Tag Archives: gifts

June 3, 2016 · 4:46 pm

Hand spun, hand knit socks

Remember this hand spun sock yarn?

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It had a long journey toward becoming a pair of socks.  Here we are early on, on the train…

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On my way to a meeting at work.  Five minutes early, enjoying the sunshine and shrubs… knitting down the heel.

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Visiting a friend in hospital (and past the heel flap on sock 1)…

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Here we are on our way to Newcastle to blockade a coal port–second sock started.  I got a lot of knitting done during train travel and nonviolence training (for an entire day–some climate change activists don’t muck about!) and there was another knitter in the training, too!

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Then I noticed late in the life of sock 2 that sock 1 and sock 2 were a bit different.  I made some adjustments.  Finally, I went over to my friend’s house for a try on. Turns out that the stretchy factor in knitting sorts out a multitude of small spinning and knitting crimes. It’s common ground between us that if he doesn’t care, I don’t either.  Usually he goes further than not caring and is pretty pleased about the whole woollen sock thing. Fantastic attitude.

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Here he is showing customary forbearance as a sock model.  Note hand knit sock on other foot.  Come to think of it, note hand spun, hand knit jumper in use years after being dyed with eucalypt. This is the attitude to hand knits that gets you another pair of socks in my circle of beloveds!

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April 24, 2016 · 3:35 pm

Just mend it: Getting started

In preparation for the upcoming mending workshops, I’ve created a directory of mending tutorials.  I’ve also been beetling away creating mending kits. Friends have been handing over their spare unwanted haberdashery and tins.  I have raided local op shops.  At one of them I was offered a motherlode of  unwanted notions that were seeking a new home. Here’s a partial view.

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Such treasures.  Including a lifetime’s collection of travelling mending kits from hotels and airlines the like of which I have never seen.  Now, it is going to new homes. I’ve even sewed little covers for thread snips from lino samples I seem to somehow have acquired.

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There are pincushions and measuring tapes, thimbles and safety pins and many reels of thread.  Amazing collections of needles, pins and such.

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The creation of the needle case gallery has been ongoing. Scraps of fabric with a lovely button and all manner of little bits of ribbon, string and cord I have saved for a special occasion (or just a use) have been converted into needle books.

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Lovely little bits of hand embroidery on fabric that has gone well past original use, now adorn a few.  Beautiful Australian print remnants have been  turned to use too.  Some have buttonholes and some have loop closures. Some are plant dyed and some are tied with cord too short to form a drawstring on a bag.

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I am very fond of my own needle case, so eventually I made some just like it.  Well, sort of like it. We started here (mine on the left, and pieces of dyed blanket on the right).

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Eventually, there were about eight.  I stitched at triathlons and in front of the TV and on the train.  I finished some with fancy buttons, beads or little bells saved from Easter bunnies.  I tied some with cotton string that has also seen the dye bath, and others with some hand twined silk string, with a thankyou to India Flint for allowing me to see this was possible and that string was not only to be made from plants.  I was thinking about the fact that I had saved all these improbable things, while others had been handed on to me by relatives and friends with similar habits–

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It brought to mind my mother’s parents, two people who lived in poverty their entire lives, scaling up to indoor plumbing and heated water during my lifetime.  My grandfather left countless pieces of recycled string, pre-loved screws and straightened out nails when he died. My grandmother had a drawer where special treasures lived that I was allowed to admire as a child.   There was a special safety pin in there she used to pierce a hole in the filter of her rare cigarettes for some supposed health reason.  There was also a little black cat made of plastic.  I knew it had come from a box of Black Magic chocolates.  I had seen the boxes for sale but never had any.  Like her, I thought this little creature was a treasure worth saving when the cardboard box and the rather amazing papers surrounding each chocolate might have passed on.

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My life is utterly unlike Millie’s.  But it is good to have things in common with her. It warms me to carry these memories of her along and hold them in my mind as I craft these little books for future menders who will share some fraction of the skills she had.

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April 18, 2016 · 3:24 pm

Socks, some more, again, still

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These socks arose from my holiday gift of sock yarn.  Here I am casting on, on the train.

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Clearly I didn’t consider sock in progress shots too often.  This one seems to be another train shot on a sunny day.  The design is Jaywalker, by Grumperina.  One of the designs I can hold in my tiny mind even on public transport.

