the life and times of woolly wumpus

where did she go?

2010-09-16T06:49:00.000-07:00

I moved over here! My practice of making having expanded past knit/crochet and felt again, and having moved to a new city, I have begun a blog with a slightly different theme. Find me at:

http://inthedistancebetween.blogspot.com/

See you in my new cyber-home!

woollywumpus designs!

2008-12-04T10:49:00.000-08:00

Who says jewelry can't be soft and cuddly? Introducing woollywumpus' line of felted rings, necklaces, and housewares. Catch us next Saturday, December 13th at the knit-one-one Holiday Sale!

off into the great blue yonder

2007-05-31T23:02:00.001-07:00

Hello all!

Well, where did the time go? Twelve days and it's been total madness. Where have I been this time?

Funny you should ask. I have after brief but very intense deliberation decided to go back to school. What the heck – why? Well, because I've been feeling a little directionless on some level, not with my work, or my friends, or my knitting, but just in a kinda general, time to kick it up to the next notch kind of way. In a I'm-about-to-turn-30-and-should-have-some-sort-of-plan kind of a way. I just dropped my application for a second bachelors degree in Painting/Drawing at CCA, my friendly local art school…(we'll see if I finish or if I bail out for grad school, south africa, or points unknown after the first year!)

So…I have been up to my eyeballs in FAFSA, application forms, portfolio shooting on my front porch, soul-searching and the like, for the last two weeks. I'm both excited and totally petrified. I mean, I have anxiety nightmares about waking up and realizing I never finished school the first time (visiting my deploma which lives in my parents' house strangely doesn't alleviate the dreams.)

Anyway this will be a different kind of FO show – I just sent off a disc of images to some stranger I don't even know at the Enrollment Offices of CCA(C) (the last C is silent!!! ha haha ha) so why not show you, who know me in a real and/or cyber kind of way? So here we go…

And in other breaking news (well, not really, but I only just got to write about it now) I will be travelling with my family to Ecuador in two days time!!! EEEEK and there is much to be done. Wanna see what a chicken with its head cut off looks like? Drop in and visit me tomorrow.

So I will be gone from blog land for the next month or so, but I'll be back with some (hopefully!) fine pictures of the Galapagos, the Amazon, and the area around Cotopaxi volcano. And hopefully some lovely raw "smelly yarn" as Elaine Kim likes to call it. (The smell would be the lanolin they leave in the wool – good stuff!)

And here is hoping that life is splendid for one and all this June! I'll miss you all!

the slow progress of habu, fo show, and wine tote party

2007-05-20T09:54:00.000-07:00

Greetings all,

Well, after my last post, the sun decided to come back out after all! (Ok maybe I shouldn't take credit for that…)

I'm in many-project mode these days. My main projects, the Kusha Kusha Jacket (kit #75 from habu) and the Swallowtail Shawl are really long and involved (read: they're taking forever), so I keep starting other little projects to entertain my very brief-attention-span brain.

OH and by the way, I KNOW you want to know where I got that little project bag. Well! Tammy George (aka pUnK rAwK PuRl) works at this cool downtown Oakland store called Entrez! Open House. This is one on the lines they carry. The coolest thing about this little bag is that the inside lining is oilcloth, so it's waterproof! Nifty.

So here is a little FO show. Actually, to be totally honest, some of these are from quite a little while ago, but never made it to the blog, so here they get their brief time in the sun!

This is the Snood pattern (what a great word! snood...SNOOD) from the DomiKnitrix book which I so love, by Jennifer Stafford. I was a bit short on this great sparkly black yarn, which was discontinued to my dismay, so I shortened the hat a bit.

I think it's meant to be roomy enough to stuff a big fat Renaissance bun into, or a head full of dreads, or something. Anyway making it smaller seemed to work fine.

And this puppy is rather old really – it's one of a set of two Noro hats, one for me, one for my husband. I love Noro Kureyon's springyness and big fat self-striping love. The pattern is by Saartje Bruijn from the Netherlands, and it can be found here.

I also ended up making this hat shorter by decreasing faster than the pattern calls for at the end – the mildly conical shape of the original seemed.....well, too gnome-like for a gal like me.

This cute little number was a knit-along held back in February by Síle Convery of knit-one-one. We had it a the Pub, which is one of my all time favorite East Bay spots. I think I've seen the pattern as a "bow tie" scarf, but we called it the Heart Scarf and did it for Valentines Day.

The yarn is something from DiVe called Autumno – sort of variegated, self-striping, and tweedy all at the same time. And really soft. I have one more ball of the stuff – don't know what I'll make of it. Probably, knowing me, another scarf.

Speaking of knit-one-one, I attended a fine party there on Friday night. It was a Felted Wine Tote party, and the totes came out adorable! It was really my first time felting anything more than a swatch. I know I shouldn't have been surprised that it worked, but I was! How does a floppy, big bag come out so petite and structural and with this cool bucle-like texture? Wow. The magic of wet wool.

And I'm sorry, but you all simply must look at this picture:

If that is not the funniest picture of Kate Freeman (who is wearing a post-felting felted bag knit by Peggy Vincent of Baby Catcher fame) I will eat my hat. Either one of them.

You'll have to swing by Síle Convery's blog to see the pre-felted version – I took the picture with her camera, so hopefully she'll upload it! – which Kate wears like a big banjo-pluckin'-type overalls. Really, it was that big.

brief summer in the bay and the swallowtail shawl

2007-05-15T23:14:00.000-07:00

hello all!

I guess it's been awhile! Summer arrived… well, for a few days anyway… here in Berkeley. We had a week (almost) of global-warming-inspired, freakish, humid heat, and I spent as much of it outdoors as was humanly possible. Now it's grey again, as is to be expected of summer in the Bay.

That's me out at the Albany Bulb – a local favorite of East Bay-ers everywhere, but particularly those with dogs. Do I have a dog? No. I wish. But I do have a client who runs a company called Metro Dog, doing boarding and training and walking and such things for lucky Bay Area doggies…

So I went for a walk with said client on a sunny day out at the Bulb, and visited the constantly shifting outdoor gallery of, I supposed what must be considered to be Outsider Art.

I think the story goes something like there was quite a large – what, colony? – community of homeless folks living out on the Bulb, which juts out from Albany in a particularly Bay Area landfilly kind of a way.

Most of them have moved on now, but they left behind an incredible sculpture garden of statues and murals made of / painted on the random urban detritus which society throws away and never thinks about again.

The place is constantly changing, like a dreamscape out of the Sandman or something, like a living thing. Faces materialize out of the broken concrete, wings sprout up into the sky. It's a fabulous place to take a walk when you're feeling a bit low on inspiration.

I guess it reminds me that if you have the eyes to see, then life is just chock full of little surprises and unexpected beauty. It's greatly augmented by a sunny day, of course, but even in the fog and the cold (like the fog and the cold which have descended again this week) a cheery kind of magic still occurs in funny little ways.

Well, on the knitting front, I started my swallowtail shawl. And boy, is it a b*tch! Lace is a challenging thing.

The Malabrigo Laceweight is a pleasure to work with, which is a good thing, because if it weren't, I'd have thrown the whole piece out the bloody window. Have any of you done this pattern? Anybody want to enlighten me as to why the Lily of the Valley border patterns NEVER add up properly? No matter how many times I count or how closely I follow the chart… dammit.

This picture shows the scarf before I got to the bleeding difficult part. The little leaves were a pleasure to knit. This border… well, all I can say is, at least the variegations of the yarn hide some of the wiggliness I have knitted into the shawl.

What else can I tell you lovely people? Oh if any of you reading this live in the East Bay, please come and join me and my client Síle Convery of knit-one-one at Rudy's Can't Fail Cafe tomorrow night at 6:30. We're having our bi-monthly (or rather…twice monthly, I can never remember the proper word for that) knit-out night. Great fun, really! And really good meatloaf (yes such a thing is possible!) at Rudy's on Wednesday night special.

Maybe I'll see you there!

knit-one-one knits out a success!

2007-05-03T23:42:00.000-07:00

Hello all!

A quick post before bed – no pics tonight, but more in the next post, I promise. The Swallowtail Shawl is going interestingly – it's pretty wiggly-wumpus right now, but I'm trusting it will pull itself together…

Finally worked up the nerve to felt my swatch from my Habu Kit #75… and it worked!! I'm new to felting, so it still seems like magic to me… the Mithrail-like fabric, with a few swishes and rubs in hot soapy water, shrunk and became fuzzy and soft, just like the sweater is supposed to be… so tonight I cast on and knit the first six rows of the back of the sweater. Whoo!

