Archive for April, 2009
Textured Circle Shrug Knitalong!
Thursday, April 30th, 2009
Wahoo! Lucky me! I get to be the next host of the Lion Brand Notebook Knitalong!
We’re going to make the Textured Circle Shrug from Glam Knits. I think that this will be a good -Along project for a number of reasons….it’s got some interesting features like the knit-on collar-in-the-round, and it’s a really good springtime knit!
We’re going to be using the LB Collection Organic Wool.
Rather than duplicate the post by Zontee from earlier today, I’ll just say, “check that blog for all the information, links, and space to comment / ask questions!”
Looking forward to it!
Posted in Book Talk, Patterns | No Comments »
Back from teaching at Loop!
Thursday, April 30th, 2009
Hi All!
I’m back from Philly and stocked up on Alchemy silken straw *AND* a ton of cute fabrics and patterns to SEW. Loop is a gorgeous space, and I can tell that the clientele really has a love for t he craft, the shop, and the owner, Craig! It was such a great weekend! Here are some pictures I took on my phone…I’m still looking for my camera so that I can post actual pictures….Please don’t laugh, Yahaira only had the weekend to teach me this fascinating new phone / Twitter combination.
The classes went really well, and I had a great time meeting everyone!
Here’s a note from one of my students that I got in my inbox just today:
I worked through the formulas and I started knitting the neck. The 1st time
through was a little overwhelming but I got over it. This first sweater
will be my template for adding elements to other sweaters. Your class was
just what I was looking for!
Marnie
YEAH! She got it!! Woo hoo!!
Did you know that Craig and Laura’s shop Spool is *THAT* Spool? The spool of the cute stuffed birdy pattern(pdf link) that everyone is making?? I totally didn’t make the connection until I was standing in the shop. Wow. A brush with fame.
Yahaira, Jo, and I are making Chinese Coins quilts together, and I picked up a copy of the pattern and a whole bunch of 2.5″ strips with which to make it. I unintentionally picked out mostly Jay McCarroll fabrics for the quirky animals and bugs (Mazie loves animals!)
Posted in Trips, events | No Comments »
Finished Quilt!
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009
OK, so here’s the finished quilt! (It was really cloudy last night…never did rain, though!)
I really love this one. It’s the biggest quilt that I’ve made so far, and I think it’s happy and awesome. That light turquoise-y blue is one of my favorite colors to be around. I rarely wear that color, but I love that color. It’s the color of swimming pool water. Remember how happy you got as a kid every time you went someplace and saw that there was a POOL!? That’s how this color makes me feel. Just, YAY!
I really think it’s interesting how disorganized the red squares became as I was doing my piecing. I knew as I was going that something didn’t quite work out with them, but until I had it all laid out on the floor, I didn’t realize how much some of them had wandered. Those red squares are frisky!
Here’s the back:
I put this one together by putting the front and back face to face, with the batting on top. I stitched all around the outside edge (leaving a 6″ opening,) turned it inside out with the batting in the middle of the two quilted pieces, then topstitched all around the outer edge. Then, I used a really pointy big-eye needle and tied it using a bamboo-cotton yarn.
I Frankenstein’d the batting together from spare parts. (I’m cheap) I did make sure, though, that all of the parts were the same composition, so that when I wash it, it’ll all do the same thing. You don’t want half of the quilt to shrink (or full, or whatever it’ll do) at a different rate than the rest of the quilt.) That’s why it’s important to use fabrics of similar weights and compositions on the top, too.
I’ve had a couple of emails from people encouraging me not to give up on knitting (after my last few posts, I realize I must seem pretty disillusioned.) Not to worry, fearless readers, I won’t. I think I had a post-winter, post-deadline crash, and I just needed to work through it.
I’m currently working on a knit top that will combine patchwork and knitting and hand-dyed yarn. I’ll start with the progress reports after I get back from teaching at Loop this weekend!
Posted in sewing | No Comments »
Quilting.
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
So I used to knit to take a break from school and other work, and I just realized that I quilt when I need a break from knitting.
I’ve finished two big quilt tops in the last month or so…I’m a little bit afraid to show them because I know they’re not perfect. I have a very wabi-sabi approach to quilt-making. I actually like it when my corners don’t match up. I get a lot of satisfaction out of knowing that they never need to be perfect, and sometimes I even turn the pieces until I find edges that don’t quite match up and then use those.
Here’s one that’s ready to be quilted:
This quilt uses up a lot of the flannel that I bought before Mazie was born. There are fabrics here that were incorporated into other quilts that I made last summer, and into the one I just finished for Ida Rose (Rob and Beth’s new baby.)
I cut out all the squares, then I match them up in twos…then I unfold those and sew the ends together…until I have long strips that I then sew all together. In doing that, some pieces get turned the wrong way, or even whole lines / strips move into the spots where other strips should be. And I leave them. It’s just the way it was meant to work out!
So this one looks pretty crazy in parts…but that’s how I like it. Something about the disorder is just so gratifying.
The back of this quilt is just strips of the border (cloud) fabric paired with a coordinating flower fabric. The batting is bamboo. I think I’ll tie this one, instead of stitching the quilting. I’ve never machine quilted, and I want to try it on a smaller quilt before I try one this big.
I’ll post better pictures when it’s more stable. I don’t want to try to take all 3 layers outside or hang them up.
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Monday
Monday, April 20th, 2009
Well, it’s back to (knitting) work for me! …here’s my “work bag” (actually a totebag that I need to give back to Kristi at some point.)
In that bag are so many unfinished patterns, sketches, swatches…all screaming for attention! I’ve already even crossed a few things off my to do list.
