Suzann’s Textilefusion

We’re back and mostly recovered from our trip to Colorado and the Estes Park Wool Market. Colorado is a delight to the eyes with its stunning scenery. However, the best sight I saw on the trip was in our own back seat. Here’s Ella, knitting a blanket for her cousin.

She asked, “How much more do I have to knit?” for a blanket which would cover her cousin from neck to toe. It’s so interesting to see how young kids perceive size and time and space.

After lots more knitting on the trip, the piece is about ten inches long. If I can talk Ella into it, we may change the project to a pillow, and her knitting will be just about done.

As we approached Estes Park, I announced, “I’m going to buy only one skein of yarn at the Wool Market.” For some reason, Charles seemed surprised.

The one skein of yarn would be Brooks Farm Yarns’s Duet, a blend of Texas wool and mohair, to go with the sage/brown/gold Duet we recently wound into balls.

Eva took a crocheted sample over to the Brooks Farm Yarn booth and previewed the possibilities for me. She found several reasonable choices, but the shades-of-green yarn looked best. When we went together, I agreed with her.

But red-orange-gold combination appealed to us, too.

You already know the outcome of the story, I’m sure. We came home with both skeins.

Eva, on the other hand, did not show as much restraint in buying yarn. Ah well. She is young, and must build a stash of her own.

The plan was to knit two ridges (four garter rows) of the rug per day. This was definitely doable.

I started just fine. Just to see what the next color would look like, I knitted a couple of extra ridges. The next color was only going to be one ridge in all, so I knitted that ridge, too.

The trouble with changing the color every couple of rows is that the color changes draw you in and you want to see how the pattern will look. So I kept knitting.

Then the mosaic pattern began to take shape, and I wanted to get to the next perceived milestone in the pattern, then to the middle of the pattern. I kept knitting and knitting.

Here I am, more than half way through the center section of the rug, having knitted 54 ridges. That’s 27 days’ worth of my schedule, which officially started on June 1st. My hands are sore, but I’m a happy knitter. I can hardly wait to knit the second half!

See, being off schedule doesn’t have to be bad news!

Late cold fronts have brought rain and cool weather to our part of Texas. We spent several lovely afternoons outside, under the two big junipers next to the house.

Yarn winding operations were moved to Ella’s small tree house. The ball winder and the umbrella swift fit perfectly on the step just below the platform. Here’s my able assistant, Ella, winding a skein of Brooks Farm Yarns’s Duet. It’s a lovely merino and mohair blend, destined to be a crochet project.

I also swatched a sample of the rug I plan to knit from Earth Arts’s natural-dyed churro wool. This is a mosaic or dotty knitting pattern that I’ve used in the past for color swatching.

The various colors have slightly different weights and yardages, so I started by weighing each color. After knitting half of the motif, I weighed each ball of yarn again. Using the before and after weights, I could figure out how much of each color it took to knit half a motif. Double that for a whole motif. Then divide the original weight by the amount needed for one motif to find out how many motifs I could actually knit with the yarn at hand.

Now I have a plan! The goal: finish the rug in time to enter it into the Taos Wool Festival Home Accessories Contest. Wish me luck!

In less than a month, the Estes Park Wool Market will be in full swing with two days of workshops and two days of shopping! It’s a beautiful venue, with the Rocky Mountains in the distance. The weather is perfect for wearing sweaters!

I’m teaching a couple of classes there this year, and I will be signing copies of Crochet Bouquet in Suzanne Correira’s booth. She is otherwise known as Fire Ant Ranch.

There’s still time to sign up for classes! If you mail your registration form before Friday, May 22, great! If you mail it after that, there’s a late fee. So send in your registrations today! Here is the brochure and registration form.

May I recommend my workshop? It is called “Style and Shape Knitting with Pleats and Darts.” We’ll make at least three different kinds of pleats, including the one shown in the yellow top, above, modeled by a young Ella.

These pleats look great on sleeves, but you can use them to enhance other parts of your garments, too. We’ll talk about this and brainstorm together to come up with great ideas for how to use pleats.

We’ll also discuss how to incorporate knitted pleats into garments, as design details or as major garment shaping. We’ll discuss how to deal with the extra weight. We’ll practice ways to figure out the number of sts you need for a pleated item.

Darts make sweaters fit better, and lucky us! We can knit darts right into our sweaters. I’ll show you how to measure and calculate darts, and how to knit them using short rows.

Every now and then you don’t know you need a dart until you’ve already finished the sweater. Never fear! You can cut a dart into your sweater. To see a cut-out dart in progress, have a look at this post.

There is homework, so be sure and read the brochure closely. Hope to see you there!

We read Frederick, by Leo Lionni, about a mouse poet. At the back of the book, Ella found instructions for making a mouse out of paper, like the ones in the book.

Ella wanted to make a mouse, but hers would be out of felt, because she wanted to stuff it and make it three-dimensional. So she made a mouse out of green felt. I got to cut out the ears and thread the needle. Ella let me embroider the face.

