Feral Knitter

The Wild Side

I finished my random What's Leftover Cowl and I have to tell you that I love it! TOTALLY impractical for our California climate, but I don't care. It was a blast to make and I might just hang it up in the office for inspiration and a reminder that not all things in life need to be calculated.

I pulled yarns at random from my two gigantic zip bags of Shetland scraps and leftovers. Some were as short as 2 yards, while others little balls were 10 yards or more. Some 4 ounces total.

I divided this bounty into lights and darks. Of course, there were lots of medium values, which I assigned to lights or darks somewhat arbitrarily.

Then I arranged these two piles into pleasing (to me) movements of color.

I then wound these into balls, knotting the yarns together, creating "magic balls." I didn't try to figure out which colors would meet in the patterning—it was a total surprise.

I found a ball of grayed, mid-value, red-violet heather that I used in all the plain rounds between patterns. This helped to meld the wild array of colors. (I don't know why I grabbed that ball from the bag—I was looking for a nearly full ball and this one caught my eye.)

Now and then I had to edit: sometimes very similar colors would come up against each other, obscuring the patterning to much (I didn't mind a little blurring here and there, though).

I followed the Steampunk version of the Inspira Cowl pattern by Celery Stalks on Ravelry, with a bit of variation: At the decrease round I decreased by K4K2tog. This kept the decreases in pattern. I then altered the pattern in the remaining rounds to P2K3; K2P3; and P2K3. Narrowing the column from 3 to 2 isn't all that noticeable given that the cowl is slouchy.

Other details: Used a size 3 needle to achieve a 5-stitches-per-inch gauge (I'm a loose knitter). My shoulders are too broad for this cowl to drape over them, but that's OK—I prefer the scrunched at the neck look.

 

Blocking Tams

Unblocked, tams are not lovely things:

It doesn't take much to transform them, though: a bath and a little bit of discipline over a plate, and the ugly duckling turns into a swan:

No fancy shaping, no difficult computations. Just the sweet maleability of knitting....

Here's another one (these are the potato chips of knitting, I swear):

These are 2 of the 5 tam colorways that I will be using for the Fair Isle Tam class at Churchmouse Yarns & Teas in Bainbridge Island, Washington, on April 1st. (Eventually I will be selling these as kits, but you all know how darned slowly I work....)

In other news:

I'm making obsessive progress on my What's Leftover Cowl:

If you have worries about knitting a corrugated rib, making one of these cowls will cure you of that anxiety. When I am using two colors in my knitting, I hold one color in each hand. For corrugated ribbing, I hold the purl color in my left hand because bringing the yarn forward is a simple act of dipping the knitting toward my chest—for me this is much much easier than purling with my right hand. However, the author of the Inspira Cowl pattern prefers to handle her yarns the opposite way, so you'll need to find out what works for you.

Simply Playing

All great work is preparing for the accident to happen.
      ~ Sydney Lumet 

Sometimes a knitter just has to plunge in, stop planning, quit testing the water with her big toe—you know what I mean: stop swatching! Fair Isle colorwork demands a certain level of pre-planning; I don't mind that, really, but sometimes I want to bust loose!

So when I ran across the Inspira Cowl on Ravelry, I knew I had found just what I needed for those times when everything seemed too calculated:

Introducing the What's Leftover Cowl!

I have bags of leftovers from the workshops I teach—odds and ends too valuable to toss but too small and random to use, discontinued colors, small balls students leave behind—pounds of yarn. I gathered up some of them (randomly—no thinking it through) and created two "magic balls." All I did was divide my pile of scraps into two value families—light (sort of) and dark (sort of). I sat on the floor and arranged each pile into a pleasing sequence. The line snaked across the floor, constantly rearranged by the passing dog. I knotted the yarns together and wound a ball. Then I turned the second pile into another ball.

Digression: You know what these remind me of? Those Japanese "string balls" of my childhood. They were built of narrow strips of colorful paper wound round and round to form a ball—little treasures were attached here and there, so that unwrapping the ball because a little treasure hunt. Hmmm, I wonder what these are really called?

[Gretchen G supplied the name: Surprise Balls. The Not Martha site has a tutorial on making your own. A Google search unearthed pictures of beautiful surprise balls and several more tutorials. I couldn't find that these are particularly Japanese, though, unlike the kusudama that Marji pointed me to, which are folded-paper balls with treasures inside. Perhaps my memory is a fault; perhaps in the 1950s they were imported from Japan.]

I have a third ball of a single color to add some continuity to the design. I simply cast on (I'm knitting the Steampunk version) and I can hardly wait to see what happens next!

Go check out the pattern (free Ravelry download)—Celery Stalks, the designer, is one funny funny writer! And I bet you'll be inspired to pull out some striping yarn to make one of these cowls yourself.

