This is one of the warmest winters I ever remember in Virginia, and I disapprove.  I heartily disapprove.  And apparently I’m demonstrating my disapproval by making blankets I don’t need.  I’ve worked on nothing but blankets for weeks, and yet I’m kicking off the quilt night after night, wishing for a hard freeze and snow that demands attention.

The wool-along blanket was pretending to be nearly finished, but I decided I had to pick apart the squares and take out a band of lace that just wasn’t right.  Geometry smacked me right upside the head, and everything went wonky and wrong. All my talk a few weeks ago about my ease with knitting was hubris.  I should have seen this coming.  But, still, the yarn won’t be ruined and the squares have come back together nicely. 

All of my despair as I crocheted the squares together proved worth it. Unzipping the seams was much easier than picking apart feet of mattress stitch. And I think repetition is making me less angsty about crochet. I am worried about making another rank of squares for the outside. I’m on the 25th square now, and still have tons of yarn left. Using all 24 of the wools will make for a giant blanket.  Giant.  Do people use bed-sized afghans?

I also zipped through a queen-sized sweater-felt pieced blanket.  I’m not sure whether or not I’ll back and quilt it.  I made nine-patch squares with larger pieces of felt, and then sashed with strips of the smaller squares.

It’s a bit homely, but very warm. Also very interesting to the wool cat.

I think this is my favorite square. That waviness of the construction stitches is what makes me hesitant to quilt it.

My dear friend Etaine was kind enough to give me a book made by her sister Michelle, who happens to be an amazing weaver and dyer and blogger. She dyed the yarn with woad and wove the fabric, which is an emboldened tabby called “Lover’s Knot.” I think I’ve spent more time cuddling the book than writing in it so far. I need to stop keeping it so precious, but but but . . .

I finished weaving the yardage I was working on, which doesn’t really look at all different than it did on the loom. I broke down and bought a stand for the loom, and I’m so glad I did. It made the work go much more quickly. Now, I’m trying to steel myself to waulk the fabric.

Finally, I finally started on a gallery wall. I’ve been meaning to hang a bunch of stuff here since the big painting and flooring spree a few years ago, but I kept hesitating. I love it.

Maybe Yarrow will rate a frame of his own.

Oh, how I meant to show you process photos of this project. But I dinna. Because. So, instead, I’ll give you peek into how messed up my process can be. If you don’t want to wade into the crazy, look at the pretty pictures and move along–no one will be the wiser.

In short, I watched some videos and read some articles on foundation paper piecing and was reminded that I found it torturous when I tried it in the past, but that the results could be so very beautiful. Coincidentally, I also decided to finally visit Jinny Beyer’s quilting shop, which is practically in my neighborhood, to theoretically pick up some Christmas presents. Lo and behold, I was able to get some beautiful handmade silk scarves for the women in my family and I picked up a foundation paper piecing kit for a tote. It was on sale, and the samples were gorgeous, and I am a sucker for blues and greens. It seemed like a great opportunity to stretch my skills and make something lovely, and that if I hated it I could donate it and never see it again.

At the beginning, the whole project set my teeth on edge. I felt like I was being hazed. Since it was a kit that involved small amounts of fabric, I was concerned that pre-washing the fabric would leave me with too little of some of the colors to complete the spectrum correctly. I am a pre-washer. It is a nigh-religious dedication. Telling me not to pre-wash fabrics is akin to telling me to stop brushing my teeth every day. Right, so I couldn’t pre-wash the fabrics, but I would live through it.

And, while I constantly piece on foundations, I piece on fabric foundations for stability and to make geometry behave itself. Foundation piecing on paper involves so much flipping and sewing blind and ignoring grain and and and . . . Oh, the humanity! These are things garment sewers don’t do. Grain is holy. Grain must be observed and obeyed at all times. But I would have to pretend to forget about the grain.

And the directions were . . . the construction directions themselves were fine, but the cutting chart and foundation pages were originally made for a different color way and rather lazily adapted for the blue colorway. Considering the price of the kit, even on sale, that truly annoyed me. But I cut, and I muddled through the piecing.

