 |
|
February 27, 2009: Please Indulge Me With Your Patience I know you're all waiting for pictures of the trip, but I want to take the memory cards to the photo place in town and have them transferred to a CD before I import them into my computer. My hard drive is still being kind of wonky, and I know that importing 400+ pictures of the most memorable trip I've ever taken in my life would be tempting fate. And we had Yet Another Snowstorm here yesterday, so I didn't even try to get to town. The farthest afield I ventured was the convenience store to pick up some eggs, milk, bread, and peanut butter. The husband has some irrational dislike of grocery stores (although he loves food) and will eat everything in the house down to the last can of beans just to avoid going shopping. Our pantry always looks like Old Mother Hubbard's cupboard when I get back from a trip. I will tell you a bit about the knitting I did and the knitting I found in Europe. The parent chaperones (all mothers) had to choose roommates before we left, so the mother of one of DD#1's friends and I paired up. Tera is a knitter, and although I knew who she was (her daughter and DD#1 went to elementary school together), they moved to Montana just four years ago. I didn't know her well—only that she was a knitter. Really, what else did I need to know? I think Tera and I are twins separated at birth. We had such a good time together. The two of us took our knitting and knitted in the airports, on the bus, in our hotel rooms—any time we weren't walking around with the kids. She finished one scarf and started another; I knit a hemp washcloth and knocked out a scarf. Our tour guide, Wesley, took note of what we were doing and unbeknownst to us, he spent the whole week trying to find a yarn store for us in each of the cities we visited. He didn't have much success until the very last day of the trip, in Budapest. At 5 p.m., when everyone was loading up the bus to go back to the hotel, he grabbed Tera and me and said, "Ladies, I found you a yarn store!" We quickly walked back over to the shopping district and he led us to a tiny little store in the basement of one of the buildings. We never would have found it on our own. Most of the yarn was buried behind displays of finished garments, but once the store owner figured out we were there to spend money, she began pulling out skeins of yarn for us to look at. Most were—naturally enough—of German and Italian manufacture. Tera and I each bought half a dozen skeins or so, and then Wesley took us back to the hotel via the subway. I also found a few finished pieces of knitting to add to my textile collection. At Prague Castle, I ducked into a little shop along Golden Lane:
and discovered a whole collection of knitted and crocheted items for sale. I literally shrieked with delight and scared the shop owner. I picked out this pillow cover, because it's handknitted and it has cables on it:
I need to pick up a pillow form for it. It's probably a good thing we were pressed for time, because I could have spent all day and a lot more money in that store. I looked at a lot of other textiles in Prague, Krakow, and Budapest, but I'm picky about quality and a lot of what is sold in the souvenir shops is poorly made (fake acrylic sheepskin being passed off as the real thing, for instance). We spent quite a bit of time in the Great Market Hall in Budapest looking at all of the textiles for sale. I saw a lot of embroidery and a lot of crocheted doilies. I already have an embroidered shawl from Budapest (a friend bought it for me about 25 years ago) so I was looking for something a bit different. I spotted this knitted lace runner hanging on a rack with a whole collection of crocheted pieces. There was a second, much larger piece as well, but I bought this one because I liked the design. It's starched to within an inch of its life—I had to roll it up to bring it home in my suitcase and I was afraid it was going to shatter.
I also picked up some dolls (at doll #3 I decided I must be turning into my maternal grandmother, who has a large doll collection of her own). I got the most enchanting marionette in Prague—we walked into a store and I saw her and fell in love:
Her name is Petra (according to the shop owner). She was boxed up and became my third arm for the remainder of the trip, because I didn't want anything to happen to her. I also bought these two dolls in Slovakia:
and this porcelain doll in Budapest:
Lest you think that I was the only one shopping, DD#1 got quite a few nice things of her own, mostly jewelry and T-shirts and chocolate. In keeping with my new career as a professional chaperone, I am going with the band to Missoula next week for band competition, and with DD#2's class to Winter Carnival. I was trying to avoid chaperoning the band trip, but the director called and said he had no other chaperones and asked if I could go. The upside is that I will have something like 16 hours of uninterrupted knitting time over two days while watching the kids rehearse. But I feel like I'm meeting myself coming and going. After the Wisconsin trip I'll be home for about 10 days and then it's off on another band trip. I did want to be a band mother when I grew up. Be careful what you wish for.
February 26, 2009: Back From Europe Linda, thanks for asking where I was—I went to Eastern Europe on a tour with the National Honor Society students from our two high schools. I didn't make a big deal of it on the blog ahead of time because I didn't want people to know I wasn't here at my house for 10 days. The trip was fabulous. I'll be putting pics on the blog in the coming days, as soon as I get out from under the mountain of stuff on my desk.
