Fiber & Friends #1

In spite of my good intentions, I just couldn't manage to blog during the Net Loft Fiber & Friends event in Cordova AK. It was all I could manage while attending daylong classes to poop out a few Instagrams; hope you enjoyed them. But I do want to tell  you about it all, so here goes in a post-happening series of posts.

Because the ferry schedule is so awkward, (so awkward, indeed, that the web site is hopelessly out of date and you'd better phone them if you're serious about going there) I had to arrive a day ahead of the start. This turned out to be a useful opportunity to scope out the town and environs. And at the Chinese restaurant just before I crossed the street to sign in, this was my fortune cookie:

The first Saturday and Sunday: a two-day workshop about hat design. Whaat? Two days to figure out how to knit a topper? Well, yes, if your teacher is the brilliant Bonne Marie Burns.

She used the humble knit beanie to give us insight into the design process of all knit garments. This means some serious and diligent swatching (stitch and row), and serious thought about sizing, materials, construction, and an historical detour into the development of the knit hat from the 1400s.

She taught us how the math of the top decreases rules the process, and how the designer can fiddle, fudge, frog, and maybe some other f-words, too, to make inspiration mesh with stitch counts and create a realistic plan for a real product.

We learned about using tear sheets for inspiration, and wrote our own design concept statements, followed by the hard graft of the actual plan for the design.

 

We measured heads, swatched swatches, swatched potential stitch patterns, tried out this 'n' that, so that by the end of the two days, I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do, and a definite plan for it,  but had not cast on a serious stitch yet. Eventually I did cast on, and in fits and starts and odd moments managed to make most of what I call the rough draft version of my hat.

The Big Idea was to make a 4-panel hat featuring a scallop shell texture motif in each one. The shell was based on one in an Alice Starmore sweater, Cape Cod by name. Executed in a different gauge and fiber, however, it was a miserable squashed caricature of a shell, so needed a good bit of revising and rescaling. Likewise, the panel dividers went through several iterations, as did the crown decrease method. I can now say with confident experience that as the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the proof of the pattern is in the knitting. You just don't know what it will look like till you know what it looks like. 

Here's the finished product, with rough draft huddled below.

 3/4 view:

 And the top. Just love that p2tog "button" as the center finish:

I have to say I'm really proud and pleased with myself, and massively grateful to Bonne Marie for all she taught us.

The Retreat Goes Forward

Friends, has this ever happened to you? You make meticulous plans for a project, let's say just for a random example, banging out a sweater at a weekend knitting retreat. You print out your pattern, order and receive your yarn from exotic foreign sources, swatch, assemble correct needles plus extras just in case, add measuring, cutting, and sewing tools. You pop it all in a bag and haul it off to said retreat.

That was me this weekend, all geared up to #bangoutablaer. (See previous post for all the sweater-banging-out background.) I cast on the minute I arrived at the cabin, and by Friday evening had made excellent progress, to wit: the contrast neck band and lace section.

It may not look like much to you, but lace doesn't get banged out quickly. In fact, some of the lace areas had to be knitted more than once. Let's just say that liquor and lace are not an ideal combination for fast progress. Well, fast and correct progress, anyway.

This being a top-down yoke cardigan, what followed on Saturday was a whole lot of horizontal knitting as the number of stitches expanded for shoulders. At one point there were 300+ stitches per row. By Sunday morning, the yoke was all banged out, sleeve stitches separated and held, then the fronts and back joined for the body of the sweater.

After that, it's just straight back and forth stocking stitch down to the contrast bands that finish off the bottom of the body. By the time I headed home, I had added about another inch to what you see in the photo above and was mightily pleased with myself. The hard, fiddly part was all banged out and the rest would be plain, if fine gauge, sailing.

And Then. And then I check my email when I get home and OMG at the top of the pile is a cheery note from Ravelry inviting me to download a revised corrected version of a pattern in my library--BLAER! Consternation is the polite word for what I felt. Deep, screaming, table-pounding consternation.  From the peak of self-congratulatory progress to the weedy bottom of the Slough of Despond.  Instead of banging out a few more rows before bedtime, I had to compare new and old pattern versions to figure out what had changed. (Note to Ravelry: you might want to help a knitter out by highlighting changed text in a new pattern version. Just sayin'.) Good news/bad news is that I can't find anything different in the size I'm making after (bad news) spending an hour comparing old and new. If something's off in the lace chart--pffft! I've done it and it looks ok, and I'm not going back there. I'm banging on undeterred.

But back to the retreat. As always, it was a joy to be with the amigas, eating delicious meals

Grilled fresh halibut, Mexican spoon bread, and salad, for example, drinking various potations, eating chocolate, soaking in the hot tub, and knitting, knitting, knitting.

Here are the members of our merry band:

Judy, in her regular clothes, banging out a beautiful green Aran sweater.

 Anne, our super host, banging out a Rowan denim gansey.

Jere, showing off her first pair of socks on her beautiful pointed Pilates toes.

Linda, who not only crocheted a scarf, but learned to knit!

Camden working on her heirloom Kaffe Fassett sweater.

You guys are all so beautiful and skilled!

And though we were inside knitting knitting knitting, browsing, and sluicing a lot, we did pop outside from time to time to admire King Mountain across the valley still wearing a lot of its winter snow

and watch the tiny new leaves emerge. They seemed to visibly expand by the hour.

