Making time

I'm constantly moaning to myself that I don't have enough time to make all the things that I want to make. It hasn't escaped me that this is because I spend a lot of time in front of the TV. I keep telling myself that this has to stop; but as much as I love making things, sitting in front of the TV is just easier. After a day of brain-straining work like editing, sitting and staring mindlessly at moving pictures appeals strongly.

Two Fridays ago, though, there was nothing on the TV and I really couldn't face re-watching a DVD that I've watched several times already (namely any Jane Austen adaptation). So instead I got out a quilt that I've been meaning to finish. I love Japanese fabrics, and this is about the fourth quilt, and the most recent, that I've started which uses them. None of the others is finished either. (The first I started was so enormous that I don't think I'll ever be able to lay it out and sandwich it together unless I borrow someone's ballroom, or maybe a sailmaker's loft.)

The design is by Ruth van Haeff and is from Handmade Style: Quilt by Murdoch Books.

I made the top of this one about six years ago, and the backing about two years ago, then stopped where I normally stop – at the thought of having to put it all together then quilt it. This is a throw-size quilt, though, so it's just small enough to be assembled on my table, which takes a lot of the tedium out of the process.

I marked out the quilting design on Friday night, pinned the lot together on Saturday morning, then spent an enjoyable few hours stitching away to the accompaniment of George Michael and the Buena Vista Social Club. I pretty soon got a blister and quite sore fingers, but as it hurt even more whenever I came back to it after a break, I decided just to sew through the pain. (Yeah, I'm hard).

I did a bit more to the quilting most nights last week (much of it in front of the TV, killing two recreational birds with one stone and making me feel less guilty about watching the box). Last night I attached the binding, and voilà, one more unfinished project finished.

I'm now inspired to tackle another neglected quilting project – once my blisters have healed.

Sorted — sort of

One of the annoying things about all my craft supplies is that they're not organised. Both yarn and fabric live in three different places, none of which is logically arranged, and my general sewing stuff lives mostly – but not entirely – in two drawers. Plus there are assorted bits and pieces – beading equipment, cutting mats, patterns, ribbons and plenty more – stashed throughout the house. The result is a lot of frustrating and messy rummaging whenever I want to do anything, which of course exacerbates my constant procrastination problem.

Yesterday I decided to take in hand one small but frequently used section of it: my knitting needles, of which I have a lot. They had been stored in three different places – how sensible! Some were randomly scattered, others still in their packets, some in a plastic box (I don't like plastic storage; it's practical, yes, but not pretty, especially the box in question, which was designed to hold one's toothbrush and toothpaste).

Now they, plus accessories such as needle gauges, cable needles and stitch holders, as well as my crochet hooks, are all here:

 

When it's not in use I can roll it up quite compactly. The roll doesn't fit some of the other doodads, such as the cables and tags for my interchangeable needle tips, but I made a matchy-matchy zippered pouch for them. 




That leaves my fixed circular needles, the ones you can't unscrew, which are a bit more of a problem. I haven't yet come up with anything that really works for these, so that's a problem for another day. In the meantime, a small section of the craft hoard is sorted.

That feels better.

Craft withdrawal

There hasn’t been much craft going on around my way for the last couple of months. There hasn’t been much exercise, proper nutrition or socialising either, all due to a huge edit I've been doing. That's done now though, to my relief, and as soon as it was finished I headed straight for the craft. Although I've done some mindless knitting in front the of the TV, and have finished a simple scarf for my friend Siobhan, I haven't done anything that required planning or more than half a brain, and I've been missing it. 

First up was finishing off the chunky pinkish-purple lace scarf I started at Easter. I made two halves the same — lace ends and a 1x1 rib for the central part — intending to graft the two pieces together along the middle of the scarf. In my usual fashion I didn't bother researching this technique until the two bits were completed. Then I discovered that it's apparently quite hard to graft 1x1 rib, especially if you want it to be invisible. Bugger.


