Some Knitting at last

So these past few weeks (OK, months) have been so empty on my blog, for which I apologize. Shortly after I wrote about my pillowcases, I announced to the local knitting guild that I would be closing down my shop, and to say that I was emotionally drained for a month is about accurate. It was wonderful to hear from everyone how much my shop (and my life's work) had meant to them, and I really felt like I had contributed something to the world at large. Which is what I wanted to do at least once in this life. We closed up shop on Saturday, Aug. 23, and employees stayed till I bought them dinner packing and organizing (all those plastic baggies full of Persian yarn!) so that Sunday's move would go smoothly.

And it did. It was wet due to the hurricane, but we moved everything big out of the shop, especially the custom-built shelves, and into the storage unit, where so much merchandise lives happily waiting for its inclusion onto the website. And as of this writing, I have had 2 real, live, bona fide, not-from-the shop orders for stuff that was just waiting for the right person to come along. Yay! My evil plot is working.

So onto the knitting. This shawl/scarf was my first exposure to Anne yarn (see Annetrelac entries at the beginning of the blog!), and I adapted a pattern for a lace shawl called "The Children of Lir" from the Lacy Knitting of Mary Schiffman published by Interweave Press. They do such an extraordinary job of bringing the history of all the needle arts to the world at large, and while I don't intend at this point in time to create my very own pattern for a shawl, I was intrigued by the relative simplicity of this pattern and its story. You can order this book from your local yarn shop; if you want to see what other great lace knitting titles Interweave has, visit their site here: www.interweave.com/knit/books.

For those not familiar with Irish myths, the children of Lir/Lyr were 4 sons (if you link the sons with the 4 provinces of Ireland) or 7 sons (if you go for the mystical numbers) who had a younger sister. When their father re-married it was to an evil stepmother who grew jealous of the attention her husband gave to her stepsons and laid a curse on them: she turned them into swans. There is a brilliant re-telling of this story called Daughter of the Forest by Juliette Marillier that tells the tale from the sister's point of view. And names and gives personalities to all 7 brothers. Oh, and the sister? She must break the curse by harvesting nettles, spinning them into thread, then weaving each of her brothers a shirt from the nettles all without speaking until her task is done. And there are some tellings that say that she could not finish one arm of one shirt so that one brother always had a swan's wing. Ms. Marillier gives an excellent rendition of this twist in the story.

ANYWAY.

When I went to the PHG weekend in Athens in 2006, Plying the Arts, I took the course in the Elizabeth Zimmerman (I am not worthy) percentage sweater taught by an amazing teacher who pulled together all of the bits of knowledge I had learned from my dear G and consolidated it into an all-day class, complete with a notebook where I could put my notes for each percentage sweater I made. Which came in handy, but that's another story. Of course, there was shopping to be done, and I bought a skein of Anne yarn. Now Anne is a sock yarn (or lace yarn), and each skein is unique. You can specify that you have 2 skeins dyed for you, but I'm not that picky. Instead, I chose a darkish color with shots of plum, and when the lace books came into the shop the following winter I perused them with B's help. I settled on the Children of Lir shawl, knitted 3 different swatches as my percentage sweater teacher had suggested, keeping each swatch on the needle so that I could compare one to the other, and chose size 3's so that the knitted portion of the pattern would show against the lacey portion of the pattern. It's not blocked, but here are the pictures of it pre-blocking:

The lacey parts represent the wings of the swans in flight. And those plum shades! They hit at just the right point in the pattern. They're almost part of the pattern.

Oh, and another thing about this shawl? It was my first provisional cast on, learned at The Mountain, including the tip that it's best to use cotton thread, not wool yarn, for casting your stitches onto so that the wool yarn you're using won't grab onto the fibers of the scrap yarn when you pull it out. So I started in the center, in pattern (I recommend knitting a row first to make the picking up for the second half much easier), and just knitted repeat after repeat after repeat. I think I knitted 10 repeats in all and kept the stitches live on the first half to make sure I had enough yarn to do the second half. Like I said, each skein of Anne is unique in all the world. And in addition to the pattern, the ends of each half are bordered in a seed stitch like the sides are. So I knitted 10 repeats, put the live stitches on scrap yarn, picked up veeerrryyy carefully from the provisional cast-on, and went down the other side.

