Cabled Square Challenge
May 4, 2009 at 7:42 pm | In Knitting | Leave a CommentThere’s been a challenge to design a 30*30 cm square for a knitted blanket on Ravelry: Verzopft & Zugedeckt. The deadline was April 30, and even if you’re not on Ravelry, you can admire the results here. The requirement to participate was to design a 30*30 cm square that includes some cabling somewhere. Being in love with cables right now, of course I had to play. Can’t be that difficult, right? Sure, only if you insist on making your life more difficult than necessary.
Since the start in February, I’ve been playing around with lots of different possibilities to knit a square. I was trying to get a complicated construction to work, and nothing worked in practice as well as on a piece of paper. So I frogged my sample square, more than once. Not getting anything to work, I gave up and forgot about it for a time, being more than busy elsewhere in the meantime. But the challenge kept nagging me. I didn’t want to give up so easily, and a week before the deadline I finally remembered what I usually forget when I try to design something: that there’s nothing lost by keeping it simple. Designing is as much about leaving out the superfluous as it is about putting features in. So, over the weekend, I finally got to work on a much simpler pattern than all my previous ideas and came up with this one:
I like the effect that the cables seem to be woven in at the top and bottom by horizontal stripes. This really came out like I imagined, which makes me happy. 
It always amazes me how even designing something so small and simple ends up taking quite a lot of time. Collecting and discarding ideas, trying things out, working the design and writing up the instructions always takes way longer than I anticipate. A big thank you goes to all the designers out there who do all the work so I can do some mindless knitting without thinking whenever I feel like it. I appreciate their work all the more since I’m trying, little by little, to get into designing my own projects.
Sketchcrawling on a Sunny Spring Day
April 12, 2009 at 6:52 pm | In Drawing | 1 CommentTags: sketchcrawl
sketchcrawl.com is a website that organizes drawing marathons around the world regularly. Having read about that from a fellow blogger already a few months ago, I had the opportunity to join in yesterday. The three of us had lots of fun! I haven’t found the time to practice and improve my drawing skills lately, so this was a brillant excuse to go out and actually draw something. Here’s the result:
In fact, I got reminded that I like doing this enough so I went out on my own today to do some more drawing. And as is often the case when I’m looking for something to draw, I found a place I must have walked by dozens of times by now and I never actually saw what’s there:
It’s the old cross from the tower of a little church which has been replaced by a new one, and they put the old one up at the backside of the church. It’s a great idea, when do you usually have the opportunity to look at a cross from a church-tower close up? It’s mounted on a big stone and looks really beautiful. So, hopefully there will be more sketching in the near future, I definitely plan to be there for the next sketchcrawl!
On a different note, my blog stats insist that there’s something to celebrate today! I can’t really believe it, but this is my 100th post on this blog. That’s a couple of years worth of weekly posting, which just about fits, so I haven’t been slacking very often. For the curious, here are some stats: I’ve had 33,706 page views till now, and my most popular page is the Needlepoint Lace Tutorial. This blog has been quite an adventure, and I think quite a few projects around here get finished just so I can post them here, which is a good thing.
So, on this note, I’d like to ask you what you like most on my blog and would love to read more about. I won’t promise anything, but I’ll try to take up any suggestions you have.
Fingerless Mitts—Adventures in Designing
March 29, 2009 at 6:20 pm | In Knitting | Leave a CommentA friend of mine asked me for a simple pair of fingerless mitts, nothing too fancy. I wanted to have some fun knitting, so I needed someting with a pattern. Every pattern I looked at had too much patterning, though, so I decided to make up my own as I went along. Here’s the result:
The mittens have a small cable on the back of the hand that’s positioned asymmetrically towards the outside of the hand. The cable grows out of the 2×2 ribbing and is a bit asymmetrical. The effect isn’t as strong as I’d like, since I wanted to emphasize the asymmetry of the design by making the cable asymmetric as well. You can see it a bit better in this progress picture:
So, while I like the result, I’m taking notes for the next time. I’d like to make the asymmetry within the cable stronger, so it really looks intentional and not just a bit wonky. Having the cable pattern run through the ribbing might add some further interest to a fairly plain pattern. Maybe I’ll make another pair, I’d like to have some for myself!
Knitting Swatches
March 22, 2009 at 7:24 pm | In Knitting | 1 CommentUntil now I’ve pretty much successfully avoided projects that needed to match a certain gauge to work, so I never knit any swatches before diving into the project proper. Now, while currently trying to finish up all those wintery projects so I’m prepared when spring finally comes around, I’m dreaming of summer knitting.
After some browsing of the magazines at my LYS I think I made a decision for a cardigan from the current Verena. The model I’m thinking about is the one on pages 6/7. Since this model isn’t available in my size and I want to use a different yarn, I needed to knit some swatches. I’m simply amazed how much difference needle size can make!
