The Pink Scarf

Color can set my fingers to flying and my mind to reeling!  Fingers and mind were both fully engaged this morning as I worked in a delirium of excitement to make this scarf for Bethy (Christmas).

It is so hard to explain how color affects me.  I realized, when I was in my 20s, that I hear music in colors (or see colors when I hear music), and decades later found the word for it:  Synesthete.  When I am working in the studio with music playing, I sometimes turn it off so I can lay out my colors for a project.  In the silence, I can "hear" the colors better.  Once I'm satisfied with the lay-out, I can go back to whatever music I was listening to.  Hard to explain.

I got up at four a.m. this morning and thought about the colors I would use for this project, then went into the studio (the short walk in the wet dark was a quick wake-up!) and got started on it.  I listened to the news (NPR) while I worked— occasionally the musical interludes would interfere, but the "mute" button solved that problem.  By half-past eleven I had finished the scarf, and was giddy with the results.  Beads, two dozen differently textured and colored yarns, and the simple single crochet stitch— what a great way to start the morning!

Why isn't it possible to make a living with baizillions of tints and hues of thread and a hook?   Oh, right— the economic bottom line. . .

The Tickley Pink, Yellow and Melon Hat

Do you remember this yarn?

It is now officially made up.  This is the hat I made this weekend, and my little model was delightful:

She complained that the beads and he dangley thingeys were too "tickley."  She returned it to me and said she didn't think she wanted it.  Her manners were so nice; she added "thank you" to her refusal!

So, now I'm trying to find some more of the unembellished yarn to make this into a larger hat to fit me.  It will be a feat.

Destination: Western North Carolina

On a mission to find interesting yarn, Asheville seemed the most logical place to start.  I have looked through the shops near home until I am embarrassed to show my face there so often.  It is the thin, wispy angora-type yarns and bouclés on my radar this time, along with shades of blue, green, grey, and soft pastels for blending.  Of course, Asheville is the center of civilization in my narrow, artsy world, and any excuse to visit is a road trip in the making.  Add to that the SAFF, and the trip is a given!

It would be remiss of me not to mention how beautiful the leaves are this fall.  But in doing this, I also have to confess that I left my camera at home, so you must take my word for the ragged beauty we encountered and color my world in carmine, indian yellow and flame.  Over these three colors and their endless permutations add a sky of Payne's grey or indigo with the occasional shaft of light fighting its way through the grey crust.  And, inexplicably, green grass!

We spent Wednesday evening at the Big Lynn Lodge in Little Switzerland.  The weather was stormy the entire way, though not so bad we did not have so beautiful vistas of the mountainous countryside.  I had a bag of Noro cotton-blend yarn tucked in a cloth tote to keep me busy, and when the temperature dropped more than 25 degrees and the evening rain and wind were mixed with sleet, I set about making the bag of yarn into a long, squishy scarf.  The Thursday morning walk from our cabin to the Lodge for breakfast was much more comfortable with the hot-from-the-hook scarf.

We had visited the Penland School in the afternoon, a trip always filled with inspiration, visually satisfactory to a degree hard to explain.  And I was so pleased to find Margaret Couch Cogswell's 2012 wall calendar there.  It is tall and thin, the perfect size for the narrow space above the light switches in the studio.  Check out her blog here.

A visit to a gallery such as The Penland School always sets the creative wheels in motion.  This visit was no exception.  I have enjoyed making books for years, in an off-and-on sort of way.  There is no experience quite like that of making a hand-made book, of holding the covers carefully as you leaf through the marvelous feel of papers selected particularly for texture, color or the simple ability to hold paint or text well.  I made a small book for Cynthia in August, and it got my book fairy out of hibernation and into flight again.  I think I will have to divide my time between bookmaking, crochet, and planting bulbs in the next weeks.  There is no point in not doing something when it brings a great deal of happiness, is there?

