The other day N mentioned he was culling some old sweaters and asked if I wanted any – of course I did (all of them). And to my surprise, he had a swants-able one in the pile – a forgotten cosy but quite misshapen semi-felted/fulled thrift store find from a few years ago.
I immediately began to cut and sew.
I didn’t follow the official swants tutorial because I wanted to make some interesting shapes with the pattern, and the shoulder seams already conformed to my hips.
And then I impatiently set off for the beach, not quite accepting the fact that you can’t really shoot your own trousers while wearing them.
I love the beach in winter. I love the emptiness and sometimes the ugliness. I love that the surf washes away the ice and snow and sloggy sh*t that prevents you from walking normally and safely on an inland path or sidewalk.
And when I’m at a wintertime beach in a semi-urban area, I can never stop Morrissey’s Everyday is Like Sunday from playing in my head…
So while the day was chilly, but the sun warm, I filled up a thermos, packed up my ass pad and some knitting* and hit a favorite spot while it was at its most opposite of a smooth summery romping ground.
One of those rusty pipes helped hold the camera, but all of my swants photos are shite.
But the swants aren’t – I love them!
Mine are more knickers though – swickers.
The color is truest here – they are cranberry and maroon. The front has a somewhat provocative triangular point – though how sexy can sweater pants really be?
And the back has a squared-off shape not unlike old-timey ass flaps on union suits.
I practically had the beach to myself, but the boardwalk was busy with those just waking up from cabin fever and those who have jolly thick-coated dogs (who must suffer through the hot summers). But no one bothered me – there’s usually a small motley band of panhandlers and nutters who think being unwashed and under various chemical influences is appealing to a woman – but the swants proved an effective repellant!
Perhaps my new cock socks** helped too…
Now I look like the nut-job.
Maybe on a colder day I’d wear these under my swirt…
Now I can’t get everyday is like swants day to the tune of the above out of my head…
*Yeah, still a little too chilly for outdoor knitting – but it was a good place to take photos of it too – coming soon.
**Smartwool, a gift from N. I told him I didn’t need anymore socks, he told me I needed these. He was right. In the few seconds Morrissey leaves my head, cock socks on the rocks repeated chant-like over and over comes in…
I love wool, I love stretchy pants, I love recycling, I love projects with quick gratification.
However, even though I have a mountain of old sweaters and went looking for more, I still can’t find the perfect Swantsable one (though I’ve already named mine Swousers). I’ve got long-ish, muscular-ish legs so I need a fairly big sweater and I want my Swousers to be more pants than knickers (although I love the shorter style of Kate Davies’s Sweeks) and I want them a bit thicker too – like an adult version of a soaker, only in the reverse rather than being disgustingly diapery – for keeping out cold and damp or snow. I hate snow pants because they swish, swish, swish and are made from synthetics, so I’d like thick wool sweatery pants for wintertime activities instead. So I must wait until the right big, long, thick sweater comes along.
Until then, I made a sweater skirt…
Or Swirt.
But that name already has certain sexual denotations I just learned about when Googling it… so perhaps it should be a Skeater or Skiter…
It started out as a thrift-store-found hand-knit South American sweater that had been shrunken and felted/fulled a bit (by its previous owner) making the body dense but the sleeves short and tight.
I cut off the arms, slit open the neck, sewed a hem at the top, sewed up the sides (put a zipper on one), and added a couple of hook and eye closures. My only complaint is with the sweater itself – the star motif on the front was cropped by the neckline, so I didn’t have much room to spare for the waist.
I was imagining that I’d style it for a photo with a new pair of grey and black wool tights (thanks K!) and a pair of cute but impractical boots I almost never wear anymore since I work from home, but instead I got to field test it in a more rugged fashion almost immediately thanks to Hercules.
In cold weather I literally freeze my ass off. Even with wool unders, base layers, and pants I feel like my southerly cheeks are still flirting with frostbite. And my knees suffer as well, though I hooked them up with a quick fix last winter. But the Swirt kept my bum and knees warm! It was about 19F and I also had on wool long johns, wool-blend leggings, and those bulky army-surplus wool gaiters, and I was fine.
Even the deer were enviously eyeing my woolies.
So one day I’ll have my Swants/Swousers, but for now the Swirt/Skeater/Skiter will do.
That one had mixed results – I’ve slipped up on whining about my personal woes.