Here is a detail of the knitted pattern:

I'm not too concerned about the bumpy parts that you can see REALLY WELL on this close-up. They'll go away with the blocking. And for a knitted lace pattern, it was easy knitting. There was a k2tog and a ssk in each row, sometimes twice, and a good explanation for a double decrease (occurring 2x in the 14 row repeat). But really, it was possible for me to knit and watch TV after I had gotten through about 7 pattern repeats. The first few repeats, of course, I did in complete concentration and with furrowed brow at The Mountain, but I never got cocky with thinking I had memorized the pattern. Oh, no preciousss. That just wouldn't do.

Here's a picture of the edge of the shawl, and you can see where the center of the shawl is at the far right-hand side of this picture:You can see on the far right that the swan's wings begin to flow to the right rather than to the left. There seems to be a small hole there, nothing major like a dropped stitch (I checked!), but it's where the provisional cast-on was necessary to the flow of the pattern. You have swans' wings going down each arm as you wear the shawl so that it is matched on each side.

And I'm really glad I selected a yarn that didn't have a lot of color variation to it. Lace can be tricky, since you want to show off your skill as a lace knitter (also known as OCD or obsessed attention to detail, and for good reason) but you are also tempted to use a pretty variegated yarn because it's there. For this pattern, I like how the yarn's variegation accents the lace's pattern.

And one of these days, I'll start on my Anne sock, the one that got this whole thing started!

Stamped Pillowcases and Their Story

Or, how I learned the value of not letting something sit unstitched for too long . . .

Yes, that was a valuable lesson. About 20 years ago, I attended a feminist bookfair that was a wonderful, mind-blowing experience. Imagine, in a great ship-building hall in Barcelona where the 3 ships were built in which Columbus arrived at the New World, complete with a life-size replica of the Santa Maria, becoming for one week a hall dedicated to books. And these were not just any books, oh no, preciousss. These were books written by women. About women. Published by women-owned publishing houses. Bought for women-owned bookstores. It was probably the most eye-opening instance in which I learned that I, too, could be the center of a story: mine. It was also the only overseas trip during which I have not purchased a copy of Lord of the Rings, one of my travel musts. This time, the purchase just didn't seem, well, appropriate. Never mind that Eowyn was one of my role models . . . this one experience was a time in which I learned that women, too, had lives that were meaningful. But that's another story.

So one of the books I bought was called Night Train to Mother and involves an American woman returning to her mother's and grandmother's homeland in Romania to learn about their lives as Jewish women before and during the Nazi and Communist occupation. While she tells the tale of her grandmother's life, the fact that an engagement took a year came up as well as the reasoning behind it: it took a year to embroider all of the towels and sheets that the young woman would need for her new home. After all, in her class, the sheets were changed once a week and washed twice a year. So think about it - a woman would need to embroider at least 26 sets of sheets and all accoutrements: sheets, bottom sheets, pillow cases, extra pillow cases, sheets for the guest rooms (presumably), and this was a huge undertaking in a young woman's family. You couldn't do that much hand work any faster than a year. You just couldn't. After all, you still had to help take care of your mother's house, your younger brothers and sisters, be measured for the clothes you'd wear for your first year, make your wedding gown . . . the list goes on.

That knowledge inspired me to go to Mrs. Dennis' soon afterwards, where I purchased some pre-printed embroidered pillow cases. I had not done embroidery for quite some time - I was mostly doing counted cross stitch and needlepoint - but I loved the lavender color threads that the pattern called for and so I threw all caution to the wind and purchased the set. For any DMC geeks out there, I used #550 as the darkest shade of purple, with #3041 and #3042 for the blue and lighter purple. But I digress.

During this time I was working at a local pub, so for the first time since college I had days off since I worked nights. Did I stitch or what?! I re-crocheted my first afghan, including taking all the tassels off, so that it looked more like a rectangle and less like a trapezoid. I also began this, my first pillowcase, thinking about how this was part of my trousseau, my own Hope Chest, and it was the first thing I did for a potential new home with a husband. A husband was a vague concept, a person with whom I would share my life with a few years later, after I had had a few more adventures of my own. After all, Eowyn was my role model, 'member?

