I don’t follow trends in fashion or home decor or electronics or cars or diets or, or, or…
And I don’t usually like what is trendy anyway.
I like certain colors and color combinations and sometimes they pop in and out of popularity, but never has the popularity merged with my need to buy.
I bought a huge wool rug for a song in 2007ish – normally I don’t go for stuff that looks like it came from stores like Ceramics Shed or Box and Bucket, but I like yellows and greys and greens and browns and of course wool, so I got it for our then large green and yellow dining room. But now it fits best in our living room, with brown furniture and soon-to-be yellow* walls. But we need curtains, and we need really wide curtains, so making them seemed like the likely option, so I ordered some fabric samples.
Then I went to the obnoxious store named for the thing at which you shoot arrows for something dumb and little and unavailable in our little town, and there were so many yellow and grey and ikat-like patterned things everywhere…
I don’t like that – I usually go against the tide – my home decor and self-presentation usually make people who follow trends cringe and look at me pitifully, and that’s the way it should be – I don’t like them, I don’t want to be like them. My car is from the ’90s and isn’t an SUV, shopping is not a hobby, I hate big-box-made-in-china-inflated-prices-for-low-quality-sh*t-especially-things-called-designer-but-just-generally-suck, and I know that in itself makes me a stereotype and stuffed in another big bag of the same folks, but at least it’s smaller one – a biodegradable, non-bleached, organic, waxed paper one perhaps?
In the end, I found cheap linen curtains that will have to do for the meantime, so I just ordered a little of the ikat fabric for some pillows.
*Oh holy hell, I can’t find a good pale mustardy yellow paint!!! They either look to lemon, or too grey, or too orange (I like orange, but the dining room is likely to be an orange variant) or shite under artificial light, or shite under natural light…
Last week we lost power for a few days. My brain became more fogged than usual and I started shifting to the left. I guessed I was getting hypothermia in my own apartment so I laid under a couple of down duvets until clearer thoughts came back… if you could call them that.
N keeps getting snow days from work; I don’t since I work from home.
We’re also sick and I’ve been feeling too crappy to make stuff.
I used to be used to being snowed in from time to time.
I’d take it as an opportunity to do wonderful things like take a bunch of random knitting needles I’ve gathered from thrift shops and yard sales –
**
And pair them up.
And of course put them back in the old pasta tin I keep them in and they jumble themselves up once more.
I almost never use straight needles anymore, at least the long ones, but I like them as artifacts.
I love cherries and eat pounds of them each June and early July.
It’s about 6″ x 8″ and filled with nearly a pound of pits. It’s great for warming knitting-sore wrists or cold hands.
I’d like another, but I don’t think I want to go through boiling and scrubbing and scouring and sanding pits again.
It’s useless when the power goes out too.
*That picture isn’t even the most recent snow – I’ve given up, I can’t be bothered, I don’t want to have any documentation of this sh*t anymore…
**This doesn’t look right, seems like it should be the other way around, but that didn’t look right either and this is the direction I took it – deleting and re-attaching the variously oriented pics was the high point of the day.
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 spent an evening this week closing up the holes in some of our sweaters. I’ve been seeing beautiful and skillful examples of mending in the blogisphere lately and though lovely, they make me feel anxious. Must I learn to do everything perfectly? To have textile conservator-level mending skills to make repairs nearly invisible or mad creative ones to do a perfect herringbone in a cheeky accent color? Don’t get me wrong, I love these things and love that someone is doing them and doing them well, but for me, I still embrace absolute utilitarianism and efficiency when it comes to darning/mending/repairing. I also usually wait until I have at least three garments that need to be fixed before I sit down to do them, even though it means I’ll probably need three different thread colors and it would have taken just as much time to do them one at a time. All of the items that got a new lease on life were thrift store finds (some decades old) and I’m always what- amazed, impressed, happy? I don’t quite know the feeling, but that these things have endurance and history, both unknown and our own, and can outlive us.
N’s favorite cashmere sweater is just a few years old and was probably fairly new when it was given up by its original owner. (Unbeknownst to me my sister-in-law gave my brother the exact same as a [new] gift around the same time I found N’s in the thrift store.) He wore it for work and not-work and everything in between several times a week and this year his elbow popped through. It’s now been patched but retired from work-wear.
I’m also chief pill-picker. I hate pills but I somewhat, and somewhat perversely, like picking them off. I’ll periodically give an item a good pick and then a vigorous brushing and I’m always amazed about how much fuzzy detritus comes away… how much crap we carry around on us and how a sweater can continue to shed yet never feel as if it’s going bald overall. But I do really hate pills on hand-knits (I’m looking at you Malabrigo!) especially when you’ve done a textured stitch and the pills hide in little valleys.
That little pile of pills and fuzz got me thinking about hoarders (and my fear of becoming one, though I do draw the line with things that rot and stink as being only for trash/compost). And then N bought some new kitchen towels – some white, some red – that gave off this nice rose-pink lint in the dryer. I know dryer lint has many uses, and once upon a time when I made paper I often used the stuff, but to keep it now seems a little excessive. I can’t compost, don’t have a pet, haven’t spilled any oil, don’t need to start a fire, and I’m not making paper or papier mache at the moment…
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!
