Etherknitter

East meets West

Imagine a dressy, elegant sweater, gossamer weight, and warm enough to be cozy.  The sleeves are wrist length, without flare.  The neckline is lower than crew, higher than scoop.  One button coyly closes the top.  It falls to just hip length.  The neck, sleeves and bottom have a 1" moss stitch border, and the buttonband (which has only the one closure at the top) has a stabilizing, delicate cable on each side.

That's the sweater fleshed out and made into a pattern by the many-pierced artist assisting me at Artfibers in San Francisco.  The yarn refuses to sit still for a decent picture.  It is Sylph, color 04.

A sweaters' worth of yarn rarely makes the leap into the stash.  I had been thinking about this one for some time.  Claudia had warned me:  "Leave your expectations at the door and your husband at the hotel."  It's hard to fall in love with sumptuous yarns, then recognize that there is no garment you can picture in your life for that fiber.  Sylph was my sole purchase.  She's higher up in the queue than I had anticipated.

Sylvia showed me pelicans.  She stopped on the street and pointed out sculptural bamboo.  Her hands danced as she described making beadlizards to us.

Juno's post today was exquisite in its concise wisdom.  My morning yoga class creaked and snapped my body into the awareness of need for more yoga.  So easy to say, "Tomorrow," and so foolish.  The Japanese garden in Golden Gate Park stirred the soul around and reminds me of my resolve.

The baby kimono is ready for assemblage.  Three needle bind-off (trivial) and seaming two sleeves remain.  The hard lessons always come last.  I cast-on two different ways:  long tail, and backwards loop.  Now I am left making the odd seams seamless.  There is trial and error in my future, more than usual.

Circular and linear thinking, Vancouver II

Mr. Etherknitter insisted on visiting the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia.  The building was recently designed and rebuilt to showcase the monumental house totems in the collection.  I wandered through, without focus, until I found the Visible Storage section.

Spinners!  Whorls!  Most of the spinning tools on display were whorls without spindles.  I've included some of the best examples.  The museum has cabinets with many drawers.  You can pull open the glass-topped drawers as you wish.  The artifacts aren't on formal exhibit.  One feels almost sneaky and sly as treasures are revealed.

There was no evidence of knitting.  You can see several spindle whorls that have archival yarn still in place.  Can you picture your own stash, frozen in time, and placed in museum collections?  The story twisted into each yarn was lost. 

Weaving appeared to be the future of spun yarn in the Coastal Peoples' cultures. 

 

Susan Point, a Coast Salish artist, has taken the spindle whorl motif into her inspiration.  The glass whorl in the third picture is from her studio.  I couldn't find functional pieces in any of the Vancouver galleries.  (How functional could a glass spindle whorl be, really?)  Her whorls have become exquisite symbols in First Nation art.  Her website (which speaks of handknitted sweaters by Coast Salish women) is worth a peek.  Marcy has promised to do an in-depth look at her place in the spinning universe at some point in the future.

 

My sock yarn project is evolving.  In everyday knitting, it is harder to measure lengths than I had anticipated.  Each knot that I use to mark out 5' of yarn introduces 0.5 - 1.0 inch of error.  Then, of course, one has to remember to mark down each time a five foot length has been knitted.  And then one has remember whether or not one has remembered.  (I wish I could tell you I was joking, but, alas, I am not.)  I've changed measurement strategies.  I measure how much yarn I use to knit a row (k2p2 row uses more than a stst row, etc.).  Maths will then allow me to calculate yardage used.  I'll have to go back to brute force measurement of foot by foot at the gusset.

This is actually better.  Mr. E has promised that if I give him good data, he can whip up a Java applet for my sidebar.  Then you can plug in your cuff, your sock's ankle length, and your foot length to find out how much yarn your sock will use.  Cool!  It will work initially with simple stst socks with ribbed cuffs, standard heel flap and gusset decreases.  Future modifications (i.e. for short row heels) are possible.  It will NEVER help you with Cat Bordhi's new sock book, which looks incredible.  It is clear that Ms. Bordhi does NOT think in linear fashion.

Vacation knitting was a Baby Kimono, pattern and yarn from Tess Yarns' new shop in Portland, Maine.  The kimono is knit all in one piece, with a three needle bind-off at the shoulders, and two small seams under the arms at the end.  I'm knitting the back now, with just a left front remaining, and it is slaying me with its cuteness. 

Some of the local bloggers and I did a Maine yarn crawl at the beginning of September.  Tess Yarns (1 Spring Street ) is a must.  Melinda is there most days and loves us knitters dearly. 

