It’s amazing what a week at home and an immovable bout of insomnia/jet lag will do for my crafting productivity. I keep trying to think of this as storing up the crafting for the months to come, because once school starts up again there won’t be much time. (Of course, I also keep thinking of the summer as “vacation time” that makes up for the extra hours I put in during the year, but it really isn’t, seeing as I work 11 months at 60+hours a week and am only actually paid for 10. Oh, the myth of academic “perqs.” But I digress.)

Seeing that it is back-to-school time, I went clothes shopping last week. This meant that I replaced a couple of t-shirts in my collection that needed to be retired. I buy pretty high-quality shirts, though, so it’s never the fabric that gives out first. Almost without exception, an item is retired because there’s some cooking stain in an obvious place. (Yes, I should probably wear an apron. I know.)

I’ve had this idea puttering around in the back of my brain for a while now: I’d like to reclaim some of these items for regular use. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve had a bit of an itch to embroider lately, and it struck me that embroidery might be a way to revitalize some of these clothes, instead of relegating them to home-only use. Last weekend, Branden and I went out looking for supplies:

We got a bunch of seed beads in useful colors, a few bugle beads, and a bunch of rayon thread. (The three shirts that are first in line are over there, on the right.)

Then I sat down and drew out a quick sketch, which I transferred to the shirt using fabric marking pencil, and began stitching in the design. I added some beads for fun, and then shortened the shirt by about 3″ so that it will fall at a slightly different place on my waist. It’s looking a little tired after all it’s been through, but here’s the (almost) finished shirt:

I still have some work to do at the hem, but wanted to wait until the length was right to make sure that the new hem worked with the design. The pattern is intentionally subtle, but it does show up more in person than in photos. The stitch pattern does a great job of distracting from/covering up those nasty oil stains, and the embroidery makes it an extra fun shirt to wear. Here’s a closeup of some of the stitches:

I just love how the shiny rayon makes those leaves pop.

Since that project was so much fun, I started doodling around with some of my weaving yarns on scrap fabric. First came some cheerful flowers:

And then…a sheep!

Rumor has it that there’s also a butterfly on the way:

And who knows what else. The designs are very quick to stitch up, and it’s really fun to play around with sketching on fabric.

Of course, one of the reasons that I don’t do a lot of embroidery is that it’s hard to find things to do with embroidered objects. But looking at the flowers gave me an idea, and when I embroidered the sheep I worked him on a bigger piece of fabric. That piece of fabric became this:

…which I find rather charming. It’s a fully lined project bag,

and it has a circular bottom that’s reinforced with plastic half-rings. They give the base some structure, to make sure that it stays open:

But because they’re only half rings, they can also fold over so that the bag can lay completely flat.

I also put in a drawstring, which I made by cable-plying matching weaving yarns together to make a cord.

Actually, I had originally planned that it would be just a drawstring bag, but then liked how it lay in the tote bag position, and added handles so that it can be used both ways.

The bag turned out to be quite roomy, too. Here it is, with a sweater’s worth of yarn:

Wouldn’t that make the perfect Rhinebeck shopping bag?

I mentioned in the last post that I had picked up some fabric while on Bainbridge Island last week. I really love it, and am excited to sew with it. Garment sewing has been tugging at the back of my mind again lately, but it’s been about 10 years since I sewed with any regularity. Sewing is not like knitting: there is no “frog” where you get back to the beginning and start over if you made a mistake. For that reason, I felt that a little practice was in order.

I have a pretty simple skirt in mind, but I had also fallen in love with the shape of this one when poking around in a boutique clothes shop in Langley, on Whidbey Island. The pieces have a more complicated shape than I was planning to use for the plaid fabric, but it was still a pretty good warm up.

I took some measurements and drew up a quick sketch,

and then whipped up a muslin to check the fit (and felt very virtuous for doing so…it’s sewing’s equivalent of the swatch, except you can’t reuse the yarn. I hate wasting fabric to make a muslin, but it is how you get a good fit).

The muslin wasn’t exciting, so I didn’t take pictures of it, but I do rather like the finished skirt.

My favorite thing about a fluted hem is that you get a fairly fitted hip but get to keep all of the leg room. I didn’t flute this one as strongly as the inspiration piece was fluted, but it’s enough that it never restricts my stride. That’s a key feature in skirt wearability for me, and I have a feeling that this one will be a favorite.

