grits are good for you

What a great image, yes? We had a fantastic lunch at the Hominy Grill in Charleston (thank you Blair for directing me to the city guide on design*sponge). The restaurant was wonderful, in an old building with an amazing pressed metal ceiling (do look at their photo gallery), yummy food and boiled peanuts. We didn't even order these, they just ended up on the table, an obligatory gustatory experience I guess. They are raw peanuts, boiled for ten hours in brine.

And for my birthday I went to knit night at Knit. No purchases because I truly do not need any more yarn but so much fun to get out and do something regular in an irregular place and chat to other knitters.

done done done

Done!!

456 rows. Two borders of 66 rows each, 324 lace rows, that's 81 repeats, lace both sides.

Done done done!!

And considering that in March this year I was truly doubting my ability to continue with this project, I am super happy. After finishing those central lace repeats just four days ago, I got through the second 66-row border in no time. I've done a preliminary wet blocking but without pinning it, just to stretch it out so that the slipped edge stitches are easier to locate for the knitted-on edging. I can do this!!

(And I've also located a couple more balls of the yarn so I actually can, physically, do the edging too. Phew, I was a bit worried for some moments. Just a reminder - this is recycled yarn from a dress that I bought at Savers in Las Vegas so there's no more after this. It also means that the panel above, folded in half, was all knit with a single thread.)

fabrika

In Savannah I did manage to pop into Fabrika, partly because that's the sort of thing that I like to check out and partly because it was conveniently located directly on the route between the cathedral where the wedding was held and our hotel.

It's a small shop, blissfully air-conditioned (a blessing even in late September). I have to be honest that I don't remember much about the fabric selection; I rarely buy new fabric and mostly wander around soaking up colours and textures and inspiration.

What I did pick up are these great silicone thimbles, one in each size. That hand-stitching on my alabama dress is hard on my fingertips and somehow the other day I managed to stab myself quite deeply in the pad of my middle finger, enough to draw blood. And that was with the blunt end of the needle - ouch! It is taking some time to get used to sewing with a thimble but if it saves me from further wounds I'll be ever so grateful.

Alas, I didn't make it to Wild Fibre in Savannah, but as a birthday present, when we were in Charleston ...

four

Little miss bear's birthday was well over a month ago but after family visits and travels it was just last weekend that we had a celebration. This year's request was for a fish cake. This year I did not bake the cake, nor was the cake in the shape of a fish (a detail that did not go unnoticed and was the subject of a few tears several days after the fact and out of the blue). I did, however, decorate the cake and have the photos to prove it (which helped to assuage the tears).

progress

In defense of myself, I have sporadically been working on my knitted veil in Peruvian wool. Slowly, slowly I am getting there. The six-stitch, four-row repeat again and again and again and ...

And every row painstakingly recorded, so that I don't lose track of where I am, so that I know how much I have to go, so that I can calculate down to the last stitch just what percentage of the way I am through. Which currently stands at (7*36+9+66)/456*2/3 or 47.8 per cent of the way.

And the knitting is not much to look at, just the same endless four rows:

And then there is the gut-wrenching question: can I really ever finish this? And the answer: yes, I'm determined to. Eventually. One day. I hope.

My alabama dress is moving along nicely though. Perhaps it's just easier to pick the stitching up but I have already completed nine of the large black swirls (three to go), three small blue swirls (one small and eight large to go), no small purple swirls as yet (so twelve of those to go). And I need to buy another spool of grey button thread.

skin + bones

Seattle Public Library was good enough to get this book in for me on inter-library loan all the way from Rhode Island - Skin + Bones: parallel practices in fashion and architecture. This is an exhibition catalogue so it contains a couple of written pieces and then photographs and blurbs about the various artist/designer/architect/practitioners.

I only read one of the written pieces about deconstruction (the other mentioned Derrida within the first paragraph and that was enough to put me off I'm afraid; my headspace is precious these days).

