I’m pretty sure the knitting is finished on the Heather Ale Cardigan, but I can’t be sure yet.  Like most  knitted lace, it looked pretty sloppy and unappealing unblocked.   Unlike most knitted lace, this sweater really needs to fit nicely to be worth having.  I think I stopped at the right places.  I blocked it using the lace blocking wires my wonderful Aunt got me this Christmas.

I love the light in the second shot–very fake-old-photo-montage, no?

Now I just get to wait for it to dry, hope it fits the way I planned, and think about what sort of beads to use on the points and which sweater to knit next.

I finished that string pieced potholder, and made another ten sock bags, but then the evil cough caught up with me.

I’m trying to think about spindle, dance shoe, and felted bag designs, but I’m not thinking as clearly as I’d like.

Embroidery was my first craft, as I explained a few years ago in a book about fiber arts. I feel I give it short shrift these days, using it now and again to adorn something else I’m flirting with, but rarely working steadily on a project for more than a day or two, and even more rarely finishing anything other than a little flourish on another project.

My lack of drawing skills holds me back. Once I have a design, I can embroider it or carve it into leather. But I can’t get what’s in my head down on to paper–there’s a gaping hole in my process, and I have to rely on friends to bridge that gap. I can’t explain the disconnect, but it’s there and it’s one of the only things that I really regret about being who I am. If there were only a pill I could take . . .

I also run into a stylistic problem with a lot of embroidery. Some of the stuff I’m best at stitching isn’t actually to my taste. I own very little of my own work for that reason. The Jacobean crewel piece above is a prime example. For the first time ever, I bought a kit to see if I could still work my needles as I had as a kid. I can. And once I finish, what will I do with it? Like so much of what I make, I’ll give it to someone and hope they appreciate the work that went into. And I’ll worry that they don’t.

Another stalled project? Perhaps one of the most ludicrous things I’ve started. I will finish it eventually, I guess, but it will take a long time. It’s a crazy quilt with an entire queen sized flat sheet for the foundation. All of the fabrics are scraps left over from clothing I’ve made for friends. And the bigger designs were all drawn for me by friends. I’ve been working on it on and off for about 15 years. It’s a riot of colors. It’s too much. It’s too big to work on comfortably. It forces me to abandon so many of my natural sensibilities about art and craft.

A lot of the other embroidery I’ve done is utilitarian, in a sense. Pieces on garments, stitched heavily–lending an almost tapestry-like effect–so that they last through hard work and washing. This piece was on a dress for years. Eventually I’ll attach it to something new. I’ve actually made it twice. The first time, I needed something to work on while I was studying in the UK one summer in college. I finished it on the flight back, and learned upon landing that a good friend of the family had given birth to twin girls–one a brunette and one a red head. I stitched that first version into a pillow and presented it off to their mother.

I’ve gone searching for more inspiration for embroidery recently, and I think I’ve found some good stuff. We’ll see if my will can overcome my whims.

I’ve been plotting a great trip out to Chicago for a dance weekend and visits with some wonderful friends, and I am giddy with excitement.  Giddy, I say!

And in that spirit, I figured I should hop online to post some clogging cue sheets.  Kate’s Mare is one of the coolest clogging steps I know, and it’s notated here, along with some other good ones.  Don’t worry if they make no sense to you–if you’re learning to clog with the peeps, I’ll explain it all next time we get together.  If you want to understand immediately but it’s making your head explode, email me. 

Download cue_sheets.pdf

And now I’m heading back to the sweat shop.  My lace cardigan has two full sleeves and six inches of body below them, and there are another 10 or 12 sock bags in progress on my sewing table.  And all of that counts as prep for replacing all of the floors, right?  Sure it does!  Using stash=cleaning.  Soon, I’ll even be able to dance in my fiber-arts studio.  Though clogging while sewing sounds mighty dangerous. 

Brush heel slap heel shuffle step leap
Brush chug slide stomp brush chug slide stomp
Brush heel slap heel shuffle step leap
Brush chug slide stomp brush chug slide stomp
And a basic

In footwork news: I taught a very informal clogging class for some friends Sunday, and it was an absolute hoot.  It felt great to be encouraging other folks to stomp about.  I think percussive dance is particularly appealing to folks with some strong tendencies towards rambunctiousness, and most of my friends could be described that way.  In fact, we had so much fun that we decided it’s going to turn into a biweekly thing, complete with live music and potluck.

Now for the handwork.  Two giant potholders,  each about 10″ square.  They’re both made up entirely of scraps from other projects, which always makes me very happy.  The Crazy patched one is actually greener than it looks–winter morning light is very blue near us, for some reason.  Both are entirely machine-stitched, which is still making me sort of twitchy.  But they’re a quick use of leftovers, and making these will force me to get much better at quilt binding, my least favorite activity these days.  I’m not sure what I’ll do with this pair once the second one is finished, but I may go make a few million if they continue to be so fun.

In all its rumpled loveliness–my lace cardigan.

