Moth Heaven

Summer Gatherings

My thermometer in the shade registers 90 degrees at the moment and half of the flowers in the garden are gasping in the direct July sun. I thank the innovative fates that I was born after the invention of central air driven by geothermal groundwater. Hard to believe that only a few weeks ago, while much of the professional knitting world was gorging on Jeni's ice cream in Columbus, I was hanging out on York Beach with part of the New England Contingent convening something we called alt-TNNA.

There were a lot more people when we planted ourselves around lunchtime, but we outlasted them all. We came prepared: we had knitting and strong sunscreen. We did all the beachy things one does like swim in the cold cold water, practiced our sand calligraphy, and showed off our cartwheels. No one paid us any mind, bunch of girls that we are, until of course, we pulled out the yarn. THEN, oh my precious, didn't we attract all of the attention there was to spare on good old York beach?

 

Fast forward two weeks and here I am in a quiet house hanging out at the kitchen table with the endlessly doodling kid, while the husband is off gathering supplies for the crazy weekend gathering of his own this week (45 audiophiles, some coming from as far away as Alabama, California, and Belgium, who all need to be fed and given coffee). So am I frantically making lasagnas? or am I catching up with some works in progress, hoping to have some new sweaters for when the sun has mercy?

Yep, clearly I'm pretty relaxed about the whole week to come. It's the knitting that keeps me sane. Or innoculates me against how much freaking work I have ahead of me. This is (by the way) my third Hiro, approaching the home stretch. I'm not entirely sold on this particular green, since I'm thinking I need to go a little more on the olive side of things here. But I'll try it on in a few rows and see what I really think. Then maybe I'll season the sauce and boil up about six pounds of lasagna noodles.

Don't worry. I'm doing this for love.

 

 

 

A Wee Sheepie Kind of Thing

I went to the fabric store today to buy buttons for this:

It's a wee sheepie sweater knit out of Sincere Sheep Resolute, a 100% Merino Superwash dyed in natural dyes. I sent the written pattern off today for tech editing, so it should be ready within the month. There's a hat too (of course).

It's the same chart as the one I used in the Wolves Will Be Wolves Hat, minus the wolves. I think we can hold off on that particular symbolism at least until the little tyke can handle Scooby Doo cartoons, don't you?

I'll let you know, of course, when it's ready. I have big knitting ahead, I just needed to get this out of my system. Baby sweaters are the knitter's bad pun: sometimes they just have to be made.

 

 

What Catches the Eye

Madison Avenue Art Deco Entranceway, photo from Supercozy blog

 

 

Thomas Paul tea towel, from Alt Modern.

 

 

Henri Rivière’s "The Painter in the Tower", plate 36 from Les trente-six vues de la Tour Eiffel (Thirty-six Views of the Eiffel Tower).

Doubt is the Stone Wall in the Road

A little unhappy designing anecdote. It has a happy ending. 

Not too long ago, Interweave Knts sent this out as part of their call for this coming Winter issue.

There were a lot of great possibilities in the overall call, but the idea of doing something cabled really appealed to me. And I thought maybe, just maybe, I could do a skirt. A cabled skirt? you ask. Yes, a cabled skirt.

Knit skirts are not nearly as popular as they deserve to be, and part of the problem is that skirt design is too dominated by the top down tube with lace at the bottom. Now, don't get me wrong. There are some really lovely examples of this formula, but it's been done.

Nor do I mean to suggest that cables on a skirt is an entirely new idea, but in the version I wanted to do, the cables would create gores, vertical panels that act a lot like the pieces sewn together in most skirts. There would be drape in ways there are few good examples of in the lowly handknit skirt. It would be awesome. There would be six panels altogether, and I would use a neglected cable from Barbara Walker, the Aqueduct Cable. (Volume 1)

So I swatched it up, sent off the proposal, and waited.

To make a long story short (and believe me, when you're waiting to knit something you're excited about, the 4 month stretch between concept and contract is a long time . . . ) the swatch came back, very much rejected. There was a nice form letter, but still, rejection is a bit of a stone wall in the road.

The thing about getting submissions back is that you never know why. Was it a bad idea? Did they like it but couldn't use it? Did I not do a good enough job explaining it? Should I have knit an enire panel for the swatch so they would believe me that I could make it work? Or were they mocking me around the table?

"What was she thinking? HAHAHAHA A cabled skirt? HAHAHAHA"

No way to tell. So many possibilities. If you know me, you know I went straight to the "It must suck" option. The papers for the proposal looked like someone had jumped up and down on them, so that helped.

