the Magpie Knits!

Last post for Magpie Knits

Well, it's been ages, and that's as good a sign as any.  This will be the last post for The Magpie Knits.  Although I'm still knitting, my life has resolved into a much clearer focus, which requires this space.  Therefore I'm taking the blog down at the end of April.

If any of you are still out there, and interested in my knitting (and costume sewing, and weaving, and gardening, and greenbuilding), please redirect your RSS feed settings to http://szarka.typepad.com/sca, or www.frontstepdesign.com.

Thanks for playing along, and I'll see you there!

Green Butterfly Shawl

Coming tomorrow!  Go here for instructions and another picture.

We're walking, we're walking...

I'm shaking things up again.

You might notice a few changes around the blogs.  First a reminder - yes, I have three.  This poor neglected one, which is supposed to be about knitting.  I also write on Front Step Design, which is a place for me to talk about my architectural business of the same name.  Finally, I've recently added Greet's Middle Ages, which started out just about my involvement in the Society for Creative Anachronism (Greet = me), but is turning into more than that.

Greet is taking over.  The SCA is a really good device for organizing my life, it turns out.  So many things that I enjoy can be bound together with that filter: homestead gardening, cooking and preserves, the guitar that I'm learning, and fiber arts.

Magpie Knits is just too confining a filter for me to update as often as I'd like, and doesn't really reflect what I want to help myself do.  Knitting the latest thing out of the magazines just for fashion's sake isn't meaningful enough to me anymore.  I suspect that's because I have been knitting nearly exclusively for myself, and now wear something off my own needles just about every day.  There's a limit.

So now I've learned to spin, and I have a wheel, and I've got some natural dying books on order, and I've gone back to weaving, and did some embroidery, and I've got big plans for the garden.  Not that I've given up knitting - Knit 2 Together is on its way so I can do that hat with the buckle to match my coat for a wedding in February (the yarn I have to spin!) - but that I'm being a little more practical, and it's fitting into a larger intention of becoming more self-sufficient, which is a rather medieval thing to do.

So if you're looking for the magpie's knits, flit on over to Greet's Middle Ages, and sort by 'Fiber Arts', or look for the photo album, 'Finished Fuzzy Objects'.  And check out the cute guys in armor, or the bellydancing while you're there.

Finished Brown Sugar.

No exclamation point there - this is not a successful knit.
The Cotton Fleece I used makes up just too tight a fabric.
Not much drape, and it just sits there on me.

I also have learned I don't like a mock turtleneck all over again.

Plus I think it really ought to be longer.

But here's the back...
Bleh.

It's currently sitting in my charity pile.

A finished Dianna!

I finally had a chance to indulge myself in a bit of self-portraiture this morning, so you'll be seeing some long overdue Finished Objects.  Some of these FO's have been prancing all over hither and yon, like to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival - the most permanent 'festival' I've ever seen...

We all run towards cultural enlightenment...well, the interesting ones of us do!
So here she is, and no, I don't know what was up with the over-exposure, because I was using exactly the same settings and place and time as all these other ones that I'm about to post.  Someone who knows more about f-stops can enlighten me - I promise to pay attention.

 

This is an incredibly beautiful sweater.  The substitute yarn worked, the drape is lovely (when I don't hang it up on my hip, there), the collar shape is so flattering, and all those black diagonals are very slimming. If you can get past the "work increased stitches into pattern as needed" instruction - make this sweater.

Turn right at the end of the block.

Yikes - it really has been two months since I posted.

Well, there's a good reason - I've been redirecting my life.  Wondering where the point was.  Starting entirely new kinds of projects.  So the shakeup has extended to my blog life as well - knitting alone isn't doing it for me any longer.  Don't worry, I'm still knitting (and have a stack of FOs that need blogging) and I don't plant to stop, but I've made up nearly all the knitted objects that I really want, and I refuse to be sucked into the consumerist side of the craft.  You know, knitting as anesthesia for life.  Not gonna do THAT.

This blog will continue, and I expect my posting schedule to continue to be erratic, but I'm turning my focus to frontstepdesign, as my primary blog practice.  Look there to see how the urban homesteading is going (slow, hot and dirty), the exploration project I've started in my local area, the success of my new Clothing Scheme, and my general philosophy of Life.  I'll post there when I've done some knitting, and I'll corral all the yarn stuff here, so if you're only interested in yarnish stuff, you don't need to change your RSS feeds and bookmarks.  But I'll mostly be across the way.

Washcloth Series, No. 1

Yeah, yeah, this is way overdue.  The cat thinks so, apparently.

I use this and Raspberry Ice Depression all the time as kitchen washcloths.  They scrub the dried-up tomato sauce off the countertops.  They swab the cat fur out from around the greasy stove hood.  I love them and plan to make more.

