I’ve finally started knitting something for myself again!  This is the Winding River Cowl, knit in Spirit Trail’s luscious Birte in Case of the Blues.  I love all of Jen’s cashmere/silk/wool blends, but this one feels particularly decadent because of its weight.  I can’t wait to finish this, because I really want a chance to wear it before winter’s end.

These mitts will be wending their way to Michigan to warm a dear friend’s hands.  I hope she likes them.  I love the stitch pattern so much.  If I’m not careful, I’m going to end up making myself some Pomotamus knee socks.

Scott’s Railroad socks are done, and just in time.  His favorites suddenly have a mysterious hole in the leg.

I blame Yarrow, our wool-eating cat.  Thankfully, I have leftover yarn, so I plan to rip down to below the hole and just re-knit the top of the sock, rather than trying to darn such a big hole.  But that can wait until my cowl is done.

In the meantime, let’s have a  little giveaway!  I have some adorable pincushions hanging around my studio, and I’d love to find homes for them.  I made them in the style of a free pattern from Marcus Fabrics, but on a larger scale using squares from some charm packs I had around.  They’re stuffed with those plastic pellets used in some stuffed animals, so they won’t attract any beasties.  I think my favorite thing about these is their little button hats.  In mine, I keep needles poked through the button holes and pins of different sorts in the legs.

If you’d like to win one, leave a comment on this post by February 23.  I’ll use a random number generator to pick the winners.

Coffeebeans:

Kashmir the first

Blue mustard:

Kashmir the second (which is a bit wonky)

The sweatshop is in full swing.  I’ve been making clothes for living history, finishing knits for others, sorting scraps for projects, and updating the Big Bad Spreadsheet of Supplies.  When I started measuring and sorting and folding and organizing everything last fall, a few friends scratched their heads, and a few thought it sounded like an excellent idea.  For me, it’s been a great motivator.  I know there are artisans who have great patience, and who are entirely process focused.  I . . . I am not one of them.  I do love the process, but I love it because I scatter my process with little finish lines.  Each time I cross one, I give myself a little mental gold star.  Hem finished?  Gold Star!  Dress cut out?  Gold Star!  Photo taken?  GOLD STAR!  Yeah yeah, I’m a grade grubber.  You gonna make something of it?

This weekend, I cut out seven garments, two of which are coats with full linings.  I also finished a couple of knitting projects for others and finally started knitting something for myself.  It’s been months since I did that.  And all of that finishing and starting made me look over the aforementioned Big Bad Spreadsheet of Supplies, which also has a sheet for a to-do list and a sheet for completed projects and the supplies they used. And you know what?  I’ve used 79.6 yards of fabric and 4784 yards of yarn, not counting scraps, since I started keeping track in September.  I hope to be wearing shiny new duds at Velja Noc next weekend, and to be able to give fantastic new gifts to friends next month in Mississippi.  And I’ll be able to do those things because I pressure myself to start and finish and improve and work really really hard, just because I think I should.

When I want to tear my hair out because I’m terribly overwhelmed by projects, please remind me of that last bit.

I learned to knit so that I could knit my own socks, and it shows. I decided to tally up the hand-knitted socks I’ve kept, and was a bit surprised. I knew that they took up a large portion of our drying rack whenever I washed them, but I hadn’t realized how large the collection had gotten.  It got to be large enough I had to give some away. I just had to.  My sock drawer is small, and I only have these two feet, and it seemed silly that excellent socks were going unworn.  So, a pair went into our living history group’s silent auction, and I made sure to cast on a pair for someone else, and I studied my collection to understand it better.

Forgive the darkness–we’re still short on sun during the hours I spend at home.  This does include Scott’s socks, but he’s down to three pair at the moment, so I own the lion’s share.  Let’s look at them in groups.

These are the green ones.  The pair on the far left are Scott’s current favorites.  I have a lot of green socks, which I’m sure surprises no one.

But even more common than green in my world–blue.

These next few batches are socks made with yarn from small, independent companies.  I love yarns like these best, particularly since many of them don’t have much or any synthetic fiber in the blends.  Mountain Colors Bearfoot is one of my favorite yarns, and it shows.

It should surprise none of you that I have a lovely collection of Spirit Trail socks. She dyes the best greens!  I’ve given away several pairs made with Jen’s yarn, and all of those are well loved and wearing well.  I do check up on them so I can darn them before they are beyond saving.

