FO: A wee Jules

Ugh.  Baby clothes are just so anti-climatic without a baby in them.  

I'm kind of at the stage in my life where everyone is having babies all around me.  Babies babies babies.  It makes for a lot of gift-giving, which I'm happy to oblige.  

Mind you, I'm not too committed to this pursuit.  I'm pretty sure that everything I've ever knitted for new babies, and their parents, gets either fitfully thrown from the side of a pram to be mashed into the dirty pavement, or hastily thrown into the washer/dryer on the hottest, most violent cycle by a sleep-deprived zombie.

Oh well.  What can I do?  Buy a gift like everyone else?

 I guess, but that's not my style, baby.

Pattern is called Jules.  The yarn...recognize it?...is leftovers from two previous sweaters, is Queensland Kathmandu Aran, and the orange, is- le sigh- my handspun.  From a spindle.  Don't ask what I was thinking.  It started out as an Ent Batt, and I spun it quite unevenly, but I think it adds to the rustic charm.  

It was gifted to first-time parents and their new Parisian son.  Alas, daddy is obsessed with New York City, so I did what I could to make it the Knickerbocker colors.

If you see this discarded in a heap, felted and shrunk, on the filthy gutters of the Champs Élysées, no worries.  I meant it to be there.  

The Great Indoors

I've been dodging quite a bit of hail lately, so basically I take this as the universe's way of saying, "stay inside! Make something warm." I will dart out in all sorts of weather in honor of my social calendar, but between the wool, the cloth, and a film class I'm taking, I'm happily popping Vitamin D supplements and crafting until my fingers are bloody. Hard core.

I'm ambitiously trying to finish up a big-ass men's sweater this week. I make one every year. This one isn't particularly technical, but it has a lovely stitch pattern and quite soothing to knit. I have been monogamous on it for the past week and a half, and I'm pleased to say that it's getting close to done.

Whooo! That's a ton of stitches. I'm using Cascade 220 tweed and size US 6 needles. I like it fine for the stitch definition and durability, but the tweedy bits are a bit crayonesque. I think I prefer a more subtle tweed. Too late for that though!

I've also been spinning a bit. Really!

I have a gorgeous little Bosworth spindle that's been working the wool lately. Above was a bad attempt at andean plying a really beautiful Ent batt of Corriedale. I'm still working out the logistics of trying to spin and ply with just one spindle, no niddy noddy, and a handful of TP rolls to roll the finished singles on. Next time, no andean. The beautiful lion-mane batt will be spun up and plied as well, and the two will be striped to make a really nice slouchy hat.

I currently have a really beautiful bit of indigo-dyed merino silk on the spindle from A Verb for Keeping Warm. It's so much fun to spin and it's turning my hands blue, as Indigo is want to do.

This is all made possible by all my kick-ass friends back in NYC who hooked me up with care packages and gave me the nudge to start spinning again.

Furnishing my Future Palace

I had no real intention on purchasing and lugging around beautiful large-scale handmade rugs. Being a migrant with no real home makes it difficult to buy home furnishings. I'm loathe to buy as much as a tea pot without having to seriously consider the consequences of having to pack it up and ship it eventually. But alas, I am a sucker for beautiful artwork.

There were lots of places in Marrakech that had rugs, and Fes had its fair share as well. One place in particular caught my eye- Coin Berbère. The shop, a bit more enclosed than the rest, was filled with treasures. Amazing things. Antique things. Pottery and Jewelry and carved panels and weavings. I would have gladly paid admission just to look...it was a treasure trove. Not too many souk stands get a nice write up in the New York Times either.

The owner, Mohammed (oh, everyone other guy we met shared the name) motioned for us to follow across the street and up a narrow staircase. There, a room, bursting with color.

I knew this was the man I would be buying carpets from. It's just narrowing them down that's the problem.

We talked dyes, we talked tribes, we talked spinning, we talked sheep. Each Berber tribe has their own distinctive style and pattern and palate. Indigo, saffron, flowers, cochineal, roots, and henna are all used to make the amazing colors. Everything is handspun, hand woven, by Berber women, working for a pittance, with the skills passed on through the generations. It is much more than a mere floor covering.

Mohammed patiently pulled out the ones that fit the criteria. Not too huge, not small. Nothing with sparkles or too much knotting. No silk. No pressure.

I loved this embroidered one.

But they were all amazing, one-of-a-kind works of art.

Some of them reminded me of Gee's Bend quilts.

Mohammed had the habit of unfurling the rug dramatically, while simultaneously hushing everyone in the room.

I kind of fell for this slightly shabby antique:

But the more intricate ones called to me as well.

This one he called the "Berber Picasso":

It was enormous, but I wanted it. He says it sells for $40,000 at ABC Carpet in New York. Having shopped for rugs there, I believe it.

