Suzann’s Textilefusion

Through an unforeseen scheduling conflict, I went to the Taos Wool Festival last week without my family. Luckily for me, a friend came along instead. We had a great time!

I taught two classes, which were pleasant as usual. Five people joined me for “Color Knitting Techniques.” “Crocheted Oak and Maple Leaves” was smaller, but just as good.

We spent Saturday morning at the market, where colors, textures, and eccentric clothing surrounded us. This wall of yarn was the first thing we saw of the market, and we had to take pictures. I’m glad we did, because the vendor later closed the tent flap against impending rain. The yarn is very thick with curly locks of mohair (?) spun into it—”fiber-spun” if memory serves—and it is meant for embellishment.

I bought some Navajo-churro rug wool from Liesel Orend, who is a fabulous colorist and weaver. The yarn is for a rug I plan to knit for next year’s Home Accessories contest.

And speaking of the contest, my Pansy Poncho won a red ribbon (second place) in the “Capes, Ponchos, and Ruanas” division of the Garment contest. Yippee!

1984

This pretty pottery basket is signed “P. Murray” and dated 1984. I bought it because it had the look of thread crochet. I think Ms. Murray pressed a piece of crochet into the clay before she shaped it into a basket.

Sunnydaze, one of the Ravelry members of Crochet Bouquet Along, is also a potter. She wrote:

I do pottery and I am always trying to imprint my clay with live ferns. It usually works but it needs to be quite deep into the clay as by the time it is fired and glazed, you can’t always see the fern that well. I also can only use one fern at a time as they usually break after one use BUT a crocheted fern in acrylic yarn won’t!!!” I’m eager to see her crocheted fern pottery!

1987

Just a few years after I bought the little basket, my future in-laws threw an engagement party for my (now) husband and me. It was a nice thing to do for us, and I knitted my mother-in-law this doily as a thank-you gift.

It is the Azalea pattern from Marianne Kinzel’s First (or Second) Book of Modern Lace Knitting. I don’t have the books here, so I’m not absolutely positive. Both books have beautiful lace patterns for tablecloths, doilies, antimacassars, and so on. It’s made of 100% linen.

I ran across it recently, as we were cleaning out their house. It has come back to me after all this time.

It was a riot of green and gold last Friday night at Dublin’s homecoming football game. Girls and boys of all ages wore gorgeous mums. One girl had a crocheted mum. Yes, it was Eva!

I suggested a homecoming corsage with a crocheted mum as one of the projects in Crochet Bouquet. After a short but meaningful silence, my editor, Linda Kopp, said, “I think that’s too regional.”

“Really?” I said in a shocked tone.

Linda asked around the office. Her colleagues from New York and California said, “Huh?” Apparently, wearing big, fancy, colorful, crazy, and expensive flowers to a football game is a southern thing. Maybe only a Texas thing?

But I persevered! Instructions for how to make your own homecoming mum appear on my other blog, Curious and Crafty Readers.

If you go truly crazy buying ribbon, you might spend only half as much as you would if you bought a ready-made homecoming mum. Otherwise, I think you will save about 2/3 of the ready-made price. Also, you don’t have to crochet the flower—you can substitute a silk mum.

The Austin Knitter’s and Crocheter’s Guild started in 1983, with a few people meeting at local libraries. I was one of them!

Those knitters and crocheters are still meeting after all these years on the first Saturday of every month, 2:00-4:00 p.m., at the Howson Branch Library at 2500 Exposition Blvd in Austin.

Last Saturday, I went to a meeting for the first time in about 12 years. We started with a mini-reunion of some of the people who had been with the Guild since the beginning. I reintroduced them
to Eva, who was just a baby the last time they saw her. They met five-year-old Ella for the first time.

After guild business and show-and-tell, I talked about Crochet Bouquet, and signed copies. Ella took these pictures of Crochet Bouquet projects and the meeting. That’s me in profile.

It was great to see several people who were at those early meetings. It was great to see so many new people, too! Members work on their own projects, as well as projects for charity. They inform and inspire each other.

If you’re in Austin on a first Saturday afternoon, please go to the meeting. They welcome visitors.

Like my fellow knitters and crocheters on Ravelry, I have a Flickr account to host the photos that I post to Ravelry. The following story probably wouldn’t have happened without Ravelry and Flickr. Thank you to them!

The Café Rouge is a nice place to eat on Eccleshall Road in Sheffield, England. I used to meet my US-American friends there. I always ordered iced water to drink, and loved how they served the water in a faceted glass with a slice of lemon and black straw.

In fact, I loved it so much I made a wall hanging about it, called Iced Water at the Cafe Rouge.

Well, imagine how happy I was when Schmap, a collection of illustrated online maps that shows stuff to do and places to go in Sheffield and many other cities in the world, asked to feature my wall hanging with the Cafe Rouge entry! Naturally, I said yes.

You can see the Schmap web page here.

In the earliest days of my blog, I posted some step-by-step photos of Iced Water at the Café Rouge. If you would like to see them, go to my sidebar, find the “Archives,” click March 2005, and read the posts from March 6 (two of them on that day), March 11, and March 16, 2005.

I’m re-crocheting a poncho with a border of pansies, using Plain & Fancy Sheep & Wool Company’s yarn. It stretched a lot when I blocked it the first time. I didn’t like the finished garment. I redesigned it. The second time around, it required more yarn. The unraveled yarn was already blocked, so I figured I would have to stretch the new yarn before using it.

Wool Winder commented on an earlier post about the poncho, “I have no idea how you are going to stretch the yarn before you crochet with it. This should be interesting, indeed.”

Yes, interesting indeed, because I had now idea how I was going to stretch the yarn, either.

