(sum)Headway

Is the name I've given my first made up object for grown ups. Knit-wise I feel I am making headway, but check it out..holey moley only some headway.
Hence the post (post) modernist title. What I'm trying to do is replicate the mock cable of Furry Goodness into a beret. Not just any old beret either, but a perfectly shaped beret like the one I bought in Vancouver last year ( which is machine knitted in fine cotton and so presents a challenge copying the increasing proportions in worsted weight alpaca) ahem...so..the mock cable stitch is easy enough on straight needles but in the round? Being too damn lazy to figure out a way to adapt it to circulars, I just do every 6th row backwards instead, giving me these lovely breeze holes. Serve me right for being so lazy.
So one last look before I rip that sucker...

Procastination-wise, I just can't decide whether these things are cute or kitsch. Like Bowie as Andy Warhol said in Basquiat "Gee, I just don't know what's any good any more".

Retail as Art Experience

Tried to take my visiting kiwi friend to Object Gallery this morning to see an exhibition I saw a few weeks ago - Seamless - including Ahn Wells' knitted (or crocheted?) tea cups (not sure whether she did these in plastic or worked them in a fibre then resin-dipped).

And these (prayer cozies). Diaphanously hilarious.

And most stunningly and inspiringly, work from Liz Williamson titled Visible Darning. This image in no way represents the subtle complexity of her work by the way.

An older piece which conveys a little better the exquisteness (exquisiosity?) of her weaving work.

Now after this huge buildup readers, the gallery was closed! They're already madly bumping in the next show. Quelle poop. So..we turn disconsolate and heavily caffeinate to Crown St.
I drool over this book, and we emerge lightheaded from Chee Soon and Fitzgerald with a $120 marimekko t-shirt for my friend (yes, a t-shirt) and a mere $7 worth of marimekko fabric offcuts for me (yep, I'm the frugal one) to start on a needle holder.
I swear that brian fitzgerald could sell ice to eskimos.

Content warning: gratuitous pet shot:
Scout wondering if marimekko does liver treats.

It's all relative folks

Ok, so here I was thinking that I was officially an obsessive perfectionist. It says so on the sidebar there >

Well…

I checked out Eunny .

And it turns out I’m not.

Not really.

How is that kind of perfection possible?

So I'll just leave you with some instructions from the Kappo dashi packets. Enjoy!

Guinea Couture

What birthday gift do you make for an 8 year old girl who has everything?

Why, Guinea Pig-Couture of course!

In a long list of crazy things I've done, I think this is up there.

It was a lot of fun though, in fact so infectious was the craziness that the Goat joined in (whose "Norwegian Tri-corn" is pictured bottom right and "Fetching Beret" top left).

Sweater-wise, having a hard time imagining this fitting a guinea pig..this looks more like a mental patient rehab project for a large rat. Just how big is a guinea pig anyway?..the internet yields no joy there..very vague on actual measurements.

Maybe it could just be an amusing hat for a lemon..or the recipient could use them as a set of egg cozies. Which is exactly what every 8 year old girl needs.
For her trousseau.

The peculiar satisfaction of a 10cent piece sized pom pom in wacky slubby yarn. My very first paying job as a 16 year old was at the National Theatre in Perth,WA, where I was sent to the Wardrobe department to make pom poms for orphans' hats for "Lil Orphan Annie". Being a musical, there was a lot of orphans and hence a lot of pom poms...but never this small.

So we'll have to wait for a shot of the couture in action, as the entire wardrobe, its piggie recipients Fred and Bruce, and the tribe of over glucosed and very over tired 8 year olds were whisked away by a concerned mother.

More irony?

I would like to flatter myself that the reach of this blog is so wide that the good folk at Nestucca Bay yarns will be slapping a defamation order on me faster than you can say "drop yer needles and put your hands in the air" but as that is less than .05% likely, I stumbled on this:

“Knit or Crochet helmet liners for our troops! The military issue helmet liners are made out of acrylic yarn, they are not warm and don't absorb water the way the wool helmet liners do. This is a way we can help our guys around the world and I am sure it will mean a lot to them to get hand knit helmet liners from home, that really work!”

Um...you're kidding, right? Is this 1914?

I'll leave you to upack that dear reader.