The idea of buying a house and decorating completely with furnishings and rugs from this store started playing out in my mind.

But remember, no pressure. He said, "Think about it. Discuss it. Come back when you are ready." Which no one else in Morocco has ever said, ever.

And come back we did. After browsing more rugs around town, I could honestly said he had the best of the best, and he had handpicked the finest out there. And we brought friends with us as well. And the friends also had no intention to buy, yet they went home with three of them.

I showed Mohammed the pictures I had taken of the ones we liked best. He pulled them out of the piles, put them on the floor, and sent his brother to fetch some mint tea.

I found out I was terrible at haggling. It was just too much pressure. Plus, the price he was asking, I thought it was more than fair for the amount of work that went into it. So count me out when it comes to negotiating something handmade.

"Close your eyes, open your heart, and take this rug home with you" Mohammed commanded.

Several cups of tea and bathroom breaks later, I went home with the above carpet. It's amazing. Now that it's home, I'm even more in love with it. It's my colors, all wool- natural grays and browns and mauves that were dyed with poppies and then left out in the sun to age and fade.

This one was purchased as well. It's much larger than the mauve one, with a sturdier cotton warp and it's mind blowing to have this currently in my apartment:

The colors...the patterns...

Our friend went home with the "brother" of the colorful one. It's the same pattern, but more negative space.

Which, if I wasn't so afraid of spilling wine, I would have grabbed that one too.

Everyone went home happy. Mohammed rolled up the rugs snug as a bug in a rug, wrapped them up with plastic and tape, and we were even able to put this in our hiking backpack for the plane ride home. He does ship as well, but it was going to cost way too much and take weeks (and I am just in love with La Poste in so many ways right now) so we opted to carry it out.

If you are ever in Fes, do yourself a favor. Buy a rug from this man.

Coin Berbère 67 Talaa Kebira (in the Haddadine quarter of the Fez medina) (212) 35-63-69-46.

Scarves

Right before I packed up and moved from Brooklyn, I had an insane urge to make a few bulky-yarn projects in order to:

1. Use up the bulky-yarn stash. I think all new knitters go through a phase where the answer is "bulky yarn" to all their yarn questions. It's fast all right. But damn, if you could get something to look flattering on something other than a waif, you deserve an award.

2. Justify my use of knitting time as making visual progress at a time when I felt like I was getting no where and spending my days on endless hold-music calls. Most of these things were all knitted in the course of an afternoon, and in one case, in the time it took for AT&T to dick me around and not resolve anything at all, even though I was asking nicely.

First up: a handspun cowl. It started out as a braid of Corriedale/Alpaca blend from Spunky Eclectic in the "Thunderstorm" colorway.

Great colors...nice and moody.

Spun it up as a chunky 2-ply.

Then I learned a fantastic new technique...the Mobius cowl.

It's a little tricky to get started, but it's simple once you do it. Randomly altering your knit and purl rows makes for interesting texture, and there are tons of different ways to make this your own.

I loved it so much, I went ahead and dug up bags of scarps of some Rowan Biggy Print (which may or may not have been in my stash for more than 7 years) and made a stripy, ultra bulky one on size 17 needles.

It's enormously warm, and I love the texture that the thick-and-thin yarn produced. I randomly alternated the two colors I had until I ran out of yarn, and poof! it's magic! Really, it would have been pushing it if I invested two hours in this.

So I kept on rolling with the Biggy Print, and made a mistake-rib scarf with what I had left:

The pattern (if you could call it that) is Franciose from "French Girl Knits". Mine came out short, so a pin or a button might be added at some point.

One more:

A VERY GLITZY alpaca batt from Loop!

I bought this ages ago, when I first started spindle-spinning. 2006 or '07. I spun it up pretty quickly, but then the yarn just sat in a bin for all these years. Shameful!

Spun up and plied, I only had 74 yards.

So I made a wee necktie out of it, based on this pattern (which called for laceweight yarn).

It does need a good blocking, but it used up all my yarn. Mission accomplished.

I felt clean and purged when that was done. No more odd skeins of overweight yarn to slow me down! Overly warm neckware to the rescue.

Moving is Hard Work.

My to-do list has been pretty gruesome lately. No one wants to hear about my mundane everyday scurrying around, packing things up and itemizing everything for insurance, filling out visa applications, opening accounts overseas and closing them over here. I have spent a great deal of time listening to hold music, and happily knitting away here and there while trying really hard not to whip myself into a murderous rage that I will one day take out on Kenny G.

That is all.

I promise for some more interesting content soon. Adventures are in the works...

I did some spinning!

