DIY-eyrea

a new adventure in bread

2012-02-12T09:56:00.001-08:00

Things I Shouldn't Get So Excited About #402: bread-making. It's not like it's that hard. It's just that the variables are so fun to play with, and even when you screw up, the results are often edible. Okay, not always by humans, but something.

Last night I decided to make the walnut and onion bread I'd originally planned for 2 February (Candlemas). The ingredients listing was definitely wrong (2/3 cup of flour to 1 cup of milk? Really?), so I kept adding flour until it seemed right to me. I also read the instructions incorrectly and proofed the yeast with all of the milk instead of just a quarter-cup. Oh well, the yeast didn't seem to mind. I made a single one-pound loaf instead of shaping the dough into two baguette-type loaves as well, and had to adjust the baking accordingly.

I refuse to be one of those stereotypical Canadians who overheat their homes in the winter, so my apartment is a little cooler than average. That's fine for me, but not yeast. Usually I let the dough rise in a cold oven, reasoning that it's at least draft-free, but last night I had a brainwave: why not turn the oven light on to warm up the inside of the oven, but not so much that it will kill the yeast? I tried it, and the yeast loved it. I bake with wholegrain spelt flour, so usually I wind up with denser bread than if I used white wheat flour anyhow, but dough rose much better this way.

Here's what the results looked like:

It tasted wonderful, especially with the soft cheese the recipe recommended. I put some brie on a slice and it was divine.

The adventure didn't have a completely happy ending — I underbaked it a little and so the centre was still a little on the moist side. Next time I'll add 10 more minutes to the baking time.

Final version of the recipe:

Ingredients

1 cup of warm milk
1 sachet of regular bread yeast (not instant)
1 generous teaspoon of honey
1.5 teaspoons sea salt
2 tablespoons butter at room temperature
about 2 1/2 cups of wholegrain spelt flour (aha! maybe it was 2-3 cups originally)
half a red onion, finely chopped
3/4 cup chopped walnuts

Method

Mix the honey into the warm milk.
Add the yeast and let proof for 10 minutes. The mixture should be foaming.
Meanwhile, measure the flour, place in a mixing bowl, and make a well.
Add the butter and salt to the milk/yeast mixture and stir until combined.
Add the milk/yeast mixture to the flour and mix/knead until combined.
Turn the dough out onto a floured board or a nonstick pastry sheet (my preference) and knead until the dough is smooth and elastic —10-15 minutes.
Place the dough in the mixing bowl, cover with clingfilm and place in a cold oven. Turn the oven light on to warm up the oven just a little. Leave until the dough is almost doubled in size — about 2 hours.
Punch down the dough and gradually knead in the chopped onion and walnuts until they are evenly distributed throughout the dough.
Form the dough into a loaf shape and place it in a loaf pan (I use silicon; if you use a regular tin, grease it first). Cover with clingfilm and return it to the cold oven with the light on for 30 minutes.
Remove the loaf from the oven and preheat the oven to 350F. Leave the loaf in a draft-free area until the oven is preheated.
Remove the clingfilm and bake the bread until it is golden brown and sounds hollow when tapped. I baked mine for 30 minutes, but 40 minutes is probably better.

sugru you

2012-02-02T19:06:00.001-08:00

I know I haven't updated this blog in ages, but it's not because I haven't been doing any DIY — far from it. A few of the bigger projects are still not yet ready for prime time, but a lot of other ones are completed.

The ever-cool Cathy gave me several packs of Sugru for my birthday last year. Sugru is a kind of silicon clay that has the texture and viscosity of stiff plasticine when fresh, and is sort of like an old-school pink pencil eraser when cured. It comes in lots of fun colours, and is intended to be used to "hack things better" — to repair, make, and improve things.

I went on the web site and had a look at the suggested uses to get an idea of what to do with the stuff. It's one of those things that when you first encounter it, you think, "that's interesting, but I don't know if I'd ever use it," but then once you find the first use, you can't stop finding things to do with it.

Not all of my attempts were successful (the web site warns you about that), but everything I made with it last autumn is still working great.

The very first thing I did was use a pack of Sugru to make better (and semi-permanent) cushions for a pair of cell phone earbuds I have. The original ones were constantly coming off and getting lost, and just weren't that comfortable. I got this straight off the Sugru web site, so no photos.

The next thing I did was a bit more original. My laundry room (more like a laundry closet) just has a bare light bulb sticking out of the wall to illuminate it. The room is so tiny and crowded the bare bulb has a hard time lighting what I need to see, so a proper shade did not appeal. Instead, I made this so-ugly-it's-fun beaded cage to put around the light. The Sugru is the blue and orange stuff next to the wall. It holds the main structural wires together and pads the wall against the wire of the cage:

The idea for a light bulb cage came from a photo of Little Edie's room at Grey Gardens.

My first experiments showed that Sugru is best for sealing something (including something that needs to be waterproof, since it's silicon), or making something more ergonomic, or padding something. Next time I get some packets of it I'm going to check over the suggestions for shoe repair on the web site very carefully.

finally

2011-08-28T15:23:00.000-07:00

Some things you get to right away. Other things you don't.

I am the proud owner of a quartz bracelet that was custom-made for me. Each big piece of quartz represents a full moon — there are thirteen in total on the bracelet, or a full year's worth. The jewelry artist added in some small round quartz beads in between some of the quartz chunks to make the chain long enough for me (she joked those represented the eclipses).

One day at work, when I was in the washroom, I flexed my wrist when the bracelet was mostly down around my hand and one of the links broke. Luckily I was able to find the one chunk of quartz that fell off and the two halves of the bracelet.

That was over five years ago.

I'd already been making my own jewelry for a while by then, but wasn't very comfortable with making wrapped loops, and wasn't sure I could do the fine work required to make a new link for the broken piece. But I bought different types of wire, figuring one or the other would work. I even brought the bracelet to a local jewelry shop that claimed they did "all kinds of repairs" (they made faces at it and went back to talking about custom engagement rings with another customer).

I've started to plan out repairing it myself several times, but I'd get as far as pulling out all the different kinds of wire I'd collected, determine that none of them were even close to the wire used in the bracelet, and give up.

Then, last night, I was reading a back issue (September 2008) of Canadian Beading, and came across Cheryl Laakes's Victorian Gothic Cuff pattern. The pattern calls for you to string beads onto a head pin, make a wrapped loop, and then clip the head end off the pin and make a second wrapped loop.

When I pulled out some spare headpins I had, they were a little thicker than the wire in the bracelet, but a lot closer than anything else I'd seen.

It took three tries, (remember, I'm more into working with beads than wire), but I got it to work. The result blends in a lot more than I thought it would, and because I had to wrap six loops instead of just two I'm now more confident about my abilities to wrap tiny lengths of wire with special pliers.

The box highlights the replacement link. In the background you can see a leftover headpin and some of the tools it took to get this to work.

It's weird —I'm so happy about getting to wear my bracelet again it's almost a non-event. Mostly I want to be sure to change the wires on the matching earrings...

how to fight back when things suck

2011-07-03T19:17:00.000-07:00

I've been trying not to whine about it too much on-line, but since the last week of this April I've been having problems with my shoulders and upper back (hence the long gap between blog posts, amongst other things). Since I'm not very good at just lying down and watching TV, I got bored very quickly, despite the pain. As soon as things started getting better, I was looking for ways to make stuff without disobeying my chiropractor and sabotaging the healing process, but which would help me from getting stir-crazy as well.

The main problem is in my left shoulder, which is the "power source" when I'm knitting, so that's been out until recently. I crochet right-handed, though, and I knew I could do that whilst reclining to support my neck and head, so I tried that.

I've been learning all sorts of things.

The first thing was that I need to learn to adjust crochet patterns the way I do knitting patterns. I made this lace cardigan:

There was something out of whack about the original sleeve length. I have longer-than-normal arms, but the original arm length went well past my knuckles (and yes, I was getting the right gauge). I took out two rounds of shells — almost three inches —to fix that. The waist/peplum is in the wrong place (see how the bottom three rows of shells run in the opposite direction?), but since I plan to wear is just buttoned at the bust, that's okay. The button, incidentally, replaces the ribbon closures called for in the pattern. It's still girly and less of a pain to take on and off.

I wanted a non-jacket that would let me look pulled together when it was wiltingly hot outside, and I think this fits the bill nicely. The yarn, incidentally, is Patons Grace mercerised cotton fingering weight, and since most of the stitches are trebles it worked up quickly.

I also learned a form of bead crochet:

My mum gave me the multicoloured pendant bead a while ago, and I had this idea of putting it on a spiral rope for a while though. For some reason I have a hard time stitching spiral ropes. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong with the stitching part, but this loop crochet method works up faster and is easier to work. It's hard to see in the photo because the seed beads are black, but the results are similar to a Russian spiral. Each loop has four size 11 seed beads and one 4mm coloured bead. I arranged thing so that the blue and green beads alternated in one spiral path, and the red and orange beads in another. The pendant had its loop and fringe added while it was still separate from the main necklace rope, and the peyote stitch loop has to be that big to accommodate the pendant.

This is one case where I really like having the pendant at the front, although of course it could be worn "backwards" with just the rope part showing in front and the pendant hanging down the back, too.

I'm really inspired by this beaded crochet stitch. I've even got two more things on the go using the same stitch — all to be made in a reclining posture, of course.

a way east easter

2011-05-05T16:03:00.000-07:00

I have two nieces. On Easter the eldest one was two and a half years old, and the youngest one was three weeks. So neither of them are into chocolate much yet.

I got told to buy them picture-books, which was perfectly cool by me, but picture-books look so lonely in a gift bag. The stupid bag keeps collapsing.

Then I remembered this Chinese zodiac amigurumi set of patterns that knit.1 magazine published a while back. It's now a free pattern to download (that's where the link goes to). I took the Year of the Rabbit pattern and Eastered it up into two dolls, one for each niece. The only mods necessary were to embroider the faces instead of using the recommended buttons, and to add the neck ribbon/flower to make them look more seasonal. The flower petals are tacked down so that little fingers can't pull them off.

I used dishcloth cotton for the bodies and neck decoration, and the faces are embroidered with cotton floss. I wanted something that wouldn't taste/feel yucky if a little one decided to teethe on an ear or an arm, and to make them more washable.

They were quick and unfussy to make, good TV crocheting, and I got a kick out of using a Japanese crochet aesthetic to appropriate a Chinese zodiac symbol for a European holiday.

comfy

2011-02-19T16:48:00.001-08:00

I just got back from a 10-day business trip to Orlando, Florida. It took some serious clothes wrangling to find ten days' worth of office-ready clothes in my closet, and more wrangling still to fit them all in my suitcase.

One of the things I decided to do for the trip was finish off this recycled-cotton pullover I've been working on:

The pattern can be found free on Knitty here. The original was made in wool, but the simple lines made me think that it would be good for cotton too. The shape is a wonderfully flattering A-line, the armholes are low enough to be comfy but high enough to be elegant, and it has those neato-keen pleats at the neck and on the slightly belled sleeves (the back has darts that imitate the pleats without adding bulk). The vast majority of the knitting was just that wide 2x6 rib that you can see forming the vertical lines. And yes, the back does work out to be wider than the front, which in wearing means it's also longer, but that keeps it from riding up, so I'm fine with that.

The recycled cotton was from a "sweater's-worth" kit that I picked up from Summit Yarns in the early 00s, right before they went out of business. The idea was that you would knit up a largish swatch in the stitch pattern you wanted to use, then machine-wash and -dry it. The yarn would shrink (mostly lengthwise — denim yarn is famous for this), and you would know your finished gauge. You could then knit the sweater to the finished gauge, and have a machine washable sweater made out of eco-friendly yarn.

Knitting the sweater was a breeze, despite the 20% increase in all the lengths I had to knit in. The yarn itself was kind of like knitting with cotton kitchen twine — not unpleasant, but not exactly "luxurious" either. It's an artifact of how quickly our "green" sensibilities have changed. While part of me is glad it's made from recycled fibre and is unbleached, another part is shrieking, "I have to throw this thing in the dryer to make it keep its shape? I never put clothes in the dryer!" Oh well, it seems to be happy being washed with the towels.

I still have another Summit kit in a hemp/cotton blend that knits up to about the same gauge.

insanity

2011-01-17T18:14:00.000-08:00

One of the things I had planned to make over my winter holiday was a new pair of plain black mittens. When I make plain mittens, I use the same Patons leaflet pattern I have been using since I was twelve years old — I think it's called "Two Needle Mitts for the Family" or something like that. I almost have the whole thing memorised, and can do a mitten in about one round trip on the streetcar between the Beach and downtown.

Instead, I wound up making these:

They took a bit longer than a couple of streetcar rides.

The mitten and gauntlet pattern are from different examples in Anna Zilboorg's Magnificent Mittens, and the only saving grace of the whole thing (besides that I can keep my hands warm to about -25C with ease now) is that I used up a nice chunk of stash yarn. I deliberately chose the patterns to maximise the stashbusting — I had more red than black left, and that dictated which patterns I knit.

I wasn't paying attention to row counts when I picked the gauntlet pattern. I just cared about the proportions of the background and foreground. Most of the gauntlets in the book go a few inches past one's wrist — enough to go over a coat cuff nicely and block out the wind. These gauntlets go almost all the way to my elbow, and I have long arms! I feel like a superhero with some kind of DIY angle to their identity when I'm wearing them. They sag a little when I'm walking with my arms hanging down naturally, but they still stay over my coat cuffs, so that's fine.

The second time I wore them, I got the best compliment a DIYer can get from a stranger. A lady came up to me and asked me where she could buy a pair. I gave her the book title, but she doesn't know any knitters who could tackle mittens in two colours. Pity.

Actually, if you're a knitter who would like to try out two-colour knitting for the first time, I'd recommend mittens. They're small and it's easy to find patterns that can be committed to memory easily. The Zilboorg book has clear instructions and lots of variety, and is as good a place to start as any.

wardrobe stuff

2010-12-28T10:41:00.000-08:00

I have this ~~bad habit of~~ knack for wearing out the left elbow on my jackets. Not just knitted ones — store-bought blazer-type ones too. Not only do I get to be annoyed by having a jacket that is perfectly wearable except for the one elbow ruining it, but I get to have insult added to injury when various people tell me to get those suede patches that everyone loved to hate in the 70s.

Right. Because suede patches look so incredibly good on tailored suit jackets

Instead, I've been busy making up some knitted jackets. Not cardigans, exactly, although technically I suppose they are. "Cardigan" implies something casual. These are office-ready, and have some dressmaker details to make them more tailored-looking.

The first one I finished is a Fiona Ellis pattern:

It's a basic shaped jacket, with just a little two-colour work as trim. I made two changes from the original design. The first change was to add hems to the bottom of all the body pieces. The original pattern just called for a few rows of the contrast colour in garter stitch, and it was doing absolutely nothing to keep the edges from curling, so I had to rework.

The second change was to omit the floppy pleated cuffs and replace them with a plain hem that had the same trim as the front and neck bands. I thought the dramatic cuffs were great, but not terribly practical for the office. I have to type a lot for my day job, and worried I would have to do a Liberace-style wrist flourish every time I went to edit a new version of a requirements document.

The second jacket is from a recent issue of Interweave Knits:

This one had a lot more mods to the original pattern.

I added extra rows of garter stitch to the bottom of the body and sleeves to keep the lace edging from curling. It still does, a little bit. The directions said steaming would get rid of this. I am not inclined to steam a jacket every time I want to wear it, so decided to let the knitting do the work.
I added a 5-stitch garter stitch border at the fronts of the body's lace edging so the edges wouldn't curl in. The original pattern called for the knitter to flip back X number of stitches and tack them down to the wrong side. "X" didn't equal a pattern repeat or half-repeat, so the lace on the back of the facing wouldn't have lined up with the front of the facing. I had to re-jig the stitch counts a little, but was pleased with the garter stitch.
The stranded colourwork (the stylised plants around the body) were worked in the round with a steek up the middle, because purling back through a 25-st repeat with no symmetry in it did not appeal.
I worked the colourwork chart so that only whole motifs were knitted in, instead of partial motifs per the instructions. I figured since I was creating the fabric instead of working with printed & cut stuff, I could pull off little niceties like that.
Because of the steek, I changed the way the front facings were worked from the original directions.
I added some rows of I-cord and I-cord knot buttons with loops to close the fronts. The original pattern had a single hook-and-eye closure just below the collar.
I made the sleeves full-length, instead of the original 3/4 length. If I'm wearing a 100% wool jacket, I want to stay warm. Also, 3/4 sleeves look ridiculous on me.

I don't think the alterations on either of these were any big deal — having it "your way" is a big motivator in DIY. Even with all the mods to the purple jacket, I only needed one sticky note to track all the numbers, and it's still perfectly recognisable as a rendition of the original jacket in the magazine.

What are your favourite DIY wardrobe tricks?

thinking too much

2010-11-28T15:45:00.001-08:00

I finished these socks recently:

The pattern is from Cookie A.'s Sock Innovations. They were dead easy to knit, and I like how the ribbing, diagonal lace panel, and plain stocking stitches work together to warp the self-striping when the socks are worn. Which is just as well, because I've tried no fewer than five different patterns on this yarn and hated the knitting, or the results, or both, for all of them except for this last (sixth) attempt. This yarn was The Yarn That Didn't Want to Be Anything for over five years. It probably doesn't help that the stripe colours and the background colour remind me of sweat socks from the mid-70s.

