Month: June 2006

Johanna comes over to the dark side
Originally uploaded by plainsight.

Today marks a scary, yet momentous day in my life. For the first time ever, I thought to myself, “gee, I can’t wait untill I get some free time so that I can knit,” honestly this is what I thought. And then, to top it off, I thought, “hey, this is a whole new step for me, I should blog about this” Actually, I don’t know who wouldn’t be excited, I am working on a great halter top design that Amy came up with and I really want to sport it on my upcoming trip to the Dominican republic, so I’ve become a knitting machine. Only too soon I will be a knitting/crocheting/blogging fiend! Hey, you gotta have a dream, right?

My cousin Johanna, a textile design student at the University of Kansas, who’s interning with me this summer, has a couple of exciting things coming up.

This weekend, she’s giving a demonstration of indigo dyeing at The Texile Museum in Washington DC–the demonstration begins at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, July 1, and includes a tour of indigo pieces at the museum. It’s been really fun to watch her prepare for her demo. She’s sewn fabric swatches with shibori techniques, and created beautiful patterns. This afternoon, we’re going to experiment with dyeing some yarn. (Johanna’s promised to post about the demonstration, with pictures, after it’s all over.)

On July 8th, she is taking off for 10 days with other art students from KU to go teach art in an orphanage in the Dominican Republic. She’s bringing all sorts of supplies, and the group is looking for donations so they can leave more art supplies at the orphanage.

The newspaper in her college town of Lawrence, Kansas, has written an article about the trip.

Technorati Tags:
travel, orphanage, dominican republic, children, art, indigo, textiles

Blogger Amelia S. got a tour of the cotton dyeing facility at Elmore-Pisgah. She said “it was better than candyland,” and she’s got great pictures on her blog.

Technorati Tags:
crochet, yarn, dyeing, cotton, elmore-pisgah

Circles Salon is hundreds of miles away, near Boston, and I have never even been there, but from what I read about them, it’s the yarn store of my dreams. They have carefully chosen yarns that emphasize the artisan, support the communities the fiber comes from, and consider the environmental impact of their creation. They have a playroom with yarn and projects for kids, they have a “salon” for hanging out and knitting, and they have a yarn cooperative that is morphing into, basically, a community owned store. How cool is that? We were all talking about the ideal yarn store at the Savory knitting group last night, and how we’d like to see it appear close to us… Perhaps Circles will consider franchising…

Technorati Tags:
knitting, cotton fleece, yarn store, boston, cooperative, environment

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Map Your Yarn Shop

With the summer travel season upon us–many folks will be looking to plan their road trips around their yarn shopping find an LYS in their vacation spot. A few new resources have just popped up.

MapMuse is gettng a lot of buzz today on e-mail lists probably due to a plug by crocheter Carol Alexander. This frappr-esque site shows you a geographical map with yarn shops listed. You can also see a list view. The initial stores were supplied by the folks at MapMuse–but they quickly added a feature that allows visitors to contribute site listings, so their directory has grown. It appears that you can’t search by zip code alone, but plugging in a city and state brings up a list of nearby stores. They also have pre-fab searches for major metropolitan areas. Searches in Seattle, WA and Washington, DC returned a very large geographical area. This might prove confusing if you didn’t know the area you were searching. I would appreciate a feature common to many online yellow pages which allows you to restrict your search to a geographical limit of a given number of miles.

Another web option is Google’s “local” interface–type in “yarn store” and a zip code or city and state and you’ll get a list–perhaps not as comprehensive as mapmuse because it doesn’t have the benefit of user input.

Luddites among us and those who travel without access to those pesky Internets will be pleased to know about another new arrival. The Knitters and Crocheter’s Travel Guide from Direction Press. (It also has listings for spinning and weaving resources.) This is a yellow pages of sorts–yarn stores can have listings or ads, and it’s organized geographically. Publisher Michelle Merin and her staff searched the country and the web do develop the most complete listing possible. For every state there are maps, ads and listings as well as a guild page that includes dates and times of local meetings. It’s a hefty tome–so it’s probably better suited for car travel than slipping in a carry-on. Nonetheless, I certainly intend to take this with me on my summer trip to the midwest.