The rest of the book was absolutely lush in its illustrations and fascinating to peruse. I was delighted to see some things in there that I recognised: one of my favourite buildings, the Institit du monde arabe in Paris; and an Issey Miyake exhibition at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporaine (also in Paris) which I saw in 1995 I think.

And then there were the entries that did my head in, that is, that I had to stop and think about and think about and try out myself to understand how it worked, like the Möbius dress from My Studio. Awesome stuff, I want to try and knit one.

savannah

So, we went to Savannah a few weeks ago for a wedding. Tim was asked to be a groomsman for a friend from high school who also lives here in the US. Being such a long way from home and family and friends as we are, it was delightful to be included in such a significant ceremony.

It's some years ago since I read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and I wish that I had had time to look at it again before we went. As it was I just managed to paint my toenails and that was an achievement. The photo above is the flooring in a cafe down the street from our hotel, apparently original to the building and over 100 years old. I love the colours and the shapes.

Travelling with children is mostly about just getting through the day, keeping the littlies adequately fed and watered, and if you're lucky doing or seeing one or two things. In Savannah we managed to visit the Juliette Gordon Low birthplace (she was founder of the Girl Scouts) and popped in to Goodwill (of course) and Gap (even more mundane but I needed to buy undies).

process

I have been working on my Alabama Studio Style tank dress with spiral appliqué. There are twelve large black spirals, the same number of blue spirals (most large and a few small), and also of small purple spirals. The plan is to hand stitch around all of them. I'm using a silvery grey craft/button thread, not white as this photo appears.

I'm fascinated by the thought processes associated with an undertaking of this scale, by the stages that my mind assigns to the project as a way of getting through it. There's the initial gung-ho start, the dawn of realisation of just how big a job this is, the slogging through it, the constant progress estimations, the possibility that you might just make it, the oh-my-goodness almost there. And then often the anti-climax of actually finishing. Do you notice anything similar when working on something really big? I'd be curious to hear.

(Ah, needless to say this is a situation that I get myself into regularly - doily quilt, knitted veil ...)

wedding foliages

While I have not taken the 'handmade pledge' (although that's about buying, not making), nor do I profess to be part of The Compact, both of these movements certainly encompass tenets that I try to live by - where possible don't buy new and choose handmade (preferably by me). So I knit our gifts for the wedding that we attended recently in Savannah (I must point out though that the bride and groom live in Chicago):

















The Vital Statistics
Pattern: Foliage by Emilee Mooney available free from Knitty - thank you!
Yarn: Sundara Yarn Worsted Merino in shade 'Watching the Night Emerge' and Noro Cash Iroha in the not quite so evocative shade 108.
Needles: 4.5 and 4mm for the grey/green and 7 and 5mm for the brown.
Size: I knit the two versions, the worsted (grey/green) and the bulky (brown). I wanted the hats to match but not be identical.
Stash/recycle content: All from stash (although I must admit recently and arbitrarily acquired). The Sundara was a curiosity purchase from someone who was de-stashing and the Noro was on sale at Churchmouse and I didn't want to leave empty handed ...
Start to Finish: 16 to 18 September 2010 (grey/green) and 21 to 24 September 2010 (brown).
Comments: I've knit this hat five times now and have enjoyed it every time. It has become my go-to gift knit. This is the first time that i have knit a bulky weight version - I had the Cash Iroha and some needles so I just gave it a shot. I think that this is a forgiving pattern - it has a bit of stretch but if it's a bit loose that's ok too.
Verdict: May their love grow and grow.

and we're back

Oh it's been an erratic past few weeks - my mum was visiting early in September and then we headed off on vacation to Georgia and South Carolina for the better part of ten days. 'Vacation' - that's still a hard word for me to use but 'holiday' here in the US very much refers to a 'holy day' such as Christmas, Easter or, unh, Hallowe'en.

