Mandy Moore's Blog, page 76

WWW: Lost Shawl, Rhinebeck Envy, Cocktail-appropriate Knitting Bags

What a wonderful piece of work.

Absolutely heartbreaking: A Toronto area knitter worked on a beautiful shawl project while she sat at the bedside of her critically ill husband. Susan Cottrell knitted as they waited for his double lung transplant, she knitted as he made his slow and difficult recovery. And at the end, she had an absolutely spectacular shawl. She blocked it, and wrapped it up to take the hospital to weave the ends in, ready to start wearing it.

And then it disappeared. It was in a plastic bag, and the fear is that it was thrown away by mistake.

You’ve probably read this post from Stephanie, the Yarn Harlot, but if you haven’t, do. Warms the heart in so many many ways. I wonder if a similar little miracle could happen for Susan?

A great way to spend a day. (Or two.)

This weekend is the Dutchess County Sheep and Wool Festival, also known as Rhinebeck, after the town where the event is held. Our own Jillian is teaching there – look for dispatches from her on the blog and on Twitter. If you’re within driving distance of the event, it’s a most excellent way to spend a fall day – yes, there’s all sorts of yarny goodness and shopping and demonstrations and classes, but there are also all the great fall fair activities: animal exhibits and livestock shows, cooking demonstrations, and of course, fantastic food. It’s a beautiful time of year, and a visit to Rhinebeck is a great way to take it all in.

So, so very good.

Having recently attended a wedding at which knitting was “encouraged“, (I am quoting the invitation here, people), I am all over these Erte bags for carrying your knitting. It is not easy to find a knitting bag that goes with a cocktail dress. Many thanks to the always appropriately attired Franklin for bringing these to my attention.

It’s Wool Week in the UK, and there are all sorts of events and activities going on to mark the occasion. I really liked some of the wooly fashions in this slideshow.

In which home decor specialists discover what we’ve known all along: knit fabrics are cozy. I do like the suggestions for making pillows from old sweaters.

Do we have any Norwegian readers who will be watching the epic 9 hours of knitting related television being broadcast November 1st? We’re jealous, and would love to know how it is! Let us know in the comments! Does anyone know if it will be streamed online? Maybe we could all watch it!

Jillian’s Spinning: Gratitude!

As you read this I am on my way to teach at Rhinebeck.

I am so grateful to have the opportunity to teach at one of my fiber happy places.

Here’s about half of the my teaching materials, plus I’m riding with Beth Smith who has a ton of teaching supplies. It all didn’t ft in my car. We ended up borrowing her husband’s SUV.

About 25 pounds of fiber.
Everybody sample!

 

I hope to see some of you at the show. I’ll be the one grinning from ear to ear!

Things that Make Kate Happy

Sunshine. Sock knitting. And a very strong americano.

The yarn is Paton’s Kroy, a criminally underappreciated sock yarn. It’s unbelievably hardwearing (my fave 75% wool/25% nylon blend), machine washes and dries beautifully, and great to knit with. And it’s easily found at mainstream craft and yarn stores, and the price point is terrific.  There are also excellent colors. I’m making a pair of manly socks, so the colorway is manly, but there are some great brights available, too. My only grumble about the yarn is that the ball band recommends a larger needle than sensible – I use my usual US 1.5/2.5mm. Anything in the US 0-2 (2mm-2.75mm) would be great.

The coffee is an americano - two shots of espresso with a bit of hot water on top to make it a longer drink — from Cafe Unwind. I take my coffee black, and an americano is a full-bodied and flavourful drink, dark and a little bit bitter. Cafe Unwind is a little coffee shop across the park from where we live, and it’s a regular stop on our dog walks. The coffee is excellent, and the baked goods (a different muffin everyday!) outstanding.