But woes affect workflow and the creative process – occasionally for the better, but most often for the worse.
Of physical states and habitation, nothing has changed from last year.
Of mental states, artistic paths, and new careers, I’m still lost.
This was also a year spent in mountains around the country and world and those were the good parts.
Otherwise the suspended animation-ness of the rest is maddening.
But I’ll continue to putter about and ramble on all things fiber for a bit – I’ll even fess up to some more UFOs in the new year.
*Thank you for reading.
I won’t brag about my reader statistics because I can’t – I know most of you in life or ravelry, so consider yourselves a special, intimate, elite group!
Though I thankfully received some helpful suggestions on how to finish it in my limited workspace, I still didn’t want to deal with it. But then I had a head-smacking moment when I realized it didn’t have to be a quilt. I wanted it to be a functional bed covering to fully realize its concept, but it made no difference whether it was a quilt, or a coverlet, or a comforter, or a duvet cover. I am loudly sighing with relief. Though I also went to 13 stores (even thrifts) trying to find a cheap comforter that I could use as filler instead of spending an ungodly amount on 4 or 5 layers of high-loft batting and failed to find one in my budget. So duvet cover it became out of thrift, necessity, and for the sake of my sanity.
Most of the other things I’ve been working on are finally coming together as well – it will be a welcome relief to stop thinking about the things I’ve been thinking about for the last few months. So now I’m allowing myself to fall backwards into a bottomless [happy] pit of multiple projects.
My vacation knitting socks are further along, and might even conclude by the end of the year.
I’ve gathered some acorns to use as dye (still no luck finding a tree infested with galls).
While I was in the woods, I saw several really cool vine yarns.
And I’ve started a couple of gifts for upcoming birthdays and holidays.
But thankfully I do not fully participate in most holidays apart from cooking and eating (mostly just the eating) so I have none of the pressure that others do to complete x projects in x time for people who might not want/like that hat, pair of socks, scarf, pillow, toy anyway.
As some may say, woot!
Or yippee!
Or hell yeah!
Or yee hah!
Or the excitement is so short-lived it will be over by the time I finish shouting.
I think I’ve gotten all of the post-vacation brain fog and re-adjustment whining and rambling out of my system.
I’ve spent the last week attending a training session and conference in my field, a grad school open house, and doing some networking. I’ve been getting up at an ungodly hour to take trains to the nearby cities. It almost felt like I was working again, but it also made me feel lucky to work the few hours I do from home – I haven’t really seen daylight apart from a quick lunchtime walk for the last few days. I’m a terrible commuter too – knitting, reading, and doing anything other than staring out of the window on buses and trains gives me motion sickness, so I spend the majority of the time fidgeting and stewing about how much time is being wasted.
But on to more important things, like wool.
A few posts ago, I wrote about meeting Valeria last year in Italy and buying her yarn. And quite luckily, I was able to meet with her, and fellow fiberphile Antontella again this year. You can read more about the Damiani Ovid and AquiLANA wool business in one of her recent posts here (Google translator is your friend). She showed me many new yarns she’s produced this year – from delicate laceweights, to a gorgeous drapey one-ply fingering, to multiple plies in increasing weights up to bulky, and including a one-ply bulky that would probably felt/full quite well. Luckily for her, she’s sold a good portion of the year’s stock (and for me or I’d spend myself into ruin) so I stuck to only a few skeins of the yarn in the new weights, and more of the aran/bulky I got last year in case I want to do some colorwork.
So when I say colorwork, I mean one color would be this intense lovely shade of blue – the exact color of the mountain sky.
I’ve shied away from blue in the past – it’s one of those colors that I don’t like in the lightest or darkest shades, or in an “electric” form. But it is also a color I’ve been gravitating to more and more in the past couple of years. And I love that I have the creamy wool from the colors of the earth and sheep and now the blue wool of the sky. Even better, the yarn is dyed naturally from Guado (Woad).
This trip was all about the blue sky – perfect weather and intense clarity day after day (at least after the first day which had an intense stormy sky that didn’t amount to much.)
And several of the alpine plants are blue too (along with the butterfly). This one is Cardo, a thistle – perhaps also known as Sea Holly – it makes a yellow dye.
And the ubiquitous old door – I wish I had a dollar for everyone who “just loves to shoot doors.” I like old doors too, but I’m not out to make a calendar or something. But I saw that the faded blue paint was the same color as my new yarn and had to snap it.
