Starting with Socks

So when I arrive at the Mountain, check in, unpack my one meager bag full of all my winter sweaters, and prepare my many, many project bags for the weekend, I always start knitting on a sock.

Why a sock?

Well, for one thing, they're small. They knit up quickly. After the cast on and joining rounds, there's a lot of "mindless knitting" followed by "thinking knitting" followed by more "mindless knitting" followed by "thinking knitting." Then you finish with scrambling to find directions for the Kitchener stitch, and before you know it, you're done with your sock.

I started knitting a sock as my first project at the Mountain several years ago, when I was learning Intarsia in the round for a sock (from the "Socks for Sandals and Clogs" book) and I wanted the peace and serenity of the Mountain to be present while I started on this seemingly impossible adventure.

It wasn't impossible - it was fun, very very fun. Basically what you do is you knit with the background yarn to the pattern, slip the pattern stitches, knit the ground stitches, and then turn the whole thing around, purling across the pattern stitches while slipping the ground stitches. It can be done with small patterns (about 5 stitches, ground stitch or two, and 5 more stitches) but not with 12 stitch beer hat patterns. Those have to be knit flat, then sew up the seam in the back.

But I digress.

So with the wonderful lightbulbs going off above my head as I sat on the porch outside with other knitters around me to ooooh and aaaah at this cool new technique, I found that I was all jazzed from my new learning experience AND sufficiently calmed down from the exciting drive up to the Mountain to begin to knit on something a little more complicated that night after dinner.

And I do mean exciting - I drive a Neon, and there's a reason for it: it is the best handling car, most fleet and easily manuever-able car I've ever driven since I inherited my Dad's Camero in the 80's. There are twisty windy mountain roads all the way up to the Mountain, and yes, I do drive them as fast as my car can handle them. There is nothing like the feel of a great car hugging the road while it is put through its paces and it, too, revels in the feel of doing what it was designed to do.

But I digress. Again.

Anyway, the next year, I brought some socks to knit on, just regular sock knitting ("mindless knitting") in the round to slow down from the drive and mesh with the energy of the Mountain that year. I used yarn I had bought in Dahlonega while touring that yarn shop with some friends, just some simple yarn, and found that this sort of settling in to be just the thing. I could concentrate better, have more mental energy later that evening, and have something to just knit on in between thinking projects.

This year, I continued the tradition with some yarn I bought in Asheville. Asheville is truly a wonderful city for the arts and many people had told me while I was a shopowner (can you say "jealous about weekend getaways??") about Earth Guild as a wonderful shop to visit. While I was on one of my many weekend getaways post-shopowner life, I helped friends with building their Tiny House and stopped for a few hours in Asheville on the way to their Mountain. All of the customers who raved about Earth Guild - they weren't kidding - no matter what sort of handcraft you like, whether it be spinning or basketweaving or knitting, they have the tools and the expertise to help you with your project and get you started on your next. So much creative inspiration, and I'm so glad I was able to spend some time there at long last, visiting a legend.

To help bring my purchase up to the correct dollar amount to qualify for a 20% discount for my entire purchase, I bought some Trekking yarn for a sock. Liked the color, wasn't sure how the patterning would happen, but I needed a sock for, well, for take along knitting. I started it in time for DragonCon last year (now that the costumers are coming full circle with kimonos and steam punk, there is a room set aside for doing one's fiber arts every morning as costume add-ins or just to sit and knit or tat with friends), then brought its companion to the Mountain to revel in the energy there:


It's got very pretty shades of blues with lots of dark purples for contrast. I've worn it once to work - I buy sandles these days especially so that I can wear my socks with them. I'm discovering, though, that I need to knit socks with gussets in the front to compensate for the difference in size between my ankles and my calves. I do like the length and the marbling of the color.




Here's the companion (not quite completed) with the yarn info. I think you can get a better look at the quality of the coloring with this shot.

The needles are, yes, aluminum, but they are my grandmother's. While I've given away her other aluminum knitting needles to a good cause, I've knit most of my socks with these.



And that, dear readers, is why I knit socks at the Mountain. I'm concentrating pretty hard on very complicated projects and on wonderful conversations, and sock knitting brings just enough *brain sigh* energy to the weekend that I can relax while I'm there.

