Knitting in Public

It's common now, isn't it?  Knitters knitting in coffee shops, under trees, in bookstores and on trains and in other public spaces.  So much so that knitting is commonplace and groups of knitters sitting together are no longer regarded as intruders in these public spaces.  Discussions about scarves and yarns and cable needles are now an invitation to be joined by other knitters.

Of course it wasn't always like this.  Knitters (and stitchers) bringing out their projects in waiting rooms and on a nice spring day and in a coffee shop were often looked at askance and questioned about why they were doing such an antiquated thing.  Such interaction would turn many people off from doing their craft except in their own homes or, if they were lucky enough, at a local guild.  Sad, but true.

Then the knitting phenomena happened.  There are a lot of reasons for this phenomena that are probably now the topics of Masters' Theses and blog posts and the like.  I saw it happen when I bought a needlework shop and within 2 years had to hire a knitter because I soon became known as a knit shop.  Who knew?  Then in 2005, an idea was launched to invite knitters to begin to knit in public, and it was named the "Worldwide Knit in Public Day."  That group of 25 worldwide  events has grown to be one of the largest knitter run event in the world.  You can read more about their success here, and you can find a Knit in Public event that you can join.  The dates are today through the 17th of the month, and as soon as I finish this blog entry I will take a sweater onto the front porch and watch the world go by as it watches me knit!

It is formally called Knit in Public day, but I see no reason that stitchers couldn't join in with the knitters.  I mean, many knitters remember stitching, or remember a friend or family member stitching, and maybe, just maybe, needlework can become more visible, too.  It's a little unconventional, it's "bearing witness to" other needle arts out there, and if nothing else, it shows that these other needle arts have changed a lot from what they were in the past.  And hey - we needleworkers are creative types who can use the internet, right?  What's stopping us from starting our own Stitch in Public day?!

So I hope you'll avail yourself of the chance to go out and let your needles be heard (well, you know what I mean!) and find someplace to Knit/Stitch in Public this week!

Gardening in May

It's Maytime in Atlanta, which means there are some evenings that it is cool enough for a quilt, and others where you wonder when the AC is going to kick in (yes, we did finally have to turn it on).  There are some evenings where the front porch beckons with a beer and a book, and others where any cooking is just not going to happen it's so humid.

And by May, I've pretty much finished all of the garden prep work:  digging, adding soil, adding compost, selecting plants, and putting them in the ground.  It's important these days to have everything well established by at least Mother's Day, so that the heat and the drought don't kill off the new plants responding so well to all this good tending.  We have both vegetable and flower areas and I've taken advantage of weekends off (still a new phenomenon) and fairly mild spring weather to tend them over the past 2 months. 

Let me start by saying that we've taken great pains to include plants that are heat and drought tolerant so that I don't have to spend too much of the precious resource called Water on plants.  We have a lot of trees and shrubs that are native:  Red Buckeye (placed close to the backyard birdfeeder and used often by the wild birds as "cover" while they decide who's next for the Diner); several types of Hawthorn, including one with inch-long spines that has really created a nice cover and dividing line between the back grassy area and the back wild area (I even saw a bunny taking in the shade once!); some Bald Cypress; and some Arrowwood Viburnum (which I need to begin cutting back, as it is taking much of the sunlight from one of the bald cypruses and I'd like for the tree to flourish more). 

And then we have some flowerbeds in the front, built around a Lantana that just grows back year after year after year and provides food for a myriad of butterflies and even the occasional hummingbird,  and even an anchoring site once to a Praying Mantis egg sac.   I fully encourage bug predators of all sorts to make our outside their homes (which results in myriad ladybugs deciding our inside is also their wintering home, but that's another story) and I'm always one to watch a ladybug take on an aphid or a praying mantis capture its prey.  Not to mention enjoying the gorgeous spiderwebs that show up almost overnight in the fall; they are truly miraculous bits of construction.

We've also continued with our Square Foot gardening that was a carryover from our time living in Midtown years ago:  construct a 4 x 4 garden, fill it with soil and mulch and compost and manure and plant your veggies in a 1' square area.  So that means you can grow 16 radishes, or 1 cauliflower, or 4 beans, or 8 carrots, and the method also allows for great crop rotation.  We've kind of gotten lazy with the 1' square method, and now tend to do our crop rotation bed by bed.  Especially with tomatoes - you can't visit any farmer's market or gardening department anywhere in Georgia without walking out with more tomato plants than you might need, and they really need to do a lot of room for expansion as they grow.

