As I mentioned, I’ve been doing a lot of reading. I noticed near the end of 2011 that I had read a lot already, so I figured if I pushed it, I could read 100 books before the end of the year. I managed to read 103 books, which was fun and definitely made a dent in my guilt-inspiring to-read shelves. These were some of the stand-outs for 2011.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.  This book was astoundingly good.  I’m a fan of Ishiguro’s work, and this might just be his best book.  It’s beautiful and sad and hard to read but I found it impossible to put down.  I wish I could read it again for the first time.  I’m very glad I read it before watching the film version.  I did find the film beautiful and haunting, but it seemed more like an homage to the novel than a stand-alone piece.  I won’t say anything about the plot because I think it should remain pristine and unspoiled for anyone who hasn’t read it.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks. I used to always say that I was not a fan of historical fiction because it was was generally poorly researched and plot driven but not beautiful. I think I’ll change my tune, because that’s like the way I qualify my love for Country music. I love good country musicians, like Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash and Hank Williams and Gillian Welch. I hate over-produced, soulless crap. And I love good historical fiction, like this. Brooks’ research is impeccable, and her language is beautiful. The book follows a fictionalized history of the Sarajevo Haggadah. The opening protagonist is a book nerd’s book nerd, and it just gets better from there.

The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw. Oh, what a first novel. I haven’t written a novel yet, but if I do, and if I manage to write something a with even a modicum of the sensitivity and magic and beauty encapsulated in this strange little magical-realistic fantasy, I’ll die a happy woman. Again, no spoilers. Just fawning.

Reamde by Neal Stephenson. I’m a big Stephenson fan, but I was starting to worry that his success had made him into one of those authors who won’t consent to editing. When I heard Reamde was more like one of his earlier books, I was excited. When I actually picked up a copy, I was delighted. It’s long, but it’s fast-paced and interesting and nerdy and smart. I reviewed it on BooksForEars. Such a good book.

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.

Let’s skip the excuses. I’ve been living, and I’ve been making, and all is well.

I knitted and sewed and wove and designed. I made gifts. I read and read and read. I received a lovely rigid heddle loom as a present and am having so much fun weaving my first project on it that I can’t decide whether to stretch out the weaving process just to enjoy it or to finish as quickly as possible so I can start all over again.

I made space for more dance in my life, and I’m in love with the special sort of soreness and confusion that comes with learning and practicing movements that leave me addled and giggling and embarrassed.

I had a wonderful time at the Knitter’s Review Retreat, as I always do, and when I came home I gave myself a break from sewing for others. I neglected my camera all this autumn. I wandered my city with friends who recently moved here and was reminded of how fascinating DC can be. All of it makes me think of Auden, and that makes me happy.

O Where Are You Going?
W. H. Auden

“O where are you going?” said reader to rider,
“That valley is fatal when furnaces burn,
Yonder’s the midden whose odors will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return.”

“O do you imagine,” said fearer to farer,
“That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?”

“O what was that bird,” said horror to hearer,
“Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?
Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,
The spot on your skin is a shocking disease.”

“Out of this house” — said rider to reader,
“Yours never will” — said farer to fearer,
“They’re looking for you” — said hearer to horror,
As he left them there, as he left them there.

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.

It’s just scar tissue! My Mom is ok. I have never felt more fortunate, or more relieved.