And one of my trusty water bottles and favorite wool zippered jacket/sweater thing are blue too.
And though we haven’t seen it since our first Abruzzo trip in 2008, the Adriatic hugs the region’s eastern boundary, so the blue reminds me of the sea as well.
Valeria also showed me some gorgeous caramel colored yarn and the oak galls she used to dye it – she recently posted about it here too. I got a couple of natural laceweight skeins with the thought of trying to dye it up myself with galls as well, though perhaps I’ll have to use black walnut since now that I’m looking for oak galls, I can’t find any – perhaps suburban pesticides keep the wasps away?
The other three blue skeins are a heavy fingering to sport weight.
And along with the aran/bulky skeins, I’m thinking about some hats, or a shawl, or there might even be enough to eek out a short-sleeved lace pullover…
But whatever it might become, the yarn will certainly remind me of the amazing land, people, history, and animals from which it came.
I made it to 5:12 a.m. this morning and feel triumphant! Then I realized it was daylight savings,* so the jet lag beast has been tossed a scrap and is still pacing a bit around the room. No more middle of the night pancake dinners/breakfasts though, but the last one was quite tasty with the last of our White Mountain edible souvenirs.
My brain is still buzzy and unfocused and my body mildly flu-like. I came home with mountain legs as firm as two well-aged prosciutti, but now they’re returning to their younger non-dead jiggly piglet state. My body and mind are out of synch with my reality and just want to put one foot in front of the other until a pleasing distance and vista and lunch spot have been reached.
**
I know it is incredibly pretentious, but I feel more culture shock returning to the U. S. rather than being outside of it (at least in the European bits). Americans weigh too much, they are sick, they are loud, they drive enormous machines, they wheel enormous luggage, they can be demanding of bedraggled clerks and service workers, their children are wild, and worst of all, they build and live in suburbs – vast expanses of land without sidewalks or farms – utterly purposeless and ugly.
But this is where I was born and legally reside and thanks to N we can leave it once in awhile.
But I’m also just another American wishing she could eat, pray, love (mostly the eating part) under the Tuscan (I’d prefer Abruzzo) sun. But there are a few things in Italy (and probably Europe in general) that are downright magical that even more increase my desire to stay.
Dairy. I have dairy issues in the states – I don’t know if it is lactose or casein or something else, but even when I get the organic grass-fed hoity-toity localish stuff here, I can have problems. I can tolerate milk, ice cream, cream, etc., about 15% of the time here, so I usually just forgo anything not aged or fermented – cheese and yogurt are ok-ish. In Italy, I have about a 99% tolerance rate – the only bad dairy experience I’ve had there was from a mediocre cream-based pasta sauce at an even more mediocre tourist trap restaurant in Rome a few years ago. So I load up on the stuff while I’m there – cappuccino, gelato, cream sauces, oh yeah! And of course cheese – I especially love the sheep and goat stuff – pecorino dolce, ricotta di capra, caciocavallo etc., etc., etc….
Allergies. I barely have them there, and leave behind my constant ropey mucous companion dangling down my throat here. That probably has a straightforward reason about the different climate and fewer useless expanses of lawns and less proliferation of non-native species with their companion herbicides and pesticides and chemical fertilizers.
So now that I’ve established that my brain is broken, my body atrophying, my nose dripping, and I’m suffering from a vague yogurt induced gut cramp, I must mention fiber – specifically my travel knitting.
I started the first pair of socks since my sock knitting debacle months ago. Again, my sock mojo is off – I used a bit bigger yarn on my preferred shorty wood needles with my 64 stitch vanilla pattern, thinking it would firm things up and be ok, but they’re big – baggy ankle big. But I don’t give a damn and still have to finish the leg parts, so I can firm up the upper ribbed section. I’m constructing them in a strange fashion, but it makes sense in my head and should allow me to use up all the yarn. I’ve dubbed them my “Nostalgia Socks” as the color reminds me of old quilts, 1970s sweaters, and now my trip.
The colors in this pic are wrong, but accurately portray the weak blue light that just barely stretched down to our nearly subterranean Italian apartment.
This is how the color should look – and if you look closely you can see one of the two knots I’ve found so far.