If the socks were over-thinking materials with pattern, this bath mat had me over-thinking the execution:

The pattern is the Doris Daymat from The Happy Hooker book. I've been wanting to make this as a bath mat for years, but could never wrap my head around estimating the yarn quantities for a finer gauge and a different mat size. I finally had a "duh" moment, found a baby blanket estimate in Ann Budd's handy crochet brochure, and everything worked out swimmingly. (Okay, except for the edge distortion you can see in the photo, but I'm trying to pitch that to myself as "whimsy" because I can't bear the thought of taking it out and doing it over with fewer stitches on the short edges.) I already have another one on the go. Incidentally, the flowers can be detached and reattached easily for those times when less funky decor is required.

Lesson learned: don't make things so complicated that execution paralysis sets in. When in doubt, try it out.

catching up

2010-10-26T19:42:00.000-07:00

Between writing a lot and reading some-but-not-enough, I've actually been making a lot of things. We did just finish harvest season in Toronto, after all. I made freezer jam for the first time (no photos — spent too much time covered in peach pulp for that, but the jam tastes great so it was worth it!). I also froze bags of tomato puree.

First you pour boiling water over tomatoes while they're sitting in a sink:

(Note: I'd already done a few batches by the time I took the photo. That's why there are free-floating tomato bits in the water. Don't be disgusted; the sink was scrubbed very clean before I started.)

Let the tomatoes sit for a bit, then fish them out one by one with a slotted spoon, core them, and peel them. The skin should slip right off once you core them, but if you have to give it a little help with the paring knife, that's cool too.

Once they're peeled, the tomatoes can go into a bowl:

And once the bowl is about as full as it is in the photo, take a stick blender to the tomatoes until they are nice and liquefied.Ladle into freezer bags, seal carefully, and place on the freezer shelf until they are sufficiently bricklike to store stacked. Let thaw in the bag, in a bowl in case of leaks, in the fridge for around 24 hours. This stuff is great for making pasta sauce, soups, and stews.

It took me the length of a long CD (say 70 minutes) to puree and freeze two baskets' worth of tomatoes. Some would argue that's a lot of work, but since I was going to listen to the CD anyhow, it didn't seem like it.

I've been doing a bunch of other stuff too, some textile, some jewelry, and some more "putting up" for the winter, but that can be another blog post. There's a lot to do...

how to save $30 without even a sale on

2010-09-26T19:38:00.000-07:00

I have a storage unit in my bedroom that sits under the windowsill. Its purpose in life is to hold yarn until I finally get my yarn stash down to reasonable levels. Then it will be stood on its end and repurposed to hold books.

In its current working conditions, it gathers a lot of dust, so I had the brilliant idea to buy a table runner to cover it up. I would much rather wash something in the laundry every once in a while than dust it every week.

So I popped down to a home decor place in my neighbourhood that shall remain nameless, and was completely sticker shocked by the prices on table runners. They went for $50 or more.

Then I noticed one of those Grossly Unfair Price Things: while the table runner I wanted was about $50, the matching napkins that went with it were only $4 apiece. I bought four, ran home giggling to myself, and threw them in the washer and dryer.

They came out wrinkly but not ruined, so I ran them over with an iron. I thought of a few ways to connect them together, but decided on a no-sew method: I just picked seven colours from my embroidery floss stash and tied them together at regular intervals, using the plaid pattern as a guide:

I had some fun staggering the floss colours on each subsequent joining, but otherwise didn't fuss too much. Three joins and twenty-one bows later, I was done:

The floss came from one of those big mixed bags of colours they sell for $20 or so. I used maybe $2 of floss, so the whole thing came to about $18. The napkin table runner is the perfect length and depth, with just a little bit of overhang on all the edges. It's actually more functional than the prefab runner back at the shop, which was narrower and would have left me with a thin strip of exposed laminate to dust (and what's the point of that?).

I know that if I'd done some fabric shopping I could have saved even more money, but there aren't any fabric shops near me and this plaid did match my bedroom decor exactly.

Had any thrifty success stories lately? Let me know in the comments!

baby steps

2010-09-13T19:37:00.001-07:00

I am not as charitable towards timid knitters as I ought to be. Not becase I think they are allowed to be timid — I can't think of anything less intimidating than looping yarn — but because that makes me a hypocrite.

I am a phobic sewer. It's not the sewing so much as the stuff that comes up front: the cutting. Cutting terrifies me because once the fabric is cut, it's cut. If you cut too big, you're still maybe able to fix it, but if you cut the piece too small, the best you can do is think of something else to make.

So, I was very pleased with myself when I managed to sew a floor cushion using instructions I got at Apartment Therapy. The photos helped a lot, there was only one cut to make, and it seems I guesstimated the seam allowances correctly (the pattern is so stupidly easy they didn't bother specifying them). Try this next time you have two old bed pillows handy and feel like getting a quick project done.

I needed to chop about 3" off the end of fabric to make it the right size. It's just a straight edge, but it's also the first time I've cut this much fabric without making a slant or jaggy edges.

The directions called for slicing part of the pillows into strips and tying the strips together. My pillows were filled with little chips of foam, so that wasn't going to work. Instead I shook all the stuffing to one side and sewed them together, sort of a pillow version of a mad doctor's experiment with hybrid lifeforms.

Two of the corners had mock box shaping. I actually managed to achieve this!

Here's the finished pillow, complete with velcro-ish closure sewn in. The cover seems a bit big, but I guess that leaves "squish room" for when people sit on it.

happiness really is a warm gun

2010-08-09T19:47:00.000-07:00

I'm on the record for hating what I call "white glue crafts." You know, you buy a kit with all these pre-cut, pre-fab pieces, and then you stick them together, and then you get to tell people you made it. But you didn't; you just assembled it.

Therefore, it's taken me a long time to come to terms with the idea that you can be creative and use glue at the same time. Glue for practical purposes, sure! I have at least three different kinds on the "interesting chemicals" shelf in the laundry room, right next to the itty bitty pots of house paint and the WD-40. But glue to make stuff with...

I broke down a little when I wrecked my old coffee table's surface and re-covered it with decoupaged Ansel Adams photos from an old calendar. Then I made the DIY souvenir van Gogh coasters by, um, appropriating the materials from a kit J-A had given me and basically throwing out the instructions.

Then I made the book purse that Jake sent me the instructions link to. Making that necessitated buying a glue gun.

I now understand why people get so enthused about glue guns.

After I was done the purse, it occurred to me that I still had twenty-two glue sticks left (would have been more, but as a novice gun-slinger I had to re-do parts of the purse). The first thing I did was fix the Elizabethan blackwork embroidery I have hanging over the entranceway to my kitchen, so that it doesn't sag anymore:

(Hey, it is Elizabethan blackwork... just modernised from Subversive Cross-Stitch. You were expecting?)

It used to be that this piece's top flap had pulled away almost completely from the backing. It's been weeks now, and it's still nice and snug. Yes, I know I didn't centre it properly, but that's not the glue's fault.

Then I took some heavy-duty clear plastic, added hot glue to it, and patched over the two ripped holes in my shower curtain (because I haven't found a red poppy curtain to replace it with yet). I used a one-hole hole puncher to punch new grommits in the curtain, and the results look like this:

You can tell, but you can't tell a lot, and it looks better than having the first foot of the shower curtain off the rings.

Having accomplished these wonders of home decor repair, I unplugged the glue gun and let it cool down. That was a couple of weeks ago, and everything is still holding up wonderfully, including the book purse.

I discovered recently, however, that the circuit board earrings I made a long time ago are not in good shape. One of them has come completely off its earring findings.

Might be time to pack some heat and ride out into the DIY repair sunset again...

it's august. fuck.

2010-08-01T14:30:00.000-07:00

Today is the first day of the second half of summer for people in the Northern Hemisphere. It's all shorter days and end of the growing season from here, folks.

[ducks as rotten fruit and verbal abuse get thrown]

Still here? Don't blame me — get angry at the Earth's orbit or move to New Zealand or something. I'm just pointing out the obvious.

The obvious, if you're a knitter, is that all those lovely sweater-weather sweaters you want to wear this fall aren't going to make themselves. So if you want at least one new jacket to wear this fall, you're going to have to find some air conditioning and get started on it now.

That's precisely what I did this morning. I agonised a little (and still am, a little) over finishing some stuff that's been on the needles for an embarrassing amount of time, but in the end I decided to grab some stash and start Sway by Fiona Ellis (it's in her Inspired Fair Isle Knits book). The original is in a lilac grey with pink trim; me being me, I'm making mine in brick red with black trim, and have decided to make some modifications. If I ever get the thing done, I'll be posting photos here. Wish me luck.

The other "September is less than five weeks away" crisis I'm going through is that I started cleaning out my bedroom closet this weekend, and I discovered that moths had eaten five pairs of my hand-knit socks, plus three skeins of sock yarn that I was keeping in the same closet. That explains why, as of Friday night, I had three new pairs of socks on the go and plans for several more. I'm all for tossing stuff I don't want anymore, but I'd like it to be me that decides what goes, not a bunch of stupid fibre-eating insects.

(By the bye, in case you are smugly patting yourself on the back because you only buy cotton and synthetics, I have some bad news for you: I have had moths eat 100% acrylic gloves with plastic palm grips. They are evil vermin right up there with raccoons.)

Two of the socks on the needles are from Cookie A.'s Sock Innovation book. The last one is a free download from Knitty, but by the same designer. I like how this woman thinks. Her suggestions for resizing the patterns are reasonable and treat the reader like a grown-up.

I find my knitting goes through phases. I don't just mean in terms of colour, technique, and output, although that happens too. Right now I'm in high production gear because I need the clothes. I like to wear jacket-y cardigans to work because actual jackets are too uncomfortable when I'm going to be sitting in a cubicle all day. Last winter, though, I wore the left elbow out on no fewer than three cardigans, leaving me with just one that I could wear (I have a bad habit of propping my head up on my left hand when I'm reading, in case you're wondering how I managed that). So it's time for more jackets, even though I also need to get the first draft of my novel done. I have enough stash for [glances around the living room] three more plain coloured ones, plus one or two that are already on the needles. There is one that I bought the pattern for and would like to make in a colour I don't have in stash. Maybe that can be this fall's yarn purchase. Yeah, I know. But hey, it's mostly stash-busting!

And, thanks to the moths, it's also time for more socks, and that can definitely be 100% stash-busting. To be honest, a lot of those socks were near to worn-out anyhow, so the critters just sped up the process a little. Not that I'll be forgiving them any time soon.

two favourites in one

2010-07-26T19:31:00.000-07:00

Early this past spring the ever-blogworthy Jake sent me this Remodelaholic link for how to make a book bag. That's a purse made from a book, as opposed to a bag made to carry around books. I've been looking at versions of these at various art and crafts shows for ages, so the instructions for how to make my own were like being handed the question for life, the universe, and everything.

Since then, I've been collecting all the odds and ends required to make the bag. I even caved in and bought my own glue gun (more on the immediate mischief that caused around the apartment in a later post). I also found some variations on the instructions on other sites, like this Country Living version, but in the end I stuck pretty close to Remodelaholic's version. It seemed the most structurally sound and usable.

Last weekend I was finally ready. The fabric was washed and ironed, the pages were cut out of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary I'd selected for sacrifice (common enough not to be a heavy loss, but pointedly an Oxford dictionary, not one of those Webster-wannabes), and the glue gun was warmed up. Here's how it all went down:

Here's the book cover after the pages have been cut from it. At this point, the spine is fairly fragile, since it was designed to be flexible when the book was being used. This was the part where I took all the measurements I'd need later to cut the fabric to size.

I followed Remodelaholic's lead and reinforced the spine with duct tape. Fortunately, I had white duct tape handy, because the lining fabric I'd chosen was a print with a white background. The duct tape reinforces the spine and makes it sturdy enough to be the bottom of a bag. I added a second, lengthwise layer after I took this shot.

Some instructions say to glue-gun the handle ribbons in place; others say use duct tape. I did both.

After that, it was a case of measuring, cutting, and pressing the fabric, then gluing the pieces into place. I am a glue-gun newbie, so I wound up having to re-do some steps and didn't do as neat a job as I'm used to managing in other media. Things still turned out presentable enough, though, and I got away with only light first-degree burns to my left index finger.

Next time (I've already decided there will be a next time) I'm going to use a bigger book. The spine on this book was about the minimum width I'd want to contemplate for a purse — it just fits my wallet — but the length and depth could be greater, or else the purse handles could be smaller. Even still, I'm pretty happy with it, and will definitely be using it!

except do it on purpose

2010-07-08T08:00:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of the DIY Eyrea will know that I'm not much one for knitting fads — and, given that the craft dates back 800-1,000 years, I count a "fad" as anything less than a century old.

By that count, felting (I am not going to call if "fulling" outside of a textile studies programme) via washing machine is most definitely a fad. Felting knitted stuff itself dates back to the first time someone pulled a shrunken, matted piece of work out of the laundry tub and thought to themselves, "You know, if I planned for that before the knitting that could be kind of useful fabric..." Felting by machine, of course, only dates back to since the invention of washing machines. Until the fad, most felting by machine was unintentional.

The Naked Sheep recently got some felted clog-style slipper kits in, and they interested me because slippers are one of the few things I feel justify felting these days. Unless you are a Dutch fisherman, you probably will never need a felted sweater. Felted bags? Meh. Depends on the bag design. Felted slippers, on the other hand, are both warm and hard-wearing. The first is probably less important in these days of central heating, but hard-wearing still counts.

I'd just finished the ballerina slippers from the mercerised wool Gina gave me (see previous post), but felted slippers sounded interesting from a longevity point of view. Knit them once, quickly, on big needles, felt them, and then enjoy them for a long, long time. It sounded like a great return on investment. So I headed down to the Sheep, checked out the kits they still had left, and came home with a purple/blue/burgundy/turquoise blend.

The slippers looked like this initially:

They were almost twice as big as they needed to be. Since I had never caused serious shrinkage to anything woolen in my life, I was very nervous that I would wind up ripping out the things and making more ballerina slippers with them, but followed the instructions with the pattern and dutifully tossed them in the washing machine.

Three and a half hours later, they were this size:

In the photo, it looks like the slippers are still way too big, but when I put them on, they're only a little too big. In other words, they feel like clogs.

I hope these really do last a long time. The felting took more time than the knitting, and it got excruciating after a while having to stop the washer every five minutes to check on the progress. If someone were going to make an entire family's worth of these things, I strongly recommend felting them all in one go. My washer survived the ordeal pretty well, but I'm much more likely to believe those stories about burning out the washer motor while felting now.

Pattern notes: this is a Fibre Trends pattern and assumes you will want to knit in the round. Because most of the slipper is worked in short rows, however, it made more sense to me to convert the whole thing to flat knitting. This only adds 12 rows of seaming to the slipper, and since there are already two sole seams to stitch up, it doesn't seem like that big a deal.

finally

2010-07-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you tell the yarn what to be, and sometimes the yarn tells you what it wants to be.

Once upon a time, the ever-cool Gina came to visit TO from Alberta. Being the ever-cool person that she is, she brought hostess gifts with her, and I put a picture of mine on this blog, like so:

Check out that gorgeous blue-green yarn. That colour combo has since become the main colour scheme for the entire on-line part of The Eyrea. I don't know if it came directly from the yarn — more likely, it came from something Gina said that I can never quite remember — but this is definitely the first instance of it showing up in tangible form.

The reason why the yarn came in one big skein of green-blue with two smaller skeins of blue-green is because you're supposed to make socks from it. It's a fine worsted weight, though, and I'm not big on thick socks for all the usual reasons — they don't fit in boots, they look chunky, blah blah blah. At first, I thought I'd make mittens with contrast cuffs or in a colour pattern. The yarn is mercerised wool (very strong stuff, but still soft to touch), so it would make a nice pair of hard-wearing mittens. I even started a cuff, but somehow they never got done.

Then, over the summer, moths ate the first pair of handmade slippers I'd knitted for myself in years. This time, I decided to try the slipper pattern in the most recent Interweave Holiday issue, since it still had that ballerina slipper shape I like and, most importantly, had instructions for my size.

They were a quick and easy knit, but I found the top edge was a little too big to get them to stay on my feet (this may be a quirk of my feet, my knitting, or the pattern — not sure). So I headed over to Mokuba, picked up some grosgrain ribbon that happened to come in the exact same colours as are in the yarn, and threaded it around the edge so I could adjust the opening:

With the addition of the ribbon, the slippers are dead comfy. I've worn them enough that there should be some "fuzzing" on the soles, but the mercerised wool is holding up very well and shows no signs of wear. It went flat on the sole, but doesn't look like it's fuzzing or pilling anywhere.

