What I'm Reading Wednesday - 1/4/12

Before I get to the books, I need to show you this picture. After posting the picture of the star quilt on the design wall, I got to wondering if that were the best configuration. So, I reversed the direction of the diamonds, and I like this a lot more. What do you think?

I'll have to do some experimenting with setting squares, etc. Now, I have creativity flowing again!!

As for what I've been reading... Well, I did a lot of Christmas knitting, and that cut into reading time. I spent about three weeks reading Jacquelyn Mitchard's Twelve Times Blessed. I gave up about three-quarters of the way through. Now, I LOVE this lady's books, but the main character in this book just kept making really stupid decisions and saying really crazy relationship-destroying things, and I finally just got to a point where reading the book upset me to the point of mild depression. When I start dreading reading a book that is supposed to be relaxing, it's time to pull out the bookmark and put the book aside. If anyone out there has read this book and thinks that I should finish reading it through, please let me know.

For my parish's book club selection in January, we are reading Elizabeth Johnson's The Quest for the Living God. This appears to be a college freshman level introductory theology book that has been strongly criticized by the American bishops. When I get through reading this book, I intend to read the bishops' statements very carefully. I am about halfway through the book, and it is well written and would be easily accessible to anyone who looking for a basic introduction to the great currents of contemporary Christian theology. Her chapter on the post-Holocaust theology that emerged in the 1940s-1960s is a lovely complement to Karen Armstrong's chapter about the development of Jewish theology in the 20th century in her book A History of God.

Finally, I have to show you why I've been typing this all hunched over on a folding chair.

The lines of authority in this house are very clearly delineated.....

Catching Up; Looking Forward

When last I posted, I was knitting as fast as I could. The last week before Christmas, I discovered that one of the cowls simply had no stretch and was continuing to bleed color. So, this one was not in the present mix:

I do want to make this cowl again, but I'll use a more conventional yarn and hope for better results. Soon after I discovered this problem, one of my intended recipients told me she is allergic to wool. At that point, I decided that she and one other person would get something else. That evening, we walked by Mix in downtown Ypsilanti, and I saw the cutest purse. So, yeah, I was one of the people out on Christmas Eve getting the last few items.

On Christmas Eve morning, I finished the Molly Stark scarf for my sister. Here are a couple of pictures of it blocking. I should have taken my camera to family Christmas, but I forgot.

I ended up using Malabrigo Worsted for this because the colorway was closer to what my sister had requested. I really liked the way this turned out.

I also made a cute little scarf for my great nephew from the Toddle pattern on Knitty. You'll just have to imagine that scarf in the leftover teal yarn from the Every Way Wrap I finished back in the summer. My niece has promised to get a picture to me.

Another project I worked on was this:

This was the entrance to my laundry/craft area. The cat litter boxes contain my dyeing supplies. Now this area looks like this:

The next shelf up has the orange bucket and the laundry baskets. I can't believe it took me living here for four years to finally get around to properly organizing this area. We are looking for a new home for the table (it's particle board with a sturdy laminate on top and metal legs; there's an extra leaf that makes the table big enough to seat 6-8 people). I will probably call Friends in Deed so that this goes to a family needing a nice table.

Finally, I have been working on the Fruit Salad quilt. Here is the result of three days of making a lot of mistakes and fixing them. It has almost seemed as though I have been relearning basic skills with this.

The sections aren't yet sewn together, and I want to think about the setting. I have been thinking right along that I would use the white fabric that is along the edges as the setting blocks, and that would really make the dark cherry pieces stick out. I'm not in love with this quilt, but I think it's not half bad.

Now, for the part I've been dreading: A recap of the year's goals and the progress thereof. Here are the goals I listed for 2011 and the progress made:

1. Continue reading serious books - there is so much to learn!  Yes! I did this.
2. Read up on and attend some meetings regarding the drain commission and its work.* No, I did none of this.
3. Get good at spinning with the spindle, smoothing out the yarn and making it thinner. No, I have simply not spent the time with this that I really do want to spend.
4. Be a gracious volunteer coordinator for the guild's weekend of workshops at the end of July. Yes, I did this and had a lot of fun doing it and have told the powers that be I will not continue as volunteer coordinator after the 2012 guild quilt show.
5. Do not volunteer to make soul-sucking quilts - if they hurt to make, maybe they shouldn't be made. Yes, I held to this. I did spend a couple of afternoons with annoying projects for door prizes for the guild's weekend of workshops, but that's part of being a community member.
6. Finish the Cone Nebula quilt. Yes
7. Play with screen printing and other techniques. Yes, but not as much as I would have liked.
8. Finish the Every Way Wrap and make other fun-to-knit projects Of course!
9. Post here at least twice a week - Wednesdays and Saturdays Umm, no. Sorry