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And here they are, done and ready to be rolled, tied and delivered to their new owner, a dear friend who I think will enjoy them… the next pair have been cast on from the handspun sock yarn I’ve made recently.  I have had them with me on busy public transport a few times already and in between the people who are surprised to find that anyone can still knit, there was an eye-and-gesture-conversation with some tourists who seemed to be Chinese and who were clearly intrigued, and another conversation with an out of practice knitter who had never seen socks knit on two circulars and who had been planing to cast on a tea cosy for some years without actually managing to do it.  So, my friends, if you are unable to start conversations on public transport, I have a strategy for you…

 

 

 

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April 13, 2016 · 11:57 am

Just Mend It!

Exciting news!  I will be spreading the joy of mending (and some skills for mending) in two workshops at The Joinery (a lovely, central, public transport accessible venue) coming up in May and organised by the good folk at the Adelaide Sustainability Centre. Should you be local and keen…

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So–bring along holey socks, dropped hems, missing buttons, evidence that clothes moths have left their babies to feed in your drawers and whatever else is plaguing your wardrobe and we’ll see what we can do!

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In preparation for the big event, I am constructing mending kits.  No doubt some people who come will be dedicated menders.  Others may not be so well equipped, and these kits are for all comers. I began with a leftover scrap of woolen blanket dyed with pohutukawa leaves. Soon, I had a little pile of hand-stitched needle books complete with pins and needles and suchlike. Meanwhile, the call has gone out for boxes and tins for the kits to go into and tins formerly full of tea or chocolate and all manner of other good things are trickling in.

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Then I started on needle books made from fabric scraps, and since I found some woolen felt of unknown origin rolled up in the cupboard, I tried some with scrap leather and vinyl samples as covers with felt pages within. My grandmother’s pinking shears were pulled out for use rather than wonderment for the first time in ten years, at least!

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Soon it led to a wish for more woollen blanket and as it happens I have a few blankets acquired at the op shops of Adelaide on a previous occasion.  I walked out to my favourite Eucalyptus Scoparia as the sun went down after work, and set the dye bath to heat by the light of a moon though cloud (this is a picturesque way of saying this photo is dark…)

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Next day, things were looking promising…

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And it may be this is enough to make needle books for everyone I know.

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March 10, 2016 · 1:02 pm

So many hand made bags!

When I turned that pair of Thai fishing pants into bag linings a while back… it had the predictable effect of setting off a bag jag. Since then, there have been dozens more.  In fact, I gave some away without ever photographing them.  I lost count.  One had a silk panel of E Cinerea leaves and a hemp base, with purple sheeting lining.

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A few had ikat fabrics salvaged from the op shop.

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There were fabrics from my friend’s mother’s stash.  Her mother has now passed on, but I think she would be pleased to know they were being used and appreciated.  There were fabrics from my stash acquired with other purposes in mind, or perhaps no purpose at all.  Those red flowers mystify me.

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E Cinerea leaves on calico and hemp fabric left over from making a pair of shorts.

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Bags with dragonflies.

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Bags with flowers. I remember acquiring this fabric in Melbourne! There are two-handled models and over-the-shoulder models.

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On the lining front, I used up a lot of manufacturers’ waste sheeting offcuts, and not before time (having had them for perhaps 20 years).  But scraps from recent sewing went into the mix too, along with random findings of patch-worked flour-bag-scraps.  Apparently this strange fixation with sewing little bits together has been going on longer than I imagine.

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There was a series of bags made with fat quarters (at least, I think that’s what they were) acquired when I made a quilt panel for a community quilt project.

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I still love these fabrics, and a friend let me see hers peeping out of her backpack on the bus to work recently.  It evaded photography apparently–and I see these are also lined with Thai fishing pant fabrics!

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But honestly, linings both fugly and lovely (to my eye) have been created.  Some fugly fabrics became lovely linings.

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Somewhat faded batiks from a garage sale.

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Screenprints of a cockatoo, from the same garage sale!  One of was destined for a friend whose taste is deliriously nineteen eighties even now, bless her. She loves it.

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Oh my.  Well, that was a major incursion into the stash.  Lots of bags were gifted over afternoon tea with a clutch of friends, which was great fun (I like it when people can choose what they really like and will use).  Then more at another celebratory lunch with a different bunch of friends. Others have been stuffed with handspun wool and handed to a friend undergoing horrible cancer treatment who still finds knitting a pleasure; stuffed with yarn for a knitting obsessive who is excited about my most outrageously strange yarns; wrapped around an awkwardly shaped birthday gift for another treasure in my life; and taken home full of clothes by my daughter instead of her using some random plastic bag.  Some have been handed to people who seem like especially strong candidates for some sentimental reason or because of a sense of taste or the sheer wish to give a gift.

