It happened! The sweater got finished, with about half an hour to spare. That time got used making a gluten-free Kentucky Derby torte. (And yes, it seems to have been enjoyed – I saw the youngest guest wearing a big smile and a lot of chocolate!) The yarn plus pattern had a LOT of give, so it turned out more like a shawl with sleeves and buttons. Bill took a photo of me with his (and my) favorite lily, right before I left to go to the garden party…
Which turned out to be indoors, because every time our hostess thought of setting the tables outside, the thunder started up again. It’s been a rather boisterous summer for thunderstorms – no sooner do I turn on the computer to look at email than it begins booming again and wisdom suggests shutting everything down and disconnecting the modem.
There is something truly, truly lovely about a garden party, and something especially lovely about this one. Simple sandwiches elegantly presented, well-dressed ladies, including Mary, sister of the hostess, who wore an extremely soignee dress she’d sewn herself from a vintage pattern (I’m guessing 1950s) though the fabric was a hot pink background with lime-green roses outlined in black. She carried it off perfectly, and claimed it was easy to sew. For her, of course.
Everyone wore hats; we sipped Earl Grey tea out of dainty china cups, and the flowers on each table were magnificent. It was definitely the party of the month, well worth finishing the sweater for.
Meanwhile, inspired by the summer 2009 Cloth Paper Scissors studio issue, I’m taking a hard look at my own studio and starting to go through things with a critical eye. It’s an interesting issue – not just the magazine, which is inspirational, but also the question of workspaces. Do they inspire? Are they easy to use and clean up? Do they mire us in the worst sort of creative bog? I think it’s time to take a closer look at this space and see what’s necessary – or not.

Realizing yesterday I had only three days til the garden party, the knitting continues. The back and one front are now done, the second front is in progress. Now it’s just today and Monday… But I paused to try a gauge swatch for the mohair, deciding it will have to be some sort of cardigan; and to finish a crazy-quilt tatted pincushion, started a few weeks ago. This is the first prototype of a class I’m teaching more than a year from now – I had to finish it and photograph it to give the organizers an idea of what I meant. Not entirely sure it’s glitzy enough – I meant it to have a tatted charm, and I think some of the tatting on it might be too big. Of course there will be more crazy-tatted experiments unfolding eventually … but meanwhile, back to the knitting.

Ask and ye shall receive… in this instance, an invitation to a garden party, even though I didn’t ask very loudly! Also, I don’t think the person who invited me read that entry – it just happened! So yesterday I spent several hours finishing the sweater back.



Now all I need is two fronts, a marathon of sewing things together and darning in the little ends, two sleeve bands, two front bands and the shawl collar. I’m afraid real work is going to get in the way of a speedy finish, but I’ve got a long book on tape to contribute to some slow-and-steady progress. The garden party is next Tuesday afternoon. I’ve been told to wear a vintage-looking dress and a flowered hat; white gloves will be provided. The sweater (if finished) would be perfect. I wonder whether I could cultivate an attitude of languid, to fit the mood of the occasion. I suspect in order to finish this sweater though, that could be counterproductive.

Inspired – mildly – by the New York State Fair competition booklet, which really should have many more tatting categories to reflect our huge enthusiasm for tatting! – I decided to finish a mohair-spinning project started when? Last summer, maybe. The goal was to spin enough for a sweater. Some of the spun mohair was markedly differed from other skeins – the ones I spun while Bill was in the hospital look neglected next to the others. But here’s the batch dyed and waiting – for a previous sweater in the queue to get more finished. Said previous sweater is a short-sleeved, slightly fitted cardigan I plan to wear to a summer wedding (if the weather justifies the need for a sweater) otherwise for the sort of garden-party events I hope to host or get invited to that never seem to happen. Anyway, I can dream!
Finishing the spinning and dyeing is part of the way there. I suppose I could always enter the skein competition – but I hope to have a sweater to show instead. There’s 21 ounces of the good stuff – and about 4 ounces of the too-loosely-plied handspun I’ll have to find another use for.
Am I getting de-railed by other projects? I was quilting for a while, trying to use up some part of my stash, and sewing like mad but not apparently getting very far along. And for the past week I’ve been doing something a bit different, about which my patience or attention is close to the end. And of course, there’s also work – which for me is a potpourri of choices and subjects. After three articles on the subject – the third currently in the works – I’ll soon be halfway to being an expert on foreclosures in the Finger Lakes (NY) area. A few nights ago I gave a wine talk on “How to Taste Like a Highbrow” for a library "Women In Wine benefit." I was astonished at the amount of research and re-writing, not to mention rehearsal, I needed before the big event. And fortunately, I had a pleasant, kind audience who said they really liked the talk. Came home and Bill said it had gone magnificently. That’s one worry off my mind for the moment! And a very different talk – one about tatting – to prepare and give next month that should hopefully provoke a lot less anxiety.

But first, there was a very big hat project. In the past eight days, I’ve made 47 little toppers for Seneca Santa. Admittedly, the bulk of most of them were done on the knitting machine, but they had to also be hand-finished, sewn up and in many cases, matched with the gorgeous mittens made by my friend June, who prefers knitting mittens to hats and seems to produce them almost magically. Last Sunday we sorted yarn, hats and mittens. We gave each other a pink challenge (notice a pink theme going on here?) and split up a pound of pink yarn. I got six hats out of it, I know June will probably not get 6 pairs of mittens, but after matching them with some of her other mittens, there are four hats waiting. There’s a gold hat bottom right in the photo – June had one of those mittens knitted before we finished sorting and matching last Sunday. There’s also a pale yellow one matched with a pair of June’s yellow mittens, unseen at the bottom of the pile. I started crocheting multiple strands of vaguely yellow yarn into a hat, then June said the started project looked like a potholder, so I pulled it out and re-did it by knitting it on size 15 needles. Now it’s airy and stretchy.
(Seneca Santa is an area charity providing Christmas gifts and warm winter stuff to needy area children. Last year we saw 269 hat and mitten sets come through the studio; but one of our most prolific mitten-makers died this past May after a long illness, so we think we’re in danger of having a lot fewer sets to give this coming year.)