On the bright side, it was only my first rejection. And I knew I needed to earn a few of those before I can count myself as experienced in design. I've since been rejected (or ignored) by Vogue Knitting, PLY, and a previously solicitous literary agent, so that's good.,

Still hoping it might be a good idea, but maybe less so, I started knitting it anyway.

Other commitments intervened, and the skirt sat waiting. I wasn't even sure it was worth pursuing. There were a few restarts, I miscalculated how much yarn I needed and had to start over with new yarn. This is why I usually purchase yarn and not ask for it like a lot of designers do. I change gears alot mid-project and sometimes I'm just wrong. I feel shy about asking for lots of yarn so that I can have some wiggle room, which is one of the great things about magazine work: they send you gobs of yarn. 

Finally, I decided to go for it. I set doubt aside and decided that if it stank, I would sit on it. If it was great, then great: out it woud go into the world. I calculated a late August release, and was looking forward to sitting down with the home stretch next week when Ta-DAAA: out comes this wonderful collection from pre-eminent designer, Norah Gaughan.

Full of gorgeous organic shapes and compelling projects, it's going to be mine as soon as I find a copy at one of my local shops. The lightening bolt is this:

It's a stunner. And I mean that in a few ways. I am really surprised at how similar the idea is to my Aqueduct Skirt. It's pure Norah all the way, which means that it is so much "prettier" a version of what I am working on that now I can't imagine finshing mine. I love the lily pad shapes at the hem, the flow of the cables up into the ribbing around the hips. It's perfect. It's original. Not only is it so much better than my version, but even if I went ahead and published my skirt now with the borrowed BW cable, it would never be perceived as anything but derivative of this design because it came after. So it's just as well Interweave Knits sent my skirt back to me.

But at the same time, I am really really pleased at how beautiful it is. So I wasn't crazy, and this means that my skirt would have been worth the effort.

I have gleened a few lessons from this little moment. I had at least one idea that was good enough that I had it (almost) in common with Norah Gaughan (even if she kicked my ass with it), and that even though a magazine might have rejected it, it was still a decent idea. I'm picking myself up now, and getting on with it. Maybe some of the other things I have in the pipeline will be just as good. Maybe better.

For those of you who are doing original work, whether you're a designer or a content to knit for yourself knitter, or you're a maker of some other sort who just happens to be reading a knitting blog, take heart from this. When you hold onto an idea out of doubt, then run smack into it on the street one day, don't be discouraged. Get a little tougher with yourself. It's validation, it means it was an interesting idea. Someone else had more courage than you to get it out there.

So get your stuff out there.

The First Thing I Ever Made Was a Mess

I was having a wonderful chat a couple of weeks ago with some new friends. We were having dinner in the kind of place where the man in gaucho pants asks you if you want what he's carrying. It's kind of like a buffet, except it's the food that wanders around.

We were talking about being people who make things. About our first crafty outputs when we were kids and how it set the stage for our adult lives as artists. I hadn't ever really thought much of my early crafting before I learned to knit, but I realize how much construction paper and magazine collages were a kind of preamble to what I now do with yarn, and how important all that spontaneous mess making was to how I work out a short row problem.

inspiration, believe it or not.

When I was very young, I made worlds in my room out of cardboard box doll houses, furnishing them with beds covered in fabric scraps and upholstered clothespin couches. I once spilled a quart of red paint during one building session all over the middle of my shag rug and tried to hide the evidence by piling stuff on top of it. The paint dried before it was discovered and so it remained: an indellible testimony to my general clumsiness. The year I was 8 I spent a homesick session at the kind of summer camp where we took classes like weaving and batik. I brought home the unfinished top of a wooden stool I had begun to carve with lotus flowers and a hummingbird, intent that I would finish it someday when I could gather my own tools. Somethings never change.

My favorite place during my brief stay at a wonderful school in the fourth grade was the pottery studio where I learned about the transformative power of the kiln.

That's a racoon, 4th grade iteration

I learned to sew and was given my first sewing machine before I was 10. I did macramé and made plant hangers with hemp cord and oversized glazed beads of my own making for my mother's expanding spider plant flock. I was supplied with needlepoint canvases for sick days in bed, and no end of nails and rope for the treehouses that never made it past their first ambitious flush of effort out there in the woods.

My parent's friends sat for portraits during cocktail parties and went home with souvenirs. I made whole families of hand puppets out of paper maché and rigged working theater curtains in a cardboard box that I moved half of the furniture in my room so I could conceal myself underneath to perform puppet shows without end for my poor patient mother.

