Follow up: yarn bombing

It's hard to believe it's been almost three years since we talked about yarn bombing in this post.

A couple of days ago, Lion brand yarn shared this photo on their facebook page, originally found here and the work of Lorna at Knits for Life.



I find it clever and fun to look at. And obviously no one is using the phone anymore anyway...

Of course, the comment section exploded with opinions ranging from admiration to disgust. As usual, the knitting community seems pretty torn over the subject.

One woman linked to an interesting interview with Ishknits, who may or may not have been yarn bombing phone booths before anyone else. If you visit her website, it's kinda neat to see the commissioned work she has done as well.

The interview... for your consideration:)  American Hipster Presents: Ishknits Documentary

a visit from the tiny things

A friend of mine is working on an art project. It involves tiny creatures, and I'm pretty sure that's all I can say. While talking about the project and life in general, he asked me if I had ever knit a sweater before and I told him about the Inishturk, and then I realized he might be scouting for some wardrobe so I offered to knit something up for his little friends. He actually tried to talk me out of it. Haha. He thought it might be too much to ask. But I was looking for a good distraction at that point in life and I was already brainstorming and designing things in my mind. So I said I would just knit something up and he could use it or not. No worries.

After a few fittings and alterations, I came up with these:

The first one is made with cotton-ease. I gave it a rough, tattered look by popping a few stitches out of stockinette here and there.

The second is made with the same wool I was using in the Inishturk. But I had to narrow the yarn down to two strands to make it more pliable.

They are both only 20 stitches around, so it was kind of hard to come up with any special patterns, but I did attempt a couple of cables in front of the wool one. You can just barely see them because they're only one stitch wide. teehee. So this would be like a teeny-tiny Aran sweater. :)

I really enjoyed the unique challenges of working in-the-small. It kind of has an eery look to it in a way, doesn't it? Can you imagine finding a tiny sweater like this in the wall of your house? You'd wonder what else the creatures have been wearing and building! Reminds me of the mice in Cinderella.

Now. I wonder if this will help get me motivated to finish the Inishturk. It only has about 60 hours left on it. :/ Naaah.

Snowy Surprise

I knit my son a hat sometime last year. It turned out pretty cute, green military style. Daddy calls it his Radar O'Reilly cap. But he lost it recently at his grandma's house. So I had to knit up a replacement. Here it is:

I'd barely got the yarn off the needles before he was able to put it to good use. We had some snowy weather on Friday, which is very unusual for Chico. It snows maybe once every couple of years and rarely sticks. But our city is situated right at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, so a short drive up the ridge to a town called Paradise and we were able to find several inches to play in. :)

It was my son's first time in the snow, which was a lot of fun to see - the way he was experiencing it for the first time. I haven't been in it much myself. But I showed him how to throw a snowball by making an example and chucking it at daddy. He thought that was pretty hilarious.

We didn't go too far up the mountains, so there wasn't quite enough snow to make a decent snowman, but I gave it the old college try, just for the heck of it. Here is my boy with his new little snow buddy.

...Don't let that smile fool you. About 30 seconds after this photo was taken, he was karate kicking his new ridiculously small "buddy" back into powder. We went out for a nice cocoa afterwards, of course. :)

<3

Yarnarchy?

If you love to knit, but have a rebellious streak, then the new trend of Yarnbombing might be for you.

Yarnbombing is defined as "a type of graffiti or street art that employs colorful displays of knitted or crocheted cloth rather than paint or chalk." So I guess since it's less permanent, it's considered more artful and less... "illegal" than graffiti.

I'm intrigued by two recent news articles on the subject. This one, about a particular Knitter At Large known as the Midnight Knitter, who sneaks out under the cover of night to yarnbomb the street signs, light poles and trees of Cape May, PA. And (on the other end of the spectrum) this story about a woman named Magda Sayeg who cooperated with the city of Austin, TX to install an art project similar to yarn bombing. Obviously the former example is more prevalent.