I finished this pillow case about a year later. When I got married. Happily, I might add, but more quickly than I had anticipated the summer before. Nope, no baby on the way - just realized that it was time to get married and have the adventures all the same. We used the finished pillow case for a while, but the case got messy as pillow cases do and I just didn't want all my hard work to get torn up by the washing machine. So I put it away and moved onto other things. Like buying my shop . . .

Fast forward to the summer of 2008. I'm in the process of closing my brick-and-mortar shop, I no longer need to stitch shop models, all my knitting is finished for the time being, and it's time for me to finish some things for me. Like a long-neglected Cherry Blossom Fairy from the Cicely May Barker series (kit from early 1980's), the Lopi purse, and hey, here's that old pillow case from 1991. I think I'll finish it, since we have an extra set of pillows on the bed from the time that Webmaster Bill broke his leg and needed extra pillows to prop it up. And oh look, I still have the plastic embroidery hoop, the needle hasn't rusted too bad, and wow! Here are all the threads, all ready to go for the 2nd pillowcase! OK, let's see where that pattern is, the one printed on the pillow case . . .

And now we run into the question you may have asked yourself. I know that I have been asked from time to time at the shop: "How long does this blue dye stay on the fabric?" Well, friends, it does come off. Oh yes, preciousss, it does fade. I'd say about 17 years after buying something pre-printed, the dye fades. Yes, yes it does.

Fortunately, I had a) finished the first pillowcase so that I could use it as a reference, and b) had enough light to see what was left of those little blue lines, but wow, it was not the most fun stitching I've ever done. I mean, seriously. I had counted on a couple of hours every few evenings, working on a couple of flowers or leaves, but wow. One leaf stitched was a good evening. I don't think I've ever taken out work as consistently as I have with this pillowcase. There's still a wonky blue petal on one of the flowers, but I decided it was flourishing to its own inner flower voice and I just wasn't going to tweak it any more.

So last weekend, I finished the second pillowcase and now both are covering the extra Target pillows that we still have. I saw no sense in throwing them out, and really, having that extra set of pillows makes my bed look like something out of the JC Penney or other [insert catalog/ magazine name here] pretty photo of bedrooms. The photos are below. Perhaps you have a set of pillowcases, languishing in a basket or a drawer. If so, I'd advise taking them out fairly soon and finishing them. Feel free to share your experiences here . . .



This is the original one. The colors faded a little from going through the washing machine. And there are tiny little sets of grey threads that serve as a border between the bouquet and the rest of the violets.
Here's a close-up of the stitched bouquet. The purple is a bit more prominent here and the pink bow has faded a bit, but you get the general idea.


They're nice, big pillowcases, too. Here's a photo of the second one - it's a little wrinkled, but I'm not that worried about a few wrinkles. I managed to stitch the darn thing, after all!

And close-up of the second one. Just so it didn't feel neglected.


And here they are, snuggled up together. The pillowcases for my trousseau. I feel so accomplished. I cannot imagine the amount of work it would have taken a hundred years ago or more, to have spent all one's free time stitching these, perhaps even knitting lace to attach along the edge of each pillow case. How very talented these women were.

Stitching Post - counted needlepoint

I've promised a stitching post on this blog, and wanted to give a little bit of background as I launch into showing the pictures.

In June of 2004, I went to the TNNA trade show in Columbus, OH, the largest trade show for yarn and needlework shop owners, teachers, and designers. Yes, folks, we really, really have our very own trade show and it is as wonderful as your imagination lets on. You get to see all the really beautiful things out there and make selections as you stare at yummy colors and different textures. The show offers classes in everything from knitting to finishing needlework to needlepoint to more of everything. I selected counted needlepoint for a couple of my classes, since I wanted to become more familiar with this art and thought that more needlepointers would be interested in this form, too.