I had to save my biggest and best tin for a post of its own.
I first saw this tin in a photographic negative I was cataloging in my old job. The tin was on the counter in someone’s kitchen in the 1940s. I read the writing through a tiny loupe and was aghast at the boasts of “scientifically processed” and claims of healthy hydrogenated vegetable shortening! And what is that graphic? A woman on a scale inferring that potato chips were diet food? Hells yeah! I love potato chips, though they’ve done nothing for my figure, unless of course I eat enough to cause severe anal leakage, but I’m a snob for the olive oil chips anyway. I started seeing this tin in antique/junk stores but they were often rusty, or the lid didn’t easily come off, or were just too damn overpriced. Generally, if I want something that isn’t really needed, I wait for serendipity to take over or to lose interest in it. However, after a year of looking for this in the right condition for the right price, I broke down and found one on Ebay, so it all worked out. Maybe serendipity is just an online market.
But in my quest for simplicity and curing former impulses and diseases of the hoarding of neat sh*t variety, I have a general rule for visiting antique/junk shops – buy nothing bigger than what would fit into my hand.* In theory I like some kinds old jewelry so that could be allowable, but I’ve never actually bought any old jewelry and it is usually more than I want to spend. I have more tchotzkies than years left in my statistical lifespan, so I generally resist the cute/weird but useless item. And I have nearly a zero interest level in military, presidential, I-am-man-and-hear-me-roar (or just destroy your lives and countries) artifacts, so old bullets, campaign buttons, coins, pins for distinctions, etc. don’t get the slightest glance from me.
But what else is little and can be extremely practical, and thus 100% approved?
Let’s open that giant tin, shall we?
Oh yeah, hells yeah, buttons!
I buy buttons that I think will look good on knits I’ve never knitted (nor will).
I buy buttons that I think I can re-sell for decent money (though I haven’t yet).
I buy buttons to replace those already on my clothes (which I’ve done once).
I buy buttons to use in my “crafts” (I do this occasionally with singles, but would never break up a set).
I buy buttons to repurpose them as jewelry (though not to make country button necklace shittery).
I buy buttons to one day feed my burning desire to amass them in a giant heap and then catalog them one by one.
And I buy buttons because some are nearly art and quite frame-able or worthy of display on their own.
(I didn’t tear off that one button in the upper left, it came that way)
I’ve had to start a new jar nearly the same size as the tin for the buttons I remove and save from clothing I cut up and turn into other things.
(And yes, I do have another boxful of buttons that you don’t get to see).
*I’ve got some big paws, so my fingers can really wrap a decent-sized find, and I do break this rule constantly if I find things that are fiber-oriented and thus can be considered a business, art, or research expense (but really, I can only kid myself so far…)
I love finding them and I love storing things in them and I especially love finding them with things already in them.
This one is from my childhood home – it looks old timey, but was from the 1970s or ’80s… which sadly, might in fact be old timey to some.
I don’t remember the marshmallows, but I like marshmallows.
It is perfect for the storage of zippers and various purse/bag hardware.
This was a lucky thrift store find of a tin with something in it – mostly needles and a lovely bent-to-fit sterling thimble. I use the needles from time to time but get pissed when I don’t realize I have a rusty one until it leaves a mark in my fabric.
Also inside are some nice bone tapestry needles – I think? And a “Tyton” tool at the bottom. Anybody know what that is? All I get is a Polish football (soccer) player.
This tin came from a thrift store and was probably $ .50 or less. I think I bought it when I only had $ .50 in my pocket. It previously held fruitcake from New Orleans. I thought you got sh*tfaced in New Orleans, not hang around and eat hard cake. But I guess you have to “feed” fruitcake with brandy or rum or something…. that could explain it.
But the loveliness inside is my collection of vintage thread. I got the thread way back when at my old favorite thrift store in a dusty old bag (perhaps once actually belonging to a dusty old bag of another sort). One day I may frame some of these in a shadow box of some sort, but I do use a teensy bit of them from time to time since the colors are wonderful and often match my clothing in need of repair. And good god, I love wooden spools. I know it’s a waste of a tree but they serve so many purposes after their intended one and just look finely aged and patinated on their own.
This is an estate sale find of a tin with something in it. I was excited to find this small stash of embroidery floss until its horrid camphor odor assaulted my sniffer. I got it anyway, cleaned and aired the tin, aired the floss, and thought it was good to go. I added a few odds and ends of my own floss too.
Sadly, it still smells.
And finally, the loveliest tin of them all, and the one I uncharacteristically paid the most for – I believe it was a whopping $12.
But $12 is no longer an insignificant amount of money to me, and I feel pressure to put something priceless and special inside of it instead of the tiny yarn balls and clippings currently in there.
Maybe I should have a candy while I think about it.
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 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…
ASTITCHMATISM 