How I came to love lace

Looking back over the last few months of spotty blog posts I've done here I see that I haven't chronicled a lot of my progress as I went from just knowing the knit and purl stitches, to being an obsessive lace knitter, so I thought I'd play catch up a little.

Along the way I learned entrelac, sock knitting, and cable knitting and learned basic shawl construction. I've seen on Ravelry that a lot of people are doing 11 shawls for 2011 and many did 10 shawls for 2010 so I was surprised when I counted and realized I think I've already done nine shawls this year! O_O Many of them are quite small though. One of the first that I did was the famous Citron. I used Noro Sekku, and although it was a bit of a headache (cobweb weight yarn with 500+ stitches on the needles at the end) it was gorgeous and is one of my joys.

See those stitches? They are tiny. I think being snowed in way the only way I did the whole thing in a week!

I also made a Multnomah shawl, but I didn't take a good photo of it at the time so I will wait till I can get that one in direct sunlight. I used Crazy Zauberball in "Tropical Fish," a crazy rainbow colorway, for that one.

Around that time, in February or March, I began to realize that what I really love are lace patterns. I get this tingly feeling in my brain when I look at them. I love intricate, complicated patterns especially. I made a sweater (I still have to stitch the pieces together but the knitting is done) with an elaborate lace pattern and realized: All you have to do, is follow the directions. It's like a computer program or a recipe. The information goes into your eyes and out your hands, and then you have something beautiful. The process of blocking items -- soaking them and pinning them out to dry -- makes the design set in a beautiful way. I adore lace. Utterly. Especially in heavier-than-lace yarns. I am pretty much expecting this will form most of my projects in the future, because it's what excites me the most.

A simple pattern that was easy to memorize was the Morning Frost wrap, which I did in Stitch Nation's Bamboo Ewe, the Beach Glass colorway. I really love it for reasons I can't completely explain, it just scratches the "blue" part of my brain just right.

And another I did in that brand of yarn, the Mercury colorway, was the Summer Flies shawl. This is such a wonderful pattern! It only took about 4 days, and I remember knitting it while I was anxious about the horrible situation in Japan this March, unable to concentrate on anything else. As for the shawl, though, it only takes a couple of skeins of this yarn and it changes pattern every couple dozen rows so it is always interesting.



Embarrassingly, I still have a lot more to post, but I will leave these for here now and upload more tomorrow. I do want to have shawls in every color I would wear, so I can have something to put over summer sundresses when freezing cold air conditioning does battle with the heat.

I still have a lot to learn, in lace. I haven't done "nupps" or attached beads and I haven't tackled Estonian lace. I prefer fingering, sport and even worsted weight yarns, though I like laceweight and cobweb well enough. This is where the whole "art" part of knitting takes hold of me and where I realize that it has a lot more potential for me than being able to make hats and scarves for the winter.

Mystery yarn and lots of rain

It has rained nonstop for a week in New Jersey, where I have been during that time, after not seeing rain for quite awhile. Here on the tree stumps in her back yard, mushrooms are going crazy. Alongside this broken stone bird head it looks like we planned it, to look rustic. But we didn't, we just haven't been keeping up with the yard. I was hoping to get some outdoor work done up here, cleaning out the shed and organizing my possessions that are stored therein.

After a mostly dry season last year I am starved for mushrooms to photograph! The strangest thing in the back yard though was the fact that all of my boxes in her wooden shed seemed to be full of Rose of Sharon seeds. The things grow like weeds in the yard, but there weren't any IN the shed. There weren't any ABOVE the shed. How on earth did the seed pods manage to worm their way into my shoes, boxes and any sort of containment device, in the shed? It is a mystery to me. More on mysteries in a moment.

Now, on to blue things. Isn't it interesting when you can see the moon during the daytime?

Last week I got some mill-end yarn at AC Moore, a bag of five skeins of this stuff. Here's where the mystery is...I can usually identify any mill-end yarn because I spend an irrational amount of time in yarn stores and I know what brands usually wind up in the mill-end bin. I even recognized that they had Hobby Lobby I Love This Yarn! there, which was surprising since they don't even have Hobby Lobby around here. Which is a store that I love, because how can you not?

