Category Archives: Knitting

September 8, 2014 · 4:41 pm

An invitation, a week 2 silkworm update and some random happenings

Let me begin with some dignity, because it won’t last. Soon we’ll be back to silkworms and other silly stuff. Anne Harris of Annie’s Workroom would like to invite you to her exhibition. It’s in Brisbane, Queensland–I am sorry to report this means I won’t be able to see it.

Expressions of Love: Lovingly Interrupted brings together established contemporary artist Kim Schoenberger’s collection of treasured memories assembled from the humble teabag. And introduces emerging artist Anne Harris’s work of naturally dyed, painted and stitched images exploring the emotions of love. Official Opening 14th September 3.30pm. Closes 28th September: Gallery 159, 159 Payne Road, The Gap, Brisbane. There is a special bus to make it easy for sunshine coast people to attend. Please call Anne 0433 162 847 for more information or visit her on the web.

And now… for the silkworm update of the week. OMG, as they say in the classics, the silkworms are still hatching! I have been struggling to figure out a cross-national item to give a sense of scale (US coins don’t work for me). Here is my trial object. Let me know how I’m doing!

Here is a close up of silk worms in several stages of growth–with more hatching every single day two weeks after they started! They were all laid as eggs within a couple of days of one another, I hasten to add. What more can I say? There is still just one mulberry tree with leaves on it in the neighbourhood.

On the weekend, there was lemon preserving (the salty kind)… inspired in part by an anonymous donation of a bag of Meyer lemons left on our porch. Three cheers for the grower and the tree!

I had the urge to cast on, a lot.

I also had the urge to dye and since it was warm and sunny, took advantage by mordanting fabric for future leaf prints. I had the realisation some time ago that I had somehow managed not to find a section on mordanting cellulose fabrics, with quite specific instructions, in Eco-Colour. I had always wished there was a section like that in there. Happily India Flint has indeed put it in her gorgeous book and if only I had paid more attention… Anyway, since I can’t change the past, I have been waiting for sunny weather to dip and dry and dip and dry on a principle somewhat different to the one I have been experimenting with–and now the sunshine is here I got to it! Good dyeing times are coming…

12 Comments

Filed under Fibre preparation, Knitting, Natural dyeing, Neighbourhood pleasures

Tagged as corriedale, dinner, friendship is the best form of wealth, gifts, India Flint, mordanting, silk, silk worms, wool, yarn

September 7, 2014 · 4:48 pm

Blog Hop Around the World

Leah from Seattle Spinner has generously nominated me as the next person in her blog hop around the world. If you’ve stopped by because she mentioned my blog, a special welcome! For regular readers of this blog who don’t know her… Leah says:

Spin, knit, weave…I LOVE these areas, for a multitude of reasons. … I am fascinated with things that go to the root of who we are–things or ideas that existed before the world of modern technology. Instead of being pastimes, these were things needed for our very survival.

She has an Etsy shop: all proceeds (after costs) go to to support a non profit organization in Peru called Awamaki which ‘is a nonprofit social enterprise that empowers rural Andean women with skills training, connects them to global market opportunities, and enables them to earn an income to transform their communities.’ Such a sensational idea…

And now for my answers to the blog hop questions!

1. What are you working on?

I always have more projects on the go than makes any kind of sense. Some lie around for extended periods until I can find the right amount of time or mental space to move them forward. Right now I am knitting a pair of socks… these travel with me on public transport and to meetings. I am practicing my picking and Norwegian purling, since I think this would be a far more efficient way to knit than the throwing, ‘English’-style knitting I learned first. I just need to build up some skill by doing it enough…

I have a quilt in progress. Must get back to it! All the blocks use India Flint’s eco-print technique to showcase a eucalypt species and I’ve embroidered the name of each tree onto the block in eucalyptus-dyed silk. And stopped, having dyed the fabric for the front and pieced the back… apparently there is something about cutting the sashing I can’t face… or some part of me that thinks I need a week to do it in!