I wouldn't choose to do it myself. But I don't think I would mind seeing it on the streets - as long as it doesn't interfere with public works or safety, it's easy to remove, it's kept off of trees (it can lead to tree fungus) and off of private property (of course). I really don't understand why people feel the need to do it, but I find it kind of amusing in a weird way. On the other hand... if I had that much spare time, I would probably try to be knitting for preemie babies or the local shelters. It seems a little more worthwhile to me and less... "illegal." :)

What are your thoughts?

You can see more photos here and here

We made the Front Page!

Special thanks to Cowlickcutie for including me in her treasury!

Sticks and Stones

Well, here is the sweater so far. What do you think?

I hope you can't see my mistakes in the cables. Haha. I thought about going back and redoing it, but... I think it would be too depressing. It took too long to get here! Good thing they tell you to do the "back" first. I'll never see this side - and hopefully I'll be better at the pattern by the time I get to the front. As some of the Ravelry ladies say, those little mistakes will just be proof that it was knit by a human instead of a machine. =)

Progress is slow not only because of the complexity of the cable pattern, but also because I got sidetracked by a few other things. I decided at one point that I wanted to finish one of my many other undone projects before I really started this new one. So I put the sweater down and spent some time on the baby quilt for my son. If you count the time I spent thinking about it, it's been about 2 years in the making. But I didn't start sewing it until about 8 months ago. The hand-quilting is really what took so long...

Here is a full-length shot. He got excited that the camera was out and wanted to be included. Awwww! ;)

Here is a close up of the blocks. The tan and grey were the original colors. I added the rest to compliment.  

I asked God for a theme or a special blessing I could put into it. He gave the image of Rock and Stone. The colors in the quilt are very earth-toned, the same as stone, sand and rocks. I arranged the blocks in a simple "brick pattern," and used a grey thread to do the quilting, symbolic of the mortor that would hold bricks together. I know the copper satin binding kinda throws the earthtone mood off a bit. Well, it looks brighter in the photos than in real life. And I thought it kinda added some... pizzaz to it.

 I looked up several verses that describe the Lord as our Rock and also His people as rocks or stones. I plan to hide these references within the quilt. I might use a fine-point pen and tiny letters to write them on a few of the dark blocks where you wouldn't really see it right away unless you were looking... maybe I'll just tuck them inside where no one will see.. like a secret prayer. =)  

"Coming to Him as to a living stone, rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God and precious, you also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house... " 1Peter 2:4,5

"The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer..." Psalm 18:2

"...And I will give him a white stone, and on the stone a new name written which no one knows except him who receives it." Revelation 2:17

Inishturk sweater started...

Finally got the yarn on the needles baby. Wasn't as easy as it sounds though.

First the crazy gauge. This is my first Knit-along, so I've been pretty excited about the sense of community and connection with other knitters. And one thing they've all been saying is that this gauge is a joke.

It's suggested that a size 8 needle and 16 sts across will produce 4" in a Double Seed stitch.
With 8s, I got 3" and with 9s, I got 3.5" (Here is the rest of the math, for my fellow Inishturkers)
I thought about going to 10s or even 11s, as some people have, but wanted to keep the definition in the cables. Some people have opted to use the 8s, but make a larger size to compensate. I was looking for the Size Small (40 in chest), but at the gauge I was knitting, I would have to knit what Lion calls a 1x in order to get a size small sweater... really?? Sounds like alot of stitches to me... I made a compromise. I decided to use size 9 needles and knit a "medium," which would give me close to a small size.

THEN, after I finally figured that out, I got to deal with this whopper of a pattern. Whew! Of all the projects I could've picked for my first knit-along, my first sweater, my first real cables... it had to be this one. Nothing like baptism by fire.

The whole process is much more complicated by the fact that for some reason, the instructions are basically given in an UP DOWN pattern, when everyone knows we knit SIDE to SIDE. Who wrote this thing???

