knitgrrl

If you’re in Northeast Ohio this weekend or within a reasonable driving distance, you should come on down to the Ingenuity Festival! I’ve organized the first-ever summer edition of Bazaar Bizarre Cleveland. We’ll be near All Go Signs‘ stage, so come to shop and stay for the shows, it’s going to be fabulous. Photos to come!

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Many, if not all of you, know that I have some serious Joss Whedon fangirl issues. If you’d forgotten this, go back and listen to the very first episode of the Knitgrrl show (with Nikol Lohr, who recently knitted a Jayne hat for her Flip and who helped me introduce everyone at Felt School to the wonder that is Firefly last year) for geeky proof.

So, check this out — my dear friend Kim of CrochetMe fame put out a call saying she wants to interview Joss after his comment during this interview about Dr. Horrible:

Wired.com: To what do you attribute the far-flung coverage and buzz about Dr. Horrible, considering there’s been little to no press for the series?

Whedon: Fact is, there’s been some buzz, but it hasn’t reached the places it would normally. Where’s our write-up in Crocheting Monthly? (I did a very sexy shoot for that one.)

And her quest made it onto Whedonesque, even — see here.

So, not to be outdone in the Joss-geeking-out…

(I HAVE ALL THE VARIANT COVERS OF THE SEASON 8 COMIC BOOK! I got The Existential Joss Whedon for Valentine’s Day! I know all the words to all the songs in the Buffy musical! I can practically quote the “Swedish” from the episode Selfless!)

…I present to you a photo of the Joss sweater I’ve been working on for-evah. Well, of its chart, anyway. Note vampire bite marks near the top edge of the neck, Angel’s tattoo and Mr. Pointy. This is a rough draft on small gauge graph paper before I start working up the charts proper in Knit Visualizer.

Spike and Giles (our cats) are giving me funny looks for snapping photos at this time of night, so you’ll have to forgive the lighting.

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This is cool. Remember my review of Robin Melanson’s fantastic book Knitting New Mittens and Gloves? (buy it now!) STC is giving away the pattern for her Alternating Current gloves for free. They ask that if you download the pattern you also knit a pair for someone in need. What a great idea!

I’m knitting my head off these days on a new pattern that will be released sometime in the near future. It’s tweedy and tasty and perfect for winter. No photos yet, I’m still working out one of the complex bits and what is already knitted isn’t terribly interesting. It’s very “oh look, stockinette…wow” right now, so I shan’t bore you. But I will say that the Plymouth Tweed I am using is fantastic and has some properties I haven’t seen before that come in handy for the pattern.

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My favorite shot. Modeled by the lovely Gina DeSantis.

Front view, now with 100% more product placement! (Hi, Lexie!)

The Tai Shan hoodie pattern from How to Knit in the Woods has been posted as a free download — here (PDF link) — and on the knitgrrl.com errata page. Why? An alert reader pointed out a funky set of numbers re: stitch marker placement (thanks, Michele!), so Andi went back and found some other things that we decided would be better released as an entirely revised pattern PDF rather than bits and pieces on the errata page. We’ve also included some extra notes on how the bamboo in the sample garment has “grown” a bit over time, and how you can counteract it when you knit your own.

Speaking of bamboo, guess what I found at the fabric store today? Not only do they have PLA fiberfill (PLA = better known as ingeo, or corn fiber) but also bamboo/organic cotton batting. I bought some Japanese-themed fabric and the bamboo, thinking I’d make a padded jacket. The batting looks a lot like Warm & Natural, if you ask me, but lighter in color. If you like sewing and wanted to line your Tai Shan with bamboo batting for extra weight/warmth, well, this’d be the stuff to get, eh? Bamboo city!

My new favorite visual toy: Multicolr — here you’ll see I’ve picked my favorite green. It pulls photos from Flickr in a selected color (you can even select more than one — here’s the green + purple). What a fun way to stimulate your creative juices when it comes to picking colors for projects!

And for those of you who wonder just what I’ve been up to, teaching all week long outside in a tent for six whole weeks, some photos:

I like to call this one “No! Don’t drink it!” — getting ready to dye some yarn and fiber.

Aforementioned yarn drying, with the Cleveland Botanical Garden in the background.

Wet felting is fun. Note bracelets. You thought I was kidding about the 1980s thing?

At our first exhibition, with some of their handiwork, wearing items from our Thrift Store Challenge. The dress at left (black/white) used to be a pillowcase. The hand-dyed yarn and felted scarves were much coveted.