Thursday morning:  At the Appalachian Handcraft Show in the Asheville Civic Center, I found some soft handspuns.  I had Ethan in mind when I found this yarn, as he loves "rainbow colors."  He describes himself as a "sunshine boy," so this might be the ticket for him:

And at Purl's on Wall Street, there was a basket (now greatly diminished) of Mango Moon yarn.  Well, I had never thought of crochet with pink beads and stones, and the purple I'd used once before was so rich . . .  and so I was rummaging happily in the funky yarn pile:

Aren't these tumbled stone beads just too yummy?

The folks at Purl's really "get" me.  I don't need 200 yards of a lot of different yarns, but a touch of color or texture here and there are perfect for the landscape-inspired crochet I most love.  For people like me, they have little mini skeins of wool, and I simply could not walk away from the possibilities there:

I think of them as brushstrokes of subtle color (except for the bright, cheery pink).

And an interesting book on geometric crochet,

Next, on to Friends and Fiberworks, where I found some of the blending fibers I was looking for.  In fact, I found so much I could have been overwhelmed, as I was on my first visit to this Yarn Eden.  But I am made of sterner stuff than that!  I gave myself a mental shake and began filling my lovely wicker shopping basket in the several sweeps I made around the shop.  Because I paid cash, I was given a 10% discount, which was no slouch amount.

While we were having lunch at Tupelo Honey, Charles looked up from the table to see Bill and Pat Martin in line, and what a happy reunion that was for the four of us!  I had last seen them in Asheville six or eight weeks ago after Pat had been given some scary medical news, but the new MRI set everything to rest, and life is smooth again.  There is nothing that can so quickly put a life on hold like a medical issue.

Friday morning:  A trip to the Ag Center and the Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair.  I have been looking forward to this for what seems like forever, and poor, long-suffering Charles was my package bearer for the event.  I provided him with two large canvas totes so he could keep up with everything without the struggle that multiple plastic bags brings.  Every man should have so kind a wife as this.

I cannot detail what we saw at the Fiber Fair.  This must be akin to the experience of a child in a toy factory.  The two oversized totes were bulging when we left.  I was looking for things not available in shops, so I found yarn with curly locks dangling from the plies, another from Jazzturtle with a core of felted sweater wool.  All tumbled in a big wooden bowl, they are feastable wool yarn:

Worth another look:

Rack upon rack of open skeins of the most luscious colors and blends of wools, pre-felt bats, bins spilling over with roving, curly locks of the most amazing colors, and some incredibly knitted creations— all this every where I turned my eyes!  Unfortunately, I could not take it all in.  My leg and back let me down, and we left after only 2 1/2 hours.

We shared lunch with Anne and Steve, and I spread the yarns over the table, a few at a time.  Anne got the bug, and there was a message on my cell phone later that she had found some unusual yarns herself.  Anne's specialty is her felted (I want to say "painted," they are so detailed) pictures.  I cannot wait to see what she does with her curly locks.

On the way back to Atlanta, my brain was exploding with color and design possibilities.  My love of pure funk was satisfied these couple of days in Asheville and environs—and I have the most wonderful collection of oddball yarns to work with over the next months!

Charles, long-suffering, has to put up with the brain outbursts.  Surely he has earned a number of Stars For His Crown from this trip, alone.

Saga of Big Red, the Great Red Scarf

The saga of Big Red began in the middle of the summer, surely an odd time to think of woolen scarves.  The idea of making up a scarf from skeins of matching yarn has always sent me out of the room, looking for something more interesting to do with my time.  Red is an exciting color, however, and there are all sorts of textures of red yarns available.  Texture is the operative word here.

The scarf is 104 inches long and roughly about 3 to 3 1/2 inches wide.  It is made of blocks of crochet from yarns both well-bred and those with no pedigree whatsoever.  Additionally, it was meant to be embroidered, beaded, and embellished without restraint, which saves me a bit of embarrassment when I have to account for the shape of some of the blocks.  In addition, I had a particular person in mind when I began this work, and I wished to see her smile when she opened the package.  Please understand that I will leave the scarf quite peacefully rolled into a bumpy wheel for weeks at a time, then suddenly unfurl it and in an absolute flurry of activity add some embroidery or beads or buttons, maybe crochet an edge or a short fringe somewhere.  The fate of Big Red is that it be in a state of constant change as long as it is in my possession.