Yarndale in pictures

Yarndale is a brand-new fiber festival, held in Skipton, Yorkshire, in the UK. A tiny market town, charming as one could hope for, Skipton was overwhelmed by the arrival of The Knitters as we clogged their roadways and filled their pubs after the show was over. This first show, launched by a team of seven clever women, was an unqualified success, with vendors reporting stellar sales, especially on the first day. New-event hiccups like running out of parking spaces and half-hour lineups for the loo were solved by the 2nd day, as the organizers rejigged the parking plan, and brought in lots of portable toilets.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the event, the variety of the vendors and public response. It was a joyful place to be. Here, a selection of pictures from the weekend.

Signs in the charity shops in town announce the event

6,212 crocheted bunting triangles welcome and overwhelm us!

Read more about this incredible bunting project here.

Tea cosy competition entries

And now, the wares for sale…

Kits from Purl & Jane

Gorgeous crochet from The Natural Dye Studio

Wow.

Natural Dye Studio yarn

Eeee!

Ann Kingstone in her fab bunny fair isle design

baa ram ewe’s Knitty Narnia booth! Enter through the wardrobe….

One of the baa ram ewe Knitty tribute patterns knit in their Titus yarn!

Lots of yummy Titus

Need a break?

The lineup to meet the legendary Lucy of the Attic24 blog never ended all weekend

Lucy’s legendary crocheted handiwork

Yum.

Yes, that’s a brass band (a great one) in a sheep pen.

So much more, but hopefully you get the idea. An event on a scale with Rhinebeck’s legendary Sheep & Wool Festival, in terms of quality and variety (and one can only hope it will grow to Rhinebeck’s size as years go on). Worth a visit? An unqualified yes from me.

More info: baa ram ewe | Attic 24 | The Natural Dye Studio

WWW: Knitting TV, Change in Amy’s Teaching Schedule, Caribou Knits update

Dianne in Aurora, Colorado is the lucky winner of our Offhand Designs bag giveway. Many thanks to Offhand Designs for the prize.

Change in Amy’s tour dates: If you’re in the UK and hoping to catch up with Amy for a class, note that there’s been a change in her schedule.  Due to the cancellation of Fibre Flurry, she’s now going to be teaching  the weekend of October 26 & 27 at Purlescence in Wantage, Oxfordshire.

What’s not to love?

The Norwegian national broadcaster, NRK, has announced that on November 1st they will broadcast 9 hours of knitting-related television. The centerpiece is a five-hour show dedicated to broadcasting a sheep-to-sweater world-record-breaking attempt.  (The previous record of four hours and 51 minutes is held by a group of Australians.)

To lead into that, they will also broadcast a four-hour documentary about the process of taking wool from fleece to sweater.

I sadly don’t speak a word of Norwegian, so I haven’t the faintest idea what they are saying in this preview video on the NRK website, but the video of the speedy knitters working away, shots of a yarn shop, and, images of beautiful hand knits is worth watching even without the soundtrack.

These programs are part of the “slow TV” movement. Imagine how far you could get with your holiday knitting with nine whole hours of this to watch!

Doubly useful.

If there can be sheep-to-sweater, why not mower-to-mittens? Delhi Township in Michigan is using a flock of 30 sheep to mow the grass of the public spaces in the community, and the sheep are being sheared, and the wool is being used to make hats, mittens and yarn sold in local arts and crafts stores.

Fibre Space, a yarn shop in Alexandria, Virginia, just outside of Washington D.C. is offering free knitting classes to US government workers affected by the shutdown.

Update on the Caribou Knits program: as of October 4th, over 40 scarves have been knitted in response to the use of the #CaribouKnits hashtag on Twitter.

Jillian”s Spinning: Zoom Looming and My Rhinebeck Sweater

The mythical Rhinebeck sweater, sigh. Mine is just not going to happen. I can’t quit making samples for my classes, plus I found a boo-boo, waaay back that I don’t think I can live with. I will bask in the gorgeous glow of all of the other Rhinebeck sweaters that did get done and dream of next year’s sweater.

I did get a little side tracked this week. I played with my Zoom Loom and some handspun. Do you have one of these yet? They are completely addictive.

Zoom Looming

I think it’s a gorgeous way to show off handspun.

Three little squares.