Anyway I just wanted to report that the first official knit-one-one knits out night was a great success. We met at Rudy's Can't Fail Cafe in Emeryville, and about ten ladies (and one brave gentleman!) graced the resin-filled tables with food, laughter, and diverse projects.

I think the event will happen every 1st and 3rd Wednesday at Rudy's, until further notice. I wholeheartedly encourage any of you who are reading from the Bay Area to come join us! It's always so inspiring to see what everyone else has going on.

A tasting of projects to inspire…

…the most adorable knit elephant toy ever, from Kate Freeman…
…wild stripey magic loop socks knit on impossibly tiny needles, from Tammy George…
…beautiful yarns cunningly procured by Elaine Kim while on vacation somewhere in the midwest (was it Ann Arbor? boy I'm getting senile…and check out her newly refurbished blog!)
…a new flick glass shipment was shared all around, and several ladies have new glittering goodies around their necks now…
…and guest appearances by Kate's lovely parents…

Anyway really great fun, and the more the merrier so maybe I'll see some of you there next time!

More soon, and in the meantime sunny smiles from Berkeley…

where does the time go? and new beginnings

2007-04-27T14:04:00.000-07:00

Jeepers! A week since my last post! It's funny how time just goes screaming by when the weather warms up… I'm waiting for someone to develop a scientific theory about why that happens…

So many things to catch up on. I spent Tuesday evening with the lovely Elaine Kim of Kim Chi Crafts puzzling over her Wordpress app… boy, that was the first time I'd ever seen the back end of Wordpress, and my hat's off to all of you who use it to construct your blogs! Though I do make a living designing websites and the like, I've never been able to call myself much of a programmer. It looked pretty wicked.

There's Elaine with Síle Convery's gentlemanly little poodle, Kofi, against the now-somewhat-infamous Yellow Wall of the knit-one-one studio.

Speaking of knit-one-one, any of you who are reading this from the Bay Area should come and join us for our first Outing, which will be this Sunday the 29th, to go to the DeYoung for the Vivienne Westwood exhibit, and afterwards to go ogle yarn at Imagiknits in the city. You can click here for more info on the outing – plus, it's free! Come with us! The more the merrier.

What else?

With new seasons come new beginnings. New beginnings of projects, that is!

1. HABU!! My Kit #75, the Kusha Kusha jacket, arrived at Article Pract the other day. WHOO HOO! The yarn is unbelievably superfine – the pattern calls for double-stranded silk-coated steel and merino. It took some getting used to – the feeling is a bit like knitting cobwebs and sewing thread together. Once you get going though, the resulting fabric, before felting, is like… well, I guess it's like how I have always imagined Tolkein's mithrail to be. Weightless, pliable, yet with a certain kind of Ogres-Don't-F*ck-With-Me toughness. You can feel the tensile strength in the yarn as you run your fingers over the knitting…

I knit my first two gauge swatches while watching season 5 of The Shield, one of my husband's favorite programs. This larger one gets felted down to see the true gauge – which I get to attempt tonight:

You can kinda check the mithrail reference, right? (Or, it's just my personal geek nature showing through.)

Speaking of which, guess who is on this month's cover for Wired Magazine? Yup, you guessed it, my favorite superstar Masi Oka, aka Hiro from Heroes, looking uncharacteristically bad-ass in his "future" costuming complete with little soul patch. I really do love Heroes, and I'm proud that I can "claim" my Six Degreees of hollywood through Heroes and Masi.

The Wired article actually does Heroes – and Masi – pretty good justice – in appreciating the loveable geek factor of having your protagonists be a group of "mild-mannered people who discover that they have supernatural abilities" or some such thing. Guess that's a concept that stirs the heart for me!

Anyway back to the projects…

2. Lace! And more lace! Another tantalizing packaged arrived in the mail for me – my first KnitPicks order. With a book about Victorian Lace, a few skeins of laceweight for me to try out, and some sock yarn to go with the Magic Loop booklet I just bought (which will be another first for me!)

I bought the most beautiful Malabrigo laceweight yarn – in Pearl Ten, a sort of soft, grey-purple. Winding that sucker by hand was a B*TCH though! Makes me contemplate getting a swift and ball winder. This yarn is intended for the Swallowtail Shawl pattern from Interweave Knits Fall 2006.

At Article Pract I ran into Kate, who was having lunch with Kurt from Imagiknit. He said that Malabrigo is responsible for some of the most beautiful greys anywhere, and I have to agree with him. Here's the pattern this yarn is destined for:

Ok, I'm going to wrap it up there for now. Here's to all things new – new dreams, new projects, new yarn, new beginnings – for all of you out there!

PuNk rAwK pUrL's Leafy Lace Scarf and Greetings to All South Africans

2007-04-19T12:33:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone!

First of all, thank you for all the tremendously kind words of encouragement from those of you who posted comments to my last post. I'm feeling much improved, largely thanks to you! Hurrah for the knitting community!

Speaking of which, I had the opportunity to take another of knit-one-one's fabulous classes last week, the Give Lace A Go! class taught by none other than Ms. pUnK RaWk pUrL herself, Tammy George. It was her first class for knit-one-one (though obviously not her first class ever!) and she totally rocked it.

(Here she is with knit-one-one Queen Bee Síle Covery, discussing purls and poodles on the couch!)

The pattern was very nice and straightforward, but it produces this great branching out effect, which unexpectedly made the stripes of my malabrigo run wavy!

I love it when weird little things like that happen. Always a fun surprise…

Anyway, I *think* the pattern is Tammy's, but heck I could be lyin', so if any of you want a great piece of only semi-mindless knitting (tv is ok – but better pay attention to counting those rows! I definitely have a few too-short leaves in my scarf…) check in with her for the pattern!

And if you want your scarf to be funny stripey autumn-y colours, the colourway I used was Malabrigo Red Pearl, #202. Just one skein (how I love Malabrigo!)

A fellow Capetonian named Robynn wrote in on my last bluesy post the suggestion to stop at thirty, and look back, and count-up… as in look back at the last decade, and count up firsts, lasts, never-agains-but-it-was-fun-at-the-time's… and I think it's a brilliant idea. Not just for me of course, but for everyone and anyone who's at some kind of major life transition…

So thank you Robynn! I'll definitely do that as a post before I hit the big 3-0 (in early August – which makes me a Leo! Rawr!) ; ) And for her, and any other South Africans or ZA-expats who happen to be reading this, here's some pictures of home:

Kalk Bay on a sunny day in winter…

the pines below the Rhodes Memorial…

the African Image cafe off of Long Street…

…this is an image only another South African can truly, um, appreciate…

Table Mountain – from the Hout Bay Road…

Hout Bay sunset!

Past Lives, almost ThirtySomething, and MacArthur Blues

2007-04-12T20:26:00.000-07:00

Greetings world!

Apologies for the long absence. Where have I been? Well, I confess with some mild humilation that after my bout with the random mystery systemic rash (which has thankfully gone down now, thanks to the unidentified Chinese muti!) I succumbed to a different form of malaise – about a week of lying-down-staring-at-the-wall-depression.

Why you might ask.

(Wait – here are some cheerful flowers first.)

Well, I'm about to turn thirty this year. (No I'm not depressed about THAT at all, actually! Thirty sounds pretty good. My friends who are already well into their thirties seem to party harder, work smarter, and generally kick a ton of ass.) But the 10's are milestones of a sort, and other than having tv shows named after them, they really do serve as markers, however arbitrary. Checkpoints along the highway of life. (Did she really say that? Yes, folks, she did. Someone beat her with a thesaurus.)

And at this particular milestone, I'm forced to ask myself, what the hell am I doing? Though I love my random freewheeling life with its multiple continents and quick-change careers, there is that little voice of reason which lives in most of our heads which says, "Do you have a plan?" "Where are you going?" Expectations breed in the dark under the bed like dust bunnies.

I had a wonderul friend up to visit from LA over the long weekend. Her name is Kristie Roldan, and we've known each other for about 12 years now. We met my freshman year at Brown, working in the theatre department, and she's a lighting designer. (At the time, I was a set designer. That was life path #1.) She's still going strong down in LA, after finishing grad school, and works her flipping hiney off, as all successful theatre people do. She's one of the only people I know from our wild and raucous theatre days who's stayed – who's survived – in the industry for this long.

Except for Sarah Ruhl, and that's where the momentary depression came in. Not that it was in any way Sarah's fault – Sarah is someone I can't really say I know anymore, but at one time, we worked together. She was very serious, very smart, and a gentle, kind person. I designed the fish puppets in the photograph below for her first production of her play, Passion Play. Now this play is getting a revamp – in Chicago, directed by Mark Wing Davey. And Sarah, sweet, quiet, intensely brilliant Sarah has just won a MacArthur. Yup, the genius award. $30,000 worth of genius!

