Through the Lens...

...of moving.

Quiet Chaos.
I'm moving in a couple of weeks to a new home and I started my packing early.
Upside: I'll have it done on time.
Downside: I have to live in the chaos longer.

I'm purging even more than when I moved from the East Coast. On the other hand, I have more yarn and fiber. My sweetie is simply shocked at the amount of (insert expletive here) textiles I have:

• Sheets and Blankets
• Curtains
• Wall hangings
• Quilts
• Table clothes
• Fabric

This next year I will be hitting the "pause button" on my life here in Portland and taking a creative sabbatical of sorts. This is the image I'll put out there and let's see if I make it happen:

Sitting in front of the fireplace, spinning, little dog at my feet and kittens by my side.

While all this transformation is going on, I'm going to be doing a lot of blogging about my new life, so why don't you subscribe to this blog and watch it all happen?

See you all along the way...

Newer Designs

I've done two designs of late using PicoAccuardi yarns for the kits.

These are both Florentina. I was going with a Steampunk kind of theme here. You can wear like this, with short or no sleeves or under a coat with just the ruffle showing. The fun part was seeing how opulent I could make the actual ruffle. Extreme femininity ahead! It also comes in a pale violet-gray.

This next design is called Mod Thing, worn by the lovely Emily. As you can see, it's also lace but in an entirely different way. One big skein of chunky yarn does it and I love this color from PicoAccuardi again. The kit has a little kit for doing the buttons with a tutorial as well as the stripey fabric. I love the many ways you can wear this baby.

The designs are really different, right? Yeah, I'm a Gemini.  For those of you who don't design knitwear, I'm sure you've figured out why so many folks design accessories. No sizing!!! That said, I'm about to release a sock pattern that is sized, in fact. We'll see how that goes and hopefully it'll be the next thing I'm blogging about!

Yeah, so there's a pattern for sale on my blog now! Woo hoo!

As you all know, this past year I've been writing lots of patterns for Krafti-Kit. I'm now branching out to writing other patterns as well. This experience has given me the needed discipline and other than my wrist giving out now and again, I'm crankin'.

I had these long underwear bottoms, circa 1955 from my mom, red and white striped, cotton. I wore them all the way through college. Now I have some not dissimilar Swedish ones in black and white. Anyway, when I first did this pattern in a solid, you just couldn't see the cool detail on the top going on. Once I did them in stripes, wowee! I thought they might be a bit much for some folks, so you know you can always knit them in a solid black and dance on your toes and do some Bob Fosse moves. Yeah.

The details: Knit flat, multiple sizes, fast to knit and very stretchy.

More to come, People!

The Awesomeness of Roses

Portland has the most amazing rose gardens in Washington Park, the International Test Gardens. In these gardens, only the most hardy, lovely, stupendous blooms make it. Although I took pictures of the blossoms, I could have just as easily taken only pictures of the stems and buds. There were several varieties that were developed to grow in a tight cluster off of a single branch, to form a bouquet. Just amazing.
So, here's the collage and click to see some detail!

Less Crafty?

I also thought I'd share this little ritual with you that I have where I light a little candle next to my work to keep me company.

Yes, this is my new look. I've been due for a face-lift for a while, I'm thinking. I was in Blogger today, showing Laura how to post and stuff and I realized that there are all these new features and new "looks". Thought I'd try one on. Let me know what you think!

I had to give the fibery stuff a break for a few days because I had WAY overdone it and my right arm was not doing so well. Today I've spent some time with my baby Suri alpaca, picking it into clouds and spinning it.

The day in pictures. I want to get back to posting more frequently and hopefully this little shot in the creative arm will do the trick.

Random Singles Find Their Match

Clearly, I can take this theme for a long walk...

I've been thinking about doing this for a long time and have sort of held it off as a treat of sorts. Yes, we silly nerdy spinners. Ah, but we have some cool stuff to show for it! The project started when I was spinning up some sample fiber from Susan at Abstract and realized I had spun up two more of her samples and put them aside.

I'm sure every spinner has this, it's a box filled with little "bobbins" of leftover, unplied singles. It comes from what we don't use when we're plying a lot of yarn and it comes from samples that we spin for the sake of deciding how we will spin the bulk of a particular fiber.

Cannibalized Box

I've been letting my little pile grow in a box and thought it would be fun to start plying all the bits up in random and not-so-random ways. Last night I plied 3 entire skeins, to my surprise! Each one has it's unique personality and one skein in particular was partially a very very fine single that Barb spun up and left of one of "our" bobbins. Ah, to get to work with yarn that she spun was a little trippy! The fibers used were various wools, silk, angora, bamboo, cashmere, baby alpaca.

Now, I'm looking forward to seeing the absolutely one of a kind fabric these yarns will make.

The first one is more jewel-toned and full of Merino.
The second one was using that fine single of Barb's and rather earth-toned.
The last one was still in the earth tones but heavier in weight.
Ah, the continual "fiber amusement"...