Here are my goals for 2012:

1. Read books that are not "assigned" by book clubs.
2. Get back to posting here on Wednesdays - What I'm Reading
3. Pick a community service project and stick with it - will I continue on the condo association board or not? If not, what will I do instead?
4. Schedule an evening a week at the spinning wheel (and/or with the spindle).
5. Make the two "art" quilts I have in my brain. They've been locked up there for too long.
6. Make the socks I've been promising myself since August. I keep letting other projects get in the way.
7. Make a wonderful quilt for my nephew and his sweet wife.
8. Have a lot of fun with my volunteer projects for the quilt guild - running the fabric sale and serving as volunteer coordinator for the quilt show.
9. Finish the rag rug I started in November, 2010....

Oh, the rag rug! My small sewing group gets together during the holiday week, and this is what I worked on during small group day this year.

That's all for now. I need to go read so that I have something to blog about on Wednesday. Thank you for your patience.

Holiday Knitting (cont.)

Another week, and I have another cowl done. This is the Diversify cowl. The main reasons I picked this pattern were that it was just right for the small skein I had of lettuce green yarn and it looked easy. Well, I was right about one of those. I was an inch into this project before I started feeling as though the pattern made any sense or I could actually see the pattern emerging from the tangle of yarn. Once I figured out what was going on, the pattern became easy, and I like the end result. Here's what it looks like unblocked (it's soaking right now).

Whew! The yarn is the same 50% silk/50% merino blend that I used for the Duet cowls. I LOVE this yarn. Once I get the gift knitting done, I've got a couple of skeins of this yarn in bright pink with which I'm going to knit the Burberry-inspired cowl for myself.

Here is the cute cat (or, gee, why am I not making more progress with my knitting this afternoon) picture of the week.

(He's got my right hand, and my left hand is holding the cellphone somewhat shakily.) What a sweet fellow!

I hope everyone out there has a nice holiday.

Hearing the Holiday Train Roaring Down the Track

This past week, I had to set aside the crafting and focus on getting ready for this week's book club meetings. Yes. On Tuesday evening, I have book club meetings 5:30-7 and 7-8:30. Of course, just to make things even more interesting, I'm leading the discussion in the second group. Fortunately, the members of the first book club were willing to meet in a restaurant just two blocks from where the second group is meeting.

The first club will be discussing Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map, about the 1854 cholera epidemic in London that helped establish the science of epidemiology. This is a really good 200-page book filled with sociology, biology, politics, geography, etc. Unfortunately, the book is buried inside a 250-page book. I recommend this book with the caveat that one be prepared to simply skip several pages at a time in a couple of places. I am looking forward to seeing what my fellow clubbers have to say about this book.

The second club will be discussing Dorothy Day's 1952 autobiography, The Long Loneliness. This is a woman who lived one of the richest lives of the 20th century. As a teenager, she was jailed as a hunger-striking suffragette during the final years of the women's suffrage movement. She worked as a journalist, getting published in an assortment of Socialist, labor, and Catholic magazines and newspapers. In her long life, she wrote books of reflections, novels, and plays. In her late 20s, upon the birth of her daughter, she left her common-law husband and became a Catholic. A few years later in the mid-1930s, in the depth of the Depression, she co-founded the Catholic Worker movement that, 30 years after her death, is still thriving with more than 230 houses of hospitality located across this country and in many others as well. I have long considered her a challenging voice in the Church and someone who makes me very uneasy. This book very much comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. She sees the world very much as a place that can be fixed and must be fixed now. I read somewhere that someone said to her once, "Someday, you'll be canonized a saint." She is said to have snapped, "I wouldn't want to be dismissed so easily." I could hear that voice crackling through this book, and I am looking forward to reading more by her, I think.....

Having finished that book, I turned my attention back to the Christmas knitting, and this afternoon I finished #5, the Impressionist Cowl, using Malabrigo Rios yarn in the colorway Indiecita (yarn that I purchased at the Busy Hands shop in Ann Arbor). Here it is before blocking.