Mountain Projects - Brambleberry Sweater

I've promised and promised to put these projects on my blog, and now here it is - a Friday afternoon in late April (Good Friday, in fact), and the Mountain is now a happy memory.

But not to worry! That's why blogs exist!

This is the first of several posts about projects I work on at the annual Atlanta Knitting Guild retreat at The Mountain in North Carolina. It is a wonderful, calming, peaceful place, way up at the ankle of the Appalachian Mountains (Atlanta being the foothills, North Carolina would be the ankles, no?). Everyone brings projects that they often cannot work on anywhere else, due to the association with The Mountain, the amount of concentration needed to work on a project, or the help they will receive from other knitters over the long weekend. And that's basically what it is: show up after noon-ish on Friday, snack, knit, eat dinner, knit, begin to taste Knitting Water, and continue knitting into the weee hours of the next day.

Sleep.

Repeat.

For an entire long weekend.

Some other projects I've worked on have been a wedding shawl for my friend and former colleague, for whom I cast on 400 stitches! a project that could only have been accomplished with many stitch markers, the complete silence of other understanding knitters, and a few swigs of Knitting Water.

I also knit Webmaster Bill his two cable-knit sweaters, the first out of Chester Farms yarn out of Virginia, a thick, durable, "wears like iron" wool yarn that is 100% machine washable. I found out while knitting that sweater that you can fudge the fact that you didn't count your rows properly, and can crochet an edging to make the arm decreases look like knit decreases instead of purl-on-the-right-side decreases. You can, you really can . . .

The second was a beautiful off-white sweater featuring yarn from Blackwater Abbey Yarns, available only through the distributor in Colorado (or from Abbey Farm in Ireland). I had had a trunk show with Blackwater Abbey Yarns while my friend was still in my employ - she is a huge fan of the designer Beth Brown-Reinsel who has designed a number of Aran and Guernsey-style sweaters out of this yarn. The yarn is also a traditional Irish Aran yarn, and not at all appealing to the soft scarf crowd, but it still proved to be a fruitful trunk show and one which I wish I could have had again. And many of the sales were to staff and owner, but that's just one of the perks of working in the yarn shop!

So, my project for the Mountain (stay on topic!) was my sweater out of this beautiful, handwash only yarn, using a pattern designed for this yarn (not by BB-R) called "Brambleberry." I used a fall-ish orangey rust yarn, and I did my swatches. Oh, boy, did I do my swatches! But more on that later.

The pattern is a little different, in that the chart is read from left to right on the right side of the pattern, and the reverse on the wrong side. Which is opposite all the other charted patterns I've ever used. Another difference is the reversal of odd-is-right, even-is-wrong row counting. Needless to say, Knitting Water has helped make these pattern differences even more clear, and has taken the sting out of ripping back and re-knitting those rows until I began to focus on the pattern's quirks.

I started this pattern 2 Mountain trips ago, in 2009, with a cast-on and knitting of the back. And you know what? After I figured out the pattern changes, it really was an easy pattern to knit. Seriously. It's only on R2 that you have to cable, and you knit the majority of the body repeating the same 8 rows. Very, very simple for late night conversation.

Then you get to do the traveling cables as you decrease for the arms, a factor which adds its very own magic to the design of the sweater. Some concentration, and no Knitting Water was involved (in fact, I think I did these decreases at home, but I wouldn't swear to it), and it makes the sweater design really cool.

Last year's Mountain stay featured knitting the front of this sweater, and one of the things I wanted to make certain of was that I was a) familiar with the pattern by this year's Mountain stay, and b) ready to start on the sleeves by doing a): finishing the front before I got to The Mountain. Which I did with the help of some very brave bunnies, as featured in that marvelous masterpiece, Watership Down, as a book on tape. Meaning I knitting into the evening and heard one of my favorite books read aloud as only a gifted storyteller can.

As promised, here are the pictures:

This is the back of the Brambleberry sweater. I only wish the color was more true - it's an orangy reddish leaf color.








This is much more true to the actual color of the yarn itself. This is a detail of the sweater. What makes the cables stand out so amazingly is the Z-twist of the yarn - it's spun in reverse. Most yarns and threads produced commercially or privately by spinners create an S-twist. But not this yarn.