I finished that first sleeve last night, and am a couple of inches into the second one.  This is going to be one warm sweater.  I’m so glad it’s lace.  I think it would be nigh unwearable otherwise.

And some felt patchwork experimentation is underway.  I’ve been playing with feltable wool scraps for a while now, looking for a good way to use recycled sweaters without stockpiling dozens of thrifted bits and bobs.  I think I have a plan now.

I cut a few felted pieces into squares, and then joined them by stitching them to little scraps of twill.  The twill should give the finished item a fair amount of stability.

Bulbs are breaking through all over the place, and I’m cranking out green things.  The Heather Ale Cardigan has shoulders and half of a sleeve.  I love it so much I plan to ask it to prom.

My hedgerow mitts are done, just in time to get a decent amount of wear before we truly enter Spring.

I love them beyond reason.

And some new socks are on the needles.  This is a skein of Fortissima Colori that makes me very, very happy.

When I’m not knitting, I’m piecing simple little things, like potholders.  And making giant pots of Green Chile.

It may all be part of a trend.  An extended, rather repetitive thing with me, the green.

The small linen quilt is finally finished.  It took about 20 minutes of quilting.  Sadly, it also took about 6o miles of driving, spread out into many, many trips to regional fabric stores.  I’m not proud of that.

For whatever reason, I started the quilting on this top using just the right green thread, ignoring the fact that said thread came on a small spool, and I just had the one, and that not all shops stock the stuff.    So I’ve spent far too much time looking for enough thread to finish this quilt over the last month or two.  And, being me, I bought lots of fabric and other thread while searching for the spool of thread I needed.

When I finally found the elusive thread, I bought all they had, which wasn’t actually that much.  I predict I will decide to use it again for a thread-intensive item, like the big linen quilt to follow this small one.  And then I will be stuck in this guilt-inducing, ludicrous situation again.  Sigh.

Still–pretty quilt!  I’m not sure what I’ll do with it, but I’m glad I made it.

My head is full of ideas for other wonderful projects.  I spent yesterday at the American Craft Council show in Baltimore with a bunch of friends.  I bought nothing but some greeting cards, but I saw amazingly beautiful things.  Including the glass spinning wheel that caused such a buzz a while back. Ruadhan and I started asking the artist about spinning on it, learned that he’d only put commercially-produced string on it to make sure it would draw, and both cringed because we hadn’t any unspun fiber to force on him.  His aside of “They’re spinners . . .” to his booth-mate probably said all he needed to say.  Clearly, other spinners have met this talented artist and tried to either make a spinner out of him or weasel the wheel away from him.

D is for daffodil

I’m cheating a bit–these photos are from last year’s garden.  I’ve
been waiting for this year’s to bloom, but they’re just not going to be ready in time.

I love daffodils because I love Wales, and mythology, and spring.  It is that simple.

These plain old big yellow daffodils are iconic, and lovely, and necessary.  I’ve been naturalizing them for years, often in other people’s land.  Some people paint graffiti on things–I plant flowers and saplings about the neighborhood as a very Civil form of disobedience.

I’ve become increasingly enamored with cultivars like these over the last few years.  It started as a need to just extend daffodil season a bit, and now I’m unabashedly flirting with accepting those pale petals for their own beauty.

I can’t drive on Valentine’s Day.  I’ve done it six times, and three of those times I’ve been in very bad car accidents.  I’m not a particularly superstitious person, but I can do basic math and those are horrible odds.  So I arranged to take today off.  I also arranged to have PT and my doctor-mandated allergy test Wednesday afternoon, thinking I could use today to recover from both–limping plus angry needle-marks all over one’s arms do not a good impression make, after all.  I woke up yesterday to learn that the ice storm we had the night before had frozen my car doors shut, so I ended up calling in sick rather than adding terrible ice-removal tasks to my extra-crappy commute and half day at work.  A morning of leisure to prep for my four hours of allergy tests and PT that afternoon seemed a good option.  Cue accidental mid-week break, complete with power outages, errands, bad roads, scratch and intradermal tests, and stability tests (though only for my leg–no one looked into my mental state).

Lo and behold, my immune system decided to switch it up on me.  When I was tested for allergies a few years ago, I tested positive for allergies to dust mites and dogs.  Yesterday, I learned I was no longer allergic to dogs, but was suddenly allergic to cats.  Now, I know dogs can be very very smart, and I’m sure Kayo and Scott have both used some amount of their mental prowess to entirely win me over to the dog side.  But such a drastic shift of allergies?  What the hell would cause that?  Are Yarrow and Speedwell really so different from Scath that their dander is poison to me when his wasn’t?  I’m so confused.

Apart from the running around, I’ve spent the last couple of days on a number of worthwhile projects.  Priority one: trying to help out our young pin oak, which was having a bad time with the ice.  Pin oaks hold their leaves through the winter, so suffer more than most deciduous trees in such  storms.

The whole tree was bent pretty dramatically towards the ground Wednesday morning, so I did some judicious ice-removal, while simultaneously convincing neighbors of my continuing insanity.  Thankfully the ice has melted and this young tree is standing up mostly straight again.

