Tag Archives: knitting

April 21, 2013 · 11:06 AM

Fiber travels in New Mexico, part II

I mentioned in my previous post that I visited Tierra Wools in tiny Los Ojos, New Mexico. Rather than paraphrase, this is the beginning of the description of their wool Shangri-La on their website’s about page (go there and read more later):

“Tierra Wools is a spinning, hand dyeing, and hand weaving workshop and a retail store. We buy carry local wool, and weave the yarn into beautiful weavings which are sold from our workshop in Los Ojos, a small village in rural Rio Arriba County in northern New Mexico. The enterprise is operated by Los Ojos Handweavers, LLC, a limited liability company owned by the growers, spinners and hand weavers that produce its goods, as well as supporting investors.”

I visited them around a decade (or a little more) ago, and at the time, it was a full house of wooly weaving and dying frenzy. Sadly, it seems to have slowed down a bit and the weavers now work on commission, though the shop still offers classes and workshops. And on Saturday, April 27th, they are having their annual Spring Harvest Festival with sheep shearing demos and other treats. I can only imagine if such a studio was plunked down in a heavy DIY urban area, they’d have to fight people off with loom parts. But I suppose it also wouldn’t be the same – the location is what this wool is about. Much of the wool comes from just a few miles away as well as the dyes. The colors in the yarn are reflected in the landscape and the products share the same rugged beauty with the surroundings. Not to mention it offers a source of income in a place where there are few people but I imagine, fewer jobs.

While there, I stocked up on some of the gorgeous Shepherd’s Lamb organic wool products. The wool comes from Antonio & Molly Manzanares from nearby Tierra Amarilla, who also sell their wooly beasts in meat and pelt form. The color range of their yarns and rovings is stunning and some of the yarn lines are dyed with natural dye plants indigenous to the area.

I had selected a few skeins of sturdy Navajo Churro rug wool, but decided to buy two bags of brown and grey-brown roving instead. The stuff apparently felts/fulls like a dream as well, so it might be the first time I end up fulling my spinning – until now, I feel like handspun is somewhat spoiled by fulling unless you’re making fulled singles, but this has the feeling of becoming something truly practical and hard-wearing, like dense nearly impenetrable mittens, or a hat with some sort of brim, or maybe an outerwear vest if I can eek out enough, but my history with vests is a little troubled…

On the softer side, I picked out some organic Rambouillet yarn in DK weight. I got two skeins of yellow which was dyed with Indigo over Chamisa, and one skein of green dyed with Osage Orange over Indigo. I love that Osage Orange was used – it was one of my favorite trees growing up and always seemed so out-of-place exotic, nearly tropical, and the fruit is nicknamed “monkey balls.” Who doesn’t love a monkey? Balls! But apparently though the fruit is inedible, it wards off pests so people put them in basements and cupboards. But I digress, I really wanted more yarn and I was out-of-characterly very attracted to some tealy blues and lavenders, but I resisted. I don’t as yet have a plan for this, though I’m leaning toward something shawlette-ish.

That wasn’t the most flattering shot of Northern New Mexico, though I do love ruins and murky colors, so I’ll leave you with a few more.

I love this road – it’s the perfect antidote to the crowded East (except you have to be careful of the occasional elk). This is also fairly close* to Tierra Wools. The landscape of the north is more conducive to grazing sheep and other livestock.

A pile of bones, but not a boney pile.

Litter is bad, but vintage litter is cool.

Another good day of hiking amongst amazing rocks.

Is it a giant rock, or tiny tree?

And I love these rest stops with private landscape viewing boxes – you can picnic free of wind and sun while watching dust devils snake below the mesa – just watch out for rattlesnakes.

And oh, holy hell, when looking up some of the abundant links in this post, I just found that there is an established “Fiber Arts Trail” in New Mexico, including a route dedicated to the Northern area. I am ashamed to say that though I am somewhat of a professional researcher, I utterly failed in looking up anything about this before I went… Next time, right???

*About 40 minutes away, which might as well be next door out there.