And then came the quilting phobia. I feel incapable of free-motion quilting because it’s too much like drawing and I can’t draw. My attempts to steel myself to quilt this in any interesting manner succumbed to my wussyness, and I stitched in the ditch (rather poorly).

But once I got passed my tantrums, I was smitten. The fabrics themselves are lovely. I wouldn’t necessarily have opted for some of these prints, but the quality of the cotton and the clarity and saturation of the dyes are beautiful. And the spectrum itself was selected by someone with real color theory skill. And the points! So fun! If I could wear the bag as a dress, I would. It’s big enough that I may move into it.

Once I was able to stop agonizing over the bag, I jumped into making up the wool-along afghan. I went through my blocked squares and noticed that I had nine squares that were roughly 10″ and the rest are in the 12″ range. Since those smaller squares also happened to be in some of the softer wools and looked nice near each other, I decided to make what’s essentially a central nine patch, border that with simple narrow lace, and then build out with the larger squares. Those lace bands will also allow me to incorporate the few fingering weight skeins I got for some of the breeds.

(For the curious, it’s BFL, CVM, BFL
Polwarth, Columbia/Targhee, Polwarth
Cormo/yak, BFL/Polwarth, Cormo/Yak with BFL embroidery
I dyed all of the blue squares in this portion of the afghan)

And then–this is where I really lost it–I realized that I’d made a relatively complex knitting construction and design decision without a second thought, did some quick calculations, sketched up a plan, and went for it. All while I was recovering from an agonizing sewing project. That isn’t right, see, because I am a sewer who learned to knit a while ago. I’m not a knitter who is experimenting with sewing. Something has gone wrong in my brain, and I find it uncomfortable. I think I’ll blame the election. And possibly cut back on caffeine.

Happy New Year, everyone.

So, I was missing because I was busy, and I was missing because I thought I didn’t have anything much to say, and then I was missing because I was wallowing in wool. I got a rigid heddle loom. That loom plus my discomfort with our lack of winter weather plus some engrossing DVDs turned me into a complete hermit.

My first project is a simple rectangular shawl made with Kroy socks and Paton’s Classic. I used the sock yarn for the warp and just wove simple stripes.

Notice how I said “just wove?”  That’s a lie.  I bounced and giggled and tried to cuddle the fabric while it was still tensioned on the loom.  I told Kaio to look at the fabric over and over again.  (He didn’t seem impressed).  I actually let Yarrow wallow in the finished shawl–supervised, of course–because it seemed wrong not to.  I love warp-faced weaves, but they aren’t soft.  This is soft, and it has a lovely hand, and it’s not even made from anything truly luscious.  I’m holding off on the really fantastic stuff until I get my head around pattern drafts.

If you look at it up close, you can see how the thinner, variegated warp shows through a little bit.  The overall color of the warp is similar to the teal I used for the wider stripes, which is part of the reason the warp is so hidden.  I love the affect.

All that woolen, sheepy yarn turned me back towards my neglected Wool-along afghan.  I worked up a half dozen new squares once my Christmas presents were finished.

Two are Elemental Effects worsted, two are Shelter, one is Solitude Icelandic, and one is Solitude Tunis/Alpaca blend.  I didn’t need to dye any of these, which is part of why these yarns made it to the top of the pile.  With the two I’ve finished since I snapped this shot, I think I’m about halfway there.  If I really do manage to use all 22 breeds and the yarns I find keep yielding more than one square each, I’m going to have a ludicrous blanket at the end.  Ludicrous.  Yarrow will need a straight-jacket.

And this is my new loom, with a nice wide tabby warp on it.  Notice that the sliding glass door is open?  I do not approve.  It should be too cold here for such frivolous throwing open of doors.

This is more Paton’s, in the same two colors I used as the weft in the smaller shawl.  Honestly, it’s a bit thick to use as  a warp with this heddle, but since I don’t love warping, I’ll muddle through.  This time, I went for more yardage and more width but just one shuttle.