Despite that I did a couple of test swatches in 1x1 rib and attempted to graft them together. Within five minutes it became apparent that this was beyond me, so I ended up doing a three-needle cast-off to join the two pieces. Not ideal, but better than having another unfinished project on my hands. 


And while I love the result as a knitted object, I don't love it on me. Note to self: opposites attract. Chunky knits look good on skinny chicks. Not on me. On me, finer yarns work better. If I remember this, I'll waste much less time and yarn making things that don't really suit me.

On the plus side, though, it's warm. I'm going to the Blue Mountains for the weekend soon and this is the first thing I will pack. I still love this pattern though and I might make it in a finer yarn. One day. 


Then a couple of weekends ago I went to the annual craft fair at Darling Harbour. I went in suffering craft withdrawal and came out suffering craft overload and pulsating retinas due to the large number of migraine-inducingly bright quilts on display. I also came out with two more lots of yarn, one of which, a silk from Kaalund Yarns, I've already crocheted up into yet another scarf. This project doesn't really belong in this blog — it's finished, after all — but I'm pretty chuffed with myself for completing it so quickly. That's enough pink scarves for the moment, though!

The pattern is one row of double-treble clusters and three rows of double crochet.

The other skein of yarn is a peacock-coloured laceweight silk. I want to make a lace shawl out of that, despite my previous misadventures with lace, but that's a longer-term project. Much longer.

When in doubt, read the instructions

Winter is my favourite season by far. The more clothes I'm wearing, the happier I am. Boots, socks, coats, gloves, scarves – especially scarves. I like my clothes to fly well under the radar; I'm not confident with colour or the way I look, so I wear mostly black, but in winter I like to spice it up with a burst of colour in the form of a scarf.

With the weather cooling down here now, I want more scarves, so I've dropped the unfinished projects and the things I've been making for for other people. Right now it's me, me, me, sweetie.

The latest project is a lace scarf in lovely Malabrigo yarn that I bought last winter, in the appropriately named shade of Hollyhock.

It's a thickish (maybe 10-ply/Aran or so) single-ply wool yarn with
a lovely felt-like feel to it. I'm knitting it on 6mm needles.

 I started it on Easter Thursday in preparation for a weekend away. Being impatient, I didn't test out the pattern first, even though it was a new one, and much more complicated than any I'd tried before.

This, predictably, backfired on me. After two days of pretty solid knitting I had about 30 centimetres done. It wasn't right, though. The repeats kept going wonky and I couldn't work out why – until I realised I'd simply skipped part of the pattern. As my father used to say: 'When in doubt, read the instructions'.

'Do you think it's worth it?' my mother said, as she watched me rip back all but the first six rows and start again. And later: 'I think I'd give up if I were you.'

I didn't, though. I finished one end and am now doing the other separately, so they'll be symmetrical. I'll do stocking stitch or rib for the central section – I need to have a play and see what looks best – then graft them together. I don't think I'll block the whole thing as I really like the honeycomb effect, but I will block the very ends just so they don't curl up.

The pattern is a 16-row repeat called Leaf Lace and the idea for the scarf came from one
that took my eye on the highly distracting Purlbee site, which is full of lovely projects.

'How many scarves do you need?' a friend once asked me. I think her reasoning was that you've only got one neck, so you only need one scarf – but if I followed that kind of logic I'd only have one pair of undies. I think that with scarves, as with undies, more is more. Every couple of years I have a cull, and give to charity the scarves that have gone out of favour. I like knitting scarves as they are an achievable project for the easily bored and distracted (like me), you can generally do them in front of the telly or on the bus, and they give you a chance to try new patterns and new yarns without having to shell out masses of money.

And they make great presents, when I can stop thinking about myself.

Perfectionism vs pragmatism

Another project I've just resurrected is a scarf I made last winter. Although it was nominally completed, I've never worn it because I couldn't quite get the finishing touches right. I thought I'd finished it once, then I tried to block it. Blocking, for non-knitters, is a technique often used for lace knitting. Unblocked lace can tend to look like an old dishrag, and blocking makes the lace pattern open up nicely so that it's more distinctive. To do it, you wet the finished knitting, stretch the bejesus out of it, pin it out on the floor while it's damp and then let it dry.  