And except for John Lloyd Young, a friend from Brown, who just won a Tony for playing Frankie Vallee (did I spell that right? gosh…) in Jersey Boys. And Peter Nachtrieb, another friend from Brown, who just won a Humana for playwriting… oh and lest we forget, Amazing Genius Boy (no, really – he really IS a genius, at I.Q. 180+), sweet and funny Masi Oka, who plays Hiro on Heroes. Yeah that guy. We went to school with him too.

All exceptional people. Utterly deserving. Total rock stars. And former classmates of ours.

Kristie and I had a good drunken mope about that at a random tapas bar on Valencia, soused in sangria.

I guess the truth is, when you come from a pool of people in which unrealistic expectations appear to be the norm, intense pressure to succeed at all costs is the climate, and sleep deprivation the opiate of choice, and prestigious awards are the prize you're supposed to have your eye on, it's easy to start to think about yourself as a failure. But what an unrealistic yardstick to measure by…

So what to do? Say, "Screw that," and knit something, make something, look through photographs of people you love. Drink a little whiskey if necessary…. and call a good friend, the kind who loves you with or without fancy awards.

So here's to friends, and here's to living life full out. Huzzah.

basketweave scarf, excess, and scary chinese muti…

2007-04-02T16:21:00.000-07:00

Well world, after a weekend of total excess (excess whiskey, excess meat, excess avoidance-of-work), I am detoxing. A mysterious systemic rash popped up on my knees and wrists, which I attributed to stress and then proceeded to ignore, until a good friend of mine dragged me down to Oakland Chinatown to see a traditional herbalist.

Now yes, I am Chinese, but I am one of those terrible second-generation kids who shame their entire people by forgetting my once fluent Chinese, and I never even learned to read characters in the first place. I get clucked over a lot by little Chinese aunties and grandmothers. Totally shameful. So even though the various Bay Area Chinatowns hold plenty of pleasant childhood-memory-evoking foods and smells, like fried duck and that totally indescribable herby-mothball-y smell, I don't frequent them much these days, mostly out of a sense of guilt. (I kinda always have the feeling that everyone on the street is suddenly going to turn around in unison and point to me and yell, "Gui-Lo! Bad American Daughter!" and sort of spit in my general direction.)

Anyway, so the herbalist. I went in and he felt my pulse and mumbled something about heat and my liver and proceeded to scrawl out a prescription in some sort of characters I've never seen before. He shuffled back out front where the teeny shop is lined floor-to-ceiling with wooden drawers full of unidentifiable herbs and medicines, and with an assistant started measuring out handfulls of this bark-y looking thing, that seed pod, a fuscia berry of some sort, until three very impressive piles of mystery stuff lay on sheets of white paper.

All the while, I was put to mind of the trips that my husband James and I made to the various muti markets in South Africa when we were researching a story in 2004. Muti is the word for the natural medicines used by the sangomas or "witch doctors" of Southern Africa, which vary in source and potency; some are notoriously made of human remains, but mostly they are just herbs and other unpronounceable natural substances. I never took any there though – just admired, and photographed, the piles of dried plants and alligator skins pelt and bone and limb scraps and crusty skulls and pickled snakes in jars.

(This is a photograph of me in the "Jerusalem of Africa," gathering information for our article while my husband shot the story. I am standing at the mouth of one shallow cave of many, in a sacred valley where up to 60 sangomas and sangomas in training will live at one time. That was previous life number 4.)

Anyway back to Oakland. He bundled them up, told me to boil each one twice in 4 cups of water until they reduced to one, and drink the lot. He warned me the medicine would be bitter and threw a handful of the pink cylendrical Haw Flake candies I used to eat when I was a kid into the bag with a grin, told me not to eat mangos, pineapple, turkey, shellfish, or asparagus and charged me $25.

Back at the flat, I boiled the mess down into a tarry, forbidding black brew. Bitter was REALLY an understatement. I think the black mass I drank down is probably one of the most unpalatable things I've ever ingested willingly. And I get to do it for five more days. Yummy.

The stuff really works though. The rash has gone down and with it my anxiety levels about… well, whatever miscellaneous crap I seem to get anxious about… have gone down too.

It never fails to amaze me how bad Western medicine is at dealing with systemic, more ephemeral ailments. Sure if I get a leg sawed off of need to have open heart surgery I hope it's in one of our shiny clinics with people like the Grey's Anatomy crew attending, but for this sort of murky, every-day malaise which creeps up on so many of us, non-western medicine rocks.

Anyway! Knitting! Where was I? Oh yes – I finally finished my basketweave scarf, inspired by Tammy of PuNk rAwK pUrL fame. It didn't turn out exactly like the yummy herringbone of Tammy's scarves, but rather with a more Japanese flavor. I'll put the pattern up here (although really, it's just stitch No. 52 from the Vogue Stitchionary Vol. 1) when I get a chance. But here are some pics in the meantime. The scarf is yet unblocked – I'm kinda enjoying the wabi-sabi-ness of its roughness… oh and I used one skein each of Tierra Acorn and Noro Silk Garden.

The Mayonnaise Jar and the Coffee – a parable

2007-03-28T16:12:00.000-07:00

The following story was sent to my by my mother, (at right, with my father, in a recent picture from the HHMI Bulletin which accompanied an article about married couples who work together in science.)

She received it from one of her colleagues at the lab. I had to post it here, because it struck me as the perfect expression of how to deal with the problem of "no time," which we all encounter so frequently in our busy busy rush rush lives.

I hope you will enjoy it too!

THE MAYONNAISE JAR AND THE COFFEE

When things in your life seem almost too much to handle, when 24 hours in a day are not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar, and the coffee...

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls.

He then asked the students if the jar was full.

They agreed that it was.

The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full.

They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar, of course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full.

The students responded with a unanimous "yes."

The professor then produced two cups of coffee from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand.

The students laughed.

"Now," said the professor, as the laughter subsided, "I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things, your family, your children, your faith, your health, your friends, and your favorite passions. Things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter, your job, your house, and your car. The sand is everything else, the small stuff. If you put the sand into the jar first," he continued, "there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls.

"The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Spend time with your children, take time to get medical checkups, take your spouse out to dinner, play golf, lawn bowls, tennis etc. Pursue those hobbies that you like. There will always be time to clean the house and do the laundry. Take care of the golf balls first, the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand."

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the coffee represented.

The professor smiled. "I'm glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there's always room for a couple of cups of coffee with a friend."

what's that around your neck?

2007-03-22T19:15:00.000-07:00

People ask me that all the time.

Some of you have seen my little box of treasures – an old Romany chocolate tin full of beautiful, sparkley, covetous pendants, which I usually bring with me to knit-alongs and the like.

You may also have seen one around the neck of the lovely Síle Convery of knit-one-one fame.

Well, wonder no more. The sparkly stuff is called dichroic glass, and a friend of mine in South Africa makes the pendants…

We've been working together for years (we've been friends, roommates, road-sistahs, and collegues over the course of time) and I still wear one of mine (I have four) every day.

So without further ado…

**flickglass designs**

This is my shameless friend-promotion post about flick glass designs, aka Frances Kierman, a very dear friend of mine who makes these gorgeous glass pendants for a living. We've known each other for years, lived together on this side of the big pond and the other as well, and I've been working with her on flick glass for about three years now. She lives in Cape Town now, three blocks from my house there, and she's kinda like a sister to me.

The pendants are made of dichroic glass, which you can read all about on the flick glass website (proudly designed and built by yours truly!!). The stuff is really an incredible medium to work with. The results are always somewhat surprising and always magical.

Visit her site to see tasty pics and look at the pricing chart (if you're a wholesaler – individual requests can just contact me direct) but don't bother about emailling Frances to order unless you're in Europe, Australia, or Africa – I'm the Official Flick Glass West Office of One!

(I figure highfalutin long-ass titles are not JUST for central African dictators, oh no…)

I distribute the pendants for the US, so if you're interested in ordering one or two or ten, email me at ejfishgirl@yahoo.com!

We'll both love you for it.

Did I mention I also designed the website? I'm proud of this one so I hope you enjoy visiting it as much as I enjoyed building it.

local find alert: analog books

2007-03-20T18:23:00.000-07:00

Kapow! How cool is that?

So cool I just had to jump back on and tell you all about it.

This is a journal made out of a recycled book, as you've probably seen in your favorite local indie bookseller's, but look at that silkscreen! Did they read my mind? That I have been wanting a better knitting notebook to replace the eeeny weenie perforated-sheet pad with the cheesy Cezanne sticker on it?

Wow. Ask the universe and ye shall receive! A totally punk rock $12 recycled knitting journal, that is.

