Suzann’s Textilefusion

To practice our earthen brick-laying and plastering techniques, we built a well-house. Our rock foundation, about 5 x 7 feet on the inside, rests on top of a concrete foundation that we dug by hand.

The first layer of earthen block is always the hardest to lay, because you have to line up and level each block. It’s not so easy to do when your foundation was made by amateur stone masons. That would be me, my nephew Bobby, my daughter Eva, and her friend, Alex.

We prevailed in the end, and built the walls up to the point where we wanted an arch-shaped opening. The arch form is two plywood semicircles. The most important thing to remember about an arch form is to put shims under it. Don’t forget.

Charles led the arch construction and all the crew had a turn mortaring in an arch block. They were reluctant to put their faces in the photo, so their t-shirts immortalized here in the picture of the finished arch.

Shaping and then laying blocks around the arch was a challenge. But again we prevailed. We put up the first of several plaster layers. Next week my cousin Jerry will pour a bond-beam (reinforced concrete) on top of the walls, and then he’ll build the well-house a roof.

As all this was going on, welding guys were putting up our house roof. The frame made it feel so much more like a house. A short week later, the roof was finished. It was Jerry’s idea to build the roof first, so we could work in the shade and so our earthen walls would be protected from rain.

We moved in as soon as it was done—you know, our water jug, our lawn-chairs, and the hundreds of bricks we made earlier in the week. Re-stacking the many 40-pound bricks wore us out in a hurry.

Our big moment came last Friday afternoon, when we laid the first earthen block on the house. Minutes later, the new roof came in handy during a downpour that lasted, oh, about four minutes.

My Dad and our dog, Firewheel, enjoyed dry seating as the rain dripped from the roof.

My first impressions of Manchester, New Hampshire, earlier this month were: the wonderful smell of pine mulch, red brick buildings, street names that reminded me of American History class, and pretty little red peppers growing into the fences along the sidewalk. Oh, and an unusually large number of ladies wearing crocheted clothing.

The Knit and Crochet Show was in town! It started on Wednesday morning with the Crochet Guild of America Professional Development Day. I enjoyed listening to Kristen Ohmdahl and Lily Chin speak about their lives and careers as authors and teachers.

The same afternoon, I went to work, conducting three consecutive round-table discussions of “A Book’s Journey, from Idea to Book-Signings.” Our table was full and overflowing for all three sessions, so I’m expecting to see a bunch of new authors publishing their crochet books in the next couple of years.

When they could get a word in edgewise, people asked great questions. I was pleased to note a healthy interest in publicity. Nowadays it’s very, very important that authors be involved in the publicity for their own books.

But it wasn’t all work for me. The next day I took a class for the first time in ages. Yay! Here’s my class sample. I wrote more about the workshop and my teacher, Máire Treanor, at my other blog, Curious and Crafty Readers.

The convention hotel was in downtown Manchester, so we could walk to all kinds of shops and restaurants. My favorite was Lala’s Hungarian pastry shop and cafe. Their most unusual item was sour cherry soup, which was cherries in a sweet-tart yogurty sauce, served cold. The stuffed kohlrabi leaves in dill sauce were mouth-wateringly good. I’ll go back just for the pastry and coffee.

I hope the Knit and Crochet Show will be in Manchester again someday.

We had a good rain yesterday afternoon. A power line broke during the storm, which left us without power for about three hours.

Eva was crocheting a gift for a friend who is moving away. She did not let a little power outage stop her work. Here she is, crocheting by flashlight.

Luckily, our slab was poured the day before! The weather has been so hot, the contractor spread hay all over the fresh concrete, and we have to water it a couple of times a day. The rain watered it yesterday!

Those heavy stem walls you see in the picture are going to support compressed earthen blocks which we will make with a totally fabulous machine manufactured by AECT of San Antonio, Texas.

We had to have a concrete pump for this last concrete pour. That pump was a thing of beauty. Mr. Hammer, the owner and operator, used a remote control device to move the pump around. When he raised it up over the trees and moved it over our slab, it looked like a slow and graceful mechanical ballet dance. Gorgeous! In this picture, the concrete truck is dumping concrete into the pump.