I am spinning a lot, in several different fibres. I went to a weekend away with members of my Guild recently and carded a lot of naturally dyed wool. It must be time to do some plying soon! These colours include indigo, logwood and cochineal. Many came from exhaust dyebaths after a dyeing workshop where I used old dyestuffs donated to the Guild.

2. How does my work differ from others?

I am not sure it always does! Over time, I find myself working further and further back along the process of creating things: over some years I went from knitting socks to spinning yarn to dyeing fibre to processing raw fleece and identifying local weeds and trees for dyeing and growing dye plants. This doesn’t interest everyone. Yet, I can’t claim to be all about process. I enjoy creating a finished thing that will be of use. I am less excited about things that are just for display.

I also find that I like to recycle things… I am interested in using every last scrap of a piece of fabric or yarn, and I enjoy turning fabrics that would otherwise be discarded into something useful. Sometimes I think this is a recent impulse, but then I look into my wardrobe where there are shirts made from flour sacks and old damask tablecloth… However–I also have a large collection of all manner of fabrics, yarn and threads and have become a collecting place for other women’s fabrics and notions. Happily, I am able to give a lot of things away to people who will use and enjoy them. This weekend, I am mordanting these fabrics, mostly salvaged from a friend’s mother’s stash. Most of the prints and plain coloured fabrics have gone to new homes but I kept the offcuts of calico and white sheeting for leaf printing…

3. Why do I create what I do?

I love to identify something that is wanted or needed, and the raw materials that would bring that thing into existence, and match the two. Sometimes I make to request or to fill a need I perceive in someone else. or I just imagine the delight a handmade item might produce. I look for opportunities to make something special and think about the recipient as I stitch it. But I also do things as they interest or inspire me and the look for the right home for them to go to. I make plenty of mistakes and have become adept at turning mistakes into useful items and finding ways to use or refashion things that are not as intended, or seem at first not-too-promising.

I also create to satisfy my fidgety nature, I think. To fend off the possibility of wasted time or boredom, and turn what might otherwise be wasted to use.

4. How does my creative process work?

Gradually. I have a substantial day job, which means that I don’t need to make a living from my craft, and also that I have limited time for crafting. I do what I can, when I can, and I am motivated by having an exciting idea, wanting to meet a date for a gift, or seeking to meet a need for some specific item. I don’t have a spiritual or romantic sense of creative process. Rather, I see myself as part of a long tradition of thrift, skill and creativity–and this delights me. So many people in the developed world are now bereft of the skills needed to meet simple, everyday material needs for themselves. I would feel a great sense of loss at not being able to make or mend. These activities are sources of pleasure and satisfaction in my life.

I have chosen to pass the baton to Barbro from Barbro’s Threads–from Australia to Finland! She says she is:

a handspinner who likes to work with many kinds of fibers in all forms. I’m interested in the history and cultural history of sheep and textiles. … Right now I’m spinning and researching for my master spinner title in my guild Björken at Stundars. I’m concentrating on three sheep from Finland (Finnsheep, Kainuu Grey, and Åland sheep), and three from Sweden (Swedish Finull, Gotland sheep, and Värmland sheep).

I am in awe of Barbro’s skills as a spinner and love reading about her textile adventures–learning new skills and visiting museums full of textile traditions quite different to the ones I can see here in Australia. I am so impressed by her work toward becoming a Master Spinner. This is something members of my Guild speak about but which my Guild can’t currently support. Barbro also has a very handsome dog… I hope you’ll visit her blog and enjoy it as much as I do!

9 Comments

Filed under Knitting, Leaf prints, Natural dyeing, Sewing, Spinning

August 17, 2014 · 1:37 pm

Socks for active toes

Last weekend I finished these socks–eucalyptus-dyed patonyle with a subtle indigo blue stripe at the cuff (I mention its subtlety since it is invisible in the image above). We went to visit the intended recipient yesterday and I could wait no longer for the right moment to take a picture in daylight.