The upper swatch is worke with a 3.5 mm needle, the lower one with a 4.0 mm. The lower one hits the target gauge precisely on number of stitches, although the row gauge is still off. But I think I can work around this. I like the way the yarn (Online Linie 214 Senta) knits up with the larger needles, so although I’m currently doing another swatch in a different yarn, I think I’ll go with this. I think I might hate myself for ever deciding to knit something with that many cables before finishing, though.
Now I just need to do the mathematics to make the model fit my size, which will be an adventure for sure. But nothing a few hours with a calculator can’t solve, I guess!
Book Review — Art in Needlework
March 15, 2009 at 8:11 pm | In Book Review, Embroidery, Project Gutenberg | Leave a CommentAs promised last week, I want to tell you a little bit about one of the sources I’m currently getting ideas for my crazy quilt project from. Art in Needlework by Lewis F. Day and Mary Buckle is basically a stitch dictionary, systematically exploring the different types of embroidery stitches and presenting them in samplers. At least that’s what makes the book useful today. Have a look, here’s the Herringbone Sampler:
For almost all the samplers the backside is also shown:
There are explanations on how all those stitches are worked, with drawn schematics where necessary. Great to look through and get inspired. In addition to traditional embroidery stitches there are chapters on appliqué, quilting, goldwork and others.
In addition to the samplers, there are also quite a few images of embroidery pieces worked in the different techniques in the book, for example this one in Satin Stich from a Chinese work:
All in all a book well worth reading. While there are a few places where the author falls into the gender stereotypes prevalent in 1900, as here in the chapter on Appliqué:
Appliqué must be carefully and exactly done, and is best worked in a frame. It is almost as much a man’s work as a woman’s. Embroidery proper is properly woman’s work; but here, as in the case of tailoring, the man comes in. The getting ready for appliqué is not the kind of thing a woman can do best.
there are also quite unexpected gems of wisdom in the book, that I can agree with in the 21st century as well:
Let the needleworker study the work of the needle in preference to that of the brush; let her aim at what stuff and threads will give her, and give more readily than would something else. Let her work according to the needle: take that for her guide, not be misled by what some other tool can do better; do what the needle can do best, and be content with that. That is the way to Art in Needlework, and the surest way.
I really enjoyed preparing this book for Project Gutenberg with the help of lots of volunteers from Distributed Proofreaders. I hope you like the result, and will get some good use out of it!
Crazy Quilted Box — Update
March 7, 2009 at 5:28 pm | In Embroidery | 1 CommentTags: Crazy Quilt
After checking that my little box is still sleeping and dreaming (luckily boxes seem to be able to sleep soundly for weeks on end, or my surprise would be totally spoiled by now), I can show you the progress I’ve made on embellishing the box. Although I have to admit, even getting the one picture I now have was far from easy. This seems to be one of the colour combinations that is fiendishly difficult to photograph. First I couldn’t get any focussed picture no matter what, and when the sun came out for a few minutes this week I managed to take one that’s at least sharp, even if the colours are less than optimal:
The reds are much more vibrant in reality than in this picture, which looks far more yellowish than intended. But at least you can see the detail here. Lots of embroidery, lots of beads, a piece of bobbin lace I had lying around from an experiment intended to get away from my white only upbringing with bobbin lace. I had lots of fun trying out different stitches and varying them.
A brillant ressource for this is Sharon b’s Stitch Dictionary. Lots of stitches to explore, and in the sidebar on the left, under “Crazy quilting and needlework”, there are several crazy quilts to drool over, and a brillant series of articles about Crazy quilt seam treatments. Lots of inspiration in there.
I also got inspired by the newest addition to PG’s Crafts Bookshelf, which I finished preparing this week. It’s also a kind of stitch dictionary, just a few years older (100 or so), but you’ll have to wait for more details until it’s actually posted, which should be today or tomorrow, hopefully. I’ll write a full review on it then, I’m sure you’ll like it as much as I do!
The Tale of the Little Red Box
February 22, 2009 at 11:56 am | In Patchwork, quilt | 1 CommentTags: Crazy Quilt
Once upon a time, there was a little red box:
The little box was very sad, because she turned out to be just a tiny little bit too small for the beautiful dress that was made especially for her:
So her big sister got to wear the dress instead, and she was left with nothing at all to wear. 
