guilty pleasure?

Long time between posts, yes?! I’ve been pretty much completely engrossed with the renovations (plasterboard and new weatherboards are up, now waiting for building permit- and now, let’s leave it there!) and preparing classes, so more or less sleep-deprived and incoherent as a result. Despite that, I was shocked into tapping out a (short!) post when I read this post and then others about that lovely repository of all inspiration, Pinterest…

I’ve been loving it, not so much for browsing but as a centralized way of storing links to all those ideas, images, colours, patterns and generally cool stuff that I find on the web and want to be able to find again later. Now it seems that I’ve not only been potentially breaking copyright by gaily pinning images/ products/ ideas without the owners consent but also enabling the company behind Pinterest to claim those images/ products/ ideas as their property. Aggh, why do the sweetest things have to be muddied?! Maybe I was naive to think that there were no such issues associated with the site, especially given that the lack of visible advertising means that there must be income or incentive for those behind the site coming from somewhere. I remember feeling weird the first time I came across pins of my own work but I guess the feeling wore off and I was more excited about seeing someone enjoying my stuff. I wouldn’t be excited if I knew someone else was profiting from it. I know there is always the risk of that once you put it out there but this situation seems extreme.

This issue is right out there at the moment so I encourage you to read others who know more and can write much more succinctly about it than I can. Bottom line, I don’t know enough but at this point, I’m not sure I feel comfortable pinning without first having permission from the owner of the image and not sure how I feel about about facilitating Pinterest having rights to that image just so that I have the privilege of a centralized place to store my images…

What do you think?!

new undertakings

We went from this:

Wonky old kitchen

with a good dose of this:

Faux bois- I kind of got used to it in the end

to this:

Ah, we still had our shower!

and now this:

Open kitchen

The inevitable change of plan happened on the very first day of renovations… instead of just replacing the kitchen and bathroom, we decided to pull out the dividing wall and add a small bathroom onto the back. Help! I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed with the change, now that we need to go through planning approval and a wee bit more work… but I am sure it will be so, so worth it when I look into that big open space. We’re having fun hosing each other down in the garden, now that the shower is gone. Luckily it has been hot. I’ll keep you posted on how things go : )

Bemused by it all

Also new is the schedule of classes that has just gone up on the Morris and Sons website… All the teachers have put together new ones this semester, so the program has expanded to include all kinds of treats, including amigurumi, toe-up and top-down socks, garment and shawl design and embellishment. I’ve given myself the challenge of seven new classes, so I have loads to learn and to polish up on and plenty of samples to knit! But I’m glad for the opportunity to push myself more and to be part of some exciting learning. On the cards for me are cast-ons and cast-offs, steeking, cables, knitting tips and tricks, seamless garment construction and fitting and an introduction to Shetland lace construction and techniques. Come along if you can- they should be fun!

And lastly, I’ve been working on a pattern for my Laura and the Wolf! Very exciting, this pattern-writing business. And slow. A couple of friends have kindly agreed to test the pattern and I am knitting up a second version, incorporating a few changes I’ve made, but it should be ready soon if anyone is keen to have a go!

Lots in store for the year ahead. Hope there is for you too.

laura and the wolf

An idea for a hat has been tugging on my sleeve for months. I finally charted out and knitted it over the scorchingly hot post-Christmas break and the cool, wintery colours sang to me as I worked, relieving my hot and sweating fingers…

Snowflake wheel

Laura and the Wolf

Drawn from a favourite childhood book, it tells of Laura and Carrie’s night ramble, bundled up against the cold, across the frozen waters of Silver Lake on a winter’s night:

“It was so beautiful that they hardly breathed. The great round moon hung in the sky and its radiance poured over a silvery world. Far, far away in every direction stretched motionless flatness, softly shining as if it were made of soft light. In the midst lay the smooth, dark lake, and a glittering moonpath stretched across it… Laura’s heart swelled. She felt herself a part of the wide land, of the far deep sky and the brilliant moonlight. She wanted to fly…

‘On the moonpath, Carrie! Let’s follow the moonpath,’ Laura cried.