That’s one warm-up item down. I did remember a lot of things along the way, and it’s nice to have a little recent practice under my belt before embarking on a more ambitious plan with the more expensive fabric. (It’s also nice to have a new skirt…) I drew up a new sketch that’s closer to the one I actually want to make with the plaid fabric,

and I did the muslin and started a practice version yesterday. This one is a much simpler A-line cut – with 3 main panels rather than 7 – but it has a waistband and pockets which add quite a bit to the complexity. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to do the welt pockets in the front as I have drawn, or if I’ll put them on the side instead. The welted pockets look a little fancier and would be fun to try since I’ve never done one before, but side pockets can usually carry more stuff. The practice skirt has lined side pockets, and I am quite liking them so far, so we’ll have to see how they hang once the zipper is in. Side pockets do have a tendency to gap, so the welted pockets might be a little more flattering, too. Branden is picking up a zipper on his way home from work tonight, so with any luck we should have a verdict soon!

Just after I got back from PEI, Branden and I hopped on a plane for another trip, this time to Seattle. I was meeting up with some online fiber friends (Twinset Ellen and Jan and Jocelyn among them) for a 4-day workshop with Susanna Hansson on Bohus knitting.

I’ve never tried Bohus before, though I have long admired the subtle color blending that characterizes the sweaters. In addition to knitting at my finest-ever gauge (9.5 sts to the inch, on 000 needles – whee!), it was fun to get acquainted with the technique. A few interesting things that I learned:

1) Purl stitches add texture and can enhance blending of colors in a colorwork pattern. They seem to be used to feather the edges between two color regions in the Bohus knitting designs, as well as to add dimension. Having those little purl bumps showing kind of blurs the edges of the designs, making them softer-looking.

2) Low-contrast color selections make beautiful gradient effects in colorwork knitting. In fairisle and other color knitting techniques, the focus is usually on high contrast color and value combinations. In the Bohus knitting, you’re often working with 5 or more colors, and several of them can be hard to tell apart without very good lighting. On the last day, Susanna showed us her entire collection of Bohus sweaters, destined someday to become a museum exhibit about the Bohus tradition. It was great to see the sweaters in person, and very interesting to see how such subtly different colors can lend depth to the colorwork. How many colors can you see?

I see a very bright pink, a bright red, a maroon, and a purple, all fading into black in that last stripe. Elsewhere in the design, there is a pale orange, and a pale pink, and possibly a few other colors.

The end result is a colorband that is simply luminous, and almost impossible for the camera to capture.

This is one of my favorites, even though I’m not usually much of a pink person. This is another:

Again, it’s color band is a combination of lots of closely related colors. I see a light and a dark green, a very pale green, at least one light blue, a pale and a dark turquoise, and a navy/black, and I think I’m probably missing a few.

Studying how the different colors and values work together was my favorite part of the class (probably no surprise there).

3) Bohus knitting generally has several different design elements, often with a different number of stitches in a pattern repeat. They don’t bother to line them up with each other; motif 1 is not necessarily in register with motif 2 or any other motif in the sweater. Again, very different than fairisle, and I’m taking that as permission from now on. Perhaps it’s because the stitch patterns are so small, but I didn’t find that the lack of symmetry was even noticeable, and things like that usually jump out at me.

Another benefit of seeing the sweaters in person was that we got to feel the yarn. Both the wool and the angora blend are wonderfully soft, but what really sold me on them was seeing how little pilling and obvious wear there has been after decades of use. I’m sure that the sweaters have been cleaned up with a pill shaver from time to time, but there was very little of the unsightly wear that you often get with a fuzzy yarn. These yarns seem to truly bloom, not shed.

Unfortunately, I think that the only way to get the yarn (or the Bohus charts) is to order a sweater kit. Being more of an innovator than a conservationist, I would like to play with the yarn in its own right, and perhaps riff off of the Bohus design, or possibly do something completely different with the same materials (the yarn is wonderful). Susanna is of the opinion that these designs cannot be improved, and that reproduction is the only answer, but I’m not so sure. These designs are definitely beautiful, and I do like them just as they are, but I think that there is also a world of possibility out there that the Bohus designers never got to explore. No art is ever complete; time, fashion, and the mood of the moment send us down some paths while others are left behind. To my mind, there is always more to explore. The difference between a living tradition and a museum collection is the sense that more is possible, that there is more to be discovered. I would love to spend some time dissecting the why’s and wherefores of how these designs work, and then play with figuring out how we might use these same tools in the future. Perhaps that work would not be true Bohus, but it would be knit in the Bohus tradition, which seems like a good thing to me.

In addition to our Bohus adventure, we spent some time on Bainbridge island where we visited Churchmouse yarns and I resisted some beautiful mohair yarn. I did pick up some lovely wool blend fabric while we were on the island, though.

