Saturday, Mom heard on regional news that Sunday was the last day of a yarn fair held all last week in Kaysersberg, a little town an hour away by car, so we spent our Sunday afternoon walking around in the sun and… buying fibery things. The fair was small, only eight or ten exhibitors, but really varied and nice, with a mix of weavers, knitters and felt-makers, and products ranging from organic yarns (dyed in vegetable dyes) to felt jewelry to hats and bags, etc. Mom found great felted wrist warmers/mitts (not knitted and then felted, but wet felted only) for a friend of hers with a birthday coming up. I nearly bought a felt hat.
I did buy 2 skeins of a fat single ply of wool-linen blend (260m) in a wonderful acid green to knit a quick scarf for a friend (I’m thinking 7mm needles and the Yarn Harlot’s one row scarf pattern), as well as 100g of a tweedy hairy wool (mohair blend?) in a wonderful tawny rust color highlighted with a discreet strand of lurex. That one is much thinner, DK or sport, perhaps even thinner.
Both came from the same table and are the work of the dyer Catherine Morel for her shop ‘L’atelier de Laine Garance’, which Google found only one mention of in all of the internet, here, in 2005. I will keep her card preciously, as her yarn looked wonderful. I’ll to ask her for a color card.
I have started knitting the scarf and stopped when I had used the whole first skein; my plan is to knit a pair of mitts with the second skein, which won’t use all of it, and then to use the rest to lengthen the scarf. The first mitt is done, though I fought tooth and nail and messed up the kitchener stitch about 5 times, ouch. I’m trying to knit a second one twin to it, which might prove hard as I sort of improvised loosely, once more, on Ysolda Teague’s wonderful garter stitch mitts pattern. I’m doing these in a very different gauge, with a different stitch count, and this time not even in garter but in stockinette, so… Wish me luck that I can replicate what worked once!
(The reason I couldn’t resist casting on to try those in stockinette is that I desperately needed a reason to put into practice the fabulous Japanese short rows method I finally “got” the other day. I’m not using a pin, because now that I got it, I don’t need to - and oh, this clever trick fills me with such joy!)
I was already coveting Habu paper yarn and others, but now with these examples I’m positively lustful!
A Dutch designer called Greetje van Tiem makes yarn from old newspaper; Italian artist Ivano Vitali is already all over that.
I love how the comments from the dezeen.com post are teeming with people who want to buy some, to make some, and who’re already trying to reproduce the result. Enthusiasm is fun.
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Let’s ignore the previous, sad half-life of this here limping blog and start anew with vim and vigor! I got my ravelry invite a few days back - a week, two weeks? - and I borrowed my brother’s camera to take snapshots of what yarny things fill my life at the moment; in short, I am hopeful I might be able to stick to blogging about crafty topics this time.
I recently knit an Edgar for the one I call sister-friend, whose birthday I was late celebrating. continue reading »
put-together book for sale - picture uploaded by hillarylang
Today’s been filled with administrative struggle - battling it out with rude civil servants, which I do not like to rag on normally, has taken its toll on my mood.
But when the mail arrived and I got Hilary’s wonderful booklet in my hands, I couldn’t not smile! It came to me so fast.
The same pile of mail contained a letter from the French customs asking me to provide a proof of purchase for my 842 painting that they hold ‘in custody’.
Printing the paypal receipt and sending it on is just a tiny annoyance in the grand scheme of things. Right? Right.
I been spotlighted at whiplash, it makes me feel all fluttery! And kinds of lousy for not having extended a better welcome to readers-future-friends in the entry itself, and for not having updated the blog in a while.
For my own records, there was an entry in Mama Urchin’s blog linking to me here too - I’m using this psot to keep track, as I am likely to lose the link otherwise. How would that be bad? you ask, and let me tell you: I know it wouldn’t matter, not to a normal person who sanely has integrated the fact that life is all about moving *onwards* - but I am neurotically afraid of losing and forgetting the past, and accordingly to the neurosis I collect; links, lint, everything.
Another link, this time both for me and you, because I find the project all sorts of fascinating: brown dress, ‘a year-long performance project’ in which the artist made herself a little brown dress and swore to wear it every single day of an entire year. Very inspiring, and well worth a look! She posts a journal there with her reflections about the ongoing project, and of course pictures of the dress in situ(s).