This prickly pear cactus, which grows on our new place, is the native home of the cochineal beetle. The rain made the bugs’ webby homes a little soggy. Usually they are pure white, but the wetness has made the beautiful bluish red show through. You can probably see the color better in the close up, below.

Cochineal revolutionized the dyeing industry in Europe a few hundred years ago. The tiny beetles made the best red dye ever, until chemical dyes came along.

Knitters, always remember that duplicate stitch is an alternative for adding small areas of color to your projects! Also, you can use duplicate stitch to customize store-bought sweaters.

Essentially, you thread a needle with your yarn and embroider over the knit stitches that are already there, duplicating their shape as you go.

I designed and embroidered this ladybug on a purchased cardigan many years ago. Both my girls have outgrown it now. Before putting it away, I wanted to show it off. I used embroidery floss to do the duplicate stitch. It thickens the fabric a little, so I prefer to use it fairly sparingly.

This pattern was published under the title “Ladybug, Fly Away Home!” in Wearable Crafts (Vol. 3, No. 4, p. 31, August 1993).

Here’s looping of a different kind. These are pipes for our under-floor heating system. The pipes run into and out of a manifold that is attached to a pump and eventually to its own water heater. So we’ll have warm feet in winter. Yay!

First my Dad, Eva, and I laid in the insulation boards and duct-taped them all. Then my brother Van and I installed the pipes. He studied the instructions very carefully so our installation went smoothly. The people at Radiantec (where we bought the system) are very helpful and patient with their do-it-yourself customers.

In a few days all this will be covered by concrete, and we’ll be ready for the roof.

Here’s a little coaster knitted in the mosaic technique, which I call Dotty Knitting. The whole thing is about 4 x 4.5 inches. It needs blocking, but I couldn’t wait to share it because it’s so cute!

Once you know how, it’s pretty easy to chart a picture or fancy motif in the mosaic knitting style. And then away you go, knitting a house. If only building a house were as easy, I’m sure most of us knitters could have knitted several good-sized houses by now.

Speaking of houses, here is a weld plate. My foot is in the picture to give you an idea of scale. It is a big, burly weld plate. Weld plates are embedded in the foundation of a building. Our house will have a metal roof, supported by pipes which will be welded to these weld plates.

The original weld plates were too wimpy, according to my cousin Jerry, who is advising us as we build the house. The mere sight of my foot would have sent them scuttling away in fright, on their too-short and skinny little hooks. Only they didn’t even have real hooks, but L-shaped rods instead. Pah. We showed them.

While heavy machinery and beefy weld plates dominate one part of our lot, this interesting flower is growing on another. It’s a milkweed called Antelope Horns.

Who loves to eat milkweed?

Monarch caterpillars!

I hope some Monarch Butterfly momma will lay her eggs on our Antelope Horns someday.

I hit a snag with the doily I was making for our Ravelry Irish Crochet Lovers crochet along. The last round of the doily pulled it up into a shallow bowl shape.

A simple truth of crocheting is that if it doesn’t lie flat as you’re making it, it will give you trouble for ever after. You can starch, you can press, you can think pure thoughts, you can hope that the next round will compensate and pull it flat, but the bowl shaped doily will be true to its nature. In other words, not flat.

So I’m going to pull out that last round and redo it. Then it will be time to start adding the motifs.

And now, on to doily wonderfulness, as promised in the title of this post!

Irish Crochet Lovers of North America, listen up!

Maire Treanor, the author of Clones Lace: The Story and Patterns of an Irish Crochet, will be teaching two Irish Crochet classes at the annual Knit and Crochet Show and educational event in Manchester, New Hampshire, July 7-10, 2010.

The titles are: “Beginners Clones Lace” and “Be Creative with Clones Lace.” Find them under 6-hour classes at the link above. The class sample of the first class is a small doily.

If you want to learn about Irish Crochet Lace from a modern-day Irish Crochet master, this is your chance. She will also be teaching at Lacis in California, and in Minnesota. I’ll try to find details of these other workshops and share them.

