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.

Tiny Art Quilt: Indian Summer 2011

Small is my size, as I get older.  I used to wonder if it was Adult Onset Attention Deficit, but whatever the cause, I will never finish a large piece anymore.  As I have aged, the pieces grow smaller and smaller!

This little art quilt is my most recent piece, called "Indian Summer 2011."  It is a sort of Journal page, a glimpse into what has been swirling around Studio 508.

It is hand and machine stitched on layers of linen and cotton scraps beneath a piece of vintage cotton voile.  The little "flags" are vintage fabric scraps from that bag of flea-market quilted scraps I keep dipping into (the English Major in me wanted to write "into which I keep dipping" *sigh*):

These little flowerlets and the white curve below are of leather (Ethan sees these as mailboxes).  I am lucky the Viking is a sturdy sewing machine!  Notice the little French Knots spilling on the striped linen-- I had to bite my lip and slap my hands to keep from obsessing on them:

Here are some more fabrics, both hand-painted and salvaged:

Everything is laid onto a scrap of rescued linen, batting beneath.  I don't know how the embroiderer in me became addicted to thick work, but it has just evolved into little quilting exercises.  The thicker, the merrier!

Enjoy!

And thanks for stopping by.

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?

Halloween Weekend and a book

It is so beautiful, the weather, I mean!  This morning we resumed planting bulbs, as the temperatures are "scheduled" to be cool for the next week or so.  Unfortunately, my little crocuses have come up already, but we will pretend they are not three inches tall and hope they will turn yellow with the weather and go back to sleep.  Waking up again in mid-February should give them enough winter weather to do their magic in the snow next year.

I have had another overload of woolen fibers and my eyes began to ache and grow scratchy, so I am off the crochet for a bit.  Instead, I made a small book.  It is (roughly) 5" wide by 5 1'2" high.  More or less.  Arches papers of varying weights, all hot press, and each of the seven signatures has a "cover" made of silk paper where the silk threads seem to float in an almost translucent ground.  I decided to put pockets of varying sizes on these cover pages, and I stitched the sides with flower thread in loose, rather casual stitches, leaving ends dangling (my trademark).  Anything that is slipped into one of the pockets becomes a sort of art work by virtue of the silk paper's slightly blurring it into an impression of itself.

Here you can see the little fabric and curly locks "tags" I sewed onto the edge of the silk paper:

The pocket in the silk paper is very visible here-- folded up from the bottom of the page:

The front of the little book below, with a note explaining the book tucked into the pocket there.  See the irregular hand stitching?  Oddly enough, when you know how to sew a straight line, even when you are sewing on paper, you have to stop and think each time you slip the needle into the paper/fabric to make it irregular!

And, lacking a cover, I have just cut a length of tie-dye ribbon and tied it up to keep things safely together when it is moved.  I already have things stuffed into it for future use!

The cover has yet to come.  The little book has not whispered to me what it wishes to have wrapped around it.  I have leather, but the book was silent.  Fabric?  No answer.  Book boards?  I could almost feel the violence of the rejection.  So, I'll wait.  When the correct form comes along, the book will tell me.  I will ask about the leather again, and perhaps the little book will have thought about it long enough to accept this idea.  I've never made a leather cover and would like the challenge.

Aaah, Early Morning . . .

. . . and the possibility of rain.  What more could we ask for, in this water-deprived, Deep South piedmont?

Yesterday (this is an older post, some two or more weeks ago) my faithful gardener, a.k.a. "hubby," and I began the struggle with the Lamb's Ear that has bullied its gentle neighboring plants for months.  There were originally three plants (what, oh what was I thinking?) in a corner of the upper terrace, so I poked at it with a deep spade, trying to pry loose the roots so the jumble of plants could be divided and moved to the new area below the bird bath.  What a job!  Aided by the loose compost in the bed, those plants had sunk iron determination into the soil with its roots.  This was one of those times when moving a plant became a personal struggle between Nature and myself.  When Charles rescued the situation with his shovel, I was amazed at the roots and the linking runners between the new plants.  No wonder I couldn't manage it with a spade!

We decided to put the Lamb's Ear in a contained space of its own at the base of Charles' bird bath.  If it escapes the surrounding stone, it will have to duke it out with the other beautiful garden thug, a mullien that will bloom as long as you give it a sip of water.  As both the mulliens and the Lamb's Ear are nearly indestructible, I will sit on the patio and sip tea and watch the battle from afar.

There are two Lamb's Ear plantings (which translates to a blue million plants) left in the corner of the raised bed.  One I will leave there, the other will be lifted (somehow that word does not adequately convey the struggle) for my niece, Nahum, who is an avid gardener.

Meanwhile, Breck's has shipped the hundreds of bulbs I ordered in the spring.  I am having a Bulb Planting Party the last weekend in October, and those who participate may share the bulbs.  Nahum's motto is "Have trowel, will travel!"  Charles is getting antsy, however, wants to plant them now, in small amounts.  I prefer the One Big Bash method, where everything is laid out in its place and the digging goes from there.  Now we must lay in a large supply of bulb food (do they put this up in four cubit foot bags?) and polish up our shovels in preparation for The Event.

We did have a little moment of practice, though, with the Adorables this morning.  We planted about twenty-five or so bulbs beside the tool shed in the side yard.  The children were interested for a longer time than we thought possible.  But, it is obvious that Bethy is not a gardener.  Ethan works eagerly, slopping dirt, plant food, water-- but enjoying himself.  He is very fond of his tiny gloves!

Then there will be a little re-locating of shrubs and plants to more hospitable environments.  My back spasmed as I typed that sentence.  Eventually, though, I keep telling myself that the garden will be in order, everything will grow undisturbed, and life on Penny Lane will be an unbroken cycle of bloom, feeding, and the long winter sleep.

Take a look, in passing, at how well the nasturtium have done, after that slow, floundering start:

The sedum are moving toward a bright autumn display:

Now, if we might have a bit of rain to soften up the earth a bit . . .

Re-blooming Iris

My re-blooming Iris has outdone itself.  This is the third exhibit, the last one in September.  And there are still three buds to unfurl.  I believe the bone meal we used to fertilize the Daffs planted in front of the Iris must have gtiven it the stimulus to grow again and be so beautifully  showy!

Enjoy!

Inspiration

From Carol Warren's house, these inspiring photos of mushrooms and their relatives:

Instead of going crazy when I see them, I try to take a deep breath and remember my friend Susan saying, "Mushrooms are just flowers without blooms."

They can still be creepy, en masse, can't they?

I like the shapes of the fungus growing from the side of the stump better than the colony of little brown buttons.  A nice idea for embroidery, or to use the ruffles in a crochet piece . . .  Felting?

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?