So let me tell you where I found this. It was staring me in the face when I walked into my neighborhood indie bookstore, Analog Books, on Euclid Ave right by the North Gate of UC Berkeley.

(That's my 'hood! I live in a den of millions of fresh-faced students and feel quietly old.)

You can also visit the creators online.

Secondly, let me say right now (up front, so we have no confusion) that while I believe that the Amazon.com's and Barnes and Noble's of the world have their place, particularly when it comes to ordering specific titles or browsing the Craft sections for bargains, I am a 100% staunch supporter of the LOCAL MOM AND POP BOOKSTORE. Or, in my case, the "local sweetly-geek-chic guy with horn-rimmed glasses" bookstore.

Love 'em! Support 'em! Buy whatever you can from them so they stay afloat and keep bringing amazing titles you'd never have seen otherwise and COOL KNITTING NOTEBOOKS and obscure works on current events not covered by CNN or Oprah!

Here's another book I bought at Analog today. This will be a familiar "face" to probably all Bay Area-ites, at least, for our resident genious Dave Eggers, but I only got a chance to pick What is the What up today and realize it's a book about Sudanese refugees in Africa and the states. And since all topics Africa are near and dear to my heart, and my husband and I sort-of vaguely collect first editions of important African (or Africana-related) fiction & non-fiction, AND it has the most beautifully done cover, I had to have it.

Why do we collect Africana. Well for those of you who don't know me, my husband James is South African, and I spent two-and-a-half of the last four years living there. We bought a house in a beach town near Cape Town, and one day we'll be leaving these shores to move back to Africa.

It's not just that though. There is something about the stories, both modern and ancient, which come out of that place. It's like the life-sterilization-board missed the entire bloody continent. Life is raw, unpredictable, joyous, tragic, and, well, alive. Not a facimile of life, as I sometimes experience it here.

And while we are on the subject of literature about Africa, here's one more title for you: A Bend in the River, by V.S. Naipaul, about life in a small town on the Congo river, which (so far) seems to oscillate between ruin and prosperity, stillness and bloody war, like so many places in Africa.

I'm in the middle of it now, and man does Naipaul have a way of capturing the paradoxes of living as a non-African in the heart of Africa.

Ok that's my little Reading Rainbow segment for you!

(And all you knitters, if I have not lost you yet, did you know that you actually CAN read AND knit at the same time? The solution: a $4 cook-book stand. Prop your current novel up on the table in front of you and knit away… go on, excercize both halves of your brain at the same time!)

habu! and japanese patterns at article pract

2007-03-20T11:58:00.000-07:00

This is my new love.

I know it looks pretty technical and intimidating at first, but when you get to know it… ; )

After a wild and crazy weekend with our good friend Jamie (in town from South Africa while on tour) and the company he's touring with, Men Jaro, I spent a blissfully chill Sunday drinking coffee at our local Peet's and then heading over to Article Pract.

At Article Pract, Takako of habu textiles, purveyors of some of the most amazing yarns ever invented, was teaching a class on how to read Japanese knitting patterns, like in the pic above.

The patterns are diagrammatic, and after getting used to the strangeness of them if you are used to the western instructional style, they are BRILLIANT. As someone who used to work with patterns at the Berkeley Reperatory Theatre's costume shop, among other places, it's so helpful to think of knitwear in these familiar terms.

But what's even cooler about them is they really teach you to think like a designer, especially if you are interested in altering or inventing knit patterns yourself.

How many decreases does the average armhole require? At what rate? How steep should the shoulder slope be? How deep to make the collar? I'll bet after working with a few sweaters from Japanese patterns, you'd have a pretty good idea.

Another concept that Takako introduced in class was the idea of making a chart for yourself showing simultaneous decreases which happen at different rates – the shoulder slope decreases on one side against the neckline decreases on the other, for example.

What a good idea!

The always-brilliant Kate Freeman of both Article Pract and knit-one-one fame taught us to write out any pattern we are attempting for the first time, row by row, to prevent confusion and duff-ups down the line.

This is how I think I'll do it from now on though. It's like a road map, where you can trouble shoot potential confusion before actually knitting up your confusion into something which has to be ripped out later…

I think the thing I love the most about the Japanese pattern is the power inherent in its simplicity. On one page, you can see pretty much all the information you need to know to knit a sweater. No long lists of instructions which themselves need sometimes a lot of explanation…The principle is minimal, and the information design is about clarity.

Anyway, I'm totally psyched to try my first sweater by this method. I ordered my kit – the first time I will be knitting from one, but as the cardigan is double-stranded mohair and silk-wrapped steel, asymmetrical, and slightly felted, I thought I'd let the folks at habu do the math and I'll just play with the spoils and enjoy this new pattern concept.

I ordered the kit in a heathery light, light grey, and of course, pictures will be forthcoming when it arrives in two weeks!!

* * PATTERN REMIX: The Nantucket Jacket * *

2007-03-13T18:38:00.000-07:00

Ta daaa! Here it is!

Finally! ; ) Thanks for being so patient in waiting for this one, dear reader.

So, like probably half-a-million other ladies around the country, I immediately fell in love with the Nantucket Jacket pattern, featured on the cover of the Winter 2006 issue of Interweave Knits . Slouchy yet tailored, with a "horse-barn-y" appeal to it (term officially coined by Elaine Kim, of Kim Chi Crafts), it looked like just the kind of thing I'd like to live in on a day-to-day basis.

A small aside here: when Elaine made her "horse-barn-y" comment, Síle Convery (who happened to be in the room at the same time) made a joke about not really being able to picture me with a riding crop and those funny little jodhpur pants.

See it's funny now, because I'm a pretty urban creature these days, tickety-ticking away on my computer all day, every day. As a graphic designer, I have to present myself with enough style to convince people that they trust me to design for them. ; )

BUT, there was a time (in the not that distant past) when I was much more of an outdoors-woman. I actually spent about a year volunteering at an Oakland stables on Skyline Drive. So I rather like the horse-barn-y look. Maybe this sweater brings back the memories of a wilder time…

Just for the record though, I never wore jodhpurs. I rode Western, after all! Cowboy boots, no jodhpurs.

Anyway Síle muttered something about being awfully young to have had so many previous lives, but I guess I've always been a bit, well, restless. ; ) Which is why it's on to the next sweater already…

SO ANYWAY back to the NANTUCKET!

I'm not going to reproduce the entire pattern here, but those of you with your copy of the Winter 06 Interweave should not have much problem plugging my changes into the original pattern, should you wish to!

Those who don't will be able to order back copies of the magazine in question here.

I do suggest having the pattern in front of you when reading the following, as I don't think my notes will make much sense otherwise.

* * THE NANTUCKET JACKET * *
by Norah Gaughan
Interweave Knits, Winter '06, begins page 62.

FINISHED SIZE (referred to in my notes): XS, 34" bust. (its actually a bit bigger than this.)

YARN: I used the Karabella Aurora 8 in colour No. 16, a pretty rust red. The pattern calls for 12 balls, but I used 11 on the dot, including edging and sleeve and body lengthening alterations. Hey, you can save yourself $9.

A last-minute word about the YARN: I received a kind note on my last Nantucket post from Frecklegirl Jess to alert me to the fact that the Karabella Aurora has a tendency to STRETCH when WET – I have not tested this out for myself, but just be warned! Dry clean!

NEEDLES: I used #9 circulars for the entire sweater, and a #7 crochet hook for the edging.

NOTIONS: I picked up some pretty polished wooden buttons ( you need 5 of 'em) at Lacis, but any 3/4" buttons will do.

GAUGE: Pattern calls for 18 sts / 24 rows = 4 in, using Stockinette Stitch. I think the Karabella Aurora 8 was something like that. Hey, this is a really stretchy sweater 'cause of all the cables.

PATTERN ALTERATIONS:

BACK: The only alteration I made to the body of the sweater was to lengthen it (both front and back, of course) by about 1-2" through the waist area, i.e. after the "shape waist" section but before the "shape bust" section. For the XS sweater, the easiest way to think about it is to count by cables, since the sweater is very boingy and getting an accurate length measurement is hard. So:

Shape bust: Begin with the first RS row AFTER the 9th cable row.
Shape armholes: Begin with the first RS row AFTER the 13th cable row.
Shape shoulders: Begin WITH the 19th cable row.

When you get to the final BO row, DON'T BIND OFF. Transfer your remaining stitches to a holder, so you can graft the shoulder seams in Kitchener stitch.

A note on LENGTH:
After getting the entire sweater together now, I realize I could potentially have lengthened the body even a little bit more, say by one more cable row, as the original pattern really called for a very short torso length. (Thank you to eagle-eyes Carrie for pointing this out to me at a knit-along in February! It was a very helpful insight).