So here is the mystery yarn. Help identifying it would be greatly appreciated! Each skein is pretty hefty, and I've test knitting enough to know it's probably fingering weight. Using #4 needles I got about nine rows to the inch, and 29 stitches on the needle made it 4 inches wide. So that is 29 sts x 36 rows = a 4-inch square. But that was unblocked, stretched slightly.

The mill-end bags say it could contain anything from acrylic to nylon to wool, and I think that judging by the way it feels and knits up -- and sticks to itself I'm untangling it -- it must be at least part wool. I couldn't get it to "spit join" when I tried to felt it by rubbing the ends together wet, but to be fair I've never been able to get 100% wool to do that either.


Oh pretty skeins, what are you? How much of you is there? If this is fingering weight, then these are about the size of a ball of Noro sock yarn, which would mean there could be 300 or even 400 or more yards per ball.

So to test it out I am knitting the Out of My Head Shawlette -- or at least starting it, we'll see how it goes -- which uses less than 400 yards. So it won't take long and will be a good test of how the colors stripe out and if it blocks. If I can wet block it successfully to make the lace pattern set neatly, then I will be pretty sure it has wool content and I can make a larger, more complicated piece out of the rest. And I will know if I have 2000 yards of the stuff!

For the sake of posting...

Just when I was thinking that it has been awhile since I posted here, because I am trying to stay away from computers these days, I sat down to try to post something and the computer froze up, kind of making my own point for me.

My little internet art shops are still active -- I am just in a non-horn-tooting mood and have been so for awhile. I am mainly interested in reading, and making things for friends/charity/myself, and being outdoors since spring started (which was in late February for me this year!).

Oh and that photo up at the top? It's from a pattern book I got called Ocean Breezes, which are all -- well, ocean themed scarves and shawls. I really love how it looks, and the ribbon kind of makes it. While I wait for some tie-dyed silk ribbon to arrive I used some cheap stuff from the craft store which actually...might look better than the expensive stuff, now that I think about it.

And I even dusted off the sewing machine (literally -- it was very dusty) to try to make a couple of dresses while at my mom's recently. I cut out this space dress on the right a long time ago and finally made it. Then I found some amazing jellyfish fabric and made the same dress with that. My love of jellyfish is also represented in things like this painting here.

Anyway, here are the dresses.



And here I am at an arboretum outside Houston.

My love of palm trees is well documented, but I still never stop being thrilled by them. If it doesn't grow in New Jersey, it is exciting to me.

A yellow-crested night heron. Pretty groovy!

Some kinda lizard!
Aren't my captions just incredibly informative and helpful?


And, um, that's a butterfly.

So there, consider yourselves up to date -- I'm making baby hats for a hospital all week so I will get back to that now, and whenever the computer lets me post something again I'll be back!

December knits

I have been too busy to post lately, not with arts and crafts unfortunately but with other kinds of work! But I've been destressing at night with knitting. Oddly, I had recently decided that crocheting is more of a natural fit for me in terms of it being really intuitive and less frustrating. But here I am knitting instead! Most of what I have made this autumn and winter have been gifts, so I haven't been posting pictures until the gifts are all distributed. A couple of items, I forgot to photograph before I sent them out, alas. But I have plenty of things I made for myself too!

Above, is a portion of the entrelac scarf I'm making with this Tutorial. I'm using Bernat Mosaic yarn in the "Medusa" colorway. I had some problems with the yarn coming apart when I pulled it too tight, in some of the "in between" colors where black is mixed in with red or yellow. But I was able to rejoin it. Entrelac looks a little intimidating and the word sounds a little ominous, but it really wasn't very hard. As with all knitting things, just paying attention and counting seem to be the most important things.

The scarf is still a work in progress but I made the "Foliage" hat from Knitty as well recently in just about two days. It again required a lot of attention and counting because every row is different than the one before it, except for the ribbing. But it is a pattern, and once you learn to look to see "what part of the leaf am I in now" you can stay on track. I like circular needles. I was afraid of them but now I am not! This comes out a little large, as people had said on Ravelry, but I like a big roomy hat to pull down when it's cold. I could seriously make these ALL DAY in every color but I don't know that I need that many.