I took a class where you stitch an authentic English teahouse shaped like a teapot. I'm not kidding. It's a real, truly live place where the artist who designed the pattern had tea with her family when she was vacationing in England. The artist's name is Libby Sturdy, and she publishes under the name Just Libby Designs (website is www.justlibbydesigns.com, which I am having a little trouble getting onto this morning). She was a terrific teacher, one who understood that students are going to ask a lot of questions and she will need to repeat herself and explain the steps in her designs clearly. Libby made sure that we went through the entire design booklet step by step so that we could make notes about what the directions said, and that we also stitched the most complicated portion of her design in the class. I was suitably impressed and went home, full of delicious English teahouse energy.

So here we are, 4 years later, and I'm on the second floor of a three-floor teahouse design. I will say that I like to work on projects a little at a time, rotating as I become tired of one design and starting on another. I've always been this way: I find great enjoyment from starting one design, picking up another, and moving onto a third when I become bored with an earlier one. I understand now that there are official Project Rotations on people's blogs - glad to know that I was on the cutting edge all along! The other thing is, I like to finish my needlepoint and move onto the next section, then the next, then the next, and there are many, many embellishments on this teahouse. For example, the windows are stitched with the basketweave stitch, then
overstitched to make the mullions, then the outer parts are stitched with padded satin stitch (a really cool technique - it requires you to stitch a long stitch in a perpendicular direction to your planned satin stitch, allowing the satin stitch to stand out more [think stonework] and for the long stitch to peek out through the gaps in the satin stitch), and so forth. All very well and good, and all instructions are laid out page by page, section by section instead of taking the easy way out by saying "refer to paragraph x on page 7." But I finished the entire 2nd floor this spring (go me!), and took pictures of it when I took pictures of the Lopi purse. Here they are:

The canvas is a gold-flecked mesh, which you can't see very well in the picture. The section on the lower right is what we stitched in class - there is a blue wrought-iron fence which you stitch in its entirety, then stitch the urn and flowers on top of it. The left-hand side is how the right-hand side looked prior to embellishment - all you can see is the urn (and on the canvas, the fence).



OK, so I didn't turn the .jpg when I brought it in, but you get the general idea. The blue is the fence, stitched in its entirety, then the urn (that you can see in the picture above), then the flowers and trellis in the urn which are overdyed ribbon done in French knots. Not the easiest thing in the world to do, but makes a great effect.



This shows the first floor which I stitched in 2004, then put down for a long time until a camping trip with friends in 2006. Most of the stitching is self-explanatory - midnight blue Gold Rush, Anchor floss, DMC perle cotton. You can see the front stoop at the very bottom of the stitching that uses the padded satin stitch - the blue ribbon is peeking out from beneath the individual strands of metallic satin stitching. It makes the whole section look like, well, a step. The part that had me give up in frustration was the stone work. It's very much a free-form decision between padding with purple under grey, grey under purple, or tent stitch. It was fun for a while, but then it had to sit for a while until I wanted to do more free-form (and finish the stonework before moving onto the side windows and the walls. Which for me was a lot more fun. But looking at it on this post, I really, really like the effect of the stonework.


This is the second floor, which I worked on this spring. I had noticed a boo-boo with one of the side windows (like, I overstitched the area where the midnight blue was supposed to go, which is probably why I put it down and didn't pick it up again!). Each of the windows is overstitched, either with tent stitch on top of basketweave or with single straight stitched to show the individual panes. Then the outside of each window is stitched with more padded satin stitch, and I gotta say, I love the way that the corners are mitered. I have another counted needlepoint piece that I may use this same technique on since it's so very effective here. The second floor stonework is sectioned by padded satin stitch and tent stitch to give the effect of wattle-and-daub for the second story.

So again, it's a case of finishing the window, stitching over the same window, stitching around the same window, etc. I like the effect, I just have to put the stitching down for a while after I've finished with that particular bit of time.

Here are the last of the pictures of the work thus far:










We'll see when I next pick this up - I'm working on a Mirabilia fairy, and finishing a pillow case that's a pre-stamped companion to the one I stitched for my "trousseau" in 1991. Oh, and by the way, the blue pre-stamped ink does come off the fabric. Just thought you'd like to know!

More later.

