knitting in the dark

This July I met Nancy, the mother-in-law of my friend Janie. Janie’s wedding was in Maine this summer, so I stayed up there with her and her fiance Charlie for two weeks beforehand, playing and helping them prepare for the wedding. We stayed at Nancy’s one night - I stayed in the room they call “the Weavery” - and I felt like I was in fiber-addict heaven. The room has two twin beds and a chair at one end… and three looms, two spinning wheels, a drum carder, and bookshelves with weaving yarn occupying the rest of it!

Apparently Nancy at one point owned a fiber studio in their town, but had closed it some years prior and moved all her supplies to this room upstairs in her house. Shortly after we arrived she and I got to talking about knitting and spinning and she offered to teach me on a wheel, which I immediately accepted! We didn’t get to sit down with it until a week later after the wedding and cleanup were over, but she pulled out her Louet S-10 and taught me the basics one evening. And I was hooked on spinning once again.

Returning home to NYC with samples of some different fibers from Nancy, I started watching the ravelry.com boards looking for a simple used spinning wheel to puchase. BQ hinted that if I figured out what kind I liked that I might receive a wheel for Christmas. But in September I got lucky and found a used S-10 for a very reasonable price and pounced. It arrived a week later and was quite simple to put together. I quickly finished on my new wheel the Welsh wool that I had purchased to learn spinning on my spindle!

(more to come…)

I had said for years that I wasn’t interested in learning to spin. I enjoy too many crafts already - knitting, needlepoint, quilting and other sewing, I take photographs, draw and paint, and the list goes on. And once I start spinning, where does it end? I viewed it as a kind of gateway craft to dyeing yarn and fiber, weaving, or thinking that buying raw fleece and doing all the processing myself might be a good idea - but so far, none of those fears have come to pass. Last Christmas (2008), my fiber-loving aunt bought me an Ashford Turkish Spindle and two ounces of alpaca from Vashon Alpaca Fibers.

Apparently this fiber came from an animal named Clemente.

I jumped right in to learning to spin, surfed the internet for instructions, bought some wool top from Weaving Works, and made some yarn!

Not too bad for my first try, right? I discovered I loved making yarn but wasn’t sure if I loved the speed and motions of spindle spinning. I didn’t immediately abandon spinning completely, but I only poked at it for the following seven months… until I met Nancy in July.

(to be continued…)

I know it was a whole two weeks ago now, so I’m not going to bother telling you that Renegade was cool; I’ll just show you my loot. It appears I’ve started hoarding fabric this year as well as yarn… I never used to do this until I started reading craft blogs! Yikes! There’s just so much inspiration out there. Anyway, I spent a reasonable (mostly affordable) amount of money at the reprodepot.com booth:

The cherries are on cotton stretch jersey - I have plans for a t-shirt quilt to take to the park and beach and I think this will make a cute accent!

And these lovely flowers are on heavier weight upholstery fabric - perhaps for the back of a pillow or to recover the cushions on my comfy chairs…

And I just couldn’t resist (slightly less affordable) new art for a wall in my new apartment (apartment yet to be found):

It’s one of a kind and very cool up close. I love the red and icy blue details:

Speaking of new apartments, you’d think that a person could find an apartment for herself somewhere in Brooklyn with a reasonable commute time into the city for $1000 or less per month, but apparently not. It’s not like I want to live in Brooklyn Heights or Park Slope or anything (well, I want to, but I know I won’t be); I’d be very happy staying in Sunset Park or moving to Greenwood Heights. And small is okay (I think I could live in about 250 square feet), but it has to be a fairly clean building and there has to be decent natural light in the apartment since I work from home quite a bit. I just can’t bring myself to move even further away from Manhattan - not only does that make the commute longer when I have to go in, but it also makes a taxi more expensive on the nights that I need to take one.

I cannot even believe what whipup.net posted two days ago: pictures of and links to crocheted versions of the shirt-stripe quilt. They’re pink and adorable! And someone left a comment about how they looked “very Kaffe Fassett.” It just goes to show you that there really aren’t any new ideas in the world… amazing.

It isn’t really done. It still has to actually be quilted, which is done by hand and takes months and months and months, but my shirt stripe quilt top is finished! I finished it while my mother was here visiting - she pressed the seams and clipped corners, but I did all the seaming myself… I’m very proud, can you tell? I’ve already started planning the next one…

Here’s a picture of all the pieces laid out on the floor before seaming…

Then I pieced it into blocks:

And the finished top!:

I am so proud, but I’ve been in tech rehearsals for some shows at Theatre Row for the last two weeks and therefore unable to share it with you until now…!

I’m still here. And I’m still plugging away at the shirt-stripe quilt. My mother’s coming to visit for a week next Wednesday, so I want to make sure I have all the triangles sewn into squares so she can help me complete the top; she’s much more practiced than I am with the long straight seams.

I have 209 completed squares and 142 half squares… not too much further to go. But I hate the pinning step before the final seam in each square.

I’m still really excited about this project (three years later…) and I cannot wait to have all the squares ready and move on to the layout!

So I haven’t been completely ignoring my striped quilt as I may have implied in my last post… somehow I actually found the time to open up and oil my sewing machine (scary!), which I’ve never done in the four years since my grandmother gave it to me when I graduated college.

It now runs much more smoothly and makes much less noise. So I used it to get some quilt squares done!

And:

And then I sewed together some little triangles:

Then I sat down in front of the TV and did a large amount of ironing and pinning and now I have a bunch ready to sew together into squares:

It’s just so satisfying to open those triangles up and see how all the sides line up to make mitered corners. There are just SO many little triangles left still…

With another full day off yesterday I did many things - including laundry and some cleaning - but what I want to show everyone is the progress I’ve made on the striped shirting quilt. I sewed all of the largest triangles together along one edge to make even bigger triangles and then pinned them all again and with another seam they will all turn into mitered-corner squares, but I’m so excited by this little progress that I couldn’t wait to share:

It’s a yummy pile of stripes (and the most beautiful weight of fabric to manipulate).

In other news: I’ve added a new “crafts” category for my posts, since I frequently do crafty things other than knitting, but not any other particular type with any regularity.