And so they ran and slid, and ran and slid again, on the glittering moonpath into the light from the silver moon. Farther and farther from shore they went, straight towards the high bank on the other side… Close to the farther shore, almost in the shadow of the high bank, they stopped. Something made Laura look up to the top of the bank.

And there, dark against the moonlight, stood a great wolf! He was looking towards her. The wind stirred his fur and the moonlight seemed to run in and out of it.

‘Let’s go back,’ Laura said quickly, as she turned, taking Carrie with her. ‘I can go faster than you.’

She ran and slid and ran again as fast as she could, but Carrie kept up.

‘I saw it too,’ Carrie panted. ‘Was it a wolf?’

‘Don’t talk!’ Laura answered. ‘Hurry!’

Laura was glad to be safe in the warm room with the desolate prairie shut out. If anything had happened to Carrie, it would have been her fault for taking her so far across the lake.

But nothing had happened. She could almost see again the great wolf with the wind ruffling the moonlight on his fur.

‘Pa!’ she said in a low voice.

‘Yes, Laura?’ Pa answered.

‘I hope you don’t find the wolf, Pa,’ Laura said.

‘Why ever not?’ Ma wondered.

‘Because he didn’t chase us,’ Laura said. ‘He didn’t chase us, Pa, and he could have caught us.’

A long, wild, wolf howl rose and faded away on the stillness. Another answered it. Then silence again.”

Snowflake wheel

I love how this chapter speaks of Laura’s joy in the wild beauty of that desolate landscape and of the delicate coexistence of man and animal before the flood of settlers poured into the west. At a time when many across the world considered wilderness as full of danger and evil, it must have been only a few that could live in such a place and still celebrate its wildness. The Laura Ingalls Wilder books are often (at least here in Australia) considered a bit twee- maybe due to that TV series?!- but passages like these make me contemplate the places and ways humans have lived, the changes we’ve undergone and a time when children were allowed out into the night to run under the moon across a frozen lake. I don’t have children of my own so I can’t honestly say how I’d feel about it… but I do think that experience of such wildness is good for the soul, adult or child.

When I first had the idea of knitting this story into a tam, I wondered how to portray all the elements- the moonpath, the frozen lake, the wolf and the joy and panic of the girls. I found this wintery combination of yarns (Rowan Scottish and Yorkshire Tweeds, plus scraps of Shetland salvaged from an op-shop vest) in my stash and decided that the key was not to try to recreate the story literally (night-time, moon etc) but to pick out the elements that meant most- the light and snow, the lake, the wolf, the flight home and the love. I traded wolf colour for fox colour (sweet!) and hunted through various colourwork books, as well as improvising my own patterns, to make three border patterns that were 10 stitches across by 9 high, breaking them up with simple stripes.

Wolf in the frozen landscape

Running home across the lake

Heart

Border patterns

I used a twisted rib band to begin (I love the look but not the feel of corrugated rib) and followed the shaping from Mary Rowe’s Knitted Tams, adding a bit of length to accommodate my big head and using one of her lovely patterns for the wheel decreases. I have so much to learn about colour- for example, the hearts are so strong and the contrast between the white and grey so subtle that the snowflake kind of disappears, but I am excited to learn and I love it and am also very happy to have finished my first proper, not-just-a-scarf, all-my-own-ideas design : )

Ravelled here.

quiet time

The days between Christmas and New Year are my favourite time in Melbourne- it is a lovely time for long walks in the quiet streets and some solid, post-celebratory snoozing. A fitting accompaniment is the new(ish) Gillian Welch album, which I am enjoying getting to know… this one is a slow unfurling- in some ways very much like her earliest albums but more personal and less obviously “old-time”.

So far, I like these two best.

Am also listening to new Martha Tilston- with the exception of a few swirling festival tracks filled with way too much flute and djembe for me, I like it- though not as much as Of Milkmaids and Architects. She has a beautiful, bare voice and some lovely lyrics.