Technorati Tags:
knitting, crochet, book, review, travel

0624061652
Originally uploaded by plainsight.

Doesn’t it make sense to be knitting socks while getting a pedicure? Sock picture to follow…

Technorati Tags:
knitting, socks, pedicure, cascade fixation, sock knitting

Here’s a sneak peek at a tube top (with optional straps) that I’m designing for a class I’m teaching in August. I’ll post a photo of the whole thing after I figure out what I’m going to do with the pattern…

In other news, I leaned up against my storm door today and it shattered slicing my wrist on the side… A tetanus shot and some skin glue (after x-rays to see if there was any “debris” in there) and I’m doing fine…

It’s pretty pathetic, but when it happened, one of my first thoughts was–“damn, I hope this doesn’t keep me from knitting!” (or crocheting, more accurately, I’ve got projects promised to both Kim and Shannon, and I wouldn’t want to dissapoint.) Also, tonight is the night of my favorite monthly knitting group at Savory here in Takoma park–it’s the biggest, rowdiest group I attend, and I wouldn’t want to miss it. I won’t.

Technorati Tags:

knitting, patterns, cotton fleece

Cat Bordhi may have been the first to knit a treehouse, but folks in London have recently knit an entire house out of unusual building materials.

Part performance art, part architectural challenge–local women spent weeks preparing the pieces using large specially made needles and rope, plastic bags, yarn and other fibers. On June 17th, they knitted the pieces to the scaffolding structure wearing hard hats and reflective vests. The show was part of an Architectural Festival that takes place annually in the city.

Technorati Tags:
knitting, architecture, london, building

Hi, I’m Johanna Buschmann. I’m Amy’s cousin and for the summer I’m her intern as well. Im living in Takoma Park with her, learning all that I can about knitting, crochet, and how to blog like a pro. Amy’s letting me do some reviews, so finally I am getting a chance to tell the world all of my thoughts and opinions!

Sexy Little Knits

When I heard about swimsuit designer, Ashley Paige’s new book “Sexy Little Knits” I thought ” there’s a knit pattern that wants me to put mohair where?” Well, although I still think that a pair of mohair panties is fairly impractical, this book is full of plenty of great designs.

The designs are fun and summery with a strong 70’s vibe. And despite the title, the book does not just boast teeny-weeny bikini’s (although there are several). Some of my favorite designs are from the chapter “Sunshine, Good Vibes” I love the Little Mermaid Strapless top, a long, form fitting tube top with a crocheted ruffle on the edge. Another fave is the Heart Babydoll Halter Dress, which boasts row of cute knitted hearts.

The patterns seem fairly straightforward perhaps a bit challenging for a novice such as myself, but definitely doable. One aspect that is really great about this book is how the designs are not strictly knit or crochet. Of the 24 designs six are crochet and what’s even cooler for all of you crochet lovers out there is that most of the designs actually combine both knit and crochet. All in all I’m really excited about this book, sure there are some patterns that are a little too sexy and impractical, even for an adventurous fashionista such as myself, but I definitely see some cute bikini tops and cool summer dresses in my immediate future.

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Adorn

Amy and I picked up the first issue of a great new magazine from the folks at Vogue, called “Adorn: the crafty girl’s guide to embellishing life.” This magazine is great. It is full of ideas for embellishing everything from your clothing and accessories to your pillows and plates.

As a textile artist I loved that the magazine featured an article that shows how to transform a plain white dress into a stylish, blue, Calvin Klein knock-off with a cool spray dye called Simply Spray soft fabric paint. Uh-oh, I smell a project in the future, actually, Amy’s already bought a couple cans for us to try out, so we will report on it soon.

Of course, one of the things we really loved about the mag is that it dedicated an entire section to crochet! The projects that it shows feature a simple circular crochet pattern that they suggest you can put on anything from your earrings to your sandles. It includes basic crochet instructions and clear illustrations. I think that this article alone garuntees that we will be buying the next issue.

Not only does “Adorn” have some good DIY projects but it also features several interesting/crafty books and cool craft stores around the country.

Technorati Tags:
crochet, knitting, book, fashion, vogue

You might think I haven’t been knitting or crocheting much, as I haven’t posted about any projects lately… Actually, I’ve been really busy but yarn companies usually don’t want you to post pictures of designs until they’ve published them…

So, I can now show you this wrap I did for Blue Sky Alpacas. I got to make it twice, first in Alpaca Silk, which was lovely, and second, in Royal–which was like crocheting with clouds. The softest, most light-weight stuff I’ve ever worked with. Amazing. (And expensive.)

This is one project I’ll probably make again for myself–it was fun and pretty fast–I was inspired by all the research into modular crochet that I was doing, but all of the original modular crochet designs Judith Copeland created were pull-overs, so I modified the concept for an open-front garment…

Thanks so much to Deneen, Maria and Darlene for doing an amazing job testing the pattern–if you’ve got pictures of your versions you’d like to post, I’ll link to them here!

More to come…