Since the previous post I knitted and beaded a second necklace, this one with the grey yarn, and then a third one from the pale green, which I have not photographed yet.
Yesterday I went shopping for cabled beading thread to reinforced all necklaces with, and for closure mechanisms. Since I also started weaving the grey yarn in a strip to see if I can make a woven chocker, I ended up bringing back home a series of little crocheted flowers to embellish that project. Even though I felt utterly reasonable, like I’d proved how damned restrained I can be (I didn’t allow myself to even look in the direction the shelves full of beads!), I still spent about 75 Euros all told..
But this is because I succumbed to
A. wonderful smooth 100% bamboo yarn, expensive but so hard to find around here - I bought it in grey and deep green to try and knit an elegant, summer, slytherin-y scarf (possibly suitable for a man if I manage; I’m not sure sure that the pattern I came up with will be unisex, but I hope).. I kinda told myself I would sell the resulting accessory if it’s nice enough, to alleviate the spending guilt; and
B. two large table cloths / light bedspread type 100% cotton garments, which I simply HAD to buy as there are a few garments Mom bought recently for her summer of which I badly want to try and rip the pattern. I got them for 50% OFF, they were both cheaper than their equivalent, on-the-roll, by-the-yard type fabric would have been, so I refuse to feel guilt over them. They’re different patterns and differet colors, and I’m now looking at the stripey, candy-colored one wondering if it would be the right lining for a bag based on a tablemat that I’ve been pondering lately.
The downer of the shopping excursion: I seem to have completely lost the turcmeric-dyed fraction of felted rope that I also intended to make a necklace out of. Maybe I forgot in the bead shop?
I even had posted the pictures of it as a WiP in the Fickr pool and now, I might ever have the rest of the process to show. Sadness.
I’ve also been watching a lot of football… I’m enjoying the World Cup. I shall now go back to doing just that, while knitting this bamboo-Slytherin experiment!
Speaking of art and craft and manufactured handmade series of things (yes, we were speaking of those, in my own head anyways)…. Because I am nothing if not easily amused by ‘meta’ stuff, or, um, era-commentary, let’s say, I bought something today: one of these.
The 842, to be precise. See, I am broke, so I had to pick a high number to spend less on it — check the formula and you’ll see what I mean. This one seemed more appealing than most possibilities though, because it’s all 2s. 2×2x2-2×2-2, is what it is. I like that in a number.
Unrelatedly, I picked up from where I had stashed it a happenstance, unfinished project based on yarn, and finished it!
I’d started making a large swatch in seed stitch with this thick (8mm needles) pure acrylic yarn I bought, the day I bought it. Which was some time last year, but please spare me; I am slow.
When I had taken the needle and slid it away from the knitting to start unraveling what was, after all, only a warm-up tryout knit, I’d noticed how the knitting curved to form a perfect hemisphere, and how gorgeous the knitted seed stitch band looked.
The texture and stitch definition was just… eye-catching. I decided then and there that I should try to make it a necklace, a neck-plate-ish thing like I’ve seen in museums except you know, in yarn and not in bronze.
I did think, though, that it would require something more than what I had so far, beads to weight it down and give it a more refined shape perhaps, something to put it more firmly in a ‘jewelry’ category instead of ‘wearable, supple accessory stuff’.
Don’t ask me where that line is and why it seemed important to me at the time; I doubt that’s a permanent state of affairs.
Anyway, today I realized I had the right beads for the job, and I finished it. I blurred Mom and her interior fleece-y robe here, because I know she’ll be unhappy with me otherwise. I already had to push to have her let me take the picture.
I have more of that yarn in that great blue - that I already knitted a fun pointy not-quite-beret with - some in grey, and some in a pale green I like very much. It’s pure acrylic, but it has the feel of a felted wool of some kind; I think the thread itself, so thick and round that you can weave it in other ways (I plan to, as well), is actually a knitted icord of very fine thread, felted chemically, or something like that. Anyway, it has a very interesting texture, I feel there is more to explore with it (and someday I will find and post the label / brand / numbers etc, perhaps).
Edited on June 16: I put a somewhat better, later picture of the necklace up on Flickr here. I think it does a better job of showing the detail, despite being perhaps too heavy on the contrast. It’s the same picture inserted in the next entry of the blog, too.