We had a wonderful time away and I'll have some more photos and stories shortly. But this was quite possibly the best bit:

My birthday card from little miss bear on Hunting Island beach after swimming in the Atlantic (for the first time) with dolphins frolicking out yonder.

september reading

Ooops, a bit Sookied out this month - Dead as a Doornail
and Definitely Dead. Vampires, witches, demons, werewolves, no sex though. Lots of fun to read and I love the Sookie character. It's also great to have a visual on many of the other characters courtesy of TrueBlood.

my sewing circle

Ravelry for sewing? I know that there are a couple of sites like this around but mysewingcircle seems to be the one that all the cool kids are using. I'm on there too, user name 'amelia', and I've started an alabama stitching group for discussion and sharing of Alabama Stitch Book and Alabama Studio Style projects. If your a seam-ster/-stress (as opposed to a sewer which just makes me think waste management) you might like to have a look.

And here's something that I've sewn recently:

We're attending a wedding next weekend and little miss bear is very excited as it is her first since she was a baby. This dress is taken from a Japanese pattern book and the fabric is a silk-cotton blend recycled/upcycled from a Sally Smith womens skirt that I once upon a time bought at an op shop in Melbourne just for the fabric. I had to alter the style rather because I didn't have enough fabric to cut the extra flare that the original pattern included. To use up as much fabric as possible I also made it longer.

I left off the front ruching as the fabric is so lovely and I didn't want to break up the print. I also finished the hem with bias tape, again to make the dress longer. Actually, my finished dress didn't end up much like the tunic pictured here at all - the reason that I used this pattern is because it was cut on the bias as was the skirt that I was sewing from.

There wasn't a lot of fabric left over (surprising how much a child's garment can take up from an adult skirt) so I had to make the bias tape from lots of small strips sewn together; came out fine though. No hand finishing on this one except for sewing on the button loop and the button (both from stash).

And that 'decorative' zig-zag stitch? There are no mistakes, just design features (I didn't do a great job of sewing on the bias tape). Same goes for that diagonal seam on the right front shoulder - the fabric went through the overlocker by accident and I couldn't cut the whole piece again so I just had to make do.

I used my overlocker/serger on most of the seams so hopefully there will be no fraying after washing. Impeccable finish is very important to me and I was put off home sewing for many years by the fact that I didn't have an overlocker and I just couldn't bear those raw edges. Funnily, nowadays I actually find those overlocked edges tacky; they are redolent of commercially produced garments rather than hand made. When using a weave, I actually much prefer French seams like I was doing on the (admittedly, yet-to-be-finished) tunique francaise; there is clearly so much more effort in them, the hand of the maker is somehow more present.

booksleuth

I think that I have a good memory. I remember peoples' names, I remember details about them, I remember episodes and feelings from childhood. Sometimes what I remember though is just a sliver and that can be frustrating. For ever so long now I have had a fragment of memory of books that I read as a child, probably in the eighties:

1. in this book the young female protagonist gets kidnapped and raises the alarm by switching on a stove which ignites a bag that is sitting on it and sets off the alarm.

2. a book about a kidnapping; when the young male protagonist tries to escape he recalls that people often stand with their weight on only one foot.

3. a spooky book where the young female protagonist has an excellent sense of time and so realises that her father's new love interest and her son are somehow living forever.

These are truly the only details that I could remember about these books. I posted my queries to Abebooks' BookSleuth® forum and lo and behold within a day I had my answers from other readers:











Third Eye by Lois Duncan
On the Edge by Gillian Cross
Locked in Time by Lois Duncan

I'm really excited to read these childhood favourites again, but also apprehensive as I guess that the impact that young adult fiction will have on me twenty years later will not be quite so profound. I'll let you know.

what colour is your parachute silk?

What Color is Your Parachute?* is a famous job hunter/career counselling book. For someone who has always felt so conflicted about career choice, it's kind of funny that I have never read it. I wonder if it even includes motherhood as an option?