While at a friend's house over the weekend for a little spin-in I realized that spinning is the guiltiest of my pleasures. I hardly ever do it anymore. I always feel like there is something else that I should be doing. It also seems like that i can't just sit in front of the wheel for 5 minutes here or there- when I'm comfy and getting a groove on, I will spin for hours and hours, until the roving runs out. I don't really have that luxury right now, so it's been quiet. I'm trying to work something out with my conscience- we are in the middle of some hard bargaining in regards to the whole spinning thing.

First up is a Loop Spontaneous Spinning Batt.



I corespun it as thick as I could on a wool core.



I also let the silk ribbon randomly wrap around the core.



It's sparkly and beautiful. I got almost 180 yards out of it, and it's fairly heavy weight.

Another loop batt. I really loved the colors in this one.



These are so fun to spin, but they make a glittery mess all over the house.



I spun a thick, even single. Well. Not really even. I just let it be what it wanted to be, and sometimes a big slub of silk would give it some interesting texture. 164 yards.



I don't have a before photo of this, but it's 8oz of Spunky Eclectic fiber in the "Turkish Delight" colorway and South African Fine fiber. It spun up similar to Merino.



300 yards of worsted 2-ply. I feel like I got the colors to line up pretty evenly. This will make a nice pair of stripey mittens if I ever get around to it.

Oh, one more thing before I continue to be placed on hold. I sent an old friend of mine some bits of handspun that I had saved up over the years from various experimental phases and workshops and samples. Within days, this landed in my inbox:

So CYOOOTE! I never thought about making an abstract chicken before. Thank you Beth for taking those scraps off my hands!

Countdown to March 8

What is March 8, you ask?

That will be the last day that I'll be running my Etsy store. Due to the logistics and the shipping limits being imposed on me, I can't take my stock with me. Also, there is the small worry that I can't feasibly ship while I'm moving. So I'm giving myself a nice cut-off date before the stress gets too much.

Here's the deal: I'm still having 30% everything with the code "Trente". Wait a week- that might turn into "quarante" as my need for a clutter-free move gets the best of me. I still have lots of good stuff, so buy it while you can! Especially some of those batts I have listed as there is no way I can store those. Smooshing them down would be tragic!

Speaking of batts, look what one of my shop patrons made:



Isn't it pretty? She's a fantastic spinner, and she lives in France to boot.

I was quite taken with this one as well:



It was a braid of merino/silk roving in the "Hydrangea" colorway. She plied it with a string spaced with delicate pearly-pink beads. Swoon!

I'll be keeping you posted, but I might have some more lace merino yarn to list this weekend, and that will be all as far as updates go.

http://www.etsy.com/shop/KnotMyDayJob

FO: Sans Argyle Socks

Oh, sigh. These were such a good idea:

They are the Argyle socks from Veronik Avery in her lovely book Knitting Classic Style. The beauty of them is that there's no colorwork to keep track of or get tangled or mess with your tension or have to deal with knitting the sock flat and seaming it, but everything colorwork is duplicate stitched on top of the finished sock. Genius.

Except I failed at the colorwork. I've done duplicate stitch plenty, but for very small expanses. Like the black faces and feet on these sheep.



Or like all the green bits on the Snail Mittens (which are still my favorite mitts):



But all the intricate criss-crossing on these socks got to me, and I realized after several tries that my stitching wasn't even close to being perfect enough to make these socks look like an arts and crafts project gone wrong. It made them look very, er, "homemade", in a really sad kind of way. My embroidery was too sloppy to be seen in public.

So I put down my darning needle and left these as it. They are plain, but warm and cozy and most people are a little horrified that I would knit my man a gift of socks that are a Cashmere blend (and handpainted to boot).



So here are the two colors I was going to use:



One thing I did learn was that it comes out a little more evenly if you use a thinner weight yarn. Even that wouldn't save them in my hands though.

I'm happy with them anyway. I knit them almost entirely while traipsing around Paris so they have lots of good memories worked in. Also, the yarn is wonderful- The Sanguine Gryphon Bugga in Autumn Tiger Beetle. It's a pretty good way to spoil anyone you might know. I guess that time will tell if this is a good sock yarn though- if the heels blow out after a couple of wears then I will turn sour on it faster than warm milk.

Also, I got this sent to me in an email:



He's pretty adorable, eh? Plus he's wearing a Snail Hat from my handspun (and a faaabulous scarf that was meant for mum, but I'm supportive of whatever he wants to wear). Smaller than adult sizes always confuse the hell out of me- I know babies and children have proportionally large noggins, but I never know how large. Lots of stretchy ribbing and maybe something that expands quite a bit seems to work better for me that trying to guesstimate inches. I think I even put a note in with the hat saying that I would knit him another one if it doesn't fit. I dodged a bullet.