Posts tagged ‘Knitting’
On beginning
Now that the wedding shawl project is finished, it is time to start something new. Sometimes this requires encouraging some creative inspiration; by leafing through pattern books and back issues of Spin-Off and Handwoven, or digging through the yarn stash and piling skeins and cones in different combinations, waiting for colors and textures to come together and suggest something. Usually, however, it is simply a matter of turning to the next item in the “things I have been trying to find time to make” list.
In The View From Saturday, by E. L. Konigsburg, a boy named Noah is being taught how to do calligraphic writing by an elderly woman named Tillie. She teaches him that filling the pen with ink properly involves six separate steps. Noah objects that six steps is a lot to do before you can begin writing. Tillie responds that the six steps to fill the pen ARE the beginning of writing.
It is easy to get impatient with, or bogged down in the preparation, when you are anxious to see a woven or knitted project begin to take shape. It helps to regard the preparatory steps as the actual beginning. Getting a warp measured out, threaded on, and tied up could be considered preparation for weaving. However if you regard it as part of the weaving process, your project is half finished by the time you throw the first shuttle. Knitting a test swatch to check the gauge is a tedious step that it is always tempting to omit, but it is faster and less frustrating than ripping out the first four inches of a sweater because it is turning out to be much larger or smaller than expected. Knitting a swatch and checking the gauge should really be a step in the process, as necessary as assembling the yarn and needles.
Several projects are begging to be undertaken, and surfaces are littered with skeins of wool or colorful clusters of cones of cotton warp, bits of paper with scribbled calculations, and pattern books sprouting clumps of page markers. Rifling through the various caches of “UFOs” (unfinished objects) has yielded one or two that are ripe for finishing and not yet gone by into “what was I thinking when I started that?” (or worse, “what was that supposed to be?”). One or two of the resulting projects may end up as false starts, but there is no doubt that something has begun …
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On knitting lace
The project highlighted in our post entitled Knitting Lace is now done. Joanna has been working on this wedding shawl for our daughter Celia; its structure is based on traditional Estonian lace patterns and is made from nearly ¾ of a mile of 2-ply, lace weight, hand-spun yarn made from the fleece of a three-year old Shetland ewe.
For knitters, lace presents its own challenges and rewards. For one thing, it is less forgiving than other knits. If you drop a stitch or accidentally omit an increase or decrease in plain knitting and don’t notice it for a few rows, it is still pretty easy to fix. Mistakes in lace are often very difficult to fix after-the-fact, which usually leads to backtracking, ripping out down to the mistake and knitting it over. On the other hand, mistakes in lace are usually easy to catch within a couple of rows, when the pattern doesn’t align properly.
While being knitted, a lace fabric is generally a bunchy, unprepossessing object. It doesn’t really bloom until it has been blocked, dampened, and pinned to dry in its finished shape. Then suddenly the pattern appears in all its intricacy.
Shetland wool is ideal for lace knitting. Its long-staple makes it possible to spin it very finely into a nice, even, lace-weight yarn, and the resulting fabric, whether knitted or woven, has high luster and surprising softness. It is no accident that the legendary ring shawls, so fine they can be passed through a wedding ring, were traditionally knit with Shetland wool.
The gallery below is comprised of a number of images showing the finished shawl . Hovering an image will reveal its title; clicking an image will take you to a carousel view and you can then move forward and back as you choose. ESC will bring you back to the gallery view.
I will close with a note concerning the images which appear on this Pairodox Farm blog. All photos are taken using point-n-shoot cameras (Nikon’s COOLPIX p7000 and Sony’s DSC HX9V); post processing is done using Gimp V2.6.
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Knitting lace
Joanna has been working on this wedding shawl, for our daughter Celia, since early fall. It’s been tough going, one-step-forward-two-steps-back at times. The end is in sight however and she has promised to work on it an hour each day until it is done. I don’t know how she does it, but I’m the sort who has difficulty sorting out his shoe laces. I asked how many stitches she thinks she will have completed in the end … she didn’t know, so we figured it out … ready for this … more than 85,000! See our post on Patience and perseverance. The instructions indicate that the project (Simply Elegant Stole from Fiddlesticks Knitting) is based on traditional Estonian lace patterns. It is made from nearly ¾ of a mile of 2-ply, lace weight, hand-spun yarn made from the fleece of a three-year old Shetland ewe by the name of Marianne. I will post an image of the completed project when it is done; stay tuned.