This morning at the coffee shop after church, I laid out all five of the cowls (this one was still on the needles), and the gals looking at them gasped at this one. "Oh, Liz! This is the one they'll fight over!" I just love the stitch pattern and how it plays with the variegated colors.

Finally, here is the cat picture of the week. Last evening, Hubby said, "Oh, look at the Big Guy!" and we both started taking pictures of our dog-like tomcat. He's 16-and-a-half years old. As far as I'm concerned, he can strike any pose he wants.

Time to go cast on cowl #6! Have a great week!

Fruit Salad Quilt and more

Part of my morning, easing-into-the-workday routine is reading Melody Johnson's blog, Fibermania. (Gee, I hope my boss looks at context here....) The big danger here is that she frequently has posts that make me crazy all day to just get home and DO something. One of those posts happened on Thursday where she reminded us about this tutorial for dyeing wool in the microwave. It so happened I had some Cascade 220 wool yarn I'd bought from Dharma Trading a few weeks ago. I was going to be home alone that evening, so after making sure I had food coloring in the kitchen,  I sent a text message to the sister (who has a fabulous new blog you really should check out) and asked her what color I should do. We agreed on a deep jewel-toned purple. The results that evening were not wonderful (sorry about the blurry photo):

On the way home from work on Friday, we stopped at the grocery store and picked up more food coloring, and I overdyed the yarn:

I did a quick hunt on Ravelry this afternoon and found the perfect pattern. It's elegant, practical, and will look FABulous in this deep color.

Earlier in the week, I finished the Scrunchable cowl.

I love it! I hope the recipient does, too. I then cast on the next cowl using some yarn I had spun. Lots of bright colors, and they're all muddying together, and I think I may just give up on it. Last evening, I cast on another cowl using the leftover dark teal yarn from the sweater I finished in the summer. I promise pictures next week.

This afternoon, I got a good start on the Fruit Salad quilt. Here are the fabrics cut so far:

I was really nervous about how these fabrics would play with each other - whether they were too close together in value, tone, etc. However, as I was selecting fabric, I really focused on the scale of the print and tried to get a range of values. As I look at this picture, I see some darks - the cherries in the strip and the jalapenos in the diamonds, some mediums - most of the rest, and some lights - the white fabric with the red and green splotches. Last week, I thought the leaf fabric in the picture below would be background fabric:

I decided against it because there just would not be enough contrast. I do think there'll be places for all five of these fabrics in this quilt, and I'm looking forward to finding those places as I go along. In case you haven't noticed, I dearly love fabrics with fruits and vegetables. I don't know why, but they make me smile. The top picture has peas in the pod, pineapples, cherries (times two!), citrus fruits, jalapeno peppers, and apples. Also, the selvedge on the edge of the white fabric informs us that name of the fabric is Peas and Carrots! I love it! (The orangey-red fabric in the first picture has turtles on it - not in the theme, but the color is SO right.)

Speaking of SO right, here are a couple of guy pictures. The first one has a ticked-off cat who has just been shoved off a lap (because he'd been biting!) and wanted assert his authority over the woman who had just jilted him.

The next picture is of someone showing excellent taste, lounging on one quilt and in front of another.

Have a good week, folks! Go forth and create!

Fruit Salad Quilt - Part 1

About a month ago, I introduced you to a jumper from 1984. I thought at first I was going to rework the entire garment into a new one, but when I started pulling it apart, I realized that the green fabric had faded and should be folded into the fabric stash. The pink skirt part had some possibilities. So, I cut a big hunk out of the middle of the front and used that fabric as the waistband.

I also cut up a muslin shirt (one of those projects that seemed like a really good idea at the time but ended up being a one-wearing outfit that then got wadded into the back of the stash). When I trimmed out the front, back, and sleeves, I had enough fabric to serve as a lining.

I figured that the lining didn't have to be as long as the skirt, and this lining is about knee-length. Last weekend, I put elastic in the back part of the waistband. (I have never done anything like this before; I've always put the elastic all around, but I had noticed that the ready-to-wear skirts I like best have the elastic just in the back.) I sewed the ends of the elastic to bits of muslin and pinned the ends into place at the side seams.

