Vacation

It's me on the shores of Gitchee Gumee--Lake Superior. Perfect summer weather for a family vacation in the woods of Northern Wisconsin. Knitting is in hand. Back soon..

Dye Party!

Pick the hottest day of the summer, throw in a bunch of friends and family, plenty of Procion dyes, and add in a pile of T-shirts and onesies and you have my Sunday--a tie-dye party of huge magnitude.

Am I crazy??

My daughter is visiting. She's expecting a baby in the fall, has a liking for ironic clothing on babies, and thought it would be fun to tie dye a pile of baby things. Could I pull it together? I had done some fabric dyeing 6 to 8 years ago and already had a bin of supplies on hand. I had several books, researched it online, and threw a big query out to the Milwaukee Art Quilters (who were very helpful).

So yesterday was the big day.

About 15 people came--all of whom were good sports and more than willing to get their hands dirty. We did some low immersion dyeing and some squirting-on-with squirt-bottles dyeing.Everyone was amazed with their artsiness, and some of these people pride themselves on not having an artsy bone in their bodies.

It's always my contention that anyone can do art but many of us had it (figuratively speaking) beaten out of us in our schooling. So I was happy to see them proven wrong.

Some results:

Some more results. Woo hoo-this will be one artful baby!

We even had a tie dye cake for dessert:

And some uninvited guests who didn't help AT ALL:

Out of the Depths

I passed through a very heavy counted cross stitch phase about 25 years ago. I love schoolgirl samplers, and typefaces and letter forms of all kinds. I always thought there was a special charm in samplers. I had discovered The Scarlet Letter and made a bunch of their reproduction samplers--almost as good as owning the real thing, which probably is never going to happen.

Those samplers were my poolside and soccer game pastimes when my kids were grade schoolers.

We moved here in the early 90s, and brought along my elderly mother and her sister. I was pulled this way and that--kids still at home and my mother and aunt depending on me for care and transportation. And about that time, my quilting went into high gear, and the counted cross stitch was set aside.

Over the last couple years, I've watched some of my quilty gang working on stitchery. I've put the blinders on during our shopping trips; didn't need to get pulled back into yet another fiber-related pursuit, even though I love anything with text on it... I happened to mention to a friend that I had a partially completed Scarlet Letter piece. I brought it to one of our sewing get-togethers and was met with lots of "You really need to finish this!!"

Whatever burned me out on this piece is in the past and mellowed out by now. OK. That sucking sound you hear is me picking up linen, floss, embroidery hoop, and tapestry needles once again. Oh, and I seem to need a magnifier now to see the weave of the linen.... What's up with that??

Yeah, there has been WAY too much time and work invested in The Ideal Landscape for it to be abandoned. And so, after 18 years, I've picked this project up once again. Most of what remains is in that right hand border. Maybe it will be finished in THIS millennium!

Braids ALL DONE

Hope everyone's Fourth of July was as beautiful as ours has been here. Sunny, just warm enough--the kind of day we dream about in February. My son and his fiancee were here for a cookout--brats, Chinese cabbage salad, corn on the cob, and carrot cake. Yum.

But enough emoting about summer. Ta da--check out my my braid quilt, all finished.

The process on this one was fun--some nice mindless piecing, and LOTS of it--but I'm very happy to show it completed. At last.

This quilt, in the form of two boxes of strips cut from the dregs of my scrap bins, attended several retreats and came along on many sewing evenings with friends. Block by block and row by row.... I love the concept of making something from nothing especially when the something turns out to look as happy as this project did. And is this frugal quilt-making behavior justification for further fabric purchases?

Why yes, yes it is.

This was begun with a photo on Bonnie Hunter's site as inspiration. While the quilt was underway, her book Adventures with Leaders and Enders was published, elaborating on the details. My Braid is organized just like hers was--darks and lights, with the pop of the red center squares. I thought her idea was perfection; no reason to meddle with that.

I dug deep into my scrap bin for this one and was absolutely indiscriminate in what I used--batiks and novelty fabrics are playing nicely with repros and modern prints here. It all works and results in a quilt that's fun to look at. At least it is for me. I used ant fabric that my daughter and I made hair scrunchies from back in the 80s, as well as the cartoon fabric I based my Serendipity quilt on....and some fabrics date back to my stint in the quilt shop in the mid-90s. Happy chaos.

The details:

Braid Quilt

Dimensions: approximately 96" X 105" (16 braids wide).

Fabrics: 100% cotton

Backed with: a length of 30s-ish fabric that would never work anywhere else...

Batting: Warm and natural

Quilted by: Marge West

Begun early 2010, completed June 2011.

Summer Knitting and Other Things

Someone needs to slow things down; summer seems to hurtling by WAY too quickly. My June was completely taken up by an online Genealogy class, which, while it wasn't too demanding, did have a fair amount of reading required, as well as a final project. I worked up a brochure for genealogy researchers on resources in our little community, which was fun and satisfying. This is something we'll be able to use day to day, when we get questions from library patrons. Along the way, I got a guided tour of a gem of a little historical society, in Eagle, the village where I work.

And they have quilts... And did I have my camera with me? No, of course not.

This has been a week of saying goodbye to a much loved and valued library co-worker. She's landed a great job at a Milwaukee hospital, with FULL BENEFITS. I have to be happy for her, but I'm going to miss her so much. We took her out to dinner last night, and about cleared the restaurant with our raucous behavior. It was a group that ranged in age from an 80-year-old down to high school-aged kids. I just love that we're all friends.

OK, back to fiber arts. I can announce a knitting breakthrough. It's great to have a problem if you can then figure it out and then sail onward, as Elizabeth Zimmermann would probably have put it..

So I've amassed a huge amount of sock yarn over the last few years. Sock yarn always seems like a nice souvenir-y yarn shop purchase. Pretty soon, you are drowning in the stuff... I've also bought sock yarn, got home and realized it was 100% wool--not my best choice for knitting actual socks, as it might show wear faster. So that yarn has always ended up in the black hole of never-going-to-be-knit.

How to use this yarn? I've been hunting for small projects, actually worth knitting, using fingering weight yarn, that might help me blast through the sock yarn surplus.

I stumbled on the Karen shoulder shawl from Indiknits.

The cast-on is a bear--it's one of these operations where you start with about three stitches and pretty much beat them to death. If you've ever attempted one of these cast-ons, you'll know *exactly* what I'm talking about. After several false starts, I finally came up with an approximation of what the pattern described and I was off and running.

This particular shawl has a good run of stockinette stitch before the lace patterning begins. But once the lace starts, as with any triangular lace shawls, the knitter is working without a net--you can't effectively use markers to delineate a pattern repeat when you're increasing the stitch count all the time.

On my first triangular shawl, I stopped and counted stitches at every. single. half. row. I've lost patience with that sort of diligence and nowadays just launch off, sometimes to my own peril. And so it happened with the Karen shawl--the patterned knitting didn't seem to be hitting the right marks as I began the second pattern repeat. I knit and ripped three times and then just cast the whole thing aside. That was about two months ago.

It bothered me though, and twice more I picked up the project and couldn't puzzle out where I had made my fatal error.

A flash of insight--it became plain that the curse of a forgotten yarnover...or two...had caused the problem. Thank goodness I have learned how to fake a yarnover! Once again, I'm sailing along on this pretty little scarf/shawl.