ArgoKnot

ArgoKnot
A journal of my weaving, spinning, and knitting life
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Author name: ozweaver

Knitting is Catching Fire!

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Oops!  See note at end the end of this post for why this post is badly titled!

Bob and I went to the movies last night.  It was an escape from the very sad and very stressful time we are going through, which involves a loved one’s serious health condition.  Bob has been not-so-patiently awaiting the release of the second “Hunger Games” movie so we dashed out to see it last night on his return from the daily hospital visit. I was mildly intrigued, but definitely looking forward to an evening’s distraction…

No one warned me there would be KNITTING!  The whole first segment of the movie held me captive, and I was craning forward in my theater seat to get a better look at the unusual knitted designs that Katniss wore!  It was a visual feast!  I swear there were three knitting garments, but I must be wrong…

….because these garments are already all over the internet, and there are only two:

 

This garment does not look knitted to me.  It made me think of nalbinding or some other rather ancient technique that predates what we call knitting today.  I’m intrigued!  I’d love to see the real garment.

Then there was this lovely cowl in luscious shades of berries/trees/water.  There is something really interesting going on in the stitch pattern. I tried to magnify this image to get a better look, but it just got a bit blurry! Hmmmmm….

Okay….enough about Katniss!  Here are a few things I’ve been working on lately.  Mostly, I have to say that I’ve been curled up in a fetal position for several weeks now….sleeping too much….

My English friend, Lesley, just finished this sweater in a deep garnet merino wool. I bet it is breathtaking!  I was so intrigued that I had to have one too…. in medium blue cotton (Cascade’s Ultra Pima in color #3772).  I have finished the cables around the neckline, and now I’ve put it aside…..it’s a lot of plain stockinette for the rest of the body….sigh…. I do love the way the longest cable comes down below the garter stitch area, which you can see on the right side in the photo.  What a beautiful design!

And I’m spinning my first “Tsarina of Tsocks” kit called “Kitri.”  The body of the sock is a lovely claret red merino/silk blend.  I’m doing a test spin for a 4-ply by topping off a few bobbins with the tsarina fiber so I can ply just a short amount to check my knitting gauge.

A couple of weeks ago Bob set up my large Shannock tapestry loom.  I’m ready to start two tapestries and need to decide which one comes first!  The full size Flax Spinner or “Into the Night,” which is a new cartoon I recently made…

Isn’t she an impressive loom? Cartoons are draped on the treadle bar, including a really old cartoon that I never wove.  In the foreground you can see an umbrella swift with a skein of silk draped on it.  I just finished using that silk to make a warp for my next painted warp project.  It will be a small wall hanging based on an image Bob took while we were in the Bahamas.  If all goes well, maybe I will bring it with me in January and hang it on the wall of our main salon.

And speaking of making cartoons…. I borrowed an opaque projector from an old friend.  It’s quite a relic from the 50s and makes quite a roar when I turned it on.  In fact, it blew a fuse, so I haven’t actually gotten to use it yet.  Here’s Bob setting it up for me.

So, I guess I’m doing more than just sleeping my days away, and I’m glad I wrote this.  It helped me see that I am progressing on work….just at a snail’s pace… and that (in reality) is not much slower than I normally work.

NOTE:  It has been 10 months since I posted this, and clearly interest in the Katniss fashions from “Catching Fire” is still running high!  Many thanks to Kristin from dreamspunfiber.com who sent some links to the two designs I wrote about.  It turns out neither one was knitted!  They are both woven! …and the green cowl is a beauty in what looks like deflected double weave! Although that makes my post title inaccurate, I am quite thrilled to learn these garments were woven.  You can take a closer look here and here.

In a Funk !!

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It’s shocking to me to see that I haven’t posted since Hallowe’en, and that post doesn’t even count.  It was just a funny photo….

I’ve been home now for more than two weeks, getting lots done, but not feeling terribly good about anything.  Bob and I are in the throes of worries about our aging parents, and it’s an emotional and stressful time.  Weaving and knitting…and spinning!….help me get through these times, but this time around things are pretty serious, and even my favorite activities cannot take away the sadness and the fear of what is coming.

Baking is another activity that soothes me during stress, so yesterday I spent some of the day baking toward our early Thanksgiving which we’ll celebrate this Thursday as well as next Thursday in order to see all of the family.  I always make Julia Child’s croissants at some point during the holidays for those who will be sleeping over.  I have to admit I stole one when they came out of the oven.  Someone had to make sure they turned out well!

