink yarn for the skirt, skein the white stuff, and use it for a felty project of some sort. we'll post a pic soon - bad habit of thinking "gee a photo would be handy" after dark...
one of the women from school saw us knitting and wanted to know where to find more fashionable patterns. we suggested interweave knits and rowan magazine, which hopefully should do the trick - the audrey pattern would definitely suit her (thanks to judy for the link).
we remember shuddering at the thought of knitted pants, however, a sweatpant knitalong has shown that they look pretty fine - a yoga/baking/playing with the cat/weekender sort of look. admittedly at the moment (dress? socks? skirt? pi shawl? summer top? jumper? etc...) the temptation is there to just hit the closest place that stocks bonds tracky dax and hand the money over after trying them on. sometimes one needs to be kind.
we're having a bit of a tough time with the dress from debbie new. originally thinking that normal 8 ply wool would be fine (what's an extra sweaty 20% polymide between friends?), we bought that from dea, and attempted to dye it, only to realise that what we thought was 100% wool is more like about 20% wool, 80% some sort of synthetic.
lesson learnt - even if you think you know what something is (and it did smell like a sheep shed) it's worth during a burn test and checking.
so now it's substitution time - the original jaeger persia yarn is discontinued, so debbie's recommendation is for something that similarly lightweight and bulky - j. from stitch'n'bitch kindly bought along a ball of persia so we could check it out, and there's a yarn at lincraft that is almost identical - gedifra boheme. problem is, it's currently retailing at aroung $13.00 per 50g ball, and the colours are poo brown and cream. other options could be something boucle from rareyarns - although we're a bit worried about how warm a whole dress in alpaca would be. there's also a yarn from bendigo woollen mills/heirloom - raindrops, although we've felt this stuff unwashed, and without testing a sample first, there is a chance that we could be knitting a very fetching scouring pad. the winner so far is colinette's isis - reputable brand, lightweight, what looks like a good plum colour...so with a little more info, it could be the winner. the colinette site also has a few other options, which could be handy if isis doesn't work out.
here's how the freeform is going so far:
the pale pink cotton (top petal shape) was interesting - we originally bought a swag of the stuff to make a vogue knitting quick knit pattern - and soon discovered that about the only quick knit that would ever suit us is an accessory - thick fabric over thick bodies ain't a good look. doing the quick knit, we used 3 strands together to get gauge (in the end 2 still got gauge and was a whole lot less heavier - one of the big things to watch out with when substituting by doubling or more finer yarn), in stocking stitch. knit loosely in garter, the yarn is a different beast entirely, and we like it a lot. so much that we're tempted to rip out what we've used to make some sort of summer top.
as for the freeform - there's a lot to go if its to turn into a skirt. it's wierd working in the freeform way, but the consolation we got last night at stitch'n'bitch is that no matter what we do, it'll always make a cushion cover. homewares have saved many a crafter's butt, we're sure.
the completed scribble lace, done with the handspun leftovers from a felted bag:
