Mandy Moore's Blog, page 60

Jillian’s Spinning: Pinterest

I am in love with Pinterest, I spend time there every day. It’s my favorite way to take a break from work, looking at all of the beautiful inspiring things and gathering all of the helpful tutorials and how-tos.

I just searched Spinning, fiber, yarn and there are pages of  how-tos on making and dyeing yarn. There is a drum carder powered by a bicycle:

 

Bicycle powered drum carder from Ecologicalartist

Which led me to the gorgeous textile blog Ecologicalartist.

Another thing I love about Pinterest is all of the connections, finding new things, remembering old things,  following what my friends are obsessing about (go look and see how many pins I have on embroidery), what friends are knitting or dreaming about knitting,  looking at inspiring things or to just rest my mind from a busy day.

I want to live here

I collect ideas for spinning, knitting and stitching projects. There are recipes I’m sure I’m going to make. I have a folder for all of the houses I pretend to live in and one for things that I think are cozy.

 

I’m jillianmoreno on Pinterest and I’ve pinned 8,829 things.

Are you on Pinterest? How do you use it?

Kate’s Undercurrent Cardi (with help); Buttonband insanity

It’s no secret: I’m rather a fan of Noro Kureyon.  I’m especially a fan of color #242. I’ve made a hat, a crochet shawl and the Lanesplitter skirt out of this colourway.

It’s my favourite, because it’s all the colours I love and wear: black, grey, green, red, orange. And in classic Noro style, it’s done in a rather unexpected manner, with funky colour changes and blends.

My “crazy Noro lady” outfit.

The minute we published the Undercurrent cardigan pattern, in mid-2011, I knew I had to have one. In colour 242, of course.

The downside to being a knit designer is that you rarely get to knit for yourself. I’m usually working on deadline projects, design projects, projects for books and magazines and other stuff. When I do get to knit for myself, I tend to go for plain socks – the sort of thing I can work on when I’m tired, or waiting for design inspiration, or when I’m in the line-up at the bank. My “me” knitting is usually projects that don’t require any thought or attention, and more to the point, projects that can be easily worked on in stolen moments and can carried around in my purse. Sadly, a sweater doesn’t fit these criteria.

I’d had a bag of Kureyon 242 sitting at the top for my stash for nearly three years, waiting for knitting time I was never going to have. So earlier this year, I arranged a barter deal with a skilled sample knitter I know: she would knit Undercurrent for me, as part of an exchange.

She worked on it over the summer, and returned the (beautifully knit) pieces to me a few weeks ago. I wanted to do the finishing. I’m VERY picky about the finishing.

Setting in a sleeve requires clippy pins, sock yarn and coffee.

Plus I knew I wanted to make some adjustments to the buttonband.

I washed the pieces, finished up the hood, and then started on the front edging. For this design, it’s done in one piece, along the right front, up and over the edge of the hood, and down the left front.

Now, the thing about knitting this sort of buttonband is that you have to place buttonholes as you’re working. And before I started it, I didn’t really have any idea if I wanted buttonholes – and if I did, I wasn’t sure how many I would want.

I pinned the thing together at the sides so I could try it on, and made some measurements: I also knew I wanted the buttonband to be a bit deeper than called for in the pattern, but I wasn’t sure how deep.

So I knit the buttonband – nice and deep  – without buttonholes. And then when it was the length I wanted, I bound most of it off (on the WS), all the way along to the top of the right front. The side where I would want the buttonholes.

And then! Then! I figured out how many buttonholes I wanted and where.

Buttonhole positions marked.

And then I made them!

How did I make them, you ask? Crochet hook!

Magical buttonhole-making tool.

I’d left the stitches of that section live, and so I was able to strategically drop stitches where I wanted buttonholes to be. I dropped them down to the middle of the band, and converted what was a k2 to a (k2tog, yo) to make a hole. And I “ravelled” those two stitches back up.

There is one small drawback to this method – other than it being sort of insane – they’re not the same buttonholes that the designer specified, but they look good to me, and they’ll get the job done.

I’m absolutely thrilled with it. Many, many thanks to Kim without whom this would just be a bag of yarn…

Just needs buttons now.

And it’s perfect.