Clothing as an Agricultural Act

Eating is an agricultural act.
~ Wendell Berry

And clothing, too, is an agricultural act—even though most of us are so separated from this fact that we aren't even aware that the clothes we don each day have their origins in the earth. The incredible, awe-inspiring inter-reliance of humans and their environment is brought home when we consider this fact: the very elastic that holds up our underpants has its origins somewhere.

We knitters are generally somewhat conscious of where our yarns come from, aware that sheep grew the wool or that fields and farmers, sun and rain conspired to grow the cotton we happily use to knit our sweaters; spinners are perhaps even more atuned to the origin of the fibers they run through their fingers day after day. 

Through the work of such clothing pioneers as Natalie Chanin, of Alabama Chanin, more and more people are learning about where their clothing comes from—and, more importantly, learning that there are alternatives. My cousin Sina Pearson, a talented upholstery fabric designer, has a lot of information on environmentally kind fabric production on her website. (If you love Studios magazine, be sure to check out Sina's How We Design and Our Workplace pages, too, clicking on the arrows at the bottom right of the page.)

I recently became aware of The Fibershed Project , which was began a year ago (here's a link to the first blog entry—sadly, the blog does not offer good navigation, but the writing and photography are worth following from the start) by Rebecca Burgess, an accomplished natural dyer in Marin County, north of San Francisco. (Her new book, Harvesting Color, is due in May). 

According to Rebecca's website, the goal of the Fibershed Project is 

To live for one year, in clothes made from fibers that are solely sourced within a geographical region no larger than 150 miles from my front door; this includes the natural dye colors as well!

Why?

The textile industry is the number one polluter of fresh water resources on the planet, as well as having an immense carbon footprint.

The average CO2 emitted for the production of one T-shirt is up to 40 times the weight of that shirt.

The goal of this project is to both show and model that beauty and fashion can function hand-in-hand with sustainability, local economies, and regional agriculture.

Fascinating and thought-provoking.

Now, sometimes our first impulse upon hearing about projects like this—whether Barbara Kingsolver's year of eating food raised within a 100-mile radius or the Johnson's zero-waste home (good article here) or the Fibershed Project—is to dismiss them as unworkable, utopian, unlikely to make a difference, elitist. Sometimes our response is to feel bad that we aren't "good enough," that we could never live up to such lofty ideals, and we despair. But I see something else that I hope you see, too: a lively group of people trying to demonstrate how all the pieces of our lives fit together in the larger scheme of things. And if that doesn't make you feel grateful for the web of people, animals, and plants that keep you warm, dry, and modest, well, I just don't know what to say! 

The Fibershed Project is hosting a fundraising dinner and fashion show on May 1st in Point Reyes Station, California, to support building a local fiber-processing mill. I'm going! If you are, too, please let me know.

Wool Lover's Retreat

(View of West Marin from the Boathouse)

Last week I was happily ensconced at the charming Manka's Lodge (warning: the link has sound) in Inverness, California, about an hour from Berkeley—teaching the mini–Fair Isle cardigan class in the fabulous Boathouse on Tomales Bay. West Marin is one of the most beautiful places on this earth!

(The Boathouse)

The Wool Lover's Retreat has been quietly taking place here for some 16 years. It is organized by Shirley Grade of the Wool House in Elm Grove, Wisconsin. Shirley is an amazing woman, not the least because she knew Elizabeth Zimmermann (in fact, if you read through Elizabeth's original newsletters in The Opinionated Knitter, you will see that Shirley is mentioned now and then). I loved getting to talk with Shirley, an inventive knitter, and hearing anecdotes about the woman who has so influenced my knitting life.

(Sally, Shirley, and Carol, sadly overexposed but clearly loving the sun)

By the end of the retreat, we had a pile of little sweaters! And these aren't all of them....

(Clearly I need to teach a little more about proper fit.... that's a joke)

The knitters were talented, interesting, and smart, wonderful company. 

(Carol, Carol and Martha toasting with their Feraltinis)

And the food! What can I say—Margaret Grade (Shirley's daughter) and Daniel DeLong are exceptional chefs who use local suppliers to create memorable food. This 2007 article from the New York Times captures some of their style. My favorite meal—and it's hard to choose, to be honest—was the breakfast of polenta with a nugget of goat cheese topped by a poached duck egg, some grated sharp cheese and a handkerchief-thin slice of ham. All from local farms and all absolutely delicious. I would eat anything that Margaret and Daniel prepared! 

(Morning coffee on the dock)

I had a quiet drive home on Friday morning, my heart lifted by the views of fog and hills.

And, as always, I have been inspired to concoct some new designs....

Several people at the retreat requested a 3-day Design Your Own Workshop—sadly, I don't have your email addresses, so would you please write me so we can set this up? It'll be fun!