And only after all of that did I learn how to knit.

And I was thinking about my 11 year old son, who is drawing and re-drawing imaginary Godzilla creatures and Ultraman characters so much that when I gave him a ream of paper last week, he was excited as if it were Christmas. He's always been a consumer of paper: I have the grocery bags full of origami creatures to illustrate that point.

The miniature Godzilla "movie set" he abandoned for the current drawing jag sits collecting dust in his room, sprawled across every flat surface like a Lilliputian back lot at Universal Studios.

Like me, he's a maker. He may not have a red paint stain on his rug (yet), but he does have the vapor trail of half finished projects of the constantly moving mind that I had. He makes a glorious mess, and I couldn't be more proud. Perhaps he will let me teach him to do something with yarn someday. But until then, I'll keep letting him follow his heart and inspiration, where ever they may lead.

So what kinds of things did you make when you were a kid?

"Fox Love" Love

No, that's not a typo. The Fox Love Jacket is finally ready for sharing. I required some help on this one to make it perfect, and I wanted to send out some love to everyone involved.

It's not a complicated knit, but making it knitter friendly was a multiple step process so I have more than the usual number of people to thank for this one. First of all, I bow to my darling boy, who at eleven is still sweet on woodland critters and wants his clothes emblazoned with them whenever possible. The inspiration came from him. Also, thank you to the talented Amy Christoffers who urged me to actually write the pattern down since I was just going to make one and move on.

 

Many thanks also to Marion, my lovely model, who was not freaked out when a total stranger (that would be me) asked her if she would wear a sweater for photographs. Granted, she was knitting a sock at the time, so she was fair game.

 

Thank you also to Courtney at Seed Stitch in Salem who let me "stage" the shoot at her gorgeous shop. I bought a sweater's worth of Shibui Heichi to thank her. And some Blue Sky Alpaca. And maybe some other things too.

My enormous gratitude to Dawn who wrangled the many pattern details and made all the numbers sing.

And to Alison who tutored me through my first solo chart composition (Adobe Illustrator has a steep learning curve), approved my final chart, made the schematic, and laid out the whole pattern so beautifully.

Just for the record, the original sweater was knit in Berroco Vintage Chunky, which I chose for its kid-friendly texture and the fact that shade #6176, aka "Pumpkin", was the perfect fox color. I purchased the yarn at the Yarn and Fiber Company in Derry, NH, where I know they always have loads of Berroco in all. the. colors.

 

Extra touches of orange

I’m having my first sale as a celebration. If you buy the Fox Love Jacket through Ravelry, there’s a coupon code FoxLove20 for 20% off your purchase, and that includes all of the patterns I have available, as long as one of the patterns you buy is the Fox Love Jacket (or even if it’s the only pattern you buy). The offer is good through midnight EDST on Tuesday, June 11th.

 

I hope you like it!

Albers Pullover

Have you guys seen the Summer Interweave Knits yet?

Maybe you understood my previous post better when you saw this:

The sweater is indeed named Albers, after Anni, not Josef.

It's knit from the top down, in two identical pieces. Even though it's knit using intarsia, you never have to cut any yarn since everything flows from one row to the next. Once you finish a color in one row, you pick it up in the row after. There's a provisional cast on for the neck because I never have luck with top down necklines fitting well, and the provisional beginning allows you to finish the neck in one piece, but also to adjust it according to your taste (which is something I do for every top down sweater I knit these days, regardless of the instructions).

It's a totally enjoyable sweater to knit for the process types, and a very flattering sweater to wear for those of you out there who are product knitters (like me).

I hope you give it a try. Don't forget if you have any questions, you can consult the Ravelry group, or drop me a line directly.

Women to Thank: Anni Albers

Recently, I added this to one of my Pinterest boards.

courtesy of Art Resource

It's a woven wall hanging by Anni Albers made of silk and rayon, held by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

If you don't already know her name, I will tell you that Anni Albers was a member of the Bauhaus School, as you might have guessed from her last name. She was indeed married to Josef Albers, who is much more widely exhibited these days.

They shared a number of formal preoccupations, so much so that it interests me where one of them might have left off working out an idea, and the other began.

If you look at her wider body of work, you'll see what I mean. But Anni deserves to be recognized in her own right, and is one of those many women that your Art survey likely skipped over as your professor rushed to wrap up the 20th century in the time remaining in the semester.