The orange square is a worsted Merino, the green square is a light worsted BFL singles and the blue-brown square is a Merino and BFL/tussah. For the eagle-eyed out there, the blue one is my Rhinebeck sweater yarn.

The orange square is pretty stiff, handspun worsted is hard to pack onto the loom. I love how it looks and the square was an excellent foil for- embroidery.

Little blue leaf

I want to use this as a patch on something, I love it! I didn’t spin the embroidery thread, that will be one of my next exploratory spinning projects.

The green square, was loose-ish and has a great soft hand. I would like to make several squares from low twist singles and make them into a scarf. Probably crocheted together like this gorgeous purple scarf. I don’t know how to crochet, so that’s on my list now too. My list of learning new things is getting long.

The blue square made me do a little dance. The yarn has flecks of sheen from the silk in one of the plies. I thought it might be lost in the weaving, but I was 100% wrong. It doesn’t show well in the photos, but the flecks of sheen are magnified in the woven square, becasue of the placement of the threads in weaving, the sheen flashes at every spot it floats over a warp thread.

I got even more excited when I laid the square on my sweater in progress knit from the same yarn. I love the combination of textures from the same yarn. I’m thinking that woven squares will make great pockets on the sweater.

Pockets please!

What creative sidetracks did you take this week?

 

 

Socks in Space!

Bright enough to be seen from space?

Two Toronto area knitters are participating in a really rather wonderful project: making socks to send into space!

I recently spoke with Emily Mooney and Catherine Goykhman about this project.

Emily, tell me about this Astro Socks project.

 Over the past five years or so, NASA has been doing a whole lot of public outreach through social media. They’ve invited thousands of people to what were originally called NASA Tweetups but are now known as NASA Socials. These are chances to visit NASA locations, such as the Kennedy Space Center, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and NASA HQ in Washington, and get a chance to see behind the scenes and talk to NASA personnel, including astronauts. A big community of “spacetweeps” has been growing since NASA started doing this.

Penny Garner, a spacetweep in Washington State, went to a NASA tweetup and follows American astronaut Reid Wiseman on Twitter. He’s scheduled to launch to the International Space Station next May. He tweeted a picture of some of the socks he was packing, and she asked where astronauts’ socks come from. When he told her they’re bought at K-Mart, she offered to knit him some instead. He accepted the offer, and the initiative to make more socks for other astronauts has since, uh, skyrocketed. She contacted me a while ago (via Twitter, of course), and I finally got the first Canadian pair going last weekend, with Catherine’s help.

Penny is the one spearheading the project; her goal is to get as many people involved as possible, as a way to get them excited about human spaceflight. This article is about her involvement.

What’s your involvement?

Because NASA gave me a rare, once-in-a-lifetime gift…  I feel a strong responsibility to share it as widely as I can. I’ve always been excited about looking up, but being mere meters from a vanload of people heading toward the vehicle that would take them off the planet was one of the most moving moments of my life. And the idea that future astronauts will be wearing the work of knitters’ hands — including mine — thrills me past words. This is a chance to connect two of my greatest passions and share them both.

Are there specific requirements for the socks?

There are indeed some specific requirements for the socks. They cannot contain any acrylic, which can combust in 100% oxygen inside a spacesuit. The astronauts asked at first for cotton socks, probably thinking wool would be thick and scratchy, and I think all the pairs going up next May are made of Cascade Fixation yarn. Penny recently got approval for 100% merino, though, and Catherine got some especially for this project.

Are you knitting for a particular astronaut?

There’s a Ravelry group  with details about the individual astronauts who have requested socks. Samantha Cristoforetti, Italy’s first female astronaut, has asked for bright yellow, which Catherine dyed specifically for her. Samantha, a captain and fighter pilot in the Italian Air Force, launches next November and will live on the station for about six months.

And you decided to make the knitting a community project?

Kate and friend Sue knitting on the Astrosocks.

Yes! The cuff of the first Canadian sock has stitches from at least 50 knitters, most of whom helped out at the Kitchener-Waterloo Knitters’ Fair. One young woman was nearly giddy at the chance to work on it, and coached her mother through her first-ever knitting on DPNs. I’ll be taking the first sock back to KW at the end of the month, so some who missed the chance last weekend will be able to contribute then.

I’ll be doing much of the knitting for the rest of the pair, taking them to yarn shops and my daughter’s school and anywhere else I can think of where there’d be knitters, and asking them to add stitches. (If the socks were entirely community-knit, gauge would be a mess, and if I asked people for ten stitches each, I’d need 3000 knitters. That would take much too long, and anyway, I am far too shy for that.)

What happens to the socks?

Each handknit pair will be worn for around a week. ISS residents don’t waste water on laundry; their used clothes go out with the garbage and burn up on reentry. So after the socks have been worn, they will become streaks of light in the sky.

  What’s next?

I’m hoping to continue the initiative indefinitely. Canada has two astronauts in training at the moment, David Saint-Jacques and Jeremy Hansen. Neither has a scheduled flight date yet but when they do, they’ll need socks.

Catherine, dyer extraordinaire

Catherine, tell me about how you got involved.

A few months ago, I was scrolling through my twitter feed and came across a tweet by Emily that caught my attention. She was looking for people who were interested in knitting socks for astronauts. I think my heart skipped a beat when I read her tweet. I want to knit socks for astronauts!

The thought of having a connection with astronauts who were actually going into space was very exciting for me. I’ve always been fascinated with space travel and when I was a kid I dreamed of becoming an astronaut.

Before I responded to Emily’s tweet, it occurred to me that maybe I could take it one step further and dye the yarn that would become socks for an astronaut. I offered some hand dyed yarn to Emily’s project. My yarn may be going to space! I can’t describe how awesome this is.

Emily and I met in August to discuss the colours I would dye. We learned through the Astrosocks Ravelry group that Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti wanted some bright yellow socks. I have two very bright yellow colourways, and rather than choose one of the two, we decide to make two pairs.

At the moment, Emily is taking care of the self-striping Mango Smoothie sock and I’ve got the semi solid Mango. I’ll be taking a sock on tour with me when I visit yarn shops and do shows for Blueberry Pie Studio.

Both colorways are available in Catherine’s Blueberry Pie Studios Etsy shop if you’d like space socks of your very own…

To learn more about the project, visit the Ravelry group.

 

Plum Rondo… What about Green Rondo?

We’re all madly in love with Julia Farwell Clay’s new Knitty design, the colorwork circular yoke pullover, Plum Rondo a la Turk.

It’s great, but maybe those colors aren’t for everyone?

Julia has used very striking – and very non-traditional colors – for this fantastic piece. The purple, orange, hot pink and yellow are a lot of fun, but we know they aren’t colors that work for everyone.

Julia’s written a blog post about the color choices for the designs. In the post, she explains the inspiration for the original choices – when Lorna’s Laces has a colorway that’s your last name, you can’t not use it – and talks about the process of choosing colors for this sort of design.

And then she provides a number of alternate palettes, if the original colorway doesn’t work for you.

She’s even provided some suggestions for those of us who like to wear a lot of black…

Totally different yet equally wonderful.

 

 

 

WWW: Caribou Knits, Knitting a Home, Knitted Wedding Bouquet

Do Caribou actually knit?

If you follow me on Twitter, you might have noticed a little more silliness than usual in the past few days. I’ve been tweeting, apparently inexplicably, about the knitting habits of Caribou.

I promise that there is a very good reason for it!

The Minnesota coffee shop chain Caribou Coffee is leading a program to support women affected with breast cancer.

Caribou’s original cost roastmaster, Amy Erickson, lost her battle with breast cancer in 1995. Since then, the company has dedicated the month of October to supporting women and men in Caribou’s communities who are impacted by the disease. From September 28 through October 31, Caribou offers its Amy’s Blend collection, including coffee, tea and merchandise, both in stores and online, and 10% of the proceeds are donating to those in need.

In addition, this year, they are running a social media campaign. For every tweet or Facebook post that uses the hashtag #CaribouKnits, volunteers will knit an inch on a scarf that will be donated to a cancer sufferer.