This morning is a glorious November day.  There is always at least one late blooming rose after the first hard frost….a rose that blooms among the hips.

Most of the trees are bare now, but along our walk we saw one still bright yellow, and another that is still bright red!

Deep blue sky, red berries against the tan field, a spot of green from a rhody…and a lovely river make for a wonderful morning walk.

In a day or so I’ll update my current projects and write a little about the various events I’ve managed to attend since I returned home.

Chilly Nights, Warm Days

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The weather has moderated in the last few days so that we are no longer freezing to death!  I know, I’m just a bit of an exaggerator!  But it’s no fun being cold all day and then painfully cold at night.  We made a very poor choice to take our sleeping bags off the boat and to skip bringing any serious winter clothes.  It’s always colder when you are exposed outside all day while also on the water.  Those sleeping bags are in my car in Annapolis, and they would have made all the difference in getting some sleep the past week or so….

This is yesterday’s pre-sunset.  I think you can feel how soft and warm the day was.  Just moments after taking this photo, Bob and I each got a text from my sister, wishing us a happy anniversary of our first date, 41 years ago.  This is a landmark date we always celebrate, and if not for her text we would have missed it for the very first time.  We are both wondering if this is our first big sign of getting older….

So we sat in the cockpit of Pandora, enjoying this view all the way through sunset.  We blew the conch shell to herald the night, and headed out to dinner ashore in Belhaven, North Carolina.

Luckily we had already planned to go out to dinner.  Boy, did we choose a fun spot!  The Spoon River Artworks and Market….interesting name since I saw neither artworks or market, but only a restaurant!  And a very nice one too.  Here is a view from our table… it’s lovely, isn’t it?  For the first time ever we chose to sit facing inward from a window table, instead of facing outward.

 And walking around lovely Belhaven before dinner I spotted this pretty cottage garden that look out to the harbor.

Today we are headed to Oriental, North Carolina, then on to my final destination in Beaufort.  I will get a few days there to relax before Bob’s crew delivers my car to me to head home while they get onboard to head offshore to Florida.

231 Mitred Squares

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All these years while my Zig Zag ruana was stuffed in a zippered vinyl project bag, I thought I only had a few squares left to knit….maybe 15.  I remember thinking I was so close to the end.  And that’s why I always thought I’d pick it up again right after whatever current project was on my needles.  I could be wearing it in just a matter of days…

Yesterday I counted how many squares I have left to knit…. 86!  How could that be? Even on the chart it looks like I’m approaching the end!  So I decided to count how many squares I’d already finished.  I couldn’t believe I’d knitted 231 squares back in the fall and winter of 2002/2003.  That’s a LOT of little mitred squares!

I remember one of my knitting friends warning me that this project involved a LOT of knitting.  Naturally, I took no heed and can barely remember the warning much less who warned me.  I was happily knitting.  Now that I’m back to it, I am slowly remembering lots of other things too.

This was the fall that my older son went away to college.  I missed him terribly, but there was a wonderful silver lining that I had not anticipated.  My younger son and I suddenly had some uninterrupted time together.  It was the year that he toured colleges, took his SATs, wrote his applications.  We went on college visits together, and I brought along my knitting….this very project.  It had not grown to the dimensions it is now which make it somewhat cumbersome for traveling.  We visited schools in Pennsylvania, New York, and New England.  We had that unexpected time to become closer.

It was the last few months before he got his driver’s license so I was still his main companion in the car, and I was the one who accompanied him when he drove places with his learner’s permit, such as the physical therapist I mentioned earlier.

It seems to me that everyone takes notice of the wonderful time you have with your firstborn, before there are siblings who require you to divide your attentions. Surely it’s a mother’s point of view to romanticize this special time with a firstborn that no other child gets.  But I think the time I had alone with my younger 16 year old was equally precious….because he was aware of it too.  We both enjoyed getting to know each other more deeply, and he had my complete attention while he navigated the rite of passage out into the world and determined who he wanted to become.  It was a significant time of life for both of us, and I was moved to have time with Chris during this stage.

And all through that period I was knitting the ‘Zig Zag.’  Chris graduated from high school over 10 years ago.  He finished his undergraduate work in math and physics and is now in his 5th year of a doctoral program in physics.  He has become the person he planned to be.  He is almost finished writing his dissertation and will probably be out of academia in a few more weeks.  There is a lot of life that has happened while this ruana lay in its project bag, buried in my studio in New Jersey, and then my new studio in Connecticut.

Such is the life of a knitting project….everything completes itself in its own time.

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