So I basically burned 2 or 3 hours of my life on earth converting each cable pattern into its row sequence one by one. I really hope I am not the only one who will ever benefit from this, so I uploaded it to share with the world:
Lion Brand Knit Along Inishturk Stitch pattern Conversion -
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgp76r8n_0czmx5xcw

Hopefully I'll have more progress to show soon. o_0

What the fiber?

I've been thinking about and shopping for yarn for the last two weeks. It's tough to shop in craft stores lately, because my little boy is usually with me and he really loves them. I made the mistake ONCE of putting him down in JoAnn's while I tried to grab something from a tall shelf. Of course he took off for the Frames and All Things Delicate, so I pulled out my mommy voice and told him to come back. He just stood there smiling... until I picked him up and then he made sure that I (and everyone else there) knew that he really wanted to go frame shopping, and mommy was being unreasonable. I've tried to go back a few times since, but the boy is too bright for me - he remembers things. I'm not sure what it is in his mind he thinks he needs a frame for - perhaps he wants to decorate his room with original photography....

Anyway. I'm trying to find a yarn for this sweater project I'm working on (the Lion Brand KAL). It calls for Fisherman's Wool, which looks good and seems very quaint and folksy. I dig it. Really. But wool is always so scratchy, and my skin can be sensitive to things like that. So I thought about doing an acrylic, but I really have never liked the feeling of most matte-finished acrylics at ALL - they just feel so cheap and yucky. The Simply Soft is one of my favorite yarns, but it really just seems too "sheeny" (might have just made that up). I definitely wanted something more natural looking, with natural fibers.

I thought about cotton. The Lion Cotton was OK looking but a little too... dishtowelly. Yeah, that's right. So I got myself pretty hooked on the idea of using Lion Cotton-Ease. It's 50% cotton / 50% acrylic, another one of my favorite yarns and it feels totally YUMMY.

Problem #1 Cotton Ease is expensive - about $6 for 3.5 oz AND I was gonna need about 6 or 7 skeins of this stuff.

Problem #2 Can't seem to match dye lots, especially with the amount of yarn I need to buy.

Problem #3 The color I really had my heart set on was Hazelnut, which of course they don't carry anywhere in Chico.
http://www.lionbrand.com/6030/PictPage/1922242133.html

 Soooo... after a week of thinking and debating and trying to shop for yarn while the baby fussed, and sifting through yarns that were too yucky, too sheeny, or too dishtowelly... guess what? I finally deceided just to get the Fisherman's Wool, which was the yarn the pattern originally called for in the first place. HA! Oh the vanity!

I chose this wool because (A) it comes in nice large balls of 8 oz. (B) the less I have to purchase, the easier it is to use coupons and match dye lots, (C) it's a nice natural fiber that I'm hoping will make the cables in the sweater really come through, and (D) the clencher was when I found it in Nature's Brown, which is a beautiful color that I hadn't seen anywhere else.

I ended up paying about $10 for $18 worth of yarn (coupons), which is way better than $42 for cotton-ease. YAY! They only had two in stock, so I still have one more ball to buy. I can already tell it's going to be a lovely yarn to work with...

Recycled yarns (Have I heard that story before?)

My mom taught me from a very young age to separate my recycling from the trash. And being eco-conscious is something that I've proudly carried over to my own household as an adult. Besides the typical recycling bin and being conscious of my carbon footprint, I'm always looking for ways to (a) use something more than once, (b) repair it so I don't have to throw it away or (c) use scraps from one thing for something else. I usually count myself fairly resourceful and clever if I can succeed at any of these. =0)

Several examples of (a) are so ingrained in my everyday routine, I really don't even think about it anymore. But the other day I was wondering what people would think of me if they saw my funny little habits. For instance, although I tend to wipe my son's mouth and hands with a wet wipe after meals, which isn't the most eco-friendly, I also sometimes save the gently-used wipe to be used again at the next meal. I also have a funny habit of cutting things in half so they go twice as far. I cut my cotton balls in half, my dryer sheets, and even after buying the "select-a-size" paper towels, which are already half the size of a regular ones, I rip those in half to make them even smaller. I try not to use any more than I need.

