I’ve been a bad blogger again, mostly because I have been so involved with various Swap-bot exchanges that I haven’t had time for fibre crafts.  I think I may have to widen this blog’s scope to cover art and paper crafts.  In the meantime, my latest swap was a photo  challenge – to take a photo a day for a week.  I have created a page with my seven main photos and some others.  You can see it here.

Just as a taster, here are thumbnails of some of my favourites.  They are not clickable, so if you want more detail you need to go to that web page.  ;-)

I had planned to spend part of today trying out paint effects on paper, but I decided to try using rubber stamps (commercial and improvised) first and I had so much fun I didn’t get around to the paint at all.  Here are the results.  As usual, click for a larger version.

The lines in the bottom section of the lefthand paper were meant to represent grass.  I am not sure that worked.  The top section of the right-hand one has extra shapes (actually capital Ss) but I wasn’t sure whether that was an improvement or not, so I left the lower part as it was.

The paler pink papers are sponged rather than stamped, as was the ground for the green paper in the first picture.

All the pieces of paper are about half A4/US letter size.

… and still making stuff – sometimes more successfully than others.  The silk scarf I was working on for the competition and exhibition didn’t work out, but I’m hoping to salvage it in some way.  I hope to have pics of it on the loom in a day or two.  I’m still working on tablet-woven bookmarks for the exhibition too.

Meanwhile I am also working on swap stuff, such as this hand-dyed yarn:

 

Some of the tablet-woven bookmarks will be for swaps too.  I just finished another bobbin lace one like this one:

 

and I am working on 2 more snakes.

I dug out my neglected lace pillow to make some bookmarks for a Swap-bot swap.  As I didn’t have much time, I decided to do some old favourites, the snakes. 

They are fun to do, and seem to be popular.  I might make some ‘lacier’ bookmarks to have ready for future swaps.

What I really should be doing is making some things for our guild challenge and exhibition.  Entries are supposed to be in by April 21st, which doesn’t leave much time.  I have some ideas, but I’m still procrastinating.  I do have some finished items for the exhibition, but I’d also like to make some things for the ‘small sales table’ there.

 

I try to keep this blog focussed on fibre crafts, but sometimes I digress.  This bookworm meme, found here, is too tempting …

 In the list of books below, bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you want to read, cross out the ones you won’t touch with a ten-foot pole, put a cross (+) in front of the ones on your book shelf, and asterisk (*) the ones you’ve never heard of.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. +The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. +The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. +The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L. M. Montgomery)
9. +Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. *A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. +Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. +Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. +Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. *Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. *The Stand (Stephen King)
19. +Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. +The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. +The Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. *The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. +The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. +East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. *Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. +Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. *The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. *Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. +The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. *The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. *The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. *I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. *The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. +The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. +The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. *The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. +Bible (some of it, at least)
46. +Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. +The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. *She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. +Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. *The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. +Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. +The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. *The Time Traveler’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. +Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. *The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. +War and Peace (Tolstoy)  (what can I say?  I went through a Russian literature phase in my late teens)
64. Interview with the Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. *Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. *The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. +Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. +The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. *The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. *Not Wanted On the Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. +Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. +Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen) –
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. *The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. *Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. *In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. *The Outsiders (S. E. Hinton)
97. *White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

PS  I’m now going to look up the “never heard of” books to see whether I need to add any of them to my “want to read” list.

I was given some Rowan Cashsoft DK in Sweet (that really is the colour name) and decided to make a Liesel scarf for a friend.

 

When I swatched, I liked the shape of the start, which forms a nice curve, but not the ending, so I decided to knit the scarf as two halves and graft them together.

The grafted section does not like quite as good as I hoped, but I think it is OK.  I considered stopping each half 2 rows before the end of the pattern repeat to make that section shorter, but that would cause problems with the purled centres of the leaves.

I used 4.5mm needles, and the scarf took 132g (375 yds).  The scarf was blocked to 7.25″ wide and 77″ long, but shrunk to 6.5″ by 72″ once unpinned and allowed to relax.  Even though my friend likes long scarves, I thought that was plenty long enough, but I still had some yarn left, so I decided to make some fingerless mitts to match.  I knitted them ‘top down’ to use that nice curved edge over the back of the back of the knuckles.  I did them on 4.00mm Brittany dpns, as I thought they needed a firmer gauge.

My friend’s hands are smaller than mine so they should fit her a little better.without the cuff creeping over the base of the hand.  I did the thumb gusset slightly towards the palm – you can see the shaping better on this picture, which also shows that the ‘straight across’ top on the palm side doesn’t interfere with bending the hand, while the curved top on the back gives a bit more protection to the fingers.  They only took 30g (85 yds) of yarn for the pair.

And here is a picture of my friend wearing them:

Just a quick entry to say that I have updated my sock page.  Some friends were discussing socks and sharing pictures and I found some old pictures that I didn’t have online, so I added them to the end of the page, with brief descriptions.

As for current craft work, I finally dug out my Icarus-in-progress, after putting it aside for Christmas and other gift knitting, and I’m still knitting the Opal socks for myself … more on those later.

Anne Dixon visited our guild this weekend – a very entertaining and informative talk yesterday which focussed on the history of inkle weaving, then a workshop today.  One of the great things about going to follow-up workshops is that you get a chance to look at the tutor’s samples in much more detail than after the talk.  Another is the chance to work alongside friends, swapping ideas and having fun though working hard.  A bonus this time was that Anne is a friend too, through the Braid Society and through other workshops at which she was a fellow student.