Of course, since the original amount of yarn was intended for socks, I have a lot left over. The next time I feel like knitting up some of these slippers, I'm thinking of making one with green-blue yarn and blue-green trim, and the other in the reverse colour scheme — sort of a medieval thing. It'll look fun, and they only get worn at home or in the homes of friends and family, after all.

vegan Barbie-doll pink

2010-07-04T07:52:00.000-07:00

This summer I decided I wanted to experiment a little with chilled soups. I love soup in the winter (one pot meal + filling + healthy = good), but the only summer soup I made was gazpacho, and as wonderful as gazpacho can be, it does get boring after a while.

Since I also love beets, I decided to try this chilled beetroot soup. It's dead easy, and goes something like this:

Steam 3 medium-sized beets until just cooked.
Gently cook chopped potatos and onions (to match the volume of beets) in butter or vegan margarine, taking care nothing browns.
Peel and chop the beets and add to the potato-onion mixture.
Add 1 litre water or stock to the vegetables. Let everything cook through for about 15 minutes.
Purée it all (I use a stick blender right in the pot) and let chill, or eat warm if you prefer.

Basic enough, right? Here's the best part: this tasty, vegan-friendly (if you use the margarine instead of butter), relatively healthy soup made with very basic ingredients comes out looking, all on its own, like this:

That's an all-natural colour that has not been 'Shopped, folks.

Bonus fun: bring it to work and have colleagues ask you if it's your dessert.

if you're reading this, you may already be a hippy

2010-06-08T20:36:00.001-07:00

To those who read both my blogs (hi Carla!): this one is getting cross-posted because it overlaps the topic scope for both of them.

The meanings of words shift all the time. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be annoying if you enjoyed using a word in its previous sense and now can’t. I know of one grandmother who got pretty upset when her grandson’s parents told her she could not teach her grandson to call a cat by saying, “Here, pussy pussy.” You understand.

Things float the other way, too. Things that had one label stamped on them can have an entirely different one stamped on them once the previous one fades. This can be good, bad, or indifferent, but it can be very annoying if the new label doesn’t quite describe the original thing as well as the old label did. Perceptions change, practices change, and eventually the thing itself is in danger of changing.

One word that illustrates this is hippy.

Hippy comes from “hip,” as in “with it.” It grew to encompass a lot of things — do some Google searches if no ready stereotypes come to mind. It also grew to encompass a lot of things that pre-date its inception as a word.

There’s a nice point in a Philip K. Dick short story (whose title I am too lazy to look up) where one character assumes another is a hippy because he has a beard. The third character who has introduced them later explains that the “hippy” is actually a conservative — he has a beard because he has a nasty case of barber’s rash.

Hippy-ism (hippiness?) spread over all sorts of things that became associated with it, whether they were exclusively for hippies or not. Things like pacifism, or home schooling, or growing your own food, or doing things by hand. People forget that there were conscientious objectors in both world wars, that community schools are a relatively new innovation, that the working classes/peasants always grew their own food whether they were “farmers” or not, that doing things by hand was once a sign of thrift and quality products rather than a sign of “dropping out.”

When people ask about my parents and/or my childhood, they often comment that my family must be hippies. We had two big vegetable patches and a small orchard, and lived in a house my dad and his brother built. My mum sewed a lot of the clothes I wore. My brothers and I had wooden toys our grandfather made us. And yeah, politically we often (but not always) wind up on the pacifists’ side.

A quick glance at some family photos, plus some extra contextual information, shows how wrong that perception is. My mum worked at an office and was (still is) a twinset-with-pearls type. My dad was a fan of Elvis and the Rat Pack. Besides, long hair can get in the way when you work in construction. The garden? The sewing? The wooden toys? Both my parents were avid gardeners who didn’t have a lot of money when I was a kid — growing veggies was fun and practical. Same thing with my mum and her sewing. And of course my grandfather made us wooden toys — he was professionally trained as a finishing carpenter and worked as one almost his entire career. The pacifism isn’t exactly unusual in people who grew up in countries that have been occupied during wartime, and both sides of my family experienced that.

Over here in North America, safe insulated attacked-twice-in-100-years-but-not-invaded North America, all those things, those activities, add up to being a hippy, at least for those who don’t know any better. An entire ethic of thrift, practicality, and simple do-it-yourself-ness has been buried under a catchword.

It goes further than that. Are you a woman who doesn’t remove her leg hair, pit hair, or (ahem) hair in other places? Get ready to be called a granola-cruncher, even if (like the character in the PK Dick story with the barber’s rash) it’s because you have sensitive skin. Actually, with the hysteria aimed at those with pubic hair these days, it might be something worse than “granola-cruncher” if you happen to be wearing a bathing suit at the time.

What if you make an effort to eat less processed food, or if you like making basics for yourself like bread, jam, or soup stock?

What if you prefer to make your own music (or listen to your friends make some) instead of buying whatever is at the top of the list on iTunes this week?

It seems to me that it doesn’t take much these days to be a nonconformist. The weird thing is that there are an awful lot of people being nonconformist in these things, or myriad other things.
So are we all hippies now? Or is it time to do a collective semantic readjustment and admit that the label is not only inadequate and misleading, but also passé?

white glue stuff (aka DIY souvenirs)

2010-06-04T18:22:00.000-07:00

Nearly two years ago, the ever-innovative J-A gave me a housewarming present for my (then) new apartment. It was a kit to transfer copies of photos or other graphics onto little tiles of champagne-coloured marble and make coasters out of them. Since I was in the throes of moving house at the time, I stuck the kit on the top shelf of my front-hall closet.

It sat there until this spring, when I pulled it down and read the instructions. Some of the process sounded like what I had done to my old coffee table when I ruined the surface (long story) — I cut up bits of an old Ansel Adams calendar a co-worker gave me and collaged the whole thing, then sprayed it with several coats of varethane. Here's an old photo that shows the table top:

I'm not big on what I call "white glue crafts" — anything that involves sticking bits of things together with white glue purely for decorative effect. But, as the refinished coffee table shows, even white glue can be used to fix things so that they're not only useful, but look good.

The coasters are useful too, of course. I wasn't too keen on getting photos laser printed on special paper at a printing services place, though, especially when the kit came with a special list explaining to the printer that although the supplied (and required) paper was plastic-coated, it wouldn't melt in the (required) colour laser printer.

That sounded like too much negotiation to make four coasters.

Then I went to Amsterdam on vacation. At the van Gogh Museum gift shop I found a pack of serviettes printed with one of my favourite van Gogh paintings — his Butterflies and Poppies still life. It seemed to me that serviette paper should be thin enough to glue well to the marble, and usually serviettes are printed so that the ink doesn't run easily (they wouldn't work well as serviettes otherwise).

It worked! Each serviette had two layers: a printed layer and a plain white layer. I separated the layers and just glued the printed one in place, then kept adding thin applications of glue/glaze until I ran out. Then I added the little cork feet that were included in the kit. The results look like this:

I love how they turned out, and I'm sure they'll be very useful.

As always, I have to wonder with a kit like this how easy it would be to just collect the materials yourself and make your own. Certainly cork pads are cheap and easy to find, as is white glue (and water to thin it with), foam brushes, and cheesecloth to wipe away excess glue. The little square of sandpaper came in handy too, so add that in to the list.

That leaves the marble squares themselves. From their size and thickness, I'd guess that these were originally destined to be part of a wall or floor, but they have irregular edges and some badly damaged corners. For coasters, that adds a little design element, but I can understand not wanting to grout them. If they can be had (and had by the each or in small quantities, with no mesh backing), then I can see making more of these.

it is done.

2010-05-24T18:35:00.001-07:00

Some things you start, you work on them, and then they're done. Short stories often work that way for me. Small knitted items do too, as well as some double-strand necklace patterns.

The above beaded collar was my first foray into beaded netting, and it did not go quickly. It's been on the thread since before I got my first beading board, so it's been over a year and a half. Although it's a three-colour pattern (hard to see in the photo, sorry, but this was the pick of a bad lot), the netting itself wasn't difficult. The hard part was wrangling the thread. It seemed like the stuff was always either tangling on itself or breaking on the blue beads. I guess they have sharp edges, but it did get frustrating.

Now that it's finally done, the collar is a little shorter than my usual (although it does measure the regular length on a beading board). It's meant to be almost choker-style, so that's all right. It definitely fits comfortably.

The pattern was a freebie from Interweave if you're interested, from (who else?) Rypan Designs. I used the same colours as the necklace in the pattern, but used one size smaller beads.

reverse engineering baked goods

2010-05-17T18:07:00.000-07:00

I seem to be on a kick involving making home-made versions of traditional prefab British food products. Previously, it was baked beans. At least those make a sort of sense, because they really are better than the tinned baked beans domestic to Canada, but the British Heinz ones, although available here, are too expensive (for me) to justify spending on, you know, baked beans.

Then I read the recent Guardian article about Soreen. I'd never heard of the stuff before, but anything packaged that's been around since 1938 and that people love so much is worth checking out, I figure. Besides, it supposedly has malt in it, and Malties/Shreddies were my favourite breakfast cereal when I was a kid.

This time, the local British candy/grocery store (90% candy, 10% imported groceries) failed me. No Soreen. Luckily, some of the commenters on the Guardian story had mentioned that their mums or grandmums had made home-baked versions, so I was able to dig up a recipe to try.

The results were crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside. It tastes nice, so long as you like a dark sugar flavour, but somehow isn't super-sweet (probably because I am always stingy about sugar). It does taste good with butter on it — it needs it, because the only fat in it is from milk. I can't imagine throwing a slice of this version in the toaster like people do with actual Soreen though. It would probably do a milder version of the Strawberry Pop-Tart Blow Torches (a classic web page if there ever was one, dating from August 1994!).

I think the next time I try this recipe I'm going to experiment with adding slightly (but only slightly) more milk. And maybe whole milk instead of the 1% I happened to have on hand. Prefab stuff this simple can be delicate.

creative challenge-type stuff

2010-05-15T18:19:00.000-07:00

I've been going through another period where there's lots of things I would like to start, but even more things I would like to finish. One of the things I would like to finish is de-cluttering my apartment, and if I'm going to do that, I have to be able to put away most of my beading trays.

The finishing of the necklace in the photograph to the right marks the clearing of yet another tray. As an added bonus, the only non-stash elements in it are the two large silver beads and the clasp.

There were two challenges with this piece: first of all, most of the beads are shades of pink. I hate pink. I hate pink so much that I was considering just tossing the beads (they'd been acquired through gifts anyhow), but then the ever-stylish J-A pointed out she liked pink, and if I wanted to experiment she'd be willing to receive the results.

The other problem was that the pink beads were all around a size 6, but not ever evenly produced. Almost all of my beading is done with size 11s, with some faceted beads and drops thrown in. J-A likes chunky styles in necklaces, but these beads weren't chunky enough.

I really do hate pink, but I am currently knitting a jacket with lots of pink in it. It's Kaffe Fassett's Red Diamonds pattern, and the trick with that particular stash reduction attempt is to choose yarns that sort of talk around red. I have pinks, plums, roses, maroons, and all sorts of colours that are close to a true red without actually getting there. I have lots of reds and scarlets and crimsons too, but the point is that because they're all thrown in together, all of a sudden pink has a place in the spectrum. If it wasn't there, the colours in the jacket would be too strong and strident.

Fassett has a much more elegant way of putting it, but I call this the principle of "sucky colours working if you put enough of them together." I tried the same thing with the beads, making the peyote-stitch tube that forms the centre part of the necklace first. I just worked it until I ran out of the anthracite beads. The tube has relatively little flex in it — the curve you see in the photo is about the maximum. Fortunately, its own weight encourages it to curve to the maximum when it is worn.

Then I worked the two herringbone bands out of what was left of the pink beads. They're just this side of being tubular — four beads around. The herringbone tubes are very flexible, which I tried to show in the photo.

After that it was just a case of attaching everything. I didn't find any large-size bead caps I liked, so I got the big silver beads instead and just gathered the ends of the beaded tubes as tightly as I could. It works. I did put some small bead caps on the tops of the herringbone tubes to help centre and attach the clasp.

Overall I think it works. This is the first piece I've done entirely on my own, from scratch, without a pattern or photo to give me an idea. Beaders tend to come up with cutesy names for their work — beading magazines even seem to encourage it — so I'm coming up with a name for this one. I'm calling it "Ethnically Confused." It has elements that can be found in the beading traditions of Africa, Eastern Europe, Central America, and Asia, yet the colours are straight out of a North American shopping mall. If I'd done it in turquoise and coral, or ebony and tiger-eye, I'm sure J-A would have had people who don't know any better asking about where it was from every time she wore it. Instead, she gets to have something that does not scream hand-made either from the "a friend of mine made this for me" standpoint, or the "some women making appalling low wages in a faraway country made this" standpoint. I'm not even sure it's not ugly, but people can make of it what they will.

As for stash-busting, you can see from what's left in the tray that I still have lots of pink beads, although not nearly as many as I started with. A lot of what's left are odd sizes or don't have properly reamed holes, so I think I'm going to only keep the cherry-red ones and the petrol ones (lower left corner on the inside and outside dish groups, respectively). The rest can go in the garbage. I made my creative challenge and I'm happy with it — time to move on to other things.

reverse engineering food

2010-04-29T19:26:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, when the World Wide Web was but a glimmer in Tim Berner-Lee's eye, the Toronto Star used to run a regular column where readers could write in and request the recipes for dishes they'd had in restaurants. A Star staffer would get the recipe from the chef in question, and then write it up along with an interview with the chef, a description of where the restaurant was and what else they had to offer on the menu, and a quote from the request letter, typically gushing about how great the dish in question was. For the price of one recipe (usually one of the more basic ones, at that — dishes that required an actual professional kitchen tended to be avoided), the chef and the restaurant got some very nice publicity.

These days, we do have the internet, and apparently there's a sizable army of people out there willing to research, reverse engineer, and otherwise discover the secrets of popular restaurant and prepared-food recipes. Once they do find out, they post the results on blogs, foodie sites, and anywhere else that seems appropriate, even in e-mail chain letters.

Once, the recipe-hunters may have been motivated by questions such as, "How do I make this at home so I don't have to trek all the way to Restaurant X?" or "How can I save some money by buying the ingredients myself?" Now, one is just as likely to find recipes motivated by sentiments like, "I love this, but I want to control the portion size/make it less fattening" or "I want to make this without the scary-sounding chemicals included."

Recently I've been reading about how the lining material used in food cans in North America can chemicaly react with certain foods, causing chemicals in the lining material to leach into the food. Baked beans are supposedly one of the worst culprits for this, which dismayed me, because I eat baked beans throughout autumn, winter, and spring. Around the same time that I started hearing about this, I decided to get some cans of Heinz baked beans from the local British grocery. They cost twice as much as domestic cans of beans, but all my British friends insist they taste better, and the article on scary chemicals from tinned foods said that the EU had different, safer standards on canned food linings.

From eating my way through the four-pack of Heinz beans, I learned two things:

My British friends were completely right.
Given (1) above, I was going to have to learn to approximate this recipe.

It took three batches of slow-cooked beans, but I finally have a decent version. They're not the same as Heinz, but they're a lot closer to, and no tin cans are involved.

Ingredients
3 cups of cooked navy beans
about 3/4 c Heinz ketchup (Heinz ketchup = Heinz-ish beans)
about 1 tbl Dijon mustard
a few drops of Worcestershire sauce

Method
Place beans in slow cooker. Add all of the other ingredients to a measuring cup, then add enough hot water to make up about 1 3/4 c total. Stir until combined. Pour over beans and cook on Low setting for 4-6 hours.

This makes a version that has the right flavour, but a strong vinegar smell. Next time I may reduce the ketchup a little and up the water a little (the consistency of the sauce is also a bit thicker than the authentic Heinz British beans, so this makes sense to me).

Did you notice there is absolutely no added sugar in this version? No brown sugar, no maple syrup, no molasses. No wonder I like it so much.

What's your favourite way to do beans?

tension

2010-04-17T13:51:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think every time a needle is involved in a craft, the whole thing becomes all about tension. The artisan has to know when to pull tight, when to pull tighter... and when to slack off.

It’s definitely true in knitting and crochet. I once knew a knitter who knitted so loosely that she could get stitches on 3mm needles — 3mm! — that were the same size as I would make on 6mm needles. She tried knitting a baby sweater as a shower gift for a friend. Her mother-in-law, a master knitter, finally had to hold up the sweater to her own body and show that it was too big for her, never mind a little baby, before my friend was ready to admit that maybe she should learn to tighten up a little.

Then there are the knitters and crocheters I’ve met who seem to think they’re engaged in knot-making, rather than loop-making. I’ve always wondered how they ever get more than one row done.

The secret, it seems to me, is to work with the materials, not against them. Yarn and thread do not have a will of their own. That means that they cannot be allowed to run all over the place as their structure would allow them. It also means they don’t have to be beaten into submission. The artisan guides, and only has to push until the materials fall into place. Once they do, the artisan has to back off and let them be.

I am starting to appreciate how especially important this is with beading, where you can have a mix of wildly different tensions in a single piece. I just finished this necklace (another Rypan kit) for the ever-stylish J-A. She bought it to make herself, then took one look at her cat when she got home and realised she could never leave half-finished beading and him together in the same space. So I said I’d do it so long as I got to keep the needles and leftover materials, and she readily agreed.