I’m waffling on whether or not I like how this combination of brick red and teal looks.  I think I like it better on screen.  I was toying with the idea of unweaving this teal weft and switching to gray. What do you think?

I’ve also been quilting, which I’ll show you next.

When I haven’t been in my studio, frantically sewing bags, I’ve been puttering about.

I decided a few months ago that I needed to come up with a reliable, organized method for saving yarn to repair the things I knit.  After a lot of searching, I finally found a reasonably priced wooden card file for the task.  It’s nice and deep, and it holds standard index cards, so it should be easy to categorize, label, and store darning yarns.

Now I just have to go through all of my leftover bits of yarn and set them up in some sort of order.

I’m working on a pair of Nutkin socks, though I’m a bit concerned about the lack of elasticity in the stitch pattern.  This is one of my last skeins of Spirit Trail Alexandra.  Sigh.  I’ll miss that yarn.

I made myself this lovely pair of Go With the Flow socks out of some gorgeous String Theory yarn I got at the KR Retreat last year.  I love the rich deep orange, and the pattern itself was nice to work.  I know I’ll get a lot of wear out of these.

I actually finished this Winding River Cowl in Birte last year, but immediately started wearing it and never got around to taking its picture.  This is one of the mainstays of my cool-weather wardrobe.

I spent the last day of my 37th year making a ludicrous batch of Jaeger schnitzel for our Samhain event  a few weeks from now.  That’s 30 pounds of pork, a whopping six gallons of schnitzel stew.  It’s in the deep freeze now. I’m so glad to have this piece of the puzzle taken care of.

Every time I start to sew for a festival, I feel like I won’t make enough, and I’ll end up disappointing someone, and that really I should try to make some kind of dent in that huge fabric stash, and try to accomplish something already, for once.  Ahem.

Before you ask, no, my Mom was not one of those Moms.  My Mom is wonderful, and while she encouraged us to work hard, she wasn’t critical.  I don’t know where that inner voice comes from, but it does keep me working.

When paired with a few excellent audiobooks, things can get out of hand.  I made a lot of bags.  I added a couple of new designs.  I made some pieced  bags, and  I made some silk bags–both with interior pockets and shoulder straps.  I’m bringing 70+ bags to Rhinebeck this weekend, and I hope to come home with far fewer so I can do it all over again for the Knitter’s Review Retreat.

As my as-yet unfinished string quilt can attest, I love to piece strings. I love that it’s all about improvisation, and that foundation piecing allows me to use up fabrics I don’t want to see but can’t stand to waste.  I kept the color schemes of these first few prototypes pretty confined, but I’m looking forward to focusing on the color preferences of a few friends and trying to capture their palettes this way.

I’m still toying with size for these, and with visual chaos.  I may make the next round larger but with more solid spaces for the eye to rest.  I’m going to miss my sewing machine this weekend.

I’ll miss my dye-pot even more.  Dyeing silk might be the most satisfying thing I’ve done in my studio this year.  And then using minimalist quilting to attach silk to a sturdier underpinning, and building that into bags . . . so fun.  This is the only one that I didn’t dye, but, well, the hand-dyed ones got assembled after dark, so they’re undocumented.  I love the bronzey mauve of the dupioni, and I had to dig into my garment silks to pull out this lovely striped silk noil to combine with it.  I think this is the closest to liking pink I’ve come in ages.  I may have a fever, or consumption.  Aren’t consumptive women in Victorian novels always swathed in rose and peach?

I hope to see lots of you in New York this weekend.  Please come by the Spirit Trail Booth and see us.

That’s a sneak peek of a project that’s coming. I developed a bit of an obsession working on the squares for my string quilt top, so I decided to just keep going and try to make a noticeable dent in the scrap baskets. I’ve been wanting to make larger knitting bags for a while, and the combined pressures of Rhinebeck and KR Retreat plans are creeping up on me.