These are socks made with yarn from other indie dyers:

Sanguine Gryphon Eidos, Colinette Jitterbug (squeaking by as Indie), String Theory, Koigu, and the terribly elusive Brooks Farm sock yarn.

These are socks made from yarn made by major companies.  I hope the socks can’t hear me, but I love them the least.  Cruel, I know.  But these all have nylon in them, and none of the yarns were dyed by friends or loved ones.  I think I’ve kicked this particular habit for a better one.  I’ll use up the commercial sock yarns I have on hand, but I doubt I’ll buy more.

Finally, these are my super thick socks.  The ones on the left are made from Rowan Cork, and I love them so very much.  I wish that yarn was still available.  Those felted ones on the right are made from a yarn I can’t remember the name of, and they are nearing the bitter end.  The Peace Fleece socks in the center are astoundingly warmed.  That matters for we winter campers.  Oh, how it matters.

And once the collection was photographed and ready to return to my sock drawer, which ones did I reach for?

My simple Brooks Farm ribbed socks.  The combination of the almost powdery wool, the simple ribbing, and the round toe makes these perfect winter socks.

This year, I’m trying to focus more clearly on music than I have since, well, since the world went all pear-shaped in 2009.  I’ve also been doing more research on early medieval Scandinavia than usual.  It feels right, then, to give you a song that circles through my brain, particularly as the ground starts to warm. This is a benediction for a Finnish Goddess of Spring who appears in the beautiful, enigmatic Kalevala. I’ve added the English translation, of course, though I can’t really vouch for its accuracy since I only know a few words of Finnish, and most of them are impolite. I’d also encourage you to listen to the song itself, and watch the original video, which is breathtaking though not entirely safe for work, or the live video, which is.

Suvetar

I’ve mentioned working on gifts recently, and how secrecy left me with less to talk about here.  I may not have mentioned how terribly impatient I am.  Once I finish making a gift, I mentally hop on one leg until I deliver it.  I often want to call the recipient and ruin the surprise before I even get halfway through a gift project.  And when I’m making something that feels particularly successful, it gets even harder.  On some level, it feels as if I owe a dear friend money, or am keeping a secret I really, really shouldn’t.

I’ve been chewing my knuckles for more than a month over this, now delivered, gift.  Those vibrant triangles I showed you a while back were part of this, a baby quilt I made for my friends Mike and Tara and their adorable newborn son Will.  Scott and Mike grew up together, and Tara and I have been friends since we were teenagers, so it feels particularly special to help welcome their first child into our community.

He was born a couple of weeks ago, but we just got the chance to meet him and deliver the present this weekend.  It felt auspicious to deliver the quilt to them on the weekend of Imbolc, a holiday so tied to creativity, pregnancy, milk, change, music, and warmth.

As I mentioned in that earlier post, I used batiks, and I made the flying geese blocks using a cool one-seam method that makes dimensional blocks.  Since this is for a baby, I did decide to quilt down the free edges of the blocks.  It just seems like that will allow the quilt to last longer and will make it easier to keep clean.  I had visions of those little pockets catching fingers or crumbs.

I’m obviously not in the “pale things for babies” camp.  I loved working with such saturated colors, and I tried to be very generous with my batik stash.

In other news, I think I’ve decided to quilt my string  squares one at a time and then put them together after the fact.  It feels like it will make the whole project much easier to finish.  I even pulled out a sacrificial (i.e. ugly) block to make into a mini-quilt for the cats to lay on so I could play with a quilting design and see if the finished quilt will handle the cats’ abuses.

And now I’m off to try to finish a quilt and make a few dozen garments and bags and maybe weave half a dozen belts and also finish some knitting.  It’s that time of year, and I can sure feel it coming.

I’ve been on a bit of a quilting spree for a while now, as you may have noticed. And when I was sorting through some quilting stuff in my studio yesterday, I realized that I never posted about a really sweet pieced bag I made right before the KR retreat last autumn.

I made the patchwork part to use up an adorable Free Spirit charm pack. That line of fabric is called “Wild Bunch,” and if it weren’t so hard to find I’d have dozens of yards of a few of the fabrics.

And that hook it’s hanging from? My amazing friend Mary made that hook out of an antler she found.