For Good Causes

I've been touched, awed, and amazed recently by a number of knitting designers who have created e-books that support various great causes. I guess my awakening to this was Juniper Moon Farms' The Shepherd and the Shearer, which raised money for the training of artisan sheep shearers. (and no, I haven't finished my Shepherd sweater yet. I took a break from it, but I'll get going again soon, I promise.)

The Yarn Harlot proved to the world the power that a multitude of knitters can wield and the good that it can do when she rounded us up to form Knitters Without Borders, which to date has contributed well over $1,000,000 to Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres. Really, with a statement like this, how can you resist?

By any North American standard, I am not a wealthy woman. Still, there has never been a day that I went hungry or wondered where I would put my kids to bed. I choose between my clothing in the morning and at least once a week I throw away food that went bad before we could eat it, buying fresh without even feeling a pang of decadence. I have never wanted for anything more than "more" of what I already have. I am...to most of the people that the tsunami effected, obscenely wealthy...
As are you.

You could go right now and make a donation. Report it to the Harlot so she can roll it into the KWB total. We'll wait right here till you're done.

.....

So here, for your consideration, are some recent e-publications that will raise funds for some much more obscure, yet wonderful causes:

Kate Davies is just one of many designers who have contributed to a pattern collection to support the Gawthorpe Collection, a British charity dedicated to the preservation and exhibition of Miss Rachel Kay-Shuttleworth's textile collection and sharing the skills and techniques represented there. The pattern collection is available on Ravelry here, and, I'm sure, from the designers and other online sources.

Next is Deb Robson, whom you may be acquainted with from her magnum opus The Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook as well as The Field Guide to Fleece and other works. To fund a year's study for her in Shetland learning all she can about Shetland sheep, Donna Druchanas has headed up a group of designers to produce a pattern collection e-book, Dreaming of Shetland.

 Besides the patterns, there are little essays by some of the designers giving background on their patterns and/or their relationship with Deb Robson. The most touching, to me, came from Priscilla Gibson-Roberts, who, despite problems with vision and dexterity, wanted to contribute a pattern for a mini decorative sock. When she threw her 000 needles and lace-weight yarn across the room in frustration, a friend came up with a sample she had knitted many years ago. Dreaming of Shetland is available from the book's web site linked above, from Ravelry, and elsewhere.

My third offering is from Cat Bordhi, one of the most amazing and creative minds in knitting today. If I get started on what she's done with shapes and techniques, we'll never get down to her e-book, which is both a new expression of her genius and a stunning cause to support. Here--I'll let Cat explain it all to you:

A gentler way to treat cancer AND warm ingenious slippers for the whole family? What are you waiting for? Get the book from Cat or Ravelry. 

And finally, one of the many advantages of these e-books is that you can, upon purchase, have them included in your Ravelry library, to be downloaded to any device, anywhere you are. Ain't the Interwebs grand?!?!?!?!

The Knit Goes On

My hat-a-thon for the Mountain Huts hat sale is over, and it's on to bigger things. You still can go to the silent auction if you're reading this on or before May 10, 2013. Loussac Library in Anchorage, 6-7 pm is the hat auction before the big meeting and slide show.

But planning and making the hats was so much fun, I'm already plotting what I could do for next year. A fish hat? A mountain hat? Breast hat? Another, even crazier mohawk? The possibilities are very exciting!

Meanwhile, the knit goes on. Sixareen Cape is slowly growing. It's fair isle; it's fine gauge; it's going to take a while.

So I started another project, a Kaffe Fassett-designed striped sweater. Plain stockinette no-brainer stitching, portable with only 2 balls to carry around at a time, peasy, right?

I loved the colors the minute that photo slammed into my eyes. And of course it would--Mr. F has a unique way with color, though usually his designs are crazy complicated with a zillion intarsia bobbins. But this is just stripes of alternating varigated yarns (color varigations also designed by Fassett, too, naturally). The whole thing was sold as a kit, which made it a much better deal than buying pattern and yarn separately. What's not to like?

The pattern is what not to like. I had already decided on a different neck than the cowl from the get-go. It looks fetching on the model, but she's probably 6'3", and I'll bet she's a lot neater than most people when she eats soup.  Fortunately,  I have been tricked by patterns before and learned from the experience(s). So I read the whole thing through, contemplating each instruction carefully. Good thing. Right off the bat there was the overall stripe prescription. The picture is a 4x4 stripe, that is, 4 red, 4 dark. The pattern says 4 red, 2 dark. Whaat?? I scrutinized the picture with a magnifying glass. Definitely 4x4. Scrutinized the bag of kit yarn. Exactly half and half. So if I unquestioningly followed the pattern, I would have a serious yarn deficit about halfway through.

At this point, the pattern is a mere suggestion. I've already got what I wanted from the kit--beautiful stripe effect in a stunning color combination. So--4" bottom ribbed welt? Too wide. 2 1/2" is much better. Using both yarns together to knit the selvedge stitch? A recipe for a fat column of stitches that won't make a good seam--forget it. 29" total length? I don't think so. (See 6'3" model remark above). And I've got plenty of time to contemplate the actual neckline. For sure it won't be a cowl!