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Tagged as bones, chamisa, felting, fulling, handmade, handspun, indigo, industry, knitting, landscape, litter, Los Ojos, meat, mountains, natural dyes, Navajo Churro, New Mexico, openess, organic, osage orange, Rambouillet, rest stops, roads, rocks, roving, rugs, sheep, spinning, Tierra Wools, travel, weavers, wool, yarn

March 24, 2013 · 7:20 PM

An improved jacket

Lately I’ve been re-working woolen clothes – both my own old ones and new thrift shop scores. Or rather, I have an overflowing box of items I intend to re-work, but have only managed to completely finish a few lately. I found this jacket or blazer in early January and it perfectly matches a scarf* I made a few years ago. And yes, I previously raged against pink a little when it falls under a raspberry or pepto influence, but I love this dirty old lavender-ish rose.

The jacket had some issues though – the plastic buttons looked wrong and cheap and were probably a replacement, there was a large hole in the bottom hem, the sleeves were hack-hemmed way too short, and at first I liked the little brown triangles at the pockets because I thought they were suede and I like mixing browns and greys thank you very much, but on closer inspection they turned out to be Ultrasuede or other sort of microfiber… ick. And then the label puzzled me as well:

It looks like an older style, but the little content tag underneath it looks more recent, but the sizing is oldschool too – says it’s a 14, but fits more like a 4 or 6 – or is it foreign? I can’t find anything online about Ms. Alice Carol except a few other pieces [mis-dated in my opinion] on Etsy, so my best guess is that it’s from the late 1970s…? I also feel that it was sufficiently altered from its original state so I could continue to monkey around with it. It doesn’t look like I did much now, but I:

let out the cuffs to the bitter end removed the sleeve buttons stitched up the side wrist gap re-hemmed the cuffs re-attached the sleeve lining repaired the hole on the bottom took off the Ultrasuede triangles cut new grey wool triangles but then didn’t like they way they looked and didn’t feel like sewing them on then made and attached my own covered buttons** out of a pair of my brother’s old grey wool pants of about the same age that match the grey stripe that you really don’t see in the pictures [did you get that in one breath?]

Much better.

* For those who are savvy or nebbie, you could find this scarf pattern for free on ravelry, but I’m in the middle of re-writing and charting it and hope to re-post it soon as a buy-it pattern (never mind that only very few have made it for free so far) but one can hope [or have the right to have delusions] right?

** Oh how I love you, DIY button blanks – why were you waiting so long to come into my life? Will I ever tire of you? But have you been in my life long enough to know that you’ll hold up through many unbuttonings and buttonings and banging into things?

Not so gawful now, or perhaps just a little less so…

This is my first winter wearing this scarf made from recycled sweater yarn especially selected to match my red coat. (Stupidly, I also wore it in NYC when all the kids dress like slutty, sexy, and sloppy Santa and go bar-hopping – I fear I may have been mistaken for one of them at a distance).

But all Santas aside, last year I found this moth-eaten semi-fulled [felted] cropped turtleneck sweater at a thrift store. I thought it was god-awful, or “gawful.”* I like bright colors, wool, and three big cheers for gay pride rainbows, but I thought this was just something that few should wear – it might just be best for a child. Since it was already ruined by holes and aggressive washings (and had the magic unzippy seams) I happily frogged the bitch.

Nice balls, eh? It then dawned on me that half of the colors** matched a Harris Tweed coat I scored months earlier.

I don’t wear much red – I prefer orange, and I think red generally washes me out. I have nothing against it per se, I just don’t choose it, and don’t have anything to wear with it – green would look way too x-masy, yellow would make it mustard and ketchup, and my rusty murky colored things don’t work. I have a grey scarf languishing on the needles, and another dark cowl that would look decent enough with the coat, but I decided it needed an equally loud accessory. I wanted a sideways constructed scarf or cowl so I could have long skinny rows and few, if any tails to weave in. I was also itching to do a large project in linen stitch – I found Cerus Scarf by Hilary Smith Callis in ravelry, and though it’s not so much a pattern as just cast-on-this-many-stitches-and-then-do-this-stitch, I linked to it for the sake of conformity, much like the drunk Santas do every year.