This is the front of the sweater. Notice the deep neckline, an indication of it being the front, and also the double-decreasing at both sides while knitting the traveling cables.

I now have greater respect for the professional photographers who make the pictures on patterns look just perfect! It's hard to see the detail, but the traveling cables start right at the arm decreases.




Why this picture of a scrap of knitting, you ask? Why, this is no ordinary scrap of knitting: this is my swatch. I knit it with three different needles, then washed the swatch to see how my individual needle choices would come out. After all, I was going to spend at least 3 years of my life on this project, and I wanted it to be perfect.

You know what I found? Not just the needle size but the needle type makes all the difference with this project. My gauge was the same whatever needle size I used, BTW.

My first needle option was a size 6, since I tend to knit loose. Not so much fun knitting with these needles on a 2-ply Worsted Weight yarn. That's the scrunched up bit at the bottom.

My second needle option was a Bryspun plastic size 7 needle. Soft on the hand and easy to manuver the yarn over and around. Great, I thought, but I'll try one more. Plus, the pattern called for a 7 though my gauge didn't change at all.

My third option was size 8 bamboo. And that made all the difference.

Remember when I said that I had washed and blocked my swatch after I knit it? Well, the portion I knit with the size 6 was all hard to pull - no give whatsoever. But the portion I knit with the nice, soft, easy-to-manuver Bryspun? It turned flat. There was no definition in my cables, they relaxed almost to the point of being just an embellishment on the pattern and not the pattern itself. I could not believe my hands, and the more knitters I've shown it to, the more my reality about using these needles has been correct.

So my final option, of the bamboo size 8's, was right on the money. The cables were crisp and at attention, and maybe because the wood offers resistance to the wool it makes the cables stand up the way they do.

That's my lesson for the day - always, always wash your swatch, and keep knitting on the same swatch so that you can see one variation from the other. Very, very, important.

Oh, and before I sign off, here are the promised sleeves, started this year at the Mountain (I had forgotten that the rows are read reversed, so after 7 rows I poured some more Knitting Water to take the sting out of ripping them out and starting again). And one more thing - I'm knitting both sleeves together/at the same time. This way I can keep up with the pattern and its myriad of increases. Like the ones I forgot right at the very beginning, which is fine because I have small wrists, and heavily increased sleeves would just hang on my wrists like flappy bits of knitted fabric. My arms increase after the elbow, and by golly, that's just where these extra increases are going to go!

Here are the pictures:


There is more knit on them now, of course. My goal here is to finish the sleeves by this autumn, to either knit the pieces together and wear this sweater at The Mountain (it gets pretty darn cold up there, let me tell ya!) or sew it together next year while there.

OK, well, that's my first of these posts of Mountain projects. Will put some more up (I've taken tons of pictures), and hopefully all the posts will be current by the time I go on next year's retreat!

Theolonius is Begun!

Here are the sock pics just taken with my cast-on row for the Ravelry Sock Knit-along for Theolonius.


P.S. It looks intimidating!


P.P.S. It was! So many extra stitch markers!! I even noted which ones I used where!

A Peaceful New Year

Yes, there is something about this time of the year. All the hectic Christmas knitting is done (thank you, Atlanta-area Shop Hop!), the packages are mailed, the kinfolk have visited and been visited by, and the overindulgence is finally over. Having had no traffic to drive through to and from work has kept me re-juvenated, too. It's just that time of the year when there's a little extra energy to spend on projects.

Like blogging.

I really, really enjoy blogging. I enjoy planning what stitched/knitted pieces I'm going to write about, taking picture of them, composing a draft blog in my brain whilst I assemble the pieces for picture-taking, and all of the writing I seem to do once I log onto my NNW blog. And I really, really appreciate how y'all are reading these postings and seem to be enjoying them in your leisure time.

So why haven't I posted in a while? Well, September was a busy month, then came October, and all the while I've been seeing my two-week temp assignment become extended and more involved. Which is fantastic - I'm working in areas that I had considered as possible job options while I was in the process of closing the shop, and am working with a terrific bunch of folks. It's interesting, too, to be in the position again of being an employee after so many years of being the employer; I really think I've gained insight into what an employer really expects and how best to do a task that is asked of me.

