one summer project

I was introduced to the punchneedle process last spring, by my friend Sarah, an accomplished rug-hooker. She got me started with the tools and a fistful of wool thread. Until then I was not a wool lover in any big way, knitting with wool only occasionally. Though I was curious about Punchneedle process it was not love at first sight, that is, until I threw my punchneedle supplies into my suitcase and took it with me on a trip West last summer.

It started to gel for me then. I found myself making lots of circular swatches to find a comfort level with the subdued colors of the wool DMC Medici thread. A growing mountain of puffy, wooly circles ended up becoming buttons. More on buttons later...

I've come to love and appreciate wool through the dyeing process. I love the way wool takes up the dyes and the depths you can get (or some people can get with the dyeing process). I spent some time this weekend transforming a pile of pale pastel skeins of DMC wool into a pile of intense vibrant skeins. I'm not methodical about this dyeing process yet, but I have a good time in a mad scientist kinda way creating colors and dipping skeins in one jar and another. I'm sure there'll come a time when I want to duplicate and control the process better.






I did have a plan though for the specific colors I needed to round out my palette and I'm happy with the weekend results. A new collection of buttons for the Fall are in the making!

lavender tender or urban girl meets her own backyard

I usually have my lavender processed by the first week in July. What happened this year? I was not paying close attention to the garden or the calender. So now I'm scrambling to cut the deep purple 'Grosso' and pale lavender 'Provence' stems before all the buds are open and dropping to the ground! Keeping in mind the perils in my untended garden, umm, those blood-sucking ticks on the swaying weeds, I'm compelled to overdress for the occasion. Long pants, rubber knee boots, garden chapeau, bug spray and clippers...urban girl meets her own backyard. Darn! There was no one to capture this vision digitally, or at least I don't think there was.

I grew up in the suburbs of San Francisco, moved to the city or rather, to Los Angeles for college, then to Manhattan and up to the Hudson Valley, never really touching the earth until I moved to the East End of Long Island 16 years ago. The passion for gardening was fleeting, as there was too much nature to contend with. (I dream of caring for a tickless rooftop patio! This coming from our household's best tick magnet!) Anyway, the lavender remains without too much help from me...hey, I did weed! This year the younger plants have matured and are yielding more lavender than ever. So the cut stems become lavender wands...drying out and then woven with my hand-dyed velvet...

Outta Town

I'm out in California celebrating my mom's 80th birthday and looking forward to Fathers' Day tomorrow. Though I filled my suitcase with yarn projects (enough for 9 days away from home), I don't seem to have made any progress on them. But we have re-organized my dad's office to accomodate his watercolor work. At least someone will be making something soon.

I took a break on Friday and went to Berkeley to visit my longtime friend Sheila. I rely on her to guide me to the most interesting spots in the Bay Area. Breakfast is my favorite meal so starting at Cafe Fanny, Alice Waters' tiny cafe always makes me happy. Mmmm! Cafe au lait and a cinnamon twist from Acme Baking next door and a sculptural epi loaf for pictures.






Next stop, across the Bay in Sausalito. I have been wanting to stop in at the Heath factory for several years and finally we made it there. (I grew up eating off Heathware dishes and when my parents lived in Sausalito I could easily visit the factory seconds pile.) The company was purchased a few years ago and now has a new generation of fans. The factory store is manned by helpful Heath enablers. Thoroughly enjoyed that stop.




A quick bite in the shopping center in Strawberry, I don't know what they call the shopping center now but it's an upscale enclave of lovely stores and tasty restaurants. As we were eating our petite lunch, Bonnie Raitt walked past wearing a black straw cowboy hat unsuccessfully disguising her theatrical red hair. (Didn't even think of pulling out the camera!)

We doubled back to Berkeley and Fourth Street.



Had enough time before I had to get back on the road to take a ritual turn through the Gardener, cross the street to charming Castle in the Air (stationary/pen/ephemera heaven), to sketCh for tasty ice cream and granita treats (mmmm), into Builders Booksource to examine their copies of 500 Chairs and finishing off with a tour of Paper Source. There is so much more to look at on Fourth Street but one must have priorities!




What a great day Sheila! Thanks.

dyeing to be or not to be...

This April I took a wool dyeing class at Webs in Northampton, MA. It was great fun, I posted pictures of the class activity then and an array of colorful skeinlets that were a result of the class exercise. What I didn't post were pictures of the sock yarn I dyed at the end of the day with the leftover dye solutions. A little canary, a touch of peacock and some cherry, that was all I had left.




I wanted to continue dyeing at home, but lacked an area to do it in. Over the course of the next few weeks I gathered supplies and more dyes and cleared a counter in my garage for mixing dye stocks and painting. Finally, Thursday I mixed the dye stocks and on Friday I was able to do my first dyeing project, finishing the sock yarn from class! I re-skeined it into a larger hank and did some over-dyeing inspired by the new leaf growth colors in the backyard!




Ready to knit into a pair of leafy Spring socks--- should I call it garden camouflage?

1 out of 500 Chairs, page 83

I got a nice surprise in the mail on Friday. My copy of the recently published 500 Chairs arrived and inside on Page 83 is a chair that I submitted to Lark Publications on their call for entries last spring. I'm very happy to have my work included.

I suspected going in that wood and metal and hard surfaced entries would be the norm, I gave it a shot anyway. I'm also relieved that my photography of the chair is passable. Ppphew! So here's a similar angle of the chair, if not the same shot that's in the book and a view of the back and an detail shot.




I'm a penny rug fan and wanted to relate to them with my chenille stitching. So this is one example of the penny rug effect on my work.

Washing instructions

Where did April go? Not that I haven’t been making anything…I have lots of projects going but nothing completed. Sewing chenille pieces, designing knitted pieces unsuccessfully, putting together lavender sachet kits for my etsy shop, setting up a wool dyeing studio in my crowded garage…and well, life.

This morning as I was on my way to the washer with a stack of chenille pieces (logs to be exact), I was thinking about how much I like them before they're washed. So I set up the camera and took some shots. Once they're washed and dried all you want to do is snuggle with them.





I also really like the backs...if I intended to draw with thread it would look like this.

Anyway, I'm having a very capable seamstress install a zipper in a guinea pig log to see how feasible it is. My dream come true---that all future logs will have that option and some overlock too. Oh, the little things!

Dasi's bootees

When I signed up to get on Ravelry, a great beta website for knitters, wool dyers, crocheters and any other aspect of yarn you can think of, I had no idea it would be such a great resource. You can document projects you knit, see what others are knitting, look for yarns for patterns, patterns for yarns and more. Everyone on Ravelry, it seemed, had knit a pair of the cutest, tiniest Mary Jane bootees with buttoned crossing straps. After I knit my first pair of socks (and only, so far) I had enough hand-painted merino sock yarn left over to knit baby bootees! I sewed the first one up to see just how cute it was when the second bootee was in progress----



Until I sewed up the second one I had no idea how much they differed in size. Same needles, but different tension? I knitted a third bootee---and came up with a matching pair. Pphew!

These were for Dasi who arrived last week. Congratulations to my friends Deborah and Andrew!



If you need to knit a pair or three of Saartje's bootees, the pattern is available online.