Vancouver I

The brain needed to be rebooted. 

We also wanted a fun trip to celebrate our anniversary.  What number, you ask?  Many.  We look at each other in disbelief - has it really been that long?  Not possible.

Just shut up and celebrate, right?  So we did.

Lorette came to town just before we left.  She did the day justice with her post, which left me with one  picture to add.  (I barely escaped camnesia.)  Blogger blogging blogger.

I scored on the patternbook front:

Jaeger JM-06 (discontinued!), Simply Shetland Four, Rowan Summer Tweed (finally).

Vancouver stunned us.   

Somewhere in British Columbia, there is snow.  The view from the plane clicked the brain computer back on.  Memory started to reload.  This held space in RAM until we landed.  Then the city of Vancouver took over and filled us.

I've never taken pictures of sidewalks until I found this labor of love. 

Can you imagine the guys pressing the leafy parts into freshly poured concrete?  These were scattered throughout Yaletown, which is the Soho of the city.   The 2010 Winter Olympics are spurring big changes.

This guy was used to keep the door open.  Can you see the idiot tourist on her knees taking multiple shots of this boy?  Good thing the frog couldn't blog the blogger.

The Aquabus is the ferry between Granville Island and downtown Vancouver.  It is the cute little blue tub in the foreground.  The city integrates itself with the water seamlessly.  I want to live here.

 

 

Who might this bird be?  A grey gull?  He was the antithesis of the hummers.  He whined constantly.  He begged for food.  He posed for pictures.

Sometimes events unfold slowly enough for my prehistoric digital camera to understand.  A passerby warned her mom to wash her hands Right Away.  Vacation was taking hold if someone else thought of psittacosis before I did.

Up next:  what knitting did the Etherknitter knit, and how does Vancouver rise to the fiber occasion?

Where in the world?

Where have Mr. and Mrs. Etherknitter been?

(Those who know,  shhhhh!)

I can't tear myself from the plyed and the spun and the knitted.

Migration of birds, migration of sanity

The tenth dogfight of the day left everyone standing.  There were no aces in the group, no hummingbird casualties.

The strafing runs to protect the nectar were vicious.  The humming of wings was masked by the angry *chittering* of territorial imperative.  Soft, audible *thuds* marked mano-a-mano combat.  The aerial acrobatics mimicked Luke Skywalker Ti fighters, as the battle continued in synchronized flying and attack manuevers. 

They are IMPOSSIBLE to catch on camera.  And now they are gone.

The quiet that has thumped onto the deck is deafening.  My google search for hummingbird migration dates listed a range of 9/3-9/19 in another year.  September 3rd was the last sighting for us.  I miss them.

Cormo fleece, "Elegance"  (Foxhill Farm), true black alpaca yearling fleece "Midnight Thunder" (Red Barn Alpacas) 70%/30%

Manise and I split the goods.  We dithered endlessly over processing.  Who?  How much?  Where?  Customer service or service of silence?  Morro in California won.  This is The World's Most Expensive Non-Vicuna roving, but it IS spectacular.  Pindrafting did not uniformly mix the colors, so the spun yarn is unique and luscious.  I tore off a four foot length, spun a three-ply, and swatched.  It is worth the $$$ even as it hurts.

I have enough for a sweater and a shawl.  It joins the queue behind other fleeces.  A fifth bobbin of spun Coopworth has joined the lineup for Mr. Etherknitter's sweater.  I need about 1800 yards of a 3-ply, which means 5400 yards of finished yarn.  I have 2539 yards done. 

Knitting progress: 

-scarf 75% finished

-Just Our Yarn sock done except for grafting

-started second Judy sock.  The plan is working.  SSS is  held at bay.

The second Judy sock is the start of a grand cuff-down sock experiment.  At what point is a given sock half done?  The two tubes (cuff and foot) are easy to measure and assess.  The heel, however, is knit only on half the stitches.  The gusset and the toe are gradually decreasing cones.  When is half the yarn used?

In the interests of knitting science, I am doing the experiment.  I'm measuring and marking 5 foot increments from the yarnball for the whole sock.  The prototype will be 20 rows of k2/p2 ribbing, 68 stitches, slipstitch heelflap, with all details to be documented as the experiment runs. 

I am already documenting 5% error.  Based on the number of ribbing rows I've done, I was 5% off in the measure. 

Has anyone done this calculation?  There still exists the opportunity to save me from myself.