So that’s how I’ve been spending my days from 9:00-4:00. I’ve got them all hooked on knitting now, too (mwah ha ha ha). It warms my heart to hear them whisper, desperately, when they’re about to go to a lecture or something else they think is going to be boring: “CAN WE BRING OUR KNITTING? PLEASE?”

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My first day off in forever and what do I do? Work. Yup. Wrote an article this morning, and am about to clean the house. Meanwhile, I’m thinking about things to knit. This sweater, or the stuff in my Ravelry queue… something, anything to get me past my current brain-stoppage on the jack in the pulpit sweater.

(Yup. That’s its working name, due to shape, but it’s awfully long…)

I remain angry at the shawl design-in-progress and am currently not speaking to her.

Tomorrow is my five-year anniversary with ye olde boyfriend. I bought him a membership to the Jack Kirby Museum, he got me copies of Red Dawn and Clash of the Titans on DVD. We are such geeks. WOLVERINES!

Proof that geekiness is pretty much lifelong: the photo at left. That is me, ca. 1982 or 1983 as Athena, post- developing an insane love of Clash of the Titans. My mother used all her art school training and more to make me that papier-maché helmet, I’ll have you know. The look on my face? I still do that all the time, it’s just my natural glare. I can’t help it!

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My boyfriend is so awesome it hurts. El Gorgo issue #1 is done! Mike (his best friend) writes it, and Tamas draws and letters everything.

I could tell you how much I love El Gorgo, but you wouldn’t even believe me, so I am holding a contest. El Gorgo-rumi! I want to see El Gorgo rendered in knit or crochet, I want you to tell your comic-book-loving significant others about the magnificent glory that is El Gorgo and I want El Gorgo to be the most popular luchador gorilla on earth, yo.

The best El Gorgo in categories knit, crochet and sewn will get prizes — chocolate, signed books, hand-dyed yarn, signed El Gorgo mini-posters…whatever we can cram into a box that’s awesome. You have until Labor Day, ok? Bonus prizes if you make mini Dagons and take photos of them fighting.

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I’ve also made the Snake in the Woods charts available as a free download on my Ravelry store, and I’ve been working on updating my patterns on Ravelry with the appropriate photos, etc. Nevermind all the new stuff that’s coming soon!

Big, big thanks to Ravelry editor Braizyn, aka Judy, who’s volunteered her time to help get my other stuff up there, too!

Speaking of being fancy (like you’re from France), Felt School is coming soon soon soon. I cannot wait. Don’t worry if you didn’t get that joke, it’s a Felt School thing…probably explained somewhere in my archives if you search. Like felt? Like awesomeness? Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other Whedony things? Think Nikol Lohr is the bee’s knees, the cat’s pajamas and many other types of animal outfits? Well, then. You should come play with us. End of Sept/beginning of October this year, right after Yarn School — there’s 2 bookable dye lab days in between. Mmm, dye lab.

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Several of you have asked about the red scarf the model is wearing on page 39 of How to Knit in the Woods. Here’s my editor’s reply:

The pattern is from the Tricoter book of knits for men (Simply Beautiful Sweaters for Men, I think). I knitted the scarf from Karabella Boise (3 balls), on 5s, I think. I probably cast on about 52 stitches (I only did two cables instead of the 4 shown in the pattern). Here’s the same pattern from KnitPicks, on HUGE yarn!

In other How to Knit in the Woods updates, the long-awaited Snake in the Woods charts have gone live on the Knitgrrl errata page and will be up soon on the publisher’s website as well. Or just click here for the PDF! It’s 3.68 MB, alas — I couldn’t get it any smaller without endangering the text. My apologies to those of you who were waiting (although I know for a fact one lucky reader’s mom is having one knit for her! hurrah!). Andi and I had to push Knit Visualizer to its very limits, so there is a little bit of funky notation. If it doesn’t make sense for some reason, please let us know!

For the record, my ultra-handsome father wearing Snake in the Woods:

and a little bit closer up:

I remain deeply sad that neither of these photos made it into the book, while one of his hand clutching a tree branch wearing the sweater did. I mean, come on. He’s got a pirate-y earring and a beard like a garden gnome? What’s not to love? (Plus, he wore a heavy wool sweater for a 90-degree photoshoot in August. Brilliant papa).

So, Stephanie (StevieLynn on Ravelry, blogging at Confessions of an Obsessive Knitter) has been making good use of her HTKITW. As a matter of fact, she is knitting-then-felting the Carver’s Harbor Blanket instead of using old sweaters. Super-hardcore! Check it out:

She has also been knitting some amazing variations on the Ell Pond Nalgene Cozy in the book, like this one. And as she lists in her Ravelry profile, when she is not knitting, she’s backpacking the Appalachian Trail, so I think she’s the perfect pattern tester for a book of woodsy stuff, eh?

Where’s Carver’s Harbor, you ask? Here are some photos on Flickr. It’s on Vinalhaven, an island off the coast of Maine where we spent last Labor Day weekend. In fact, our room at the Tidewater overlooked the harbor directly. My mom is heading to Vinalhaven this week and I am wildly jealous. There was a storefront space available downtown that just screamed “move here and open a knitting store.” And as for Ell Pond, that’s in Wells, Maine, right down the road from my aunt’s. Knowing them, they’re probably swimming there right now. No fair.

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(Well, they’re not so little, trust me).

In case you wonder how I get so much done, it comes down to having help from my friends when I need it. And this month…I really, really need it. It’s much more difficult to teach outside all day than I’d thought it would be. Sun is not my friend, to say the least, even under a big tent!

It helps that I have a pool of production and test knitters to draw from — I distinguish between the two in that production knitters simply knit what they’re told, as-is, and test knitters are there to point out problems, potential inconsistencies, etc. Having both makes it easier to get a well-done pattern into the technical editor’s hands, I think, and paying for the services of all of the above helps distinguish a professional-grade pattern.

So, the incomparable, painfully awesome Andi is helping me get some reknitting off to the production knitters so I can do new versions/new photos of two older sweater designs in a different yarn. This means changing up the gauge, the needle size and all kinds of other tweaking, and having her help means it gets done now rather than, say, a month from now. It also helps that she did the actual test knitting on the original versions, and is intimately aware of how they were put together. (A good test knitter is worth her weight in gold, platinum, chocolate and just about anything else she asks for…anything she asks for, she gets).

Andi’s also working on a step-by-step how-to for knitting socks that our sock-inexperienced production knitters can use, and my fabulous summer intern Carrie’s helping her on that. The more actual knitting Andi and I can divert to the knitters, the more productive we can be with our own design work! She’s a smidge addicted to my hand-dyed yarn, though, so what should have been skeins for swatches somehow magically ended up becoming a pair of socks. You should have heard her on the phone. Paraphrased: “Umm… I just started knitting and I’m, well… I’m at the toe already.” As if she’d, say, accidentally fallen off a chair or something. One second she was sitting there and pow! suddenly! a sock! In her defense, it was exceptionally pretty yarn — I was testing out some new blue, green and purple dyes I ordered. Photos soon!

I’m also well into a third, brand-new sweater design that is driving me crazy, since I can’t knit nearly as fast as I can think and plan. (For the moment, I’ve also put down a shawl pattern I was working on, because it just isn’t looking the way I want it to look and I can’t quite summon the courage to frog it. I think I might bind it off and give it to a friend as a kerchief instead. Yes, I can be a total tink-sissy). My dear friend Suz from Cleveland SnB is knitting a second sweater from the half-done pattern as I continue to write it up and refine it. This is insanity. I’m 2 sleeves in, and maybe 1/4 done with the body. She’s half a sleeve in. You never know when something might change, so basically, she’s signed up for potential frogging galore. Brave, brave Suz. Still, if the pattern comes out even 85% close to what I’m seeing in my mind’s eye, it’s going to be very cool, though.

So if you ever wonder why I’m not blogging much this month, now you know!

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This week, I started teaching my fashion/fiber program at ArtWorks. Things learned by the Master Teaching Artist, or MTA (that’d be me): present day teenagers are fascinated with the 1980s, I am old, and also, I am old. Witness this exchange:

Apprentice: “I love Cyndi Lauper.”
Me: “I think one of my very first cassettes was Cyndi Lauper.”
(Two apprentices, whispering to each other): “What’s a cassette?”

Sigh.

My apprentices are fantastic so far, very enthusiastic. We’re planning a timeline-inspired fashion show for their final project. This week, it’s research at the Case Western Reserve University library, learning to dye wool and knitting 101. I also gave mini-knitting lessons to two boys from the ceramics class. They got it right away, but were too cool to keep doing it. Funny. Some visiting artists from Turkey were with us for a few days — the leader of their group brought some textiles for us to inspect. I’ll have photos for you as soon as I get them off the camera.

In other related, cool news — the owners of Ozark Handspun, one of my favorite yarns, have commissioned my apprentices to produce some nuno felt pieces incorporating their yarn that will go on tour to various yarn shops around the country. Yay! Of course first they need to learn how to felt… we’ve got 40 silk scarves on order and will be practicing on those with the wool we dye this week before we move on to the tasty and amazing Ozark Handspun! I couldn’t resist, I got a hank of green Ozark Handspun for myself, too. Me and my green issues…

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