Monthly Archives: May 2017

May 29, 2017 · 11:29 am

Passerine hat

As autumn has settled in there has been some final harvesting. And perhaps the final hat.  You just never know.

It’s made of an alpaca yarn left over when my mother-out-law made a vest, and some eucalyptus dyed handspun alpaca.  It has already gone to a happy new home as a birthday gift.

My colour work still needs some practice.  In my efforts not to pull too tightly on the floats I have some overly loose stitches.  But actually, I think this turned out really well.  I loved the pattern at first sight.  It’s the passerine hat by Erica Heusser.  Somehow the crown on mine looks totally different to all of her images (and I see the same result in some other people’s versions on Ravelry).  But it is not a problem of any kind.  It’s a completely charming design and I’d knit it again, except that I seem to have moved on from hats for now and I am working on another project that needs to get knit, because autumn is moving all too quickly into winter!

8 Comments

Filed under Knitting

Tagged as , , ,

May 24, 2017 · 11:47 am

Box pouches

IMAG4294

I’ve had a spell of eco printing onto old woollen blankets.  It is extremely rewarding: wool is the perfect fibre for dyeing with eucalypts (as India Flint has said so may times) and the pile of the blanket means that every detail can show!

IMAG4292

This one turned out to be the perfect size for my friend’s new and glorious ceramic keep cup.  She was struggling with plastic at her favourite cafe; saw my beloved’s keep cup in use, found a lovely ceramic one of her own on a side trip to the art gallery–and all it needed was a little insulation against the bumps of life.

This is a larger model I also like a lot.  I think I will make more.  The pattern came from Kristine Vejar’s Modern Natural Dyer, which was a kind birthday gift.  I am enjoying it very much.

8 Comments

Filed under Leaf prints, Natural dyeing, Sewing

Tagged as , ,

May 19, 2017 · 2:12 pm

Persist

The hat jag didn’t stop with those shown in the last post, but there came a day when I was ready to try something new and I chose Donna Druchunas’ Persist Hat. Well, mostly.  Needless to say I modified it a little.  The design features the word persist, naturally.  And the sign for infinity.  I chose to feature the word more and the infinity sign a little less.

IMAG4423

The first one made me think my colour knitting had improved a bit!  I used some lovely soft local Polwarth yarn I had spun from the stash, and some leftover equally soft alpaca rich commercial yarn that was lying about.

IMAG4325

After that, I made another one, because… repetition seems to be in my blood.  And “persist” is a concept I embrace.  And I liked the first one and had ideas for further mods.  I went with a contrast cast-on and a twisted rib brim.  I like it. One of these hats was always planned for the daughter of friends who is a high school activist.  I chose this pattern with her in mind. She has been in a protracted campaign to establish a gay-straight alliance at her school.  She and I talk about it every time we meet up, and I am constantly holding out for the need to build our capacity to persist in the face of injustice.  I hope she might enjoy a soft and snug reminder of that principle.

2 Comments

Filed under Craftivism, Knitting

Tagged as , ,

May 14, 2017 · 5:37 pm

An outbreak of hats

The recent period of incapacity and pain has somehow led to an outbreak of hats.  I was talking it over with a considerably older friend whose mobility is now quite restricted and whose everyday life has become a challenge in its own right.  Formerly a proficient and very adventurous knitter (when I first met her she was knitting an extremely complex cabled jumper in a traditional style), she has been knitting the same hat over and over for the last few years.  When I said to her that I had been feeling as though perhaps I just didn’t have the mental space to attempt anything more complex than a beanie and then another beanie, she said that was how she felt.

2017-04-14 09.43.05

First there was this.  It is closer to Jared Flood’s Turn A Square than any other I have made more or less following the pattern, but it’s handspun and the colour change in the yarn turned out to be almost at the crown!

2017-04-14 09.43.44

Then there was an alpaca-dyed-with-eucalyptus hat.  Then I knit up a ball of possum wool that remained from a trip to Aotearoa/NZ. But somehow the casting on kept happening… in this case oatmeal corriedale hand dyed by The Thylacine and spun into yarn by me, cast on on the train.

2017-04-13 08.20.53

And pretty soon, there was a pile.

IMAG4296

Suri alpaca… oddments of eucalyptus dyed wool, two colours of eucalyptus dyed + naturally black alpaca, corriedale!  It was about then that the colour work began: a sign that the pain has been abating and also that the casting on keeps occurring. It’s great to have whisked through some of the small quantities in my stash, and it is also a happy thing that the cold weather has arrived and we are going to a shed warming where many people with all kinds of head sizes and tastes and tolerances for fibres will be there.  I can feel a beanie giveaway coming on!

 

2 Comments

Filed under Knitting, Natural dyeing

Tagged as , , , , , ,

May 1, 2017 · 3:14 pm

Simple, pleasurable embroidery

2017-04-14 09.42.48

I have been embroidering some small bags.  They came with crowd sourced underwear (organic, fair trade) in them, with all the good information about the product printed onto unbleached calico.  Seven bags in all!  I decided to convert them to loveliness and started with dyeing them in indigo.  They are all slightly different shades of blue, some having been dipped more times than others.

2017-04-14 09.42.11

I am not a sophisticated embroiderer.  But I keep being given cast off embroidery thread, so there was no shortage of thread and no shortage of portable canvases for stitching.

2017-04-14 09.42.01

So I tried several patterns and admit I still enjoy the spiral most of all.

2017-04-14 09.41.45

One of the bags went travelling with my Mum when she was looking for a simple project, so then there were six.

2017-04-14 09.41.27

And after all these adventures in stitching, there is yet one waiting to be embroidered.

2017-04-14 09.41.19

I learned some things about how to store embroidery thread from the heritage items that have come to me, some of them in tangles, some in the original skeins, and some wrapped on cardboard shapes that keep the thread neat without taking up a lot of space and using something that comes into the house all the time.  Thank you to those women whose hands have held these threads already and whose minds have touched mine however distantly in this way.

2017-04-04 08.52.22

In the middle of all this my mother-out-law sent me her stash of embroidery threads in pastel colours, so some of them have gone into the project too.  So much pleasure from running stitch…

2017-04-14 09.40.58

16 Comments

Filed under Natural dyeing, Sewing

Tagged as , , , ,