To bring everyone up to date, after my blog posting in September, Webmaster Bill decided that I needed to have a happy birthday celebration on Tybee Island, so we spent a long weekend down there in a hotel on the beach. I was really impressed with a small wildlife museum that was close by, and all the work they're doing to keep the sea turtle populations healthy and thriving. When we were there, in late September, 10 of the 11 nests had hatched and they were just waiting for the last one to hatch in the next week or so. Yay! Baby sea turtles! They had a couple in salt water tanks in the museum, and they are really so cute and so tiny! It's hard to believe they grow up to be so huge.

Then October I spent learning about wildlife rehabilitation. You see, there was this explosion in the Gulf of Mexico last April . . . oh wait, you already knew about that, right? Of course you do! So I wanted to help save everything, like I usually do, and I went on the website that spring for the Audobon Society to see when they needed me to come down and save brown pelicans and dolphins and everything else that was covered in oil. So I filled out their on-line volunteer form and it asked questions like, "Can you type?" (of course I can type - 120 wpm was my top speed, thank you very much) and "Can you answer phones?" (well, yes) and "Can you file?" (oh, if you could only see me file!). But then at the bottom was a question "Do you have wildlife rehabilitation experience?" and I thought, 'Well, no, but I could get some.' On-line again I found an organization that teaches folks to be wildlife rehabilitators or updates the skills and knowledge of current rehabbers. They have classes all over the US and Canada and some even in Brazil and they were scheduling one for Knoxville over Halloween weekend. Did I let a few invites to a few Halloween parties stop me in my quest to save all wild animals? Oh my, no.

Learning about wildlife rehabilitation was an amazing experience. I read the book, remembered all my basic anatomy courses and cell stuff, re-learned how to do fractions and use a calculator (after all, how much calcium do you feed a growing owl that weighs x lbs. and calcium comes in mg tablets?) after all these years, and it all came back with a loud *wumph.* I took a long weekend and drove up to Knoxville in the late fall (yes, it was a beautiful trip), found my hotel thanks to Mapquest, found a local brewpub for the weekend evenings, and just really learned a new skill. Will I use it immediately? Well, no, but I did find a place near me that has opportunities when I want to take them to assist with the myriad of tasks that must crop up when rehabilitating wildlife, and will take some time this winter to stay in touch with them.

Oh, and before I forget it, here's the link to the organization I took the course from: it's called International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council and their website is here: theiwrc.org. Talk about a dedicated, amazing group of people; I'm glad I could be a part of their lives and carry what I know back into the world with me.

November and December were Christmas knitting months for all the great-nieces and -nephews. No, I didn't take pictures; I didn't want to post and then ruin the surprise. And I was too overjoyed to finish all of them (well, almost all!) in time for shipping before Christmas. I have asked some of the recipients to allow me to post their baby sweater pictures, though, so we'll see if there are baby sweater pictures in the next few months! Several that I did make were by Roo Designs; their designs are adorable, very versatile, and put fun animals on the front (which means intarsia which also means yarn ends. I really, really dislike weaving in yarn ends.). Their website it here: Roo Designs.com, and while Sheepish doesn't carry them at the moment, you can probably ask them to order you a few, just to try. I'll warn you, though - they're addictive!

OK, well, here we are . . . at the end of a pretty long blog post (again!). Thank you all for reading down this far, and I hope you all have a happy and prosperous New Year!

A Project for Meeee!

At last, at last, at last, here it is: an opportunity to do some stitching, from my very own stash, for my very own self!! And stitching - not knitting, not sweaters or socks or gorgeous shawls, but good, ol' fashioned counted cross stitch. Want to know when was the last time I stitched something for me and not for Nease's Needlework? 2003.

That was the year that the knitting craze really took over, when my dear Gwen came to work for me, when I put aside all fancy scissors and small needles and gorgeous threads and I picked up knitting for real.

In early 2003, I stitched a beautiful Eva Rosenstand piece of a wren in the furze. You know the old English rhyme: The wren, the wren/The king of all birds/St. Stephen's Day/Got caught in the furze. It hearkens back to the custom of young boys on St. Stephen's Day chasing a wren across the land until the poor thing just died of exhaustion. Then these boys would bring the wren's body back to the village and received food and praise for their terrible deed. (I really wonder how many wrens really got away? Probably a lot more than got caught. I know that MY stitched wren got away!!).

