10/31/2005
I hope everyone has a safe and Happy Halloween!
We attended a great party on Saturday evening and have another to attend this evening. Though tonight’s is the NANOWRIMO kick-off party for the local NANO-ites. I’ve met a couple of the people already and I’m not sure I will be fitting in at all at tonight’s soiree. The local people seem to mostly be undergrads at CSU and at least one of the ones I’ve met already is a bit full of herself and lacking in social ettiquette. Plus, I’m not a fictional writer so there is little in common to bridge that gap in age and life-experience. That said it is open to SO’s as it’s a social gathering until Midnight when the NANO-ites will write their first 100 words together. So, perhaps I’ll be able to converse with the non-writers in attendance. I’ll be sure to have a sock in my purse so I have something to occupy myself if it gets too boring for me.
It seems Monday’s are not the days for me to have Internet access… This is the first I’ve had reliable access today since I returned from water aerobics this morning. I wonder how long Comcast is going to be doing this “upgrade” - grrrr! I’ll have a photo tomorrow of the key pieces of our costumes and see if you all can guess what we were. Stay tuned…
10/28/2005
I’m taking a page from Melanie as far as holiday knitting goes. Well, sorta. These were all in the queue before this post was made, but her post kind of spurred me on…
The big green thing is what I hope will be a slightly fluted rectangular felt basket with perhaps a slight turn over at the top. That said, I just flew by the seat of my pants on it without doing any swatch felting. But, I figured it isn’t a high science sort of thing. It’s three skeins of Lamb’s Pride Worsted knit doubled. If it turns out I’ll fine tune and write up a pattern probably. I’m hoping it will be roughly the right size for holding holiday cards as they arrive, but it isn’t for me. If it turns out as planned upon felting it will also be acting as a gift basket for one of the recipents of DH’s homemade cheese and liqueurs. See, I just designed the labels and occassionally had to remove the cheese from the brine and put it into the cheese fridge. But, other than that I’ve had no hand in it. So for family at least I want to contribute something handmade as well.
On the right, the peacock and brown huge thing is a single soled Fiber Trends Clog in the pre-felted state. I put one of my size 9 shoes in the shot for scale. Look how huge that slipper is! LOL! I can actually stick it on my head with my face peaking out the area for the seam in the middle of the sole. It would almost make a really cute hat/hood thing if it weren’t for the nipple-like toe sticking up out of your head, LOL! (okay, I come from a wierd family where we try a lot of things on our head if it looks like it’ll fit - sue me!)
I have the other sole completed and on the needle up at the top. But, I haven’t decided if I want to attach that one or just do the top part of the second one and do the soles later. See, the soles are definitely NOT television or movie watching WIPs with all the short rows and such in there. But, part of me wants to finish one and felt it and make sure I made the right size. See, my sister has size 11 feet, so I made the man’s medium, but I’ve since seen at least one post about this pattern with Lamb’s Pride and the need to go down a size on the pattern. But, won’t the clogs match better if they are felted together? And, if I did do the wrong size, what am I going to do with only one?? It would be foolish.
Oh, and the observant out there will notice that the sole on the needles is not attached to a double worsted yarn, but is instead being knit from a bulky yarn. I’m tempting fate here. I didn’t swatch and felt yet again and made a somewhat drastic yarn substitution. So, I may have two strikes against me on this one. That said, those two parts were both knit last Saturday. So, it isn’t like I’m thowing out a ton of time if things don’t work out.
The LYS didn’t have any brown Lamb’s Pride and that is pretty much their only worsted weight felting priced yarn so I went with this. It’s Patons some or other and is 100% wool. I don’t trust Knit Pick’s colors online or in thier catalog enough to pick out the proper turqoise/teal/peacock color I know my sister will like and I knew Persian Peacock or whatever it is called from Brown Sheep was going to be perfect. But, I think I shall be placing my first order with Knit Picks next week and will be sure to include a Wool of the Andes color card in that order in case I need to knit another pair of felted clogs for her. I’m a Knit Picks virgin, can you believe that???? Shocking, isn’t it????
I hope everyone has safe and enjoyable Halloween festivities this weekend!
10/27/2005
Thank you all! You are sooo kind and loving!
This week has just been a bad one.