One thing we are concentrating on this gardening season is fine-tuning the crop rotation.  We got kind of caught up short when we planted potatoes in what had been last year's tomato bed, only to find out that members of the Nightshade family (both tomatoes and potatoes) should not be two consecutive planting.  Ooops!  We're hoping that with a visit to our local Ace Hardware's gardening department has yielded enough plant food and (I hate to admit it) pesticide that we can save the potato crop. I've always believed that healthy plants will pretty much keep away pests, but sometimes they need an extra boost.  Sort of like putting antibiotic cream on a cut when the comfrey root doesn't do the trick.

We've got a variety of heirloom and hybrid tomatoes, and I swear that ever since I put some plant food around them they have gotten bigger and less blossoms have dropped off.  The tomato bed is flushed out with basil (of course!), tomatillos (you have to have 2 for cross pollination), and some peppers.  I had not been a big pepper fan, but I have since found that cooking with cayenne peppers (the real thing, either dried or fresh) creates a heat in the salsa, tomato sauce, or chili that commercially prepared pepper flakes just ain't gonna do.  There will be much salsa this year that I can use as a sauce for chicken or as an adjunct to celery.  Or on top of soups - one of my cookbooks has a black bean soup with pineapple salsa on top;  yummy!  And some of the bigger varieties (my especial favorite is Cherokee Purple) are just perfect for stuffing.  I also realized that you can use ground turkey instead of sausage when stuffing, a much healthier meat alternative.

The bean patch has 3 different kinds of bush beans (and bush is the operative word here!) including some purple beans that are quite a contrast to their green brethren.  And some cukes that are shadowing the dill from the intense sunlight.  Members of the squash family do take a lot of space and water, and I have never developed a taste for zucchini or summer squash even though I do believe in growing what is native to your area.  I have a great recipe for zucchini bread, but really, I can buy one zucchini as I need it and in the process support a local farmer with my purchase!  I've tried heirloom melons and while the ones we ate before the melon borers did were tasty and delicious, but I was just too discouraged with how many we lost to pests in years past to want to tackle them this year.  I do like cukes, though, and saw a cooking show recently that had some insight into how to make really, really good and authentic Tzatziki:  you marinate the cukes overnight (I didn't see in what) and that gets most of the water out of them, and you also use Greek, not US, yogurt.  One cuke has already started, and there are many, many blossoms.

With any luck, the birds and critters will leave us most of the blueberries (otherwise, it's up at dawn to pick not-quite-ripe berries, and the taste just isn't there), the sweet potatoes in their brand new bed will yield the milk crate that they yielded last year (seriously - 9 plants, a milk crate full of sweet potatoes), and the Rattlesnake beans (another heirloom, drought-resistant variety) will make lots of luscious, healthy beans for both steaming and for bean stews.  Will keep ya posted!

My Little Fairy is Getting Her Wings

First, of course, she got her face.  I promised you a while back that she had a face (at least on the paper design), and this fall and spring I have stitched her face and hair and accompanying bits of vines and berries.  Here she is with her face (not yet backstitched, as I prefer to do that in-hand and not on a frame):

Fairy Flora with long-anticipated face

It was interesting coming back to the face tones - I found them more challenging to stitch than the bottom parts of her gown, intricate as they were.  Or maybe not; the gown sections were blocks of color and if you stitched one side of a color, it was easy to add in the additional colors to the side of your first block.  I've included a re-print of her skirt detail below:

Skirt detail with "blocks" of color

So you can see that once a color went in place, the remaining colors went around it and above it and filled in with it.

One would think it would be easy to stitch a face with the same detail and stitching abilities, right?

Not really, no.

Maybe it was the length of time I was separated from my fairy.  They are, after all, amoral creatures and don't take too kindly to neglect.  One always gives the Wee Folk bits of cream, shiny pennies, and the like so as not to fall out of their good graces.  Perhaps I should have taken this advice when I returned to stitch her face after an absence of about a year?  Because you see, I had to stitch her neck twice in order to make her neck swan-like and not boxer-like, and to ensure that her face lined up with other stitching points of reference.  Like her hair.  Or the vines around her brow.  Or . . . you get the picture!

