Tag Archives: gifts

August 6, 2018 · 9:43 am

Tuffsock Knitting: Indigo dyed Suffolk

This post is part of the Tuff Socks Naturally project, an open, collaborative project exploring more sustainable alternatives to superwash and nylon in sock yarn. You can join in on the discussion on this blog or on the blog of the fabulous Rebecca at Needle and Spindle or on instagram using the hashtag #tuffsocksnaturally.

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You may remember this yarn.  The fibre is Suffolk, one of the traditional sock knitting Downs breeds, in this case from Kangaroo Island, off the coast of  South Australia. I dyed it in a fructose based indigo vat as flicked locks, then carded and spun it three ply with a tight twist.  

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I am not sure that this yarn will work for everyone.  It is not silky soft, and the factors that make wool comfortable for one person and prickly to the next person are very individual. On the other hand it is robust, springy and feels resilient–I love that kind of springiness in  a sock personally.  So I had a conversation with a couple of friends about this issue and settled on one who was delighted at the prospect when she had the chance to hold it in her hands.  It was midwinter here so she received these socks gleefully!

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I have had trouble capturing the blue in photos.  It’s truest in the top picture of the wound ball.  I think these will be very robust and very warm socks and I’ll have to wait to see how the reviews from the recipient pan out!

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June 3, 2018 · 9:20 pm

Purple socks!

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I’ve been wanting to knit socks for a friend for some time–she feels the cold and her beloved has let me know knitted gifts would be welcomed.  But to be honest, I think that I’ve been worried somehow that I wouldn’t do a good enough job.  At the same time, it’s obvious that if I said that to her she’d laugh. She has faced immense grief this year and I wanted to give her something comforting. I decided that tuffsocks would not hit that mark and one day as I was passing the Button Bar I stepped in and purchased some commercial yarn.

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I do love the old colour changing sock yarn, and with hours of meetings several days in a row, and some lengthy bus journeys, the first one grew like topsy.

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Here is the second, parked on my coat on some bus or other. Now in all honesty, I planned to finally make two socks that were alike.  But in the end, when I finished one in a meeting, I was quite prepared to graft the toe but quite unprepared to stop knitting, and it would have been super inappropriate to sit in a meeting trying to find the right stage in the colour sequence.

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So–I hope she can enjoy these quite mismatched socks.  The yarn quite frankly made me think my handspun has advantages–this yarn was splitty, contained a knot, though with the colour sequence maintained better than sometimes happens, and was tangled and messy and hard to manage for almost the entire duration.

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But the colour sure was fun.

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May 24, 2018 · 10:18 am

Leftovers socks

IMAG6439Trying to be thoughtful about sock yarns in a period where I knit socks constantly and quite quickly has led to all manner of interesting insights.  This post introduces another.  At present it is not an option for me to leave home without a sock in progress.  I’m spending a lot of time on public transport–which is good, but requires management.  I go to a lot of meetings and presentations–which is sometimes good and sometimes challenging. Socks help me!

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The tuffsocksnaturally project has been one great outcome of trying to move in an eco-friendly direction–and I have sock yarn spinning to show! However, creating sock yarn involves slowly spinning (I can’t take that on the bus!), dyeing, washing and converting skeins to balls.  All of which is pleasurable time spent but certainly does take time. In the case of my Suffolk adventures, I also need to be confident the intended recipient will enjoy and be able to comfortably wear the resulting socks, which requires some chat.  BUT: if there is some point where I do not have a handspun sock ready to knit and I reach the end of my current pair–I need a plan!

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A while back, I went to a two day meeting in Parramatta, which is now part of greater Sydney.  The tree and the sculpture are images from my roaming around in the few daylight hours I had outside a meeting there.  As I prepared to leave for an entire two days of meeting, with airport waiting, airtrain trips, waiting in train stations, and who knows what kind of night in a hotel, I ran out of sock yarn.  So I decided to knit leftover yarns in the same colour family into socks.  Yes, dear Readers, I am blessed with friends who have said to me “just knit up whatever you’ve got!  I’m not bothered if you use up your scraps” or, when I asked another friend if he fancied socks that were knit this way, said that sounded like fun.  To me this sounded a lot more attractive as a knitting project than some of the patterns I see popping up from time to time directed at people like me who have knit a lot of socks and have leftover sock yarns (some of which go to the recipient so they can darn in the future but some of which stay with me).