Here is a little flapper hat, it is a basic simple crochet stitch -- it's listed as the Amelia hat on ravelry. Very quick and simple to make, except that I started by making a different one -- Claire, I think -- and the pattern just stopped making sense to me at one point. Crochet instructions are easy to follow but it seemed as though it was impossible to repeat the pattern in the stitches the way they were listed so I decided to just go for something quick and easy to use my Manos del Uruguay yarn.

This is finished now, but here is a photo from the WIP phase -- the Drop Stitch Scarf in Bernat Mosaic "Psychedelic" yarn. Absolutely wonderful yarn and a perfect pattern to show it off with. I would make these all day too! I bought five more skeins of Psychedelic yarn on sale because I love it so much, but only one was the same dye lot as this one and there is a noticeable difference -- the yellow in this dye lot is SO BRIGHT. The others are much more muted. I will use them, of course, but for something where super bright yellow is not needed.

I'm still working on my Carnaby skirt, and I have a couple more gifts to make -- plus I still have my afghan squares and crochet flowers waiting for me to make more to finish up those projects. I think I like the fast ones the best. What on earth am i going to do with all these knitted goods?

ArtFire sale extended, new items

I'm extending my 25% off sale at my ArtFire sale through the week, which includes lots of art and a couple of knit/crocheted items. The autumn tree painting you see above, and the crocheted fingerless gloves below, are among the items that are for sale at a considerable discount.
Adorned with a red flower and a little robin. I definitely prefer crocheting, I've decided, after fighting with dropped stitches on a different project this week that was knit...but I will continue to do both. I think everyone who does this stuff has one method that they prefer, so I'd have to say that crocheting appears to be my preference.

I visited Woolbearers in Mount Holly, NJ today and got some beautiful yarn, including this below, a variety called Cornucopia in the color Provence. It made me think of something regal -- like a queen in a palace overlooking a cloudy cliff at the edge of the sea. I have no idea what I'd do with it but I have to have some.

And continuing my fixation on rainbows, some beautiful rainbow yarn...I wish I had an endless supply, everything I owned would be made of it! Another thing I prefer about yarn crafts to sewing, is that you don't need to plug anything in -- you don't need a machine. I hand sewed garments for years, but it was very time consuming, and the end results weren't quite as neat as I'd like them to be. Knitting and crocheting seem to come out very neatly. And you don't have all these little pins falling all over the place too. Oh I still sew, don't worry -- I am going to set up a machine in a permanent spot and use it whenever inspiration strikes me, but the rat-a-tat of the machine is something you can't do in bed at night or in a waiting room. Wouldn't it be interesting if you DID do it in a waiting room though?

Cyber Monday sale at ArtFire

I'm not usually the sales/promotion type but I like that ArtFire has a "sale" function so here we go! My shop is 25% off today and...well maybe longer, we'll see. I have prints and original paintings for sale but I'm also adding a few knit/crocheted items. For instance, this pair of fingerless crocheted gloves. I started with a star pattern that I liked, made a band of single crochet and finished with a shell pattern to make a unique, bohemian little eclectic design with this multi-colored yarn. I am very happy with them! They are super cheap with this sale, too, and they are one of a kind.

I'll try to have some more items up today but I have imported a couple of Etsy items over to ArtFire for the time being to give special deals on them as well. Check back to see what i have in stock!

Chunky yarn and granny squares

Among the many gifts I've been making lately (which I'm still not posting pics of, ha!) I managed to make something out of some fantastic chunky yarn I got, with a simple knit stitch that shows off the interesting textures. This is my first knit item that I'm putting up for sale, it's on ArtFire. I like ArtFire a lot, you can put stuff on the site on your Amazon wish list and you can purchase without having an account on the site itself. I know that the arts and crafts sites are overflowing with knit and crocheted items but I'm going to be pretty picky about the things I offer -- it's going to be all things I'd want to keep for myself if I needed this many scarves and things!

Meanwhile, I am working on two or three paintings that will also be gifts, so I also can't share pictures of them yet!! Oh my goodness! It's going to be such a relief after Dec. 25 when I can finally share these things. I did crochet seven squares for my afghan though which I talked about here. I didn't finish my flower scarf yet though, I got sidetracked. It's hard to make things for myself when there's so much else to do. But I am very devoted to my afghan project!