What it will look  like if I ever get around to blocking it.
I did this by sticky taping the scarf to the table.
If only real blocking were that easy.

What blocking also does, sometimes, is make the thing about twice as long as you thought it would be. So it was with this scarf. Once I'd laboriously blocked it, it ended up more than three metres long. I unpinned it and ripped it back to a less stupid length, but I still didn't know what to do with the ends. Fringing, a different lace pattern? I tried two different types of fringing but the ends kept curling up and looking stupid, and I couldn't think of how to prevent this other than by adding beads to the fringe, which I knew would just clack about frantically every time I moved and irritate the hell out of me, so I chucked it in the knitting basket and ignored it for a year. 

Last night it got to me, so I just decided to fix it as best I could. With one eye on Paper Giants on the telly* and another on the scarf, I undid the fringing, ripped back the curling ends and cast them off again. Then I replaced the fringing. 

Fringed but as yet unblocked.

Neat edges! Ever since I learnt that you can neaten your edges
by slipping the first stitch of every row, that's what I've done.
It doesn't matter on edges that you won't see, such as in the seams of a garment,
but it's nice for edges that are on show. 

 

The scarf still not the way I wanted it to be, but I just can't get it to match the idealised but vague mental picture I've got of it. However, a scarf around the neck is worth several in the knitting basket, and I really like the the stitch pattern and the yarn (Filatura di Crosa Multicolour, a mohair with subtly morphing colours). 

 I might or might not get around to blocking it again, but in the meantime, I'm going to wear it just so I can tick another project off the list. Roll on, winter!



* I enjoyed Paper Giants, but were the 1970s really that groovy and daggily glamorous? Maybe they were if you worked at Cleo and got to photograph nude actors and write articles that would make religious conservatives rant themselves into non-existence. But if you were a brainy, bookish teenage girl growing up amid the beach culture of the Central Coast … not so much.

The rewards of tidiness

I’m neither tidy nor untidy. I seem to be a 50–50 hybrid of my very untidy father and my exactly-the-opposite mother. I often let things pile up a bit, but never to the extent that I can't invite friends in unexpectedly because the place looks as though junkies have ransacked it or a rubbish truck has overturned in the kitchen. I don’t like tidying up, but I hate clutter and disorder too — or at least the visible sort. What goes on in cupboards and drawers, out of my sight, rarely bothers me.

About three years ago I knitted myself a lace scarf in a fine variegated yarn, in sombre tones of black, dark red, charcoal and purple. I absolutely loved it and used to wear it all the time in winter. Then, a year or two ago, I lost it. One day it was there, around my neck; the next it wasn't. I looked everywhere, but couldn't find it. I figured it had slipped off or been left behind somewhere; so, as it was obviously gone, I decided to just hope that someone else had found it and was enjoying it. 

Yesterday, I took it into my head to sort out the Chest of Shame — the big wooden box into which craft around here goes to die, or at least to be ignored for a decade or so. I'd pulled a heap of stuff out of it a couple of weeks ago, to show a suitably incredulous friend the extent to which the unfinished projects have got out of hand, and yesterday the mess got to me. In the process of tidying up I scrabbled about behind the chest, and found a few useful odds and ends — plus the lost scarf. I'd looked in every logical place in the house and a few illogical ones too — but it had never occurred to me to look behind the chest. Finding that scarf totally made my day. Even the discovery that bits of it had been fairly enthusiastically chewed by marauding micro-vermin couldn't dampen my joy. I don't think I've got any of the same yarn left over to repair it with, so I'll darn it with something else and not let the repairs worry me. I'm just really glad to have it back.

