...One Year Later...

I finished it! Talk about a New Year's Resolution... I went out to Boulder to spend Christmas with my nieces (and other less cute but still lovable family members) and as I was packing, I came to the realization that a) I had no Christmas presents for anyone, and 2) at the rate I was going, the intended wearers would be in college by the time I finished it. So out came the needles again.

I didn't finish in time to give this one to my niece for Christmas-- in fact, I finished it on the plane ride back from Denver. But it'll go in a box soon (as soon as I decipher the pattern and scribble it down on paper for sharing)...

Gee's Bend

Wow-- A Gee's Bend quilt is up for sale on eBay. I'm such a fan of these things, I still kick myself for missing the Gee's Bend exhibit at the Whitney Museum a couple years ago. Seeing this quilt on the market got me googling a bit; there are lots of sites with photos of these quilts. FiberArts magazine had this photo of another Gee's Bend quilt to fall in love with:

New Year's 2007!

Did I say that this sweater was getting too wide? Now it might be too tall. By an inch, maybe more. Must've been all the champagne. And the beach. And the company of great friends, and great friends of friends. I have to say, I haven't really been a big fan of New Year's, as holidays go. But this year, I took my friend up on an invitation to ring in 2007 with him and a dozen or two of his friends in South Carolina. So much fun! And nobody seemed to mind too much that I was knitting compulsively the whole time-- except when I got distracted with frogging back a few stitches and yelled out an answer to a Trivial Pursuit question my team was apparently asking another team. Just call me Lazy "Wrong Way" Kate. We still won.

Color mixing

Dabs of Romney wool blends (powered by Kool-Aid!) that I purchased at Rhinebeck this past fall, thinking of making a mosaic knit jacket. Excuses for not having spun it yet: a) I'm still missing that piece from the flyer of my (Ashford Traditional) spinning wheel, and b) the winter weather's been so mild, who needs a woolen sweater-jacket?? I'm thinking about borrowing a friend's wheel later today... or maybe tinkering with my knitting machine. Inspiration of the day: this sweater-jacket from Anthropologie, slightly hideous in a wonderful way.

Red Heart baby sweater progress...

I know, it's really wide. More like a 3-year-old sweater. This is the full width-- two panels for the front (it'll be a little jacket, with a zipper, if I can figure out how to do that) and the back.

Christmas Quilt!

So there's this new (to me) rug-hooking technique-- well, actually an old, or old-looking technique-- that involves the use of washed, over-dyed woolen cloth. Zack and I found out about this at Rhinebeck this year, when we stumbled on a stall full of dyed woolens for sale. I can't find the address of the lady who ran the stall, but she had the most miserable-sounding sinus infection. We bought a whole bunch of overdyed woolen remnants from her.Apparently, you're supposed cut these woolens into strips and sew them into rugs. I cut them into fourths and sewed them into a quilt top. It's a little scratchy, but not as bad as you might think.

(The night after Rhinebeck: Zack is doubting whether I'll ever actually finish this project)

Does it still qualify as a quilt if it only takes about six hours to assemble? The picture at the top of this post is of the quilt all laid out on the living room floor last week, with T-minus 15 minutes to go before I was supposed to meet Zack to go to a friend's holiday party. I was hoping to suprise him with the assembled quilt as a Christmas present, but I ran out of time. Instead, I surprised him with the quilt top-batting sandwich. After the party, we headed back to my house and stayed up until 3am watching late nite talk shows and old Christmas movie reruns, and knotting the quilt top to the backing with some multi-colored acrylic yarn (yeah, Red Heart!).

I wonder if it "hurts" a quilt to knot it together instead of basting it, and then later quilt it and take the knotting out? I have ZERO patience with quilting, and end up sleeping under basted quilts for years and years. Embarassing admission: I still have not bound this quilt, which I sleep under every night. Knotting is so great-- you can knot a full size quilt in about the space of 1 Jay Leno + 1 Conan O'Brien show. If you knotted instead of basting, though, would you end up with gigantic holes in the fabric when you later took the knots out?

Pictures of the finished quilt to come when I get back to New Haven and sew on the binding!

Bleeding Heart

It's time you knew, folks.

I knit with Red Heart yarn. That's right, I said RED HEART. The kind that gives your knitting that special, unnatural sparkle, like fiberglass insulation. It comes in shades you haven't seen since you stopped fingerpainting. It's responsible for at least 5% of U.S. petroleum consumption.