There was less than a metre of yarn left when I finished these. I handed them over and they were whipped onto enthusiastic feet in no time at all. This was he closest to a still image I was likely to get.

Pretty soon they were out into the chook yard with someone else’s shoes over them…

Happily these fast-growing feet are the same size as those of an adult in the family–so in case they are outgrown they will still be of use.

Then, up into the mandarin tree in weatherproof pants because of impending rain..

And pretty soon my pocket full of socks had become a pocket full of flowers and beautiful leaves and we were heading home after some guitar playing, hot chocolate (or carob or dandelion, depending), chat and plans for a future shared meal and off into the evening with enough mandarins for marmalade and more. Friends are such wonder and delight!

1 Comment

Filed under Knitting, Natural dyeing

Tagged as eucalyptus, friendship is the best form of wealth, gifts, indigo, socks, wool, yarn

August 7, 2014 · 5:34 pm

Slippers–and camellias–again!

Every time I think I can’t make another pair of Bev Galeskas’ Felted Clogs… I turn out to be wrong. I made two purple pairs and a blue pair… one purple pair were felted as dinner entertainment in order to be a good fit for the recipient. One blue pair await felting. And this pair await a recipient. I think the kicker is the number of people who speak to me about slipper love when it’s cold! And perhaps, how quickly I can whip out a pair of these nowadays. Long gone are the days when row 2 took me twenty minutes and I had to lie on the couch for the rest of the evening afterward. Have I said before that I hope Bev Galeskas is a rich woman? When I went to the web to get that link to the pattern, Ravelry said ‘Would you like to see 10525 projects made from this pattern and much more?’ I hope Bev did a great deal on royalties and that she isn’t facing the difficulty of some of those songwriters whose work only made other folk rich!

And, not to be deterred by the comedy of errors of my recent camellia experiment, I decided I may as well pick up the remaining fallen camellias and preservation dye with them (the first such jar is looking good). Some days, my goals have to be small!

2 Comments

Filed under Knitting, Natural dyeing

Tagged as alpaca, camellia flowers, friendship is the best form of wealth, Steep and Store, Stuff

July 22, 2014 · 2:08 pm

Crafting locally…

I made these socks on many bus trips and on a trip to a conference interstate where I had more knitting time than usual. But they are for a small friend who loves very close by. He pulled them on with glee within minutes of taking them out of their package, which made me feel pretty gleeful too! They’ve been indigo dyed on patonyle superwash sock yarn.

There were a lot of comments about my knitting at the conference. People who are surprised to find my hand made sock looks just like a sock from the shop! People who aren’t sure if that is knitting or crochet. People who think knitting is too complicated for them. Seriously! It’s not rocket science. I do find it hilarious when people who have written books, can operate computers, can drive car or can raise children–think they may not be able to learn to knit. Most don’t really want to, which is fine. But I don’t readily accept that people don’t have the capacity. Willingness, and for that matter, quiet time, is a whole other thing.

When we went to do the local shop this week, there was evidence of other people crafting locally.

These were in the planters on the nearby main road. So cute!

I suspect the Viva La Broad Bean yarn bombers, who have a made a project of decorating our neighbourhood. One of them t0ld me a while back she had saved one of my yarn bombs when the pole it was stitched onto was removed and it was thrown to the ground and treated like rubbish. She took it home and washed it ready to re-apply it. What a woman! So–shouting out to VLBB, who made me smile at the shops this week 🙂

4 Comments

Filed under Knitting, Neighbourhood pleasures

Tagged as indigo, yarn bombing

July 7, 2014 · 4:46 pm

Spinning, mending and a gift of hand-knit eucalyptus-dyed socks

I keep thinking I’ll get knitting on some big project or other… but I seem to keep spinning instead. Alpaca dyed with eucalyptus keeps happening…

There has been some random polwarth spinning from batts I prepared some time ago (and full of nepps they are too!) Love that maidenhair fern, a gift from my mother that is really thriving at present.