Wishing you an equally chilled-out break…

fo’s

I’ve been thinking that, for a knitters blog, I very rarely post photos of my finished objects… I guess it is mostly because I figure that the majority of people who read this are also knitters and will most probably see my projects as I pop them on Rav and so I get lazy with it. I also struggle with posting often about stuff I make. Not sure why- I like people liking my stuff as much as the next person but it somehow feels weird to put stuff up all the time. And I love commenting on blogs about the amazing things that people do and make but am not so comfortable receiving the same here. Weird. False modesty? Fear of criticism? Right now, I’m also heavier than I’ve ever been so I am not loving how I look in photos… I really need to get over that. But does anyone else struggle with this whole thing?!

So… some finished objects. All in one go so I get it done.

My favourite fo is something I saw in a beautiful book when I first started knitting… I dreamed of the day I’d be good enough to knit it and then put the photocopied pattern in my folder and forgot about it. Then, recently, I found out that my wonderful manager Judith also had a longstanding hankering to make it so we decided to do it together- needless to say, she is too busy to do any of her own knitting so it ended up just me.

Faroese lace shawl

Fringe and garter lace

It really wasn’t a complicated knit, although the instructions were very limited, but that just gave me the opportunity to test myself to see how much I’d really learned over the last seven years. And I did fine. It is a “true”, big-ass shawl that would keep a Faroese (and Melbourne) woman warm in the cold winter winds. The yarn is Rowanspun DK that was a cardigan in a previous life but that never really felt like it was in its true element. But this shawl is the perfect union of pattern and yarn and I love it.

Razor Shell

Above is a shawl/ stole made from yarn dyed in my first experiments in dyeing with plants that I made for the guild’s group exhibition (on here at the moment!). I was inspired to make something rhythmic like this but with a more simple feeling so I used a 12-stitch Razor Shell pattern to make an open chevron. I like the way the colours work together- in retrospect, I should have flipped the warmer shades the other way around to make them stand out more clearly but that’s learning.

Plant colours

A simple crochet cowl made to showcase the beautiful 12-ply alpaca bought from Tailored Strands during Knitcamp… super warm.

Alpaca cowl

Last is my Home Comforts cardigan- very unlike what I normally knit but I wanted to use a very simple pattern with large panels to highlight some very beautiful handspun yarn (probably Merino or Polwarth) that I bought at the guild last year. This is really homey, soft and organic and not very cool and I love that about it… so it is my stay-in-my-pyjamas-all-day-type garment that doesn’t really show itself in public!

Big and cuddly

And my final fo- and probably the one I am most proud of- is the tunic I am wearing in the above photos. I say most proud because I think of myself as a bad and slack sewer but I have worn this pretty much every day since craft camp two weeks ago- so it has made the grade in terms of being cool enough to wear and I love it. It was also my first experience of overlocking- instant love for linen edges!- and so has a special place in my heart. Guess what I’ve asked for for a joint birthday/Christmas present?!

harris tweed upcycling

My dad and I share a passion for Harris tweed… for him, that passion is rooted in  childhood memories of Geelong and western Victoria, where he, like many boys and men, wore jackets made from it, tailored either here or in the UK. For me, it was the incredible textures and colours of this handwoven fabric that took my breath away…

Colours

A brief visit to the Outer Hebrides last year gave us the chance to explore the fabled woven cloth a little bit more, which only fueled our respect for the culture and tradition of HT and those who have made it for over a century.

Weavers sample book

The industry has waxen and waned over that time; recently, Yorkshire businessman Brian Haggis bought Kenneth Mackenzie Ltd in Stornoway, which at the time accounted for about 95 per cent of HT production. Haggas then reduced all 8000 HT patterns down to four, refused to sell to any one else and started producing exclusively for his own garment production in China. His efforts led to the closure of several mills producing the yarns used in HT production and the redundancy of many millworkers and and did not bode well for the future for the industry. However, a combination of the efforts of another local company, Harris Tweed Hebrides, and a renewed interest from local and international clothing and interior designers seems to gently suggest the possibility of a more diverse and robust future… for a far more informed view on the subject, Mike Donald’s blog, the croft, is well worth reading. Having spent many years on the mainland, most recently as a publican in Glasgow, this native Hebridean has returned to Lewis to undertake a weavers training and posts regularly on HT as seen locally and around the globe and other aspects of island life. Also interviewed here. This interesting BBC article on HT is also worth a view if you’re keen.