The chain on this necklace is a diagonal stitch I’ve never seen before. The pattern warned that it can be sloopy at first (look at the chain to the left of the clasp and you’ll see what they meant), but once you get going it makes a beautiful, supple, and perfectly flat set of links. If I’d had more practice with it I’m sure I could have fixed the first part. The trick is, and again the Rypan pattern is specific about this, that you have to pull tightly, more tightly than one would think one could get away with in a stitch like this. The truth is, though, that the beads just don’t sit right until they’re firmly told where they need to go.

The swags were the opposite. Here, the trick was to keep a looser than normal tension, because swags that are pulled tight don’t hang and flow nicely. I used gravity, letting the beads fall along the thread until they met up with the last-stitched bead, to make sure there were no gaps, and then stitched. It was only when I had gone around the right-angle-weave posts (the larger, vertical strips of beads between the swags) once that I pulled tightly.

Really, the importance of tension shows the benefits of knowing how to do multiple types of needlework. Anyone who’s done crewel embroidery, or knitting, or tatting, or any number of other ways of manipulating stringy bits will recognise what needs to be done for the finished work to be successful.

much better

2010-03-17T21:06:00.001-07:00

In retrospect this was an incredibly stupid thing to do when I was coming off a bout of stomach flu, but I'm glad that the washroom is repainted, and in a colour I like too:

It took two quarts of the new colour to fix the one quart of painting disaster I blogged about last time. Thanks to the bit of mirror I managed to get in the shot, you can see what the paint looks like without the flash bouncing off it as well. (You can also see that I do not have, nor will I ever have, matching towels.)

Here's the shot I took of the wall behind the washroom door, after I'd spackled but before I'd started painting:

This was the worst wall for filling in holes left by unused towel racks and the like, but two other walls had spackling too. You can see why I had to repaint.

The new green is surprisingly neutral, not too dark (despite being on a "dark colours" paint card), and hasn't come off in the shower yet.

This means that I'm officially done the "stuff I meant to paint" part of the redecorating of this apartment — the main living area is exactly the colour I wanted (a pale yellow tending towards cream). I was pretty lucky when I bought this place: the previous owner had done some lovely upgrades, everything was in good repair, and the colours were along the lines of what I liked. Except for a dripping tap, nothing has had to be done with any urgency. Everything else that I would like to do is a) expensive and b) involves hiring people, so I plan on holding off for a while, at least until I get better organised.

drat.

2010-03-13T18:14:00.000-08:00

The cliché is that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. In actuality, there is a fourth: paint chip cards.

I really liked what the previous owner of my condo had done with the washroom. The vanity countertop is a mix of greens and a brown-beige in sort of a marbled pattern. You can see it used as a background in a lot of my beading photos, like for this post. She'd painted the walls a warm sage green that had lots of beige in it. It looked great with the counter-tops, the pale grey tile floors, and the white trim and porcelain. Normally I don't go for warm tones, but it looked great with my red poppies shower curtain and vanity set.

The only thing I (respectfully) disagreed with the previous owner about was the towel racks. You see, she liked brass, which is the one finish I absolutely can't stand. I'm more of a pewter/stainless steel person.

I took down the brass hooks on the back of the washroom door and replaced them with pewter ones fine, but there were a lot of towel racks to take down — a grand total of four. In addition, there were lots of clusters of pin-holes in the walls where thumbtacks had been used to hang up small pictures. I had to do a lot of spackling on both of the main walls. The only recourse was to repaint.

I spent a lot of time holding up paint chip cards to the walls, and settled on a colour. The local paint store, who had stood me so well back when I repainted my bedroom, let me down. They kept recommending light, very light colours for the bathroom. From a decorating point of view I understand, because it is a small room with no windows, but that vanity counter really needs something to pull it together with the rest of the room. I am not in a financial or aesthetic situation where I can think of replacing the vanity counter. Besides, I like it.

The quart of paint I bought looked like trouble as soon as I opened the lid, but the staff at the paint store had assured me that the colour would darken considerably as the paint dried.

They lied. The first wall I did is touch-dry now, and it's much lighter than what was on the paint chip, never mind the warm sage green I was going for. It's white. It looks like primer with a slight sage green tone. It makes the washroom look like it's the staff washroom in a sub-par retail outlet.

All right, all right, I know that colour is never guaranteed when you buy paint, but this isn't even close. It is several shades lighter than the original colour, which I knew I wasn't going to match perfectly, but wanted to get as close as possible to. Now I'm going to have to repaint entirely, possibly even use two coats to cover up the debacle currently gracing the walls.

The only good news is that the room takes less than the length of one CD (the Trainspotting soundtrack, if you really want to know) to paint, albeit with less than my usual care in the corners because I was annoyed when I was doing the work.

I would post photos, but photos don't tend to turn out well because of the aforementioned windowlessness. The flash distorts the wall colour a lot. I will, however, try for photos when I finally have my happy ending to this adventure and get the damn walls the colour I want!

somewhat instant gratification

2010-02-21T17:50:00.000-08:00

The square peyote stitch component featured in the February 2010 issue of Bead & Button was an instant favourite with me. If you read the article and instructions about it, you can see how versatile it is. In the magazine they tell you how to make three different kinds of bracelets with it, but my first thought was that it would be a great base for an earrings and necklace set.

Something about beaded jewelry makes my egomania come out. Even though I do seem to like some classic, everyday-ish beaded jewelry that looks like it's from the 1940s-1960s, I also have this knack for making ornate stuff that's more like poor glass-bead cousins of more glamorous metal-worked pieces made for medieval royalty or something.

Today I made the earrings part of the earring-and-necklace set. I added a short dangle to the component with a matching glass drop bead. The flash distorted the colours (someday I will figure out how to photograph beaded jewelry easily so the colours come out right), but the blue beads, including the glass drops, are deep cobalt blue, while the metallic beads are a pale copper that looks more like a red gold. I used copper findings, including copper wire guards at the top of each component so that they would swing from the earring wires properly — a trick I picked up from a previous issue of Bead & Button.

The square component is dead quick to make, but it took me a couple of tries to get the finding and dangle attached in a way that pleased me. Originally I was going to use copper jump rings to attach the glass drops (ie: no seed beads), but it turned out that the jump rings I had on hand were too thick to go through the holes in the beads.

The finished earrings are a third try, but since each try took under twenty minutes, it was still quick as handmade things go.

everybody loves a history

2010-02-18T18:10:00.000-08:00

One of the things I love about needlework is that there's so many different directions to go in it. You can leap off the deep end and make "clothing" that's absolutely unwearable, even if it looks very cool. Or you can go super-traditional and make stuff that got figured out centuries ago, using much the same materials and tools that would have been used on the first attempts.

Then there's the very interesting middle ground: making things based on very old work, but putting a new twist on it.

I've done a bit of the last two recently.

Lately I seem to have been collecting up men's sock patterns from the 1950s for No Good Reason. It just seems deadly important that I have them.

I made the ever-storytelling Howard a pair of socks from a pattern published in 1950. The needles I used were most likely bought between 1955-1960. They were my grandmother's, in Imperial measure, and not a size she used much after 1965 or so, so she must have got them after moving to Canada, but before metric needle sizes came in around 1970. I tried to pick 1950s-style colours, and used "normal" sock yarn: 80-85% wool, 15-20% nylon. Sock yarn hasn't changed much since nylon was invented, although of course nowadays it's harder to find the 3-ply stuff, so I did use 4-ply.

The original pattern was called something like "Men's Socks with Geometric Clock Pattern in Two Colours" or "Pattern #12," so I have taken the liberty of renaming them the Kerouac Socks. Jack Kerouac may or may not have ever worn hand-knit socks (he was a Quebecois! he must have! but I have no proof), but these are socks of the sort he would have recognised back in the day. Just like most men's colourwork patterns I've found from the period, you knit the leg straight, using the intarsia method for the colourwork, then sew up the back seam, do a standard heel turn, and finish the foot in the round. I did one-stitch garter stitch at the beginning and end of each row of the leg to make it easier to sew up and to ensure I had a perfectly flat seam at the back of the leg. Which is to say, when Howard wears them it will feel like the socks have no seams at all.

Bamburg

Meanwhile, after two and a half years of whinging about it, I finally made myself a new pair of gloves to replace a pair that moths ate. The old pair were my first attempt at mittens designed by Anna Zilboorg, so it took me a while to get over them.
These are Bamburg, and the pattern is from an issue of The Knitter magazine that was out around the end of 2009. The design is based on medieval knight's gloves, and the description in the magazine pointed out that the geometric patterns that were practical on the metal gloves used with suits of armour are the same patterns used in Selbu knitted glove designs. How cool is that?

The palm side is a Selbu pattern that when used as a texture on the medieval metal gloves made lances and swords easier to keep a grip on:

I like how the thumb has its own pattern. Most people who have seen my rendering of the gloves say it's a smaller fleur-de-lis to go with the bigger one on the back of each hand, but to me it looks more like a stalk of wheat. Chacun à son gout and all that.

By the way, although I didn't photograph it separately because it's just plain black knitting, the inside of the gauntlets are lined (the hand part is not). Practical.

There's a lot more vintage stuff I want to make, but as usual I'm moving forwards in all directions. The next two things to get done are both less traditional-looking. Well, okay, maybe one is and maybe it isn't, but when I blog about it you can decide for yourself.

These gloves are Part 1 of my Bronze-level medal for the Knitting Olympics. I know some people are following rules where there are no levels of medals and either you get achieve your goal or you don't, but as usual I did it My Way (cue the Sid Vicious version).

knitsploitation

2010-01-27T18:20:00.001-08:00

I've been trying to explain this for years, and I keep on failing. But here I am, trying again.

It seems like no cultural activity is safe from exploitation by those out to make a quick buck. From food to sex to sports to work, religion to politics to a fondness for puppies: there are calendars, coffee mugs, t-shirts, and countless other tchotchkes trying to divert revenue from the main thing people want to spend their money on to some useless "themed" item.

So the person who loves golf gets bookends made to look like golf clubs. The cat aficionado gets a sweatshirt with a romanticised picture of kittens on it. And knitters get earrings shaped like balls of yarn, bookmarks that say "I'll start reading this again as soon as I get to the end of the row," and books with people talking around knitting, rather than about knitting itself.

I can't stand any of this stuff. Here's just a short list of the reasons why:

I knit the way smokers smoke. It's a nervous habit that I find relaxing. The main difference is that at the end of an evening, I'll have a sock done whereas the smoker will have a full ashtray. That really is the main difference.
I knit because I am a tall, big woman. I learned to knit when I was about nine. I stopped growing (at 1.75m, taking a North American size 14) when I was 12. If I wanted a sloppy fisherman-knit sweater, the kind that was popular when I was 12, I was going to have to bloody well make it myself. For the kind of knits I like to wear, that still holds true today.

Furthermore:

I resent the pop culture norm that "real knitters don't knit with acrylic." I have had the honour of knowing several master knitters who knit exclusively with acrylic. They were all old enough to remember when substandard wool was the only option, and they were thrilled when the synthetics came on the market. Maybe you disagree with them on their fibre choices, but that doesn't make them bad knitters. I for one am grateful to have the choices of fibre we have today, and that includes working in synthetics when it's the best tool for the job I want to accomplish.
Furthermore, I really hate it when people are snobby about not working with acrylic, but cheerfully buy off-the-rack clothes made with synthetic fibres. You know who you are.
I also resent the consumerist attitude that says knitting today is more about buying yarn and less about making stuff. I like making stuff. The purpose of buying yarn, for me, is to make stuff. It is not to "fondle", or satisfy an "addiction", or any other sex/drug metaphor people want to use to cover up buying habits they seem to be vaguely ashamed of. Sure, I like a nice skein of nice fibre as much as the next person. But I'm not going to buy it unless I have some idea of what I want to do with it.
Most of all, I hate the assumption that knitting today is a "hobby," a "pass-time" that no-one "has" to do. If I want the clothes to fit, I have to make them myself, or else hire a dressmaker, or else shop somewhere that is very well stocked in the medium to larger sizes. If I want cardigans with sleeves that go down to my wrists, I'm going to have to make them. "Hobby" is a put-down for all the years I've spent making sure my skill levels were good enough that I could make things that didn't scream, "this was hand-made by a non-professional."

I have been knitting for 75% of my life. I knitted in high school between classes and put up with other kids calling me "Little Suzy Homemaker," growling back at them (long before Lily Chin appropriated it) that I was an "urban knitter" who was "in it for the fashion." In university I used knitting to convey character during drama class. During my first career as a high school teacher, the half-hour of knitting on the bus to and from work was my only leisure time on workdays, and ensured I'd have something comfortable and decent to wear to class while I tried to cover rent on a part-timer's salary.

For the first twenty years of my knitting, my grandmother was the only other knitter I knew. I raided the public library for books to teach me techniques (Oma lived an hour's drive away and wasn't always there to show me how to do things when I was ready to learn them). We made our own knitting culture, creating work that was about a good job done and the usability of the finished product. We had no trends, no peer pressure, no romance of an imagined "tradition". We just knew hand-made socks were superior to the store-bought ones, and that machine-made hats don't keep your ears warm in Canadian winters.

Now hawkers of "heart-warming" books want me to buy their wares so they can tell me amusing anecdotes about uneven stitches (uneven stitches? I can't make them if I tried, not the way Oma taught me to work them), mother-to-daughter bonding (my mum hates knitting, and my grandmother was taught to knit at school, not home), overcoming "fear" (Oma gave me a bagful of odd balls so I could experiment before working a usable item. I never had a chance to be afraid.). Finally, they keep insisting that knitters are helpless to resist when it comes to buying yarn, even if they can't keep their tension consistent for the length of a row, never mind a whole sweater.

It makes me angry. They are taking my lifelong nervous-yet-constructive habit away from me, then distorting it to push the consumerist angle that it is better to be a good yarn buyer than a good knitter. They are insulting me by telling me that people with seven years' experience in this 800-year-old craft are "experts," even though my thirty years of knitting makes me feel like an intermediate who is finally getting the hang of it. They want to infantilise me and take away my hard-won expertise, my ability to judge what is right for me to create and spend my money on.

Hence "knitsploitation." Like "sexploitation," it's taking something people like and then twisting it until it's merely a set of consumer goods. And like the cigarette smoker who wouldn't necessarily appreciate a book on modern tobacco cultivation, the last thing I need in my life is a book trying to give me the warm fuzzies about a craft that is already warm and fuzzy all on its own.

Make it stop.

blocking en masse

2010-01-06T09:28:00.000-08:00

Some people block their knitted stuff just as a matter of finishing it — just one more step towards the end, like darning in the ends.

I was always taught that if you have to block it, it means you did a crappy job knitting it in the first place. Knitters who claim you have to block to "get rid of uneven stitches" make me cringe. How about just not making the uneven stitches in the first place?

My mum told me recently the lace scarf I made her had been admired by a friend of hers, but was astonished that I did not iron my work. Iron? Iron? It's got bobbles in it! And it's made out of Kidsilk Haze! Even the biggest blocking fanatic won't iron bobbles, especially ones knitted into yarn of silk and mohair.

Apparently I have found one who would.

One of the tricks with craftsmanship is knowing when to deviate from your usual best practices, though, and I recently made four things that require blocking. Not ironing, mind you (shudder) —just some stretching to get them in the right form.

Three of the items are Estonian lace: two shawls and a scarf. One is a beret in stranded colourwork.

I waited until I had a nice, quiet stretch of time. In this case, it was Christmas Day. That might shock some folks, but I had a perfectly nice winter solstice celebration on the 20th, thank you.

I woke up, brushed my teeth, and got to work.

Soak

I gathered together everything I needed to block, filled up the sink with cool water, added Soak, and set a timer for fifteen minutes.
Note: Normally soaking several different-coloured items together like this would not necessarily be a good idea, because dye can bleed out and discolour other items. Since all my items were in the same colour range, I decided to risk it. Nothing bad happened to the knits themselves, although the jury's still out on my bedsheet.

During the fifteen minutes, I stripped the bed, put on an old fitted sheet, and scarfed down some breakfast.

Then the pinning started. Some knitters block things lovingly, measuring and re-measuring. I'm more of the school of "er, yeah, looks right, and I'm sick of pinning so I'm going to use some blocking wires now." Here are the two shawls blocked out on the bed, both using a combination of pins and blocking wires:
What's impressive about both these pieces is that they were half to two-thirds the size on the needles before blocking. Lace can be weird that way.

The beret got popped over a dinner plate. I tried just putting it on the mattress with the shawls, but it was draining too much water, so I set up my drying rack and put it on that.

By the time I got to the scarf, I had run out of room on the bed. Also, the scarf is made from Handmaiden Sea Silk, so it tends to smell like seaweed when wet, and I didn't want the smell near the shawls. so I just draped it over the top of the drying rack and gave it some tugs to set the width:
Yes, my living room looks like a workshop.

As of this writing, everything has been drying for about an hour and a half. I'm going to set this post to delay publishing until the first week of January. With any luck, the three items here that are gifts will be in their recipients' hands by then.

I'm not sure how long things will take to dry. If the stuff on the bed isn't ready by tonight, though, at least I have my sofa bed to sleep on. DIYers need sofa beds.

bling!