I'm not that long-waisted, but even with the additional length above, the top of the seed wedges which allow for the flattering flare of the sweater rides slightly higher than my belt line. I think this sweater probably looks nicest if that line, i.e. where the sweater is at its thinnest, corresponds to your thinnest bits.

LEFT FRONT/ RIGHT FRONT:
Just use the same cable row numbers above (or whichever ones you use) to match your increasing/decreasing to the back of the sweater. That being said, you should know that even if you follow the pattern to a tee, the shoulder seam winds up sitting somewhat back from center (i.e the distance between the start of the shape armholes section and the shape shoulders section is greater on the front panels than on the back, due to how many rows it takes to "move" the seed stitch all the way over for the collar shaping.)

This actually works out fine, and simply must be taken into account when you attach the sleeves (see below), but it's good to know ahead of time, just so you don't pull your hair out over it like I did for a night. Live and learn.

When you get to the final BO row, DON'T BIND OFF. Transfer your remaining stitches to a holder, so you can graft the shoulder seams in Kitchener stitch.

SLEEVES:
Here's where I really messed this pattern around. You can see how it knits up according to the original here, at my previous entry specifically about Nantucket sleeve woes, and you can see more pictures of the alteration I eventually made here. To the right is a detail shot of the new sleeve pattern laid flat.

The problem was that the original sleeve knits up too short and too bulky for my taste, and the seed stitch underarm generated a peculiarly reptilian feel. See, while we're on the subject of previous lives, I used to be a rock climber, so definitely don't have waify little twig arms. Perhaps you can get away with knitting this the original way if you have skinny little twig arms, but for the rest of you, who don't, here's my alteration:

CO 51 (remember, this is for the XS, but for a larger size, simply CO the number required by the pattern, minus 3 sts.).
Purl 1 WS row.
Set up row: k1, knit Chart A over 21 sts, k 3, p1, k3, knit Chart C over 21 sts, k1. (total 51 sts.) If you are knitting a larger size than the XS, factor in the extra sts at both ends of the row, and do them in reverse stockinette.
Row 2 (WS): p1, Chart C, p2, k1, p1, k1, p2, Chart A, p1. (The central 3 sts become seed st.)
Row 3-6: Continue as established, with the central 3 sts in seed st. This forms a slighly more solid cuff than doing the entire sleeve in Chart B.

Row 7: inc 1 st each end of the needle, in rev. stockinette, so that the row would read like this:
p1, k1, Chart A, k1, Chart B, k1, Chart C, k1, p1 (total 53 sts)
Row 8 and on: Now continue for another 7 cable rounds in this established pattern, as you have been for the rest of the sweater. C'mon i know you're REALLY GOOD at it by now, having finished miles of it on the body of the sweater!

**NOTE: I drastically lengthened the sleeve, because I don't really have any use for a short-sleeved sweater, but if you want to keep the original half-lenth sleeves, simply don't go as many cable rounds before you start increasing towards the armhole as I did here.

Continue even (with your 53 sts, right?) until you have finished your 8th cable row. On the first RS row after the 8th cable row, begin increasing as such:

Increase 1 purl sts at the end of every other RS row, 6 times. (total 65 sts)

Shape cap: On your first RS row AFTER the 12th cable row, resume the pattern at the "shape cap" section:

BO 3 sts at beg of next 2 rows, then BO 2 sts at beg of foll 2 rows – 55 sts rem.
Dec 1 st each end of needle every RS row 6 (for XS!) times, then every 4th row once, then every RS row 5 times – 31 sts remain.
BO (beginning on WS) 2 sts at beg of next 2 rows, then BO 3 sts at beg of foll 2 rows – 21 sts rem.
BO all sts.

You'll notice that all the increasing and decreasing now happens in the reverse stockinette sections at the end of each needle, which makes a clean and unobtrusive gusset under each armpit. Yay!

FINISHING:
It may be helpful to note at this point that when you go to stitch your sleeves onto the body, you will need to set them slightly towards the front, if you want that pretty eyelet stripe to run down the crest of your arm (and you did all that work to put it there, so why wouldn't you want to show it off?) So what that means is you need to line up the shoulder seam with the back-most EDGE of the eyelet pattern, NOT with the CENTER, as you'd think. An easy way to check this, and find the exact spot on the sleeve that the shoulder seam will hit, is to make sure your seams line up at the armpit at well. Don't forget to check that both sleeves are even with each other too!

Once you have your sweater all stitched up, you can begin the crochet edging. I used for a slightly simpler design on the edging than called for in the pattern, by using the scalloping only around the collar. So here are my changes:

Crochet edging:
Row 1: With WS of work facing, work 1 row of single crochet (sc) from the bottom corner of the left front, up front edge, around collar, and stop at the base of the collar on the right front. Then *ch 2, skip down one st to make a 1/2" buttonhole, work in sc for 2" (or 7 sts in sc), and repeat from * 4 more times to create 5 buttonholes. (You probably won't have a full 2" left after the last buttonhole, so just go until the bottom of the right front.)

Row 2: Turn work and work sc back up the right front, until you get just past the top buttonhole, and then begin the scalloped pattern: * skip 2 sts while chaining 1, ([double chain, ch 1] 3 times, double chain again ALL in the next st, skip 2 sts, sc in next st, rep from * to bottom of collar on left side (make sure it's close to even with the right side!), and continue in sc down the left front, and weave in your loose ends.

I opted not to do the edging on the sleeves, but if you want to, just follow the original pattern.

Sew your buttons on the left side, centered on the band formed by the seed stitch/edging.

Voila! The Nantucket Jacket is finally finished!

flash, find your fit and radio africa

2007-03-13T14:46:00.000-07:00

Howdy world!

Is this not the most glorious weather ever?? Man do I love spring! And I love daylight savings – it's such a relief to have light all day. Makes a person feel more alive…

Well I had a fabulously busy weekend. My weekends are full of learning these days – I'm taking a Flash class at the SFSU Center for Extended Learning, with an excellent professor named Lane Good. Wow is Flash a powerful programme…

I made the image on the right, of proteas on Table Mountain, Cape Town, during the first week of class, and I thought I'd share it with y'all.

And this too, if you want to see a little Finding Nemo-eque animation I made for class last week:

dude, mr turtle is my father! Hee hee. Anyone want to hire a flash animator?

So one class does not a busy weekend make, right? On Sunday, I had the pleasure of attending knit-one-one's Find Your Perfect Fit class, taught by the irrepressible Julie Weisenberger (at left, tracing a sweater.)

What a powerhouse she is! The tips and inspirations for sweater patterns, fit, texture, and embellishment just come rolling out of her like a great big tsunami of ideas. If you're ever thinking of refining your sweater skills, I'd say don't miss experiencing Julie's expertise, either at knit-one-one for classes or at Article Pract for her drop-in Saturday morning sweater sessions.

And, if that were not enough, a few members of the class and Síle Convery herself all went to a Radio Africa dinner at Sweet Adeline. "What's Radio Africa?" you say. It's a simply fabulous idea, which I've seen versions of in places like New York, but which I've only experienced here.

Radio Africa is a nomadic restaurant. They travel to different venues like Sweet Adeline and present a one-night-only, price-fixed three course dinner. Everything we ate was really masterfully prepared and totally delicious, and at $32 a head, that's not a bad night out in the Bay!

I'm also particularly given to like Radio Africa because of the head chef, Ethiopian-born Eskender Aseged, who is friendly and genteel all at the same time, and meeting other here/there people always cheers me up when I miss our life on the other side of the world.

Oh and check out the cutest honey-bee linens ever. I considered stealing the one off of our table, but I thought that might be a little too cheeky.

Anyway, that is my excuse for not having posted the changes for the Nantucket Jacket yet, which I finished yesterday!!! WHOOO HOOOOO! Pictures and pattern notes coming this week, for real. ; )

nantucket sleeve success!

2007-03-08T14:48:00.000-08:00

Hello world!

Well, after a week of not knowing, I'm pleased to report that the pattern alteration I made to the Nantucket Jacket sleeve appears to have worked! Phew – glad I won't have to rip that whole sucker out!

You'll notice, those of you who are familiar with the original pattern, that I've also opted to make the sleeve longer. It's now somewhere between full length and three-quarter, at least on me. I figured, how often was I really going to wear a short-sleeved sweater?

Here is a pic of the new sleeve, flat:

What I did was substitute Chart B from the original pattern (the one with all the yarn-overs) for the width that comes from the seed stitch section in the original pattern.

I kept the sleeve width consistant for 8 cable repeats, instead of increasing immediately, then increased at the row ends, every four rows, in reverse stockinette to bring the width out to the proper measurement to begin the decreases for the cap shaping. I've basted one new sleeve on, and voila, it works!