Thankfully I didn’t wear any green so as not to be confused with the drunken masses attending the St. Pat’s day parade in the city yesterday. I would have worn this cacophony of reds in opposition and protest of toxic colored alcoholic beverages*** and the assholes who spew them on the streets and trains, but alas the weather was a bit wicked and I lurked about in my muds and rusts.

*I didn’t realize this was already a used term, see here.

**This was another project that surprised me in terms of color and color dominance. I only did one row of the pale yellow and it absolutely screams out and takes the pink along with it, bleaching it down. And where is the orange? Though I did an extra row of orange, you almost don’t even see it. If I had more yarn, I’d like to try a version without the yellow and pink and see if that gives it more of a murky glow. And I’m still on the fence about removing the kinky fringe and stitching it into a cowl… I usually opt out of fringe, and I’m not sure why I don’t sorta like it, but I think it’s because if it’s too close to your face on a windy day it goes into your mouth? Or maybe it is something from childhood. I don’t have a specific plan for the harvested blues and greens yarn yet, but the smaller balls make them excellent for sideways designs…

***Nothing wrong with a good alcoholic beverage, just those that involve dye, or a culture of mass sloppy public drunkenness.

On color and vests

So I admit, I was whiny about my inability to get what I wanted with the redwood roving mix, but I keep thinking about color and I’m trying to understand it in terms of spinning.

This is made from some of my earlier handspun yarn that I mixed myself and liked. Some will think of it as Pepto-B, bubble gum, and berry & orange sherbet barf, but I think of it as campfire embers. This was also (in my mind at least) a success with taking a color I don’t really like (the pink) and mixing it up with others to tone it down. I’ve got some strong and opposing feelings about certain colors – some pinks and yellows I abhor, some I love, some that I abhor I love on others, or love knowing that others love them. This was also made up of souvenirs from nearly one coast to the other. The burgundy and bright orange were some crappy batts seconds from a now forgotten booth at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival and some goldish-lavenderish roving came from there as well; the pink was a bag of dyed Border Leicester locks from SuDan Farm at the Portland, OR farmer’s market. We were in Portland during one September when it was being its characteristic grey and damp self, and the colors in the market happily screamed out:

The booth with the locks also screamed out to me since it was the only one I saw with wooly goodness and I was immediately on it like the fly on sh*t. I first selected a bag of cheery bright yellow locks and then decided I wanted another to keep it company, but I’m not sure why I picked the pink – this particular pink falls into my category of not liking it, but glad it exists. But I think at the time it was just showing off at the moment in super-saturated glory amidst the grey. When I got home, it didn’t appeal to me so much, so I knew it would have to take second seat to some of my other more loved colors. However, I wanted to retain the bright warm mood to turn it into a garment or accessory best worn on grey days which my old city had aplenty. The yarn turned out to be pretty stiff and scratchy and felt most like baling twine, so it wasn’t going to be something I could wear next to my skin, but I didn’t have enough to make a sweater, so…. enter the vest.

This brings me to ranting territory, and by the way, the vest above is loosely based on the East-Knit Vest in 5 Sizes pattern by Kathy North – but I improvised most of it, so don’t use mine as a reference for the pattern. But, why are vests often inherently frumpy? I wish to exclude the long flowing designer-y ones, those that are more practical as an outer-garment, and anything for men or children and just focus on the basic waist-ish length knitted vest for women. There is almost no way that I can wear this and I don’t look like: a matronly frump, a homeschooler of the creepy variety, a media stereotype of a spinster in the making, an aging woman who still sleeps with teddy bears and a unicorn nightlight, someone who wears mom jeans, or someone who still wears what granny made in the ’70s even though she shouldn’t. Part of the problem could be that it doesn’t suit my body shape* and the yarn is bulky and loud and attention-grabbing, but there is still this [nearly audible to others] underlying drumbeat of frumpity dump dump, frumpity dump dump, frumpity dump dump…** whenever I wear it. I’m not particularly fashionable, I don’t give a damn how others judge the way I look, and I frequently wear a down vest, but I just can’t rock this one… I still wear it though, occasionally.

*My vintage dress dummy is not me – she/it has impossibly high tits, though we do share the same approximate waist size.