There has been dull mending that doesn’t warrant a picture, but I seem to have had a small release from my usual functional approach. This extremely utilitarian apron must date back almost 20 years… it is that long since I made my living baking and kitchen-handing. I think I bought it second hand. It had been discarded because one of the tapes was missing. I long ago replaced it with some bias binding sewed in half, which I assume was on hand at the time. It certainly isn’t a match for the other tape! And the apron itself has had a hole for a very long time.

Not any more. I now use it for spinning–to catch all the random fibres and dirt and little bits of dried plant that drop from any fleece I have prepared myself, no matter how many rinses. I also mended this wool knit on the train one morning, beginning as I waited at the station. Just a little hole up by the neckline.

I bought this garment years ago from Soewn Earth. It has faded quite a bit, but I am still enjoying it… and considering whether it might be time for a re-bundle. First–across (with eucalyptus dyed silk thread)…

Then in the other direction…

Maybe later some embroidery for sheer decoration? And finally, some socks for a friend with several new jobs and rather small feet. She hasn’t had a pair from me in ages. I put these in the mail to be a surprise parcel. Sorry about the office desk pictures on an overcast day. Once I finish a gift I get impatient to have it meet its intended recipient.

They succeeded in being a surprise and she sounded delighted. It’s midwinter here and they arrived in the week prior to the longest night of the year. Perfect for chilly nights.

For the love of mending: Make do and mend afternoon

We had a make do and mend afternoon with friends recently. We’re investigating actions we might take about climate change, and we’ve begun with some conversations about consumerism. Who knows where that might lead? I began by stitching up a torn out seam for my partner and tightening all the screws on the clothes rack so it works properly. Meanwhile a rusty frypan was rehabilitated, an electrical plug was replaced, and the endless chewing of moths on fine wool was darned in by others.

I have a wardrobe which is heavy on the bottom end. I always have more clothes suitable for gardening and doing filthy jobs than I have clothes for best. And my favourites are usually my gardening clothes. Things that are no longer suitable for wearing to work or to visit my mother, unless I’ll be weeding while I’m there. My father is a bit like me. When I knit him socks he puts them in the drawer until he has worn out a previous pair. My current favourite jeans are well past their best, and weeks ago they went through in the knee. I kept thinking I would turn them into a bag, but then I kept taking them out of the reuse pile and pulling them on. So with a crowd of friends who were mending and repairing too, and a pot of pumpkin soup to keep it cheery, I patched them. Maybe one day this patch will be part of a bag!

For those who wish they knew how to patch the knee of jeans, step one for a simple mend is to rip out whichever seam is less complicated. Leave the flat felled, beautifully topstitched seam intact and rip the other one, if there is a choice.

Choose a nice patch. This one was once part of a pair of cotton twill pants and is now eco printed with E Cinerea leaves. Trim back the hole to some solid fabric, and shape it. My mother taught me this mend and always created a straight sided shape, like a rectangle. I decided to try something rounded. Put the patch on the inside, and turn the edges of the jeans under all around, attaching to the patch fabric. Tacking would be a great way to proceed, but I prefer pins. Call me a daredevil!

On the inside, turn the edges of the patch under, toward the wrong side of the jeans. Stitching the first seam and then turning the second would have been a good idea, but I was having an interesting conversation and didn’t want to leave the room to use the sewing machine yet!

Stitch around each edge.

Apologies for the indoor pictures on a rainy day–but here is the patch, being a mend on gardening jeans, in the garden, with the sun out, however weakly!

One of my treasured friends brought some socks with him. It’s a shame about the lighting, but never mind.

I made these from Cleckheaton 5 ply crepe in pure wool (not the best possible choice for socks) in 2009. Here they are on my desk at work in all their glory in 2009. Who can believe I managed to find the photo (or understand why I took it at work?)

