>A funny thing happened this evening when I went to write my last post. I FOUND the two missing posts. How weird is that? It seems I have two blog accounts, and the errant posts are in this mysterious “other” account. Hmmm….my ignorance on things techie knows no bounds!
….and one other thing. I’m smitten by the Knitting Daily blog. If you don’t know about Major Laura (an avid knitter serving in Iraq) you must take a look.
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I can only use this title “Shameless May” if I get this published before midnight! Yes, you guessed it….it’s May 31st. Where have I been for the last six weeks? Well, it’s been pretty exciting. I’ve been to England and Scotland for almost three weeks, and I’ve been sailing in the Chesapeake Bay for the long Memorial Day weekend. Not a bad life, is it? Believe it or not, aside from the UK, I would always rather stay home and weave, knit or spin. I know. I have an addiction! And you see, in the UK, I did get to spin and knit. ….
I guess for once I have more pictures than words. I think for most people this is a good thing. I can easily spew out more than a thousand words for every picture I take for this blog. Perhaps the best thing today is to share a few photos from England and a few from my garden. I have spent my very short time at home in the garden the last few days. So there’s been no weaving anyway…. I have been spinning mohair on a drop spindle and working on a new knitting project with yarn I bought in England. Have I tackled those other unfinished knitting projects? I haven’t even given them a thought. I’m a yarn slut. It’s not pretty….but it’s May and
my garden is!
And here is a picture of my friend Lesley and me at Isaac Newton’s house, appropriately named Woolesthorpe. Yes, there were sheep!
>Stash….I’ve read a lot of things about stash over the 30 years I’ve been collecting mine, and a few people have given me stash advice in person. I was out walking one day this week when stash advice began to replay in my head. I want to record some of those ideas before they go underground again for another decade or so!
Pat Slaven recently wrote a very poignant essay about stash, inspired by the death of two good friends. She was somewhat involved in dealing with the stashes left behind by both these women. In one case she was invited to view the friend’s quilting stash in order to pick some fabrics to make a quilt for the 6 year old son of the deceased woman. Are you getting misty yet? She tried not to influence the young boy, but she did hope that he would choose fabrics that would still speak to him as he grew and matured into a young man, and beyond, as this quilt would hopefully stay with him for many years. Pat was relieved that he did choose fabrics that were not specifically for very young boys. The poignant part of this story is that Pat discovered that her friend never seemed to have used any of these fabrics. There were no quilted projects in progress, no finished projects anywhere in the house, and no one remembers ever seeing her sew. There was only her stash. Her friends and family can only speculate what this stash meant to her. Was she going to learn to sew? Was she just interested in collecting interesting fabrics? Who knows, but her stash remained hidden in various closets in the house, complete with sales receipts.
Many years ago, in a weaving class with Daryl Lancaster, she admonished all of us to enjoy our shopping experiences. She said, “Shop to shop, buy what appeals to you! Then weave from your stash!” This has been my motto for many years, ever since I first heard Daryl say it! I shop with such abandon! I buy things that call out to me, and boy do things sing to me. The problem now is that I have opportunities to buy (and do buy) at a faster rate than I can weave. I now have some serious space considerations, and no hope of catching up if I continue to have SEX (Stash Enhancement eXperiences) at this rate! My studio looks like a warehouse, and it’s often difficult to access my looms, much less my stash. I do weave from my stash, but the effort it takes to get things out and examine my stash is often competely overwhelming. Sometimes I have to take a month’s break before I can face going back into my studio to put some of that stash away. It’s too hard. There’s too much of it, it doesn’t fit neatly on my shelves (in plastic bins, and in anything else that will contain it) anymore. Trying to find things has become a herculean endeavor, and I am not strong enough for the task! I now have my spinning stash in one bedroom, my knitting stash in another, and all of my weaving stash overfilling my basement studio.
This leads me to a bit of advice I heard recently on a podcast I enjoy: “Cast On” by Brenda Dayne. As part of her New Year’s ritual each year she goes through her stash and reorganizes it. She had some fantastic ideas, especially for anyone whose stash is still moderately sized. She calls her yearly process the “Airing of the Stash.” She gets it all out for viewing. Yarns that will make complete projects she bags together, and when she has several complete projects bagged she places them all together in large vacuum bags and proceeds to vacuum them into a small concise size, which can be stored and easily viewed. You go, Brenda!
It gets even more interesting after this. With the rest of her stash, which consists of small batches of yarns that appealed to her when she bought them, she begins grouping them into possible projects. She looks at color and texture and decides what yarns look good together. These also get vacuum bagged together, after being collected into various possible project groups. What a feat of decision making and courage! She makes it sound like this possibly takes place during ONE day, maybe a couple of days. I may remember this wrong, but I’ve pictured this more random stash spread out on a bed! I’m thinking of my random stash taking up every horizontal surface in every room in my house, and me playing a horrific memory game (oh, where is that lovely aubergine mohair that would go so well with this celery green alpaca? Did I see it in the dining room or the basement?) Ha! After 30 years, I think my stash has become a behemoth, a monster, a nightmare.
But, to get back on track with Brenda Dayne’s idea: Here’s one awesome benefit of doing this. At least once a year you see your stash. It rekindles the ideas you had when you bought each thing, which perhaps will get you started on a new project, and/or motivate you to finish current projects in order to start something new. And better yet, now that you’ve seen your stash, when you are out shopping and some wonderful little tidbit leaps out at you, you can make an intelligent decision on whether you really need it or not! How great is that? I might be panting over some incredible blend of color and luxury fiber, but perhaps I won’t buy it knowing that I have something equally wonderful waiting for my attention at home.