Of course ideally I wouldn't be using these products so much at all. That's been sort of a resolution for me this year - I'm going to look into those reusable dryer ball softeners and I also try to remind myself to use a dishtowel or sponge instead of a paper towel. Honestly, I think it's just the Germ-a-phobe in me that is so attracted to wet wipes. The idea of What might be living on that sponge or dishtowel after a day's use really creeps me out - so that might be a hard one to break... =]

Anyway, all this is coming to a point... really. In light of habit (c) above, I was very excited to do some research today on eco-friendly recycled yarns for use in my merchandise. So far, I've only found Eco-Ways at my local JoAnn's, which I have used in several of my newborn hats.

Today, I was pleased to learn about Lion Recycled Cotton which is made from cotton fabric pieces that would otherwise be discarded when fabric is cut to produce tee-shirts. Brilliant! I love that somebody saw little scraps of cotton going into the trash and thought to themselves "how can we use this?" When most people just see rubbish, someone here saw potential! Red Heart also has a similar item on the market.

Of course there are also plenty of crafty people on Etsy who are actually making recycled yarn themselves by either unraveling old second hand sweaters or even spinning their own reused fibers into a "new" yarn! The ladder is very intriguing to me, but I admit I don't know very much about it. I suppose the former is perfectly feasible for me to do for myself. I'm just kind of apprehensive about destroying a perfectly good sweater to use the yarn for something else (i.e. a sweater). That doesn't seem to have the same impact as redeeming something that was actually going to be thrown away...

Therefore, the yarn I think I might be most excited about is Simply Soft Eco by Caron. Even though it is only 20% recycled material (as opposed to 30% in the EcoWays or about 75% in the recycled cottons), I like the fact that it is Post-Consumer - made from recycled, cleaned and processed plastic bottles. How cool is that?

So I'm looking forward to trying these new yarns out. And I encourage all my knitting and crocheting friends to do the same. I've heard mostly good reviews - some people say you can't tell the difference in texture. Some people say (about the recycled cotton) that it might feel even softer than the virgin fiber cotton!

I believe a trip to the yarn store is in order...

Where did she go??

Well, I know it's been awhile! It seems to me that somewhere along the way, I promised to blog more often. Why did I promise me that? I knew the minute i made that promise I wasn't going to keep it.

But the holidays were quite a whirlwind - besides being The Usual Busy trying to find gifts and making travel plans, I also finished a last minute quilt for my mom, and decided somewhere in there that I wanted to get in touch with my "roots" by studying Swedish Christmas traditions. That was kind of a joke. Oh yeah, and I filled about 15 orders on my Etsy page! Lots of Sock Monkeys. =)

The Swedish thing was a joke because I didn't really think of it until a week before Christmas. That's really not enough time to create straw ornaments or find a good gingerbread recipe and about three weeks too late to observe Advent (which is kind of a big deal there I guess). It was frustrating trying to find an authentic Swedish recipe for anything, and if I did, it was in Swedish! I think you lose something in the translation, and of course they use things there that we don't really have here. Lucky for me, a friend on Facebook 'fessed up to being Swedish herself. She kind of took me under her wing a bit, emailed me some of her family recipes and told me alot of ingredients that you usually wouldn't find in the states can be purchased at IKEA. Ikea!! Why didn't I think of that?? I love that place. We take special trips to Sacramento sometimes, just to go to Ikea! Brilliant.

With the holidays upon me, I was not driving to Ikea. But my friend was sweet enough to stop by my house on the morning of Christmas Eve, just to give me a box of Pearl Sugar and one of Swedish Vanilla. Mmmmm. My mouth is watering all over the keyboard just thinking of it.

All that to say: in an effort to squeeze tradition into a ridiculously busy holiday, I have a distinct memory of sitting with my son on the floor of our kitchen on Christmas morning, eating Risgrynsgrot (Rice Pudding) which I had made quite at the last minute, even as Joel was packing our car for a 3 hour drive to my mom's house. We certainly didn't have time to sit around the table and make it A Thing, but I'm proud of myself for making it happen at all.

