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I've had a couple of requests from people who want to knit both the adult and children's version of Hiro, so I'm offering a deal this week. Purchase the two of them together over on Ravelry, and get a special price: $10.00.
Every little bit helps, am I right?
Happy knitting!
The new Knitty is up, Deep Fall 2012. You may notice that this issue marks the website's 10th anniversary which makes me take a moment to check my clock. It seems like so little time ago when I wandered onto the internet wondering if there might be people on there talking about knitting, and found the place crowded around the knitty coffeeshop. Amy Singer was one of the internet's pioneers, planting a flag in the html wilderness back when most websites flashed and heralded your arrival with dancing gifs and 8 bit music. As far as we've come as a community and knitting has developed as an identity, much of that distance we all owe to Amy, Jillian Moreno, and the talented tech editors, writers, designers, and advertisers who made knitty possible for all these years. Don't miss Amy's letter this issue, it's a little bit teary and sweet.
What makes Knitty's 10th anniversary extra special for me is that I have a pattern tucked in there among the luminaries. It's the one photographed by Caro Sheridan:
It's a handspun sweater I'm calling Party Mix. The idea came out of a conversation I had with Amy King of Spunky Eclectic about the nature of stash and spinning for a sweater. The pattern bridges a gap for me between a short attention span for spinning and the fact that I favor sweaters as my primary knitting.
Like many spinners, I have plenty of six to eight ounce bits of fiber (I tend to buy bumps in pairs because one is never enough), but very few sweater lots of fiber. Six ounces is about all I ever really want to spin out of something before I lose interest and want something new. Meanwhile, I have favorite colors I gravitate to when I buy fiber so the stash already has a lot of coordinates.
Party Mix is knit out of that stash, made of pieces that are designed with 4 to 6 oz units in mind (for most sizes), so that out of a motley pile comes an elegant sweater. The front and back can be two different yarns, unified by one yarn devoted to the sleeves and triangular side panels. This unifying yarn can be handspun, or it can be a commercial one. You can even push it further, and make each piece out of a different yarn.
For the yarns, I chose to make a 2-ply, partly because I am lazy, but really because a 2 ply leaves the component colors more intact and lets them stripe as much as possible in the knitted fabric. A 3-ply would have blended them down further, and I really wanted to highlight the handpainted quality of the original roving. You can make that decision for yourself of course, and if you are combining rovings for your yarn, a 3-ply gives you the option of using three different rovings, which means you can really explore your stash even further. Adrian of Hello Yarn has a great post on this technique to check out if this is a new-to-you idea.
The vital statistics on the sweaters include the fact that Random Kelly spun the yarn I used in the front of the top version in about a weekend, because that's the kind of get 'er done spinnner she is. It took me about a week to match her output. All the yarns are from Spunky Eclectic BFL/Silk in various colorways that had a burgundy quality in common: Toronto for the body and Sangria for the sides and sleeves of the bottom version, Tahiti for the front and an edited version of Sangria (minus the darkest parts to make it coordinate with the Tahiti) for the back of the top version, along with a Cascade 220 color called Provence for the sleeves. All yarns were spun to 9 to 10 wpi, most of them about 1000 ypp. Kelly's yarn was lighter than mine (she's an accomplished woolen spinner while I am still working on getting air into my singles) so while she ended up with the same wpi, her yarn was closer to 1100 ypp. That's something for me to work on.
Meanwhile, if you aren't a spinner, and you like the pattern enough to make it, rest assured that any worsted-ish weight yarn you love will work. I suggested Noro Silk Garden in the pattern specs, but you can easily use a variegated yarn like Lorna's Laces Shepherd Multi or Crystal Palace Mochi Plus coordinated with solids (or not). Its really all about play (as it often is for me) and messing around with what you love.
Happy Anniversary, Amy & Jillian. Thank you for all that you do!
There are some lovely versions of Hiro beginning to pop up on Ravelry. It's really fun to knit vicariously through all the people who have posted their color choices. I want so many versions of this sweater myself, but there are other projects calling my name right now, and I already have two. I know another one is in my future, I just need to find the yarn that comes in the colors I want, if I can only settle on one color scheme.
For example, another favorite website of mine that breaks down the colors in nice pictures is Design Seeds. Perhaps you've heard of it. If you haven't, I'll send you over there at the end of this post but not before, because if you go now, I know that I'll lose you and never see you again.
The Design Seeds blog includes a few combinations that really scream at me right now. I'm going to pick just one for this post, to show you how you can play with this.
So here's this photo, and the colors that make me so happy (no shock here, just look at my blog banner):
So I matched the colors and plugged four of them into my little preview file (which I made using Excel following the tutorial by the lovely Marnie MacLean here) and got this:
I kind of like these swatches, but they lack something that the photo has, so I changed the municipal pool blue out for the lighter robin's egg blue. And I got this:
Better. But still. I wasn't pleased with the interplay, so I made a new version that I thought would work, using the results so far as a predictor and voilá:
Still, not quite right. I like the order, but I'm not crazy about the mouse brown next to my face when I would so prefer the blue. Two clicks of Command-R later and
Yep. That's it. ::Sigh::
As promised, this is the link to the Design Seeds blog, and to the specific post that I used here. Go ahead and pay her a visit. It was nice knowing you.
