photo journal

There has been a lot of this as I continue to take control of my sewing room:

small containers to hold 'crumbs'  (anything under 2") sorted by colour

scraps waiting for my attention

moving from open baskets to lidded storage -- this stack is for squares from 2' - 4.5"

 
and some of this in preparation for a workshop (on using coloured and variegated yarns) I am facilitating on Saturday

two samples of 'stacked pooling'

while listening to this on a continual loop in preparation for a worship service I am leading on Sunday

and a vast amount of this (we spent most of the last week of WM’s annual leave gardening)

native hibiscus in foreground, buddleia in middle ground;
clivea and camelia in backgrouns

verbena seedlings

cosmos seedlings sown five days ago!

 There has been a daily dose of this (can’t resist that view)


and tomorrow is forecast to be 40°C ( 104°F) so there will probably be some of this:


Unfortunately, there never seems to be enough of this:


And, yes, I do know I owe you a post about our time away!

a blanket for Emily

If you’re looking for the May post for 2013: The Year of the Finished Project, it’s over here.

As you may know from this post, my eldest niece (my sister’s eldest daughter) had her first baby on 23 April. Being just two days before my own birthday, you could say she was an early birthday present.

This is the same baby I made the Very Hungry Caterpillar quilt for (because it is her mama’s favourite childhood story).

But I’ve gone a little less bright and a little more “pretty” for her baby blanket.

I didn’t start the blanket until the day after she was born, and then I ripped it out (too wide and wrong colour combination) and started again two days later. It’s not that I didn’t know she was coming, of course. It’s just that I didn’t know she would be a girl (although I had a feeling she might be!)

I was also being true to my own rules – no new knitting projects until others were finished – but a new baby is exceptional! They don’t come along in my family every day!

I have not been in the mood for knitting between saying goodbye to DD and the Grandsons, being sick, and working over at the “renovator’s delight” (henceforth known as “RD” -- there will be a post soon, I promise)!

But there’s nothing like a new baby to bring out all those craft-y tendencies!

I looked through my stash and decided to use up my Fiddle De Dee cotton (by Cleckheaton, sadly discontinued) because it’s a heavier weight (10ply/Aran/worsted) than the other cotton in my stash (we’re coming in to winter) and, more importantly, it’s machine washable and dryable! I don’t know that my niece knows such a thing as hand-washing exists! It knits up very softly although, being cotton, is quite hard on the hands when knitting for extended periods. I only had small amounts of each of four colour-ways, three skeins (150g) of lemon, and six skeins (300g) each of mint, a lemon/blue/white variegated yarn and an lemon/mint/pink/white variegated yarn.

The right combination and the right pattern were going to be important so an entrelac blanket it must be (hi Cindy! LOL). My first choice was to use the two variegated yarns but I didn’t like the combination so I settled on the mint and pink variation (of course! LOL)

Anyway, I hope to see Emily next weekend and wish her mama “happy mother’s day” for the first time. But I doubt I’ll have the blanket finished. This is where I was up to on Saturday afternoon; I’ve done part of the next tier since then!.

(Thanks Diane for the photo taken by iPhone during our workshop on Saturday)

If I had time to knit all day I might have got it done …

But there’s no way that was going to happen!

It will be sweet when it is, don't you think?

Linking up with Barbara at Cat Patches for the New FO challenge (on the last possible day!).

snippets from the craft show

Last Sunday,  DD and I went to the annual Stitches and Craft Show held at Darling Harbour, in Sydney. We were already tired from the sock workshop the day before (yes, it went well thanks). DD had missed the Show last year due to giving birth to Younger Grandson and I had missed most of it due to looking for a sewing machine on my first day’s visit and teaching knitting at the Guild stand on my second day’s visit.

DD and I went to quite a few “workshops”. I don’t know why they call them workshops – they are “talks” or, in some cases, product demonstrations. The first talk we attended was about embroidery hints and tips (and products). DD wanted to go home as soon as it was over – she was already raring to get at some handwork! Inevitably, one of us gets all excited and wants to go home within the first hour of being there!

Some “workshops” we attended together, some we went in two different directions. I attended a talk given by Reece Scannell and Kathy Doughty (Material Obsession) about the use of colour. It was only when Kathy took over for the second thirty minutes that I remembered the camera in my bag.

The final workshop we attended was Saffron Craig talking about her latest designs.
(Sorry about the hassle with the camera, Saffron, and thanks for allowing me to take and publish this photo.)

The hat in front was made from a Saffron Craig fabric by Nicole Mallalieu (You Sew Girl).

BTW, I don’t have permission to publish the photos of the quilts here, sorry. You can go to the two posts on Di’s blog (here and here) to see the photos which she has permission to publish. This is the link to the Quilt Guild of NSW website to see the prize winning quilts.

DD and I made the mistake of going to look at the quilts at 3:30; we had been at the Show since 10am. It was too much. Next year we are going for two days!

second top finished in five days

I must be on a roll!

For your viewing pleasure I present the completed top I have called "Scrappy Strings " because it's made of string blocks made from scraps of fabric. (poetic I'm not)

We chose a very dark brown sashing because, of all the colour choices available at the Big Box Store, it worked best with our blocks. I had anticipated using a crimson-red because most of the fabrics had some kind of red in them and most of those were more crimson than orange, but the red we needed wasn't available.

Brown is a relative of red (if mixed with yellow and black) and this brown had a slight tendency to green which is also in quite a few of the blocks.

We will quilt this one on the quilting frame. Apparently DD spends "idle moments" (like when she's feeding the baby) practising quilting doodles for this quilt so it's time to hand it over to her (first I have to piece a back!)

I'm not too sure that I like the look of this kind of scrap quilt - I think I like a more controlled look.

So our next quilt, which I have already started cutting, is in shades of blue, blue-green and purple: many different fabrics but a more-controlled palette.

I wonder if I'll like this one better?

Do you like scrappy quilts? It's okay to say you don't - I genuinely want to know!

an old jumper

I knitted this jumper (sweater) back in the dark ages, before I had a blog. I finished it in 2003 and I think I worked on it (on and off) for about three years.

taken in artificial light but reasonably true to colour

It was inspired by Kaffe Fassett but is not one of his designs - it's one of my own. The theory is the diagonal patches of light colour would cause the eye to travel up or down rather than across as horizontal stripes would. I wanted something more interesting than stripes anyway!

I'm proud of this jumper but I don't love it. It's very thick and heavy; it's made mostly from 8ply (DK) weight yarn - with some 5ply (sportweight) and some 12 ply (chunky). It's mostly wool with a little bit of mohair.

I don't wear it very often - whenever I do, someone always wants to talk to me about it - it's not a jumper I can wear when I want to be "invisible"!

Now that I've seen the photos - it looks more like a man's jumper, doesn't it?

Today it formed the centrepiece of a workshop I gave on "colour theory for knitters". How did it go? I felt it went okay but it fell a bit flat! But you'd have to ask the participants for the real story, wouldn't you?


Can you guess how many different yarns are in the jumper?

Carnival of Colour

Some more of my yarn before it is re-skeined. You can see how strong the colours are much better when the colour is in bulk!

I've finished the first set of dyes that I bought a week before Christmas. Now I've figured out what works and what doesn't, I 'm getting down to the serious business of writing down my mixtures and recording colours by the simple method of keeping a small piece of yarn! First the dye colours straight [1 teaspoon to 1 cup], then 50/50 mix of each colour with every other. After those 45 colours, I 'll do the 3:1 blends; there'll be 72 of those!