Here is the recipe if anyone is interested:

Risgrynsgrot
3/4c long grain rice
1 1/2c water
1 tsp. salt
3 1/2c milk
1 piece whole cinnamon
Bring rice, water and salt to a boil. Stir, cover, and boil for about 10 minutes over low heat. Add milk and cinnamon and simmer for 30-40 minutes more, until it is nice and thick and the ricec is soft.
I definitely add a little sugar to it. Other toppings options include butter, ground cinnamon, or a little extra milk.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It's a Christmas Eve tradition all over Sweden. They like to put one whole almond in the pot, and whoever finds the almond in their bowl will have good luck next year... or get married... or win a special prize (whichever you prefer). =>

Well, I'm off for now. I have SO many ideas for the Etsy shop, it really isn't funny. New designs are on the horizon! For some reason (probably the fact that I can't say no), I've also signed myself up for this knit-a-long. It's a sweater with a weird name. I like to call it the Crazy Difficult Cable sweater that Charity will weep over.

One last note, if you haven't already, please visit this Etsy shop: http://www.heartsforhaiti.etsy.com/. 100% of the proceeds go to Doctors Without Borders for Haitian Relief. I donated my Sleek Black ipod Cozy for the cause. <3

Artists and Lawyers

I've just spent two nights studying about the new CPSIA laws. Precious hours of my life that I will never get back, basically sifting through mountains of cyber info. You can almost see all the Etsians wandering around with bewildered looks, trying to figure out what strange land they have stumbled into, where everyone seems to speak "legal" and nobody knows what EXACTLY they have to change about their products to make them "compliant." Well, they do, but it takes awhile to figure out. In fact, just as I was realizing that my yarn and textile products are exempt from this law (since they have no possible traces of lead), I was also realizing that I will be needed a different label called a tracking label. A completely differnent law passed at the same time is responsible for this. It's actually not that bad. I think my labels just have to have my Company name (which I was gonna do anyway), Location (which is good too) and a date of production. That last one is a bit tricky, since sometimes it takes me a few days to finish one thing =) But I'll wing it. Apparently, I'm supposed to also keep track of what materials I use and the dates/items I use them on. All this is to tie into the date of production on the label, just in case there is a recall.

At least I think I have that right. That's what I've gathered from days of staring into glaring white computer screens. UGH. I'm all for safety and everything but this is really kind of a drag. For me and the other thousands of Etsy folk trying to make some spare change out of yard sale finds and a little creativity. Maybe I exaggerate, but you get my point.

... I wonder, in the event of a recall, if They really expect me to be able to trace my xyz yarn I bought 5 years ago on a road trip, find the doohicky I made with it way back in Last Year, and call up the one gal who bought a beanie or something? And anyway, even if I did, how much do you wanna bet she'll just say "Oh, sweetheart. Don't worry about it. I'll take my chances against killer Fun Fur anyday over a trip to the post office..."

updates

Lots to do. I try to work during my baby's naptimes and bedtimes. Sometimes I work while he's awake too. Today, I got a little engrossed in my projects (I have a tendency to do this) and almost forgot to make second breakfast. He didn't seem to mind too much.

Been doing some research on Etsy. I'm learning its ins and outs, the feel of it. It is quite a web of networking! There is so much to learn.

I think I will redo my banner. I like it, but I've never been thrilled with it. It's my "front door," my window display, so to speak. It greets people when they visit and I really want it to reflect my style and the spirit of my shop a little more than it does.

I'm also tring to diversify my inventory. Now that I have a few burpies listed, I want to start putting up some other things, just to mix it up. I'm already getting lots of visitors, and I'd hate for them to think burpies are all I do...

Posted this guy last night. I made him from reclaimed Rockford socks I found...

Trying to knit a few things, too. But not sure I can make them fast enough to list for the weekend. I forgot how slooooow knitting goes...