Category: Crafts

Crafts of vari­ous sorts, includ­ing knitting

Knitting is Serious Business

Appar­ently there’s a group of nuns in hid­ing after their knit­ting busi­ness went bust; they are even said to have mort­gaged a mon­as­tery to fin­ance their efforts to keep up with the latest fash­ions in knit­ting design. More on the story in Nuns on the Run (link from whip up).

On first read­ing it’s funny; then I found it sad that their attempt to (I assume) give the mon­as­tery a sound fin­an­cial foot­ing went so astray. So often these attempts by mon­as­ter­ies to fin­ance them­selves by selling wine, beer, or oth­er comest­ibles is lauded to the hilt — were these women pres­sured to rep­lic­ate those suc­cesses? It’s no sur­prise if mon­as­tery busi­nesses fail just like oth­er busi­nesses do, of course, but some­how I sus­pect the con­sequences are different.

Crochet Patterns

I was chat­ting with Eve about crochet pat­terns that are worth mak­ing, and found out she did­n’t know about Priscil­la’s crochet. Priscil­la’s web­site was off the air for what seemed like ages (maybe a year?) but is now back again; it has lots of crochet pat­terns for afghans and book­marks and pothold­ers and that sort of thing. I’ve made a few of the pat­terns and not had any prob­lems with them. The site is a little clunky and old-fash­ioned, and has a couple of links that look weird, but don’t let that put you off the pat­terns themselves.

I’m fairly old-fash­ioned in what I like to crochet – mostly Christ­mas dec­or­a­tions, coast­ers, doil­ies, book­marks, hats. I tend to crochet things and then put them away and not use them as I don’t really have the right spots to show them off. Except for the coast­ers, which the cats seem to think I made for them to play with. I don’t usu­ally like the look of cro­cheted cloth­ing although some light, breezy sum­mer tops look good. Not that I’ve ever made one, my list of things to knit and crochet is long enough already! 

Oth­er pat­tern links I have found include Free Pat­terns; you have to register at the site but I haven’t got any spam from it that I know of. They have all sorts of pat­terns, not just for crochet and knit­ting. There’s Crochet­Me, which claims to have “con­tem­por­ary, cool, hip, fash­ion­able crochet.” There aren’t a lot of pat­terns there that interest me per­son­ally, but then there aren’t a lot of pat­terns (yet), so I’ll prob­ably look again in a few months time and see what’s there. In the pay-for cat­egory, some of the pat­terns at Stitch Diva look good, at least for warm­er days or a warm­er cli­mate. So many ideas, so little time…

Bootees

I was a few months preg­nant when Tim asked when I was going to knit some bootees (aka booties) for the baby. I wondered why he had­n’t asked for the first child, he answered that he had­n’t known I could knit back then. Fair enough.

So I got some yarn in time for the trip to Hawaii, think­ing it would be a good chance to get some knit­ting in. I tried two pat­terns, one from a book of my great-aunt’s, and one on the web; I pre­ferred the web pat­tern (they’re the bootees on the right). Once the baby arrived of course, we redis­covered why we had­n’t used the bootees we had with our first child; they don’t stay on the feet! Socks or out­fits with feet built-in are much more prac­tic­al. Although I did dis­cov­er that if you put socks on first, the bootees do stay on longer.

The res­ults of the Hawaii knit­ting are here, show­cased on a table­cloth I got in Hawaii… Baby's jacket and bootees

The jack­et is a seam­less cabled jack­et, knit­ted in Baby Soft by Lana Gatto from a pat­tern that’s no longer avail­able. The only slightly tricky bit was mak­ing the increases work into the cable pat­tern prop­erly, that required a piece of paper and a cer­tain amount of cal­cu­lat­ing. Oth­er than that, a reas­on­ably easy knit and the yarn is lovely and soft. I just hope she spends as much (or more) time wear­ing it as I did knit­ting it!

Fife

Some time ago I prom­ised our son that I would knit him a sweat­er. He picked the pat­tern, and the yarn, pick­ing some­thing (of course) in a fine yarn that took seem­ingly forever to fin­ish. How­ever, fin­ish it I did, eventually.