I finished the silk sort—one of the more trying things I’ve had to do lately—and got out the dye pot. I really love working with the pre-cut silk, because the 10″ squares are such a great size for crock pot dyeing. So far I’m working with the dyes I have on hand, but I’ll probably order several more colors in the next week or so. I can keep myself very happy with greens and blues, but I know some of you knitters go for other colors. Any requests? I’ll definitely get some orange and red, and I have no shortage of gold and brown squares on hand, so I can add them to the mix.

My first attempt at making bags with the hand-dyed silk squares is . . . not terrible. You can see that this bag is significantly bigger than one of my normal sock bags. It’s lined in the same black dupioni edging the blue in the straps, and I added a pocket and snap closure and some interfacing to make the base firm. I like the simple quilting on the straps (also interfaced) but I feel like the body of the bag is too flimsy, and I don’t trust the closure to be kind to the silk, even though I interlined that spot. I think I want the bodies to be quilted, which is going to make these much, much slower to produce. But, well, once I have a vision in mind . . . you know how that goes.

I mentioned a while back that I started a new tradition while we were camping. For years, Preachain’s fighters have worn handmade red and black checkered colors. The first ones were painted, and then someone started patching the checks. For years they were one-sided, which made me worry about wear, and then Bodwin made some double sided sets. It was all exactly the sort of development you’d expect from longstanding friends slowly improving and riffing on a concept. The variety of techniques and slight differences in color is great, and each fighter has a story of where theirs came from and who they’ve given colors to over the years. I managed to stay out of the production of the colors for a good long time, but I was finally convinced to make a few linen ones last fall. I decided to do a black side and a red side, because who doesn’t want reversible handmade patchwork, right?

I made two, gave them away, and then got all itchy over the idea of making so few and of not getting the patchwork quite as precise as I wanted. How many times have I mentioned that linen is a bitch to use for patchwork over the years? Is it time to retitle the blog yet? “Crazy(from linen patchwork)Lanea”

So, of course, I accidentally made a whole lot more. Folks came over for a sewing weekend, and Keegan and Bodwin offered to help cut, so I handed over fabric and rotary cutters and mats, and came back to a to-sew pile so, so huge. I finished 13 of these in time for camp, and handed them out to folks who really stood out to me.

But, of course, we’re more than a war band. While we were surveying my piles of red and black linen and Keegan’s piles of red and black cotton that weekend, we got to talking about wanting to reward the people who make our encampment so wonderful year in and year out. A lot of people work really hard to make Preachain what it is, and that includes running events, cooking meals, water-bearing, teaching . . . I can’t even count all of the things Preachainees do to make our camp what it is. Cotton is much easier to sew into patchwork than linen, and so we decided to make something both smaller and bigger. I made some little checky favors to give to people who were bending over backwards to help out, and I gave a couple away and waited to see what would happen next. They Ruadhan took one of the finished ones and made me accept it as a gift from her and Veruchka. We formed a Murder. A Murder of crows. It’s like a service fraternity, but different. It’s still small, and I’m daunted by the amount of patchwork I’m facing, because I think in time every single member of the tribe should be wearing one of these little sigils if we’re really doing this tribe thing right. I’ve only gotten to maybe 5 percent of the crow-folk so far, so there’s a lot of tiny-little patchwork in my future. Well, our future. I can’t do it alone.

I’ve been knitting a fair amount on this second sock yarn blanket over the last couple of months. I’m trying to stick to a watery palette this time around, and I’m making garter squares rather than stockinette so this one will be warmer than Chesapeake. I’m also edging the squares in black.

I love how it’s looking so far, and I’m looking forward to some more cool weather so it will be cozy to work on, rather than too warm to hold in my lap.

Our new vegetable garden is going strong. Since I waited until after the hurricane to plant anything, I went with cool season crops. Of course, the torrential rains came after the hurricane (and earthquake), so we were running short on sun for a while there.

The outer edge is all lettuce and all salad greens, and there are broccoli and green onion plants and some basil and tarragon in the middle. I’m not sure whether we’ll get to harvest with those slower crops, but the lettuces and greens are all delicious.

