Posted in cooking, crafting, homesteading, knitting on Friday, January 14, 2011| 4 Comments »
There’s nothing like being snug and warm when it’s cold and blowy outside, especially if there’s something yummy-smelling simmering on the stove, and I have a few minutes to sit and do some knitting…
The last of our Christmas turkey simmering for stock:
A pair of socks I knit for my three-month-old nephew:
Our kitten Whiskey, in action:
Posted in crafting, knitting, wheel of the year on Friday, September 17, 2010| 9 Comments »
It’s been a busy week, so this will be a brief and utterly random photo post:
Our entire onion harvest. They are small because I planted a little late, and didn’t weed enough. I will plant two or three times as many onions next year, as these will only last us a couple of months.
It may be autumn, but these pretty purple wild asters are still blooming everywhere around here!
I knit this little cardigan and hat for my sister’s first baby, who is due October 3rd, so I need to get it packed up and into the mail tomorrow…
Posted in crafting, knitting on Tuesday, March 16, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Last time I posted about knitting, I had just finished my first pair of socks. I pretty much immediately started a second pair, which are about 2/3 done.
I’ve learned that socks made with worsted-weight yarn goes way faster than socks made with fingering-weight yarn. I also learned that I can knit approximately 6 inches of sock ribbing during the course of a Thornhaven discussion. I expect to finish these before the end of the month. Once this pair is done, I may set a goal for myself that I knit at least one pair of socks (for myself or someone else) per month.
While I’ve been knitting these socks, I’ve finished two other projects (the 14, now 15-year-old sweater is unfortunately not one of them).
Finished project #1:
A cowl, or tube scarf, to keep the cold wind off the sides of my face while I’m walking the dog int he back fields. I wanted something I could scrunch down into when it got really cold. The pattern was challenging, and involved a lot of counting. I might make it again, as a gift, if I found a yarn that I thought would complement the pattern really well. Unfortunately it a) isn’t as warm as I wanted, due to the open-ness of the pattern at some points, and b) it rolls down on itself readily, so it doesn’t stay up over my cheeks very well. Still, it worked for the latter half of the winter, and I’m glad I made it. And it looks kinda cute on me:
Finished project #2:
A baby kimono and hat for my tenant John’s baby boy. I will never, ever use Red Heart Yarn again. There’s good acrylic and bad acrylic, and this is bad acrylic (which I didn’t know when I bought it – I just thought the colours were good for a boy, and that acrylic was nice and machine-washable for a baby). It was a royal pain in the posterior to work with. But I had fun modifying the pattern so that the finished garment wouldn’t roll up on itself (and I learned that patterns designed for cotton yarn don’t necessarily work so well in acrylic). I would knit this pattern again in cotton, or in machine washable wool.
Apart from my second pair of socks, the other thing I’m working on is a gift for someone who reads this blog, and so will have to remain under wraps for now.
Posted in crafting, knitting, natural dyeing on Saturday, February 27, 2010| 1 Comment »
It’s the time of year when I’m itching to rush headlong into a bunch of exciting new creative projects, but don’t actually have the energy to do any of them, because my SAD hasn’t yet retreated enough.
One project I have started dipping into (pun entirely intended) is plant-based dyes for animal fibers (wool, etc.) I’ve been doing a fair amount of knitting lately, and since I have abundant local sources of fiber (llama, alpaca, and mohair goats to name a few), and friends who spin, it only makes sense to start learning to use the plants in my “back yard” to dye yarn. Well, it makes sense to me!
So my first experiment is with buckthorn, a shrubby, spikey shrub/small tree that forms at least 90% of our boundary hedges. According to John Lust’s The Herb Book, Alder Buckthorn (Rhamus frangula) should give a brown dye. I’m pretty sure what I have is European Buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica), rather than Alder Buckthorn, but I thought I’d give it a try anyway.
A few days ago I cut a branch out of a buckthorn. I snipped all the twigs on the branch into one-inch pieces, put them in a small stainless steel pot, added water, and let it soak for 24 hours. The next day I simmered the twigs for an hour and then left the pot to stand for a further 24 hours. The resulting liquid was a promising shade of not-quite-coffee brown:
Then I strained the twigs out of the liquid, poured it back into the pot, and put it back on the stove. I got my fiber samples thoroughly wet, then put them in the pot and simmered them for about an hour. I didn’t use any mordant on this fiber. As far as I understand the cursory instructions in The Herb Book (to be fair, it’s a book on herbal medicine, not on dying), a mordant isn’t needed because of the tannic acid in the wood.
I turned the burner off, and left everything to soak for another 24 hours or so, and then rinsed the fibers.
Top picture is the original fiber, bottom is the dyed fiber. The hank of yarn is part of an unravelled wool sweater, and the fiber is a bit of mohair/merino roving. It’s a quite pretty shade of toffee / caramel (or camel?) brown that I’m pleased with. The next test will be to see how lightfast it is.
I’m trying to be good and take proper notes – since the dyeing process has so many variables that can affect the colours you get (length of soak time, mordant, pH, type of fiber, etc.):
For my next trick, I will try to turn yarn blue using black beans!
Posted in crafting, knitting on Thursday, January 21, 2010| 2 Comments »
Back in October, I posted that I’d started knitting my very first pair of socks. This past weekend, at our monthly crafting get-together, I finished them:
They even mostly fit me! They’re a tiny bit tight, but I altered the pattern a tad to take into account the fact that I have tiny feet, and it turns out I needn’t have. I will make the next pair slightly larger, and at least an inch higher on the calves, but I’m very, very pleased with my first effort. Now I want a whole sock-drawer full of colourful hand knit socks, which should only take me about 5 years or so…
t! gets it. In the car on the way home from the crafting meet-up, I said,
“I finished my socks! Do you know what this means?”