Boy am I relieved.

Here's a detail pic of the substituted Chart B pattern:

Almost done! Check back in in about a week to see the finished sweater! I will also post detailed pattern notes on the full alterations I made to the original Nantucket Jacket pattern.

Stay tuned!

questionnaire time!

2007-03-07T18:06:00.000-08:00

Hello world!

I just visited the blog of Carrie (aka Eagle Eyes, 'cause she's always the first to spot typos and the like whenever we update the knit-one-one site! Damn she's good.) and found this delightful questionnaire.

I have to admit at this juncture that I LOVE these thingies. Right up there with other secret slightly-shameful addictions like Sudoku and bad TV… but when your friends are scattered across the globe, and you sometimes have to go for years a time without seeing them, there's a strange kind of comfort in these little quizzes.

So, with all respect to Carrie (and apologies for unceremoniously taking this questionnaire out of whatever original context it had) here it is… all you fellow blogging-knitters and knitting-bloggers out there, please copy it if you need a blog topic next time you write, and send me a note so I can come read all about you! ; )

1. What is/are your favorite yarn/s to knit with? What fibers do you absolutely *not* like?
Natural fibres! Wool – what can I say, I'm old fashioned. I'm currently really loving 8-ply merino, such as I'm using on my Nantucket Jacket, at the moment…soft but stable and springy and such a pleasure to knit. I've yet to try some of the costlier fibres, like silk or cashmere, but it's sure nice to run my fingers over them at Article Pract.

Synthetics, the plasticky-er the icky-er. While I certainly love the effect of a bit of novelty yarn here and there, working extensively with the stuff is kind of like eating a whole bag of chips at one sitting…

2. What do you use to store your needles/hooks in?
Denise sets rock! The rest of my circulars and dpn's are bamboo (with one lonely little #2 Addi Turbo) and they live with the rest of my knitting odds and ends (markers, counters, tapestry needles, and a pair of fuscia kiddie scissors) in a little yellow suitcase, á la Paper Source. I have two sets of straights – one lives rammed into the wretchedly unending ball of flame orange Kidlin with which I'm knitting a wretchedly-unending lace scarf, and the other set lives in my fat knitting basket.

3. How long have you been knitting & how did you learn? Would you consider your skill level to be beginner, intermediate or advanced?
I'd say I'm intermediate, with a bit of an unfair advantage towards patterning after all my time in the theater doing it for a living, which makes me look more competant than I actually am. ; )

I learned to knit the first time when I was probably four or five, from my grandmother, with a whole pile of unravelled sweaters to work with. (Really! I'm not kidding! That's war-survivor mentality for you.)

I relearned at Brown University because it was cold and I had a lot of long, boring board meetings I had to attend for the theatre I helped run.

And I relearned yet again last year, after being inspired by my client Síle Convery of knit-one-one, who hosts the most excellent knitting classes this side of the Mason Dixon line. (Ok so technically we're to neither side of it, but you get the point.)

What can I say? I'm hooked.

4. Do you have an Amazon or other online wish list?
Actually not! For someone who makes a living with computers, I'm remarkably recalcitrant when it comes to embracing the technologies in my own life. I love the smell of real live books, new or used, and spend many happy hours browsing the stacks with the, like, three other luddites in the San Francisco Bay Area.

5. What's your favorite scent? (for candles, bath products, etc.)
Hmmmm… unusual smells like fig or mango, or spicy smells if they don't smell synthetic. I love lavendar and lemon grass and tea rose as well.

6. Do you have a sweet tooth? Favorite candy?
Sometimes! And when I do, it's with a vengeance. Dark chocolate, caramel things, and those Kasugai gummy candies of various fruit flavors (lychee rocks) you get in the Asian supermarkets.

7. What other crafts or Do-It-Yourself things do you like to do? Do you spin?
Boy, I think I've given just about everything a whirl at least once… did learn how to spin on a drop-spindle, but I'm too short for that to be a practical option for creating my own yarn! I had to stand on a chair to get enough height…

I sew (used to work in the costume shops of the Berkeley Rep and Cal Shakes), like figuring things out like patterns, masks, prosthetics, and puppets, and used to work in the dye room of said theatres as well … I paint in acrylics and oils, keep a sketchbook, build things (I also used to be a carpenter), fix-it around the house, learned to blow borosillicate glass at the Crucible last year, and sculpt in paper-mache or clay… oh and I can re-sole shoes and do basic leatherwork as well, after working costume crafts and volunteering at a ranch which needed occasional tack TLC…

8. What's your favorite color(s)? Any colors you just can't stand?
Rich earth tones – rusts, interesting greys and blues and greens, anything with good depth and complexity to it. I love yellow, but not to wear. I don't think there is any one colour I can't stand… ok maybe after growing up in the 80's certain pastel peach shades or shades of mustard give me involuntary muscle spasms…

9. What is your family situation? Do you have any pets?
I'm 29, married with no children, (see there's my husband James over there…we were in Namibia, in Swakopmund, the same week Brangelina had their baby), a few wilting houseplants, no living pets but I've had quite a menagerie over the years, including two iguanas, two parrakeets, a cat, a rabbit, and an assortment of fish, frogs, and newts.

10. What is/are your favorite item/s to knit?
I'm on a sweater kick right now! I'm enjoying having these longer projects which I can really be with for a while, muse over what works and what doesn't. I'm coveting the Vogue Stitchionary books so I can start piecing together patterns on my own. Texture definitely appeals more to me than colourwork – I'd rather find a really brilliant yarn and play up its best qualities than have to deal with a tangle of bobbins and such… but I may be converted one of these days.

11. What are you knitting right now?
- The Nantucket Jacket, from the Winter 06 Interweave Knits
- Two of the most endless, excruciating scarves ever…the aforementioned Kidlin lace, and a knit-lenthwise copy of the Crinoid shawl from Morehouse Merino (see the pic to the left)… all I have to say is a gal would have to be MAD to attemt to do a whole shawl in this fashion.

12. Do you prefer straight or circular needles? Bamboo, aluminum, plastic?
Circulars! Except for lace, which I may never attempt again anyway… I LOVE my Denises… I thought I'd hate the plastic, but you know, it works. Before Denise, it was all bamboo, which I still love the feel of. And knitting really itty-bitty things on those Addi Turbos is strangely addictive, if carpal-tunnel inducing.

Oh and by the way, for the period-piece afficionados among you…(I KNOW I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE!!!) Lacis on Adeline/Shattuck and Ashby sells amazing, beautiful bone and redwood crochet hooks and the like. So you too can pretend to be living in the Victorian era without the corsets…

13. Is there anything that you collect?
Vintage dresses/costuming (not exactly intentionally, but I never seem to be able to resist a ridiculous bargain when I see one), good tools for many trades (drafting, carpentry, costuming, leatherwork, knitting…) african art, bones and feathers and shells and other natural detritus, paintings by one of my very best buddies and paintress extraodinaire, Vivian Prinsloo (that's one of her paintings over there. >> )

magnolias and nantucket jacket blues

2007-03-03T17:12:00.000-08:00

Did I mention that this is one of my favorite times of the year? The magnolias have been magnificent this spring. I pass several different varietals on the way to my local Peet's in Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto. This little tree is on Walnut street near Cedar… After all the chilly grey of the winter, the riot of pink is positively soul-restoring.

It's another balmy Saturday in Berkeley, after a week of rain. I drove down to Stanford yesterday to visit my brother Max, who's on grad school tours now. The hills are green with all the recent rain, and I was struck again by how much Stanford resembles a gigantic country club. Lush, almost tropical with its palm-lined avenues, and the long open collonades (is that spelled right? hm) of romaneque arches in yellow sandstone, breezy sunshine, and glinting mosaics.

Anyway I gotta hand it to my brother for always landing with his bum in the butter, as the South Africans say. Here he is, next to a maquette for Rodin's The Gates of Hell. Stanford's Rodin collection is just amazing. What a sculptor. The hands, the feet, not really for their anatomical detail (although that is impressive as well) but for the resonance of their humanity.

But right, back to my brother. With acceptances to Harvard and Rockefeller, and Stanford and Teach for America pending, Max puts the ROCK in rock star.

Maybe by now you're wondering where the "nantucket jacket blues" part comes in.

Well, I thought I'd made it all the way through a pattern for once without seriously altering it, but I guess not. After weeks of cabling away I finally have the body of the sweater finished, (proudly displayed in this pic) and have been working on the sleeves these past few days.

I went to try the one 2/3's completed sleeve on, and realized…I hate it. HATE it. The seed stitch underarms totally don't do it for me. Maybe if I had skinny little, waify arms, I'd be able to rock it, but no. Can we say, "alligator arms?"