Obsessed with: resurrected gadgetry

A glorp of Nabaztags (that’s the correct term because I just made it up)

This happens a lot nowadays. Something gets invented, people get excited and buy it and for whatever reason, the company that made the thing gives up on it, or goes bankrupt and it’s pretty much a paperweight after that. That happened with Nabaztag, the robotic rabbit that I fell in love with back in 2006ish. Since Nabaztag rabbits relied on a central server to make them do anything at all, white plastic rabbits all over the world just stopped working around 2009. Creepy.

I recently moved into a new apartment and couldn’t bear NOT to bring my dead plastic friend with me. Instead of unpacking boxes one day, I googled. And found that a whole bunch of Nabaztag lovers had started their own server! My robotic bunny has returned from the dead! (Props to Violet, the company that went under, but was kind enough to release the code into the open so that obsessive geeks could make this happen.)

So now, at the top of the page, you see a link to “Send Amy a message”. When you fill out the two fields and click “Send it”, this is what happens:

Want a Nabaztag? Good luck. You might find one on eBay. Or you might want to take the risk on Karotz, the successor (and soon to be unsupported as well) to the Nabaztag. Nothing techy-cool can work forever.

WWW: Sheep dog trials, marathon knitting, knitting to combat anxiety.

A lovely collection of photos from the Wyoming Stock Dog Association annual sheep dog trials event, held last weekend. Sheep! Sheep dogs! What’s not to love?

A fascinating article on Slate about the challenges of defining colors. How do you describe taupe, anyway?

A step on the journey…

From the Woolmark company, A lovely short film, depicting the journey of merino – from fleece to fashion

Runner David Babcock

What makes me giggle about this story is the idea that running a marathon isn’t enough of a challenge, so a runner felt the need to add a bit more interest… Runner David Babcock of Missouri ran the New York City Marathon this past weekend, while knitting a scarf. He’s not permitted to carry needles while he runs, so he developed a method of finger knitting. The video on the webpage is great… a training run, with knitting. (You know, I think I’d exercise more if I could get some knitting done at the same time… )

The Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto has announced a “Warm the Sole” drive to collect socks. The socks will be donated to the local Scott Mission shelter for the homeless. Although their focus in on store-bought socks, perhaps a few pairs of hand-knit socks might make their way into the collection, too?

A beautiful, honest piece about anxiety and how knitting combats it. Yup. Many of us know this well.

Jillian’s Spinning: Teaching in Baltimore

I’m just back from teaching in Baltimore at the Intrepid Spinner retreat. What a great bunch of spinners! In my classes we spun fat yarn, spun color, plied and stitched.

The spinners at the retreat were curious and nimble minded. They were happy to take an idea and explore it. We ate brownies and told stories. All of the spinners I taught were new to me, even the three that traveled from Michigan  – we could have traveled together!

I enjoy teaching all of my classes, seeing the light go on in a spinner eyes when something clicks or something I say answers a question they’ve been chewing on for a while. But when I teach color classes I always see something shift in my spinners, they come in hesitant about working or combining colors and leave ready to mix and spin through their whole stash with confidence. At this retreat I debuted my Spinning for Stitching class and it was beyond fun to share my latest spinning obsession with other stitchers.

Last, but not least I got to spend time with two of my favorite people, Jacey and her husband Levi. We strolled and ate our way through Baltimore in between the teaching, talking so much I’m not sure how we remembered to breathe.

This was my last teaching gig for the year and today I’m packing up my samples and putting them away to wait for the spring!

 

 

 

I listened to this book as I drove back and forth and I can’t recommend it enough, an interesting twist on a doomsday story, with engaging characters and great reader.

Station Eleven!

WWW: Labors of Love and Art

I’ve been bowled away recently by two knit projects, and I wanted to share them with you. Well, each is actually multiple projects – and they are fantastic, wonderful and so very very creative.

There’s animator Jonathan Royce’s Totums.  The inspiration began long before Jonathan could knit, with some paintings his made of character ideas for animation. The animation project didn’t come to fruition, and the paintings gathered dust. Until Jonathan was taught to knit, and gained access to his partner’s sock yarn leftovers stash…

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the latest batch, “in the works”

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Jonathan claims that his knitting skills are “pretty basic”. I would beg to differ!

To give you a sense of scale, this little guy is sitting on a hand-held video game controller.

Jonathan makes these little creatures as gifts, and sometimes sells them. He’s thinking of putting up a shop on Etsy, but if you’re in southern Ontario you can often find a few for sale at Epic Books, a bookstore on Locke St. South in Hamilton. You can see them all, and get in touch with Jonathan, on the Totums Facebook page.