2009-12-26T08:38:00.000-08:00

Usually I don't like beadwork that is too over-the-top. I admire the artisanship that goes into making elaborate neckpieces (if it gets big and artistic-looking enough, it's a "neckpiece," not a "necklace"), but I wouldn't want to wear them.

The Ice Blossoms bracelet (sorry, subscriber-only) is about as rococo as I would ever want to get with jewelry I would actually wear. Even though I decided to use cheap acrylic crystals instead of the Swarovski ones called for in the pattern, the thing is still plenty heavy and drapes nicely on the wrist. The original pattern calls for seed bead fringes around the centre stone in each main motif, but I thought it was ornate enough without them.

I've been making so much stuff in my usual blacks, reds, and purples lately that I decided to branch out a little and make the bracelet multi-coloured in lighter colours. I like the results, but would also love to see it done in more Gothic colours: all jet black, or dark red crystals with amber seed beads. It would probably look good in the cobalt blue that's currently popular too, or the earth tones that are popular in the beading world right now.

The thing I like the best about wearing the bracelet is that the big main motifs are flexible, so they curve to fit your wrist. This is a lot more comfortable than a similar bracelet would be made of same-sized pieces of metal.

Most of the beading is a variation on right-angle weave. You backstitch your way through making different loops, and then frame them in more beads to stabilise the loops and keep them all on the same horizontal plane. The blue beads closer to the clasp were not in the original pattern; I added them to make the bracelet a bit bigger (normal-sized bracelets fit my wrist exactly with absolutely no ease).

I found these ornate toggle clasps for $2.50 for ten clasps. They go great with the ornate style of the bracelet.

More beading stuff

I finally found a way to get seed beads back into their bottles without losing half of them into the carpet. Teaspoons are too big for the job, but if you can find a little souvenir spoon, they work great! They're small enough to fit into the standard medicine-bottle style of seed bead containers, but big enough to scoop up a decent amount of seed beads at once:
Finally, a reason to collect those spoons.

a learning experience

2009-12-12T13:18:00.000-08:00

Rypan Designs seems to be taking over my entire beading life. Since they seem to be pretty good, maybe that's not entirely a bad thing. I just finished making this vintage-style bracelet based on one of their kits. The kit uses size 8/0 seed beads; I used size 11/0s because I tend to use size 11/0s for everything. It makes for a narrower, more delicate chain. Arguably I could have stuck with the 8/0s and made a wider chain that probably would have suited me better, but I liked the smallness of this when I was done.

The black beads in the photo aren't really black. They're clear but very dark brown and kind of remind me of Coca-Cola. I meant to buy black and at first I wasn't sure about the choice, but in the end it somehow makes things more vintage-y and I like the effect, especially since the petal beads are matte and the centres are metal-lined.

This is the first time I have worked peyote stitch and gotten it to wind up looking like peyote stitch, instead of a very sloppy and ill-formed herringbone stitch. Making the side petals (the parts of the daisy that stick out from the main ribbon of stitching) work took about eight tries, but eventually I was able to form them consistently.

I seem to have a thing for beaded daisies at the moment. I'm currently working on a modified version of a Bead & Button download (first search result; it's a subscriber-only download, sorry), using those size 11/0s instead of the 15/0s the pattern calls for. The photo will probably be up eventually. The current bracelet-in-progress has a ladder-stitch base of bugle beads. The daisies float on their centres above the base, which makes them sort of bobble-headed, but in a nice sort of way. I'm looking forward to seeing how the finished product works out. The thing about working these daisies is that you have to expect and welcome some variation into each motif — unlike other stitches, it doesn't work if things are too uniform. Which is good, because the inexpensive beads I insist on using won't give uniform results no matter how well I stitch them.

modern is traditional

2009-10-04T08:47:00.001-07:00

"Modern or traditional?"

I hate that question. It divides all tastes with a hard line that has the Victorians and all that came before them on one side, and the modernists on the other. For the former: embellishments everywhere, natural materials, a complicated palette of tertiary colours. For the latter: everything stripped down to absolute basics, man-made materials, primary and very simple secondary colours.

It completely leaves out all the joy of juxtaposition you get when you take that hard dividing line and try to blur it a bit. Which brings me to my latest finished objects:

Gothic cross necklace

This was made from a kit I got at a beading expo a couple of weeks back. It's by Rypan Designs Beadwork, and, like all their kits, was very easy to put together. I like how they use basic beads to make their kits, so that after you make the first one, you can always make more to justify the cost of the kit to yourself. Their three-drape Victorian Gothic necklace was the first beading I ever did, and I've made at least half a dozen versions of it since.

Henry VIII collar

This design came from The Anti-Craft. You can check the link for their explanation of why it's called Henry VIII. I like that it uses up almost an entire vial of seed beads -- great way to stash-bust! The first two rows are completed simultaneously using a two-needle technique, which is nice because after the relatively slow start, the next two rows zoom along. I went for plain glass drops, but there is a lot of potential to change the look of the collar by using different colour combinations and drop beads.

Hemlock doily (1941)

My bedroom furniture is a great example of the modern-is-traditional aesthetic. It's from IKEA, so you can bet that not a single scrap of materials is superfluous, yet it has the scrollwork and bedknobs of a Victorian metal bedframe.

In this set, the wardrobe and night-stands are metal and scrollworked as well, plus the shelves have punched-hole patterns on them in the shape of Scandinavian eight-pointed stars. The metal seems to pick up dust like crazy, and I've been looking for tablecloths for a long time. I've never found any that I liked, though.

Then it occurred to me: the ever-knitting Emily at the Naked Sheep took a vintage doily pattern and worked it in a heavy worsted-weight yarn to make a shawl. What if I took the same pattern and worked it in the original fine crochet cotton to make a doily?

Emily told me where to find the pattern, I guesstimated that I would need one size larger needles than what the original called for to get the size I wanted, and off I went.

This is an extremely quick knit. I started on a Sunday and was done by the following Thursday.

The only thing that took me a long time to get around to was the pinning out and starching. I finally pinned out the doily on my bed's mattress (with a fitted sheet underneath it!), sprayed the starch on, and let it dry by itself. That worked perfectly. You can see in the final photo that I decided to make it a bit pointier than the original.

my (unblocked) Hemlock with Emily's shawl at the Sheep

the blocked & starched Hemlock doing dust-prevention duty on my night-stand

Now I just need to make another one for the other night-stand!

More things I've finished lately

2009-08-23T20:36:00.000-07:00

Some of these things have actually been off the needles for months, but I would set up stupid "efficiency" tasks for myself like: "Oh, I'll darn in the ends on these when I finish that other pair of socks I have on the needles," and then I would go off and work on something else, and both projects would languish. But here's the latest this week:

Bacchus socks

These are from the Fall 2008 issue of Interweave Knits and are the first socks knitted from the toe up that I've ever got to fit a human foot. I like the idea of having a full toolkit of methods for knitting, but I really don't get why people are fanatical about toe-up socks. Then again, I still don't get why people are fanatical about knitting in the round, even though I'm knitting in the round a lot myself lately (although expecting that to change somewhat this fall when I start making sweaters and jackets again).

I'm not the biggest fan of making bobbles, but these were no more than two bobbles per round, so it was fine. I like the use of ribbing to make the whole sock a bit more shapely. I had to make these wider and longer than what the pattern called for, but everything worked out in the end.

Celtic knot socks

These are from the same issue of Interweave Knits as the Bacchus socks — lots of great patterns in this issue! These were also written for toe-up construction, but since the texture pattern is symmetrical, I knit them cuff-down since that was easier on my brain.

Beaded earrings

I bought all the beads and findings for these a couple of years ago, and they've been languishing in my bead box ever since. One night I spontaneously decided I was sick of them using up the space in the bead box, pulled out my pliers, and put them together. I had to redo them once (but only once). In the end they seemed to turn out:

French Girl lace jacket

I finished this one a while ago, but (as you can see) have been having trouble photographing it. To make this one, you knit two halves —cuff to centre back, and then cuff to centre back for the other side — and then knit the collar separately, using a three-needle cast-0ff to attach it. The three-needle cast-off is what gives the jacket structure — there are absolutely no seams anywhere else. My two big modifications for this one from the original pattern were to make it long-sleeved and to add a garter stitch border to the bottom, instead of the single crochet originally called for.

The back gusset adds some nice shaping to the jacket and makes it a bit more difficult to see where the graft line is that joins the two halves at the back (it's along one side of the gusset and up the centre back).The collar is made from the twisted edge up and then joined with a gathered three-needle cast-off. I'm finding French Girl Knits has some great construction ideas that make you think "Hey, I could use that for..."

Now what?

I started my first knitted doily today, and even though I took several hours out to visit some friends, I am still 60% done by the round count. The rounds are getting bigger and bigger, of course, but there are also more plain rounds, so the progress has actually been pretty linear.

I'm also working on another French Girl constructed-in-two-halves jacket. I need more jackets, and since I am sitting down in a cubicle most of the day, I prefer knitted ones. It would be loved to post finished photos of both of these soon, because that means they're getting used!

Old-fashioned skills in the age of small appliances

2009-08-03T12:26:00.000-07:00

My youngest brother recently moved to an apartment with less cupboard space, and so I inherited his breadmaking machine. The manual got lost a long time ago, and it doesn't seem to be available on-line, but I found some tips for "operating any bread machine" and some basic recipes.

This morning I threw all the ingredients into the machine, set it for a basic whole wheat loaf, and pressed the start button. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly until I followed the recipe instructions about checking the dough's consistency.

The instructions said that you were supposed to pause the bread machine (like lifting the lid on a washing machine, I suppose) and check how sticky the dough was, then add either water (for dry dough) or flour (for too-sticky dough) until the correct consistency had been achieved.

So I opened the lid... and the bread machine kept kneading away. I poked at a part that was nice and far away from the mixer blade, and it was definitely too sticky, so I added some flour and closed the lid.

After a few minutes, just like the instructions said, I checked again — still too sticky. This time I pressed the Stop button to make the machine stop long enough so I could be super extra sure that the machine would mix in the new infusion of flour properly.

But when I pressed the Start button, the machine screamed at me and started blinking "H-E", which I guess is some sort of error. It wouldn't start no matter what. Apparently on this model, Stop really means "something awful is happening! STOP!"

I dug the dough out of the machine's baker thingy, threw it in my favourite bread-mixing bowl with some flour, and kneaded it until it was the right consistency. Then I tossed a tea towel over the bowl and let it sit for 30 minutes, before shaping the loaf and putting it in a loaf pan. 45 minutes later I had a perfectly nice loaf of bread with a crumb density that is perfect for sandwiches:

Next time: must remember not to push the button, or not use the machine.

Things I've finished lately

2009-08-01T05:27:00.000-07:00

I've been having trouble finishing DIY things in the last few months. Not finishing, the part where you seam and darn in ends — that part is enjoyable, and means the bulk of the work is over if you've done the job right to begin with.

No, this is more like: getting an idea, diving into the stash, rummaging amongst the needles until I find the right size, casting on, getting 50-80% done... and then repeating the same process from the beginning. It's getting to the point that I'm "missing" some needle sizes because all the available pairs have half-finished work hanging off them. Not good.

I think it might finally be coming to an end. Not only do I feel like finishing things, but I actually am finishing them. Some things are more finished than others:

Unintentional beaded flowers

Note: these are made from seed beads. They are sitting on the wrist rest of my laptop in the photo. Think small and finicky.

I couldn't sleep one night, so I decided to look through pattern books I already know well —I find the photos pleasant, but because I already know the material, it's boring enough to make me sleepy.

On this particular night, I was looking through a copy of Bead & Button and found the instructions for these seed-stitch flowers. All of a sudden I had this brilliant idea: to make a lot of seed-stitch flowers, sew them over a wire frame with seed-stitch mesh in between, and make a funky lampshade for the bare light bulb in my laundry room!

The ideal would have been to write the idea down and go to sleep. Nope. Couldn't. So I got up around midnight, pulled out my beading stuff, and got the pink-pearl flower with the burgundy centre done around five AM. I would have been done early, but this was my first attempt at brick stitch and the thread got so tangled I had to start over after completing just one petal. The burgundy flower with the turquoise trim went more quickly.

No, I never made the lamp shade, although I did pick out some lampworked beads from my stash so that I wouldn't have to make several dozen flowers just to cover one light bulb.

Dishcloths

I've been needing new dishcloths for a while, so these were intentional. Usually I just do the cast on three stitches, do an eyelet edge increase 'til it's wide enough, decrease back to three stitches kind of dishcloths, but I liked the 1950s factor on these spiky petal ones (think starburst clocks and things knit sideways in short rows to make a circular shape). They are dead quick, and somehow only use about half a ball of standard dishcloth cotton. The green one is made from Bernat, the blue and yellow ones from Lily Sugar 'n' Cream, and the multi-coloured one is an attempt to use up the leftovers. I still have another leftovers one on the needles, and it looks like I'll have enough yarn and then some.
One thing I am irrational about: dishcloths must be reversible. The multi-coloured one bothers me a bit because the colour changes aren't the same on the other side (physically impossible in knitting, of course, although one can minimise the effect). If you graft these to finish them instead of seaming per the pattern, they're almost exactly the same on both sides.

French Girl cover jacket... and other stuff

I've been really getting into the designs in the French Girl Knits book. They're all seamless without going to convoluted lengths just to be seamless —the seamlessness is worked sensibly into the design. I made some mods to my version, but since none of the photos I took of this this morning turned out, that will have to be another blog post. This one has run long enough!

easy stuff

2009-03-27T04:14:00.000-07:00

I recently picked up a copy of Nancy Bush's excellent Knitted Lace of Estonia, and already have sticky notes on various pages, marking off the ones I want to make first. So far I have one project done, one on the go, and a third one slated to be done next. All are made 100% from stash yarn.

The scarf in the photo was the first thing I finished. It was a birthday present for my mum, made from the same yarn and to go with the lace beret I made her. The scarf weighs in at 31g, so the beret and the scarf together weigh less than a typical beret does on its own. For some reason I find that very satisfying — it reminds me of those catalogues for camping gear that list the weight of each item along with loving descriptions of the "space-age" material it's made from. Here's something that could have been made any time in the last 800 years and it's remarkably light, plus it can be folded into a very small space for storage.

As near as I can tell from the book, Estonians have a lock on how to do lace so that it's fun, quick, and turns out well. They always alternate one complex "pattern" row with one simple one, which makes for a nice rhythm, and the patterns are very quick to memorise. I don't do lifelines, so the knitting rushes along. To be perfectly honest, there are a few mistakes where I shifted one stitch over here or there, but a judicious increase-this and decrease-that straightened everything out again, and they don't jump out at you when you look at the scarf.

Because the Kidsilk Haze is so airy, the nupps (knobs, the flat bobbles you can see along the lace patterns) are very faint unless you hold the scarf up to the light, which explains my choice of display arrangement for the photo. They do add to the texture, though — just more subtly than if I'd used a more substantial yarn.

For anyone skittish about trying out lace (why?) I recommend an Estonian scarf pattern.

fun with glue guns

2009-03-08T19:27:00.000-07:00

The other night the ever-creative Carla and I went to the Linux Caffe and took a workshop course on how to make jewelry out of old electronics parts. The workshop wasn't held in the café proper, but in a room in the same building that felt like one of those workshops created from a garage (although in this particular case, it wasn't). There was a big heap of electronics in the centre of a large table, plus jewelry findings and some mismatched jewelry beads. We were also given a box full of various cutting, gripping, and bending tools to break apart and shape things. Finally, there were a couple of glue guns to attach things in new ways. The instructor gave us some pointers on how to work things, explained a few basic safety rules (power tools = wear safety goggles), and we were off.

The group at the other end of the table lucked out and found some parts that were lined with copper. They cut the copper lining into strips and made all sorts of things with it.

As you might be able to tell from the photo, I wound up making all of my stuff from a single controller board I found. I liked the dark green color, and it was thin enough that I could cut it into pieces with a regular pair of scissors. That let me be a bit more precise — check out the rounded corners on the brooch for proof.

I glue-gunned all the pieces to jewelry findings while I was there, then did a little refining once I got home. I added the earring hooks myself at home, and I added the extra jump rings to the necklace pendant so that it would fit onto my favourite necklace chain. Because I kept things so minimal, I wound up being done way before everyone else, but I was happy with the results, so that was okay.

Normally I don't like to do glue-type DIY stuff, just because of the hordes of "crafts" which involve gluing together a few pre-fab pieces, but this was pretty satisfying. I think it's because you have to decide how everything is going to work together yourself.

What's been interesting to me is the reactions I've been getting. People have generally been very positive. A lot of people have wanted details so they could make their own. It's all very cyberpunk à la William Gibson's novels, but it works in real life.

reversible clothing

2009-02-21T08:15:00.000-08:00

When I was about seventeen, I tried to design a reversible sweater using a chevron rib stitch. I completely forgot to consider how narrow ribbed fabric gets (tension swatch? what tension swatch?), and gave up halfway up the back or so. When my mum told my Croatian grandmother about it, she told me about this fabric that used to be sold at the market when she was a little girl. It was cheap stuff, not very well made, and it had one pattern printed on one side, and a different pattern printed on the other side. She thought the idea was you could make something out of it with one pattern showing, and then, when that was worn out, make a smaller something by taking apart the original item, and letting the other pattern show. That way it wouldn't be as obvious how thrifty you were being. She also said her father wouldn't let anyone in the family buy any of this fabric on point of pride (ie: it was for poor people, not them).

