The Heathen Housewife

I’ve been busy here having fun the last week or so. Spring is almost finally upon us, sort of. Yesterday it was 80 degrees here, today it went back down to 40. But the girls and I have been playing outside a bit, which is great. We’re getting our first tastes of what summer will be like – digging in the sandbox, running around with bikes and scooters and hanging out with our neighbors in the yards.

Today I wore sandals for the first time this year, and we dug out the girls’ Crocs and flip-flops. Julie can wear hers from last year, Sophie will need new ones.

Anyway, let’s do a quick catch-up on the knitting stuff. I went to the Minnesota Knitters’ Guild annual Yarnover event on Saturday. It’s always fun to see all the other knitters, to run in to old friends and make some new ones. It was a little freaky sitting down to chat with people a couple of times, and they casually asked me specific questions about my current projects or mentioned other facts from the blog. And don’t get me wrong, dear readers. None of you were invasive or weird or anything. It’s just – even after all this time, I always find it surprising that real people out there are actually reading my blather. So, Hi! Nice to meetcha!

I took two classes, one from Joan Schrouder who is awesome and smart and funny. I really enjoyed the entrelac class I took from her last year, so I signed up for her class on enclosing cut edges this time. I’m a big fan of steeks, so playing around with them always feels like fun. I knit up the swatch as homework, then we secured the edges with crochet chains before cutting. So far, this was similar to the technique I learned at Meg Swansen’s camp five years ago, but Joan did a great job of describing other techniques that I’ve heard about and tried, including Rick Mondragon’s crochet technique and machine stitching, as well as just cutting without reinforcement.

So we cut it open. And then came the cool part. We picked up stitches in the same holes on both sides of the fabric! We knit around and around making two seperate layers of fabric until it was long enough to cover the cut edge…

And then we did something very like a three-needle bind-off but without the bind-off part to join the two layers and continue with a single-layer button band.

It’s a really cool idea. The sample we made in class was actually quite thick – too thick to be practical for an actual sweater, but Joan had us do the crochet-chain version because we could do it in class without a sewing machine. Done on a cut edge stabilized with machine stitches instead of a worsted-weight crochet chain, this could actually work out pretty well. I’m totally going to try this on the next swatch I do for a steeked project.

I don’t think I really want to talk too much about the other class I took. It was okay, but not amazingly wonderful. The teacher was a big-name, nationally known designer, and she had some good ideas, but there were some problems in the transition between theory and application. Still, it was decent food for thought. I know, you want the dirty details, but for once I’m going to take the high road. At least in public.

Okay, and the other thing about Yarnover is that they have a great marketplace where lots of local and regional vendors come to sell knitting and fiber-related stuff. I’m very proud of myself. I did look around and admire many things, I walked away with only one purchase…

I’m a huge fan of Jennie the Potter, and I’ve been wanting another one of her mugs. I’ve had one for a while that I keep some of my double-pointed needles in on my desk, but for the last week I’ve been actually using the new one for its intended purpose, and I love it. Not only is it pretty, but it’s a perfect size and dishwasher safe!

She has some really cute newer patterns, and I came close to buying a bowl as a mothers’ day gift for my MIL, but held back. I’ll see her again at Shepherd’s Harvest on Mothers’ Day weekend, and I think I’ll buy it then.

In the mean time, I’ve been spinning, spinning, spinning.

There’s my four ounces of superwash merino, spun up into pretty darn thin singles and plied into either a thick lace weight or a thin fingering.

Oh, yum! That’s 650 yards, plenty for either a small lace something or at least one pair of socks, maybe two. Sorry, you can’t have it. I gave it to a friend who was visiting on her way to the Spring Fling at the Loopy Ewe. More on that in a minute.

Of course, the wheel looks naked and lonely with no project on it, so I picked out the next pile of roving to play with.

I’m going to go for some more rilly thin singles here, and shoot for a navajo-plied fingering weight.

Seriously, this roving is meant to make some awesome stripes.

Jaci is my friend from Eau Claire, and we were talking on the phone a few weeks ago. She mentioned she was flying out of Minneapolis for her trip to St. Louis, and I spontaneously said “Why don’t you drive up a day early, and then you can spend the night at my house!” So she did, and we had a whirlwind day of fun. We drove over to the Yarnery to visit the blankie, stopped at another yarn shop while we were out, took the girls out to dinner, and then Ben and Jerry’s for dessert.

It was pure coincidence that we were wearing eerily similar t-shirts. And then she was off to St. Louis for a crazy time with the wild knitters. I am not jealous. I am not jealous. No, I am really not jealous. Seriously. Not jealous. Not one little bit.

Hoookay. One more thing. A quickie update on my little sweater project. These pictures are horrible, the colors are totally off despite the natural lighting. But you’ll get the idea.

I love it that the sleeves are done first. By the time I finished the sleeves, I’d memorized the really very simple stitch pattern, and now it is thisclose to mindless knitting to work back and forth across the body. Which means that it feels like it’s knitting up really quickly, which is great.

This is homespun yarn, spun from a heathery top that had several colors combed together. Of course, the colors weren’t uniform throughout, and you can see there is a bit of striping, most notably at the top where you can see a big ole streak of red. Just a couple few more inches, and I’ll be headed into the home stretch and the really fun part of joining all the pieces together and racing to the top. I think I’ll go work on it now.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 25th, 2009 at 1:35 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.