This is the other side. I sort of used this free pattern, though I ignored it during some important bits.  I didn’t do a perfect job lining up the straps over the patchwork on this side, but I’ll live.  I may be overconfident with sewing patterns sometimes most of the time. I added a key clip on a lariat–you can see it poking up a bit on one side. This is a small bag, but not a tiny one, so it was perfect for carrying around at the retreat. It held my wallet, phone, a water bottle, and a sock bag comfortably. I’m tempted to make a similar but larger bag out of a sturdier or reinforced fabric to use on my commute.

I also had to–had to!–make some pillows with Japanese indigo prints.

I got the center panel a few years ago when I was visiting those wonderful Two Sock Knitters in Chicago.  We went to an amazing quilt show, which is where I found the center panels for these pillows.

Now I just need to get some pillow forms for the center.  And, quite possibly, make 100 more pillows.  They’re addictive, what with the small, easy area to quilt and the lack of binding.  I posted a photo of the finished pillow on facebook, and the response from my friends was, well, enthusiastic.  I made the pair with a single recipient in mind, but I may need to repeat the task a few times.

I got stuck, like I always do, feeling like I couldn’t post about presents.  And I was spending a lot of time working on presents.  Silly silly silly.

But other things are in the works.

We replaced our slapdash potrack with this beauty:

All of that shining copper makes me so giddy.  I have a thing about copper.  You may have noticed.  I hope to find a great clock or something for the top, but that will take a while.  This replaces a chrome towel bar that was too small and was bound to pull out of the wall if I hung all of my copper pots on it.

I’m knitting away on a couple of things for others:

Some mitts for a friend.

And some socks for Scott.

But mostly, I’ve been working on my string quilt.

All of the blocks are finished.  Now I need to sash it.  I’m still pondering my options.  Since these blocks are foundation pieced, they’re kind of thick.  I haven’t been able to find enough of a quilting cotton I like for sashing, so I may go with something heavier to match the weight of the blocks and add some interesting texture. In the meantime, I’m playing with layout and picking favorites.

The Good Brother by Chris Offutt

I’m a huge fan of Chris Offutt’s work, which I was introduced to as a college student with a serious devotion to Appalachian Studies.  Knowing that Offutt has been focusing on writing for TV rather than churning out stories and novels for the last several years, I just help on to this book.  I guess I was saving it for the lean times.

The novel follows Virgil Caudill, a young man from rural Kentucky who is trying to come to terms with his brother’s murder.  His community expects Virgil to avenge his brother Boyd’s murder, and Virgil feels that he can never match his brother’s charisma or generosity.  Virgil ends up building a false identity and leaving Kentucky for rural Montana.  Once there, he becomes entwined with a community of radical survivalists who he can’t seem to make sense of or escape.

Offutt’s prose is beautiful.  I’ve read so much “genre fiction” from Appalachia that seems tired and flat–Offutt’s never is.  He has an understanding of rural mountain culture that feels unmatched, and his exploration of the concept of manhood and its attendant responsibilities and pitfalls fascinates me.  I am particularly touched by his clarity in expressing views on race and difference in Appalachia.  One of the greatest slanders about the place is that it’s full of hateful people–that’s just not true.

I didn’t love this book quite as much as I did Out of the Woods and Kentucky Straight, in part because Offutt is such an exemplary short story writer.  But The Good Brother will haunt me.

And now I get to wallow in some delicious Willa Cather.

I’ve been keeping my nose in books a lot lately, so here are some mini-reviews of some recent goodies.

Material Obsession 2: More Modern Quilts with Traditional Roots by Kathy Doughty and Sarah Fielke. This book absolutely floored me. I wasn’t previously familiar with either author, since I’m really just getting into quilt blogs and contemporary designers. But when I started flipping through the pages, I was immediately hooked. I don’t generally go in for books of patterns because I tend to just learn how to piece a particular block or style and the go from there, but this book is full of quilts I want to make. I’ve read some complaints about the patterns themselves, but since I don’t rely much on pattern instructions once I’ve cut what I need to cut, that doesn’t worry me too much. What does worry me is that I’ll never have enough time to make all of them, or enough beds to put them on.