The pat­tern is Alice Star­more’s Fife, from the Fish­er­men’s Sweat­ers book. It comes in one size only, for an eight-year-old, so it’s a little big on him right now, but won’t be by next winter. There’s a pic­ture at the vir­tu­al yarns web site, which is a show case for the Star­more designs (and sells kits and yarn). I knit­ted my ver­sion in Cleck­heaton Machine Wash 5‑ply Crepe, which I got in Aus­tralia last time we were there. They don’t seem to have the same col­our any more for that yarn, it’s col­our 2181 (pic­tured in a dif­fer­ent yarn). For once in my life I got per­fect gauge on the recom­men­ded needles! Both stitch and row gauges matched, which made knit­ting a lot easi­er — no cal­cu­lat­ing changes in increases and decreases to match a dif­fer­ing row gauge. 

So here’s the sweat­er, nicely laid out on my new wooly board (great for dry­ing knit­ted sweat­ers), pho­to­graphed on a nice spring day in our back yard.

Fife sweater

Snarky Crafts

When you’ve almost come to the end of the cur­rent list of craft pro­jects (some­thing that will prob­ably apply to me in about, oh, the year 2012 or so if I’m lucky), and you’re look­ing around for ideas, here are a couple of web sites you might enjoy. Actu­ally, look at them before you get to the end of that list, as you’re unlikely to want to make any­thing fea­tured here. Warn­ing: be care­ful with your cof­fee when you start look­ing at these.

Item 1 is even called What Not to Crochet (link thanks to Tim) and fea­tures all sorts of items that make you won­der who would put any time at all into buy­ing the yarn for them, let alone actu­ally mak­ing them. There are even design­ers out there using crochet as a base for mod­ern art (about which I am obvi­ously a phil­istine and have no appre­ci­ation of the finer points) — check out the bunny suit as an example of that, and then the com­plete web­site from the designer. 

Item 2 (not sure how I stumbled across this): Thread­bared has some delight­fully snarky com­ments on old sew­ing, knit­ting, and crochet pat­terns. Some of the items them­selves are actu­ally ok (unlike almost all from the What Not to Crochet link), but the set shots haven’t worn well (and most of them were prob­ably ridicu­lous even when brand new). 

Crochet Danger

I had to laugh at Eve’s link to the story of the weenie who was scared of knit­ting needles (while admit­ting I first saw the link at whump dot com from fol­low­ing XML 2005 Aggreg­at­or links). I have a bet­ter story than mere knit­ting needles or even nee­dle­work needles, since all of those have really blunt ends.

When the TSA dir­ect­ives first came out after Septem­ber 11, ban­ning knit­ting needles, I, along with a lot of oth­er people, was struck by the arbit­rar­i­ness of the bans. No knives, but forks were still allowed, and so were glasses made of glass. Per­son­ally I’d rather have someone come at me with a blunt knife that’s not cap­able of cut­ting any­thing than a broken glass. So I read the list of banned items and noticed that crochet hooks wer­en’t on the list. Giv­en that in terms of crafts I bounce between knit­ting, nee­dle­work, crochet, and lots of oth­ers, I have a good sup­ply of crochet hooks. I picked one out to take on my next set of flights. Not just any crochet hook though, one of my fine 1.25 mm crochet hooks that at the time I was using for filet crochet. So this is a hook, with what can only be described as a barb on one end, with a total dia­met­er of 1.25 mm (I have smal­ler, but had two of the 1.25 mm hooks so could eas­ily risk los­ing one).

The first secur­ity per­son checked the hook, looked wor­ried, asked her super­visor, the super­visor said “crochet hooks are allowed”. And that was it. On board I went, with my filet crochet and my crochet hook. These days knit­ting needles are expressly allowed, as are crochet hooks (although the TSA calls them “crochet needles”) so I will still be able to carry around my filet crochet hooks and scare unsus­pect­ing knit­ting needle phobics (yes, there is such a thing as a needle pho­bia; most people who suf­fer from it have pho­bi­as about vac­cin­a­tion and blood test-type needles, not knit­ting needles, although the pho­bia is appar­ently bad enough in some people to be set off by any needle-type object). 

So if you see someone with what looks like a viciously thin, barbed object and thin yarn, just remem­ber the TSA per­mits it. Mind you, read­ing that list does raise oth­er ques­tions, such as “if you can­’t smoke on board, why do you need a cigar cut­ter?” and “why are toy trans­former robots expressly per­mit­ted but not oth­er toys?” but that’s just me being picky.