Suzann’s Textilefusion

When someone mentions the name “Interweave,” I think of fine publications about fiber and textiles.

It’s a prestigious name!

So you can imagine how very excited I am to be teaching for Interweave Knitting Lab New England, October 4-7, 2012 in Manchester, NH!

I’m leading several workshops that are full of information. Workshop participants will see lots of samples and practice the techniques as well.

• Color, Texture, and Structure with the Elusive Slip Stitch (all day, October 4)
• Color Composure (all day, October 5)
• Knit Mosaic Patterns and Chart Your Own (morning, October 6)
• Seamless Argyles in the Round (afternoon, October 6)

I’m also giving a talk, illustrated with a colorful slide show, that shows how “TextileFusion” began and has developed over the last nearly 20 years:

• TextileFusion: A Knitting of Art (evening, October 4)

For more information, please visit Interweave Knitting Lab New England at http://www.cvent.com/d/7cqpz4. I hope to see you there!

On Tuesday evening, at the girls’ piano lesson, I sewed the last button onto my Quilting Ladies’ Group Valentine’s Day Quilt. I tried to sew more buttons on, but when I put them tentatively on the quilt, the quilt said, “Enough already!” Usually, I can find a place to tuck in one more, but all my attempts were rejected.

So it was finished! Yay!

This quilt combines old and new and bits and pieces that will remind me of friends and fun times. Like this pretty quilted heart will always make me think of Peggy.

The yellowy flower is a Twirl Center Rose from Crochet Garden.

These yellow and white applique daisies are from my mother-in-law’s sewing collection. She was a lovely lady named Mary Eugenia Frederick. She went by ‘Gene,” but we thought Eugenia was a beautiful middle name for our younger daughter.

Rachel made the fabric flower with the red center. Our older daughters like to go adventuring together and talk about music. Gail Hughes made the green buttons that serve as leaves for Rachel’s flower.

Three pink heart buttons from Hazel are surrounded by flowers from Crochet Garden: Begonia (lower left), Turkestani Star with a button from Gail Hughes, and Any Color Pinks at the upper right.

For Donna’s quilt, she asked us each to sign a piece of fabric, which she incorporated in to her quilt. The spool charm is from Donna.

This heart, cut out of an antique quilt, is from Mindy. Both green buttons and the crystal topped button on the heart are by Gail Hughes. Hazel’s buttons are the red heart-shaped ones hidden next to the big heart.

This quilt is full of love!

Polymer clay buttons are so much fun to make! They’re colorful and pretty. They’re machine-washable and dryable. Button-lover that I am, I have enjoyed making these little beauties since the 1980s. The buttons started accumulating. How could I display all those buttons? A button cloth!

Since there were so many colors of buttons, I needed a colorful button cloth. Borrowing a color-meandering technique from quilter Jinny Beyer, I arranged the hues of the rainbow in different shades and tints.

Using the wonderful Ultimate Sweater Machine and yarns from my collection, I knitted blocks of color, alternating with cream and white, and with black and gray at the beginning and end of each strip. I used the join-as-you-knit method to add new strips of color blocks.

After blocking the knitting, I added quilt batting and fabric backing. Then I quilted it and added binding all around.

Now to sew buttons onto the cloth! It took a long time to work through my backlog of buttons. After that, whenever I made a new button style or color-way, I sewed a sample onto the cloth right away.

It’s such a fun piece to show. I always take it to my button workshops. People are surprised to learn that all the colors are the colors of the clay—no paint!

Sock season is almost at an end in our part of Texas. Even so, it was cool enough this morning to wear my latest handmade pair while out running errands and grocery shopping with my mom. After that, I had to change to flip-flops.

The yarn is Coats & Clark Heart and Sole with Aloe. My knitting seems to go very fast with this yarn. It also feels very nice on my feet. Maybe the aloe is responsible. The colorway: Green Envy. Eva has already succumbed to the green envy. She ordered a pair of her very own for her next birthday.

The bluebonnets are in our front yard. It’s such a pleasure to go outside these days.

What do you think of this neat, mitered corner?

My quilting friend Peggy showed me how to sew a continuous binding on a quilt, which miters on the topside and underside of each corner. Thanks, Peggy!

This is my first try, and it’s much quicker than my old binding method. It went pretty well, though I may not show you every single corner up close and personal. Peggy prefers a narrow binding, but I like mine to be wide enough to frame the wall hanging.

After sewing on, taking off, rearranging, and resewing several motifs, the lower right corner of my Valentine quilt may be finished.

Ella’s hand hovered over the buttons, ready to sort. From Eva’s position in the armchair, she could oversee our work while texting, facebooking, and doing homework. I sat on the floor with a box of crocheted flowers. It was time to embellish.

Choosing embellishment is my favorite part of making any wallhanging, because of the sheer potential and unpredictability. I also love having my daughters’ advice, because they help me see things differently.