The stripes at the tops are all my samples for the previous period–a metre or two of yarn dyed with samples of local eucalypts and other plants. The rue dyepot was the worst ever–but a triumph of neighbourhood cooperation involving a rendezvous at the local train station where my friend handed a bag of rue prunings out the door and I stood there ready receive them as he continued on his way on the train relieved of his pungent burden! One of the socks is all in orange tones and the other tans and greens. Rue. The ordinary kind does not give red, my friends, take it from me (or sort me out if you know how to get red from it–seems like there is a Siberian kind that might give red–but only from the seeds–or some such). I digress. These socks have been worn a lot, which is very flattering, and my heart’s friend wanted to keep them, though perhaps only for in-slipper wear. We consulted about whether it was feasible to darn these holes. I wasn’t sure. He can darn but has not kept up his knitting skills in a period when carpentry has been needed more at his place.

He has the biggest feet on my knitting roster. These holes are BIG. I wasn’t sure about darning them. He went off to tend to a bicycle (there were others people dealing with wood and still others entertaining children with the wheelbarrow and others still darning). I thought it over, no doubt drawing on things I’ve seen and read, and wondered if I could just pick up and knit on a patch. I pulled out 4 ply patonyle dyed with eucalypts. I’ve learned a few things about getting a strong colour since I dyed these socks. the original wool in the socks has worn thin and the 4 ply was fine for the job. I decided on a visible mending aesthetic.

At first, I wasn’t sure how to join on the sides on. Then it dawned on me… pick up a further stitch and knit or purl it together with the edge stitch. What could be simpler?

Put your sunglasses on, I must have changed the settings on the camera.

When I got to the end of each hole, I decided to graft.

I picked up more stitches and kitchener stitched (grafted) them together. And in the end… the conversation was so good I mended all three of the big holes. Comfy socks to wear when your feet are up. Eat your hearts out!

10 Comments

Filed under Knitting, Natural dyeing, Neighbourhood pleasures, Sewing

Tagged as E Cinerea, eucalyptus, friendship is the best form of wealth, local trees, rue, think globally, wool

May 20, 2014 · 8:54 am

More joy of stranded colourwork knitting

There have been two more pairs of Tingvoll slippers. Too much fun! Unfortunately, without going into boring detail, I have also been having a great deal of trouble with photographs. My phone suffered a major episode while I was in Melbourne and is now on its second trip to repair. The first visit fixed one problem but rendered the camera absolutely unable to focus. This has meant discovering not a single photo is in focus when it it too late to take another set… having unfamiliar equipment, no equipment, or using the retired cameras and remembering why they were pensioned off! So, my apologies for photo quality, and my hopes that my capacity to take pictures for the blog at will, and upload them with similar abandon, and access WordPress on my phone, will return soon.

If you have been following along for a long while you might remember my dyeing project using eucalypts over grey Corriedale. I created two sets of yarn–one where I maintained the colour changes and one where I plied different coloured singles together. These slippers use the three ply colour-changes-maintained yarn. Until now, I had struggled to figure out what to make with something so lovely but so chunky.

This first pair were made with 5.5 mm needles, my handspun eucalyptus dyed Corriedale wool and Bendigo Woolen Mills 12 ply, leftover from making slippers for a goth friend.

They have gone to a different friend who is a writer. She said she might save them to be special writing slippers. What an exceedingly fine compliment.

This second pair, knit on 5 mm needles, have gone to another dear one who spends her work life assisting people to recover from trauma.

I hope they will gladden her heart!

Having done it three times I began to find the chart so much easier to follow… my sense of following a chart as difficult began to ebb away. My confidence that I can do colour knitting began to grow stronger. I began to have that sense of happy familiarity you get with a song you have listened to a lot. I now have my first set of metal DPNs and I like them very much–I tend to use circulars for most knitting in the round–and I mostly do knit in the round. But in this case the pattern divides into four sections in a way that I decided very much lent itself to DPNs. Lovely! I can only recommend this pattern.