After much procrastination, I decided to get on with it. Today was the day. I thought, ‘Okay, since the original yarn was steam-blocked while it was still crocheted, I should probably steam block the new yarn.’ I dampened the hanks and steamed them with my iron. So far so good.

But how would I stretch it out and keep it stretched long enough to dry? I put away the iron and collapsed the ironing board. Then I blinked. I pulled the ironing board back up. And collapsed it again. Hmmm!

I up-ended the ironing board, looped the yarn around the foot and the ironing surface. The moment of reckoning was upon us (me and the yarn, you know). Would the yarn stretch far enough to allow the ironing board to “catch” and hold?

It did! You can see the yarn stretching contraption in the photo above.

Progress so far: pansy trim finished except for darning in some ends; three rounds of poncho complete. It’s a start!

We went out to check on some wild pig bones, which lie in a culvert down the dirt road from our house. We hoped they were bleached and clean enough for us to take home and add to Ella’s collection.

Too bad–they still had fur and other stuff attached to them. Recent rains have partially buried the rib cage and apparently washed the skull away. They are fossils in the making.

Undaunted, Miss Ella spotted the skull of a carnivore, maybe a fox or a small dog. We picked up pieces of armadillo shell, too. Ella wants to study bones someday. Preferably dinosaur bones.

Then Eva spotted a piece of broken china along the roadside. It was a piece of a willow pattern plate, of all things!

It was a little like our life in England. We were always on the lookout for broken china, especially in places that the earth was disturbed, or where old houses were torn down, or even in our own back yard, where previous owners dumped and burned household trash. We collected boxes and boxes of broken china for making mosaics.

I was so inspired by the china we found in England, that I made a wall hanging about them. In addition to actual pieces of broken china, it has a knitted and embellished willow pattern plate on it. Read more about it here (scroll down to Shards 1: Willow).

“What is the story behind these broken pieces of china?” I asked myself. It became the theme for my wall hanging. You can see that the knitted plate is “broken” (the dark blue lines). You can look behind the flaps of the plate to find the story.

And all that started with a trip to look for bones! As Eva said, “Well, it was probably bone china.”

Stitches East will be November 6-9, 2008, in Baltimore—with perfect sweater weather, I hope!

One of the classes I’ll be teaching is called Seveness Knitting. Seveness stands for Suzann’s Sensational Similar Shade Scrap Stripe System (seven s’s).

We tend, over the years, to gather yarns in many variations of our favorite colors. Seveness is a way to use those yarns together for a lovely effect. It looks sedimentary, agate-like, interesting to the eye.

So you can use scrap yarns, stash, sale yarns, or all three, to make subtly beautiful color combinations, like the pink samples here. They remind me of the stunning stone rhodochrosite. We saw a polished slab of rhodochrosite at a rock shop during our Colorado trip–I want one!!

Best of all, because you go for an overall gauge, you can use Seveness technique with any printed pattern.

In the workshop, I will show you how to plan ‘random’ color changes and add accent colors. You knit a sample, then learn to measure for an overall gauge.

You’ll see how to incorporate Seveness with other techniques, like the brown Seveness and Fair Isle sample here. I’ll suggest some finishing tips to deal with all the ends. And I have a couple of other tricks up my Seveness Sleeve. Hey, that’s Eightesses. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

The knitting techniques we use in the class are simple, so an advanced beginner (can do k, p, stockinette st, seed st) will feel comfortable. Intermediate and advanced knitters will enjoy the ideas and the possibilities presented by Seveness Knitting.

Here’s the cardigan I made after the pink swatches at the top of the post. It has faded some, but I’ve worn it a lot since it was finished in 2001.

Eighty leaves. That’s about how many my Roses Cape will need. Just thinking of crocheting eighty leaves made my shoulders droop. When I broke the job down to four leaves a day for 20 days, it didn’t seem so bad.

And now, I’m over half-way through!

The Roses Cape is going to be made exclusively from stash, which is why these leaves vary so much. All the leaf yarn is from fellow textile lovers.

Several of the greens are from a lady who colored them in a dyeing workshop—”Take it! My husband will thank you!” she said. I don’t remember her name, but Thank You, Lady!

Others are from a friend I met at the Hallamshire Guild in Sheffield. Thank You, Betty!

Yet others are from a friend I met at the Taos Wool Festival. Thank You, Randi!

Fiber people are truly generous.

Eva loved Ana Paula Rimoli’s Amigurumi World. She brought it on our Colorado trip in June and spent hours crocheting cute little projects (the pear, which we named Solo, a coffee cup, an octopus). We had to make a special stop so she could buy stuffing for her amigurumi creations.

It wasn’t long before she struck out on her own, creating Bob and his beady friend. Eva agonized for days over Bob’s hairdo, finally settling on a neon orange mohawk. She worked out on her own how to crochet beads into Bob’s pet. Here they are, in the treehouse.

Bob was part of our household for several months before we ever saw him. He’s a bit of a rascal. Charles and I often say, “Eva, did you leave the lid off the pickle jar?”

“No. I haven’t had a pickle in weeks and weeks,” Eva says.

“I’ve never even opened the pickle jar,” Ella chimes in. Must have been Bob, we say.

“Who turned the thermostat up to 84 degrees?” I asked one day last winter.

Eva said, “Not me! I never mess with the thermostat.”

“I can’t even reach it,” chimes in Ella. Must have been Bob.

As you might imagine we were glad to meet him in the flesh. No, that isn’t right. We met him in the wool. Yes, that’s better. Mainly, we wanted to keep an eye on him.

During our photo shoot with Bob, his pet visited our cat Izzy. Bob recognized the danger. He’s sneaking up next to Izzy, hoping to rescue his pet.

Oh no! Too late!