As I neared the finish line and my puff started to recede, I realised I had a hessian potato sack with a hole in it awaiting attention.  Converted to a bag, mended and embellished all in one step! Then I tidied up remaining scraps by making the final two bags and called it the end of this particular bag jag.  A pile of bags has gone to Port Augusta to be shared with Adnyamathanha women through her work.  And there’s an end of it, until next time!

 

 

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February 22, 2016 · 12:08 pm

Lessons for spinners, courtesy of Noro

This post arises from a pair of socks I just recently finished, in time for the birthday of my beloved fairy-goddess-son. They started off with a gifted yarn, Noro Taiyo S69.  It’s cotton-wool-polyamide-silk.  Something in me just loves a gift from my beloved becoming a gift to our ever growing and beloved friend.  Here we are at the start, on the beach.

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Casting on.  If you look carefully you’ll see that the colour effects for which Noro are famous must be achieved by spinning, while in many other commercial yarns they are achieved by dyeing after the yarn has been spun.

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Here I am making a little progress watching other people swim, unable to remember why I didn’t bring my bathers. Noro is a Japanese yarn company justly famous for the colours it uses and its selection of yarns that feature a sequence of long, changing colours.  As a person who loves knitting socks from their yarn (whilst always thinking that the fibre miles involved mean I should never do it again), I think the experience offers some tips for the spinner who may wish to create her or his own sock yarn.

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On a beach, at a picnic, on holiday. Home grown basil and backyard hen eggs!

Lesson 1: Three plies?  Why bother?  Noro sells at least two sock yarns that are unplied singles, and this is one of them.  Everything I have learned about how to create one’s own sock yarn suggests that a minimum of three singles should be tightly plied together to create a tough sock yarn.

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Lesson 2: Knots?  What is the problem with knots?  Spinners really try to create one continuous thread.  Novice spinners curse when their thread snaps and requires a splice of some kind when plying.  Noro seems not to care.  You can be knitting away and find a knot right in the middle of a colour sequence.  It isn’t joined up to continue the colour sequence you expected, either.  The knot might join two colours together abruptly and disrupt any repeat colour sequence completely. As happened twice in this ball!

Lesson 3: Vegetable matter–just accept it.  Spinning is a craft that should not be taken up by the squeamish. If you are going to process raw fleece, get your tetanus booster and set out squick meter to low, because any minute you will be dealing with grass seeds, chaff, burrs, seeds, dead beetles, sheep manure, mud and, umm, things you can’t identify… and that might be for the best.  Once I removed a dead mouse from a fleece I was processing.  Hand spinners try to remove this vegetable (and animal) matter from our yarn.  So does Noro.  But Noro sometimes fails, and so do hand spinners.

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Lesson 4: Unpredictable colour changes can be perfect.  When I am knitting Noro, there are always times when I just LOVE the colours.  And other times when I wonder how much longer I will be knitting this unpleasant grey shade of mauve.  Perhaps I should  be less judgmental of my own colour choices.  Would I apply the same scheme of judgments?

Lesson 5: Evenness is overrated.  In a Noro yarn, some sections will be at least double or three times the thickness of others, and slubs are a constant.  I still love knitting Noro, and perhaps I could take the same attitude to any yarns I make that are uneven or slubby?

Alert readers will have begun to suspect that I have a plan to spin sock yarn this year.  This is the only way I’ll have locally sourced fibres or naturally dyed socks, or even both at once.  More soon!

 

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February 15, 2016 · 3:35 pm

Transformation: Bed sheet to handkerchieves and napkins

There has been a casualty at our place.  A lovely, fine, cotton fitted sheet.  It wore through into holes! This is my favourite set of sheets, sadly.  A lovely buttery yellow and a beautiful fabric, bought for a remarkably low price when orphaned in a shop.  I didn’t want to relegate it to a dropsheet (something that protects the floor when you are painting).

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So, now that I have made friends with my roll hemming foot, I decided to practice, and made 45 cm square napkins and handkerchieves.  They look good.  Not perfect, but good!

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Several made it into a bucket of milk and then a dye pot. They are not quite what I had hoped for, but they are fine.  Clearly this cotton was harder to wet than some, and the milk mordant streaked along the lines where they fell into folds as they hung to dry.  That has left some really interesting patterns on the fabric.