As all of the crochet projects have begun, my sister's seven large bins of yarn was the catalyst, along with my less impressive small drawers of yarn.  Add to that mix the yarn that called to me from the shelves of shops I visit.  As lovely as novelty thread can be, I feel it needs to be anchored with a worsted or DK weight, something of such a standard composition that I can poke around with a crochet hook and find the next loop for a stitch!  This makes a bulky, highly textured fabric.

And there is that age-old problem of mixing weights of yarn.  Super-chunky and sock weights have different gauges, right?  Hence the occasional bulge.  Well, all right, the constant bulging.  But I rather like the wavy edges, and you can see where I have added even more crochet to the waves and bumps to make them more pronounced.

Here are some photos of The Great Red Scarf for you to enjoy.  I can't think of a way to show the entire 104 inches in one photo, and it is not finished, so the full portrait would be wasted.  It will not be finished until about an hour before it is given away.  Can't help it; one idea leads to another, and . . .

These felt balls had the beginnings of beading when I found them in a yarn shop, so I just went a tiny bit bonkers and added the prickly "stems" of seed beads to the mix.  They reside in little crocheted cushions:

This small bird's nest contains a vintage button whose crystals are quartz with chunky leaves dangling outside the main line of the scarf):

The fringe sewn here is in DMC perle cotton (this to fill in a"dip" in the line where I switched weights of yarn):

This is a little tab of felted sweater wool that I curled over and beaded.  It adds a nice texture to the novelty thread base:

Vintage button, short streamers of an especially soft eyelash, and tags of polka-dot cotton strips:

These beads break up a boring block of merino:

And the coral glass leaf beads have little seed beads dotting the ends.  They swing when the scarf is moved about:

So many more ideas to go with it!  But, you can see why I think of it as "Big Red!" can't you?

The Scarf Chronicles: Chapter Two

Are you ready for another cup of tea, another little sit-down in my kitchen?  The sudden turn in the weather this morning makes the kitchen and tea a cozy place to be.  Today we have lemon-ginger scones to nibble as I show you some more of my scarves.

This first piece is made of cotton yarn from my weaving thread cabinet.  It is stitched on the back loop of each row, which gives it ridges and a deep, extra-soft feel.  The yarn is five strands of creamy cotton that stitched up at an embarrassing 108 inches of creamy, ridgey texture!  After the euphoria wore off, I realized it was just a little too narrow (five inches), so I added "finger" fringe to the four sides and the piece suddenly had the width it needed to be taken seriously, along with humor and uber texture.  This reminds me of walking the beach at low tide, with ripples and patterns left by the receding waves.  The little fingers are in constant motion, like the sea itself:

I also decided to turn the stripe pattern on its side and crochet long verticals rather than sweeping back and forth over the shorter horizontal track.  I like the way the fabric drapes when it is crocheted this way.  This grey is a scrappy from skeins of silk, rayon, and cotton, and as nice as it is, I feel it is missing something— it may need to be unravelled and re-crocheted before it can rest as "done":

I repeated the idea of the vertical stripe in blue-grey, but with more types of yarns in the mix this time.  Grey, blue-grey, pale and dark violet, as well as sea blues— another scarf of delights.  It would not have looked nearly so interesting if this more than a dozen yarns had been clumped into horizontal blocks rather than the narrow vertical stripes that blend so well together.  Many thanks to Jill for supplementing my greys and blues:

Confession time:  This was the most mouth-watering crochet time I have spent so far.  I used a very simple single crochet stitch, but choosing from the bags of yarn spread around me to augment the drawers of my own yarn was like running amok in a favorite yarn shop!  So much fun, in fact, that I have gone a bit bonkers with the idea and repeated it in another group of blue-greys (darker, more man-scarf colors), an autumnal green,  and one of browns, which is the autumn forest floor, to me.

and

The next scarf was stitched with a cream worsted wool that I added to a soft, light, multi-colored fleece-effect novelty yarn.  After stitching, it is difficult to tell that the base is the cream worsted, the thin, fluffy novelty yarn is so completely dominating!  I remember working on this while I listened to The Help on CD, alternately laughing, gasping in horror, nodding in agreement, forgetting to count and unravelling line after line . . .