Today we were given a choice of 2 warping plans.  I chose what she calls Baltic-style pickup, a technique used all around the Baltic Sea – Scandinavia, Latvia and so on.  I’d already pretty much decided to choose that one, but seeing her samples yesterday confirmed I’d made the right choice as I loved her Baltic designs. 

 I warped up my Ashford mini-inkle loom last night using 3 colours of #8 pearl cotton.  (The third colour was white - you can just see a line of it on each side separating the borders from the main pattern area.)

 

 Yes, that tiny sample is all I have to show from a 6-hour workshop, but I am still very pleased with it.  I wove enough to convince myself that I now understand the technique, and that is what I needed to do today.  I spent a lot of the time there watching Anne demonstrate other techniques on the other warping plan, but I couldn’t try any of those on this warp.  I also spent a long time looking at her samples, and making notes of things I want to try later.  Overall, a very enjoyable day!

My last entry showed a replaced toe and a patched heel.  On the other pair of Fortissima socks, there were larger thin areas on the heels so instead of duplicate stitching to strengthen them I decided to cut the affected areas right out and replace them.  As there was interest in the earlier post, I thought I’d show this process here.  It looks complicated, but as long as you are comfortable grafting two rows together, it is easier than it looks.

[Note:  these socks were knitted toe-up, so the gusset stitches were on needles and as I knit back and forth across the flap, I ‘ate up’ one gusset stitch at each turn, using ssk and p2tog.  This makes it easy to reknit the heel flap.  For top-down socks with the gusset stitches picked up from the side of the heel flap, it isn’t quite as simple.  If I were repairing that type of heel, I would probably cut the whole heel out, including the shaping at the bottom, repair as shown here but starting at the top of the flap, continue with the original heel shaping and graft across the bottom of the heel.]

So, the first (and possibly most difficult) step is to snip the yarn a few rows away from one edge of the area to be repaired and start unpicking the yarn.  It may be quite felted, so be careful.  When you get to the edge, store the freed gusset stitch on a dpn or waste yarn.  Continue doing this till you have only one row to go, then carefully tink the stitches one by one, putting them onto another dpn or piece of waste yarn.  As you cut off the reclaimed yarn, remember to leave a long enough end to sew in later.  The repair is slightly easier if you start and end at an edge, but I find that makes it bulkier where the ends are sewn in so I prefer to stop the unpicking mid-row. Repeat the process in the opposite direction.

 

You now have a sock with a big hole, but no loose stitches.  I have left the top edge of the hole on waste yarn as I find it gets in the way less that way.  The next task is to knit the missing part of the flap, ending one row early ready for grafting.

 

Note the gusset stitch still on a needle (later replaced by waste yarn as the needle fell out) at the right of the picture.  The last stitch on the left side has already been used up.  The new stitch that did that is the slipped edge stitch, which needs to be linked to the row above.  Pull the free end out of the stitch below, and use it to graft to the slipped stitch on the row above, then back into its original stitch.  Now you can graft the flap to the row above.  If you are starting and stopping at an edge, that’s all you need to do – you can just sew in the ends. If you are starting and stopping in the middle of a row, you will get to a point where thre are two missing rows, not just one, so you have to stop grafting.

 

After completing the last full stitch on the bottom row, use the yarn end to continue knitting (or in my case purling) across the row, turn as you did at the other side and then graft back to fill the remaining gap.  Sew in the ends and you now have a fully repaired heel.

Now I have a confession to make.  When I tried to do the final piece of grafting, I found I was one stitch short at the top.  After some close inspection, I realised I had aligned the stitches wrongly at the start of the grafted row.  Now any sensible knitter would say “It’s only a heel flap, no-one will see it, so just fudge it to make it work.”  I repeat that … NO ONE WILL SEE IT!!!!  But I couldn’t do that. I did try to convince myself, really I did, but I ended up grafting across the whole of that second row, unpicking the original yarn ahead of me, till I reached the other side and corrected the mistake, then turned the corner and did a few more stitches so I could join in mid-row again.  Yes, I’m crazy!!!  But at least I can look at my repaired heel and feel real satisfaction.      

I noticed yeserday that the top of the heel flap of one of my favourite socks had worn very thin, with only the nylon remaining in some places. I checked the other 3 similar socks (I’d knitted 2 identical pairs around the same time) and found 2 of them had the same problem.  I also checked the toes and found the two right socks were both badly worn over the top of the big toe nail. 

I checked my notes and realised they are over 10 years old. That’s not bad for socks which have been worn a lot, but as I said, these are my favourite socks, in Fortissima Cotton Colori, and I wasn’t ready to give up on them yet.

As the nylon was holding the shape of the stitches, I decided to duplicate stitch over the thin area, working from the inside of the flap so it wouldn’t show much on the outside:

 

 The patched area felt much thicker than the rest, quite lumpy, so I was afraid it might rub against my heel, but I wore the first sock yesterday when I visited my mother in hospital.  That was quite a bit of walking and I couldn’t feel any lumpiness at all, and it will soon flatten out with wear.  I’ll do the other thin heel areas over the next few days

This morning I tackled one of the toes.  It seemed easier to reknit the toe than to patch it.  I snipped just below the toe shaping, then ripped back to the first non-shaping round, putting the stitches onto dpns as I carefully tinked the final round.  These socks were knitted toe-up, but converting increases to decreases so I could knit the replacement toe top-down was no problem.  You can see the change in colour and texture of the yarn at the top of the shaping, but after a few washes the difference won’t show.