**Phrase coined by my old [former, not elderly] co-worker and knitting friend F. W.!

Curse of the redwood roving

I buy economical roving seconds from an American yarn company – I could name the company and my source, but I don’t want to give away what I feel is my own personal secret stash that I don’t actually own. The roving is easy to spin, comes in some nice colors, and makes a durable yarn. I haven’t had much desire for spinning a solid-colored yarn since I want my yarn to look handspun and unique, so I usually blend colors. I have a background in art, I am good at picking out pleasing paint palettes for rooms, and I am in no way colorblind or challenged, though I do like some challenging colors. I bought a pound of what appeared to be a soft, slightly dirty red, the warm color of redwood and the innards of cedar. When it arrived, I was pleased, and it was the pleasant not-too-reddish hue I hoped it to be. However, whenever I put it with other colors, it turns a nasty raspberry – I have nothing against raspberries, I like raspberry sorbet, not berets, unless it’s a song, but I don’t really like the song either, just the artist, well, sort of but really, in the past maybe, but I don’t like that part of the past very much… So yeah, raspberry reminds me of the 1980s, and those being my years of middle school and other childhood angst and trauma of being a geek in a backassward rural town, I’d rather not go there again.

I figured this first glimpse of the evil that this raspberry roving becomes is my my fault entirely.

I don’t know what I was thinking, but I think I was thinking of the American Southwest – turquoise in a desert sunset or something stupid. I stopped spinning when I knew it was clearly awful.

My mom needed a birthday present, and she had some purplish fuchsiaish eyeglasses that I thought would go with the yarn, so I whipped up a hat. A hat only a mother could love… but this isn’t some stupid crayon drawing that can be ignored until something conveniently spills on it, so I don’t think she wears it much, and wouldn’t model it, but N is a good sport. The hat is warm, and though the pattern was improvised, I jotted down the recipe for future bulky handspun use, so at least it had purpose.

A few months later, I bought some gorgeous hand-painted roving from Scarlet Fleece at my then LYS in a colorway called “easter egg.” To me, it was all of the lovely colors of autumn, so I’m not sure what they were going for in the name, but the gorgeous colors were the important thing. I wanted to make a small shawl from it, but only had four ounces, which could have been just barely enough, but I wanted more, I wanted bigger. Enter the bastard redwood.

This picture really does show it being a bit berry, but trust me, I didn’t photograph it well, and see the reddish tone in the multicolored roving on the left end? Yeah, it does match. My other choices for blends were a saffron yellow that seemed a little too bright, and a coppery brown (see hat above) that brought it down into dinginess. All my little samples and tests in indoor and outdoor light led me to believe the redwood would be the perfect match, so I went with it, and kept going with it even though I could see it was an utter mistake after plying the first few yards…

So, now I know I suck at color when it comes to spinning and I ruined the perfect subtle warms oranges in the other roving. It is raspberries with lemons and grapes. Hello 1980s, hello fugly-ass yarn. It looks like one of those vomitous swirly lollipops.

Maybe I’ll make a shawl out of it for my mother…

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Tagged as bad colors, colors, fugly, handspun, hats, knitting, prince, raspberry, roving, spinning, the 1980s, ugly colors, wool

February 11, 2013 · 12:57 PM

Kitchens, not golf

Recently I made a decent score of vintage Minerva knitting magazines. I found them in a booth in an antique mall in a semi-rural area of the mid-Atlantic (or the easternmost edge of the Midwest if you are cynical, or the East Coast if you’re being slightly unrealistic or live way out west and don’t really pay attention to maps). They were just a couple bucks apiece and I snatched ’em all up. I had a few from the 1930s in my personal library already, and I have the idea that I will make some of the patterns some day, but now I’m probably being unrealistic. I fall in love with vintage patterns and then realize I don’t have the rest of the wardrobe to pull it off (mostly high-waisted skirts/pants, and I hate high waists), the knitting skills or patience to figure out how to modify to fit my 21st century body, or the patience to work with tiny gauge yarn and needles. I will eventually sell off the ones I know I’ll never use, but some are just so lovely to look at over and over.