Each use of the hashtag #CaribouKnits = 1 inch of knitting, 40 uses of the hashtag = one 40 inch scarf. 1 Scarf = a warm gift for a person dealing with Breast Cancer.

Annie Modesitt writes about the project on her blog, and speaks movingly about the comfort she was able to bring to her cousin with a gift of a warm knit scarf.

It’s true that there is debate about the value of cancer “awareness” programs, and there is some controversy about some of the organizations raising funds. In this case, Caribou is making two very directed and meaningful contributions: the scarves created go directly to those affected, and the funds raised are going to CancerCare, a US-based organization that provides counselling, support and financial assistance to those dealing with a cancer diagnosis.

So, join us in discussing the knitting habits of the Caribou…

Cozy and comfy.

Kalamzoo, MI, artist Annie Eckrich, has knitted herself a house.  Annie, a recent college graduate, created the house, which is on display at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, in Kalamazoo, as part of the ArtPrize program.

The house, which measures 9 1/2 feet square, and 13 feet high, includes a knitted lamp and chunky knitted slippers parked near a small knitted chair. The obvious coziness and comfiness of the house is a draw, but the inspiration for the project is a little darker… the artist’s family lost their house to foreclosure when Annie was a teen, and her mother taught her how to knit to deal with the stress. This ‘Woolhouse’, in a very tangible way, demonstrates the comforts of home.

Image from the knitter’s blog. Thanks.

Love it! KniterlyErin (with the help of some friends) knitted her own wedding bouquet, corsages and boutonnières.

The lucky knitter, a little overwhelmed.

File under: be careful what you wish for. An 81-year-old knitter won a prize in a contest hosted by a knitting magazine: to win a lifetime’s supply of wool. The challenge is that although he’s a fast knitter, Eric Powls knows he’ll never be able to use it all up… so he’s looking to donate the wool to a good cause.

Small plug: today is the launch day for a new Craftsy class, Blocking Handknits. Taught by Kate.

Jillian’s Spinning: Yardage – Chain Vs. 3 Ply

When I’m spinning I constantly have questioning flying into my brain – why is it that way? How can I make it another way? If I change these things what would happen to my yarn?

I was happily spinning samples this weekend and I thought – How much does chain plying shorten a color run in a variegated yarn? It would shorten it more than 2 ply, but what about 3 ply? It sat there knocking and would not get out of my brain. So I spun to answer the question for myself.

I’m not a technical spinner. I didn’t measure the fiber in grams, I didn’t measure WPI or TPI, grist or count treadles. I am happy with an ish answer almost always.

When I have a spinning question I spin with the exuberance of the perpetually curious. I want my answers fast. If I’m not satisfied, I may do it again.

I lined up the color run in the fiber – it was a ABC-CBA (blue, green, dark fuchsia- dark fuchia, green, blue) repeat. I divided it in half width-wise, rechecked that the color run lined up, then divided each piece length-wise by how I would ply it. Then I spun.

2-ply, 3-ply, chain ply.
cjkodesigns BFL, Romina coloway.

Each of these is 2 ounces of fiber, spun heavy worsted to chunky. I decided, in my Quick and Dirty scientific method™ to just measure the dark fuchsia color in all three, since there was the most of that color in a chunk. See, quick and dirty .

Just the pink.

I don’t even have to measure to know that the 2 ply has the most yardage. But the 3 ply and the chain ply looked close. So I measured with a measuring tape. The 3 ply is 5.14 yards, the chain ply is 4.67 yards – the 3 ply is a littler chunkier than the chain ply, so if it were spun with more attention to the technical as opposed to the Q&D method, it would have more yardage. Even more yardage for both the 2 and 3 ply becasue I did some splicing in my plying to keep the colors matched up. The two ply has 8 yards.

This answer satisfies me. I’ve always thought that chain plying eats up yardage, but it’s so easy to keep colors together. Now I know if I want clear color runs and yardage, I’ll be plying to match color instead of chain plying.

 Do you chain ply or match colors in a 2 or 3 ply?