And remember my giddiness over Pigeonroof Studios Mimsy BFL roving? And even more over the Hitchhiker pattern? I can call it a finished project now since I shoved it in my bag at the last minute. It was one of those that ended sooner than I was ready to finish, and previously I only let myself knit a few rows here and there as a reward for meeting some goals on my portfolio pieces. Ok, I may have over-rewarded myself, but this is my favorite handspun yarn to date – the softness and drape are wonderful (if I do say so myself) but most of that is due to the inherent qualities of the fiber itself.
My yardage was less than the suggested amount and I used bigger needles, so I didn’t quite make it to the original 42 points. Mine is 41 1/2 – instead of a half a point, I just made the last one wider. I watched 42 on the plane over and hoped I could have that numerical reference as well, but I didn’t quite make the team.
I finished it in the first few days we were there, so I was able to wear it again and again and again – it’s finally taking a rest drying from a light blocking to stretch it out a little.
As for acquisitions, I bought some cheap (but ugly) sock yarn, and some cheap (but lovely) mohair in the market.
* Daylight savings happened in Italy last weekend. We spent a day wondering why none of the cafes were opened when they should have been, rushed to return the rental car when we didn’t have to hurry, and even left for the airport an hour before we needed to – but none of it was the problem it would have been in the spring.
** I love this picture that N took – in the camera it appeared that I had been steamrolled, but now it looks more like a Nancy Drew book jacket for “Murder on the Mountain.” I love sleeping on mountains – some bedroom designer should get on that – forget beds – rig up a soft inclined meadow and mimic warm sun and chilly breezes in a room instead.
(And yes, those last posts were pre-written and hastily posted from an internet cafe – I wonder how much longer those will exist, and/or how long it will take me to get a smart phone?)
Being away meant I couldn’t go to Rhinebeck this year, but um, I don’t care – though I’m enjoying reading about it.
I’m now suffering through the haze of jet lag (pancakes at 3 a.m. seemed like a good idea at the time…) and clogged ears, the depression of leaving a land I love, and the bureaucratic shitstorm and other items of work I left behind (and which gathered strength instead of my unrealistic hopes of dissipating). So just a bit now, but more later – especially the wooly bits.
First I must take a moment to praise the porchetta panino.
We set an all-time record of eating 4 in one trip (not in one sitting though).
And they are the perfect protein-packed porcine pranzo on the trail (even if they get squashed in the pack).
Days and days spent in the mountains with near-miraculous perfect weather and autumnal shades.
And let us not forget pasta – especially with saffron and generous shavings of truffles.
I tend to get a little obsessive/fanatical about certain colors, textures, and shapes. For a few years, I loved the diamond. Not hard-assed sparkly rocks that people die for literally and figuratively, but the shape in a flattened geometric form. I had some awesome diamond-shaped eyeglasses back in the late 1990s that I wore to dust; I have some argyle clothing, jewelry with diamond shapes, some great vintage diamond-shaped buttons I’ve yet to use, and I’ve sewn and knitted many diamonds.
Little did I know I had a thing for hexagons too.
I knew I liked antique hex tile floors. I had an original one in my first roach-infested apartment (it wasn’t the first of several infested, it was the first and happened to be infested). And I fantasize often about having one again (a tiled floor, not an apartment full of cockroaches).
I photograph tiled floors when I see them, including this one in the late 1990s, which also served as evidence in case I was brutally murdered or came down with an incurable STD or sudden Bukowski-like alcoholism from the seediest hotel I’ve ever patronized in Niagra Falls (I mean seediest ever, not one of many in Niagra Falls).
And check out this awesome antique floor in a non-hipster cafe in Brooklyn I saw last year:
(And yes, I have a cheap-ass pre-paid phone and can’t figure out how to email the picture to myself, so yeah…)
When we first started fixing up our former house, I was completely and entirely ecstatic when I found this in the bathroom:
However, my joy was short lived when I found other things:
And the absence of the tile throughout and/or layers of cement and other impenetrables that prevented us from salvaging the original floor.
I wanted to put down a new authentic porcelain hex floor, but the high price sent me to the big box for the cheap alternative:
Still porcelain hexagons, but not quite the real thing – the real deal is more flat and matte with thinner grout lines. I loved that bathroom though, and I yearn for that giant cast-iron tub again…
But I’m still always on the look-out for hex floors and sometimes find them in surprising places:
Look how small the hexagons are! The tiny little hexes are just a little bit bigger than a hex floor tile.