Here's a pile of unfinished squares...


And a slight close-up. I was very happy to be able to follow the instructions and actually make these happen, having never done anything like them before. The instructions for doing a "cluster" were confusing...as long as you have 5 loops on your hook at the end of each go-around you're good, but the instructions just say "pull through all loops on hook" without specifying how many. Well it's five. So there you go!

Knitting vs. crochet

After making fifty zillion things for other people for fun, I am doing a little something for myself, i.e. making as many colorful flowers as possible (or 16, whichever comes first) to create a rainbow flower scarf. I am going to use that gorgeous green yarn I got the other day to make a hat (with another flower on it) to go along with it. Hooray!

I don't draw much of a distinction between knitting and crochet normally -- I just call it all "knitting" if it involves yarn, but there's obviously a huge difference. I just figure out what project I want to do first and then think "Oh, I don't know how to do that" and go ahead and figure out what I need to know. For instance, flowers happen to be crochet items usually. But other things I've wanted to do came with knitting instructions so I learned what I needed to know to make them. If I could only do one though it would probably be crochet. For one thing, look what I needed to knit a hat:

A set of circular needles and a set of double-pointed needles, neither of which I particularly knew how to use. I figured it out and it wasn't hard, but it still gets a bit messy at times. When you have 100 stitches on your needles you have the possibility of dropping all of them. Whereas with crochet...

You just need this. And there's just one loop on it generally, so that's all you are at risk for dropping. And it's small! And it won't poke holes in your purse! But that doesn't mean I don't like knitting...I just never thought about the differences before I have been heavily engrossed in both this month.

Here is the beginning of the monster hat project I began a week or so ago. You can see that at this point I had moved to double pointed needles and was learning how to pick up stitches to add something to it. I did the teeth "wrong" technically, but they look the same as if I had done them "right" and they are just as sturdy. But the directions to pick up stitches just didn't make sense until I had done a few of them...

See, it all worked out in the end! I also had to learn how to do an I-cord. So for this project I learned three major new things as well as a half a dozen new stitches I hadn't used before. So that's how I do things...if I want to do it badly enough I just assume I can do it, and plunge into it.

Below, is a picture of something in a book I desperately want to make for myself -- sorry about the glare from the camera, I didn't have a scanner -- but I really love this color combination and I want to learn to make squares. I guess I'll finish the flowers first!

Knitting adventures

I did a little knitting and crocheting when I was a child but didn't pick it up again until two years ago, and since then I've just done a little during the months of October to January usually -- I get sidetracked by other things for the rest of the year -- but the madness is upon me again. So far I had really only done knitting and purling, though I started trying to use double-pointed needles to make socks, but lost my place and moved on. This year though something has clicked into place. In the last two weeks I've done a ton of things -- completed gifts for seven people (plus tiny little extra things to throw in with them) as well as several things for myself, which when I think about it is complete madness. I guess I haven't been doing anything else!

Pictured above is my first attempt to use circular needles. Although it called for a 40" circular I realized later they meant the Magic Loop, and the 32" I got was about as big a size as could accommodate it. What I'm trying to make is this:

The Brainmonster hat

I also don't know how to pick up stitches or do half a dozen other things, but the only way to do stuff is just to bloody well do it!

I also learned a new stitch -- which took a couple of tries to get right, but I think looks really nice, for this Nook/Kindle cozy which I can show a picture of even though it's a gift, because my friend already knows she's getting it! ;) This pattern is on Ravelry though you have to be logged in to see it.

It is surprising to learn that these two colors are actually the same -- the Cinder color from Loops & Threads at Michael's, in the Chelsea striped roving variety. It changes from one to the other throughout the skein -- I like both on their own so I think it would look lovely in anything. I might make myself a Nook cozy with that. I don't know why, I just think they need a cozy!
Doesn't EVERYTHING need a cozy??



And finally, from Pins and Needles yarn store in Princeton, I got a couple of skeins of really nice yarn -- the colorful one is by Punta Yarns, and the other by Manos del Uruguay. I usually just buy Vanna White and Red Heart yarn as I learn how to do stuff -- or the Michael's brand, Loops and Threads, so this is all very exciting, I assure you! It's too nice to use! But I will use it...just like fabric, I can't resist...