This is the first day in quite a few weeks that I’ve woken up feeling like working. Mazie woke up at 6:30, and we all just got on up! It was nice to be up with the birds in the cool of the morning.
My daughter is not an early riser, usually. She some days wakes up as late as 10:00. It all depends on when she’s finally able to settle down and go to sleep. I was the same way as a kid. My parents had to put me to bed several times every night before it stuck. Mazie hates to miss any of the action.
Someone commented after my last post asking why we’re teaching Mazie to sign. It wasn’t something that I had decided all along to do. I think we started it because we got the Baby Einstein DVD and she enjoyed it, and started actually doing the signs herself. Then Nathan and I had to quick try to learn from the DVD, too. (And now my mom and dad are also signing with Mazie.)
At this point, we have pretty much outgrown the first DVD and gone on to using other books and references. There’s a lot of information available on the internet (both pro and con) about baby signing. We haven’t taken any classes, just tend to look up signs for words that we need as we need them.
A lot of the tantrums that happen at Mazie’s age (approaching two years) are because babies can understand most of what we say, but don’t have the physical capability to make words in a way that we can understand them. So they become frustrated at not having their wants understood…and the only way they can communicate that is to have a little tantrum.
SO. Signing gives babies who haven’t yet learned how to speak a way to communicate. For example, she can tell me when she’s hungry, thirsty, wet, and even what specific things she wants to eat or drink. She has a sign for “all done” so that instead of crying to get down from her high chair, she just tells me she’s ready.
Just so far, I think we’re seeing a lot fewer tantrums than we would without the signs. (Because we do see some, and mostly when we can’t figure out what she wants, or what specifically she wants to do.)
In other news! Nathan and I actually took off a couple of weekends ago! We went to the Inn of the Mountain Gods in Mescalero. It’s a beautiful spot. I recommend it if you’re in the area. It was a gorgeous drive, and the Inn itself is nice, too. It must be gorgeous in the winter with skiing! We talked about going up with Mazie next winter.
Posted in just chit chat | 1 Comment »
What I’ve been doing while I’ve been off the internet.
Friday, April 17th, 2009
A lot of my time has been spent just trying not to be sick! This spring has been awful for flu / colds / allergies. We (me, Nate, Mom, Dad, Mazie) all have had this awful flu thing for weeks and weeks. And we hear from everyone that there’s something really yucky going around. It seems like one of us is over it, then another one will get it again and we all have another round of whatever this junk is.
AND…it’s windy season. We’ve been having 30+ mph winds almost every day. With winds like that, you start to feel battered around the head after a while. Since we’re in the desert, they also carry fine dust, pollen, smoke, whatever is in the air…so allergies are just awful.
I’ve also just been needing a knitting break. I had a major deadline on a project and it really sucked the life right out of me. I had hired a knitter to help and she went M.I.A and I missed my own deadline (I was in charge of coordinating the project) and because she disappeared I was totally screwed. My patterns still aren’t done because I had to spend the extra time chasing her around and eventually knitting her project again.
I think that behind my need to go into a little hibernation there were several factors. One major one was just that every interaction seemed to be really strained. The tutorial I posted started that ball rolling, and then this thing with this knitter (who lives here in town, so it has totally snowballed into a bigger deal than I even want to go into here.) It just really wore me out and made me feel like I needed to take a step back and not think about work for a while.
Want to know one thing that really sucks about trying to freelance in this economy? Trying to get PAID. You do all the work, send your invoice, and then wait-wait-wait. It’s terrible. I just this week was reimbursed by hmm-hmm-hmm (not naming names) for travel that I did waaaaay back in January! (Well over $1000.) It makes it hard to work on their projects when I’m not even paid back for that kind of thing. As much as I try to rationalize that the money is coming from another pot, it’s still really difficult to motivate.
All this goes back to things I’ve written before. I know that I need to step back, focus on my OWN business, and not give so much energy to OPP (Other Peoples’ Projects.) Believe it or not, everything that I’m working on is old stuff. Everything was proposed and decided on months ago. SO, I haven’t been taking on new projects, just still finishing up old commitments.
Any day now, I’ll snap out of this funk and get back to knitting content. I’m still working through it, so bear with me.
Posted in just chit chat | 5 Comments »
The Blahs
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
Well! It’s been a while. I’m just coming out of a serious case of the blahs. I’m sitting here trying to figure out a way to write about what the cause was without sounding like a big complainer…and I can’t. It was a number of things all adding up to me feeling really overworked, tired and cranky.
So. I’ll just skip that part of it and post a cute Mazie picture:
This is in the back yard at my parents’ house. It’s warm enough to play outside, but most afternoons have been too windy. Yesterday was so nice that we actually got to spend about an hour out playing. Mazie loves to pick up rocks. Mom and Dad have a desert-style of landscaping (which basically means no grass and lots of gravel all over) so she is able to find some pretty interesting rocks. Her current favorites are two almost matching smooth yellow marble pebbles. They really glow in the sun like alabaster and fit perfectly in her fists.
The roses and iris are blooming, so we’ve been enjoying smelling the flowers and talking about them. She picked an iris bud yesterday and pulled it all apart to see what it was like on the inside. It’s so interesting to watch her study things. She’s very curious and thoughtful.
Mazie’s sign language is really picking up. She’s able to not only repeat words that we say in sign language, but is able to converse. She sees the cat sleeping and signs “kitty asleep” or hears him in the morning and signs “kitty eat” because we always get up and feed him first thing. It’s amazing to see her learning process. I’m so lucky to be able to be working from home so that I can experience this with her.
And that’s the kind of stuff I need to think about when other stuff goes south. Somebody remind me next time!