As someone interested in textiles and the contemporary community that is grounded in their creation and celebration, I feel that I owe a debt to Anni for her book On Weaving, published in 1965, two years after I was born. Anni's work and her writing were part and product of the midcentury reevaluation of the beauty embedded in what had been historically marginalized as the "domestic arts". This new respect for hand work for which she was instrumental is the fertile ground out of which came interest in publishing books by Elizabeth Zimmerman, Priscilla Gibson Roberts, Barbara Walker, Mary Thomas, and Paula Simmons.

There's a Foundation for promoting Josef and Anni's work in Bethany, Conneticut, and they have a website. There's a very nice gallery there of her work which you can click around in. Take a moment to admire her work, and thank her for what she did for us all.

 

 

Getting Out of The Chair

Hey.

I'm in a knitting rut. As in, all I do these days is knit.

It's beginning to show a little wear and tear on the body. My butt is flat, my hands ache, I'm developing a widow's hump from looking down at my work all the time, and my clothes are not fitting very well. It's been something I haven't really cared about late in the winter since I hardly get out of my sweat pants most days lately, because what clothes are there better to knit in that something with an elastic waistband?

Damn, I'm a mess.

I went for a bike ride yesterday: a pathetic wind sucking ass kicking bike ride. It was the kind of ride I would have never thought would be a challenge, but yesterday, I was humbled by a tiny hill I usually consider a warm up.

Balance. I need to strike some kind of balance. Less chair time, more movement time.

I'm about to celebrate my 50th birthday, in fact. What better way to mark the half century mark than to buy some cute and inspiring bike togs, and hit the road?

It's spring after all. Time to get outside and move. Join me?

 

Make Room on Your Bookshelf for Your New BFF

So you knit. And you read my blog (thank you again for that, I know it's been awhile since I last said that), so you're probably interested in knitting sweaters, whether or not you actually knit sweaters yourself. If you knit sweaters, you probably have a collection that you aren't as happy with than when you set out on that 1200+ yard oddyssey, right?

 

As a sweater knitter, maybe you make good sweaters that look just like the pattern photo. Your gauge and yarn are a perfect match, the seams are tight and professional looking, your buttonholes sing, your color choice -- da bomb. But then comes that moment when you put the thing on, look in the mirror, and are disappointed with what you see. You might think it's you: your swimmer's shoulders, your short legs. What a shame. You're wearing a sweater that doesn't make you feel awesome for having made something with your own hands, you've only succeeded in reminding yourself about what you hate in the mirror.

Enter Amy Herzog, your best defense against having this ever happen again.

For sure, you know Amy. But in the unlikely case that you you don't know Amy, allow me to introduce the two of you. Amy Herzog has been teaching and designing with the laser focused purpose of empowering knitters to make flattering sweaters. She has been workshopping her ideas all over the country for the last two years, refining her data and helping knitters of all shapes and sizes get real about what will work for their unique selves, and now she's distilled it all into a great package anyone who knows the way to their local bookshop can get their hands on.

 

With the double release this month of both her Craftsy class and her book Knit to Flatter, anyone who's ever wanted to take a class with Amy now has accesss to her clothing smarts. The online class and the book function as compliments to each other, and are certain to make their way into every sweater knitter's basic toolbox. The bonus is that the book also includes 18 patterns designed to cover the bases, and to help you knit that first (or next) perfect-for-you sweater.

Her voice will remind you of your BFF, guiding you in your choices, reminding you of what "works". Like any "guide" book, there are sure to be moments when you might doubt such universal advice can apply to you all the time, but Amy herself is quick to point out that your personal preference trumps what she suggests. But you will likely find that she's right most of the time. There is no better advice than to knit what makes you happy, but when you take Amy's advice, what makes you happy will be a sweater that makes you feel as beautiful as you already are.

 

Interested in other blogger's take on Amy's book?  She's making the rounds this week on her Knit to Flatter Blog Tour.

Monday, April 15: Rock and Purl - Ruth Garcia-Alcantud

Tuesday, April 16: Mind of Winter - Julia Trice

Wednesday, April 17: Mary Jane Mucklestone

Thursday, April 18: Moth Heaven - Julia Farwell-Clay (that's me!)

Friday, April 19: Baby Cocktails - Thea Colman

Saturday, April 20: Knitting At Large - Julie Matthews

Sunday, April 21: ADD Knitter

Monday, April 22: Savory Knitting - Amy Christoffers

Tuesday, April 23: Carole Knits