And here’s the last of my catch-up entries, representing an amazing amount of time spent in late winter and early spring. The thread is size 30, hand-dyed, a small sampling of the dyeing I’ve been doing, though the colors are unfortunately washed-out by the flash – they’re much more intense than they appear. I dyed at least 200 skeins in various color variegations – mostly size 20 but also quite a bit of 30 and a dabbling in 10. I’ve done some tatting with these and I like the result – and when I took them with me to several tatting events people seemed happy with them.

They’re sitting on a layer of crocheted wash cloths / or dish cloths I’ve been making for the joint purpose of putting a dent into my cotton stash and trying to do some early preparation for Christmas. The dish-cloths are mindless crochet, and were perfect to take with me to Cleveland this winter – they were about all I had the wits to work on during Bill’s heart surgery and hospital stay. But because a few years ago I was gifted with a crocheted dish-cloth and found it quickly became a favorite to use in the kitchen, I thought these could be a gift appreciated by others, as well. I think it will be fun to put these together with a few other goodies – I’m not saying what in case my family is reading this!
Today was a work-day, but before I went in, I did some garden digging, made some soap (melt and pour, but it was fun anyway!) and planted two rows in the garden, doing some digging to prepare a bit more. This evening I planted the eggplant and peppers, transplanted some cosmos and marigolds, and hung up my shovel as having done enough for now.
At least outside. Inside, in the studio, I’m trying to usefully diminish another stash – by making quilt squares. Why is it that umpteen pieces of fabric may be put together with a lot of energy and effort – and the pile of fabric diminishes not at all?

Catching up – it seems like I’m always trying to catch up a little – comes in many forms. Today, under the impetus of two inspirations, I finally finished the sweater I began in February. I seem to have over-estimated my own size; also, as the sweater grew, I shrank a little. I wanted it to be oversized anyway, in part because it’s cotton and linen and could hypothetically shrink in any direction (though cotton tends to get shorter and wider with washing). I could also hypothetically shrink in any direction, though actually this isn’t happening quite as energetically as I’d like it to! The two goads to completion are related – tonight is the first in our library’s “Women in Wine” series, a fund-raiser for the library’s future expansion, and one I wrote about for the local newspaper; among those present at the event should be Heidi W., who started the same pattern sweater using different yarn – and I promised to model my finished one for her benefit.

You didn't think I'd take a photo with myself in it, did you?
Of course, I’ve also started another sweater already, hopefully one I’ll finish faster, because I intend to wear it this summer. The next one is white, made of a cloud-soft silk/bamboo combination I’ve got in the shop (in fact, it’s called “silk bamboo” and the back is already 1 ½ inches high. This will be a lace pattern with short sleeves and slightly larger needles – size 5 instead of size 3. Occasionally I read knitting blogs whose writers seem to finish a sweater every week or two. How do they do it? Don’t they have lives? Mine has me writing or completing five articles this week. Three down, two to go, not bad for Wednesday (they’re due Friday).

Catching up

There are reasons – good ones – for the long gap in postings. Here are – in short – the two biggies. One was Bill’s open-heart surgery in early March, which entailed months of getting ready beforehand, with important preparations like making reservations, doctors’ appointments, that earlier-mentioned dental work (apparently necessary before open heart surgery, and 30 years of accumulated neglect added up to a bit of it) collecting the things we needed, making arrangements for the cat… then we made the long trip to Cleveland for tests and surgery. This was a harrowing adventure, as heart surgery can only be, with a fortunately happy ending in the form of a potentially successful outcome – a heart remodeled by the best heart surgeons in the universe to last for a longer, healthier life. There are no photos of that experience – a good thing, too!

Back home, my complex career as care-giver, chauffeur, appointment-scheduler, prescription-courier, gourmet chef, wood-carrier and fire-stoker eclipsed my more usual pursuits except for one important commitment requiring almost-as-compelling attention: organizing the Tatting Seminars in Hector. There are multiple organizers and inspired contributors to the event, including conference attendees who simply pitch in and make things happen – but being the person who actually lives in Hector adds that boots-on-the-ground excitement, as well as making it more practical for me to be the person who acquires some of the bulkier supplies, coordinates a few extra details, acts as the message-center, etc. Add to that the challenge of being a conference teacher, vendor, dyer and purveyor of hand-painted threads, and life becomes complicated.
We all survived the weekend, even Primrose the scaredy-cat who surprised everyone, including herself, by allowing a houseguest to approach and actually touch her. Can’t show the threads here – they came out beautifully, but now they’re gone. More threads will follow… eventually. Today was a time to partially catch up on bills and with Bill; tonight is dedicated to catching up on sleep, and tomorrow, the skeining begins again.

The photo shows some of the conference attendees – quite a few were hiding in the back row behind other people, a few stepped out of the photo entirely to capture whomever was left on their own cameras. I’m there too – at the far left in the back row, wearing green (behind Jeannie Z in red).
Now the fun is over – at least, for the moment – and it’s back to work.