Bag with Handles

Aside from the fact that I mis-sewed (is that a word?) the handles back-to-front and I had to re-sew them front to front and back to back, the bag is ready for felting. You'll see on these pictures that these are the mis-sewn handles, but you get the general idea.










Here's the completed bag in all its glory! Off to the washing machine . . .

Flower Power Bag in progress

No Annetrelac sock here, and I'm getting more into stitching since I finished up several knitting sweaters before the hot weather really started, so it's on to "What are the ongoing shop projects at Nease's Needlework?" Well, of course, I'll be happy to share! Now, the first project I mention here is a Lopi felted bag (not something you think about in Georgia summers), but we'll just say that air conditioning is a wonderful invention and the various stitching projects will have their own blogs soon, not to worry!

So I was looking at all the lovely colors of Lopi, thinking how great they would be if they could turn themselves into a felted bag, and lo and behold, Designs by Shelley had a great bag pattern. It's called "Flower Power Bag" and featured a multi colored bag with flowers attached to the pocket. You knit the bottom of the bag in one color, the two sides in contrasting colors, then knit and attach the front pocket and straps and voila! It's ready to felt! It knitted very quickly and I worked on it at the shop, since I work on Thursday evenings for the time being and Friday afternoons can be a bit slow during the summer.

Here's a picture of the bag pattern from Designs by Shelley:



You can see the other Designs by Shelley bags at her website http://saboardman.tripod.com
and order them from Nease's Needlework. Call or come by the shop to pick out your favorite (shameless plug!).

I modified the colors a little bit, since I didn't have Lopi in yellow and I wasn't sure how Brown Sheep's Lamb's Pride Bulky would felt on a Lopi bag, so I decided to use 2 shades of rose for the sides (which are picked up and worked in stockinette stitch from each long edge of the purse bottom), and the navy that I used on the bottom is the pocket color. I used green for the top, which is knit after the edges are sewn together, and for the handles. If you feel you need practice doing your mattress stitch to sew sides together, Lopi is big and bulky and easy to see! I know that Lopi is not everyone's favorite yarn to work with, especially in GA's 90+ degree temperatures, but in the shop in the air conditioning, it wasn't so bad. The front table held the bag while I worked on it which helped with the weight of it since it wasn't sitting on my lap as I knitted.

And a word about the handles - I fully expected they'd be knit as I-cords but they weren't. They were a 5 stitch stockinette stitch that you knit for 20 inches and thank goodness I remembered how to knit backwards. I had learned that technique years ago when I learned entrelac, as it makes the work go more quickly since you're not turning the work from back to front on a limited number of stitches (10 or less). So I guess the designer (Shelley) wanted flat handles for the bag rather than small round ones. And you know, it makes sense: felted bags can be heavy and I'd much prefer having a flat handle that will fit easily on my shoulder, rather than a small round one that will dig in when I load the bag with items.

Anyway, since I've taken these pictures, I've finished the handles and sewn on the pocket. I'll take pictures of the completed bag in its unfelted state next week, after I've had a chance to catch my breath from the trip I'm taking this weekend with Webmaster Bill. I can measure it and show how large Lopi is before felting when knit on size 13 needles. Once it's felted, I'll probably use some scrap yarn and do some needle felting of flowers onto the front of the bag to fit in with the instructions (they do say "Flower Power," after all!).

So here are the pics:
This is the front of the bag, and the side where the pocket goes. It took very little time to get this far - I started on a Saturday late afternoon, and knit on Thursday evenings if the shop is slow.

Here are the yarns I used:



What you may or may not be able to tell from your monitor is the shade of green I used. Those of you who know me well will know that this shade of green, AKA 70's green, is one of my least favorite shades in all of color-dom. My employees (most of whom who love this shade) took great joy in pointing out to me that everything old is new again; my thoughts are "but must this 70's green be new again, too???" It does go with the bright shades of rose, though, in a way that shows them off without their rosy-ness being too bright.



And yes, there is my side seam with my mattress stitch. A kind and knowledgeable knitting teacher taught me how to do this seam while we were enjoying a glass of wine and some chocolates at The Mountain retreat center, and I've never disliked seaming since. There just might be a lesson in there!

So hope you enjoy this posting, and I'll have more pics to put up in a week or so!