I wonder if the maker was sick of it after one motif, this was a leftover from a finished quilt, it was made to be a chair pad or other small item, or yeah, maybe she (maybe he but not likely) died. I love the inconsistent greens as well – I wonder if it was made from old-time scrubs or nurse’s uniforms, or if the fabric was home-dyed.
For those of you in the knitting world, you’re probably expecting me to say I’m hip-deep in hexipuffs for the Beekeeper’s Quilt and that’s what this is all about. Nope, though I like it a lot, and considered it for a little while, I’m going to pass for now (even though I may have purchased a few mega-sale skeins of sock yarn with this in mind).
I occasionally find myself designing floors for bathrooms, kitchens, and foyers of homes we don’t have. In fact, one of the houses we purchased over the last year had a half-bath (I hate the name “powder room”) small enough that I could justify the price of the real thing and to my own custom design. But alas, I must settle on non-floor hexagons for now.
But look at this!
(Picture yanked from internet – no idea of its original publication)
Ok, so a floor again, but even though whatever house we’ll eventually get will eventually need to be re-sold, I’m really tempted to do something along these lines. I don’t know if it is paper or fabric, but it would be fairly economical and a more interesting alternative to the paper bag floor (which I also sort of like, but can’t get past that leather crazy quilt jacket look of it).
But back to what I can do now, which really isn’t something I can do since I must finish other things first, but what I’m fantasizing about doing is a traditional hexagon quilt. After a summer’s worth of basting letters for an appliqued quilt, and though at the time they often annoyed the hell of of me, I had the brilliant epiphany that a quilt can actually be as portable of a project as sock knitting. Though that is probably obvious to all already, I’d never thought of making quilts outside of hours-long blocks of time at home. And though my earlier thoughts of sewing a quilt by hand were along the lines of you’ve got to be f*cking joking, I now want to piece that bitch up one by one by one in airports, while visiting other people’s houses, in waiting rooms, and sprawled on the sofa while binge watching some mildly awful but addictive television series.
I haven’t decided whether or not to use my current stash and scraps or come up with something a little more uniform and floor-like, but I’ve sure as hell had fun playing with the possibilities – at least in my head, of course, since I really can’t be spending any real time on it. (And I haven’ t yet printed off a bunch of blank hex sheets I found on this site).
I’d be remiss in not mentioning the hexing possibilities with crochet in the form of hexy granny afghans – see this Flickr group for pics – but alas, I don’t crochet. I don’t like the looks of it sometimes, but that’s usually the maker’s fault for choosing crap acrylic yarn, or poor colors, or having no general aesthetic sense.
But I’d like to learn one of these days…
Oh yeah, and my inner jukebox plays this every time I think of the word hex:
The 1990s infected me with a whole wiggling writhing wad of ear worms…
So I yammered on for a few posts about my new yarn and roving from New Mexico a few months ago here and here, but all along I’ve been thinking about the wool I acquired in Italy last autumn.
We were in Abruzzo for a few weeks in September/October 2012, on a mission to hike nearly every day in all three of the relatively new national parks: Parco Nazionale d’Abruzzo, Parco Nazionale del Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga, Parco Nazionale della Majella, and some regional parks and preserves including: Parco Naturale Sirente Velino, Riserva Naturale Regionale Monte Genzana e Alto Gizio, and Riserva Regionale Gole del Sagittario. We had previously been in the area in 2008, less than a year before the devastating earthquake in the L’Aquila region, and had only a small taste of the hiking then that was later to come. In the four years since however, more North American tourists have invaded come to the region, and though it is good for the economy, especially the areas still rebuilding, it isn’t the same immersive/escapist experience as it was before. Now you hear the occasional loudly spoken English (I still can’t get past that someone-will-understand-me-if-I-speak-louder-rather-than-actually-learn-a-word-of-the-language habit), see flip-flops on ugly feet, pay much higher prices for apartment rentals, and stumble around overly large rolling luggage. But I too am a North American, and a visitor, and have poor language skills, so I can’t be too much of a snob.
I first learned about Valeria and her AquiLANA yarn in a round-about way through ravelry when I posted to an Italian group seeking information about local wool producers. She and her husband’s family raise sheep in the L’Aquila region – their business, Azienda Agrozootecnica Damiani Ovidio, can be found on Facebook. Through another ravelry friend, we managed to communicate despite my awful Italian, (thank you Google translator) and because of her friend’s quite good English, to set up a time to meet in her town for a yarn purchase.