2 Comments

Filed under Knitting

Tagged as corriedale, dyeing, eucalyptus, friendship is the best form of wealth, neighbourhood dyeplants, wool, yarn

May 11, 2014 · 3:29 pm

Handspun socks

Once upon a time there was a braid of Superwash Merino/Bamboo/Nylon blend, especially for sock spinners from Ewe Give Me The Knits, who surely wins a prize for business name. I spent many an hour, some more patient than others, turning it into 100g of handspun three ply (for those who knit but do not spin, I mean there are three strands going into the final yarn, not that it is finer than ‘fingering’ or ‘4 ply’), high-twist yarn. There is a previous post about the spinning part. Fibre selection and spinning strategy were both focused on producing sock yarn.

In my experience, if I want to produce a fine yarn, especially one with three plies, I have to make sure the singles are really fine. In this case I went with ‘as fine as possible’, pretty much. The comments at Guild touched on ‘frog hair’, though needless to say there are some serious fine spinners in the Guild, and I’m not one of them. Here is my yarn beside some 4 ply (fingering) sock yarns I’ve knit into socks using 3 mm needles.

Closer… I think my yarn is on the thin side compared to the 4 ply (fingering) yarn I usually would use to knit socks, so I went down a needle size to 2.75 mm (oooh—) and cast on!

With yarn and needles as fine as any I’ve ever used, this took a little while. Quite a while. But in the end… these went off to warm the toes of my fairy godson–and yesterday I sighted them peeking out between his shoes and his jeans as we all pedalled into town to see a fabulous exhibition and talk about political printmaking in South Australia in the 1970s and 1980s. I feel very deeply blessed to have precious friends who appreciate handmade things so fulsomely.

3 Comments

Filed under Knitting, Spinning

Tagged as bamboo, friendship is the best form of wealth, merino, nylon, wool

April 29, 2014 · 6:53 am

The unbearable cuteness of stranded colour knitting

After all the three-ply colour spinning there has been around here, I started to itch to use those colours in knitting. I settled on these, the Tingvoll slippers by Kristin Spurkland. I began them before I went to Melbourne in March. I found that knitting them over breakfast in a cafe in Melbourne triggered a conversation every single day, and usually with another keen knitter. It made me feel right at home, even though I was far from home and essentially, I was in the cafe because there was nothing for breakfast in the cupboard where I was staying!

Even the soles are cute.

I knit these in Corriedale. Yes, Malcolm the Corriedale. The orange is dyed with eucalyptus, and the yellow with my mother’s coreopsis flowers. While I was in Melbourne, I found myself frustrated by how slowly it was all going and how hard I was finding it to read the charts. In the learning zone I was in spending my whole day at a workshop–I started to explore. By the time I was flying home I had found that I could knit withe one colour in each hand–picking the yellow (‘European style’ as some call it here–yarn in the left hand) and throwing the orange (‘English style’, as some call it here–yarn in the right hand). Best of both worlds! I love that phenomenon: learning one new thing opens the doors to learning others. Delightful.

They are smaller than I had hoped, which just shows I settled on this wool and this pattern with no real thought for sizing and not much attention to the instructions. Clearly it would be a good idea for me to quit spinning finer than I like to knit! I think they are destined for a small child of my acquaintance. She is a fine appreciator of hand knits. Her Dad says when he told her I might be knitting her slippers, she was ‘beside herself!’ Apparently she likes the felted clogs I knit him so much she tries them on a lot, even though he has some of the largest feet I’ve ever knit for…

15 Comments

Filed under Knitting, Natural dyeing

Tagged as corriedale, orange again, wool, yarn, yellow

Category Archives: Knitting

An invitation, a week 2 silkworm update and some random happenings

Blog Hop Around the World

Socks for active toes

Slippers–and camellias–again!

Crafting locally…

Spinning, mending and a gift of hand-knit eucalyptus-dyed socks

For the love of mending: Make do and mend afternoon

More joy of stranded colourwork knitting

Handspun socks

The unbearable cuteness of stranded colour knitting

People you may like to visit online

Administrivia

Search

Recent posts

Follow Blog via Email

Archives

Categories

Category Archives: Knitting

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

People you may like to visit online

Administrivia

Search

Recent posts

Follow Blog via Email

Archives

Categories