That said, I did manage to get a decent Internet connection yesterday and updated the Spinning Gallery. It includes the washed and blocked Alpaca yarns, plus my largest skein I’ve spun so far that I spun at the end of last week. I’m giving you a sneak peak here, but I’m pretty sure the recipient of this hank of yarn reads this blog so I’ve altered the photo to keep part of it secret…
It’s 300-yds 100% wool 2-ply yarn. I won’t tell you the color (though if you don’t know me in real life you are safe to go look at the 2-ply yarns in the Spinning Gallery to see it unobscured). This is by far my best yarn to date. I *love* it and am so happy to have a nice yardage like that. I like it so much part of me wants to keep it. But, the recipient is much more fond of this color than I am so I know it is going to a loving home and will become some beautiful gloves or mitterns or a hat or a scarf or anything else you can make with 300 yds of sock-weight yarn.
This also marks my first completed holiday gift so far. There are several in progress - grandma’s scarf (I haven’t touched it in over a week), grandpa’s hat has the yarn spun, a felted basket for gifting DH’s cheese and liqueurs (I did the labels for those), felted slippers for my sister and last night we bought some heavy weight cotton canvas in various prints to sew small tote bags for gifting cheese and liqueur to others.
10/26/2005
I haven’t made a stitch or spun an inch…
Perhaps that is why every little thing going wrong puts me into a huge downward spiral??? I’m kind of drowning right now, excuse me…
10/25/2005
I was about 6 and staying with grandmother in town while my mom went to yet another doctor appointment for her rapidly deteriorating vision that remained at the time. A friend of my grandmother’s from her church was having a garage sale. I was enthralled with the six tea cups and saucers and their matching 8 or 9 squared plates. I just loved the sketch-like quality of the floral design and how it looked as though each cup had been hand watercolored in certain spots, but the sketch allowed to remain pure in areas.
As I grew older and became a rabid fan of Anne of Green Gables I was quite enamored with “fine china” and “raspberry cordial” and afternoon teas complete with white gloves and cakes and finger sandwiches. However, my mom was more of a mug sort of person. Even her wedding china was sturdy and classic, but not elegant or feminine. Fluted edges and floral patterns were just not her style. So, I secretly lusted after such things.
Imagine my surprise when twenty years after admiring that incomplete, yet respectable in number, set of china to be opening a box that my grandparents hand delivered to Colorado from Minnesota as part of our wedding gift! It was a lovely surprise and a forgotten memory so was really two surprises in one.
I love that set and DH loves having formal teas, though he much prefers his plain white dinnerware or his manly Denby cups when we take tea. The floral pattern is a bit too much for him. So, these long loved china cups and saucers and little plates sit in my hutch gathering dust. Well, I decided it was time to blow off that dust and use them. Well, actually I’ll hand wash them lovingly before using them.
So, enter the idea of an old fashioned afternoon tea with dainty little cookies, scones (perhaps crumpets if I’m feeling lucky) with homemade rose hip jelly and lemon curd, watercress sandwiches, chicken salad sandwiches, and a selection of fine teas to choose from. All the while, surrounded by the trimmings of the holiday season! Thus the idea of what I hope will become an annual gathering of the SnB gals enjoying food, fellowship, and fibery fun during the rush of the holiday season.
Once I had the idea I had to come up with invitations that fit with the festivities. I wanted to get the invites out early before people’s holiday calendars got too full. Since they were going out early I didn’t want to overwhelm anyone with the nearness of the holiday season by making the invites too holiday-like. Then, the idea came to me. I could make them an invitation and a gift in one! I could them all fine art prints with the theme of tea and knitting!
I went with the cliche of knitting tea and etched a drypoint plate of my favorite girly china tea cup and saucer with a small hank of hand spun yarn and single knitting needle. I wanted to capture the true look of the floral pattern and wanted some color on the invites so I opted to make prints that must pass through the press twice. So, first the papers were passed through the press with a monotype plate. This is a flat plate to which color has been laid down like a painting, but in mirror. It’s a planographic printing process. Each printing you must repaint the plate. This results in only one print, hence the “mono” in the name. You can make similar prints, but they are each unique. So the color was laid down using them monotype process. Next was to add the details. This was done with a drypoint plate in which the design was manually scratched, then the plate is inked fully and the ink removed from the surface so it is only in the scratched lines. Then the monotype printed paper and the inked drypoint plate took a second pass through the press. The drypoint printing is an intaglio process.
Due to the strenuous inking process and the material required to be able to hand scratch the plate, drypoint plates usually can only produce about 20 prints. The plate degrades with each pass so beyond 20 the prints just are of satisfactory quality. If less then 20 prints are pulled from a plate, the plate is destroyed by marking a line through the design so that no further prints can be made.
So, the invites were delivered last Monday evening and everyone received theirs. I figure now I can show you all.
I was able to pull 8 prints from these plates. I needed 6 for the invites and have two remaining. That is only 2 prints from a small run of prints that are available to the general public. The 6th print of the run is currently available on Ebay, along with another limted edition print that celebrates autumn.
