A Quilt, A Moth, A Hayride

I've got some pictures this time around:



This is a quilt for my father. I finally got around to finishing it, though not in the way that I had originally planned. See, all those little blocks are his old shirts, and they were supposed to continue out to the edge of the top of the quilt. However, they are a drag to cut and sew, I ran into some sort of size issue and had to trim things back anyway, and I just could not bear the thought of cutting more of them. So it got some borders instead.



I machine-quilted the whole thing, which also proved to be a fairly beastly task. But! It's done. If anyone seeks piles of men's dress shirts, let me know - I've got a ton of them left!

Also:


Viva La Moth! A completed - though not in action - Wing of the Moth shawl. I know this picture gives you no sense of scale; this thing is pretty big! I'm quite happy with how it came out, and it feels wonderful. The topmost lace pattern was simple enough to read and remember, but bored me to tears when I was nearing the end of that section - all those increases! Going into the second lace panel (Twin Leaf I think it is called?) I ran into a bit of an issue with how the 2 different lace patterns fell together. They don't......"line up" to a specific point in the top pattern, and my OCD-brain thought that it was a miscount in the knitting on my part. But no - the numbers all add up, just not the way that my brain wanted them to. I'm happy with how it all fits together in the grand scheme of things, but that first row really threw me.

But I sense you are really here for X-TREME BLOCKING:



This is the bottom center. I think it resembles a beetle-snout/nose. The corona edging is mildly more even than it appears in this picture; there was a wrinkle beneath it. The blocking process took a bit - a lot of going around in circles. I pinned out the top first with some blocking wires, and then I worked from the center of each side out in either direction. Each corona got 6 pins. I attempted to make the circles between them even, with even spacing, to the best of my ability. Once fully blocked, the whole thing was dry within 3 hours - ah, lace! Such swift gratification in the blocking department.

Of course, there was some knitting progress as well:



This is the Hayride Capelet I'm reverse-engineering - I've got about 2 more sets of decreases to go and then I get into the top edging detail - this includes some more aggressive decreasing, some eyelets, the usual. This is moving along with shocking haste! It's a simple Horseshoe Pattern - an 11 stitch repeat, with some reverse straight-stitch between the repeats. I'm working the decreases quite blindly, at the first and last stitches of the reverse sections. From the beginning, I cast on for 15 repeats, with 16 stitches between each section, and 10 stitches at either end. After working some garter stitch rows, I got into the pattern repeats, working decrease rows every 16 rows. I've got to check out the pictures some more to see what happens with the topmost section............I'll probably post the pattern for this once I've got it all figured out. It's a breeze to knit and I highly recommend the alpaca........

Long Weekend

Last week I taught a 5-day Non-Adhesive Bookbinding class. I had 6 students, and we made what seemed like 734658 books! Here are a few:4-Needle Coptic on Boards (2), Historic Longstitch (2), Coptic on Binders Board, Butterfly.

It was nice to be teaching again, especially this class - I've been teaching Non-Adhesive Binding for......7 years or so? And it's still plenty of fun. I tend to teach this course a bit fatalistically - I've seen - and made! - a lot of mistakes when making these, and I let the students know what many of those problems are/might be. They don't make the same mistakes, and we can spend more time making more books! Everyone wins.

So after a long week of teaching bookbinding what's a girl to do? Well..............

This was NOT my original plan for a long weekend - I WAS set to do some long-overdue quilting (finally finishing up a quilt for my father that I "gave" him for Christmas 2 years ago) and maybe get a jump on the holiday crafting. I got a wee bit immersed in the scraps of fabric though:This is the Color-Wheel Quilt form Last Minute Patchwork and Quilted Gifts. I added about 13" in border to make it a more useful size. I gotta tell you, this thing went FAST - the entire business took about a day, start to finish. I cut a template for the circle color pieces, picked out 52 (!) fabrics that sort of worked together, and got to sewing. Of course I managed to sew half of the pieces backwards - the transitions weren't working out for awhile. After some un-sewing, I got things back in order, tacked on some white fabric, found a suitable border fabric (and had *just* enough!) and got to machine quilting! ...Which went surprisingly okay. I gotta say, it was getting the color pieces in order that took the most time. My only issue with this is the build-up of thread in the center. As I intend for this to be used as a blanket quilt, it's a bit rough, but not intolerable. If I make this pattern again (I may!) I will probably put some sort of hand embroidered motif in the center.

(I did finish dad's quilt, too, but I haven't taken any pictures yet)

And I got some knitting done a well: Not much to look at, but that there IS progress - I'm through 2 of the 3 balls of yarn, and thinking a bit that i might run out. Not sure though - I'm doing decreases so it is a bit tough to say, and I haven't figured out all of the shaping at the top of this yet. We'll see. I'm hoping to complete this in the next week or so - it's going quite fast and rather smoothly. And man oh man is the yarn a joy to work with................

On and Off the Needles

Well! Pictures, as promised. The above is a close-up of one of my TWO completed Socks That Rock, and I have to say that these socks do indeed RAWK. They are pretty rad. I'm not quite sure of why this color (Loch Ness) was one of the very few available when I managed to get to the booth dispensing such yarn (and got a free pattern book!), but I think it is just divine.

Also off the needles, after many many years, this blue mercerized cotton lace-ish scarf. I realized that it's scarf-like nature did not NEED me to complete the half ball of yarn remaining; I was never going to get to that. However, 5 rows of garter stitch and an easy bind-off seemed much more reasonable. Now to move it to the blocking pile......
But really what I want to tell you about is some reverse-engineering. Which I love.
I picked up some lovely alpaca while at Rhinebeck, and I think that I had this project in mind for it. I somehow fell in love with this (the drape, the swing, the warm!) and quickly realized that:
1. It's way too expensive for what it is,
2. I'd probably never wear it,
3. Looks easy enough!
and so began the task of reverse-engineering. Made infinitely easier by the most amazing ZOOM feature on that site! You can count the stitches!

Here then is a bit of process: I poked around to see what Barbara Walker had resembling the pattern and quickly found the rather simple "Horseshoe Pattern" - a 10 +1 repeat. Based on the pattern (and the stitch orientation) I could tell that the garment was knit from the bottom up. It was really just a matter of figuring out what the frequency of decreases was between the patterns. Some math, a bunch of random notes, zoom zoom zooming a lot, and a rather large cast-on later (382 stitches) gave me this:
.....and here's the Horseshoe pattern repeat:This yarn is really lovely to work with, and I think my numbers are (thus far) correct. Why am I doing this, if I know that I most likely will not wear it? Process knitter. Through and through. Fer reals.

Meanwhile, this has been beckoning from the "feed me" bin:Quilt pictures soon! Moth - in action! - soon! Handspun soon!