Anyway, having children changes you, obviously, but in subtle ways which you might not expect. My experience is that when you get over those first few weeks (months) and re-emerge from your tracksuit pants into the world you find yourself a different person. You want to wear different clothes, different colours. Dark blue, which I had always eschewed as looking matronly on me, is suddenly just the right colour and I have recently acquired a few t-shirts (yes, the dreaded VS) and two cardigans (Ben Sherman and H&M via Goodwill) and Yves and Daybreak have come off the needles.

And suddenly you also want something different in your life. Something neutral, something chic, something ... beige. Yes, I was looking at yorkiegirl's knitting projects on Ravelry; all those neutrals - cream, oyster, alabaster, parchment, linen - so serene, so sophisticated, so what I wanted right now. So, I knit myself something.

The Vital Statistics
Pattern: A Little Ruffle, available free from Sadie & Oliver. Thank you!
Size: As per the directions is a great size.
Yarn: I had always thought of paler neutrals as something that I couldn't wear but on this project I didn't care, I wanted something beige (or thereabouts, I'm calling it wheaten). And I'm delighted with it - I received a compliment immediately from a very colour- and design-savvy friend that the brown looked great and the grey picked up my blue eyes and I felt wonderful. I will have no hesitation in wearing this with confidence now.

Oh and the yarn, well of course I liked the colour - it was a men's zip-up cardigan that I bought for Tim but there was a mark on it and a hole appeared and it sat around for a few weeks so I decided to make it into something else, for me. To achieve the weight I wanted, I ended up double stranding this yarn but picking out a single ply as I knit along - tedious and a bit wasteful. It's 92 per cent merino and 8 per cent cashmere - it didn't knit up very nicely which surprised me, given the yarn content. That was perhaps because it was recycled and had a lot of kink in it. Once I blocked it the drape became beautiful and it's very soft.

The grey is some Columbia Minerva Princessa that I got free at a stash swap, colourway is 2229 'Dark Oxford'.

Needles: 4.5 and 5mm.
Start to finish: 18 August to 15 September 2010.
Stash/recycle content: Whoo-hoo - all of it!

Comments: Excellent, simple, free pattern - not really a half-circle shawl, more like a scarf with tapered ends and a frill. I did a provisional cast on of the initial 10 stitches to avoid having to pick stitches up in order to do the frill. that just seemed like double work and I try to avoid that where I can. As for the striping, I just winged it on that. As I didn't carry the yarn up the sides of the work, I was able to knit three rows of alternating colours and I really like the effect, it's quite graphic.

Verdict: I really love this scarf. I have already worn it a couple of times and felt great for being a bit daring. My only reservation about it is that it might be more a 'little house' than 'little ruffle with the brown and grey but I think that the graphic effect of the stripes updates it a bit. I must say that wearing it, I realised, that if you are a knitter, you need to be comfortable wearing knitwear.

* I'm not one for extreme sports but I have been watching Project Runway lately so parachute silk seemed like a more appropriate title for me.

whorls

I have finished placing, cutting and pinning the spirals on my alabama dress. I have even done a little bit of stitching. There are a lot of pins though so it is unfortunately not a very portable project. And heavy too! All that cotton adds up.

stella

Stella is a lovely neighbour of ours who recently turned nine (ok, not so recently, in fact, weeks ago but I only just finished making the present for her). There is a great home decor shop in Capitol Hill that I forget the name of - I'll look it up and provide details but for the moment it's just along from Molly Moon's Ice Cream, reason enough to go there - that sells 'green' products: recycled, upcycled etc. There I saw some blank books that were actually bound in fabric that had been salvaged from clothing with the pockets nicely placed in the front centre of the book. I love the idea of always having a handy place to store your drawing materials.

