Communities

September 28, 2008 at 5:46 pm | In Fiber Art, Knitting | 1 Comment

As little as a century ago, women were expected to be proficient in a variety of needlecrafts. In today’s world of cheap mass production, this is no longer the case. So if you are interested in fibery things, finding people who share the same interest is not as easy any more as turning to your family and neighbours.

Luckily, the development of the internet has made it much easier to communicate and find like-minded people around the planet. Being the only person you know who’s interested in a particular topic can make you feel isolated. Using the internet, finding people with similar interests is often as easy as reaching out and telling the world what you’re doing, for example with a blog like this. But it gets even easier: there are quite a few communities around catering for different interests, and participating in them has a lot of advantages. Let me show you what joining a new community has done for me just in the last couple of weeks:

Since I’m not primarily a knitter, I resisted the buzz building up around Ravelry for quite a while, but a couple of weeks ago I finally gave in and joined. I have to admit, I’m captivated. I can browse the projects of new and old friends and let their projects inspire me. I can easily build up a collection with all the patterns I’m stumbling over on the internet. Most of the patterns are already on Ravelry, complete with nice pictures from folks who’ve already completed the project. I even found a knitting group right around the corner from where I’m living, so I spent a nice evening knitting in company about a week ago, and I plan to repeat that. I’m definitely spending a lot more time knitting than a couple of weeks ago.

Browsing through my friend’s projects, I rediscovered Celestine. This definitely is the kind of project that appeals to me: a quick, geometrical pattern, and I had the perfect yarn and a recipient in mind. So here’s what I came up with:

Ravelry allows me to easily track the progress of a project, record what yarn and needles I’m using, and add my own comments. Just periodically raising that progress bar has kept me amused and motivated the past days I’ve been working on that project.

One thing I keep noticing over and over again with different interests is that it is often the community connected with an activity that keeps me going. Exchanging experiences and showing the results of my work to like-minded people is a powerful motivator. If I get stuck, the solution of the problem is often just a search or a question away. And knowing that others take an interest in my work often motivates me to actually finish a project instead of just forgetting it in a dark corner.

Hexagons for Quilters

September 20, 2008 at 6:52 pm | In Patchwork, quilt | 3 Comments
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Jon Ingram wrote an interesting post on his blog on using a simple hexagonal shape to study different tiling patterns. The results of his playful approach are really nice, and immediately led me to think about the possibilities this kind of patterned tile would present for quilters. So I requested a pattern file that wasn’t in the black and white Jon used for his printouts, but just the simple lines, printed and cut out 30 of them and started to play.

My first try was to create a big circle using a ring of 6 tiles. The result gives a nice motif of a circle with a meandering band weaving in and out of the circle. The difficult part was then to create a symmetric tiling pattern that can repeat indefinitely, but after a bit of fiddling I quite like the result.


I could easily imagine one of those big circle motifs as a quilting pattern for hand-quilting, so I drew one out to try the effect:

I’m not really convinced of this one, I think those tilings are stronger when used to fill a whole area, which leads to the next idea: When designing for machine-quilting, it’s nice to have continuous-line patterns so you don’t have to start and stop sewing all the time. So my next step was to try to create patterns that don’t have any closed loops. The first one has a strong horizontal design:


Next I was just randomly placing the tiles, the only rule being not to create a closed loop. This seems to be quite easy to achieve, so there’s definitely room to achieve a lot of different pattern ranging from very regular to almost chaotic. For this one I used a 3×3 pattern of tiles that repeat horizontally and vertically:

So there’s no shortage of possible designs, even while using just one tile and no colours. Any patterns created in this manner could be easily used as designs for either hand or machine quilting. Now, what about colours? The circle design reminds me a bit of celtic knotwork, which could be appliquéd using bias tape. This would be easy to achieve with this design.