February 13, 2009: Discombobulated I love that word. It's so descriptive. And it's exactly how I've been feeling. I drank three cups of tea yesterday afternoon in an attempt to keep myself awake for our fire department business meeting last night. It worked, but then I was a bit wired and had trouble settling down, and the feeling is still with me. I know better. Caffeine and I don't get along well after 2 p.m. I took the newsletter to the bulk mail center at the post office this afternoon, and e-mailed the digital copies. It feels good to have that done before the 15th of the month. That's always my goal, and I met it this month. Cross that one off the list. I'm going to go sit in my chair and watch some "Bones" episodes that I recorded. And knit. I need it.
February 11, 2009: Bumper Cars I felt like I was on a bumper car ride yesterday—no fewer than four people almost hit me while I was driving around doing errands. One person ran a stop sign and almost broadsided me; another blew through a red light (fortunately I hadn't entered the intersection completely); a third was backing out of a parking space at the bank and came within an inch of hitting the front of my truck (he only stopped because I was inside the truck honking my horn); and the fourth was a woman so busy jawing on her cell phone that she neglected to notice that I was in the lane next to her before she tried to move over. What is with people? It's not like my vehicle is hard to see, and yet people drive like they are the only ones on the road. The husband asked me if I had some kind of magnet for bad drivers installed in my truck. I've gone through one skein of the Cornucopia yarn and while I like the feel of it, knitting with it is not easy because it wants to twist. Badly. The yarn is a knitted tube, not strands of plied singles, so it doesn't have any obvious twist to it. However, the action of making each stitch—I throw—adds twist to the knitted tube. It adds so much twist that I have to stop every so often and either redistribute the twist down the strand or switch to knitting Continental for a few rows. (I don't normally knit Continental because it bothers my wrists.) It makes for much slower going than I am used to. I need to watch how I wind this next skein of yarn and see if I can counteract the twisting tendency. If I can't, I may just have to suck it up and knit Continental on this project. The Spring issue of the newsletter is ready to pick up at the printer. I will do that this afternoon and get it into the mail tomorrow. Digital subscribers should watch for a an e-mail alert followed by the actual newsletter sometime on Friday.
February 10, 2009: How to Become a Designer It looks as though I will be teaching a three-hour Designer Workshop at the Spring Knit & Crochet Show in Portland in May, in addition to the classes for which I submitted proposals. I am excited about this! The goal of the class is "providing aspiring or new designers with tips, information, strategies, etc. for becoming better at designing and marketing themselves." My first thought was "How will I keep this to three hours? I could talk for days on this subject!" Then I made a list of things I want to cover. One thing is for sure—the students are probably going to get a very unique perspective on how to become a designer, considering that I never set out to do this for a living and I certainly didn't go about it the conventional way. I like it that I get to host this session at a TKGA (The Knitting Guild Association) show, because TKGA (and specifically, Jean Lampe) is in many ways responsible for the launch of my designing and teaching career. We parted paths there for a while when the former TKGA management went off the tracks (so to speak), but TKGA seems to be finding its way back now under Offinger. I just wish they hadn't changed the name. It doesn't roll off my tongue quite the same way. I just got a wonderful gift from one of our employees:
His wife was cleaning out their basement and found this Studio fine-gauge knitting machine that she purchased at a yard sale years ago and never used. She thought I would appreciate it. I have this exact same knitting machine in both the mid-gauge and bulky versions, so I'm tickled to have the fine gauge version, too. (Not that mine get used much anymore, but one of these days I hope to have room to put them up and leave them.) I have an incredibly long to-do list today, and it mostly consists of running around and picking stuff up or dropping stuff off. DD#2 is home because she's got a cold and is feeling punky. I told her she would have to ride around with me today. She doesn't seem too busted up about that. And DD#1 has a band concert tonight. It's going to be a long day.