Quilt Remix: Spin Traditional Favorites Into 10 Fresh Projects by Emily Cier: This has some very interesting projects for modern quilts that are departures from traditional patterns.  I think a few of her concepts are particularly beautiful and interesting, including her takes on Ohio Star and Trip Around the World.  I am desperately trying to remain faithful to the quilt top I’m putting  together now, but I can’t wait to start a new project.

Hogfather by Terry Pratchett. All of my Pratchett books came from our late friend Mike, and this seemed like the right winter to read this book. It’s fun and light, but also explores some questions about myth and belief that I find very interesting.

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett. More lightness in winter. It’s silly but fun, and introduces a few characters that figure in the series. I’m reading these books all out of order, so it’s like I came across a prequel.

Goddess Embroideries of the Balkan Lands and the Greek Islands by Mary B. Kelly. I love this series of books. I haven’t necessarily used any of the images as a basis for embroidery patterns, but they are having a huge effect on my sense of shape and color in stitchery.

Leviathan and Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld. I loved these books! I can’t wait for the third one to come out. They’re excellent YA steampunk books set in an alternate pre-WWI past, where national alliances group those countries that use Darwinian concepts to develop genetically altered animals and those countries that rely on mechanics and combustion engines. I love the protagonist. Love her.

The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins. I did manage to wait until the third books was about to be released before picking these up, and I’m so glad I did. I had to race through them, they were so compelling. The distopian YA series follows Katniss, a 16 year old girl from what is now Appalachia who is chosen to compete in a horrible arena called The Hunger Games against a young man from her home town and teenagers from the rest of their country. I loved the series.

We celebrated in the ways we know best.  I knitted a pile of horseshoe lace cowls for the women in my family. 

That’s a custom green Spirit Trail cashmere, Briar Rose cashmere, Socks that Shine, Spirit Trail Alexandra, and Spirit Trail Si-Ling.

We cooked, we gave each other books and music and the like. Kaio got to eat way too many table scraps and run around on the mountain.  Speedwell . . . hid from things.  And then Yarrow found his favorite thing in the world.

Happy holidays, and a blessed New Year.  I have a quilt to finish.

I’ve been playing with triangles. I’ve been playing with lots and lots of triangles.  (And I’ve also been fighting WordPress to post images for a week or two, but that’s another thing entirely.)

The triangles are making me think of Sierpinski gaskets. Which, admittedly, is not hard to do, because I went to Tech in the 1990s when all students were legally required to have posters of fractals, and Jonathan Coulton holds an inordinate amount of space in my brain. Fractals came up in conversation a few times at the KR Retreat this year.  Well, I forced people to talk about fractals a few times at the retreat.  Benoit Mandelbrot died this autumn at 85, and that led me to revisit things I’d read about him and his work.  We talked about the possibility of knitting fractals, and those patterns that attempt it.  Really, we can knit or sew tributes to fractals, and sometimes we do, but our lives are too short to complete true fractal constructions.

I was one of those girls who was good at math until I was suddenly bad at math.  The more I study educational policy and methods, the more I understand where it all went wrong between me and math.  I had a couple of horrendous teachers, and then I had a phobia.  I got by and it didn’t torpedo my GPA, but I restricted my AP classes to history and literature and government and the like.  I was very much an English major at Tech, surrounded by people with math and science intelligences I envied so much.  My big brother is excellent at math and has always been. Several of my friends understand and revel in higher maths in ways that astound me.  I surround myself with mathematicians and scientists because they fascinate me so. I’m not one of those artsy types who is proud of my math failings–I want to get better, and I hope I am. One of the reasons I love knitting and sewing and quilting so much is that they force me to engage in applied geometry and they require lots of basic computations.

Back to the practical . . .  I love the three-dimensionality of these one-seam flying geese.  But I’m tearing my hair out trying to decide how to quilt them.  Do I dare sew down all of those little wings?  Or do I dare not? Surely the finished quilt will last longer if I keep those little batik geese from catching on things and being pulled this way and that.

And then there’s the problem of the lost points.  I know there are people, better piecers than I, who can work so exactly that they don’t lose points in the seams as they assemble a top.  I ripped and re-assembled this small top three times trying to prevent biasing and lost points, and then I resigned myself to its flaws.  Despite or because of them, it’s beautiful.

When I’m not piecing triangles, I’m knitting them.  Or counting socks.  More on both later.  In the mean time, check out Vi Hart.  I wish she’d been my math teacher.