It did not take long for me to fall under the spell of Noro yarns.  The long lines of color give a different effect from the short color changes of many variegated yarns.  The only drawback is the occasional slubbing in the single plys that throws a line of stitch off.  I am hoping the Noro spinners will improve with practice.  Below, the bright colors from a mainly cotton blend called Taiyo:

In this scarf I have combined two skeins of different green cottons (by Arauncania), using the heavier brown cotton as a sort of marker to divide the greens into blocks and to give some visual break between the two yarns.  The cotton is very soft, and it is stitched quite loosely, so I doubled and sewed up the selvedge edges to make into a tube. This should keep it from stretching out of shape.  A good choice for a man.  I don't usually think in man-colors, but I am learning.  And Charles approves.  What more is there to be sought than a man's approval . . . ?  I digress.

This rich gold scarf came from Jill's bag of browns.  It is two strands of plied wool that I doubled in the back-loop single crochet that makes such a nice texture of soft yarns.  As I sat working with it on the patio one day, a leaf drifted down from the oak overlooking the sun room beside me.  The leaf was a deep red, and against this gold yarn it was stunning.  I thought for a moment the leaf had simply sought a beautiful backdrop for its last days . . .

And now, the tea pot is empty (**sigh**), the scones are only discernible by the crumbs on the tiered tray, and reality intrudes with the idea of there being life beyond crocheted scarves.  We will meet another day and enjoy another handful of the bunch, perhaps after the fall gardening is done.  How cozy the tea will be when the temperature is in the low 60s!

Hand Warmer

Now, this was fun!  From bits and ends of other projects (of course).  I crocheted, measured it on my hand, crocheted some more, slipped my hand into it . . .  Thus the singleton has become my Michael Jackson hand warmer.  As this is hand-spun wool yarn, the bonus is a bit of lanolin for the hand with every wearing.

Wouldn't it be nice to have two buckets of these at the door, one of lefties, one of rights?  No two should match.  Only boring people wear matched sets of things. . . Except shoes.  Once upon a time I had a friend with a shoe fetish.  We worked in downtown Atlanta together, and at lunch she would often go to Rich's for their shoe sales.  These sales were not calm, polite affairs.  The women who shopped them had split personalities, and the personality that took over when shopping for bargains was not always rational.

Well, Ethel bought the most darling pair of shoes during one of those lunch-time manias, black with brightly-colored leather ball trim at the toes, and they complimented several suits she wore.  But after a short time of wearing them, she began to develop back trouble.  That was when she noticed that the shoes she had were not really mates.  One shoe had a one-inch heel, the other had a one-and-a half-inch heel.  The same shoe, except for the heels.  But in the feeding frenzy at the shoe sale, she grabbed the box and never thought the shoes might not be a matched set.

Beautiful women and their shoe collections . . .

The Scarf Chronicles: Chapter One

While words are fine, it's time I posted photographic evidence of my crochet labors, or no one will believe I've really done anything at all.  So, come join me in my kitchen and I'll spread the work on the counter for you pleasure.  Have a cup of tea and some almond biscotti while I tell you about the scarves.  The "group" photo above includes a large portion of them.  One, The Great Red, will come later.  I cannot stop working on it!  But, you will see, eventually, what I mean.

The original objective was to "use up" the yarn my sister gave me.  That would be the logical thing to do (waste not, want not).  But seven large bins of skeins?  And a lot of novelty yarn, which is difficult to work with and I really only need a little bit of the flashy stuff for accent, not entire scarves.  There was no possibility of it fitting into the already crowded space that my modest yarn collection occupied . . .  So, I kept little balls of a lot of the flashy yarn and shared the rest with my Freestyle friends.  We scrumbled for several meetings with it.