So...maybe it's glue-induced stupor, but Yarn Harlot's socks seem strangely appealing to me today and am considering attempting them via Knitty's toe-up tute with some Knittery's handpainted 4-ply. Possibly in Passionfruit.
Mabye.
Is that extra crunchy? Have I tipped over the aesthetic edge? Do I need to get out more?
These and other issues more pressing than the duration of the ceasefire in Lebanon will be addressed in upcoming posts.

Big ole Jan Gilray kinda day

Well...I'm tired, covered in glue and badly in need of a haircut, but apart from that I'm OK.
So I celebrated meeting Phase II of my deadline by finding a parking spot downtown...!
And to paraphrase Robbie Robertson "How come you always end up down at Tapestry Craft"? Answer: "I don't know, the wind just kind of ... pushed me this way".
It's true..I did find myself there, and then when I came to, the first thing my eyes focused on was a skein of handpainted brushed mohair by Jan Gilray in 'Copper'. And I had to buy it. (Simply because the colours were so scrumptious. I don't like all Jan's colourways, but when she gets it right, she really gets it right..this is seriously beautiful. Black to Deepest Plum to Hint O' Rust. Droolsome).
Now, is that a crime?
Well, if you'd blown half your haircut budget on it, perhaps.
Speaking of crime, while I was browsing there, I couldn't help but overhear the conversation at the counter which was on the topic of 'knitting in public'. I gathered the customer was probably a top-silk barrister and was bemoaning the fact that though she really wanted to take her knitting with her into court, she felt that it might not exactly help her professional image (that and the fact that she didn't think she could get the needles through security). Then she quipped "But you can fit a lot under that gown"! I liked her.
I also picked up some Jan Gilray's Colourworks handpainted merino for an 8 yr olds birthday on the weekend... sometimes the tiniest and silliest projects take the longest yarn-selection time.

Goodness in its various forms

Crackerey Goodness
It's what you eat when you haven't gone grocery shopping because you've been too busy finishing Furry Goodness.

Tassle-test.
Yep, looks about right

My contribution to Knits of Cinema, an emerging genre I've noticed in the knitblog community here and there).

Glampyre's City Shawl looks a lot like the one Jennifer Aniston wore in Along Came Polly (hey, I had a very important hottie cozy to knit at the time and we had no DVDs in the house)





.

But it's ironic!

...I said to our informal not-stitch-n-bitch gathering last weekend, when I suggested this as my next project. Now that it's finished it seems doubly so...

Errr...oops.

OK, so obviously there's room for improvement here. Like gauge maintenance. And the whole increasing/shaping thing. And casting off loosely.

But at least my previously nude and style-challenged hottie is looking so much more...Ralph Lauren.

And it's a real tactile success, if not a 100% aesthetic one.
I'm so glad I did this before diving into a sweater.
For me.
To wear outside where people will see it.
As opposed to one for Ms. Hottie.
To wear under the doona.

Bottom line?: It's a hottie cover for gourd's sake, get a grip. Move on with your life

I only needed one skein of Lamb's Pride for this, but I stuffed up my order at Yarns Online and (long tedious story later) ordered 2. But hey it was on sale and I’m sure that second skein will come in handy for something else, even if it’s just fondling.

Can I just say at this point how lovely Meaghan at Yarns Online is? She called me interstate to try to sort out the order confusion -which was entirely my fault-, and ended up offering me a postage credit! Now that’s what I call good old fashioned customer service. Needless to say that credit will be used sooner rather than later as they have yummy things on their catalogue.

Thank you to everyone who's commented and welcomed me to knittingblogworld. Owing to a certain degree of technical ineptitude on my part your comments are only just now appearing (thanks to the Goat sorting that out for me).

I wish I was in Melbourne this week so I could see the Maurice Sendak Exhibition at the Jewish Musem.

The Goat and I did see some beautiful work on the weekend however.

We went to Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery to see Bronwyn Oliver. I grabbed a catalogue.
Funny... it says at the top "1959 - 2006".
That's weird.
Why does it say "... - 2006"?
Then it hit me.

I've been debating with myself about the appropriateness of speaking to this here, as John McDonald said in SMH on Saturday " There is a terrible delicacy" about this sad topic, but as this site is envisioned as a space where craft, design, art and life collide I decided that it is.

Bronwyn Oliver is no longer with us.