Before you go: I do have one more suggestion for color selection. There is a small flower-like motif in the chart that would get lost if the colors are too close. In Hiro, it's between the second and third color, in Hiro Petite, it's between the first and second color. Your best bet is to make sure these two colors have a high contrast. They don't have to be the highest of all your colors, but you want to make sure your colors honor that little detail in the chart. If you own th pattern, you can look at it to see what I mean. Now go play.
Once upon a time, there was a princess. She was the delight of her father, an amateur actress, a student of palmistry, a reader of Baudelaire, a ceaseless needlepointer, and the grandmother of a knitter.
My paternal grandmother Portia died when I was almost 9, so what I remember of her is limited to our luncheons in nice restaurants, her pristinely coiled hair, and her beautiful brooches, always perfectly placed on the lapel of her navy suit.
What I know about Portia comes from what I have of her belongings: her books, her needlepoint, her hats, and her photo albums which she kept for most of her life. The one from her 20's is my favorite, especially for the clothes.
Here she is in the Roman Forum with her mother, Dollie Bartlett.
I so wish I had a picture of Portia's coat in color, because this one looks splendid. Is it embroidered or a woven jacquard? In many colors or just a few? I can only imagine. Note the line of buttons down the side of the skirt, and the festoon on her cloche. Her two necklaces. The gloves. I love how matronly Dollie looks next to her daughter, how frumpy she was by this point in her life in her shapeless dress and obscuring hat. I also smile to think that Dollie was about my age when this photo was taken, perhaps even younger than I am now.
Details: Gingham! I have always admired this dress. I love the low slung waist of the time. If you look carefully, you can see a lace collar and three tiers of scallops on her sleeves. Her hair is coiled on either side of her head, a style she wore for most of her life. She always had very long hair; by her 70's, she wore it wrapped over the top of her head.
All of her friends seem to have long hair in this decade. I am surprised to notice that since movies and the like always depict such ladies with bobbed hair. All of Portia's crowd have elaborate braids pinned over their ears and sometimes they wrap scarves over top of it all. It's quite arty and bohemian looking. But no bobs.
This picture is from the Grand Tour section of the album, where Portia and a whole gang of chums set off in 1923 like something in a Henry James novel to strike swell poses in front of such sites as King Tut's tomb, which in 1923 would have only have been known for a few years. I love that the clothing is straight out of central casting for a Mummy's revenge movie.
Portia on the right with her best friend Gerry in a rare photo of them in pants -- or rather, plus fours -- scarves wrapped about the neck and over the top of their hats to protect them from sun and dust, long pocketed cardigans, low waisted midi blouses, practical shoes.
Here she is on Spider Lake in Wisconsin. What she has in her lap is a wind-up film camera, the nifty iphone of her time. It's her fair isle patterned jersey that intrigues me the most here, because it's likely machine made, but of very high quality. You will be disppointed to know that the back is plain. There are several pages of her wearing this outfit so I know this from other shots. It seems to have been a good day for cameras in general. I also love the way she looks in a beret. The coat must have been loaned to cover the chill of the lake, since it doesn't fit her at all, and looks to me like it was from one of her male friends.
Just in case you suspect she was at all restrained, there's plenty of evidence in this collection to suggest she was every bit as silly and impulsive as a 20 something should be: here she is soaking wet, stockings and all, but not a hair out of place. I don't know if she jumped or was pushed, but clearly it was a blast after all. I wonder if the dress was ruined since it looks a bit delicate: silk perhaps? And of several layers with embroidery on the surface, pin tucks, and a silhouette so very much like what I think of when I think of the mid-20's. Again, I wish I knew what color there was in this dress, since it must have been beautiful.
Here are two of my favorite pictures, favorites because they are both of Portia at her needlepoint, which she was renowned for.
Portia's on the right. I love her friend's blouse. There are a few dresses and blouses on the women in the album that have this little Romanian flavor. It intrigues me that they are doing needlework, and her friend is wearing a blouse also made by hand, but probably by someone from far far away who was not sitting on a porch in white linen and pearls when she made it.
Portia on the left. Again, more needlepoint, and note the headscarves.
As a knitter, I cherish Portia's needle work. I have a small chair she made for me with Winnie the Pooh characters stitched all over it. I own her applique'd cocktail napkins and a few pillows that she stitched. There's an elaborate canvas of birds and fruit she had framed that hangs in my office among the family photos. The work is so fine in scale, so small, like she had all the time in the world to make every stitch.
My mother always talked of Portia's devotion to needlework, so that even though it was my mother who first taught me to knit, I feel like my hands came from my grandmother.
We all remember Portia most of all for the way she surrounded herself with beautiful things. Her life was more complicated than all that, and ugly too at times. But she never failed to dress the part of a princess at play. It's best I think to remember her for that.