Why do I do it?

Because it only costs about three bucks a skein. And I mean, a real skein, not a 50 gram ball. Because "real" yarn at "real" yarn stores is so expensive that you have to have a trust fund to support a knitting habit, anymore. Because I'm a poor grad student and try to avoid going into "real" yarn stores, lest I plunk down half my stipend on the above-mentioned "real" yarn, which means that I am usually in a Wal-Mart or a Michael's or, last week, a Jo-Ann Fabrics Store buying something entirely unrelated and find myself in the yarn section... and for $3, is it really so wrong if I buy one skein, or maybe two, for a little baby sweater pattern that just popped into my head? Baby sweaters knit in acrylic can be tossed in the washer, no problem. And by the way, you don't have to feel guilty for not finishing a project that only set you back $6.

Think about it. I bet you use Red Heart, too. Time to stand up and be proud about it! Is there anything you hate more than going into yarn stores, picking up a teeny skiff of cash-merino-paca-- something that you'd need about 50 skeins of to knit a sock for Barbie-- and it's so expensive that the yarn store people haven't even bothered to put a price tag on it? So that you have to ask, over and over again. "Oh, right, this one's $65, too?" Who can afford this stuff??

Well, on my way back down from the soapbox, I offer you a photo of what I've knit with my Red Heart yarn. Here's the back:

Inspired by socks on the Yarn Harlot's site, I'm knitting a hoodie (that word bugs me, for some reason) for my niece. But right now, I'm going to the auto shop to fix a leak in my tire. Take 'er easy!

Prom/Christmas dress... finished!

Remember this dress?

Last spring, I got the sewing bug and tried to whip together a bunch of remnants in about three hours for the law school prom. The bodice started off looking like this in March, and then two months later I added some smocking so it looked like this.

Another six months passed, and then this guy invited me to his program's holiday party so... the Almost Prom Dress became a Christmas Dress. I had sewn the skirt on, but it was a disaster (uneven gathering, no plan at all for how to attach a zipper) so I took it off and re-attached it. The skirt was still pretty full at the top, so I decided to do some large-scale smocking at the top of the skirt. Hmm. Kinda lumpy. I was still sewing on it when Zack came to pick me up. Instead of giving me a bunch of (deserved) grief about being late, he helped measure the hem. I cut off the extra fabric on the bottom and we were out the door.

Unfortunately, it was a freezing cold night, so I wasn't in a hurry to take off my coat at the party. Which means that I don't have any pictures of me actually wearing the dress. But a friend did take a nice one of my date.

I'm still mixed about how the waist came out all lumpy. I'm thinking about doing some beading around the contours of the smocking, at least on the waist part, just to weight things down a little bit. So stay tuned for the next variation...

I *heart* Sarah Swett

I'm a sucker for twining leaf patterns.

Yesterday, while cleaning up my room to install some new-to-me bookcases, I rediscovered my old-school scanner, which stubbornly continues to work despite years of neglect and improper storage. So I scanned a couple pages from the knitting journal I updated obsessively for, oh, about a month, sometime in 1998. The page above is all that remains of my first attempt to spin & handknit Sarah Swett's amazing sweater from the Knitting in America book-- chronicled (my attempt, that is) in more detail here (synopsis: first time spinning/dyeing, indigo didn't exactly take, yarn too thick, gauge too big, ripped it out, made a different sweater, yadda yadda).

I still couldn't get that sweater out of my head, though, and when I bought that old y knitting machine a couple eons ago, the Sarah Swett pattern was one of the first two-color swatches I knit. I punched in the pattern to the Design-A-Knit software, revved up the machine, started the carriage running across the needles (gnash! gnash! For anyone who hasn't heard a knitting machine work before, I think it's the scariest sound). Here's what happened:

See, I got through the pattern okay-- you can see the leaves, and the birds hanging out in the leaf-tops--but what are all those random little red stitches that show up, especially near the top? Was my computer (running the Design-A-Knit software) just getting overheated/running out of memory? Is it something mechanical in the knitting machine? Should I have programmed in shorter whatchamacallits (the maximum number of stitches that one yarn gets held in the back at a time)?

Yeah, I don't know either. But now you understand why I haven't exactly been in a hurry to break the machine out of its box again.