So the one almost-finished sleeve is sitting sadly on a holder while I test out a revised pattern for the other. (Nothing like pattern writing on the fly.) If my experiment works, then I'll rip the first one out, and knit it to match. Ribbit, ribbit. And I will post my changes faithfully here at Woolly Wumpus, so check back in in a week or so, all those of you who similarly don't need extra bulk attached to their arms.

Here is the offending sleeve, whip-stitched together for trial purposes. I goofed one row of the seed stitch too, which doesn't help.

See how weird it looks? Weird! This is such a texture-heavy sweater that to my mind, making the sleeves even heavier is a mistake. I'm knitting Chart B into the sleeves (the yarn-over sequence) to help lighten the feel and make the overall effect sleeker. And gone will be the seed-stitch filler. Down with alligator arms.

OH yes by the way, this pattern seems to be one of the more popular ones from the Winter 2006 Interweave Knits magazine. It's called the "Nantucket Jacket" and graces the cover in a similar rust-red to the one I ended up using. I'll include full pattern and yarn notes when I write up my chages. So stay tuned…

PATTERN REMIX: The Nagano Sakura Scarf Cabled

2007-02-21T17:41:00.000-08:00

I love cherry blossoms. And this is perhaps one of my most favorite times of the year in the bay area… blossom time… cherry blossoms in full riot, dusting the ground with snowy petals, magnolias heavy with silky, improbable flowers, and everything smelling so damn good…

I saw this pattern in Knitty: Issue 15 Spring 2006. Designed by Sara Parelhoff, the Nagano Sakura scarf has that kind of mix between utility and randomness which I love.

I loved the whimsy of it, but I don't have access to a washing machine which offers much control, so felting was out for me. So I adapted the pattern thusly…

A note: the original pattern, images, and notes can be found here.

Nagano Sakura Remix

MATERIALS:
MC: 1 skein:
Karabella Aurora 8 100% Merino, dark brown
(50g/98 yds)
ballband gauge – 18 sts/10 cm on US 7-8
CC1: 1 skein (you'll have a ton left over):
New England Shetland 100% Merino Extrafine, #73 Lady Slipper (pink)
(50g/196 yds)
ballband gauge – 24 sts/ 10 cm on US 2-4
CC2: 1 skein (you'll have a ton left over):
New England Shetland 100% Merino Extrafine, #19 Blackberry (deep purple)
(same specs as CC1)

NEEDLES:
#9 Straight or Circular
#11 dpns
#2 Stright or Circular (Addi Turbo circulars recommended)

PATTERN NOTES:

I changed the materials and the construction of this scarf, if not the general feeling of it. This way, it's less of a think scarf and more like an embellishment…although for such a thin little thing, it keeps your neck surprisingly warm. Perfect for late winter, touch of spring, in the Bay Area…

CHANGES:
• Materials
• Length
• Not felted
• Cable instead of stockinette for main body of scarf
• Added a second blossom size

PATTERN:

SCARF:

Branch #1
Using your #11 dpns, CO 3 sts. Work 6 inches in I-cord. Cut yarn and set aside on a dpn or stitch holder.

Branch #2
Using your #11 dpns, CO 3 sts. Work 10 inches in I-cord. Cut yarn and set aside.

Branch #3
Using your # 11 dpns, CO 2 sts. Work 8 inches in I-cord. DO NOT break yarn.

Turn work around so WS is facing. Move branch #3 to right end of needle. Slip branch #2 onto left end of work and slide next to branch #3. Slip branch #1 onto left end of work and slide next to branch #2.

Using #9 needle, purl all sts to join strands of I-Cord; 8 sts

Next Row (RS): Using #9 needles, k1, inc 1, k 6, inc 1, k1; 10 sts.
Next Row (WS): Purl all.

Begin Cable Pattern: 6 row repeat:

Row 1 (RS): k1, p2, k1, p2, k1, p2, k1
Row 2 (WS) p1, k2, p1, k2, p1, k2, p1
Row 3: Same as row 1.
Row 4: Same as row 2.
Row 5 (Cable Row): k1, p1, slip next 3 sts onto cable needle and hold to back of work. P1, k1, p1 from left needle; then p1, k1, p1 from cn, p1, k1.
Row 6: same as row 2.

Repeat Cable pattern until the scarf is as long as you want it to be.

Next RS Row (Decrease): k1, p2tog, k1, p2, k1, p2tog, k1; 8 sts remain.
Next Row (WS): p all

Next Row (RS): Using #11 dpn, k2. Place remaining sts on a second dpn.

Branch #4: Using 2 sts on first dpn, knit 4 inches of I-Cord, BO these sts and cut yarn.

Branch #5: With RS facing, transfer next 3 sts from holder dpn to a new dpn. Rejoin yarn and knit 10 inches of I-cord. BO these sts and cut yarn.

Branch #6 With RS facing, use last 3 sts on holder dpn, and rejoin yarn and knit 7 inches of I-Cord.

Weave in loose ends, being careful not to bunch up the I-Cord branches.

FLOWERS (Make 9 total of the two different sizes. I did 3 large and 6 small.)

I added a larger size blossom to the mix, to give the clusters a bit of variety. The Picot edging which follows applies for both sizes:

Cast on & picot edging: Use the #2 needles and CC2, and leave a long tail at start and finish of CC2. Use the knitted cast on to cast on:
CO4, BO1, CO2, BO1, [CO5, BO1, CO2, BO1] 4 times, CO1; 25 sts.

Cut yarn, leaving a long tail, and switch to CC1:

LARGE FLOWER:
Row 1 (WS): p all sts
Row 2 (RS): k all sts
Row 3: p all sts
Row 4: [ssk, k1, k2tog] 5 times. 15 sts remain.
Row 5: p all
Row 6: [S2KP] 5 times. 5 sts rem. (S2KP: Slip next 2 sts knitwise, k next st, pass 2 slipped sts over the st just knitted. This forms a centered double decrease.)

SMALL FLOWER:
Row 1: p all sts
Row 2: [ssk, k1, k2tog] 5 times. 15 sts remain.
Row 3: p all
Row 4: [S2KP] 5 times. 5 sts rem.

Cut yarn and draw through the remaining 5 sts. Pull tight and sew edges together to form flower shape.

Weave in the CC1 ends. With one CC2 tail, embellish the flower by sewing a few sts in the center of the flower (see photo), and either weave in the end or wrap it around the decorative sts you just made, on the WS, where they gather towards the center.

Take the other CC2 tail and thread through to center. You will use this one to attatch the flowers to the scarf. Place them however you like – the more random, the more natural the "branches" will look!

And don't forget to stop this spring and smell the roses!

* * local talent alert! • location: piedmont, ca * *

2007-02-21T17:18:00.000-08:00

Ok, first, a teeny bit more about me: I am a graphic designer, and my specialty is branding and business packages for independant new businesses.

One of my favorite, most soul-feeding aspects of my job is that I get to help foster local talent… and both in the East Bay and in Cape Town, South Africa, where I live the other half of the time, we are blessed with plenty of it! So shop local! No excuses now.

As a person who Makes Things, I am especially compelled to mention whenever I stumble across other people who do too, and who do it with such flair.

walrusagain bags
The first part of this post is about a guy who serves me coffee every week at Rooz in Piedmont, the cafe across the street from my chiropractor. More about my chiropractor in a minute…

So I don't even know this boy's name, but he has red hair and is there most mornings at Rooz. I noticed a small row of very covetable bags show up at the back of the cafe one day, and didn't think much of it until I realized that the boy who has been serving me coffee all this while is the one who makes them!

Can we say, men who sew ROCK?

The bags are fantastic – the right mix of rough-cut and design-savvy, simply made, and the best part, other than all of them being unique and handmade by a YOUNG MAN WHO SEWS, is that he sells them for $30-$40. Fantastic. Go over to Rooz and get yourself one! A good project or book bag…

All about My Chiropractor – Alive Chiropractic
My chiropractor, Dr. Jennifer Wilhelm, also rocks. I've had chronic back, neck, and knee pains for ages, being as how I spend all my days in front of a computer or hunched over the latest project. In less than half-a-year, she has sorted me out, and she is an absolutely radiant, lovely human being to boot. She also has an equally lovely therapeutic masseuse in house, named Juliette Polizzi. Don't let her petite frame fake you out – those hands are STRONG!

PATTERN REMIX: The Jawbreaker Cardigan Remade

2007-02-19T18:05:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone out there in the blogosphere!