As I mentioned, I saved up enough to buy a replacement for my old inkle loom. I weave lots of belts and trim for living history stuff, and my old open sided inkle just wasn’t up to the sort of work I do. I was constantly cantilevering pins loose and having to send it back to the maker for repair. Moreover, the combination of its short continuous warp set-up and its narrowness was limiting me so much I was barely weaving. I could weave a band about 5 inches wide–and that required constant fussing to keep all of the warp threads in place–and about 8 feet long. That’s not long enough to trim out most garments, so I’d have to do successive identical warps to make trim. That . . . that’s not fun–just like knitting one sock pattern over and over again isn’t fun. I passed it on to some good friends of mine, and they’re having a great time with it.

I got myself a Gilmore Big Wave. It’s amazing. I’ve never worked on a better-designed, sturdier belt loom. It’s wide enough that I can make scarves and possibly place mats on it, but I need to get myself some more texsolv heddles first. I am also likely to get a set of rigid heddles so I can weave some twill bands on this loom. I really, really want to weave pinwheel twill.

In the meantime, I’m putting it through its paces. I wove another one of my monster white wool belts just to see how I’d fair, and all went well once I figured out how to work with the brakes and heddles. Then I warped up about 13 yards of red and black check, just to see if I could. Yep, it all fit. I think I could fit another yard or so on there, but I maxed out the capabilities of my warping frame with this warp, and I may face a new challenge as I advance the woven cloth at the other end.

The heddle tower is the best invention since sliced bread. It opens up such a big, clean shed, and it works so smoothly. My hands are really appreciating the change. The combination of a large knife-edge shuttle, the glorious heddle tower, the ratcheting brakes on both the warp and cloth side, and the nice wide loom itself makes it so much less stressful on my body to work. Until I put this ludicrously long warp on it, I kept accidentally weaving an entire project when I was only intending to dress the loom and set the warp to make sure there were no errors in the warp pattern. Whoops.

It will wind up being some number of belts for some number of Celts.

And yes, everything I weave does come with Kaio hair, just like everything I knit and everything I sew. It is known.

What? It only took me a month.  It was a month that included an earthquake and a hurricane and some ludicrous flooding.  Ludicrous.  We’re fine, our house is fine, most of my garden survived.  I’m giddy with excitement about the things I’m working on in my studio, but that will wait until I fulfill that promise to post camp pictures.  La.

So, we went. We camped. We had a blast. I took fewer pictures than I intended.  I felt guilty for doing less than I meant to. Such is life.  I showed up with a basket of presents, a new song, a new poem story thing (it’s a hard one to explain), and clothing for friends.  Oh, and the food was ridiculous.  Drac and I have been plotting for years about cooking an Italian feast together the first night of our meal  plan. It would be huge, and we would call it Dago Day and get in trouble but get back out of trouble by feeding the angry people, and we would make people beg us to let them eat with us, and we would teach people who only know about pizza and meatballs that there’s so much more the Italian cuisine, and we would make everyone eat too much.  We finally got on the stick, and we worked magic, my friends.  We had canoli.  We had gorgeous roasted pork with goat cheese and caramelized onions.  We had vegetables with bagna caôda.  We had my great-grandmother’s excellent cannelloni in cream sauce and Drac’s astoundingly good homemade salad dressing for the greens.  We had stomach aches.  It was excellent.

We like rituals and traditions, and we tend to build new ones every once in a blue moon. One long-standing tradition circles Preachain’s Clanne Champion.  Each new champion makes new items for the Champion’s regalia, and the subsequent Champions have to tend and carry those relics around while they serve in that post.  The Standard has some of those glorious relics on it, in the form of crow’s head finials and a gorgeous repoussé plate on the spear-point’s sheathe.  I’m pretty sure Madach cast the finials, and he may have made the plate as well.  We didn’t have him with us this year, but we had his work.