Something else I found was a linen skirt, in a deep burgundy shade which is the nearest I get to flamboyant. I think I started it last summer, and I'd completely forgotten about it. It was finished except for the waistband. It fits okay, it looks okay; I've no idea why I abandoned it. I found the leftover fabric, too, so immediately made it a waistband. Then I decided to experiment. One of the disadvantages of linen, if you care to look at it that way, is that it creases extravagantly. I love wearing it so much — it's so cool and swishy and perfect for Sydney's hot, humid summers — that I don't care. I figure all those creases are a sign of quality, and should be worn insouciantly. 

I like deliberately creased fabrics, too, and decided to have a go at really hammering some creases into this linen skirt, just to see what would happen. I saturated it with hot water, squeezed most of it out, pleated it roughly by hand, twisted it into a pretzel shape, trussed it up in a lingerie bag then chucked it into the tumble-dryer and left it thumping around in there for an ecologically unjustifiable length of time.

I wore it last night and by the end of the night the creases had pretty much dropped out. Turns out that linen is easy to crease unintentionally and hard to crease deliberately. Go figure. Still, I've decided I might give up ironing linen skirts and crease them intentionally all the time. Less housework can only be a good thing. Except I might tidy up more often. You never know what you'll find.

Morris Mania

I've been pretty obsessed with quilting over the last couple of weeks, and have just finished a quilt for my friend Diana. It was meant to be her birthday present last year, but I didn't get it done in time. I didn't get it done in time for her graduation in December either, but it's finished now. Her birthday is not until May but, never having been able to delay gratification even slightly, I've given it to her early (or late, depending on how you look at it).

The fabrics are William Morris reproductions that I bought at least twelve years ago. I've always loved Morris designs and I had more than forty different prints in mostly autumn tones that I was saving for a special quilt. I'd toyed with ideas for various quilt patterns over the years, but none seemed quite right. About three years ago I cut up some of the fabric to make a simple quilt of large squares, laid them out on the floor to see the result – and hated it. Plan B was to recycle some of them, broken up by plain fabric, into a quilt for my friend Angela. She and I both liked the result – plain but effective.

That still left me with a whole lot of both cut and uncut fabrics. Then Kathy Doughty of Material Obsession kindly gave me a pattern that I knew instantly would be perfect. It's just a random arrangement of squares in three different sizes. It works well with the Morris fabrics, despite their busyness.

My favourite of all the fabrics is the one with the flame-coloured
sinuous pattern in the centre.

I originally wanted to hand quilt it with a rambling, Morris-esque floral pattern, but for once I realised my own limitations and decided that was just never going to happen. Instead I got it professionally machine quilted by Belinda Betts, who did a lovely job for a very reasonable fee. It now sits on the arm of my sofa all year round and I totally love myself sick every time I look at it. It's the only quilt I've made so far that I'm completely happy with.

The border of the backing, which is the only fabric
quiet enough to show up the nice quilting.

 

Even after that I still had yet more Morris fabric, so I cut out quarter-circles for Diana's quilt. The original layout was a lot busier than the one below and the fabrics ended up fighting each other. I pared it back to this variation on the Drunkard's Path pattern (the choice of which is not meant as any reflection on Diana's habits!).

The binding

Two of my favourite patches of red

 

The backing fabrics. The khaki one is the only fabric in the quilt that isn't Morris.

Working out the pattern for the border involved a lot of mathematical cogitation and puzzled prodding of the calculator, and even more trial and error in pencilling on, then rubbing off, various lines until I got them right (more by accident than design; it felt a bit like the quilting equivalent of infinite numbers of typing monkeys eventually bringing forth Shakespeare.) My stitches got a bit smaller in the border, but that's okay. Quilting the border only took a couple of evenings, and was quite enjoyable.

I'm still left with the remaining quarter circles, which I intend to make into a quilt  resembling one on Elinor's bed in the Emma Thompson film of Sense and Sensibility. (Are there any totally tragic and/or sharp-eyed Jane Austen/quilting fans out there who know the one I mean?)