February 9, 2009: Mountain Brook Studio Susan asked about my friends the potters and whether or not they have a website. They do! You can tell them I sent you. Tom and Marcie Briney live around the corner from us and we've known them since we moved here. Tom is on the fire department with the husband. They are both captains and they, along with two other neighbors, constitute one of the primary interior attack crews on structure fires. Sometimes I refer to Tom Briney and the husband as the "Bobbsey Twins," at which point the husband reminds me of the importance of maintaining crew integrity. Tom and Marcie are 13 years older than the husband and me, and we're about that much older than their kids. Their kids have worked for us; our girls babysit their grandchildren. Marcie taught me to cross-country ski and laughed at me when I fell on my butt. She's the best cook I know. They are the closest thing we have to relatives here. And they make beautiful pottery, some of which adorns my house. "Mountain Brook" is the name of the area where we live. I have a history of Mountain Brook (published in 1979) that describes it like this:
That description is still pretty accurate. The first families moved to Mountain Brook around 1901. It might have taken them half a day by wagon to drive to Kalispell in good weather; in the winter they would spend three or four months isolated up here. I think about that when I get in my truck and make a trip to town in 30 minutes. And I often drive a cross a gravel road that was hand-dug (more than a mile!) by a group of bachelors to make it easier for the residents of Mountain Brook to get to Kalispell. Doers, indeed. We love living here.
February 8, 2009: Rare Sun I finished the hemp bag yesterday afternoon and I really like how it turned out. It is very roomy inside. DD#2 and I tested it out with a load of apples. The whole bag required a few inches less than three full skeins of the Lanaknits Allhemp 6. I just noticed on the website that they are now selling a pre-washed version of this yarn. I may wash the bag one more time just to soften it up a bit more, although I don't want it to be too limp. I went back to working on the corn scarf after I finished the bag. The longer it gets the more three-dimensional it is. I think I will steam it rather than block it when it's done, because I really want it to retain that sculptural appearance. I'm hoping to get it done this week. I have a list of items for the Summer issue and the list looks really nice when things begin to get checked off of it.
It's a lovely sunny day here. The husband played with the camera and took some pictures: Looking south down the road in front of our house:
Chester and Rusty (note the rescued
The Swan Mountain Range as seen from our front yard (some days I can't believe I live here):
I am going out to get some vitamin D.
February 7, 2009: SPAM I almost missed the note this week from Offinger Management that I had been selected to teach at the Spring Knit & Crochet Show. My ISP has an overly aggressive spam filter, and this has been an ongoing problem. The spam filter catches stuff it shouldn't, and continues to catch stuff even after I go in and whitelist addresses. Logging in to check the spam filter is clunky, so I forget to do it as often as I should. I only remembered to check it this week because I was expecting to hear about the show and hadn't yet seen anything. Lo and behold—there were the e-mails from Offinger, stuck in the spam filter (and I whitelisted them some time ago). I'm quite tempted to have my ISP shut the filter off altogether and just let Apple Mail screen everything. Who knows what else I have missed? I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed lately, although—given the state of the economy—I'm trying not to look at it as a bad thing. I have plenty of revenue-generating work. The DVD is being mastered this week and should be going to the duplicators soon. I stopped talking about it because I kept running into those annoying technical glitches. Everything has been straightened out, but it was really beginning to weigh on me that the release date got pushed back. I got a quote from the printer this week for doing yet another print run of the Aran book, and I have to decide when to squeeze the trigger on that one. If I wait too long, I run the risk of making vendors wait for their orders to be filled, but I'd kind of like to wait and see if the current pace of orders keeps up. On the other hand, the printer is giving me a 10% discount if I order now because this is traditionally a slow time of year for them. I can't make designs come out of my head if they don't want to, and one of the sweater designs I was going to farm out to my test-knitter for the Summer issue simply refuses to cooperate. Because of all the traveling I have scheduled, I've got a very tight timetable for publication of that issue, with no wiggle room. If I don't farm it out, I'll have to knit two full-size garments some time in the next two months. Do I have time to do that? Or will I have to give up sleeping? I'd like to get the back catalog of my designs up for sale on the website—many (although not all) of the designs from Twists and Turns back issues have been formatted as single patterns. The rest could be formatted as single patterns if I had the models re-knitted. I just haven't had time or energy to throw in that direction. The Taste of Aran Afghan pattern is almost out of stock, and before I have it re-printed, I'd like to redo the layout, and have it reknitted in a different yarn. Alas, no time or energy for that project, either. I've got more teaching gigs scheduled this year than I planned to. I love teaching, but I've already decided that I am not going to go anywhere in 2010 (except for possibly the TKGA Knit & Crochet Shows, especially if they keep the one in Portland). But I have to get through 2009, first, and all this teaching means careful orchestration in order to get class materials and samples where they need to be at the appropriate times. I'm trying to keep up with the swelling tide of digital publishing—I continue to hear the drumbeat that print publishing is going the way of the dinosaur and how I need to work harder at making all of my products available in digital media. I'm comfortable in print publishing. I can do digital publishing, but I don't enjoy it and some days I just resent being pushed in that direction. Cables 2 has gotten lost amid all this other stuff, and that bothers me most of all. I can't find any significant chunk of time to work on it, nor can I seem to get my brain switched into book-writing mode. Don't get me wrong—I am grateful that I am not sitting here wondering if my job will go away tomorrow. It's just that when I sit down to work on one project, I start to wonder if I should be working on something else, and if I work on something else, I wonder if I should be working on a different something else, and so on . . . I think maybe it's time for me to make a list. That's always a very comforting activity for me, one which is exceeded in its ability to comfort only by the act of actually crossing things off of it. Or maybe I should go check the spam folder again.