I learned a few things from this:

It's not good enough to make a reversible fabric. You have to plan a reversible garment.
If you're going to make something reversible, make it very cool-looking, so no-one can question your motives.

I've already had one reversible sewn jacket: a light swing coat my mum made me one year as a New Year's present. I did tend to wear it only one way out, but it was fun to show off, and nice to know that if I spilled some of my lunch on it, I could always turn it inside out. Me being me, that happened a few times.

Now I've got a copy of M'Lou Baber's Double Knitting (scroll down). Every single item in it is reversible, including the hats and bags. The photo at the top of this post shows how far I've gotten on the Central Park jacket, which has these gorgeous Art Nouveau trees and birds knitted into it. The bottom part is the tree roots. Then the foreground and background colours switch and show the trees reaching into the air, with the stylised birds flying between them.

In case you haven't done double knitting before: The technique itself just feels a lot like doing K1, P1 rib, and goes more quickly than you might think. There's absolutely no stranding or colour weaving involved, because you're always using both colours equally. I'd actually say it's easier to get into than other colour techniques like intarsia and stranded colourwork. The finished items in this particular book have no seams, which is a bonus for the anti-seam brigade. For this type of knitting, I agree seamless is the way to go, just because if you were seaming, you'd need to match two mirror-image seams stitch for stitch if you wanted it to hang right, and that would be trickier than the seamless alternative. As always, I prefer the best and simplest tool for the job.

I'm looking forward to posting the finished jacket here!

adventures in home wiring

2009-02-14T08:37:00.000-08:00

My bedroom just had one of those standard square ceiling lamps that have been produced in exactly the same way since at least the 1960s: white, the size of an occasional pillow, and with fine scroll design painted along the edge that never went with anything and never will.

As previously blogged about, I painted my bedroom, and the next step was to find a light fixture that contributed to the vaguely "hotel room in Nice circa 1908" vibe I have going, but was bright and fun like the paint on the walls*. I'm really big on waking up in a room that makes me feel happy, and wanted something that would be bright and cheerful in the dark Canadian winter, but fun in the summer too.

This lamp is from the IKEA children's section. If I cut all the beads off, or replace them with more sedate ones, I could get a grown-up look from it. I like how the not-quite-matched beads look, though, and it goes well with the rest of the colour scheme. Besides that, the scrolls go with my furniture, and there's not a single speck of brass on it (I hate brass).

I did the wiring myself, with only one tech support call to my brother Rob, who knows much more about these things (in my defence, the wiring in that socket looks safe, but a little non-standard as to colour coding). The worst part — once the wire colour mystery was solved, anyhow — was trying to get the cover at the top of the fixture to hold all the wires in place. I took down the lamp just this morning, rearranged some of the beading, duct taped the lamp wire into place under the cover, and then replaced the whole thing. I'm still not confident it won't start to sag in the next 24-72 hours, but we'll see.

* This photo shows the paint colour better than previous ones, but it's still too blue. The actual colour has some green in it — hence the ocean resort theme.

About socks

2009-01-25T21:09:00.000-08:00

It's -15C outside my apartment as I write this, and Toronto has been in the throes of the annual "deep freeze" weather for over a week now. I don't like to moan about it — it happens almost every year, so it's not exactly a surprise. What does surprise me is how people deal with it.

I just finished the Noro socks I started last April, and am wearing them right now. They're warm in a way that only natural-fibre items can be — my feet just feel nice and comfortable, but not hot the way that synthetics will do to you. They're plenty thin to wear in my winter boots without pinching, and being Noro, they have the same colours in them, but not in the same order, which is pleasing.

Call me smug, but I find it rather sad that there are lots of people who live in this city, under the exact same climate conditions as me, in the exact same income bracket, but who will never get to know how comfortable and pleasant wearing a simple pair of hand-made socks can be. From the custom heel and toe shaping, to instep shaping if you really want to, they fit better than machine-made socks, no contest. The colour and pattern combinations are way more fun than what's offered in finished socks. And, despite being asked several times over the years, I still have no idea how long they take me to knit because I just work on them during all my in-between times: commuting, waiting to be served in a restaurant, even waiting in line at the grocery checkout. I do know from the pairs I've made for gifts and from historical accounts I've read that they don't take long.

So: if you've been holding out on socks because the smaller needle and yarn size scares you, or because of fitting issues, or because you just don't understand the appeal... the work is light and the wearing very rewarding. I didn't make socks for the first fifteen years that I knitted (there was one abortive attempt when I was seventeen, but that had other factors going against it). To me, there was an element of tackiness to it, like knitting golf club covers or doorknob cosies.

But now that I've worn them, there's just no going back.

Cross-posting on myself

2009-01-25T18:19:00.001-08:00

I reviewed Rebel Knitter's Knittishishms book on my main blog today. The review ended up there instead of here because the main blog includes talking about things literary, and although there are great patterns in it, Knittishisms is more of a book to read than a "pattern" book. It's the sort of book you could hand a non-knitting friend to read while they waited for you to do something (say, darn in some ends), and they would find it enjoyable to read.

Of course, having to decide which blog to review the book on brings up all sorts of Golden Notebook-ish dilemmas (if I may be so pretentious), but it seems a factor in modern geekdom that we only interact where our obsessions intersect.

An unexpected finished item

2008-12-29T07:02:00.000-08:00

On the "Apollo 8 anniversary," (we're always creative about what to call 25 December), my mum showed me a hand-knitted beret she had bought recently, and asked me if I could make her another one of a similar size, any appropriate colour or style I wanted. What she liked about it was that it was a bit wider than a standard beret, which suited the way she was wearing it (back of the head instead of to one side).

Rowan Magazine's 30th anniversary issue had a vintage-style beret I wanted to make, and I had three balls of Rowan Kidsilk Haze given to me by the ever-inexplicable J-A. The colour is ashes of roses — pink with a lot of grey in it, almost like cross between burgundy and lavender. I started it on the 27th and had it finished last night, the 28th. That's including the time I took to calculate how to give it a wider circumference without messing up the lace motifs on it, so job well done if I may say so myself.

The pattern called for Rowan Wool Cotton, which also looked very nice in the magazine photos. Fortunately, the Kidsilk Haze knits up to almost exactly the same gauge. Of course, it gives a very different look to the beret — soft and floppy instead of crisp and sculpted.

The colour turns out to be even harder to photograph than it was to describe above (it's colour 600 if you look on a Rowan shade card). When the flash went off, the silk in the yarn reflected the light and made it look like it was made out of cheap wire. With the flash off, I could get a relatively sharp photo, but the yarn came out a scary shade of light pink. I opted for monochrome photos, since in this case the point is to talk about the knitting:

I don't know why, but I really enjoy it when berets are divided into an odd number of sections.

Note that this beret was knitted straight and then seamed (the original pattern is written that way, but die-hard in-the-round knitters could convert it in a jiffy). The seam is at the 5 o'clock position in this photo in case anyone is looking for it. All of the motifs match up, so it's not especially noticeable unless you hold the beret up to the light.

Here's the bottom half (seam at 5 o'clock again, and this time you can see it from the inside a little):
Yes, the band stretches to fit a human head. I tried it on my head, and it was very comfy.

I think the part I enjoy the most is that the entire finished beret only weighs 14g (that's about half an ounce for people on imperial measure). I started with a part-ball of the Kidsilk Haze and expected to need part of a second one, but I didn't even finish the first!

S'mores

2008-12-13T08:38:00.000-08:00

I made good on my promise to try out making S'mores from scratch (if you can call making something from three highly processed ingredients "from scratch), and this is how things worked out:

First off, the costs. I went to a somewhat overprice grocery store for the graham crackers and the marshmallows, which cost $3.99 and $1.29 respectively. Ironically, all of the available chocolate bars were too fancy for the purposes of re-creating a campfire dessert invented in the 1920s, so I had to go across the street to the British import candy store and get a genuine Cadbury milk chocolate bar. The shop is stocked right now with all sorts of imported Christmas treats (the Guinness pudding was very tempting but too expensive for me), so I wound up getting one of the big bars that they don't always have. This was the most expensive ingredient, at $5.99 for a 230g bar.

Including tax, that put my total investment at $12.84, which matches the kit, but I got larger amounts of the ingredients. Unless the kit came with pretty amazing North American chocolate (doubtful), I got better quality ingredients as well.

The graham cracker package conveniently had S'mores instructions on it (I just can't bring myself to call it a "recipe"). I followed them and had some ready in well under five minutes. A hint: if the marshmallows keep falling off the piece of chocolate (mine did), split them open a little to expose the sticky insides, then push them onto the chocolate a little. The inner part not covered in powdered sugar sticks like glue.

Now that I've tried them, I don't get what the fuss is all about. Then again, I'm a Rice Krispies squares fan, and I'm sure if I hadn't grown up with those I wouldn't get what that was about either. I suspect that S'mores taste better if you're in the middle of a mosquito-infested national park and have just had hot dogs and beans for dinner after hiking for hours and desperately trying to fill in your "identify local flora and fauna" assignment, even though you haven't seen a single hawk all day and all the plants look the same to you.

Given that wrapping paper is so cheap, I think that if you're going to give S'mores ingredients as a gift, it makes a lot more sense to self-assemble. If the person you're getting it for loves S'mores that much, they probably don't associate it with yuppie-style packaging.

prefab DIY

2008-12-08T18:51:00.000-08:00

If you're connected with DIY at all, I'm sure you'll know what I mean by "prefab DIY." It's those all-in-one boxes that you have to do a little bit of assembly on, maybe add one ingredient, sometimes have a few basic tools on hand, and then you're done. Often there is very little scope for creativity — the satisfaction comes from making it look just like the photo on the box. Often, as well, the price of such certainty is reflected in what you pay.

Sometimes these kits are convenient (like when you really don't feel like having vast quantities of the raw materials left over), or they can be subverted easily enough to have fun with them. Last year, for example, the ever-fun Tara had a gingerbread house party, and we decided to make one depressed-area gingerbread house with graffiti and snow yellowed by food colouring, plus a surrealistic Das Candy-Haus of Dr. Caligari. There was lots of giggling and very pleasing results at the end of the afternoon.

And then... there's items like this one:
Someone took about seventy-five cents' worth of marshmallows, a dollar-fifty of chocolate bars, and maybe another dollar's worth of graham crackers, put it in a nifty box with a recipe, and created a S'mores kit that retails in the $10-$15 range (all prices in Canadian dollars).

Now, if the person who came up with this can sell it at that price, more power to them. But surely if you can cook well enough to follow a S'mores recipe, you can cook well enough to buy your own marshmallows, chocolate bars, and graham crackers, find a recipe on the internet if you don't have one already, and eat any leftover ingredients raw if you don't feel like doing anything else with them. (I would humbly suggest, however, that since you're more likely to have graham crackers and marshmallows left over than anything else, you could always break the crackers into pieces, melt the marshmallows, combine, and make a batch of graham cracker macaroons. I'm just saying.)

The thing is, I'm sure whoever decided to package, market, and sell these kits did their homework and worked out a price point that reflected what the market would bear and what consumer demand would deem reasonable. What irks me is what this says about the cooking aptitude of the general population in Canada and like countries.

I'm going to put my money where my mouth is and do a price comparison this weekend. I'll see how I do, and will report back.

the slipper experiment

2008-12-07T17:20:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I hauled up the last of the yarn from my locker to my apartment. As I suspected, most of the nice stuff had wound up in the locker (in sealed plastic bags, in a suitcase, thank goodness). Now that it's all in my living space, I'm starting to appreciate what a gargantuan task reducing the stash will be. The idea is to have it all fit in my cedar-lined chest. That means I need to decrease the volume to about 20% of what I have now. That's okay: part of knowing how to solve the problem is knowing the size of it.

I count any unfinished knitting as stash, even though it's really living in that strange twilight-land between stash and knitting. The truth is, I have so many ideas that sometimes things that are on their way to being finished wind up being unraveled and turned into stash again. I hate that silly debate between "process" and "project" knitting (reminds me too much of left-brain vs. right-brain, and all the other stupid binaries we impose on ourselves), but it's true I like to experiment at least as much as I like to get things done.

The past couple of weeks have been good for finishing things and experimenting at the same time. I finally finished the Lana Grossa socks I first blogged about last May, and started the second Noro sock of the pair I was working on at the same time. It had been so long, I had to look up my old blog post to find out what size needles I had used for the Noro, because all I could remember was that it was smaller-than-usual. (I knew there was a reason why I kept this blog!)

I also just finished a new pair of slippers for myself, because my old ones were ruined when I painted my bedroom. My old slippers were Isotoners, but this time I decided to knit my own.

I have a friend who saw a lot of my sweaters before she saw my apartment, and when she finally came over, the first thing she said was, "Where's all the knitted household stuff?" The truth is, I'm not that big on afghans, knitted pillows, tea cosies, or (gack!) wall hangings, much less door-knob cosies, toilet paper roll covers, or other ways people have found over the years to use up leftovers. That includes household slippers. When I was little, my grandmother used to knit my brothers and I slippers. We used their natural slippiness to our advantage, and would "surf" down the cushion-floored hallway after a running start. We would have our new slippers completely worn out in about a week, maybe two if they were made from Phentex instead of the usual leftover Eaton's Lady Fair Sayelle acrylic. Come to think of it, maybe that's why Oma taught me that slipper pattern as soon as I was past the scarf stage.

There's a nice pair of slippers in Melanie Falick's Handknit Holidays, though, and the idea of reducing some stash and replacing my slippers for "free" appealed. Also, this pattern calls for fingering-weight yarn, so I felt confident substituting some sock yarn. It takes me a couple of years to wear out a pair of hand-knit socks.

Here's the finished version:

Besides the yarn substitution, the major changes I made to the original pattern were:

Altering the size to something that would fit my feet. The pattern instructions are, as is typical for women's socks and slippers patterns, too small for me, even at the largest size. I take a North American size 10 shoe (that's a European 41, or a UK size 8), so I had to do some math to size it up myself. It wasn't that hard once I had compared the instructions to the schematics a few times, but it would be nice if someone remembered that not all women are five feet four with a size six shoe when they're publishing these things. There's a reason why I could design my own sweaters by the time I was sixteen, and it's not because I'm a fashion genius, unfortunately.
Ditching the long laces that were supposed to cross and tie halfway up the calf and replacing them with short laces that hold up the sides but don't require any tying, because they're sewn onto the slipper at both ends. (They can't be eliminated entirely because they're what's keeping the sides of the slipper from curling and falling off the foot.) The laces are still threaded through the centre-foot points to allow for the slipper to stretch and flex correctly as I wear it.
Removing the yarn-overs the pattern called for and replacing them with make-one increases instead. I don't have anything against lace patterns; I just thought this would look better. I also eliminated the yarn-over at the back of the heel since there wasn't going to be any lace to run through it.

I'd like to get some leather partial soles for them (the kind with the separate toe and heel pieces that come with the tough linen thread to sew them on with), but haven't seen these for sale in a long time. If you have a lead, please let me know.

The slippers fit and stay on a lot better than you would be led to believe when you're making them (the uppers curl something awful until they're on your feet), and the minimal upper means that your feet stay warm, but not too warm when you're wearing them. The final effect is that of a dancing slipper — pretty and elegant.

knitting and timing

2008-11-11T13:09:00.000-08:00

This month is NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel from scratch, starting 1 November and finishing on or before 30 November. This is my third year participating, and my second year of being a registered participant. Last year I got more than the 50,000 words completed, despite heavy hours at my day job, and this year I am on track to do the same.

Which is a long way of explaining why I was finishing a baby jacket at 2:30 in the morning last Saturday.

The jacket pattern is from Interweave, which seems to be the source of 80% of my pattern knitting these days. It's just a knit-and-purl pattern, sort of a King Charles Brocade, and had to be made in unisex colours because we don't know if the baby is a boy or a girl yet:

(The buttons are little sunshines with smiles on them. The eyes are the buttonholes.)

There were no side seams on the body —the only seams were up the sleeves and to attach the sleeves to the body. Since the fabric pattern was knit-and-purl anyhow, I used a trick my grandmother taught me and knitted the first and last stitch of any seam sides, no matter what was going on in the pattern at the time. Doing a one-stitch garter border like this made it very easy to seam, and I got everything straight on the first go. Given that I did the sewing-up at 7:00 in the morning the day I was to give the gift, the speed was both needed and appreciated.

The garter-stitch seam lies nice and flat (especially important for baby sweaters), but it shows more than a traditional seam. In my humble opinion, it is nice-looking enough to be called "decorative."

The yarn is an "eco-cotton" by Marks & Kattens. It worked well and has a nice soft hand on 3.25mm needles.

The only really nasty part in the whole pattern was doing the seed-stitch collar on 2.75mm needles for 7cm. Highly recommended if you want something more polished than Your Average Baby Sweater but don't want to get bogged down in complicated stitch manoeuvres.

And yes, this took about as long as making an adult sweater.