Not even that project will exhaust my supply of Morris fabrics, though. But I reckon I might have done enough Morris-themed quilts for now.

Quilting until your fingers blister

It's not only unfinished knitting projects that I have in abundance. Oh, no! There are several unfinished quilts, too. Some are half-quilted, others have the top finished but haven't yet been sandwiched together with the backing and batting, and still others consist of cut-out pieces waiting to be sewn together.

While I like the piecing aspect of patchwork, and usually get the component bits sewn up pretty promptly, I lag when it comes to putting it all together. The process of laying the various layers out on the floor, smoothing them out nicely, centring them and then grubbing about on the floor with nose down and bum up while safety-pinning them all in place (trying not to pin the whole shebang to the carpet in the process) is frankly a drag, especially in a small flat. One day, I tell myself, I will have a whole room devoted to craft, with a massive table on which I could lay out quilts of quite unwieldy hugeness. But in the meantime, procrastination rules.

On Sunday I dug a quilt out and had another go at it. This is not the oldest of my unfinished quilts by any means – I started it only a couple of years ago, so it's positively youthful by my standards  – but it's for a not-far-off occasion, and I'm at last feeling some urgency about it.

First I needed to mark all the quilting lines on the top. Then I marked out a right-angled cross affair on the floor so that I could centre the back, which has a panel in the middle. Then I sandwiched all the layers together, and lo, if it wasn't like doing my tax or going to the dentist – not fun, sure, but a whole lot less painful than I expected or remembered. I did need to go and sit on the balcony for a while in the middle of the process, to let the blood drain out of my head and back to the rest of me, but I finished it in a couple of hours. As with the tax and the dentist, relief and a sense of achievement followed.

I started quilting it that night too. I love the look of hand quilting, but I'm not all that enamoured of the process. I don't mind it, so long as it doesn't take too long, but I can't imagine ever making an heirloom quilt with an intricate pattern of tiny stitches. Life, my attention span and my temper are all too short. I'm quilting this one with quite long stitches, partly for expedience, and partly because I'm sewing through four layers (the top is appliquéd) with No 5 pearl cotton, which is thick and takes a fair bit of dragging through the fabric, as I'm finding. My fingers are quite sore from four days of on-and-off quilting, but I'd rather put up with the pain than use a thimble – they are just too cumbersome and I've never been able to get used to them. I can't use a quilting hoop either, so I sew with the quilt flat on the dining table.

What do you think, dear readers – enough quilting, or should I echo some of the lines
and do more? Comments and opinions welcome.

The stitches are getting a bit smaller as I go along and get used to the rhythm, but that's okay. I like the way it's turning out – both the rustic look of the stitching and especially the fact that it's looking closer to finished. I've been working from home most of this week, allegedly – in truth I've been ducking out to do some sneaky quilting from time to time. I still need to decide what to do in the border, but at least now I feel confident that the worst is over and it will be finished in time. More photos once it's all done.

Just before I wrote this post I was idly examining my sore fingers, and found that they are actually blistered. Does quilting until your fingers blister put you in the realm of extreme craft? I'd like to think so.

Brand new year, same old procrastination problem

If only I'd made a new year's resolution to neglect my blog. It would have been the sole new year's resolution in living memory that I've kept. This blog could be in danger of becoming my latest unfinished project (an irony too shaming to be borne).

Since I last posted I've started more new projects without finishing any of the old ones – why break the habit of a lifetime now? – although there's not much photographic evidence of any of them as yet. I've got one very large (and I think rather exciting) new project on the go, which I'm not supposed to blab about yet, so more on that later. Suffice to say that that's the main thing keeping me away from the blog recently.

That and work. I could get so much more done if I didn't have to go out and earn. That's one reason I like period dramas so much – the ladies seem to spend all their time swanning about in fetching frocks and doing craft. Never mind the likelihood of dying in your twenties from consumption or a two-day labour; before you popped your clogs prematurely, you'd at least have time to do a whole lot of quality needlework. Oh, the bliss. I've got all the right accomplishments for the wrong century.