I realised that book binding is outside my craft skill set and besides, it would be sad once you had filled the book to no longer have use of that cute fabric cover (and especially the pocket), so I decided to sew a sketch book cover that can be reused (even greener!). For the fabric I chose a floral-printed mini-corduroy jacket that has been in the cupboard for sometime (bought at a thrift store here in the US though, so less than two years).

The construction is a very simple - a rectangle with flaps sewn at either end which the book covers slip into. There was no appropriate pocket on the jacket so I made the pocket and pocket flap (and a buttonhole - still a mental block for me but actually oh so simple) just the right size for some mini pencils. I went to a lot of trouble to make sure that the pattern met up across the pocket and flap - it worked out well. The button is from the jacket cuffs.

As a finishing touch I embroidered Stella's name on the inside flap using some embroidery floss that I bought at the thrift store (of course).

august reading

Three books!

She Walks These Hills by Sharyn McCrumb - More in the Ballad series, really enjoyed this one.
Last Rituals and My Soul to Take by Yrsa Sigurdardottir - I actually picked the second of these up at the library from the 'grab and go' shelf but had to put it back because I saw that it was the second book with the same character and well, I had to read the first one first. So I did, and then the second one immediately afterwards. Great Icelandic murder/detective fiction. I'll be on the lookout for her next novel.

spirals

As much as I keep saying that I would like to show more in-progress shots of what I am working on, I am aware that I just keep pulling finished items out of nowhere. Like this:

The Vital Statistics
Pattern: Yummy Scrummy Cupcake, available free!
Size: the regular size; there's also a pattern for mini cupcakes.
Yarn: Tahki Cotton Classic in shades 'white' and 'cotton candy' and just two rows of Grignasco Bambi in shade 416.
Needles: 4mm.
Start to finish: 28 August to 30 August 2010; this is part of the reason that it is only now making an appearance in its finished state - it all happened so quickly.
Stash/recycle content: all from stash - hooray.
Comments: Hmm, looks a bit more like an iced dumpling than a cupcake. I should have knit on much smaller needles in order to tighten the gauge and achieve a firmer finished object. The top is decorated with three of the sparkly buttons that I have also previously used on the red vintage baby booties. Stuffing comes from a cushion from the thrift store that didn't survive the wash very well.
Verdict: Could have been better but still cute, and for a wonderful cause. This cupcake is destined to be part of the Knit for Life fundraising display in the window of The Yellowleaf Cupcake Co. in the Belltown neighbourhood of Seattle - "Working with one of Seattle's most inspirational knitting groups, we will donate $1.00 of every regular price "PINK SNOWBALL" cupcake to Knit For Life. Helping to make every hospital visit a "stitch" easier! One Cupcake, One Stitch, One Smile...Knit For Life!" Sweet.

So, in an attempt to remedy all this - my other current knitting as I continue to recover from Daybreak (which I think should be renamed 'Crack at Dawn') has been a very pleasant, meditative stocking stitch number - 'A Little Ruffle'. I am not yet up to the ruffle. The yarn is recycled from a 92 per cent wool 8 percent cashmere zip-front sweater that I bought at Goodwill, that Tim wore for a while and then left sitting around for too long so I unravelled it. That's the way things go here.

And my current addiction - sewing knit fabrics, particularly working on projects from Alabama Studio Style. This may become an obsession. The cotton knits are so nice to work with and I'm fascinated by all of the possibilities that the book allows. I have sewn up the tank dress using fabric from a very simple (boring) black t-shirt dress that I bought at Goodwill and some black t-shirts because I needed more fabric to complete the length of the skirt - photos of that later - and am pondering how to go about the embellishment. A word first though about showing projects underway - it's scary. What if it doesn't work out? What if I don't finish it (ha ha, that wouldn't be a first)? What if I can't achieve the thing that I have in mind and that gets revealed to the world? All the usual angst about making things really and perhaps a good way to confront them.

