The Virtual Knitter

Last weekend I made The Clutch You’ll Never Give Up from Leigh Radford’s “Oneskein’ book.  I unintentionally used a color of yarn that almost exactly matches that used for the sample in her book.  Instead of embellishing it with sewn on buttons however, I am using it to display one of my rhinestone brooches, which I can change out to suit my mood or outfit.

I made the clutch using a yarn that I spun myself, shown in the photo above with the clutch.  A bit of the fiber used is shown in the lower right of the photo.  The yarn has some sparkling bits and mohair in it, giving the piece a more textural quality than if it were knit from a 100% wool yarn.  I purchased this fiber from Arianie of Matahari Spinnery, one of my favorite online resources for spinning fiber.  If you’re a spinner, check out her site where she offers special pricing on a different fiber each month.

I was very pleased with how well this piece felted.  There were several things I did differently this time with my felting, so I’m not sure which, if any, of these variables impacted the felting process, or if this success was due only to the yarn and gauge.  First of all, since this piece was small, I felted it in a small lingerie bag, made of a mesh instead of the more tightly woven fabric of the pillowcase I usually use.  I also squirted a liberal amount of blue Dawn dishwasher soap directly into the washer and used a cycle I found called “Super Clean” with the presoak turned off.  I did have one “control” in the process because I also included in the wash a small swatch of a completely different yarn, knit using a different stitch at a much tighter gauge.  The felting of the swatch was equally as successful, so I tend to think that my felting conditions were just the ticket for fast felting.  I’ll be sure to try exactly those same conditions with my next project to see if that’s true.

Since I was in a hurry to finish this project, I also tried something new for drying.  First I rigged up the following setup for drying in front of the fireplace:

That’s a baking rack, set on top of 4 small jars in order to elevate the piece to be more in line with the heat source.  Later, after the fireplace was turned off, I remembered that my dryer has a rack insert for drying items that you don’t want to tumble, which I’ve never used.  I tried that next and it seemed to work wonders for speeding up the drying process.  It will be interesting to try in the future when I’m drying a larger piece. 

If you haven’t attempted felting, I highly recommend this project as an introduction.  It’s small size makes it easy for you to get a taste of the process without investing a huge amount of yarn or time. 

I want to share the tragic tale of “My So Called Scarf Swatch.”  If any of you have knitted this scarf, you already know what a lovely stitch pattern it is.  It’s a popular online pattern that can be found here.  It’s so popular in fact, that I found several knitters working on it at Madrona Fiber Arts two weekends ago.  I’ve started this same scarf a few times myself, but as is my typical habit, I’ve not once used the yarn specified in the pattern.  Instead, I’ve used something from my stash that seems like it would make good use of the wonderful stitch pattern.  By the way, does anyone know the actual name of this stitch?

Anyway, my first attempt, with a nice variegated worsted weight wool, ended up getting ripped out not only because I somehow got distracted and messed up the stitch pattern, but the gauge was just too tight for the piece to drape nicely.  Instead, I decided to use some Rowan Tapestry, a lucious self-striping Soy/Wool blend that I’ve had in my stash for a few months.  I figured it would be just perfect for a nice scarf.  The gentle self-striping colorway of this yarn proved to be just lovely for this project:

Well, as they say, three times a charm – NOT!  After three false starts with this, I’ve just given up for now and am using a different yarn entirely.  First, I decided that the scarf was too narrow using the 30 stitches specified in the pattern.  But alas, this stitch, especially with the softness of the Tapestry yarn, makes it nearly impossible to frog!  So, I just broke the yarn and started over.  Next, I was working on it at Madrona and got sidetracked and screwed up the stitch again to the point that it was going to need to be started over (I was just a couple inches into it at that point).  Well things were going along well and I was working on it again at lunch the next day, chatting away with a coworker.  And I screwed the darn thing up again!  At this point, I just figured that I should start over with a completely different yarn because this project was obviously cursed!

I’m now working on it using my one yarn purchase from the Marketplace at Madrona Fiber Arts – three balls of another self-striping yarn called Vero, purchased from the Acorn Street booth.  There’s nothing subtle about this colorway.  In fact, I actually am finding it a bit garish knitted up, but I will persevere as the knitting is going much better with this version.

As you can see, this one’s LOUD!  Fortunately, I like bright colors, so I may keep it.  I’ll post pictures when it’s completed.

Today I went snowshoeing at the Stevens Pass Nordic Center with 3 friends, Naomi, Joan and Helen.  The roads were clear (well wet, not icy) so we drove up to the pass rather than taking the shuttle bus.  Since it was so warm, the conditions weren’t actually ideal.  Instead of nice and powdery, the snow was a bit crunchy due to the warm temps.  Below is a picture of Naomi, Helen and me on the trail.  We made Helen stand in the rut of the trail so that we would look taller next to her!

We hope to go out once or twice a month for the rest of the season.  If anyone has any tips on great places to snowshoe in Western Washington, I’d love to hear about them! 

On to the second day of the wonderful Madrona Fiber Arts event!  But first, let me tell you about something that’s going on in blogland.

I’ve just finished transferring over my old blog entries to this new blog.  I’ve got a new name for it too – Kitty’s Knitterbox.  My old blog didn’t really have a name, other than my URL for my website, KristiKnits.com.  The blog tool that my site host for that site provides is very rudimentary at best, lacking much of the functionality that most blogs require.  Now that I’ve decided to take blogging a little more seriously, I felt the need to find a better service.  So, I’ve signed up to use GoDaddy’s “Quick Blog” tool.  I’ve acquired a new URL, www.kittyknitter.com.  I may end up abandoning KristiKnits.com in favor of KittyKnitter.com.  

Now, back to Madrona Fiber Arts.

On the Day 2, I took a class called “Introduction to Fair Isle” taught by Janine Bajus, who is somewhat of a Fair Isle genius.  Unlike some of the other students, I was not previously familiar with Janine’s work.  My first exposure to it was at the “Teacher’s Gallery” on Friday night where I was nearly awe struck when I saw how beautiful her creations are!  Janine has her own blog, The Feral Knitter, where you can see some of her work for yourself. 

There are two things that make Janine’s work so special.  The first one is that she’s mastered the traditional Fair Isle technique and harnesses it to create somewhat non-traditional Fair Isle designs.  The second is her color expertise, which was the focus of our workshop.  Janine spent a bit of time explaining her own background in addition to speaking about the history of Fair Isle. 

Next, we jumped into the issue of color choice and saw samples of what works and what doesn’t work in Fair Isle design.  Then we attempted to put the color theory to work as we got to dive into Janine’s “stash” of shetland yarn to choose colors to match pictures we had chosen from old copies of National Geographic magazine.  We evaluated each other’s choices and discussed how they could effectively be incorporated into a pleasing design.  Finally, we chose colors to take with us to complete our own Fair Isle hats based on patterns Janine created for the class.  Since I had really liked the ones that matched my photo, I went back to that and made a selection of a few of the colors from the image, which you can see in the photo below.

I’ve not had a chance to start mine yet, but I’ll post my progress here as I do.  A pleasant outcome of the class was that a group of us have decided to get together to create a Shetland Wool Co-op in order to acquire a full set of small color samples that we can use in our design planning.  I’m really looking forward to this, not only because I’ll get a great tool out of it, but I might make some new fiber friends!