Next, I discovered (to my deep regret), the wool needed to go.  Allergies are hard bedfellows.  So I began to crochet the wool out of the studio—except that every now and again, I needed just a teeny weeny bit more, so I would take a small sample of the almost exhausted ball of wool and go shopping to buy more wool to finish out the project . . .  What was she thinking, you're asking.  Answer:  I don't think I was thinking at all.  I was just crocheting and loving every row of beautiful stitches that seemed to leap from the hook.  Mesmerized, I was.

As we've had suddenly autumn weather the last week, the wool can now be taken onto the patio and worked, especially the sheddy types.  The breezes sweep the wool particles away.  How kind of Mother Nature to do that clean-up job for me!

The Scarves.  The first is a scrappy piece, a loop of blues and sand-colored neutrals that I doubled over and stitched as a tube to help the looser-woven parts remain stable. It can be worn in a short, double loop, or as a single longer loop.   I was thinking of windy days by the sea as I worked:

Palest sky-blue merino mixed with another DK merino dyed shades of blue and green here.  The problem is that this loop scarf was meant to be a long, wide scarf, but the second skein of the sky blue merino was not where I thought I had stored it.  There are a number of things that could be said here about my planning abilities, but they can wait for another day.  I was short of yarn (of course!), and it was yarn I'd bought twenty years ago in Oak Ridge, Tennesee, hand-spun and impossible to duplicate.  After trying, unsuccessfully, to find something that could be used with it, I changed my plans and made it into this extra-long loop and put little "fingers" at the join. It is heavy and will create warmth under blizzard conditions:

Aren't the fingers delightful?

From bits and pieces came a narrow blue scrappy that is 50 inches long, 4 1/2 inches wide and quite light-weight. This would be nice worn with a winter knit blouse (or for a little boy, doubled over under his winter jacket):

The last of the loops (I have made two others as gifts for nieces Jessica and Nahum) is this red one of rich merino and a strand of red twisted with sequins.  This may be my holiday scarf.  It is light-weight and cheery:

I am now over scarf loops.

There are some serious keep-you-warm creations.  The second is the only scarf to which I added a fringe.  Long fringes can be so much trouble when you're shopping and going in and out of shops, unlooping a scarf . . .

After finishing them, I wondered how easily these wonderfully soft and thick scarves might fit around a person's neck, and that was when I made the decision to make longer and narrower pieces that could be looped twice around neck and shoulders without the bulk of these chunk yarn pieces.  Almost twenty years ago I wove a long, five inch wide scarf for my mother that was meant to be worn doubled, and it was quite striking with her classic suits.  She wore it on her shoulders and by doubling it, was able to catch up the ends of the scarf and draw them through the loop and hold it in place with a fancy pin.  I began to re-visit that idea, with variations on width and composition.

In the studio I keep a yarn basket where I toss the short ends of a skein, a colorful collection of any type and color of yarn.  This amazing scarf is the product of that lively basket, and one I will keep for myself.  I like it best rolled up, where its 144 inches (yes, four yards!) makes a circle that is six inches in diameter, looking for all the world like a colorful little flower (that comment from Anne).  The yarns range from slightly chubby worsteds to DK and fingering weights, a true conglomerate.

I should mention that I have scrumbled all of my life because it has always been so difficult for me to read a pattern.  I have a double stigmatism, which means that there are shadows on both sides of objects.  Imagine reading a cross-stitch pattern or finding your place in a closely-printed page of instructions when there are shadows popping up everywhere!  As a result of having done free-form crochet for so long, I have forgotten the proper way to crochet and make sensible objects.  The scarf project became a way of reminding myself the rules I could not grasp when I was eight and learning to knit and crochet from our neighbor, Bebe Webb.

This is the scarf I made from an idea I saw in a shop.  It took me a while to figure out how to do the little fingers on the side and keep everything as one continuous line rather than adding an edging afterward (as I did the cream cotton, which you'll hear about another day), but once I'd gotten the hang of it, this was purest stitching joy.  I used Kudo yarn:

Whee!!!  What a lot of looking and talking we've done today.  There are more finished pieces, and several still on the hook.  It is so much more interesting to have several projects going on simultaneously, different stitches, different yarn tensions to be balanced, more to think about . . .