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And that is how one of my friends came to get these socks, which were received with a squeak of glee!

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May 1, 2018 · 5:36 pm

More striped socks…

You probably remember the last pair of Kit Couture Garpen Socks–not so long ago!  There was quite a bit of wool left over.  So I decided I could surely make a second pair (and pulled out my scales just to check).  here I am at the railway station on my way to work with a cunning plan (also, a pair of socks to post, lunch and a chia pudding in a vegemite jar–I love a good plan).

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Here I am making headway on a night train.

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Then came the sudden realisation (in a day long meeting) that, in fact, these socks were not going to match at all.  I’d like to pretend this was a decision I made, but it was not.  At this point I decided it would not be OK to rip out in a meeting, and quite frankly, I didn’t fancy ripping out anyway and–I quite like them.  Though that is the self serving attitude, I admit!

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And here they are in all their glory…

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Mismatched or glorious?

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April 27, 2018 · 5:54 pm

Rinse and repeat

If these socks look familiar, its because a beloved friend brought me two skeins of lovely wool naturally dyed by Aurinkokehra. I knit a pair of socks from the first skein not so long ago and in the end, could not resist knitting another.  I’ve repeated the calf shaping, reinforcing stitches,  and the cotton and silk reinforcing thread.  The result is equally delightful.  There is something about yarn that changes colour as you knit that I really enjoy.  Such a well chosen gift for me!  These socks contain no nylon and no superwash–so I guess that they might be #tuffsocksnaturally but the yarn is certainly not my handspun.

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March 30, 2018 · 5:09 pm

Garpen Socks

There has been quite some sock knitting going on–with more than one pair on the needles at once.  years ago I always had one pair of 4 ply (fingering) and one pair of 8 ply (DK) socks on the needles at once.  At this stage I think teh driver has been wanting to make sure one pair is always at a stage where I can knit without looking in meetings, as my life contains many of them at present.   These are the Kit Couture Garpen socks.  The site is available in English (translation button in the top right of the screen) but so far I think this specific pattern is only available in Danish.  I decided I could probably manage without the translation!IMAG6170

Here they are in Tasmania.

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And, of course, on public transport!

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They have rather lovely details.

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I believe that after an awkward start I managed to get the colour changes for the stripes looking quite neat!

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Then right at the end I took my eye off the diagram, in which the toe would have been apricot.  I am fascinated by these moments in which I sometimes catch myself with a perception of something (here, a sock pattern) that is so convincing I assume it is correct.  But the pattern says otherwise when eventually consulted (after this pair were completed).  Never mind–I doubt the recipient minds at all and they are ready to keep her toes warm through our winter as autumn is here, at least some of the time!

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March 13, 2018 · 2:28 pm

Beanies!

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In the absence of being able to create a longer post… I knit some more beanies with the leftovers from a jumper I knit a while back, with worsted weight (10ply) merino.  These are the TinCanKnits Barley hat pattern.

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In the end, I sent them to my daughter, who has taken up yachting and therefore needs more snug hats than ever, likes a slouchy fit, and has skipped right over the rumours that redheads shouldn’t wear orange (happily–who makes this stuff up?).  I did not intend to knit them in two colours apiece but that was the yardage I had.  She has sent me sleepy happy photos of herself wearing them but I am not sure she is ready to be an internet sensation so you just get the hats!  I sent two other parcels of hats off–one to a fellow climate activist who is in Canada and needed warmth of all kinds.  The other to friends in Tasmania who will wear some and share others on.