February 6, 2009: Freezing Rain School was cancelled today. I woke up to the sound of dripping off the metal roof, and the first rural department out on a vehicle rollover this morning said the roads were "just horrible" because of the freezing rain. Everything has a nice half-inch glaze of ice on it. I tried to get out to the truck to get something and slid on the ice and pulled a muscle in my back righting myself. It's not bad, but there's twinge now that wasn't there before. I was supposed to take DD#1 to school early this morning so she could meet with one of her teachers and get homework to take on the Europe trip. I have to say I'm not at all happy with this need for the teachers to load these kids down with stuff to do while they are traveling. First of all, this is a National Honor Society trip. These are kids who are doing well in school. Second, a lot of them are in the IB (international baccalaureate) program, so they always have more homework than anyone else. Why not give these kids a pass for a week and let them enjoy this trip without stressing about getting a week's worth of homework done in between sightseeing tours of major European cities?
I did a dry run with my suitcase yesterday. Amazingly, I got everything into a 21" suitcase with room to spare for souvenirs. I finally decided on some travel knitting (hats) and got the appropriate yarn and needles. My roomie on this trip is a knitter, too, which is an added bonus (besides that she's just a nice person). She's also a much more seasoned international traveler than I am. I think I'll do fine, but it's nice to have someone nearby who's been through some of this. DD#1 asked if I would make "that soup with the pasta and beans and spinach," so I made a pot of pasta e fagioli soup for lunch. It looked so pretty in the bowl (my dinnerware is all handmade by our potter friends around the corner) that I had to take a picture. (Sorry, it's kind of a wonky shot but it was the only in-focus one.)
We have a fire going and I am knitting. I would like to get that hemp bag done today and crossed off the list.
February 4, 2009: Mid-Week Miscellany The husband said to me the other night, "No wonder the Democrats don't think taxes are too high—they never pay them." I did finally hear some talk about the corporate tax rate being cut to 25%. I hope it happens. I've stopped watching CNBC because I was getting a little tired of all the whining about how the peasants were turning on the investor class and how the average American "just doesn't get it" about the world of finance. Please. I used to like Erin Burnett (she's got fabulous hair), but she was beginning to sound like Marie Antoinette, so I switched to the Weather Channel. Speaking of weather—we're under an inversion again. That's when cold air sinks under a high pressure system and gets stuck in the valleys. It's cold and gray and overcast down here, but if you go up to about 6000 feet, it's warmer and the sun in shining brilliantly. We've had winters with inversions that lasted for weeks, and they really do grind you down. As an added bonus, inversions come with freezing fog that makes the roadways very slick. I remember one day in February a few years ago when I was heading to town and a truck coming in the opposite direction hit a patch of black ice and flipped over onto its top into a culvert on the side of the road. The two guys in the truck climbed out safely; they were shaken up but not injured. I can always tell when the freezing fog is particularly bad, because calls for the rural fire departments to respond to one-vehicle rollovers and other accidents will start coming over the scanner at about the same time that everyone is heading to work. The husband has been out on a lot of medical and fire calls in the past week. I've noticed something kind of odd happening. It used to be that people only called for an ambulance in fairly serious situations. Now it seems like people are calling for an ambulance for more minor things that could be handled simply by getting a friend or relative to drive them to the hospital. Responding departments have to treat every call as serious, but I do worry that those minor calls are taking away resources that might be needed at a more serious call. If I were having a heart attack and the ambulance couldn't respond to me because they were transporting someone with a dislocated kneecap to the hospital, I might be a bit more than annoyed. Our department doesn't do any transport. The husband is very clear that—as a volunteer responder—he cannot give up three hours of his day to respond to a call, drive the patient to the hospital, unload the patient, drive the ambulance back, and do all the necessary paperwork. Our fire chief has had to get creative and work with surrounding departments (some of whom do transport) so that we have ambulance coverage in our district. I don't think that most people have a good appreciation of how emergency care in rural settings works. They just expect that when they pick up the phone, someone will show up. I woke up at 2 a.m. this morning with a list of things I need to do running through my head. It's a lot of little details that need to be taken care of this week and next.