The Single(s) Life

Single? Me? Oh right. You should know better that it's always yarn related!!

This past week I've been on a bit of a campaign of sorts. Singles. Non plied yarn spun perfectly so that it is not over twisted. Why? Well, I read something in SpinOff a couple of years ago. A spinner said, why should I spin the wool twice??

Now, I know there are plenty of good reasons to spin yarn "twice" or more, for a lovely plied yarn. It creates a more "balanced" yarn that's stronger. But here I am, buying Malabrigo lace and Noro which are both single ply lovely yarns. When I ply handpainted rovings the color gets at least a little mixed up, mostly to good affect.

Call me lazy, but I wanted to start spinning yarns that didn't need to be plied. I just wanted to be done, first time around, for a change.

I started with Silk/Merino blend. The first skein on the right came out just right and the one on the left is just a bit over-twisted. (click image to see closeup)
Then comes some Corriedale pencil roving that I really wanted to keep true to its vibrant color. (This colorway no longer available)

On the bobbin

Post niddy noddy and pre-soak

Off the nostepinne

I'm thinking about crocheting some of this yarn. No real plans, but I am really happy with the results and I should mention that in the rinsing, I did slightly felt the yarn per the suggestion of another spinner, but I wouldn't have to do that. It did give it a nice halo to do that.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it! Try the single life, it's kind of exciting ;-)

A Metaphor for Everything!

Yarn I spun that I'm making a shawl from

What's the most popular subject when creating life metaphors or political or...anything? Sports! I care nothing for sports. As you know, it's all about the yarn, the fiber, the spin and the knit. I've decided that knitting can be a metaphor for everything as well. We just need to educate everyone else so they understand. Or, we can be smug and not tell them a thing. Yeah. Not like us. Never mind...

But first, I'm just going to create a list of all of the textile related sayings that I can come up with:

A stitch in time saves nine
Dyed in the wool.
Telling a good yarn
Woven into the fabric of our lives (I know the cotton council has stolen that from somewhere)

And words...

Whole-cloth
Spinster
Sleazy

Here are some more from Kimbery Wulfert's site, antique quilt dating.

Oh, I've gone astray. I write my blogs in real-time can't ya tell? I went off searching for more when I came up with this incredible book that explains my fascination with this sort of thing. My mother taught me all sort of New England sayings, without really knowing what she was passing on.

So now it's up to you, dear readers to tell me what textile related sayings you know.

I know that's I've gone completely astray on this blog post but next post I'm going to actually come up with some ACTUAL metaphors for life in textiles. Deal?

Textures

Photo by Micki Da Re
You might note that the title description for this blog is not only about tea knitting but about nature inspiring design.

Before I moved to the Pacific Northwest I was dreaming about the wonderful plant life I would find here. In the Northeast, the cold of winter limits the variety of plants you can grown. Don't get me wrong, the variety back there is still amazing, but give it warmer temps and lots of rain and...

The trees here are enormous. The plants, greener than green. The ground covered with blankets of foliage. So, a little break from the fiber action to post some recent forest and park pics from my outings. Enjoy.

Photo by Micki Da Re

Photo by Micki Da Re

Photo by Micki Da Re

Photo by Micki Da Re

Photo by Micki Da Re

Photo by Micki Da Re

Photo by Micki Da Re

Photo by Micki Da Re

A Designer I Be?

How many years has it been, gentle readers, since I declared that I would write my designs down? I guess it took an actual job as a designer to force me to do it.

Since I've been partnering with Laura at Krafti-Kit last Summer, I've been much more in the role of designer than I ever thought. We had originally planned to purchase exclusive designers for the entire first year, but way sooner than that we've come to offer our own designs. It doesn't mean that we don't still WANT to work with designers. It's just been more time-efficient at times to do our own thing.

I'm going to start off by saying that one of my biggest time savers has been Knit Visualizer. I cannot say enough great things about this charting software that I've had for quite sometime now. I can use it for needlepoint as well as knitting and who knows what else?

One of my favorite parts of designing has been working with dyers like PicoAccuardi on projects like these socks, knitted in Maple Way. I'm working on a lace project using one of their yarns right now and I'm just loving it. More than just sock yarn!
Then I collared FibroFibers for a wool/bamboo blend for this crochet project (modeled by the ever lovely Petra):
An entire sweater? Yeah, but baby sized:
There have been some smaller projects too:
Oh yeah, knitting with beads too:
And then there's the needlepoint:
At this point, you might think, Wow! That's a lot of designs. Truth is though, that I have a basket of ones that are still in the works that haven't made it to market yet.

I've also been thinking about pattern writing "guildlines" that would be "approved" by some authoritative source. I think it's great that we have the freedom to do things as we like, but sometimes I do like the idea of agreed upon pattern guidelines. What do you all think?

Back to the drawing board, literally!