Iknitadog
The Iditarod (the famous 1,000 mile Alaskan dog sled race) and its knit-a-long companion, the Iknitarod, are long over now and are well past yesterday’s news. But it’s what I think of whenever I catch sight of this cute, silly hat I created during those events. It always makes me smile, even if I do know the disproportional amount of work that went into making such a small, utilitarian thing, and all it’s various hand spun yarns. I’m especially pleased with the dog that’s knit with Chiengora. Yes, that’s right: I knit the dog on the hat with yarn that I spun from the fur of my dog. The original pattern for this hat did not have a dog. However, I’m not the first person to think it’s a good idea to stage a herding dog among this flock of sheep. Meg Warren did it, and published her version as a separate pattern on Ravelry. Her dogs, however, are very clearly border collies, and well -I wanted the dog in my version of the hat to look like MY dog, a Cardigan Corgi. My thinking was that learning the colorwork technique was enough to manage at one time, without worrying about the pattern, too. I subsequently decided to re-chart the entire pattern for this hat, so I wouldn’t have to think about it while I was knitting. It took me a surprisingly long time to make a digital version of the pattern that was in my head, and creating it on a computer was its own learning process. Here’s how it turned out:
Now I’m working on the accompanying mitts, and as soon as I look up Elizabeth Zimmerman’s method of casting off by casting on, this first one is going to be finished. Here’s ripping out, last week:
Both mitts really should be finished by now, but with things being what they were last week, the mitts were set aside for several days and I made a lot of progress on swatching, instead. My new pattern is nearly done, and then it will be on to knitting a real sample of it. In the meantime, here’s a teaser:
Un-raveling; Re-creating
~on dealing with loss, playing with the cards you’re dealt, and keeping the creation of the fabric going, stitch by stitch
If you’re the kind of person who notices these kinds of things, you’ll have noticed that there was no written post last week. Last week, I had some things come up unexpectedly that needed taken care of immediately. Namely, several people I am close to had, within days of each other, very different varieties of very real, very emotional, life-altering crisis. It was hard to watch them go through what they were dealing with; I made sure I was there, and I did my best.
I also did what I always do when faced with such things dealt out by life – I took all that emotion and re-directed it into a super-focused high beam of intense creativity. I swatched like a fiend, in the car on the way to and from the funeral. I sat on the kitchen floor with the dog and dashed stitch counts out onto the pages of a notebook with a favorite pen. I ripped back the palm of a mitt I was winging the pattern on, and re-engineered the thumb the way it seemed it would work better – and it did.
Then I vacuumed the house, and was glad for the dog fur gathered in the corners on the old hardwood floors. I sipped homemade root beer in someone else’s cozy kitchen and basked in the presence of friends. I stood with my feet planted solidly on my lawn and watched the sunset, and was aware of the absence of hospital walls.
All these things we go through, alone, as individuals. All these things we share the experience of, across all humanity. We unravel, we pick up, and we go on.
The thing about colorwork
~on trying new techniques, and learning to carry all the things
The thing nobody told me about colorwork knitting is that it’s really quite easy – especially Fair Isle colorwork, where you only have to orchestrate two strands of yarn at any one time. It turns out that working with several colors at once is enjoyable, relaxing, and rewarding. In fact, it’s the most instantly gratifying kind of knitting there is. Even after working a scant ten rows, you can clearly see a motif emerging. As soon as you notice it, you immediately have the feeling of having accomplished something. After all, the whole point of colorwork is what you do with the colors; without that, it’s just plain old stockinette!
Generally speaking, when I knit things, they only come in one, single, absolutely correct color at a time. Once having seen the finished item in my mind’s eye, I’ll go to great lengths to get exactly that color. For the sake of that one perfect skein, I will spend hours upon hours searching for and sourcing from multiple destashes (yarn other people don’t want anymore), hopping around to yarn stores that are hours apart, over-dyeing yarn I am already in possession of, or dyeing and spinning my own yarn, from scratch (which is sometimes easier, and less time consuming!). And that’s just for one skein. When there are multiple colors, plural, in a project, I can easily get caught up for well nigh on a month or more, setting straight every value, tone, and shade before even considering picking up a pair of knitting needles.
Like this hat. It should have been simple; it IS simple. Gloriously simple, in the way only an incredibly well-designed thing can be. And as with so many of my projects, I had a vision. Of fluffy, curly-locked, natural-wool-colored sheep, on a handknit field of some-colors-or-other (the colors of that certain spin-a-long fiber, in particular…), with softly glistening, slightly sparkling, snowy white “snow” yarn falling gently from a cloudless “sky”. Essentially: I excel at making beautifully simple things artfully complicated. Lucky for me, I had the perseverance (and coincidentally had sufficient time during a vacation) to create the yarns of my dreams. Color problems solved!
Then I started knitting.
I’m just going to come out and say right now, that when those Shetland and Fair Islanders hit upon creating elaborate-looking colorwork patterns while only using two colors in any single row, it was – and is – sheer genius. I, on the other hand, in my untried, untested, and inexperienced foray into such things, took a nice three color pattern and inadvertently turned it into a seven color pattern, with five of those colors appearing in a few single rows. Oops./Whee!
On the one hand, the finished product came out great, and I love it, and accompanying mitts are already on the way. On the other hand… well, let’s just say those seven colors made two color knitting seem like a breeze (which it is, really). Truly, carrying five colors wasn’t hard or bad, it was just a lot more like Tetris than I fairly want my knitting to regularly be. And also – I need to have an footnote here about BFL. For some reason, every spinner I know jumps all over BFL (Blue Faced Leicester, a breed of sheep). It’s the “background yarn” in this hat (the “meadow” and the “sky”). Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice fiber to spin, and it dyes very well, and the finished yarn looks great, especially when it has silk added in. I just can’t seem to be able to wear it, except on my head (although, for certain, I’m going to go through the itchy agony to wear these glorious mitts for a few hours at a time, once they’re done). Even just thinking about putting a BFL scarf around my neck makes me squirm; and BFL is soft. I’ve seen people snuggle up in high collared grey masham sweaters and not even twitch. I am amazed by, and envy, those people, and I would spin and knit what I consider “wool with character” for them, all day long. Not so for me. I’ve spent the past several weeks picking stray BFL fibers off of everything I own. Not because they look bad, stuck to whatever they’re stuck to, but because I can feel them, and they’re irritating! I do believe I’m about to become a very picky crafter when it comes to my own skin. The personal wearable wools campaign is ON.