February 3, 2009: The Cable Detective One of my favorite activites as a designer is looking at stitch patterns in my stitch dictionaries. I love to deconstruct them, rearrange them, morph them into something else, and just play around with them. I also love to go hunting for cables in the sections of stitch dictionaries that have nothing to do with cables—in the slip-stitch chapters, the color knitting chapters, the lace chapters, etc. It's actually fairly easy to find cables in a stitch pattern when the pattern is charted out, as in the Japanese books. It's a bit harder to locate cables in a mass of verbiage (think Harmony stitch guides). But that's what makes it so much fun. I started a scarf in the Kollage Cornucopia yarn (see the January 28 post), but I wasn't happy with the way it was coming along. For one thing, the needle size suggested on the ball band (5 mm, or US size 8) was way too big, as suggested needle sizes often are. And I just wasn't thrilled with the stitch pattern. Some yarns are very picky. They don't want to be knit up in just any old stitch pattern. They want a stitch pattern that graces them and shows off their best qualities. This yarn was very clear that it needed a particular kind of stitch pattern or it would continue to give me fits. I ripped out what I had done, re-wound the yarn, and pulled out one of my Harmony stitch dictionaries. And in the section on "patterns for texture and colour" I stumbled across something very cool: a knit-purl "pleat" pattern with a narrow two-stitch cable as part of the pleat. I've probably looked at that page hundreds of times and never noticed that the pattern included a cable, because the picture quality isn't so good. I asked the yarn what it thought and it said, "Cast on immediately!"—so I did. I did a bit of fiddling with needles; I like to use my Signature needles for small items like scarves, but this yarn is incredibly slippery and wasn't happy on those needles. I tried a pair of bamboo needles, but the tips were too blunt (I have the "stilletto" points on my Signature needles, which should tell you something). I finally settled on a pair of Inox coated aluminum 4 mm (US size 6) needles and everyone was happy. I love this stitch pattern/yarn combination. The yarn is smooth, so the texture of the stitch pattern shows up really well. The stitch pattern is three-dimensional, so the scarf has some structural interest—it doesn't just lie flat. The little two-stitch cable is an added bonus. It's a good marriage of yarn and stitch pattern. I've had to limit the amount of time I spend working on the hemp market bag. I had a massage yesterday and my massage therapist said my right shoulder was all knotted up. I'm pretty sure it's because of the hemp, because I worked on the market bag while we watched the Super Bowl. I think I'll do another inch or two of the openwork mesh part and do the remainder of the bag in stockinette stitch.
February 1, 2009: Spring Issue Sneak Peek The Spring issue went to the printer last week. I plan to have it out before February 15. Here's a look at what will be in that issue: A guy's pullover in Sublime Soya Cotton, a soy and cotton blend yarn that feels wonderful when knit up. Everyone who has seen this sweater has tried to buy it from me. Right now it's a model at Camas Creek Yarn, if you'd like to see it in person.
This doesn't usually happen, but the Spring issue has two hoodie patterns in it. The first was designed by Master Knitter Mary Halpert, who is also the designer behind Rick's Aran in the Fall 2003 issue of Twists and Turns. This is a darling little zip-up cardi for your favorite toddler.
The second hoodie was actually designed by DD#2. She gave me a very detailed list of what she wanted in her sweater. She picked out the cable pattern, yarn, and buttons, and I basically just acted as her test-knitter.
Kayla Clark is a designer new to the pages of Twists and Turns. She designed this wonderful Aran pullover-inspired pillow. It's a generous 20" x 20" size, perfect for lounging upon while watching TV.
And finally, a lace-and-cable shawl knit from a silk/bamboo yarn. Accompanying this design is a technical article on knitting lace-and-cable patterns.
|
| Home |
| About Big Sky Knitting Designs, LLC |
| Books by Janet Szabo |
| Twists and Turns® Newsletter |
| Patterns |
| Teaching Schedule |
| Customer Support |
| Complimentary Patterns |
| Janet's Blog |
| Contact |
 |
|
this imprint knitting pattern webring site |
| BLOG ARCHIVES |
| December 2007 |
| January 2008 |
| FeBRuary 2008 |
| March 2008 |
| April 2008 |
| May 2008 |
| June 2008 |
| July 2008 |
| August 2008 |
| September 2008 |
| OCTOBER 2008 |
| November 2008 |
| December 2008 |
| January 2009 |