So Dad and I inadvertently started collecting HT jackets, really because, despite being reclaimed by the odd Fitzroy dandy and worn at events like the Glasgow and Melbourne Tweed Rides (still can’t believe I missed ours!), mostly these jackets (often with outdated cuts or the odd moth-hole) languish in wardrobes or on opshop racks. Which seems too much of a shame.

After rapidly accumulating half a dozen, we realized we were going to have to face the philosophical dilemma of what to do with them. Some we found were old- whether obviously well-worn or made of patterns that I’d not seen in the new models for sale in Scotland.

Textures

Others showed no sign of wear but were incredibly beautiful in their patterns. And the majority were lovely (aren’t all HT lovely?!) but much more standard herringbones and barley twists.

Perhaps I am too pragmatic sometimes but my feeling is that things should be used, especially clothes and textiles. I’d much prefer that, when I’m dead and gone, someone will unravel one of my handknit jumpers to reuse the lovely yarn than leave it sitting in a jumper drawer gathering dust and moth poo. So we decided that those jackets that were either old and interesting, lovely and/or a good cut should be left untouched so that they could be used by my dad or someone else and that all others were fair game for upcycling into something else.

After lots of careful unpicking and lots of thought, last week I finally took the plunge and used some of dads share to cover some old cushions of his. Very simple, nothing fancy- but they are lovely together.

Harris Tweed cushions

Harris Tweed cushions

Tweed and velvet

Cosy

I have bigger plans for mine but, having only recently renewed my friendship with my sewing machine, it’s been good to start on something simple to discover how the fabric works! Now I need to explore interfacings and wadding to achieve the right amount of stiffness for the purpose… I’ll keep you posted on progress. I’m also planning to photograph those older and more unusual jackets so will post images here soon. And I should say that I am always on the lookout for more so would be thrilled if anyone wants to act as scout for me at their local opshops ; )

spring growth

Despite a year of almost entire neglect on our part (the shame!), our raggedy, unkempt spring garden still holds treasures…

Metrosideros excelsa; Feijoa

Malus domestica 'Pink Lady'

Prunus armeniaca; Apricot

Prunus armeniaca; Apricot

Our very first feijoas and apricots and a huge number of fruit on the multigrafted apple, although the said neglect created a window for coddling moth to get in so we may end up with mostly cookers. Instant karma on that one.

Allium sativum; Garlic

Allium vulgare; Garlic

Despite not using much garlic in the kitchen, I love having this particular one here as a reminder of our lovely place up at Marysville. It used to flower madly for long periods up there and was virtually the only thing standing when we visited the land after the huge fires that wiped out so much life… It is the flowers that really bring back memories of the place but it’ll be my first harvest of the bulbs this year so I’ll report back on flavour : )

The great thing about getting into dyeing with plants is you start to see the good in having lots of weeds! Dandelion leaves and roots yield colour, as does fennel and plenty of other unwanted plants. I just wish couch and kikuyu were useful for something ; )

Taraxacum officinale; Dandelion

And there are new uses for the parts of plants that you’d normally chuck in the compost- the base of a rhubarb stem (the part with the little wings that wrap around the adjoining stalks) can apparently be used as a mordant, as can sorrel, which grows quicker than I can eat it and is often unappealing because of the slug slime on it!

Rumex acetosa: Sorrel

I also scored a curry tree at a school fete recently and am excited to be able to pick my own fresh leaves! What I really can’t wait for is next autumn when we are finally going to dig up the rest of the concrete and make the garden proper- curved beds, more fruit trees (blood plum, mulberry and lemonade) and a little space for a fire drum… but, for now, I am thrilled that some things are thriving. So what is growing in your garden?