I’ve been away a lot this spring, but I’ve not been idle. Well, not completely idle. In addition to a bout of castonitis*, I’ve made some more squares for the Mawata Colossus:
Look! Finished objects!
knitting
Colour Play 3: the zombie socks
The observant among you may have noticed a brand new knitting project at the bottom of my last post. “What’s that?” you may have wondered, “A new project? Does that mean she’s finished some of that giant, nagging heap of WIPs?” No. No, it does not, smarty trousers. What it means is that I have this compulsion to use every trip over half an hour long as an excuse to start something new. Continue reading
Shaking things loose
My, but it’s been a strange and tense few months. The worst is over, though, so we buggered off to New Orleans to celebrate, shake the dust off, and see if we could rediscover our mojo. Strangely, I took very few photos (or rather, I took many photos of very few things) — I was so busy just looking at everything (and tasting, and listening, and and and…). (Also, I’m always afraid that I’ll be the sort of visitor who sees a place only through a camera lens.) Here are a few of my favourite photos, though.
There were hidden places:
Motley
While my computer issues are resolving themselves (or not), here’s a photo of one of the ridiculously late Xmas presents, modelled by my nephew and photographed by my exceptionally talented sister-in-law, Anusha Balram.
I think he likes it.
Info: The blanket is in Malabrigo Rios, in Sunset and Purple Mystery. I made the design up, though I haven’t decided whether to write it up as a pattern — there are a couple of kinks that I’d need to work out first. Looking at this photo, though, I’m seriously tempted.
Colour play 2: The Great Shetland Experiment
Being stage 2 of ongoing experiments in becoming the boss of colour in spinning.
The Cormo spinning progresses apace, but as I mentioned last time, it’s going to take a while, and I have the attention span of a hummingbird on speed. Enter some English Shetland wool from Into the Whirled: one multicoloured braid
Hand me that sheep, Igor
If you spin, you’ve seen them: those braids of fibre, hand painted in glorious blobs of colour, with names like Night Carnival, Autumn Leaves, Mille Fiori. Those braids scare the pants off of me. Now, I love colour. I’m a knitter; I design in colourwork; of course I love colour. But for some reason, faced with those riotous braids, I’m stymied. What the hell would I do with them? What if, despite the dyer’s careful application of their art, I spin them up into something ugly? Something that offends the eye and sends children screaming to their mothers? Those colourful braids hold so much potential, and others have made gasp-worthy yarn from them, yet somehow I’m convinced that in my hands, that potential would go horribly wrong.
Horseshoes and hand grenades
Lately, I feel surrounded by the almost finished. The nearly there. The not quite. I suspect that this feeling is largely due to confirmation bias: a large event in my non-knitting life has been so close to done for weeks, and many other tasks must hang fire until this thing is over, which colours how I see everything else. It’s not as though I haven’t finished anything lately, it’s just that the unfinished things loom large, and are niggling at me like an itch I can’t quite reach. For instance:
A brand new day
This will be a quick post, (apparently I don’t know how to do a quick post) because there is Deadline Knitting to be done and with the last couple of months of chaos finally over (knock on wood), I have ten whole days to focus on that and that alone. Ahhhhhh.
This past weekend we had an estate sale. In case you haven’t done this, it involves two to three weeks of a few total strangers running rampant through your home pricing everything that isn’t nailed down and throwing out everything that can’t be priced, followed by three days of a horde of total strangers tromping through, poking at everything, and trying to buy it all for even less than the sticker indicates (which is already less than you’d think, because it all has to go in a weekend).
Mawata Colossus
It all started with the Yarn Harlot.
You see, I had never heard of mawata until I stumbled upon Stephanie’s post proclaiming the glories of her hand-knit mawata mittens. Like eleventy billion knitters before me, I was intrigued by the idea that these stretched silk cocoons, stacked in layer upon gauzy layer, could be pulled apart and just…knit. And the fabric! So nubbly and colourful, humble yet elegant. I had to make such a fabric. It was an aesthetic imperative. Continue reading
E. Elliott Knits 