(Photo by Valeria/AquiLANA)
I would love to give more details about her wool and the company, but I’d have to commit to a serious translation session that I am too unfocused to partake in at the moment. But to say her yarn is fabulous and it comes from these sheep off the mountains is enough for me.
But back to the area for a moment – our time hiking in the parks was simply awesome. Some of the maps and trail markings were extremely good, some not so, and we had a hiking guidebook that should be burned due to some dangerous misinformation. Many of the trails also had formerly been mule tracks and were best left for four-legged beasts or those very sure of foot and without any tendencies toward vertigo. But overall, it was some of the best hiking I’ve done.
(But I’ll pack a few more emergency supplies the next time).
And of course eating was a nearly spiritual experience.
Can’t get any better to come down off a mountain, stop along the road, and dive into a plate of freshly grilled lamb arrosticini.
I’ve purchased wool from small producers at domestic festivals before, but this was the first time the wool smacked me in the face as coming from a very specific place – it had an intense “terroir” if you will.
And to make it even more local, some is dyed with Montepulciano wine for a lovely muted rose-grey (this is fingering weight).
At first, I only wanted to buy the Montepulciano-dyed wool because I almost never knit with white/natural. I don’t have a reason why except that I usually like color more, I fear stains (I like to drink the Montepulciano too), and some whites look really bad on me. I guess I do have my reasons. But after spending some time in the mountains with the fluffy clouds, bleached rocks, and flocks of sheep with their fluffy white Maremma guard dogs, I decided that I had to have the color of the land (or, ahem, lamb).
See?
So then my new stash of clear, clean, true wool went from the crisp vast mountains and valleys to the land of exhaust and grime…
I have a couple of ideas about what I’d like to do with the yarn, however I’m putting pressure on myself that both items will be my own designs. But I’m also realizing that with the strange turns of my life lately, my self-diagnosed ADD, work on portfolio pieces, and the chaos of everything else, I’m absolutely itching to dive right into this yarn NOW without the bother of critical design thoughts and only the happiness and escapism in remembering the land and enjoying the wool.
I’ve swatched some of the natural wool in aran/bulky weight and it will probably turn into a cable-knit sweater – either something classic/vintage inspired along the lines of the Beatnik Pullover, or more modern like the Roam Tunic. I’m leaning toward classic though since I pray for the day skinny jeans disappear (and will probably take tunics with them). Unless of course it could be a dress on its own…
The wine yarn will be a shawl, and that pattern is about halfway done, but I’ve run into a few snafus that I need to work out. I’ll test knit a version of it in recycled yarn before I use the good yarn too, so it will take some time.
The bulky/aran yarn reminds me a little of Quince & Company Osprey – it seems that it may be processed and spun in a similar fashion and has that same lovely soft, sproingy, spongy factor – and maybe even more so. It is soft, yes, but not weakly soft – almost cottony. I even washed one of my swatches and it got even better – I wouldn’t say that it bloomed, but the stitch definition relaxed slightly while still being entirely legible. I’m sure the yarn will wear quite well, yet be very comfortable.
It is already my favorite sweater.
And we’ve made plans for a return trip, so perhaps I may come back with more sheepy souvenirs!
It was the last of the summer hiking trips for us.
Our cottage was decorated in “Wal-Mart for cabin.”
I actually miss the tacky painted saw blades, crude whittlings, and sh*t made out of driftwood and antlers of mountain/country crafts of yesteryear (or just a few years ago really).
Now it is plastic sh*t from China (often copied from domestic crafters).
But I managed to finally finish basting all of those damn letters.
The pile looks smaller than it really is.
I will never be so wordy on a quilt again.
Our CSA has been offering loads of lovely flowers.
It is a nice thing to have fresh flowers, but not in place of food – they really need to step it up in the veg department. And as vinyl village apartment dwellers, we can’t compost, so I don’t like to have too many fresh flowers.
The letters are ready to mingle with the as yet unmade quilt blocks.
I’m also getting wordy with a fair isle scarf.
I don’t love stranded knitting.
I don’t hate it though.
My Tour de Fleece spinning goals fell short.
But I finished plying my Pigeonroof Studios “lettuce” and have one braid left to finish spinning for a particular project.
I spun this one a little too thin and it came out lighter and softer in color, so it might have to become a different project.
Or the original project will be scrapped altogether.
ASTITCHMATISM 