I learned from this first washcloth that seed stitch is bigger than garter stitch.  Seed stitch scrubs really well, but perhaps it should be the border rather than the center.  The green is leftover cotton from Nessie, the blue is from Allegra, and the mauvey border is the stash that I used for Cowgirl.

Colorado Socks!

These socks were a year in the making.

First, we had to go to Colorado.  In May of 2005.

A picture of CH taking a picture of Pike's Peak.

Where I bought two skeins of Schachenmayr Nomotta 'Crazy Cotton' in the very lovely Yarn Studio in Minturn.

(It's a good thing I have the label in front of me.  I haven't yet gotten so clever as to be able to remember how to spell these German sock yarn brands, no matter how lovely they are.)

(But that's okay - the label clearly states, "No Matta' ".  Right?  Right.)

Then, I cast on and knit all of one toe-up sock, my first.  And couldn't bind off, because all the bind-offs I could find at the time weren't stretchy enough to get my foot in, DESPITE the sock fitting perfectly if I just strung the active loops on waste yarn.  Sigh.  So the sock and its mate ball went back into the stash and I did other things.

But.  I have been meanwhile converted to the wonder that is the Knitter's Handbook, by Knitter's Magazine, and therein, on the Most Blessed Page 22, there is the Sewn Tubular Bind-off, which worked just fine, due to fabulous stretchiness.  So I whacked out the second sock (after a bit of remedial Toe-Up practicing) and now they are done and lovely.

Of course, I've started another pair.

The People's Friend Summer Special Stole

What a name, huh?

This is the solution I needed when I posted Help!  It's done now.

strange but lovely English pattern

This was one of the random loose patterns at my LYS.  Although I have confidence in my ability to figure out any knitting pattern anywhere (thank you Adrienne Vittadini) I have never done a shawl composition before, and I was nervous about edgings and transitions and combining different patterns....And I was antsy to get started since my deadline was June 1 and I've never knit on deadline, at least within the same year, and this is a Big Thing.  On teensey #2 Addi Turbo needles.

If I did something like this again, I might be able to pull something together on my own from a lace book, on not so teensey needles, but I needed to do at least one by a pattern.

I actually got to use stash for the People's Stole.  Three balls of Rowan greeny-blue.  One wool-cotton, two 4 ply cotton, in progressively darker greeny-blues.  But quickly it was apparent that three balls of fingering weight do not a stole make (Lesson 1).  So I bought five balls of white crochet cotton from a discount store (my LYS doesn't carry crochet cotton), only it wasn't cotton, but acrylic Royale Silkessence.  At least it'll be wash and wear, right?

So here it is, in all its blurry magnificence...(yeah, yeah, it was a rainy day, and I had a lot to do, and I figured better to hurry and blog SOMETHING rather than allow nasty perfectionism to keep me from getting the shawl to its recepient gift-giver.  So it's gone, and this is all I have left.  But I imagine I'll see it on my friend after The Day in June.)

The whole blurry thing:

The blurry top:

The blurry middle:

The blurry end:

I learned something Really Important on this project.  Six rows a day, on this shawl, took me 20-30 minutes.  Six rows a day, every day, for 2.5 months, and that was it.  Done.  Done early.  And I finished Brown Sugar, knit Candy, and started Cowgirl.

Now I'm jonesing to knit curtains, or linen bath towels that will dry faster than terry on the clothesline CH doesn't yet know he's going to rig up for me.  Large Home Objects.  Not a rug, though...the cats are still in shedding season and I just don't want to increase the opportunities for Laundry Sponsored By Hairball Horking.

I'll probably work it off doing Warshcloths.

Podcasts!

I work a desk job that is supposed to be rather glamorous - but I think architecture is revered mostly because people don't realize that it's a good deal of mousing around by yourself.  My head has an occupant who would really prefer to be bouncing around after the most interesting thought-butterfly, and the web can be a terrible distraction.

So I try to occupy the ADD child with audio, and have recently found knitting podcasts.

Knitcast - I particularly recommend Episode 11, which is about an art exhibition intersecting knitting and architecture.  My favorites from the show are:

BRICK SCARF link

BRICK WALL link

BRICK link
(Ok, yeah, we have a theme.  I once did some watercolors of bricks - if I were to do my own versions of the above knitted bricky works, we would need to designate a display area, so I could occasionally add "another brick in the wall."  snerk.  And then there was the year-long Construct Your Own Brick Driveway project.  We like us some bricks.)

I also lurrve ALL of Brenda Dayne's fabulously entertaining Cast-on episodes.  Every one.  I love her voice, and her sense of humor, and her taste in music, particularly Siegal-Schwall Band from Episode 7.