The woman who had created the little box felt responsible for the sadness of the box, and started to think about what to do about it. Then she remembered the big box of fabric scraps that she had collected over the years and showed the contents to the little box, to see if there’s anything there that would strike her fancy. Together they came up with the parts of a dress for the little box:
The little box really liked the bright reds and yellows that fit so well with her red coverings, and she was very happy with the result. But a few minutes later, she became sad again. The woman who made her didn’t want to see her so sad and asked her what the problem is. It turned out that she was envious of all the pretty embroidery threads and beads on her big sister’s dress. “Don’t worry, little box,” said the woman, “you’re going to be a crazy quilt box,” and she showed her the boxes full of embroidery thread and beads and lace trimmings she had collected over time. Now the little box was smiling again, and went to sleep dreaming of the sparkly dress she was to wear one day.
To Be Continued…
Boxology
February 20, 2009 at 4:53 pm | In Embroidery | 2 CommentsTags: needlepoint
Oops! After cutting the cardboard sides for my needlepoint box too big to start with (better safe than sorry), I made them smaller a couple of times till I was sure they would fit. After covering the sides with fabric and sewing the box together, I ended up with this, though:
Yep, the box was too small! Since I couldn’t make the band shorter, I needed to make another box. Second time around was easier, though, since I knew exactly how big to make the sides. A bit of fiddly hand-sewing later, things were looking much better:
Now the only thing left to do was adding feet and covering the bottom, which was fiddly as well, but the result is worth it:
This is where Jocelyns Needlepoint Box Tutorial really shines: Explaining all the small things that make the result look neat and tidy, and that are actually easier to do if done right. By starting to attach the piece of fabric that covers the bottom of the box in the middle of all four sides almost simultaneously, I was able to stretch the fabric nice and tight without much fiddling and additional cursing.
The lid was another story, though, but that’s entirely my fault for not considering the consequences of my choice of material:
The canvas I’ve stitched this on is very stiff, so it’s hard to pull it around the cardboard of the lid and get a tidy backside. That it’s white doesn’t help either, since that colour doesn’t appear anywhere else on that box.
So, next time around I’m going to change a couple of things: Either use a thinner and more flexible fabric, or at least take some paint in the general colour scheme for the box to the canvas before starting to stitch. A friend also suggested to use a small ribbon or something to cover up the sides, which I think would also work.
But all in all I’m still very pleased with the finished box, so here it is:
Now, there’s still that too small box left, and I already have a couple ideas what to do with it, so back to work play it is!
Needlepoint Lace—Flower Motif
February 8, 2009 at 8:23 pm | In Lace | Leave a CommentTags: Encyclopedia of Needlework, Needlepoint Lace
I’ve made another little bit of progress on my needlepoint lace motif from the Encyclopedia of Needlework and managed to finish all the lace fillings:
And while only practice makes perfect, even a little bit of practice helps a lot in how my stitches turn out, as you can see in this detail of the flower:
I worked from the left to the right, and the fillings are symmetrical on both sides. You can clearly see that things went way better on the right side, when I already got the hang of the filling. The difficulty lies usually in the irregular forms of the motifs, so I have to start and end lines in different places and space the stitches correctly. So, any kind of stitch practice, as in a sampler with lots of squares, wouldn’t really help me. Properly inserting the fillings into those irregular spaces does take practice, and this kind of practice only comes with working more pieces of this.
So, on to the last step, buttonholing the outline. Since this is a relatively large piece of lace, this will be a major task, so don’t expect me to be finished by next week. In the Encyclopedia, this piece is shown with two different kinds of outline: The normal one as described in my Tutorial, and the high relief used in traditional Venetian lace:
I’m tempted to give this a try with this piece, though it’s a lot of work and probably a mess keeping all those padding threads in line. I’ll report back, hopefully soon, on how things are going.
Living Dangerously
February 1, 2009 at 2:28 pm | In Knitting | 4 CommentsA couple of weeks ago I surprised myself by feeling the need to make something for me to wear! I’ve always shied away from sewing or knitting clothes because of the need to fit. I guess I’m afraid of investing all that time and then finding that it doesn’t fit or I don’t like to wear it. But I immediately was attracted to this winter vest out of chunky yarn, and since this is a relatively easy piece of clothing (no arms, for one), I decided to risk it this time. Getting gauge wasn’t easy because I had to substitute yarns and the pattern doesn’t lend itself to a single gauge swatch, so I used the first front as an extended swatch, and around the third or fourth try I was happy with the results I was getting. Using chunky yarn definitely does cut the time needed to knit this up, so here’s the first front, all finished:
I seem to be in love with cables lately, so this is no exception. What I really start to appreciate in knitting patterns is the attention to the little details. Here it’s the ribbing that’s different where the cables are so they grow organically out of the ribbing, and the arm decreases that are done farther in on the area of purl stitches so as not to disrupt the 1×1 ribbing at the side. And I’m happy with the colour I chose, as well. The model in the pattern I’m working on was in white, which definitely isn’t my colour. The picture shows the colour off well, it’s a dark, rich orange.
The second front is already on the needles, so I hope to be able to finish this in less than a couple of years. 
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