Have I mentioned that I run with amazing artists and artisans?   Metal work fascinates me, in part because I just try to help people who do it and steer clear of it myself.  I am ready to help folks with clothing and weaving and repairs and cooking and first aid and and and, but once the fire is made, I leave the metal folks to deal with the metal.  This year, Etaine mentioned that her striker was no longer throwing a good spark.  In a matter of minutes, Treon and the guys got out some blow tubes, made our little fire very very hot, and reforged it so it would be a good tool again.

Bing bang boom, problem solved in less time than it would take me to darn a sock.

As usual, I spent as much time as I could with friends who live too too far away.  Scot and Maggie live an ocean away, and I can’t get enough of them.  I haunt their booth, because it’s rare than we can get them away from work.  We did get them out of the shop to see some fighting one day, which was good.

Adon managed to shatter his spear, like you do.  It’s a thing that happens.  No one was injured.

Joyner came back after many many years away and fit right in with our older, wiser, better fed tribe.  I think he’ll stay.

In general, we hung around, we tried not to get sun-burned, we sang and told stories and possibly over-indulged once or twice, and we had the sort of dorky conversations about history and archaeology only big nerds like us can stand.  I can’t wait to see everyone again.

We prepped for summer camp, we went to summer camp, and we came home, and all is well.  I’ll tell you how well soon.

In short:

• I made a ton of red and black patchwork.
• I gave away a bunch of presents.
• I started a new tradition. (These first three are all connected)
• I wrote a new bardic . . . thing.
• I made a lot of clothes for friends.
• I knit.
• I helped officiate a wedding.
• I ordered a new tape loom and some fabric.

I’ll try to post photos.

And now, I’m off to decide what to plant in the vegetable garden for fall.  I’m so happy we have moderate weather in Virginia right now.  I want to bask in it, but I also want to finish doing laundry.

If you saw the little studio tour video I made a while back, you saw my studio.  I adore that room and spend a lot of time there, but it doesn’t generally come first in terms of furnishing budgets.  The knee walls limit shelving options, and our stairs are narrow, and we’ve spent a lot of our time and money improving the house itself since we bought our little fixer-upper, rather than buying things to put in it.  I’ve been using a really basic beat up Ikea table for my machines since my sophomore year of college.   Multiple moves and multiple cats and countless projects later, that table is still stable enough, but it’s scratched and, well, it will never be an heirloom.

All of my hours haunting rural antique stores has paid off in a big way.  Meet my new Mission library table.

It’s Quarter-sawn tiger oak, with handles made by Grand Rapids Brass.  I found it in my favorite antique shop down in central Virginia.  I can’t believe how little I paid for it.  I saw it in late April, bought it over the phone once I measured stairways and entrances to make sure we could get it inside.  I’m doing some research now to see if I can identify the maker and date, but that’s really an academic exercise, because whoever made it made it beautifully.    I’m so excited to have those two drawers to hold bobbins and shears and other tools.  I love the lower shelf, which will be a great place to keep the baskets of scraps I use for quilting.  The grail of the wood just glows, and the bookmatching on the top–heavenly.

The drawers are deep enough to prevent me from using the knee-lift on my sewing machine, so I’m talking to friends who make furniture to see if one can make me a separate sewing machine table for my big Janome.  If it works out, that can slot into the corner, and the two will form an L that will be perfect for pooling a big quilt into the corner.  I know some people daydream about beaches or Hollywood, but right now all I want to dream about is working here, right here, in this little corner of my world.

Maryland Sheep and Wool was wonderful this year.  We had the mildest, most beautiful weather I remember at that festival.  It was great to spend time with all of my dear friends at Tuatha and Spirit Trail, and to see so many friends from local knitting groups and the KR retreat.  I didn’t want to come home.  I didn’t buy much, but I will try to show you my little treasures when I break out the camera.  I’ve been so busy organizing and purging to make way for this table that I’ve been neglecting my camera.

Now back to the studio!  I have a new bag design underway, and have knitting and sock bags I need to photograph, and audiobooks to listen to, and furniture to move, and a studio to organize.