It's also a lack of confidence about my creative abilities. I have, ahem, rather high standards and expectations and a lot of what I do along the way I don't deem to be very good or at least good enough. Like drawings and sketches and so forth. So, without any further ado, here is what I have in mind:

I have the black dress done - good start. Now I'm thinking about how to do the spiral appliques. What I have in mind is three tiers of spirals - from hem upwards in black, purple and blue - in diminishing size and with diminishing coverage in silver. Not sure how to do the silver yet - I have tried some silver fabric spray paint but wasn't happy with the effect. I have also tried just drawing onto the fabric with a metallic Sharpie. And I did a test run spiral:

The silver Sharpie, unfortunately, looks very flat in this photo (whereas the spray paint that I tried had too much 'glimmer') but this little project showed me something - the circle distorts once it is cut into a spiral shape as does the gradation of the silver shading. So I think that the silver, if any, has to go on after the spirals have been applied to the dress. Good - off to cut out spirals.

shetland

No, we haven't been travelling, except down to Tenino (rhymes with, umm, wino) just outside Olympia, where we have Shetlands in our own back yard. Shetland sheep that is, and it's the sheep herder's side paddock and ...

Point is, we own a sheep (ok, technically two-thirds of a sheep as part of a mini fibre co-operative organised by a very resourceful knitting friend - thank you Aimee). There are four sheep altogether, the one in the middle is nominally 'ours':

We've all bought into the co-op and will share in the costs and proceeds (proceeds being raw fleece). No idea what I'm going to do with it when the time comes but getting it will be really exciting - we will not be shearing the sheep but instead rooing them! Australians must be good at that.

Below are some up-close photos of the sheep on the left's fleece (he was the only one that we could get hold of and pet). Aimee and I held on to one horn each and I had an awful irrational fear that they would just break off as though made of chalk. Although small, sheep are quite strong when they want to get away from you!

Oh it's going to be so much fun picking all that vegetable matter out of the fleece. I'm serious, that's just my sort of micro-mindless task. As long as it is just vegetable matter ....

stretch target

Ahh, corporate speak - stretch targets, personal and professional development plans, key performance indicators. Anyway, on 1 January this year I stated that stretch was one of my goals for 2010, that is, sewing knit fabrics, and promptly forgot about it until I started working on my Alabama projects. I have decided to leave that blue/green tank unfinished and consider it a toile and ditto for the pink (which is from Alabama Stitch Book - I wanted to try it out for comparison, fit- and length-wise).

I used my overlocker to sew both of these and wouldn't actually recommend it (although I also wouldn't recommend hand stitching as who could bear to rip out those seams as you work on getting the fit right?) Next time I am just going to use the sewing machine with a very shallow, long zigzag stitch and a little less pressure on the foot than usual.

So what, I wonder, would the key performance indicators for motherhood be? Sometimes we catch up with people whom we haven't seen for a few weeks and they ask what I've been doing. Well, I want to say, both the children are still alive and in one piece and we're all wearing clean undies. I mean, that really is meeting my targets (the first one about keeping the children alive being non-negotiable).

And speaking of clean undies - that is my other recent stretch project.

I haven't been happy with any of the girls' underpants on the market here so, having seen Omi Creates' endeavours, I decided to make some. Modern yet modest is how this underpants pattern from that*darn*kat is described and I think that is spot on. And such a fabulous way to use up scraps, old t-shirts, favourite baby clothes - fantastic. You can still see the (admittedly upside-down) Esprit lable on this pair from a top that I bought at an op shop many moons ago. The blue was from a t-shirt of mine that was in decent condition but had a stain right down the front, the red for the bands was some yardage that I had bought previously for something else but decided not to use.

These were mostly sewn on the machine, with the overlocker to neaten up some hems but I question whether that is really necessary. The overlocker is great for knits but the thing is, knits don't really unravel so raw edges are not going to be such a big deal. I actually like to use the overlocker on woven fabrics to keep them from coming apart.

Anyway, I've met my stretch target. Now I just need to go about getting a raise ...