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I am wondering whether to leave the remainder plain or action my original idea–an indigo dye pot in the heat of summer and some shibori style stitch resist decoration.  At the moment that feels like more than I can manage. In the meantime, I found some fine vintage looking lawn from an op shop  in the cupboard during a recent (cough!) spate of bag making and decided it was not appropriate for a bag but was perfect for more handkerchieves.  Evidently I am on the verge of becoming an evangelist of the hanky.  Brace yourselves!

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February 7, 2016 · 7:47 pm

Transformation: Pants to bags

Once upon a time, (well, it was just before the year 2000 began at a folk festival, actually), I bought this pair of Thai fishing pants.  I had never seen a garment like them before, and I had never owned anything hand woven before I made the big decision to buy them.  They have had some mending and a lot of wear, and finally, it has come to this.

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They once had a green pattern, but it has long since washed and worn away. They have been in the cupboard where garments for re-use go awaiting a good idea for a few months. This week I decided that this fabric was too worn to be the outer of a bag, but it would probably make a suitable inner lining. I cut them apart, ripping the beautifully finished seams away from the main fabric and cutting off the hems and tie. The bigger pieces readily made a lining for this bag, cut from fabric left over when I made a dear friend a cabbage print shirt.

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In the end, I sewed together the leftovers and ended up with enough to line two more bags.

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I can’t remember where I got this lovely batik fabric, but I think it was a garage sale. It was square, with a border around the edge. Perhaps a small table cloth?  Perhaps a wrap?

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Now it is three bags!

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As I looked at all that now remains of those much loved pants, I had a thought.  The seams and hems and tie would do a perfectly good job of tying up a dye bundle. And needless to say, I couldn’t stop at four bags!

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February 3, 2016 · 10:42 am

Cotton socks

My mother can’t do wool socks.  It took her a while to explain this to me. Partly because the first pair I knit her were made from crochet cotton (because I was ignorant and it was cheap and pretty).  Those socks may have violated some key principles of received sock knitting wisdom, but eventually she told me that they were her favourites, that she likes that they are short, and that she loves to wear them when she gardens.  The more complicated ones I knit from fabulous sock yarns made mostly of wool, she can neither wear nor bear to part with.  But I am glad she finally told me so I didn’t have to foist this curious arrangement on her with yet more unwearable pairs!2015-12-26 11.50.56

Quite some time ago I was wondering what might work for her and looking for a wool free sock yarn I had managed to find in the shop on some previous visit.  There was no more wool free sock yarn to be had that day in that place.  However, I came across this Misti alpaca, cotton and silk blend.  I cast on with enthusiasm, and then they sat languishing for months due to concern that I might not have enough yarn to finish them.  It is hard to say what it could be about a long period in the naughty corner that might cause more yarn to magically appear in the knitting bag, but apparently hope springs eternal!

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These socks came on holiday part finished, and they were completed in double quick time.  They have been handed over and now I’ve even had a cheery text from Mum which shows them on her feet.  She says they fit, and more importantly, that they are comfy!  I am sure  a moment after she took that snap, she whipped them off her too-hot feet and set them aside to wait for winter…

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January 27, 2016 · 10:32 am

Holiday sock knitting

There came a point in our Late December-early January holiday travels when I turned to my beloved and admitted that I might run out of sock yarn.  Is this the time for a confession?  I pre-wrote posts that could auto-load while we were gone.  And I brought back a pile of knitted goodies which might take some time to show and tell.

But back to the holiday yarn shortage.  I had all the sock yarn I owned with me, except a mighty skein of handspun sock yarn that is finer than 4 ply (fingering).  I have lost my nerve on that for the time being.  I had reached the end of the sock yarn in my stash. I did have a lot of yarn with me, bound for things other than socks, but still.  I suspect I am harder company in the absence of sock yarn, because my beloved insisted on acquiring more as a Christmas gift, and fast!

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Pretty soon I had worked my public transport app skillz and got us to a yarn shop in Melbourne.  We left with three balls of sock yarn.  Nothing local or naturally dyed about it, ahem. Here the first sock is out at a lunch of kedgeree.

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What a fun knit the first pair were… holiday time is knitting time, so they were finished in Coogee at a friend’s house in super quick time. Needless to say the second pair were cast on without delay.

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And now this pair have gone to live with one of our treasured friends.  You have to love people who get a text message asking if they want a pair of hand knit socks and demanding to know the length of their foot who respond enthusiastically and with the required information.  You know, because socks are such urgent stuff.  In midsummer!

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