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March 1, 2018 · 4:55 pm

Indigo and woad

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Over summer I worked on my indigo dyeing skills.  In case it isn’t obvious–there will be some time travelling blog posts, because there is a lot I did over December and January that we haven’t discussed, my friends.  Here is my Indigo fructose vat on day 1. The indigo vat went quite well but I felt I still didn’t manage to extract all the blue from it.  Most weekends I dream of cranking it back up, and fail to manage the time.

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This is my latest attempt at a fermentation woad vat.  It does look promising!  I used all of this summer’s  woad harvest (admittedly it was small this year) and one of the hottest weeks of summer and still failed to get the vat to reduce.  I do think constant heat is the thing I really need to sort out for this method–but Jenai Hooke gave me a gift indigo ball at summer dye camp which might kick start the process when I am ready to try again!

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I dyed washed fleece and some fabric, but the main project for the indigo vat was to dye some knitting a dear friend had done.  She describes herself as having a midlife crisis which she is managing, in part, by knitting a lot, I mean A LOT of beanies.  In the last six or twelve months she has scaled up to knitting gauntlets (arm warmers) and sharing the love of those.  She gave me natural white knits and asked if I would indigo dye them and at last I’ve done it.  They are, she said, knit from wool from sheep who grazed in the fields of France where many fascists died.  I think these are for herself.  Since I put them in the mail, I have received a great photo of her wearing them, grinning spectacularly and with a message saying she is taking them to Berlin.  Berlin!  The rest of my pile of beanies has headed out into the world too. Some to a climate activist I know who is studying in Canada and finding the snowy winter and the prospect of climate catastrophe very challenging (she can choose one and gift the others), and a big pile to my dear friends in Tasmania.  When I saw them recently, one of then was wearing a very stretched out eucalyptus dyed beanie that only I could have spun and knit, and clearly wears beanies all year round.  And, they know a lot of cash strapped people in Tassie who might feel the same need.  I figure they will know what to do with a pile of hand knit happiness.

 

 

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February 21, 2018 · 7:57 pm

Bags 2

Did you really think I could stop at… oh… ten or twelve bags (especially as I was on holiday)?  Naturally, I could not.  I went to the Guild and there was a pile of denim offcuts.  You know how it is.

They all turned out to be different denims, each one reasonably narrow but the width of the bolt.  No concern to me.  I paired some with a yellow open weave linen (I think) I have inherited.  I made several of these and they look quite elegant.

This patch was found on the footpath in Melbourne in December. It seemed wrong to leave it there to the wind, rain, mud and passing shoes and dogs, until it found its way into the stormwater drain.

And this bag is made from a piece of fabric my mother-out-law passed on to me in the last year.

On the inside, all manner of scraps and bits and pieces, and of course–more pockets!

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February 19, 2018 · 7:43 pm

Bags 1

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One day at Guild, one of my friends gifted me two pairs of worn out cargo pants, in case I’d like to find a way to reuse them. Some people really know you!  They were made of tencel or some similar wood pulp based fibre.  They had been much worn, like a favourite garment.  And they had so many pockets!  Ones with zips, some that were more of a welt pocket… some that were stitched shut and had never been ripped open for use–lots to play with.  So I cut them up, extracted the cotton drawstring cords for later use, and began piecing the intact fabric into bag linings and likewise, the pockets.

There was an entire series of bark cloth curtain fabric bags.  I used up the boomerang bags patches I was given by one of the Adelaide organisers a while back pretty quickly.  Then I did a series with the remaining secondhand IKEA fabric my daughter gave me a while back (the orange and white stripes).  They match my ironing board cover and they are extra large.

Finally, I converted some fabric I remember buying at Paddy’s market in Melbourne at least 20 years ago (cough, maybe it was 30 years ago) into about 4 more bags.  I must have been reliving my childhood as an admirer of ancient Egypt when I bought this, I think.  I vaguely remember feeling obliged to buy something even though I couldn’t spare the cash at that time (it must have been the nature of the interaction with the stallholder).  The print gestures in that direction, but I really can’t see it as a garment.  Some of these bags have already gone to friends, and others await their ultimate destination.

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