I've been a fan of her work for about 16 years and to say it was a shock to find out about her recent death as I walked into the space filled with her final work would be an understatement. It lent a strangely poignant edge to the experience as we wandered the gallery and admired her work. Work which requires no words of explanation and just demands to be seen.

Sakura. Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

You can see more here.

BAWK

the amish-ey simplicity of it all...

Two big fat Amish Challahs (we're very ecumenical here at Needle's Edge) of Lamb's Pride Worsted in Pistachio arrived in the post. No plastic bags, no garish collars of branding, just small tags of card.
I can't wait to wind one of these into a ball and start knitting BAWK aka Rachael's hot water bottle cozy.

I mean that quite literally readers, as I don't think I have so compulsively needed to finish something this badly in a long time. I can't believe I knitted a gauge square for a hottie cover. At least I discovered that I am apparently a loose knitter and needed to go down half a needle size, shock!

Lamb's Pride, what can I say? Dreamy to knit - I haven't knitted with a yarn that's so round and smooth (instead of just twisted) before, and I love the way it fluffs up like cotton wool as you're making the stitch, then magically pulls itself tauter and snugger once you're done. Such is it's trance-inducingly dreamy qualities that the only times I've had to frog Bawk is upon discovering I've sailed right past where I was meant to stop and purl/cable, coz' I was enjoying myself so much just watching the yarn slip through... knit knit knit knit.....


Now, this may seem like a "well, der" kinda moment to you readers (or indeed, to Ms Yarn-a-go-go herself), but I guess I needed to disover it for myself, frog a few rows then go back and make sure that the P2s of my ribbing travelled straight up from the p2s of the channels either side of the cable.

Like I said, these realisations come slower to some of us than to others, but I still believe sometimes it's better to know something experientially rather than theoreticaly.

Will I be able to finish Bawk before the end credits of tonight's Bleak House finish rolling? Find out!

You can't. You won't. And you don't stop!

(Ok ok, so it’s actually a still from Sabotage,but let’s not allow referencing pedantry to come between us )

What I’m actually talking about here is, of course, FG. Which threatens to not stop.

Ever.

It now weighs 350 g, which doesn’t seem that much in the abstract
but once it’s been lying in your lap for a hour or two while watching Six Feet Under, it seems much more than that.

Scout looks on bemused>

v waiting for a pair of toe up socks

Or perhaps that’s just the weight on my psyche from the Fishers’unravelling.

In any case, this scarf is going to be extremely warm.

Possibly even claustrophobically hot.

But at least I’ll know what to pack next time we visit Montreal.

The hail was not kind to Agatha>

Not quite off topic: After attending a seminar last night with the very erudite Justice Kirby talking about global human rights and bioethics, it was such a relief to let my brain relax with a bit of mindless K2P2 lest it explode (my brain that is, not FG). Philistine that I am, the factoid that I took away from the entire evening was Eleanor Roosevelt visiting

Concord Repatriation Hospital .

Eleanor Roosevelt….

In Concord.

Wonders will never cease.

Speaking of ER, you may have seen her appearance in Ian Falconer’s Olivia books:

Children’s Lit.com: "Many people have remarked upon the unusual portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt on the wall of Olivia's bedroom in OLIVIA SAVES THE
CIRCUS. Why did you select Mrs. Roosevelt to be featured in the book and why this particular portrait of her"?

Ian Falconer: "I chose Eleanor Roosevelt because she is a great role model and because it's totally absurd".

Swatching Madness

To break the monotony of K2,P2 rib on Furry Goodness, I thought I'd swatch up something from the Big Book of Knitting Stitch Patterns.

About 2 cms of Fabric Stitch.

I think this would be quite a good stitch for a threwr for the cerch. Except there's a lot of purl in there and as we all know, purl puts the url in curl. Nothing worse than a curly threwr.

And a 6 stitch cable with the new cable needle.

Meanwhile, FG has been relegated to the sidelines.

Watchin' in a Winter Wonderland

smh.com.au

August 16, 2006

“ FIRST Sydney turned dark under a blanket of thunder, lightning, rain and hail...”

yes it certainly did

RTI

...or Repetitive Tile Injury

Furry Goodness checks my perspective for me while I take a break. It thinks I may be quarter of a mil. out on the bottom left.

Tip for young players: alpaca and double-sided tape don't mix, unless you're really into picking fibres off with tweezers.