Priority two: prove I still knit.

This is the lace cardigan I’m making for the sake of a  beer label.   I asked Aes and Phalen to brew some heather ale, and they agreed, while encouraging me to perhaps grow hops and heather and also do a label shoot for them.  So I have to come up with a lovely outfit that seems to evoke heather, and maybe Scotland, and the like.  So, of course, greens and purples and knitted lace.  I need to speed up, I guess, since it’s not that long until heather season.  Though, being lace, the sweater is further along than it looks.  I’m using a free pattern from Elann, though I’m not using the second lace pattern for the sleeves, and I am going to make it longer than the original.  It’s worked from the top down with raglan shaping, so the alterations should be dead easy.

And Hedgerow Mitts:

(Ignore the bump over my wrist there–my friend Tara gave me a beautiful bracelet, and I can’t bring myself to take it off right now.)
I started off a second pair of Hedgerow socks in some lovely Fearless Fibers sockyarn I had on hand. But then thought it was silly to make another pair so similar to my first, noticed that I was going to have too few stitches, and accidentally designed some mitts.  It may be a special kind of laziness that makes a knitter design a new garment rather than start over upon realizing things aren’t working out.  The first mitt is finished, and the second one is humming along.  I really like how this stitch patterns feels as mitts–it is very stretchy, and reminds me of those arthritis-therapy gloves turned pretty.

Priority three: shop for books and eat great food with my Mom. Nuff said.

Priority four: cut big pieces of fabric into smaller pieces of fabric.  I’m trying to do more with red, because the red-loving people need bags too.

Priority five: Order flooring!  Tonight, we buy bamboo.  Lots and lots of bamboo.  I know some of you gals go for jewelry, flowers, and candy–and I certainly like all of those things–but this is the best V-Day plan ever.   We get to replace carpets that literally make me sick with environmentally-sound bamboo floors, thus increasing the value of the house and making dancing at home easier, while employing a dear friend to do the work, all the while financing the project with the settlement money from that terrible car accident Scott was in a few winters ago.  It’s like a home-improvement hat trick.

Please remind me I said that when we have to pack up everything we own so that the flooring can be installed, ok?

C is for Contra dance, and Clogging–two long-standing passions of mine (and two things that are downright tough to photograph).

I haven’t talked about either enough here on the blog, because I’ve been dealing with a few chronic injuries over the last several years, and it’s been keeping me off the dance floor more than I would like.  But I should talk about dance.  When someone asks me about myself, “folk dancer” is one of the first descriptors I blurt out.  I dance in my dreams.  I was in a clogging troupe in college, and it changed so much about my life I barely have words to describe it.  Teaching other people to dance is an avocation for me–so many of the dance forms I love can only be transmitted from dancer to dancer over years of interaction, and I hate to think any of the steps would fall out of the communal repertoire  So when I got the go-ahead from my physical therapist, I  checked out the Glen Echo dance schedule so I could start getting back on the floor and also take some photos for you crazy kids.

And that’s when I saw that my friend Morna was in town from Montana to call the Friday night dance, with the open band as her musicians.  Talk about serendipity.

The dance community at Glen Echo has been hoofing for decades, hosting two weekly contras and scads of other social dances year-round.  I started dancing there when I was 16 or 17–I can’t count the number of hours of fun I’ve had, or the steps and dances I’ve learned, or the fantastic bands and callers I’ve heard.

And as if getting to dance while one of my good friends is calling wasn’t good enough, Brooke and the kids were there too, as were my friends Joni and Adrian, and several other dancers I haven’t seen in far too long.

When I Contra dance, I clog.  When I first started hitting percussive licks on the floor of the Spanish Ballroom, I can’t say it was generally well-received.  Back in the day, clogging was seen as anathema to the soft, whooshing sound of feet gliding over the dance floor during a contra.  I was too loud for many of the dancers–my feet were loud, and my hair was unnaturally bright, and my clothes were just plain too strange.  Times have changed.  Lots of folks clog during the contras these days, and some guys wear skirts, and I no longer look like the punk rocker I still am at heart.

(Morna took pictures of my feet, and I took pictures of hers–it’s like yarn-porn, but with worn old dancing shoes)

In the spirit of me dancing more, and teaching other folks to clog (while also reducing allergens and improving the resale value of our house) we’re gearing up to remove all of the carpeting in our house and replace it with 1,400 square feet of bamboo.  Hot dog, I can’t wait.  Come for lessons, friends.  You just have to know how to walk and how to count to eight.

We’re currently without internet access at home, hence the lack of posting and emailing.  We had some big wind storms, and the power is back but the web still eludes us.  If you’re trying to email me, well, sorry.  I’ll try to catch up as best I can on someone’s DSL box.

Coming soon: proof of knitting on two separate projects, and my C post in the ABC along. 

Now go vote in the primaries, you Virginians and Marylanders, and whoever else is at the end of the primary queue with us.