If you asked my what my ideal kitchen would look like, it would be in the sanitary style with yellow and green accents, and would perfectly match the magazine on the right. I would like a dog in said kitchen as well, and I actually like the sweater on the cover too – perfect for my long torso and disdain of the high-waist. Many of the patterns in the earlier issues are quite simple, involve a lot of garter stitch and seem to offer a size close to mine – in fact, they only offer just one or two sizes. It seems like pattern designers of today bend over backwards to try to accommodate as many sizes as possible, when a knitter could just have some better skills and a simple self-modifiable design would be enough. But as I stated before, though I’d like to have more instinctual and skilled knitting abilities, I’m still working on that, so I should shut up. The top on the left is pretty awesome though, and the baggy cowl neck would make fitting a little more forgiving – that one might have a future for me.

And then there is the early to mid-20th century obsession with “sportswear” that usually involves golf. Golf.* Granted, clothing of the day offered very little stretch and flexibility so one had to completely change her outfit if she expected to do anything remotely active, and sport and leisure were often very social so you had to look cute doing said activity, but golf? I could do some research and find out a good answer about the sport: the middle-class was growing in North America and was gaining increasing amounts of leisure time after the industrial revolution, public golf courses were opening to the masses, both women and men participated (though often not at the same time) and tweed knickers and and argyle socks are just plain awesome, but I will just continue to wonder instead.

*My disdain of golf runs much deeper than the general discomfort of tight high-waisted clothes. Golf in ye olde times wasn’t too bad and it helped to preserve green open spaces in and around cities (though was very bad for being generally racist, and could be sexist and elitist as well). But golf of today is an environmental ass-kicking – the gazilibillion gallons/litres of water and pesticides that go into maintaining them is breathtaking, they’re built in places where grass is not supposed to grow, they take up a lot of land for only one purpose, and they can be populated by the stereotypical fat-cat country clubber with his head up his right-wing ass.

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Tagged as golf, kitchens, knitting, Minerva, sanitary style, sportswear, vintage knitting patterns, yellow and green

February 6, 2013 · 4:17 PM

Pears, not bananas

I finished* my Lazy Daisy Shawlette** (previously mentioned here) from my handspun merino superwash roving from Pigeonroof Studios.

The color of the roving is called Bosc, but it often looked like a ripe Bartlett, and some days it most closely resembles an over-ripe banana, but I choose not to think of it that way. I like my bananas still a bit green; over-ripe turns my stomach a bit – especially their odor.

See that little drip of pinkish red left of center? It screamed out at me when I was spinning, but I love it – it’s the drip that brings it back into pear territory

I finished this in record time because I was completely monogamous with the project. Usually I get a little tired with something or my hands and wrists begin to ache, but not this time. I’m discovering that color changes are more of a motivation for me rather than watching texture change or seeing rapid growth.

Record time also means I f*cked it up, and don’t want to acknowledge it yet. I ran out of yarn three inches short of completing the bind-off. A “good”*** knitter would rip it out and re-do, but screw that. I used a little bit of recycled sweater yarn – it matches in color in certain places, but not texture or sheen.

See? Well, I probably won’t be able to tolerate it at some point, and I’m also afraid the edges will soon roll – again a “good” knitter would rip and tink back and do a few more garter rows to prevent rolling, but I don’t want to – I had intended to do more, I’m just shit at judging remaining yarn amounts. I think I’ll probably attempt to spin something complementary and add a few more rows later, but for now I’m done.

*If you got to the end of this, you know it might not actually be finished yet.

**The pattern, by Orange Flower (aka Sketchbook) on ravelry is described as a recipe, and it is a good/easy one. The original version has the maker doing a crocheted edge, but I am crochet-challenged, so I omitted that and only stuck to the increasing on every row aspect of it – great for showing off handspun.