And no, I did not take pictures of said ooopses!  I'm sure many of you reading this blog have had your share of rips outs, starting with the realization that your neck doesn't look right . . . then the bargaining that you do to see if your face will align anyway . . . then the denial that it really won't matter if someone sees it . . . then the anger that, in fact, a delicate fairy does not need a boxer's bull neck . . . and finally the acceptance that results when you pour yourself a glass of your favorite beverage that you need to take the edge off, and begin to rip all that work out.  Yes, there are phases to ripping out; and don't they closely look like the ones that accompany the steps of grief??!  I mean, you put all that time, thought, counting, and care into your work, and one (or three) tiny miscounts means that you come to grief and all its stages.  A little adjusted, of course, but still, grief (and some feeling of foolishness) all the same.

Now that my fairy has her little face,  I am about to venture into the scariest part of this entire stitching adventure next to beginning such a project:  the Kreinik threads.  Ah, the Kreinik threads.  They are a boon to the beauty of counted cross stitch, needlepoint, scrapbooking, and even fly fishing (think about it), but they are also a bane to the stitcher.  You see, you have to be very, very careful when you stitch with them.  I am using one shade of Kreinik Blending Filament with three different shades of DMC thread (not at the same time, thank goodness!)  And her wings are enormous - they are easily 1/3 of the stitched area at the top of the fabric.  At least.  And when they are finished, they will, together with all of the beads that will adorn her wings and her hair and her gown and make her magic wand, add a touch of magic and whimsy and not-quite-there-ness that really makes her a fairy.  (Let's face it:  I grew up reading and re-reading different editions of Grimms' Fairy Tales and am currently reading Lord Dunsany, so I'm allowed a little imagination in my stitching realism!)   But all that is in the future.

I remember through all of the trade shows I attended I learned the same advice that I passed onto my customers to make stitching with Blending Filament easier:  use shorter lengths, knot the end of the BF to itself near the eye of the needle, and use a large enough needle to "open" the fabric.  All of which I'm doing (well, maybe not the shorter lengths part, because that means I have to begin and end threads more often and I don't like doing that:  it wastes thread and valuable stitching time), but let me tell ya:  knotting a bit of metallic thread together with a bit of stitching filament to itself near the eye of the needle ain't an easy thing to do!  The thread has a will of its own and wants to just float off into space, on the wings of a fairy.

Using the twin-pointed needles I'm using, like these shown to the left, still involves the extra step of using a regular needle to weave the end of the thread in the back (not knotting it), stitching a cross stitch, then unthreading the regular needle and re-threading the threads through the eye of the twin-pointed needle (I use a needle threader).  It makes the actual stitching a whole lot easier, it really does, and I think it makes the stitches much more even. They don't tend to slant in one direction or another.  But the whole starting and ending of stitching is going to be an interesting endeavor.

I must confess, I did start stitching her wings as soon as I finished taking pictures.  I found 2 of the three DMC colors that I needed in my stash bag, not in my project bag, which is OK.  The needle-geek part of me even knew what those colors look like:  it's 451, 452, and 453.  They're kind of a greyish mauve.  Not quite grey, but not mauve-y either.  They'll make a great color on top of the Twilight Blue linen my fairy is stitched on, with a lot of subtlety and shimmery-ness, too.  And thank goodness I only have one color of Blending Filament to use!  I've got 2 spools, and I hope that will be enough for her wings.  Like I said, they're enormous!

And with all that metallic thread to stitch on my fairy, maybe I ought to take a page from old Irish folk tales and leave a penny on my stitching stand to make my metallic stitching experience enjoyable!

After the metallic thread comes the beading, at which point my lovely fairy will come out of her Q-Snap frame and will go in-hand.  If you look at the frame (plastic PVC piping with plastic bits that snap on the top), there is no way to move her around for beading purposes.  So maybe I'll start with the beading and then if I have to move her I'll take her completely out of the frame.  But the bottom of her gown gets beads, too, and any snap onto the bead will, obviously, break it into many bits.

Will keep you updated on her progress . . .