Then, I sewed the ends down with several lines of stitching, removed the pins, and folded over and sewed down the waistband all around. Sharp-eyed folks will notice that I didn't do a try-on after I had the elastic pinned into place. Shall we just say that the middle of the back of the waistband has been opened twice, the elastic cut and sewed together twice (because certain people don't learn very quickly....)? Since I didn't tamper with the hemming when I was disassembling the jumper, I could go straight to the buttonholes.

While most people in Washtenaw County were either huddled in front of their televisions or standing in Michigan Stadium living and dying play by play, I was in the sewing room cursing my sewing machine, my inability to read simple directions, the thread I was using, etc. Periodically, I'd dash downstairs to catch the score or watch a replay (because the radio in the sewing room is permanently tuned to the local public radio station, and it's too confusing to be changing stations, that's why) and then dive back into the buttonhole mess. Anyway, I ended up with 14 pretty well spaced buttonholes, and then I attached buttons I had scavenged from a shirt that I had torn up for rags earlier this month. Here's the finished product:

I like it, it fits nicely, and I have another versatile skirt for the spring and summer.

I have finished another cowl; this uses the Braided Vines pattern I found on Ravelry. It was pretty quick and easy (while I was working on this, I also made a Duet hat for a lady at church - no pix, sorry).

With this cowl done, I pulled the next yarn I wanted to work with, a wool/silk blend I got at the Fiber Expo two years ago and decided on the Scrunchable cowl pattern from Ravelry.  I was hanging out with friends all day on Friday, knitting my little heart out, and I got home to show my husband that I had made about an inch of cowl - I had trouble pulling enough yarn for the long-tail cast on (three tries with the first needles), then I didn't have the gauge right (which I discovered after knitting for two hours), which meant I had to start over, and it took three tries to get the right sized tail for the second set of needles. Then I realized that I still didn't have quite the right gauge, but I also didn't have the next size of needles. So, I did a few judicious decreases (which took me two hours to figure out - okay, dinner was mixed in there), and finally, I really got going, and here's the cowl about half done:

Isn't that gorgeous? Do you see why I stuck with this yarn and with this pattern? I could totally see myself making this pattern in another color way. There are some gorgeous single-colored cowls showing on Ravelry.

Do you know that I still think of myself as a quilter? This afternoon, I pulled out that pile of fabrics I had pulled a couple of weeks ago and then did something I very seldom do: Opened a book and looked for a quilt pattern. I like to design my own, but sometimes I just have to let someone else do that work. I opened Jan Krentz' Lone Star Quilts and Beyond, found a pattern that I really like - Remembrances - and started sorting fabrics. Here's what I ended up with:

The lighting isn't very good, but trust me, we have oranges, lemons, apples, cherries, pineapples, peas, and jalapeno peppers. More pictures next week, I promise.

Finally, a new cat has been seen in the fabric hutch:

I have not seen a conflict between Little Bit (whose domain this has been) and the Princess interloper, but I am curious about how the timing works. Is it that Little Bit (who doesn't stay in the hutch when I'm in the sewing room) simply cedes the space to Princess when I'm in the room? hmmm

Eleanor Cowl - done!

Just a quick post here. I finished knitting the Eleanor cowl and blocked it.

Isn't that a beautiful lace pattern? I am so pleased with it, and I hope that the niece who gets it loves it, too. I didn't have much yarn left over, in fact, I actually didn't knit the last four rows of the pattern.

The little red threads on the yarn is where I was measuring half yards to see how much I had left. This morning at the coffee shop with friends after church, I mattress-stitched the sides together and realized in the middle of the process that the top row (the bind-off row) was tight. Ooops. I tried telling myself it didn't matter, but I knew that the tight top row would keep the piece from being comfortable to put on or wear.

When I got home, I poked through my knitting bag and found the Knitty article about the Interlock Bindoff that I had put aside for a day like this. The technique is well explained, beautifully illustrated, and easy to learn. The resulting top row is very stretchy and easy to wear. Here's the finished product:

In another part of my life, I attended a prayer vigil last Friday evening to help show support for a member of my parish who is facing deportation. I would ask anyone reading this to please look at this website and please consider signing the online petition and calling one of the numbers listed, asking that this mother of three American citizens be allowed to stay in this country. The bishop of the Catholic diocese of Lansing has written a letter to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency supporting Lourdes' petition. There are some terrible injustices going on in our society that are ruining the lives of some of our most vulnerable neighbors. Writing this paragraph is such a tiny thing to do, but if enough of us "ordinary" people speak up, maybe we can start fixing these problems.