So I don't have a picture of THAT wren, which I initialed and dated 2003, but I do have a picture of the companion piece I bought, back in about 2001, when the great and wonderful Eva Rosenstand company (from Copenhagen) was about to close its doors and end its absolutely lovely and colorful and nature-inspired designs. They never sold well in my shop; people either disliked the idea of kits ("I want to pick out my own threads or fabrics") or the kits themselves were just a little too old-fashioned for my hip, new, mod patrons. Remember how popular angels were for a while there? These angel stitchers were very talented, and perhaps these simple but beautiful kits of blues and yellows and oranges were just a little too simple for their tastes. Regardless, I still bought a bunch of small kits before they went out of production.

*side note* The Eva Rosenstand company did not in the end go away - they were bought by Permin of Copenhagen, a Danish subsidiary of Wichelt Imports, so their designs still exist. The threads now are DMC threads, and the linens are regular linen, not the soft and supple linen that was milled by the E.R. company nor the threads dyed by E.R. It's a color-snob thing, I know, but the more colors there are in this world, the more lovely a place it is for all of us *sigh*

Anyway, on to the pictures of my little blue-tit (I think that's the name of the bird!):

It's such a simple design, really. The yellows match the furze of the wren - I've always seen these as companion pieces. And look how big the graph is!! It's easy to read!! It's larger than the stitched piece on the linen. It has symbols that are logical in their set-up (meaning, black is a large big square, then the yellows are lighter symbols, etc.).





Aren't these colors just lovely? Don't they just make you want to pick them up and play with them and see this pretty design come to life on your fabric? There's just something about them that makes me lose all ability to put thoughts into words. But look how many threads of each color there are!! At least twice and a half as you'll ever need for such a small piece of a bird. And you separate the threads into bundles and you get to play with them even before you begin to stitch. Antici *say it!* pation!


Here's the oh-so-recognizable packaging for this little kit:


Remember that packaging from way back when?? I know, it's hard to keep the glare off of the plastic, but I just had to show the packaging anyway.

The other cool thing about having a kit like this in plastic is that you can take it to an outdoor festival. Which I did back in May over Memorial Day, and four of us sat in a corner of the outdoor shed and all of us stitched our projects. Webmaster Bill came by and said that we looked like the 4 Fates (I forget what he said the 4th one was - maybe a new Fate who foresees the future?). It was so much fun to be stitching with others, especially after so many years of knitting with others. It's a different feel - you hold the fabric in your hands, you bring the needle up and down, the design appears as if by magic on your linen, and there's always a brief pause in the conversation when the rhythm of your stitching reminds you that you need to pay attention.

Oh, and another note: I've begun wearing reading glasses when I stitch on linen. Guess I'm over 40 now and my eyes are catching up with me! I stole, uh, borrowed a pair of reading glasses from the storage unit. They're tacky, but they haven't sold so I figure I'll just break them in so that I can brag about what a great product they are. It's nice to be able to see the individual threads on the linen bigger than they really are, so that my eyes don't get as tired as easily and I make no mistakes when I wear them (I finally started making mistakes stitching over 2 threads while stitching on linen - yech!). Now I wear them, they're tacky, they remind me that I better start stitching quickly, and I can see well enough with them to stitch waaaay past my bedtime.


These are the glasses in their little Chinese puzzle box. Aren't they tacky? But they work, and it's just me and Webmaster Bill, and the cats, none of whom care that *sniff* I look like an old woman now!!

I had really, really forgotten how easily I lose myself when stitching a piece of counted cross stitch. Honestly. It's like having a whole afternoon to, say, update your blog, then you realize your butt hurts and your fingers ache, and lo and behold, you've been sitting in the same chair for an hour and a half. Stitching is like that for me. I spent one Saturday afternoon earlier this summer (July, was it?) just watching a couple of movies and stitching. Then I looked up and it was 5 hours later and I hadn't stitched as much as I thought I would, but time had ceased to exist for me. And if there was a weekend marathon on cable of the TV show "House"? Oh, then just forget about me going to sleep for a while!