Are you yawning, your eyes glazed over, attention wandering? Let us continue this another time.  You have been kindly uncomplaining during my ramble.  Thank you.  Now, may I pour you another cup of tea?

Saga of the Dressed-Up Wool

I never know whether I should thank my father for the obsessive-compulsive gene he passed on to me, or if I should volunteer for gene replacement study, but sometimes obsessive determination is a wonderful characteristic to have.

I have been crocheting a lot lately (all right, compulsively).  The problem I have is I want to use beautiful yarn that is not hair-pullingly difficult to work with.  A little lumpy, but not horribly so.  Beads would be nice.  Add to that list of requirements that I should not have allergic reactions to the content.  Here, I am afraid that wool drops off the radar. But wool is so forgiving, so embracing!

*Sigh*  The truth is this:  I am in the process of crocheting the wool out of the studio.  It has to go.  But I would like to give it a nice send-off.  This is how the Saga Of The Dressed-Up Wool began. . .

On a trip to Asheville several weeks ago, I found a skein of yarn that was made of lengths (18 inches) of rather commonplace yarns knotted together.  Unlike some others of this cobbled-together yarn I have seen that was put together with outrageous fibers of multiple (and very incompatible) weights, these commonplace lengths looked as if they could be crocheted easily.  The knots would be decorative.  The weight of the yarn was a worsted one, so there was the consistency I always look for.  I also discovered that the yarn was made by a Mom and her two children, so I plunked over the $25.00 for the skein immediately (cottage industries need to be nurtured).

The skein stayed in my mind as we went on to other things in Asheville, and after a while I realized I was actively working on improving the yarn with all these mental gymnastics!  At Purl's, on Wall Street, Elizabeth so kindly gave me all the "trimmings" from the store's ball-winding station.  They are always so interesting, and there are lengths that can be used for embroidery or felting or . . . As we approached our car, it suddenly hit me that the yarn I wanted could be made by hand but it would not have to be spun, as I have no aspirations to be a spinner at this late stage of my life.  The half-bag of trimmings, some beads--- I suddenly had latched onto a way to create an interesting yarn!

Between Saturday and Sunday, I worked for about twelve hours on this project.  To describe the process, you must grant me a certain willing suspension of disbelief (Coleridge, I think).  After knotting some of the interesting yarns from the bag of trimmings from Purl's onto some hand-spun yarn, I hand-sewed seed beads, buttons, small chips of stone and quartz, other beads and trims, to a staggering 15 yards of wool yarn.  Wool?  you are asking with a puzzled look.  Yes, wool.  Wool because it does have that "forgiving" quality I mentioned, and because it can hide the carrier thread for all these gizmos I was hanging onto the yarn.  I was careful not to flap the yarn around and send up sprays of wool particles to sent my allergies on the alert again, but I did take Monday completely off to let things settle a bit both in the studio and in my imagination.

The result of this slave-labor effort is an absolutely drop-dead gorgeous yarn.  Well, to me it is a drop-dead gorgeous yarn.  It began as the yarn in the first photo up top.  These are some of the results:

If this does not make your mouth water, maybe you are reading the wrong blog.  I digress.  Forgive me.

On Monday, while I was recuperating from the yarn decorating frenzy, I did some serious thinking about what I'd done in the studio over the weekend.  This same technique would work well with the wool cord I'd made earlier, wouldn't it?  And think of the objects I could add to the list for embellishment:

• sweater-wool felted shapes
• leather shapes
• embroidered shapes
• crocheted (with small, tight yarn) shapes
• vintage trims and lace snippets
• old game pieces
• sequins
• bracelet charms
• alphabet beads
• vintage jewelry pieces

I could make that felted cord meant originally for a simple neckpiece into a marvel of ostentation . . . Yes, another project, which will also be totally unexplainable to my friends, but immensely interesting to me.  So, thank you, Daddy, for the obsessive-compulsive gene.  I would be in the throes of a really dull retirement without it.