So remember how I mentioned in my very first post that a very nice woman named Anita suggested that I start a blog to record my pattern edits and notes? Well, this one is for her. (And anyone else out there interested in knitting the Jawbreaker Cardigan in a different way…)

I'm not going to retype the entire pattern here, but only the areas where I made changes. Think of it as looking at my notes, without having to read my dreadful handwriting. And if any of it makes gawdawfully no sense at all, feel free to contact me…

PATTERN: Jawbreaker Cardigan
FROM: Interweave Knits, Winter 2006 Issue

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: Kendra Cray

SIZE USED: S (37" bust)

YARN: Cascade Yarns Pastaza, Colour: 028
50% Merino/50% Alpaca
100 gms/132 yds
16 sts/4 in on #9 needles, according to
the ball band.

NEEDLES: Pattern calls for #10.5 and #11.
I used #11 and #13.

NOTES: The main changes which I made to this cardigan were:
1 ) changing the yarn (see above)
2 ) changing the number of buttonholes from 1 to 2
3 ) changing the rate of increase on the front panels
4 ) changing the collar
5 ) changing the length

* * * A warning… the following is going to make absolutely no sense unless you have the pattern in front of you! * * *

BACK:
I made no appreciable changes to the back, other than (ah, uh, erm....*accidentally*) making the whole thing longer. Happy accident though!

The pattern calls for you to knit (in size S, remember!) to 12-1/2 inches long, ending with a WS row, before you start the armhole shaping. The trick with the Pastaza is that it's a pleasantly weighty yarn, so 12-1/2" FLAT is not 12-1/2" DRAPED… so I knit 54 rows (including the ribbing at the hem) before the armhole shaping row. For the rest of the back, I proceeded with the pattern as written, until the BO row.

A note on binding off, which applies throughout: I suggest NOT binding off the shoulder seams, and grafting front and back together using Kitchener stitch. Much less bumpy at the seams. Also, when binding off for the armholes and neck, I ended up using the Elastic Bind Off (which for some reason, I don't find very elastic) which actually gave me a stiffer edge, which helped with the way I joined the collar…

RIGHT FRONT:
On the right and left front panels, I increased the length to match the back, and increased along the center edges faster than the pattern did, to allow for a second button hole.

Follow pattern as written until… PATTERN READS: …Shape Center Front: inc 1 st at beg of next row, then every foll 14th row 4 more times (for the SMALL!).

WHAT I DID: I condensed the 4 sets of 14 rows repeated above to 3 sets of 14 rows
…Shape Center Front: Inc. 1 st at beg of next row, then knit 13 rows even (set of 14, #1)…
Set of 14, #2: Increase 1 st, as described in the pattern, at rows 1 and 7.
Set of 14, #3: Increase 1 st, as described in the pattern, at rows 1 and 7. At row 9, knit the buttonhole row as described in the pattern later on. At row 12, begin the armhole shaping section.
Follow the rest of the pattern – for the rest of the armhole shaping, for the original buttonhole, through the neck shaping and until the BO row. (See note about binding off above.)

LEFT FRONT:
I simply used the same counting pattern as for the right front, and otherwise followed the pattern. See note above about binding off.

SLEEVES:
I made no real alterations to the sleeves, other than noting this:
PATTERN READS: Work even until piece measures 12" from CO, ending with a WS row. My count for this was 42 rows total, including the ribbing at the cuff. The idea is to make the sleeves the same length as the overall sweater, so if in doubt, just keep holding the two up to each other to check. See note above about binding off.

BLOCKING:
You have to block this sweater. I mean maybe you can get away with not blocking the sleeves, or maybe the back, but the front edges curl miserably unless you block 'em good. Besides it makes stitching the whole thing easier.

FINISHING:
You'll need to stitch the body pieces together at the shoulder seams before knitting on the collar. DO YOUR BLOCKING FIRST. Trust me. Sleeves are optional at this point – you can do 'em before or after the collar.

COLLAR:
I completely thew out all the instructions for the collar, and did this instead:
Using the little "holes" created by the elastic bind off, I took a length of yarn on a tapestry needle and "whip-stitched" a starting row onto my #11 circular needles. Is this allowed in knitting? I have no idea. It seemed to work pretty well.

BEGIN: I "picked up" 85 stitches along the neckline this way, starting at the right side of sweater, around the back, and through the left side.
Row 1: (RS): k all
Row 2: (WS): k all
Repeat rows 1 and 2, 6 more times, until you have 12 rows total.
Row 13: BO all. (I used the elastic bind off again.)
Take the loose tail you're left with after the BO and make a 1/2" loop with it, and weave the end back into the collar really well. This will form the hidden button-loop for the collar cross-over.

The collar will curl, oh yes it will. So I decided not to fight it, and that's how I ended up with the somewhat unusual curled collar. I'm sure all you fashionistas out there know the proper term for this – I can't remember it right now.

BUTTONS:
I bought sliced sea shells (see pic!) from Baubles and Beads on Shattuck in Berkeley for my two main buttons, but you can use just about anything. The nice thing about this sweater is it is quite plain, so your buttons get to make the statement. Or not. Up to you.

You'll also need a smallish (3/8" - 1/2") inconspicuous button, which you will place at the join between collar and left front of sweater, roughly 6" away from the edge. (you can see mine, a simple clear green button, at the very right edge of this photograph. It's faint – squint! This is so you can cross the right side of the collar over the left and fasten it here.

Like I said feel free to write me if it looks to you like I've goofed this in any way!

PATTERN: the Síle bobble scarf

2007-02-16T10:50:00.000-08:00

This one goes out to my good friend Lara, currently sorting thousands of pounds of fire-recovery seed for the BLM in Las Vegas.

This is a basic garter stitch scarf with a pleasant twist. Some people call it the caterpillar scarf – I think, if we're going with bug analogies, that it looks a bit more like a centipede, but of course you could vary the bobble length and/or the distance between bobbles very easily.

**An important note: I am not the designer of this pattern! The scarf was given to me, and I think that I have figured out how to make it, but I certainly can claim no credit for how cool it is!**

The pattern is written for any worsted weight yarn, although single ply seems to work the best. My scarf in the picture above, which was knit for me by Síle Convery of knit-one-one, is Malabrigo Olive. It was taught in last month's beginner knitting class at knit-one-one!

YARN: Worsted weight, 1 skein
NEEDLES: #9
GAUGE: Kinda something like 12 sts / 10 cm. Hey, it's a scarf.

abbreviations:

k = knit
p = purl
co = cast on
bo = bind off
sts = stitches
RS = right side
WS = wrong side

Cast On: 12 sts in the long tail method (for a 4" wide scarf)

Row 1 (WS): k 12. turn knitting.

Row 2 (RS): co 6 sts (using knitted cast on*), and immediately bind all 6 sts off**, k 12, turn knitting. (12 sts remain)
Row 3: co 6 sts (using knitted cast on) and immediately bind off 6 sts, k12 (12 sts remain)
Row 4: k all
Row 5: k all
Row 6: k all
Row 7: k all

*With the knitted cast on, you are working from left to right, vs standard knitting which is right to left, so you must turn the knitting first before casting on the stitches. Technically, they will "belong" to the row before.)

** Here you return to knitting normally, from right to left. Get it? Cast on left to right, then WITHOUT TURNING YOUR KNITTING begin binding off again.

Repeat Rows 2-7 for bobble pattern, until the scarf is as long as you want it to be.

When it's long enough, or when you've almost run out of yarn, at your next RS row:

RS: co 6 sts (using knitted cast on) and immediately bind off 6 sts, k12 (12 sts remain)
WS: co 6 sts (using knitted cast on) and immediately bind off 6 sts, k12 (12 sts remain)
RS: bind off all sts

Finishing: weave in your two loose tails and voíla. Bobble scarf!

Here's another picture:

woolly wumpus lands

2007-02-15T18:53:00.000-08:00

This is me. (I'm standing in the hallway of my house in Cape Town, 2004.)

Here I am, sitting at my computer and starting a blog instead of working like I should be. A few words about why I am here.

I am a graphic designer, and one of my clients recently got me back into knitting, and now I am a junkie. I suppose there are worse things to be addicted to, like things which can kill you immediately (instead of my slow suffocation under a giant pile of yarn and procrastination) but you get the point.

So I was at a knit-along at the Pub on Solano with said client, Síle Convery, of knit-one-one, and a handful of other ladies. We were talking about a sweater I had knit last week, whose pattern I altered with total disregard to the "knit-it-according-to-pattern-first" rule. It turned out ok. And one of the women present suggested I start a blog to post my creations and alterations of existing patterns.

And I thought, well, that's not a bad idea. It's not like I need another excuse to procrastinate. And there are so many things in life to write about, not just knitting, or making things, or… or…

Here I am!

For Anita, who gave me the idea to be here, thank you for bequeathing upon me this grand excuse to not do work.

And for everyone else, I hope I manage to be somewhat entertaining, and that you can all benefit slightly from visiting my little woolly life.