How about creating a game out of those tiles? Using three colours on each tile, a different one for each line segment, there are six different ways to colour our tile. Making an equal number of tiles of each colour combination, those tiles could be used to create your own patterns. A game could for example consist of the task to only connect sides with the same colour, and whoever manages to create a closed loop wins. Something like this already exists as Tantrix.

Or we could make a variable wall-hanging: Make a plain quilt for the back divided into hexagons the size of the tiles by lines of quilting. Put the underside of a button or a piece of velcro in the middle of each hexagon. Make your tiles and put the other side of the button or velcro on the back. Now you can change the design of your wall-decoration as often as you want!

To try out the practicalities of sewing tiles like this, I decided to run a trial today. Here’s the result:

Each side of the tiles is about 4.5cm long. The long strips were appliquéd using 12mm bias tape. The strip for the small segment couldn’t be done that way because the curvature is just too strong. So I cut out the fabric in the correct form and appliquéd it down. The sides are closed with a simple zig-zag-stitch. Of course it would also be possible to sew the hexagons together from the left side and then turn them, but for today’s trial I decided that was too much hassle. All in all the result looks pretty nice, but I think I need to figure out a better way to sew the small circle segment.

Box in Canvas Embroidery

September 14, 2008 at 6:38 pm | In Embroidery | Leave a Comment

After finding Jocelyns Needlepoint Box Tutorial over at Pins and Needles, I was running wild with ideas to make my own. But where to start? I hadn’t done any needlepoint for quite a while and wanted to start simple, but with my own design nevertheless. At the library an old friend came home with me: Canvas Embroidery by Peggy Field and June Linsley. Concentrating on creating your own designs from the very first embroidery project, this book gives lots of avenues to explore.

One of the first exercises suggested is to start with a small square in the middle of a design and build up a sqare project by adding borders around that square. Simple to just start and design as you go along, and the perfect lid for a square box! So here’s what I ended up with:

Lid for Needlepoint Box

Lid for Needlepoint Box

Apart from using stitches from the book, the last two wider borders are from the Stitch of the Month page of the American Needlepoint Guild. The inner one is 6×6s, and the outer one a Herringbone border variation. I really like the design, the only thing I’ll do different next time is to take some colour to the canvas before stitching so the white of the canvas doesn’t stick out so badly in the places where it’s visible.

Now I need to stitch the sides of the box using the same borders, and build and assemble the box, which will be quite a bit of work. I think these boxes are a brillant idea to use needlepoint for, since I find stitching pictures to hang on the wall gets old after a while.

Book Review — Lace in Fashion

September 7, 2008 at 9:39 am | In Book Review, Lace | 2 Comments
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I was browsing the museum shop at the V&A Museum in London when this book fell into my hands and subsequently followed me home: Lace in Fashion from the Sixteenth to Twentieth Centuries by Pat Earnshaw. There’s a lot of information inside, and I just finished reading the book a few days ago. What I got out of it is a much better sense of the historical developments in lace making.

In contradiction to a lot of other books on the history of lace this one doesn’t divide lace into different sorts. Hand- and machine-made laces, needlepoint and bobbin laces, drawn-thread embroidery, crochet and knitted laces stand next to each other and get embedded in historical context. This treatment fits the actual use of laces in fashion much better, where more often than not a certain effect was sought out, no matter how the lace that created that effect was produced. The cultural as well as the economical influences on the use of lace are traced, and I found the story of how the development of machine-made laces in the 19th century influenced the use of lace and eventually superseded most hand-made laces especially fascinating.

The book contains many illustrations showing people wearing lace as well as close-ups of the different laces, so a good comparison of the different styles can be made. It took me a while to read because there’s such a lot of information in relatively small print on those pages, and I needed thinking as well as reading time.

Pat Earnshaw also made me think about the role of lace making by hand in today’s world. Since this touches quite deeply on my understanding of myself as a lace maker, I’ll explore those thoughts in a later post. But I have to say that I just love books that make me think!

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