DIY with paint

2008-10-27T03:17:00.001-07:00

If you read both this and my main blog, you know that I moved to a new apartment over the summer. Everything was pretty much the way I wanted it, except for the colour of the bedroom walls. The previous owner had painted the room a very dark blue, which went great with her light-coloured oak furniture, but not so great with my black metal furniture:

I wear black most days, but it's not how I decorate.

There was one big obstacle to getting the painting done: I'd never painted a room before. I talked to lots of people about it, and got responses ranging from "it's easy, just read about it on the net and go for it" to "ugh! what a lot of work! and it always turns out badly! hire someone!".

I almost hired someone, but when I thought of how the logistics of that would work, it seemed that trying to do it myself was a lot better. Either way I was sleeping on the couch (a very comfy sofa bed, but nevertheless a couch) for a couple of days.

So I read about it on the net, used a paint calculator to figure out how much I needed, and went from there (the Benjamin Moore site helped me; I'm sure there's other places). And you know? If you decide that painting is what you're doing that day, and don't plan on doing anything else, it's not that bad. My only regret is that I didn't talk to the ever-practical Brenda beforehand: she recommends painting in your underwear if you're by yourself or comfortable with the people you're painting with, because paint is easy to get off skin, but nigh-impossible to get off clothing. Thanks to Beryl, Cila (sorry if I spelled your name wrong), Howard, Eric, and Andreea for all the hints. Thanks also to the ever-amazing Jan for creating lots of examples of how paint can transform a room.

Saturday: removed furniture, emptied closet, removed closet doors, removed electrical faceplates, taped, tarped, and did 2 coats of primer. The dark blue was still showing through the primer, but I had two cans of paint as opposed to one can of primer, so I was still optimistic.

Sunday: crash. Clifford the big red couch got folded out as a bed and did a great job. The mattress and support frame are almost exactly like my regular bed. Very comfy.

Monday night: Decided that sleeping on the couch for a week, waiting until the following Saturday was not going to cut it, despite Clifford's excellent attributes as a bed. Having my clothing scattered over the rest of the apartment in garbage bags and stacked on other furniture was also a factor. So at 8:00pm I opened one of the cans of paint and started painting. I had two coats finished around midnight (only one coat inside the closet because otherwise I'd run out of paint and have to start the second can) and was amazed. Everything had been covered up.

Tuesday night: Removed tarp & tape, then touched up baseboards, ceiling, and closet shelves with a sample bottle of Debbie's White by Debbie Travis. If you get on your hands and knees you can see the touch-ups, but otherwise not. I also removed excess paint from light switches and electrical plugs (not all mine, the last paint job had left this too) with Q-tips and nail polish remover. Replaced faceplates. Removed antique brass faceplates from living room and bathroom, and discovered they were there to camouflage that the light switches had paint on them. More Q-tips and nail polish remover. Replaced face plates with nice clean-looking white ones. I seem determined to make this place look like it's from 1963, but it's working out well.

Tuesday also saw the furniture get replaced in the bedroom, being careful to avoid the touched-up parts of the baseboard. Slept in the bed.

(this isn't quite the colour, thanks to the camera flash, but you get the idea)

Wednesday night: Closet touch-ups were dry, so the clothes got put away. Interestingly, there is way more room now than there was before. Side benefits!

Verdict: You can definitely tell it's an amateur job, but I was painting over another amateur job, so I don't feel bad. When the day comes to sell, I'll have to paint it off-white or something else boring, but for living in, it is fabulous.

Postscript: there was one faceplate that had no holes in it. When I took it off, I found these wires. The clear red knobby things say "3M" on them. If anyone knows what these are, please let me know!

Annie and ATLAS

2008-09-14T10:18:00.000-07:00

This past week the Large Hadron Collider at CERN went on-line, which means it's about time I blogged about that Annie Modesitt jacket I made last winter. Yes, that is a coherent, single-topic sentence. Read on and find out why.

One of the parts of the Large Hadron Collider is ATLAS. And ATLAS has a very interesting shape at each end. Check out this diagram:

See how the ends look like broadly ribbed knit fabric radiating out from the centre? That was the first thing I thought of, anyhow.

I sketched out a few sweater patterns based on the circular broad rib, but kept coming up with stuff that would make the wearer look like they had made a sweater out of a craft-fair pillow from the 1960s. Then I picked up the anniversary copy of Vogue and found my answer in Annie Modesitt's Twisted Float Shrug. The original is designed to make the most of the interesting colour blips that happen from striping garter stitch (as the photos on the link show), but I took the same shape and did the wide ribs of the ATLAS equipment in a single colour. I used a heathery green/black/brown shade of Galway, using garter stitch at the very centre to represent the hole in the middle of the machinery:

(Note: No matter what I do, the yarn always photographs darker and more boring-looking than it is in real life. In real life it changes subtly with the light and shows off the texture of the ribs swimmingly.)

The back/fronts are a single circle that gets knitted from the centre out, much as you would for a beret or a doily. When the width is equal to the width you want for the back, you knit onto waste yarn where the sleeves will be, then knit over the waste yarn. When it's time to knit the sleeves, you pull out the waste yarn and knit down. I kept the texture of the wide ribs going, and decided to make slightly belled sleeves instead of the tapered sleeves called for in the original pattern:

I like how the sleeves maintain the overall pattern even as they leave the geometric plane of the jacket body — it seems appropriate for something inspired by a physics experiment. I also like how easily this pattern adapted itself from being based on colour (okay, and texture) to texture and a monochrome colour. The main caveat is that you have to use a stitch that looks good on both the right and wrong sides of the fabric.*

There seems to be a lot of discussion about this pattern regarding yarn amounts. I used almost every last centimetre of ten balls of Galway, which has excellent yardage. On the other hand, I made outer part of the circle (after the sleeve slits were knitted) extra-generous because I wanted to have a nice length and lots of overlap at the front.

I wore this over a black long-sleeved V-neck all last winter, and it's great — comfy but dressy, perfect for my business-casual office. The big shawl collar keeps the draughts off, which is nice since my cubicle is under a vent. I'm sure it will be a wardrobe staple again this winter.

* So! Who's up for making this work in reversible cables?

Naked Sheep 2.0 Rocks!!!

2008-09-03T19:37:00.000-07:00

(I feel like everyone who reads that title needs to do so out loud, preferably using one of those microphones that imitates a large stadium echo.)

Tonight the ever-amazing Lisa hosted the first knitting night at the newly rebooted Naked Sheep, and an excellent time was had by all. If you live anywhere near Toronto, you simply must go and see. Yes, even if you don't knit or crochet.

Lisa and I met at the original opening of the Naked Sheep four years ago, and the first thing she told me after announcing she had bought the shop was that she was going to rearrange the shelves so that there was room to sit and knit in the centre of the shop, and so that things were more spacious.

"Makes sense," I said, but wondered about the narrow shape of the shop and whether it could be made "spacious" and still have a decent stock of yarn and pattern books.

Well, I got to see with my own two eyes tonight, and after I picked up my jaw from off the floor, I couldn't stop saying how much of a difference the new layout makes. Not only is there room to sit and knit, there is room to dance. I know, because we did some dancing towards the end of the night when everyone was packing up their knitting.

"Wow, I can't believe how open it all is," I said to Lisa. "How many shelves did you get rid of?"

"Actually, I bought a new one," she said, and pointed to a six-by-six foot cubbyhole rack on the wall behind her.

I am amazed. More space to move around and knit, and yet more space for yarn.

The energy tonight at the knitting drop-in was incredible. I don't want to moan about all the details, but I had a very busy day at work followed by a stressful drive to Mississauga to return a rental car. I wasn't even sure I was going to make it, but I wanted to see the new shop and check things out, so I went. It's almost 11:00pm as I write this blog, and I still feel buzzed.

Some people who dropped by tonight, like Brenda and Sandra, were people I met at the Sheep during the opening of the original version of the shop. Other people were new to me, and some were even new to the shop, but everyone got welcomed in and invited to pull up a chair. (And I would give them shout-outs too, but I can't remember everyone's name! If you were there, please e-mail me so I can say hi to everyone!) Knitters of all sorts of different skill levels were there, which to me just makes things more fun — some projects even got worked by several sets of hands. Variety is very cool when it comes to DIY.

On the way over, it occurred to me that I should at least give Lisa a card — I mean, that is one of the things you're supposed to do when someone you know takes over a business — so I made a quick dash into my favourite card shop. They had all sorts of cool blank cards, and a couple of "congratulations" cards, but in the end I picked one that had a neat collage on the front: a pen-and-ink drawing of a woman's head from the 1950s, a diagram of an atom picked out in sparkly ink, bright happy shapes. On the inside it was blank; on the outside it said "Inspired".

In a single word, it describes Naked Sheep 2.0 perfectly.

Go see.

Lies knitters tell themselves

2008-09-01T15:43:00.000-07:00

It's a funny way to freshen up this blog, but after a month of unpacking, furniture assembling, and general settling-in, this is where my head is at, and this is why:

The ever-cool Lisa has bought The Naked Sheep, just a few minutes' walk from both my old apartment and my new one, and she has graciously invited me to teach some classes for her. This means that I have had to pay more attention to the knitting zeitgeist than I usually do, so as to know what the heck people are talking about when they join my classes.

What I'm finding is that we're still lying to ourselves about some pretty fundamental things:

The irrational hatred of seams continues with ongoing propaganda attacks and untrue claims that seams "weaken" (if you do them right, they strengthen), "are difficult" (not if you bother to learn how), and are "a pain" (again, not if you bother to learn how). Come 0n, guys. I think Elizabeth Zimmermann is amazing too, but I prefer to look to her as the inspiration for keeping my own knitting wits about me, not for being a "blind follower", as she referred to knitters who followed patterns slavishly and never thought about what was best for them. It's got to the point where Meg Swansen, Elizabeth's daughter and an amazing knitter in her own right, is writing diplomatic, logical magazine articles trying to remind the knitting proles that there is no right way to knit. When Elizabeth came on the scene, knitting in the round was unheard of except for socks and gloves — she had to push to get circular knitting accepted as a general technique. Now the pendulum has swung the other way, with some knitters acting as if they've been asked to trample their fair trade cashmere in manure if someone so much as mentions seams. Is it not better to know how to seam so that you can when it's the best method for the job at hand? Maybe (gasp) you might find you prefer to knit as I usually do, and view seaming as a pleasant end to a knitting job well done. And if you don't, at least you won't be ignorant anymore. I have altered patterns from in the round to flat pieces, and I have also done vice versa. It's whatever it takes to get the job done right, and forget about dogma.

I am going to be an aunt for the first time sometime around New Year's, and have already picked out what I'm going to knit for the baby shower. I am also knitting for friends of mine who are expecting their first in November. I've looked at a lot of baby patterns in the last week or so, and I noticed something: most of them emphasise how quick they are to do, even when they're also labelled "heirloom." I'm currently working on a cabled pullover for the baby due in November, and I have these empirical measurements to offer: 93 stitches for the front and back, 23.5 cm in length. 93 stitches is about normal for an adult-size sweater — just in thicker yarn than the fingering-weight I'm using for the baby. 23.5 cm is almost halfway to an adult-size length for a sweater. My conclusion is that baby sweaters are not that faster than adult ones. So since I'm making two baby sweaters, one due in October and the other in November, I had better get cracking.

"Circular needles are superior in every way." Again, if an educated knitter has a personal preference for circs, I won't argue with them (unless they are disdainful of my own personal preference, in which case they better be ready to do a thorough defence). But straight needles, especially those lovely fourteen-inchers that I prefer, came into existence for a reason. The way I knit, I tuck the right-hand needle under my arm and hold it still while my right hand feeds the yarn and my left hand worries about forming the stitches. It works great for me, and is the normal way to knit in the eastern Netherlands (where the grandmother who taught me how is from), and so I'm told, in parts of Scotland. When I first learned how to wield double-pointed sock needles and circulars, I had to completly re-learn how to knit, and it was not fun. I'm now at the point where I'm pretty comfortable with the other method, but I do find that I really enjoy settling down with a pair of nice steel straight needles after finishing a project on circs.

Now, some of this is going to lead to the time-honoured comment of, "Well, that's your opinion, but everyone's free to say what they like, and the truth is that most knitters prefer..." True, this is my own opinion, but I don't buy the part about "most knitters." Most knitters never even get to hear these opinions, because they're drowned out by all the noise coming out from other sources. There are knitters who always knit in the round, always use circulars, and whip off baby sweaters very quickly (like the ever-original Brenda, who is also well on her way to being a wizard of the top-down method), but it seems to me that they need to fight to be heard as much as I do. Maybe it's time we all stopped being such blind followers and took this to the next level.

Moving, DIY style

2008-07-31T15:39:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged in exactly a month, because every spare moment has been spent on packing. I've been 100% dedicated to DIY, though, and here's proof.

As soon as I got the keys to my new place, I walked over to, let myself in, and walked around, checking everything over. Then I opened the closets and estimated how much would be dedicated to clothing and how much to yarn stash.

When I went to the laundry room and flicked on the light switch, I noticed that the light bulb didn't have a cover and immediately thought, "Hm, wonder if I could bead something. That could be a good excuse to use up miscellaneous seed beads — or those lampwork beads that don't match anything!"

As I pack my kitchen and washroom (the two rooms that are being moved tonight, so help me), I am alternating layers of breakable items like drinking glasses with layers of yarn skeins. The yarn is also being used to keep boxes of books from getting too heavy.

One of my new neighbours helped show me which keys fit where in the parking garage, including my storage locker. He recommended getting a set of storage shelves for the locker, especially if I make preserves. "I do! Thanks for mentioning!" was my immediate reply.

I'm not quite sure where the couch is going to go, but I know where my work-in-progress baskets will be relative to it.

I already have the spot for my working chair (writing, blogging, planning out textile and jewelry projects) picked out.

I took a quick flip through my favourite seasonal cookbook and picked out a blackberry/lime drink to make when my friends come over to help me Saturday.

Okay, back to the boxes... next time I post here will probably be sometime in mid-August. I plan to take advantage of the new place's central air conditioning to get more done at night (but promise to keep the AC at an environmentally-friendly level).

Time of Reckoning

2008-07-01T11:57:00.000-07:00

I'm moving in about a month, and all I can think about is: where am I going to put my stash in the new place? It's an issue, because the new place is only about two-thirds the size of the old place (but with a washer/dryer and dishwasher, so very much worth it). This, of course, leads to the usual question of "How do I turn all this stash into useful stuff, like clothes and gifts?"

And that, dear reader, led to a very useful review of What's In the Stash.

Disclaimer: I started my DIY life with virtually no stash. My grandmother gave me just enough of her stash that if I wanted to try out a new stitch pattern (or, in the case of crochet, a whole new craft), I could do it, but not have much more of any given colour than was enough for a few inches of fabric. That was fine — it encouraged me to experiment without going for the grand plunge of a whole new project to work on.

Then I inherited my grandmother's stash, plus the stash of a friend of the family who gave up knitting due to her arthritis. I also started earning a reasonable income. The consequence is that I have a crazy amount of odd balls of yarn, mostly in acrylic, and absolutely no compunction to give them up. When I mention it, people always tell me to give it to charity. They don't get that I don't want to give it to charity. I will buy new yarn and give it to charity, no problem. But this is my inherited stash, and what I'm really interested in is in turning it into cool-looking clothing that doesn't look like I made it from stash.

Not everything is in odd balls. Some yarn I have enough of to make a solid-colour sweater. Other yarn I have enough of to be a main colour with contrast colours either gathered from the stash or bought new to supplement. I love Sally Melville's adage that, "It takes a little cash to use up a whole lot of stash!".

To that end, I'm currently crocheting a wool cardigan from Teva Durham's Loop-d-loop Crochet book (the one I'm making is the one with the Irish crochet medallions on the front). The main colour is stash; I bought the contrasting colours. It's all in Mission Falls wool, so it all goes together nicely. I'll post photos here when enough of it is done.

It's also a good time to recycle ideas I had for things that didn't work out in previous stash-reduction exercises. A couple of years ago I tried making a woven-look tailored jacket out of the Golden Hands/Creative Hands set I have from the early 1970s, and while the fabric looked great, it became rather obvious I was going to run out of yarn. Now I've discovered other yarn, in a different colour and in greater quantity, and I'm thinking it's time to resurrect that idea.

Plus, the opportunity to try the really "grand" projects that would be prohibitively expensive to buy as a single project, like those wonderful knee-length Kaffe Fassett coats. Sure, you're supposed to make them out of luxurious Rowan and other yarns, but even acrylic starts to look nice when you combine enough colours.

As scary as the yarn packing is going to be, this could be a lot of fun. If only I had time to both knit and pack....

still a put-down. but better.

2008-06-18T18:10:00.000-07:00

The Guardian recently ran an article about how to DIY yourself into the latest fashions, with everything from turning t-shirts into dresses to making pom-poms (!). Along the way they covered knitting, and for once there wasn't a single ageist remark about it. Instead, journalist Lousia Casson called it "the surprise celebrity fad of the decade."

Right, because no-one could possibly get interested in knitting for any intrinsic value it has in itself. It must be proles with delusions of grandeur copy-catting those crazy knitting celebrities. Although perhaps that the fad has lasted a whole decade (bit longer than that, actually, the latest revival is getting on fifteen years now) would indicate there are other forces at work.