“It means you get to start another pair of socks?”
“Exactly!”
Posted in crafting, green living, knitting, quilting on Tuesday, January 12, 2010| 4 Comments »
This year’s hand-made Christmas gifts included:
A scarf for my mum, knit with some lovely yarn that Arin spun for me
A second scarf for my mother-in-law, knit from soft, shiny bamboo yarn.
And a lap quilt for Baba, t!’s Ukranian grandmother. She liked it a lot.
Posted in crafting, knitting on Monday, November 16, 2009| 2 Comments »
In 1995 I moved to Ottawa to start my first real grown-up job, working for Nortel (which, at the time, was still called BNR – Bell Northern Reasearch). I had a little one-bedroom apartment downtown, some disposable income, not many friends, and lots of free time. So I decided to knit myself a sweater. I found a local yarn shop, and bought a pattern, and some yarn, and a set of needles, and all the bits and pieces you need to knit a sweater, and I started knitting. My grandmother taught me to knit when I was about eight years old, and I practiced regularly during her visits and whenever I needed to knit something (Girl Guide badges, doll clothes, the occasional hat or pair of mittens) so the sweater went fairly well. It was an easy pattern: moss stitch with raglan sleeves.
Within the year (or so, my memory is quite fuzzy on the matter) I had knit the front and back and two sleeves, and had the remaining stitches for each segment on its individual stitch-holder. I started to sew up the seams… and ran out of yarn. I had the making up and the one-inch ribbed collar to go, and I was out of yarn. I failed to find any more of the same yarn, and so bought the closest I could find – which really wasn’t very close. The original yarn was a very lightly heathered beige in a wool blend (no idea what yarn it is, the ball bands were lost years ago). The new yarn I bought was a fairly close colour match for the beige, without the heather flecking, and 100% acrylic. It was the closest I could find, and I didn’t like it.
So the sweater pieces got put away in a box. Yep, I had a whole sweater 97% finished, and I stuck it in a box rather than finish it with the best matching yarn I could find. The box containing the sweater moved to the UK with me in 1997. It moved in the UK with me from my apartment to the house I bought in Reading. It moved back to Canada with me in 2003. It moved from my house in Montreal to our homestead in Maxville with me 14 months ago.
And last month, I took it out of its box and took it to a crafting weekend organized by my friends who knit. They Oooh-ed and Aaah-ed over my sweater pieces and gave me lots of helpful advice and suggestions, and leant their moral support while I sewed up the rest of the seams and started to knit the neck with the not-matching yarn. I finished the neck a few days later at home, and had to research how to cast off – it had been so many years since I knit anything.
Disaster! My cast-off was way too tight, and the neck of the sweater won’t go over my head.
I was trying for a roll-neck, but I think I need to stay with the original (long-lost, but interpolated from the cuffs and waistband) pattern, and do an inch of ribbing for the neck instead. So I’m going to rip out what I have, back down to the stitches at the top of the of the front, back, and sleeves (yes, the same stitches that sat on stitch-holders for 14 years), and re-knit the neck in ribbing. I’ve found a bind-off that’s supposed to be extra-stretchy just for things like sweater necks.
Wish me luck.
Posted in chickens, cooking, dear diary, homesteading, knitting on Friday, October 23, 2009| Leave a Comment »
Wake up, drink tea. Check email.
Take the dog for a 4.5k jog. My neighbors wave at us as they slow down to drive by on the gravel roads. It’s -0.5°C when we leave the house and +0.7°C when we get back.
Change into work clothes.
Put on a load of laundry.
Disinfect kitchen worksurfaces, sinks, and chicken-butchering tools.
Kill, hang, bleed, skin, eviscerate, wash, and chill two chickens.
(Get t! to hang the laundry out on the line while I am elbow deep in chicken guts).
Disinfect kitchen worksurfaces, sinks, and chicken-butchering tools.
Put on a batch of bread dough for tonight’s supper of home-made pizza and a loaf of bread.
Knit a couple of inches of the sock I’m working on.
Bring the laundry in. It’s sleeting out.
Close up the chicken coop for the night.
Mop/disinfect the kitchen floor (post chicken-butchering) while t! takes the dog out for his evening walk.
Make and eat pizza for supper. Yum. Put bread in for second rise.
Watch an episode of something on DVD (we don’t have TV reception or cable) while the bread bakes.
Post to blog.
Fall exhausted into bed.
Tomorrow: Farmer’s market for groceries, possibly flea market for tools & other things. Chores. Cleaning out and re-organizing the garage in preparation for stacking our winter firewood in it.
Posted in crafting, knitting on Thursday, October 22, 2009| 2 Comments »
I resisted for ages and ages and ages…
…a bunch of my friends took up knitting over the last couple of years, but I wanted to start quilting so I did that instead. But those darned knitters my lovely friends who knit finally sucked me in.
My grandmother taught me to knit when I was about 8 years old, and I knit scarves, hats, doll clothes, and mittens as a kid. When I was living in Ottawa in 1995-1997, I picked up knitting again and knit most of a sweater (more about this sweater in another post).
Between
…I’ve started knitting my first pair of socks. Slowly and painfully. I wish I had been interested in knitting socks back when my grandmother was teaching me. I’ve used DPNs before, but the memories of how to start knitting in the round on them came back in fits and starts as I ripped out and re-started the beginning of the first sock several times. But it’s going better now:
Oh, and I also caved and signed up on Ravelry.
out here 