I’ve been feeling the call to dabble in sewing again lately, and this really wanted to be a skirt. It’s a warm up for my long-term goal of sewing with handwoven fabrics, and I’m looking forward to doing some garment sewing again.

We also stopped by Earthues in Ballard, where I bought a healthy collection of natural dye extracts and dyeing assists for future experiments.

No definite plans for those yet, but they should turn into something fun soon.

After the knitting class, Branden and I took off for a few days of quiet time on Lopez island. The cabin we’d reserved turned out to be something of a disaster, so we changed plans and wandered around Whidbey for a few days instead, and had a great time. On the way back into Seattle, we stopped in at my two favorite knitting stores (Fiber Gallery and Weaving Works), and I picked up a couple of sets of needles to try out. As I go to smaller and smaller needles, I’ve been having some problems with my addi lace needles bending, and I’m wondering if carbon fiber might stand up to the abuse a bit better. I’ve never tried square needles, so I picked up some of those, too, just for fun.

And now, here we are back home again. This week will be a chance to catch up on some things around the house, and then next week the school year starts up again. I can’t believe that summer is over already; it feels like it just started! It was fun to get some travel and some fiber time in there, though.

While we were in PEI, we went into several local art galleries and craft shops. I took these photos with my friend’s camera, and didn’t want to hold up the last blog post until I got them from her, but they’re worth a post of their own.

There were many wonderful things made by the artists of PEI, but these stitch paintings by Margaret England really caught my eye.

Aren’t they fabulous? At first, I thought they were photos or even oil paintings, but on closer inspection they turned out to be layers and layers of fabric, with intricate details and additional dimension added using stitches in colored thread. I’ve never seen anything quite like them, and they’re just beautiful. The texture of the stitches gave the images a depth that they wouldn’t otherwise have had, and the intricacy of the work really brought out the details (just look at that owl!) There were so many fun things on the island, but I think that these were my favorites. There are so many things to do with textile art!

Good intentions are not blog posts. We’ve been coming and going and going and coming around here for the past few weeks, and I just haven’t gotten around to posting, much as I thought I would. Let’s fix that, shall we?

First, let’s wander all the way back to the beginning of August. My college roommate and I went on a week-long trip to Prince Edward Island. We’re both bookish, and have a soft spot for the Anne of Green Gables series. Also, I have heard that Canada’s eastern seaboard is beautiful and wanted to check it out.

It’s about a 10 hour drive from here, but we made it up there in one day and back in another, and then spent 4 days in between exploring the island. It’s a beautiful place, quiet and sparsely populated. Lots of views of sea and sky, cute little farmhouses, old barns, and churches everywhere. Unfortunately, I munged up the camera settings and most of my photos turned out really dark, but these should give you a general idea.

Lots of rolling hills:

And beautiful shoreline. Aren’t the colors spectacular?

Lighthouses everywhere (36 on the island alone, I think they said…).

And, of course, Green Gables:

I also managed to find some yarn along the way. This little skein of softness came from the island basketweaver’s collective. I was sorely tempted to buy a basket to put it in, too, after they showed us how they soak and pound island wood into strips to weave the baskets. My cats eat baskets, though, so I held firm on those and went for the yarn instead. It’s a mix of angora, alpaca, and merino, and it’s impossible not to pet.

The island also has two sweater shops that sell machine-knit sweaters made by knitters on the islands or in nearby provinces, using yarns spun on local mills in New Brunswick and on the island.  You might imagine that I found that hard to pass up, especially as the sweaters were reasonably priced, considering the time and work that goes into them. This one followed me home, and I think it’s likely destined to become a favorite.

I found the sweater design instructive, also. I don’t usually wear raglans, because the shoulder shaping makes my top look smaller and my bottom heavier (not what I need). I tried on several other raglans in the shop of similar designs, and none of them worked well for me. The pebbly color texture in this one diminished the lines from the raglan shaping, and the addition of a large collar and buttons made it much more flattering than most of the designs. An interesting lesson in garment design and construction, in addition to a comfy fall sweater.

Of course, the same shop also had the yarn for sale, and I spent a good while dithering over whether to buy a sweater pre-assembled or in parts. In the end, I did both:

For about a fifth of the cost of the sweater, I ended up with a second sweaters’ worth, in shades of green and teal. The design hasn’t quite taken shape yet, but I’m looking forward to knitting with this yarn when it does. Both will be good souvenirs of my first trip to the Maritime provinces, and from the feel of the wool, they’ll last me  good long time. My last sweater of this style was well used when it came to me and then lasted for more than a decade of heavy use. Hopefully these will have similarly long lives.

That’s trip one (of two) in a nutshell. I still need to collect some photos from the second trip, so we’ll catch up on that in a second post soon.