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
spinning
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:
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.
Necessity is a mother
Remember the cardboard lazy kate? This one here:
Well, despite the fine craftsmanship and minutes of work that went into it, this kate has not held up well. Continue reading
No pressure
Oh, dear. It’s been a while again, hasn’t it? It has been an…interesting month over here at Casa de Cusser, and to be honest, I haven’t felt like I had much to say (or at least, not much that was suitable for this blog. Or children. Or those with sensitive ears. Despite the nickname, I try not to swear on this blog, and there was a lot of swearing going on.) However, it looks like the worst is over (touch every piece of wood in the house), and things don’t seem so bad, and I do have something to write about: the healing properties of stash-diving in times of trouble.
The start of an(other) obsession
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about sock yarn. More precisely, I’ve been thinking about spinning sock yarn: how best to spin it, what fibres to use, how to put it all together into The Perfect Sock Yarn. Continue reading
Lessons of a spinning n00b: an apology to the Cheviot
I’ve been doing some thinking about the Cheviot of Sad, and about what I wrote last week. Specifically, about the claim that I like crunchy, wooly wool, and how incongruous that claim was with how I actually felt about such a wool. Do I really like wooly wool, I wondered, or do I just like to think of myself as the sort of person who likes wooly wool, in the same way that in my twenties I liked to think of myself as the sort of person who read Nietzsche, and so carted that copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra through eleventy moves, despite the fact that the bookmark never moved past page 86? Continue reading
You can’t love ’em all
Once again, it’s been too long between posts. Most of October was taken up with putting together submissions for magazines, which cannot be posted about on pain of…well, rejection. I’m also working on a couple of new designs, which are too early in the process to be written about; it’s almost as though exposing them too young will cause failure to thrive. Then November hit, and with it the annual urge to knit ALL the presents. I succumbed this year, against my better judgement, and of course I can’t go posting those projects all over the internets, lest my family see them before their appointed time of unveiling. There is something I’ve been wanting to write about, though, and it contains both spinning and knitting content, so today seems like a good day for it.
E. Elliott Knits 