Apart from a bad case of RTI from scoring forced perspective brick-pattern tilework into Bristol Board for what seems like an eternity...

FG is coming along nicely, although it's now about 5 degrees warmer than when I started it, so I may not be wearing it until next year. Which reminds me, does anyone know of a really good non-napthalene way to mothproof wool for storage? I've read that cedar chips are good, but in Australia?

In breaking news, I found a perfect chequerboard lino reference for the model on the cover of the Gillian Welch Revelator CD I was listening to whilst knitting FG.

photo Mark Seliger

Now who says nothing good comes from goofing off?

Not stash, it's Project Fuel

Fruit of today's shopping mission; a nocturne in green and grey:

Three balls of Grignasco Tango for the Goat.

Two balls of Eki Riva Sport for me to finish Furry Goodness.

Three sheets of Canson paper, two packets of scale I-beam, five super-precision glueing tips and one small bottle of Zappagap for the model.

Off-stage is 2 new cable needles..no more safety pins!

Knitted Golf Balls?

Despite the fact that I'm neither a golfer nor a knitter (not an accomplished one anyway) I managed to knit a golf ball!

Jester is finished, thanks to Elizabeth Morrison who responded promptly to my desperate email about my increasing crisis. I wasn't expecting such a speedy reply, but she did..isn't it nice to know that the international knitting community looks out for each other?

It's riddled with mistakes...

But it was my first time knitting in the round and on dpns (5mm), so I decided to forgive myself and after umpteenth rips n' frogs, I obviously decided at some point to -uncharacteristically- ignore and press on...

The real crisis came when I came to the end of the i-cord (a rather lumpy 6 stitch icord instead of the prescribed - and more elegant- 3 stitch one...unintentional. Lesson #2: Always read and re-read the instructions) and had to increase for the start of the ball. For some reason my stitches had become so unbelievably tight there that the M1 increase required a hammer and WD40 to get the needle through. And so the aforementioned email to Elizabeth.


Frog and redo i-cord (still as a 6stitch..too distracted by increasing issues to correct that as well). Magically straightforward increasing. Stuff golf ball. Bind off. Marvel.

I think it's not too bad for a first attempt at a hat in the round and hopefully the overall cuteness distracts from the obvious wonks in the ribbed band...and...well, pretty much all over it. Fairly pleased however with the regularity of my increasing.

Plan view:

Pizza anyone?

So can't wait to see it in action..hope it fits. Trying to discreetly wip out a tape measure and wrap it around a child's head without the mother noticing seems a tad impossible, if not giving the game away (if you want the gift to be a surprise) so I consulted this very handy chart at fibre gypsy and worked out a formula based on a 16 1/2 " head circumference. That's the theory anyway...whether it works in reality remains to be seen. Fingers crossed.

Just how long do you want this thing anyway?

Presenting W.I.P. Furry Goodness by Kathleen at Knits Well with Others.

Mmmm.. stylin' tracky dacks.

So far I've used 6 balls of Eki Riva alpaca sport (14 ply) and I am just lovin' the cable...some call it Baby Cable, some Mock Cable, some Simple(ton?) Cable..whatever the nomenclature it's a subtley textural and therefore very pleasing cable.


I'm lovin' the cable texture so much in fact that I can't stop. I thought I would stop after 6 balls. (When I went yarn shopping for this project, I naively thought 4 balls would do it) then back to tapestry craft for another 2 balls - that's all they had left on the shelf a week later, as if a plague of alpaca locusts had swept through in the intervening days - but their website's online ordering tracker informs me they have 9 balls left in some sneaky squirrel stash, so will have to get in their pronto to buy more (lesson of the week: Always Ask)...either 1 or 2 more balls.
The plan is to make tassles first, then use whatever is left to just keep going... Dory-like

Keep on knitting...keep on knitting...keep on knitting....

Not indefinately of course... I just think that the luxe of a super long scarf, of being able to wrap it around your neck and still have plenty of length suits the yarn, colour and stitch.

Only problem is I will have to knit a whole outfit to wear with it, in a fuzzy grey quelque chose as this yarn sheds like a mutha!!! Like a little baby alpaca has been napping in my lap for a few days (nor! how cute would that be?).Forget wearing black with it (there goes most of my wardrobe).

Undeterred however, I'm going to use the same cable stitch in a beret.

Nice








as Louis Balfour would say.