And there’s the Kitchener Waterloo’s Uptown Knitmob and their Mobbed with Love project. This particular knit-group has been meeting for years, and they’re very tight.  As you do, when you’re knitters with a mom-to-be in your midst, you knit a blanket.

The One That Started It All.

And there’s another baby….

The second one: and this time it’s strips rather than squares.

And some more – including twins!

And it just keeps going. The group has made an amazing number of collaborative projects -and not just blankets.

They’ve built a website to gather together all the projects, and are updating it regularly with photos of the projects. They’re also providing funny, honest and helpful tips and tricks — “accept that no one measures the same” – for managing these types of collaborative knits. The sense of love and generosity is palpable.

Jillian’s Spinning: Teaching Questions

Reblocking teaching swatches

Yesterday I was packing up and getting ready to teach at the Intrepid Spinner retreat and I started thinking about what I like in a spinning or knitting class. I still take as many classes as I can because it’s the best way that I learn and it’s fun!

Some of the things I like in a class are: A light attitude, I know I’m there to learn but I don’t want it to feel like I’m back at school. The ability to go at my own pace, sometimes I want to keep working on something until I feel comfortable with it. Samples to look at, I am a visual person and I want to see examples. Beautiful materials to work with, please don’t just give me white medium wool when there is so much beautiful dyed fiber and varieties of breeds available. Checking in, I like a teacher that walks around, checks in with me and doesn’t just lecture from the front. Engaged classmates, if everyone is having fun and learning it’s contagious.

What do you like in classes?

 

Yarn Fest!

 

Are any of you coming to Interweave’s Yarn Fest in the spring? Both Kate and I are teaching there and we’d love to see our Knitty people. Let us know if you’ll be in any of our classes!

 

 

 

Ply with me!

 

My Craftsy class, Ply to Knit, got a great review from Jacey on the PLY Magazine blog. Still haven’t signed up? Take a peek and see if it looks like fun learning to you! There’s even a little discount in the link.

 

A Very Happy Birthday Post

Wishing our Amy a very happy birthday!

The birthday girl! Photo courtesy indigirl.

On choosing colors for Volteado

The designer of the very lovely Volteado socks has written a really great post on her blog: discussing color combos and choices for the socks.

The originals, in Plum and Sunset.

I love the colors she chose for the sample, but then when I saw some of the suggestions she and Tanis, the yarn dyer, had for other combos.. well, just wow! These two worked together would be absolutely fantastic.

They have ideas for all tastes and moods.

The designer is also hosting a KAL for the socks, on Ravelry. It runs until the end of November, and knitters who complete a pair of socks will be entered to win a prize.

The Ravelry group provides a fun way to see other color combos in action. This unexpected variegated-and-solid version by SuperM is a winner.

And Artndzne’s are coming along really well, too, in Tanis’s Truffle and Papaya… just as the colornames suggest, there’s a of chocolate-and-fruit thing going on which I find really beautiful.

WWW: Knitted Glass; Thoughts On Knitting for Charity; Craftivism

Just amazing.

Artist Carol Milne creates absolutely fantastic knitted-glass sculptures. She’s not actually knitting with molten glass, but using a lost-wax casting-based method to create molds for the glass – even more careful and painstaking work, if you can possibly imagine. You can see more of her work in her online gallery.

A great interview with Leanne Prain, author of the new book “Strange Material“, about the process of storytelling through textiles. The book explores the use of craft to tell stories, going beyond the personal. Craft has always been about personal experience and communication – a quilt for a new baby, a prayer shawl for a loved one going through an illness, a cross-stitch sampler as a view into the stitcher’s life – but in the past decade we’ve seen an evolution in the use and messages of craft: moving beyond the practical and personal to ‘simple’ decorative yarnbombing to the use of craft to make political statements. (And not a single mention of a Granny.)

A thoughtful and thought-provoking piece from designer and blogger Rachel Atkinson, about charity knitting efforts.

I’m rather amused by the appearance of the world’s fastest knitter, Hazel Tindall, to announce the launch of super-fast broadband internet access in the Shetland Islands. Goodness knows, we knitters do love our internet access… She was draped in a 35-meter scarf for the launch announcement, a scarf she herself started knitting in 2005.

Image courtesy the Chicago Tribune.

A nice profile of designer Anna Hrachovec, the genius behind the Mochimochi Land line of knitted creatures and toys. She speaks about her inspiration and creative process, and the challenges of turning your hobby into your career.