***Don’t tell me there’s a “proper” way to do anything…see my work-in-progess manifesto in about.

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Tagged as bananas, glold, grellow, handspun, knitting, Lazy Daisy Shawlette, Orange Flower, pears, Pigeonroof Studios, shawl, shawlette, spinning, yellow, yellowish

January 25, 2013 · 10:29 PM

Fiber high

I have other things I should be doing, other things I should be finishing, more important life/money/job things that really need my attention, but instead I started another project. A very simple one with very lovely fiber from Pigeonroof Studios. I spun it last summer when I should have been doing other things then too, but I couldn’t resist its siren song of buttery sproingyness. I bought it on impulse, wondered why others praised it, and spent more than I normally do for just a few ounces (but I normally buy rough raw stuff or cheap rejected bits). And then it came and I realized it’s fiber crack (or whatever is better than crack but just as addicting).* Seriously, I don’t want to go back to my cheap ~~street~~ farm-level habit now. The fiber basically spun itself and the colors popped through my fingers – spinning happiness at its best. So now in the frozen days of winter, I couldn’t stop myself, and I’m enjoying every bright and buttery-kitteny-soft moment of letting it slip through my fingers.

The pattern I’m vaguely following is the Lazy Daisy Shawlette by Orange Flower, and alas, I can’t afford to buy any more of the fiber at the moment, unless I start ~~pawning~~ selling some of my things.

*Drug addiction is serious stuff, I apologize for making light of it, but what other colorful exaggerations about addictions can be made? Saying it’s like a nice stiff drink on a thirsty day actually makes me sound like an alcoholic (and making light of alcoholism is bad too), saying it’s like having a [insert good poker hand here] when the pot is huge sort of endorses gambling and I hate casinos, saying it’s like a daily mega-hunk of chocolate while under the throes of PMS would alienate a male reader, and I don’t even want to get into the sex-addict analogies… [hee hee anal is in analogies]…addictions of any sort are bad, get help.

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Tagged as ball of yarn, dress dummy, handmade, handspun, knitting, shawl, shawlette, skein, spinning, yellow

January 22, 2013 · 11:16 PM

Sock, you suck

As I was finishing up the second in a pair of socks, I was thinking about how I would write them up on my ravelry page. I was going to be brazen and claim that I was never afflicted with second sock syndrome – in fact, the second usually flies off the needles. This one flew alright, and I was so brazen that I didn’t try it on once…until just now. What insult can you hurl at a sock? It has no mother to wear combat boots, it’s sexless so it can’t go f*ck itself, it has no religion and thus hell isn’t a place it can go… But I want to hurt this second sock, make it feel very low and very bad, but all I could do was rip it out. Now the sock pictured above, in near perfect knitted glory, is its older twin (older by nearly three years)! I was going to call this an UFO, but I figured I could whip it out in a week or so. I knit socks only in the spaces of time that I wouldn’t knit otherwise – they are the perfect little project I can tuck inside a purse and work on while traveling and waiting. I haven’t done much waiting lately, and these were started on metal needles, so I was afraid of the TSA and thus didn’t take them traveling much, so my sock knitting timetable nearly screeched to a halt on this pair. So what happened in the meantime? I think I forgot that my new aforementioned metal needles were a size smaller than my normal ones and that the first sock was an experiment to see if I could go down a size and still use my standard stitch counts. Then I probably ripped out the first sock and started again with four or so more stitches (I still need to count) but by the foot section I could in fact go down to my regular stitch count on the smaller needles, so I forgot the business about the top. At least that’s what I think happened. I can’t look at the pile of kinky ripped yarn anymore, and that’s too bad, the first one fits soooo well, and I can’t wait to wear it…maybe I can sneak it on with one from another pair if my pants are long enough, or I am bold enough…maybe it need not ever have a twin (maybe that was its plan all along and it sabotaged its twin in knitero!)

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Tagged as brown, frustration, knitting, leather couch, project gone bad, ripping, second sock syndrome, socks, wool

January 21, 2013 · 12:01 PM

Dr. King, President Obama

Brilliant statement.

(Not so brilliant job writing it down, but it was in Zuccotti Park, so perhaps the maker was tired from Occupying Wall Street)

Onward, and hopes for real, positive, and radical change in the next four years!

And for a daily dose of fiber, knit yourself an Obama!

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Tagged as 2013, dr. king, inauguration, knitting, Martin Luther King, MLK, Obama, Occupy Wall Street, president

Tag Archives: knitting

Fiber travels in New Mexico, part II

An improved jacket

Not so gawful now, or perhaps just a little less so…

On color and vests

Curse of the redwood roving

Kitchens, not golf

Pears, not bananas

Fiber high

Sock, you suck

Dr. King, President Obama

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