Maybe I'm just touchy about it because the article gave Madonna as an example of a knitting celebrity (what, did Julia Roberts give it up, or is that just old news?). On the plus side, the article acknowledges that a full-blown sweater can be daunting for some newbies, and provides a free music player cozy pattern link, plus a link to knitting clubs around Britain.

Overall, not bad. It's easier to fight classism than the feminist minefield the usual "granny" reference brings up — you know, the one I posted about before, where one winds up being very long-winded and saying something like, "Yes, I knit, and I learnt to knit from my grandmother, but to say knitting is for grandmothers alone is both ageist and ignorant of the actual demographics. Furthermore, while being a grandmother is both a desirable and positive role, limiting knitters to a gender straitjacket like that is unfair to knitters of both sexes who are not grandmothers, and..." anyhow, you know the rest.

Besides, the free sewing pattern links in the article look like they'd be good to check out.

Raccoon in Progress

2008-05-31T18:47:00.000-07:00

Queen of quiet irony Jean-Anne keeps saying she's frustrated with my mentions of the raccoon jacket. She has every right to be — after all, I did start the thing last year, and put it down for a long, long time, so long that I had to disentangle it from the work-in-progress graveyard in the corner bounded by a couch, a bookshelf, and the outer wall of my living room.

It's back in regular rotation, though, and I'm desperately trying to get it done (amongst all the other things I'm desperately trying to get done, like my novel's first draft) before the Toronto summer hits us with all its hot and humid disgustingness. I love Toronto for three of its four seasons, about ten of the year's twelve months. I spend every Toronto summer wishing I had the money and means to spend it in New Zealand, though. I don't care if it will be raining — just find me somewhere that's cool, even cold, and serves decent tea where I can knit, write, and do Pilates in peace Then I'm happy as the proverbial clam.

Anyhow, back to the Raccoon Jacket. It's an Annie Modesitt design, and I knew as soon as I saw it that I must make it.

For me, making this jacket is an act of sympathetic magical revenge. When I first moved to my neighourhood, I had a lovely two-bedroom apartment in a four-plex built around 1920. It had a front balcony bigger than the living room. For the winter, the living room had a wood-burning fireplace. Because the street level is much lower than the houses (ie: every building has stairs going up from the street to the front door), I had an amazing view. Oh yeah, there was a smaller but serviceable back balcony too.

The raccoons destroyed it all. They were attracted by the bags of garbage the previous tenant left on the back balcony, and they didn't leave after I cleaned everything up. They used the balconies as latrines, and ripped up the attic so badly my heating bill almost matched my rent. They stank, they attracted insects, and according to my old downstairs neighbours they even made it into parts of building humans were trying to live in. They even left a "calling card" of a squirrel with its chest burst open like some urban residential version of Alien in front of my back door when I shooed them away as I went out one evening.

I now live in an equally lovely but raccoon-free sixplex that was built in the 1950s. I can see the front door of my old apartment from my new apartment.

The "pelts" on the Raccoon Jacket are made from short rows. Even the chevron stripes on the sleeves are made from short rows. I added ten centimetres to the sleeves to make them wrist-length. I have longer-than-average arms and legs, so "cropped" stuff tends to look just shrunken or otherwise wrong on me.

My only complaint so far is with the yarn — see the weird striping and clumping hear the cap shaping for the sleeve? That's because the grey mix yarn (the main colour) lost one of its two strands for several yards. This was the second time this happened, and I was out of spare yarn, so the darker clump to the right of the black triangle is me mixing in a strand of black to keep the furriness somewhat even. You can see the thin lighter strip I knit before I realised what was going on.

Oh well, in real life raccoons don't have ideal pelts either. Believe me, I've seen enough of the evil vermin to know. Don't even get me started on animal rights (which I normally support) or how "cute" they are. Nothing truly cute smells or acts like that.

I have one more sleeve, the collar, and the finishing to go. Instead of the fur coat clasps Modesitt recommends, I think I'm going to make frog closures out of some Butterfly 10 cotton. I also want to get this thing lined — the fabric is both heavy and stretchy, so I think it will need the support. Black or midnight blue satin lining, I think.

Here's hoping I can show the finished thing here soon.

Sock Off

2008-05-17T08:21:00.000-07:00

I say this every year, but this year I mean it: this is the Summer of Socks for me. A lot of my existing socks have been around for five or more years now (hand-made socks lasting longer and all), and some of them are worn down to the nylon at the toes. I never seem to wear out hand-knit heels, just the toes. I know I could darn them, but that wouldn't reduce my yarn stash as quickly and the truth is I'm not very good at darning toe points. Under the ball of the foot or elsewhere on the sole, yes, but not right at the end where all the decreases are.

New socks it is, then — about the only wool knitting that's bearable in the summer.

Noro sock yarn:

I'm glad I bought my yarn at The Purple Purl, because the ever-cool-and-helpful Jennifer advised that I should go down a few needle sizes to get the yarn to work — 2.25mm instead of my usual 2.75mm. (Note to those who don't knit fine yarn: at this weight, half a millimetre makes a big difference). Jennifer said she had cast on the same number of stitches as usual, though, so I tried that for mine, and encountered one of those "weird gauge things" that show up from time to time. Apparently the smaller needle size only affected the row gauge, not the stitch gauge — the socks are the same width as the Lana Grossa socks I was making at the same time, but the cuffs and heel are shorter. Just one of those things, I guess.

Anyways, Jennifer's advice was excellent as usual, because the smaller needles make a smooth, firm fabric. The Noro is a loosely-spun single-ply, just like their their thicker wool yarns, so it needs to be shown who's boss. Just like the other yarn, too, the sock yarn can be a bit "breaky" in places, but it also spit-splices well, so it's only a minor annoyance instead of a major setback (so long as you're not squeamish about spit, anyhow). I'm glad they put some nylon in it to make it proper sock yarn, as opposed to "artisan" stuff that is beautiful to knit with but wears out in about a week.

Lana Grossa sock yarn:

This is the finished version of the sock I started during the storytelling festival I blogged about a few posts back. It's just nice, well-behaved, proper sock yarn with good striping and great texture. See how the colours matched up again after I finished the heel shaping? I love it when that happens. I find the European brands that offer self-striping all tend to do that — they must plan out their stripe lengths so that they will work with an average-size adult sock. As a bonus, my stripes ended in the colourway about where they began (100g skein, so two socks per ball), so my second sock will approximately match the first one and I didn't even have to trim away any yarn!

The Noro sock yarn is also a 100g ball, and those socks won't match — the colours will be shifted about one stripe. Since the Noro has long repeats and has that lovely gradual transition between colours, I think that will be a benefit, not a drawback.

I'm looking forward to wearing both these pairs next winter. More immediately, I'm looking forward to getting the mates to each of these done so I can finish the cotton/wool socks I started two summers ago (oops) and try out the ball of Tofutsi I got when Gina was here. The other Lana Grossa and the Austermann moisturised wool yarn should come first, though, to take advantage of this cooler spring weather we're having.

Bigger is better?

2008-04-30T16:33:00.000-07:00

I saw these giant-size pomegranates in my local supermarket the other day and couldn't resist buying one (plus a regular-size grapefruit for scale), just for the sheer freak factor and the photo op. It was easily twice the size of the last one I bought.

That was size. What about taste?

You guessed it. I used a quarter of the pomegranate and half the grapefruit to make a pomegranate, grapefruit, and salmon salad for dinner tonight. The pomegranate seeds were the size of corn kernels — and were almost completely tasteless. Fortunately, the grapefruit was a good one, so at least I had some acidity to balance off the salmon and the olive oil.

Once again size and taste turn out to be incompatible. The thing is, how do we manage to tell the supermarkets that?

A Waffle-less Weekend

2008-04-24T03:08:00.001-07:00

Last weekend I had the ever-effervescent Gina stay with me for a weekend yarn crawl. Beryl and I picked her up from the airport on Friday night after a brief, unplanned tour of Malton (lesson learned: if you're ever driving to Pearson airport from downtown, get in the right lane on the 427 as soon as you get past the 401). Saturday morning we ate breakfast at The Purple Purl, visited Americo and Romni, then wound up at Lettuce Knit. Gina stayed in the shop to check out yarn while Beryl and I scavenged Kensington Market to get food for the evening's barbequeue.

On Sunday we had brunch at Boom on St. Clair and then yarn shopped at In the Loop.

Gina did well on her stash enhancement. I said the only thing I wanted to buy was some Noro sock yarn. Which I did. I also got some other interesting sock yarns — more about them in future posts as I use them up.

Despite constant mention of them, we never did have any waffles. Come to think of it, I'm not sure anyone really wanted any.

Gina was kind and generous enough to give me these amazing things in the photo at the top, all made by artisans in and around Calgary. That's mercerised 3-ply-weight yarn — the idea is that the green yarn is for socks with the blue as heel and toe yarn, but I'm more inclined to make mittens from it. The soap with the star motif is made with ostrich oil, and the mug is stoneware (and has been much used in the last few days for the drinking of tea).

So you can see why I haven't been doing much writing lately. Expect the next few posts to be about sock-knitting.

DIY for everything!

2008-04-18T04:08:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I swear I'd be happier on a commune somewhere in a forest or a desert, with just an excellent internet connection and decent mail service to keep us in touch with the outside world.

Either that, or I'm just too picky for a world where we're encouraged to make the mass market, one-size-fits-all choice.

I recently checked out this Nivea eye cream, more for the part about hiding shadows (which I always have, no matter how much sleep I get) than for the spokesmodel dancing around in her PJs during the TV ad. It's lovely stuff, but I keep thinking, "This little 14g jar cost as much to buy as it does to make 750g of day cream at home." Before this venture back into commercial preparations, I'd been using the home-made day cream under my eyes for over a year, and that part of my face isn't any more wrinkly than when I started.

So, I've been thinking. What if I took my Froosh day cream recipe and added some reflective agents? If it doesn't work, I'll be out $10 of ingredients (with the reflective agents, maybe $12-$15) and 45 minutes. That's not any worse than walking out on a bad movie.

The only really bad part is that 250g of cream used on my entire face lasts over a year, so 750g... eh well, I have great friends who are happy to get free day cream.

1998 wants their news back

2008-04-12T08:52:00.000-07:00

The ever-elegant Jan recently sent me a link to the story "Stitching And Bitching Downtown: Not Your Grandma's Bag". She did this in full knowledge that I am a thirtysomething DIY enthusiast, and have been knitting and practising other textile arts since I was nine years old. Jan also knows that I got tired of the whole "grandmother" stereotype when I was about ten. My grandmother did teach me how to knit, but it was my mother who taught me embroidery and sewing. For that matter, my father taught me how to hold a hammer and use a pair of pliers correctly. It wasn't a "hobby" thing or a "feminine roles" thing, but simply a do-it-yourself thing.

The article is an overview of all the places in downtown Toronto where people can gather for stitch 'n' bitches, whether for knitting, sewing, or something else entirely. There's the usual little bits which mention people's day jobs, what they're making, and what they get out of making things.

It was great to see some prominent hangouts highlighted in the mainstream media again, but I have to question the assertion that stitching is still perceived as a "grandmother" thing. Stitch 'n' bitch groups have been flourishing (again) since the late 90s, and although people still ask me on the streetcar about what I'm making, who I'm making it for, and how long I've been doing whatever skill it is I'm using to get my project done, no-one's questioned my age or made a "grandma" comment since about 1998. This is in synch with what other stitchers I'm friends with (and I'm in regular contact with about forty of them) tell me when the subject comes up at our stitch 'n' bitches. We're also very aware that the art was not perfected by our grandmothers, as stated in the article, but by centuries of craftsmanship. Knitting alone has been around for over 800 years. That may be too much information for an article focusing on today's trends, but at least it's not misleading like the "grandmother" statement.

The main propagators of the "grandmother" stereotype seem to be journalists looking for an opening hook for their articles on stitching groups, which, incidentally, also often fail to include the growing number of men who are returning to textile crafts (although, to be fair, they either form their own s'n'bs or just work on their own). It might be time to look for a new angle on this still-growing trend of communal DIY.

Sure, any publicity is good publicity, but great publicity is even better.

At this point in time, I think angles like these are more in line with what's actually going on out there:

Our Changing Downtown: "Once, the buildings in the Fashion District housed sweatshops where factory workers hunched over sewing machines for hours. Now, the same buildings are renovated into chic condos, but that doesn't mean you won't be able to find groups of people downtown enthusiastically wielding needles to make clothes."

Tradition Reinvented: "Time was that skills like knitting and sewing were used to save money to avoid the extra cost of finished store-bought clothes. Nowadays, downtown urban professionals are turning to these traditional crafts as a creative outlet and opportunity for socialising."

Even these themes are fading. I said five years ago that I would know knitting, sewing, and other textile arts were back in the mainstream when they were ubiquitous enough it was no longer a big deal to see someone working on something in public. That's not to say that everyone would have started making their own socks, but that practically everyone would know someone who did -- sort of like knowing someone who enjoys gourmet cooking, or reads novels. We're not quite there, but we almost are. To be honest, I think the next trick DIY needs to pull off is to survive an economic downturn -- something it can be really hurt by now that it's considered a "leisure" activity and not a positive way of achieving a better lifestyle than one's income allows (more positive than having a high credit card balance, anyhow).

Maybe that's the next story.

knitting and listening

2008-04-07T16:25:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday I went to a story-telling festival at Harbourfront (see my main blog for details), and decided there was no way I was going to be able to sit still without some knitting. It's not that I expected the telling to be bad; I had high expectations based on what friends who had been previous years had said, and I wasn't disappointed. But I know me, and I know it was either knit or grind my teeth. For someone who had a reputation as being patient and quiet as a child, I've never been able to sit still well. I think I just learned to cope early on.

I added to my list of things to work on because I couldn't find the pair of socks I already had on the go [sigh]. On the other hand, this was the next pair of socks I was going to work on anyhow, so in a way it's all good (and more stash reduction!). The yarn is some Lana Grossa self-striping stuff my mum got me last time she was back home in Holland.

Mystery solved -- mittens lost

2008-04-05T10:25:00.000-07:00

I just became self-employed in the past year. That means that last week I took all my envelopes of receipts, remittances, and government forms to my new accountant (he actually has lots of experience, but he's new to me).

The conundrum was that I needed a bag to put all my envelopes of papers into. It's a tough call -- you don't want to use a bag you're going to need, but you don't want to show up with a bag that looks stupid, either.

I duly dug around in my Box of Bags, and discovered a plain black messenger bag I hadn't looked at in a while. Wow, I thought to myself, this is in good shape. I should start using it again. I remembered that I used to over-fill it and kill my shoulder with the weight, but the bag was in great shape -- just needed some brushing down.

I opened it up to check if I'd left anything inside, and discovered a dark grey pair of hand-made mittens. Perfect! I'm constantly losing/ruining mittens, and the ones I made this year were crap because I was too lazy to dig up the pattern I'd been using since I was twelve years old and I screwed up the thumb shaping (in different ways on each mitten). So I tried the newly-discovered ones on, figuring I could put them away with my other winter things and be ahead of the game for once next winter. It was also nice to find this pair again, because I remembered losing them, and got the satisfaction of that "A-ha!" moment when what was lost becomes found again.

There was only one problem.

Moths had found the left one before I had.

Stash reduction

2008-04-01T19:14:00.001-07:00

Last Saturday I gave a Rubbermaid chest-of-drawers to a friend. It was stuck in one of my closets; I didn't need it.

Yarn doesn't work that way with me. Nor does thread, buttons, beads, canvas, or anything else you can make something out of. The Oma who taught me how to knit always told me never to give yarn away, and I find that, except on rare occasions, I really can't. Make something and then give it away, sure, but not the raw product, not unless it's going to stay in the family.

So it works like this: if you know me, you know that I always have a perfectly silly amount of projects on the go. I've decided to knock them off in short-term plans. The main goal is to reduce stash.

Here, for instance, are the short-term knitting plans:

scribble lace jacket from the Debbie New Unexpected Knitting book: 100% stash. Unfortunately, it doesn't take much yarn.

birthday presents for a friend of mine (already late, but just wait on the photos for when they're done!). I still have the crazy idea I can do these this week and then post them to her on Saturday.

crocheted plastic shopping bags from Canadian Living -- despite carrying around a reusable shopping bag everywhere, I still have tons of plastic bags.

The name of the game is to avoid reverse stash reduction. That's when you start something to reduce stash, and think to yourself, "That's great! I just need to buy ------- to finish it, and I'll use up all this stuff!" Then you wind up buying more than you use up.

This happened recently to me with a necklace and earrings set I made (sorry about the crappy photo -- the colours are much better in real life). I love how they turned out, but I wound up two vials of seed beads and assorted 4mm beads up in stash when it was supposed to be going down. I'm going to make a bracelet to match and another necklace of a different pattern, just to use up some more beads. It helps that I like jewelry, but hopefully you see the forces at work here.

The big questions are: how do we DIY without turning into the consumers we were at least partly hoping to not be? DIY is supposed to be about getting it your own way and (hopefully) saving some money by making something better than you can afford ready-made -- how did it get to be about buying more stuff?