For instance, I imagined this Valentine’s quilt as a dream in pink, red, and cream. Then I found the applique daisies inherited from my mother-in-law. They had yellow centers.

“Yellow?!” I thought at first. A few minutes later, I was thinking, “Hmm. Yellow. Ah, yes.”

We took great care selecting yellow buttons. Some were way too bright, some were too big (but tucking them under the edge of a flower reduced their impact), a few were just right. We added crocheted flowers with yellow in them. Suddenly the quilt took on a spring-like, gardenish feel, unlike the straight-up Valentine-colors theme I had envisioned.

Ella supplied me with many pink and light pink buttons to surround the heart, and red and purplish buttons to hide in the background. She found every single red sparkly button in the pile.

“Mom, it needs some green,” said Eva from on high.

Ella got busy finding green buttons and I looked for crocheted leaves.

The flowers, leaves, and buttons cascaded from top left to lower right, looking like a pretty garland. Yes, they were pretty, but kind of dull, just slashing through at an angle like that.

Ella, inspired by all the buttons, ran off to find some fabric to make a quilt of her own. I searched for an element to counterbalance the diagonal garland, rushing across the face of the quilt.

“Eva, what do you think of this pomagranate?” I asked.

“It sure is big,” she said.

I took it off. “Well, when you take the pomegranate away, the quilt looks all empty and sad,” said Eva.

I put it back on. “That’s better,” said Eva.

This year, Valentine’s Day fell on Tuesday, which is the day our weekly quilting/crafting group meets. To celebrate, we were all to make a small quilt, using embellishments or other supplies from every one in the group.

One member made fabric flowers for everyone. Others shared crafty charms and Valentine buttons. Two ladies gave us all little quilted hearts. My contribution was a collection of beads, buttons, and a bit of ribbon for each person.

I decided to make my usual TextileFusion-style quilt, so the first step was to knit some fabric for the quilt top. A few hours at my trusty Ultimate Sweater Machine resulted in this length of knitted fabric in pinks, creams, and reds. All the yarn is from stash—gotta love that!!

The first photo shows the fabric already stabilized with fusible interfacing. Then I cut it up and pinned the pieces on to a fabric foundation. Since the foundation fabric doesn’t show in the finished piece, I used some leftover fabric that has been lying around for years.

Here it is, all pinned and ready to sew.

I zig-zagged between each and every cut edge, sometimes twice. The zig catches the edge of one cut piece, and the zag catches the edge of the piece next to the first cut piece. At the same time, they are both attached to the foundation fabric.

It takes a while, and it’s kind of messy because the cut knitting sheds little bits of yarn. Finally, all the pieces were attached to each other and the foundation. I added rickrack to the quilt top.

Next time, my favorite part of the process: choosing embellishments!

Ella asked me to knit her a pair of socks. “Blue, please,” she said, very sweetly. She preferred a turquoise hue.

We already had the yarn: Patons Stretch Socks in colorway “Kelp.” The socks were finished in time for her birthday.

Since then, I finished another pair for myself in colorway “Plum.”

Here we are, modelling our hand-knit socks. Our feet are almost the same size, but hers are only nine years old.

I will soon have the smallest feet in the family. Yay! They won’t be able to borrow my sneakers anymore!

Pennsylvania has a great online resource called the Access Pennsylvania Digital Repository, where you can find the actual pages of old newspapers, among other things. The best part is that you can search for specific words in these old newspapers. Amazing!

I was searching for biographical information about an old-time crochet designer, when this war-time ad appeared on the search list.

In the April 27, 1944 edition of The Ambler Gazette, National Union Radio Corporation of Lansdale, Pennsylvania, offered “Good Money for Girls and Women” for “Light, Clean, Easy, Interesting, and Essential Work.”

Here’s my favorite part:

If you can sew, crochet or knit, you can learn to assemble radio tubes. It’s easy but a skill which will always be valuable to you. The tubes you help us make may save the life of some boy you know who has gone to war.

Employers of today should take notice! Knitting, crocheting, and sewing are skills that prepare people to save lives.

Professor Wolfgang Michael was an expert on Reformation-era German theater. He taught at The University of Texas at Austin, where he also directed German language plays. I acted in several of his plays in the early 1980s. It was fun!

Dr. Michael wore Birkenstock sandals. No surprise there. He was a Bohemian academic. If he hadn’t worn them, we might have been concerned.

My friend Sheryl from Dallas is a professional in the world of finance and a great knitter. During a visit to Dallas in the early 1990s, I was truly surprised to see Sheryl wearing Birkenstock sandals. She said something like, “If I’m going to knit socks, I want to show them off!”

That sounded like a perfectly good reason to me.

Since this is to be my year for knitting socks, I asked for some Birkenstocks last Christmas. I like them a lot. Here are my Christmas sandals and my newly-finished socks. The yarn is Patons Stretch Socks (41% cotton, 39% wool, 13% nylon, 7% elastic) in colorway “Sugar.”

More socks are on the needles.