This idea of “viewing your stash” at least once a year is a terrific idea. I just can’t figure out how to do it! I’m not sure I can share photos of my own personal stash here, for two reasons. The first and biggest reason is that it won’t all fit in one picture, or even two. It might fit in a photo album! The second reason is that I’m a bit shy about this. It would be like showing the dark side of my addiction. It’s not pretty!
Well, okay, here’s one picture (what’s a blog entry without a picture?). I think this is about 1/4 of my linen stash for weaving, with some other stuff in the background. I swear not all of my stash is this messy….really!
>I’ve been in a knitting funk since the new year. It stems from trying to make a sweater for my older son’s fiancee for Christmas. I chose the cute sweater from Interweave Knits’ Spring ’06 issue called “Sunshine Circle Jacket.” It was a fun design to knit, and quite creative in its use of partial circles for the fronts of the jacket to give a bolera shape to the garment. But it turned out WAY too big, in spite of my knitting the smallest size. So I partially ripped it out and made those circles somewhat smaller and re-did the ribbing around the whole thing (I had decided that ribbing would be better than a bulky hem as called for in the directions). Still, again, the sweater just swallows her up. So, for the third round I marked various key spots while it was on Lauren. It’s just sitting near my favorite knitting chair waiting to be re-done yet again.
You may wonder why one little set back would cause such a funk, lasting over two months now. I have lots of other knitting projects (not to mention weaving and spinning projects) to take my mind off this one knitting fiasco in the long span of my knitting history. I can’t say for sure why this is so traumatic for me. This is certainly not the first project to turn out less than perfectly for me!
I think it was the knitting “tight rope” I’d strung for myself this holiday season. I have been spinning and knitting a sweater for my younger son. I ordered roving from one of the Orkney Islands off Scotland, from sheep called Ronadlsay that I’d never known of before. I never intended that sweater to be a Christmas present for Chris, but I had hoped it would be done in time to give him for Thanksgiving. As Christmas approached and Lauren’s Sunshine Circle jacket dragged on, I realized I’d be lucky if I finished Chris’ sweater by the end of January when he returned to college. Then there was also my little niece’s Christmas sweater, a wonderful Dale design called Marihone.
It has adorable little red and black lady bugs interspersed with multi-colored stripes of different widths. Back in Dec. it was just zipping along lickety-split. When Lauren’s sweater went down the path of (I’m tempted to say failure, but will refrain!), the path of do-over I had to put both Madison’s and Chris’ sweaters aside. When I returned to Madison’s sweater, it had lost it’s zip. Somehow it’s become a drudgery to work on it. There really is no time to dawdle with a toddler sweater if one expects the toddler to wear it for more than a nano second. But now it’s March and it’s still not finished! Help! I did plan for it to fit her next fall/winter as well, but I was sure hoping she’d get two seasons out of it. Now the first season is ending.
So, back to Chris’ sweater. He’s home for spring break now, and he’s asking me to work on it. I had finished the body and started one sleeve. The steeks on the body were still closed so today I decided to cut them open so Chris could try on the sweater. I was practically paralyzed with a lack of confidence about this sweater fitting. Also, although Chris would fervently deny it, I think he is quite picky, and I was almost certain he’d find something not to his liking about the fit of this sweater. While I was spinning the yarn (for months) we had discussed very carefully what this sweater should look like. Chris had very strong opinions about what this sweater should NOT look like! Anyway, on to the punch line!….
I cut open the steeks, and he tried it on and loved it. I mean really loved it! I wanted to faint from relief. Something has turned out very well. Now I have just the bit of impetus I need for tackling those sleeves. I don’t know if he’ll be taking the sweater with him this weekend at the end of his spring break, but surely he’ll have it another week later. It’s a good thing he’s in Rochester, NY, where it won’t be truly spring weather for some time to come!
And so I did finish it! Less than a week before Easter! A friend of mine took it to him on Maundy Thursday since she was going to Rochester. Rochester has had two snow storms since then, so he has gotten to wear it a few times!
Whew!
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This is a little out of order, going back to the lunar eclipse that happened on Saturday, March 3. Losing those two posts interfered with my writing about the eclipse, but now I’ve made peace with the disappearance of those two entries I can get back on track.
My friend Elisa called me about 7.30, and told me to go outside to see the eclipse. I grabbed my cell phone (so I could call my two sons and my husband since everyone was out of town that evening) and went out on the front porch. This porch is the best feature of my whole house. It sits quite far back from the road, so our front porch is a private place, and since it faces East, there have been many wonderful evenings to watch the moon rise. The moon was still rising Saturday night when I went out on the porch to see the eclipse. The eclipse was more than half way done already, but it was still a wonderful sight. I watched until the end, which must have been about half an hour.
A couple of years ago I read that native American women thought moonlight was very good for female well being. Women should sleep with the light of a full moon falling directly on their faces. Well, even though glass cuts out the real rays of moonlight, I’ve felt very connected knowing that on those somewhat rare occasions when a full moon is rising late enough in the evening for me to be in bed, that light is falling on me as it comes straight through one of my windows! So I thought of all that real moonlight falling on me as I watched the eclipse. I hope I gained something good from it!
No weaving to speak of yet this week, but I have returned to my younger son’s handspun, handknit sweater. I’ve started the sleeves! He’ll be home tomorrow evening for a week (spring break). With a lot of luck I hope to finish both sleeves and get the sweater assembled for him to take back to school with him. School is in Rochester, NY, so he could still get some wear out of a winter sweater there before real spring weather arrives.