The first new project that I've finished lately is a scarf for a friend's 50th, in Paton's Jet and 1x1 rib in two-row stripes. Subdued but rather handsome, I think. I hope he does too.

For the life of me I couldn't style this thing. I took about forty shots before I got this.
Yes, this is the best of them. Note to self: don't give up the day job to become a photographer.

And the insomnia project is also finished.

Despite my initial resolve, I ended up doing most of this in daylight. I did do some of it at night, with varying degrees of success. Trying to knit in only ambient light (that is, the light from the carpark next door) on the balcony at three am, while unable to sleep due to the insufferable heatwave we had about a month ago, resulted in a big fat mess of dropped stitches and general wrongness that all had to be unpicked in the cruel light of day. And then I ran out of the very expensive cashmere yarn about two centimetres from the end and had to buy more. Annoyance.

But the result is pleasing, I think – even if the styling, once again, leaves much to be desired. Still, I'm sure it will look much better on a human being than plonked awkwardly on the table.

The yarn is Morris & Sons cashmere. It's undyed. The colours you see are those of the goats who used to own it, and one of the brown skeins was slightly darker than the others, but I like that there is some natural variation to link it back to the animal that it came from.

This yarn was just lovely to knit with; so soft it has to be felt to be believed. Although 'felt' seems an inadequate word. 'Fondled' is much better.*

Scarves are great for in front of the telly (I'm watching The Tudors at the moment, and alternating between admiring the costumes and tutting at the often frankly silly dialogue), but now I need to get back to a real unfinished project – some quilting this time – as I'm on a deadline.  


* I just looked up synonyms for 'fondle,' and two of the suggestions were 'embosom' and 'inarm'. Don't you just love English? This is why I like working with words; there are so many interesting ones around that even after 22 years as an editor, I still come across unfamiliar terms all the time. (Especially when reading John Banville. He makes me feel like Uma Thurman's character in The Truth About Cats and Dogs, in the scene where she's reading two books at once: the book she's reading, and a dictionary so that she can understand the book she's reading. Try The Untouchable and see what I mean.)

Knitting in the dark

It's been a couple of months between posts, but I'm starting off a new year of craft with an experiment: knitting in the middle of the night. No, the summer heat has not turned me; it's an anti-insomnia strategy. My usual response to insomnia is simply to lie there waiting for sleep to come. As I've been a rubbish sleeper all my life, clearly this isn't working.

Recently I read that chanting 'Om' to yourself can be effective (not aloud; that kind of thing performed in the middle of the night can get you a reputation as your building's resident weirdo). The idea is, presumably, that if you do it long enough you will bore yourself back to sleep. I've given it a go and it's HARD (and boring. And pointless. My mind keeps wandering to more interesting thoughts). Another strategy I've read about is to get up and do something, which is supposed to help break the sleeplessness cycle. I tried this a couple of times a few months ago, getting up and knitting for half an hour or so. That was much more enjoyable than silent chanting, and much more effective than lying there hoping in vain that cruel sleep might relent and take me.

So I'm going to give it another go. It needs to be something that can be done in dim light (as bright lights will persuade one's already confused bodyclock that it's daytime). That means pale colours. It also needs to be easy enough for a semi-fuddled brain to grasp, which means a simple pattern. I reckon this might be it:

This is a scarf that a friend requested, in beautifully soft cashmere. I'm not being disingenuous when I say it's easy; although it looks busy, it's just some cabling every fourth row. I tested it while watching Spooks last night, and as I managed to understand the plot machinations while not putting a stitch wrong, I reckon it's simple enough to do while only semi-conscious.

I knitted this much of the scarf in daylight, as I wanted to test out the pattern and also make sure its future owner liked it. But now that it's been approved, this project will be strictly nocturnal until I've finished it.

How long does it take an insomniac to knit a scarf? I'll tell you in a few weeks (or a few days, depending on how badly I'm sleeping).