Ella’s idea was to roll pieces of felt to make the legs, so they would be more substantial than just a single layer of felt. It was a good idea.

We cat-tested the mouse. Socks didn’t let the mouse interrupt her nap. Izzy was skeptical. Only Roosevelt was curious. All in all they treated Ella’s mouse with much more respect than they treat most mice.

It is a great mouse, and very sturdy, because Ella put many stitches in it.

We’re having an Irish Crochet Along in the Irish Crochet Lovers group on Ravelry. Our motif for April was this shamrock, from The Priscilla Irish Crochet Book No. 1, by Lula M. Harvey. It is Figure 27.

Our plan is to crochet one or two motifs a month for several months. In October, we’ll join them in the traditional Irish Crochet way. November is the month for adding trim to our projects.

I’m learning a lot from the crocheters in the group. Some have done a Irish Crochet for a long time. They know some very helpful tricks.

You can download the Irish Crochet book that this pattern is in free at http://www.antiquepatternlibrary.org. Click on their catalog of books, and look under “Harvey.”

This is an Irish Crochet-style collar which I made for my mother in the late 1980s. Her periwinkle blue suit shows it off very nicely.

It’s the real thing! At least it’s as real as an Irish Crochet collar can be, when made by a USAmerican, a century after the Irish potato famine, which catapulted Irish Crochet lace to such fabulous heights. I make this distinction, because so many people who want to try Irish Crochet are very worried about whether they are doing it the “traditional way,” and they are nervous because they can’t be sure that our modern crochet threads are exactly like the ones used in the olden times.

I figure, unless you’re a survivor of the Irish potato famine, you crochet with a piece of wire embedded in a cork, and you crochet by candlelight after the sun goes down, you won’t be making truly traditional Irish Crochet. The best we can hope for is to make post-traditional Irish Crochet. That frees us to crochet it with modern tools and conveniences, and even non-traditional materials and colors. Hurray!

Having said that, I’d like to tell you that I’m teaching a workshop called “Irish Crochet Lace for the 21st Century” at the Taos Wool Festival in October 2009. Further information will soon be available at http://www.taoswoolfestival.org.

The pattern is in The Priscilla Irish Crochet Book No. 2, by Eliza Taylor (ed.), originally published in 1912. It is “Figure 85. Coat Collar.” You can download this book free at http://www.antiquepatternlibrary.org. Click on their catalog of books, and look under “Taylor.”

We were at an antique mall at Hillsborough, Texas, when I saw the corner of a collar, peeking from a stack of doilies and other pretty pieces of needlework.

My heart beat faster. It looked like Irish Crochet lace! What a find! Had anyone else noticed this treasure? I glanced around furtively. Thank goodness, no one was else near enough to see. With trembling hands, I reached for the collar. I closed my eyes as I picked it up, afraid to look at the price tag.

Then the truth was revealed. It wasn’t Irish Crochet lace. It was machine made lace, sometimes called “chemical lace.” But wow, it was a really good copy of Irish Crochet lace, even down to the three-dimensional flowers, and the different mesh backgrounds.

I bought the collar, because its very pretty and I can use it in workshops and I might write about it and another fabulous crochet fake that I know about. That one is in a museum.

Next time: a real Irish Crochet technique collar. How do I know? I made it!

Eva’s crocheted socks are finished! She likes them, but we’re not sure about our dear cat, Izzy. Izzy contemplated the socks for less than a minute and then ran off. We mustn’t assume this has anything to do with her opinion of the socks, or of Eva’s feet, for that matter.

I’m glad Eva likes her crocheted socks, but in the future, I will knit socks. The gauge was small (as it needs to be for socks). My poor, aging eyes found the stitches difficult to see. Yes, I wore my reading glasses. Please don’t remind me again.

It was way too laborious for me insert the hook into the small stitches. Also, the socks don’t stretch like I want them to.

With knitting, I don’t have to see the stitches so well. They’re just there on the needle and I can see without glasses where to place my needle in order to knit them. I had started Ella’s socks in crochet, but switched to knitting. Believe it or not, they are growing quicker than the crocheted version.

Thank you to Karen Whooley for her patient and friendly instruction in our online sock class on Crochetville! She got me thinking about socks again. Yay!

This is my first crocheted sock ever! The pattern is from Karen Ratto-Whooley, who is teaching an online Toe-Up Crocheted Sock workshop on Crochetville. The yarn is Opal.

Our two-week class started on March 13, with a lesson that took us from the toe to the ankle. Karen encouraged us to work both socks to the ankle before she gave us the heel-turning directions last Friday. She hoped to help us avoid single sock syndrome.

I’m only lacking a few rounds on this sock, because Eva likes her socks to be fairly short. The second sock is already to the ankle.

When Ella found out that I was making socks for Eva, she said, “But what about me?!” She chose between two colorways of Socka from my stash. Her most important question was, “Does this look good with my hair?” (Like mother, like daughter.) Her pair is already underway.