Maire’s book is available from Country Yarns (once you get there, scroll down a little).

It’s been a long time since I used the “HouseBuilding” category on a post. Our new house was delayed for one reason and then another since about 2006. But now we are back on track. Hurray!

The power company came out a couple of weeks ago and installed poles and power lines to our place. The poles make our driveway look more real, somehow–like an actual road. It’s an amazing shift in perspective, and a tangible indication of progress.

“Look at the copper ground wires glistening in the setting sun,” I said dreamily, as we walk down the driveway one evening.

My daughter laughed. “Mom, you’re the only person I know who would get so excited about electrical poles.”

Power to us!

And now the flower. Unbeknownst to me, after enlarging a roadside trench to keep rainwater from overflowing into our yard and under our house, Charles planted “North Texas Wildflower Mix” in the disturbed earth.

What a surprise it was this spring to find poppies, cornflowers, scarlet flax, baby blue eyes, and sandwort growing along the ditch. We love the red poppies, but this pink and white poppy was our favorite. It makes me want to copy it in crochet!

I was excited to see monk’s cloth in Walmart! It’s like the cloth that cross-stitchers use, with a very regular, square weave that is easy to see and easy to stitch into. “I can crochet right into the edge!” I said.

So I planned a square cloth shawl with a crocheted floral trim. I made the flowery bits, which would be joined as I crocheted along.

Luckily I thought to wash the cloth first. It shrank quite a bit. It also fluffed up a little, and a flaw that I found after getting the fabric home resolved itself and I can’t even see it now.

The decorative stitching added some interest to the stark whiteness of the cloth. And also, it was fun! I love decorative stitches, and it’s a good thing, because it took a long time to stitch across each side.

After zig-zag stitching around the cut edges, I folded the edges under and crocheted (*sc, sk 1 space in the fabric, ch 1*, repeat bet *s) all around the square.

Before starting the floral trim, I tried it on.

Oh no.

It looked like I was wearing a tablecloth.

I folded it this way. No joy. I folded it another way. Still no good. I squinted my eyes just so. Nope. I put it away for a day or two.

That did not help. It still looked like a tablecloth, and there’s nothing sillier than a plump, stern-looking, middle-aged lady wearing a tablecloth. Even if it has a pretty crocheted trim.

Well, now we have a new tablecloth.

But what about my shawl? I found some pretty fabric to match the flowery pieces I already crocheted. It’s not the kind of fabric you can easily crochet into, but I figured out a solution to that problem, and will report on it later.

Our Irish Crochet Lovers group over at Ravelry is doing an Irish Crochet Doily Crochet-Along through March. We’re mostly working on different doilies, since we have some beginners and some experts and some in-between.

I chose a plate doily from a 1911 book called Irish Crochet Lace (Revised) by Sara Hadley. You can download it free from Antique Pattern Library.

This project is definitely for confident crocheters. Let’s just say the instructions are not up to the standards of the twenty-first century. Luckily the photos are clear enough that one can count.

It has two rounds of flowers around this center, with sixteen traditional Irish Crochet roses and sixteen flat flowers. It’s the perfect portable project!

My Irish Crochet sample is growing, slowly but surely. I had to redo some sections of the background several times before I was pleased with it. See the pink line in the photo? It shows, more-or-less, the direction of the very simple background mesh I am crocheting between the motifs.

Inside the turquoise circle at the right, you can see how the background isn’t quite level with the corresponding rows elsewhere in the sample. That’s one section I will pull out and redo. Keeping rows even and level will get easier with practice.

One of my favorite tricks is to crochet a good-sized sample of the background stitch. It helps me get used to the stitch pattern for one thing. Also, I can use the sample to help me visualize how the ground will meet the motifs.

Here’s a photo of the background sample lying on top of the actual piece. In the pink circle the sample lines up with the background I have already crocheted. In the turquoise circle, you can see how the stitches might meet up with the flower motif. I will use this as a guide to help me place the stitches when I get to that point.

Speaking of Irish Crochet, I have been working on some class proposals for the Knit and Crochet Show in July 2010. One of the classes is about Irish Crochet. Wish me luck!