First off, I apologize for not posting last week. I had forgotten that the Greenwood library would be closed during the early part of the week, which meant I couldn't upload a new post (not enough bandwidth at home). In my last post, I mentioned new projects I'd started for the end of the year, particularly a couple of quilts. The other thing that's been on the cusp of being started for a couple of months is a crocheted blanket. I've mentioned before my less-than-enthusiastic feelings about crochet until I stumbled upon Lucy of Attic 24 a few years ago. Hers is one of the first blogs I ever saw and still my favourite. Because of her wonderful sense of colour and her warm-light-filled photography that shows off her crochet to huge advantage, I've changed my mind about crochet. I haven't produced much so far, but you might remember this frothy collection of granny squares, still unfinished but very much in the unfinished but not abandoned category. This past summer Lucy revealed a gorgeous crocheted blanket that she calls Coast Ripple, the colours (blues, blue-greens, olive and pale greens, creams, and sandy shades) referring to the Dorset beachscape of her childhood. I was just as swept away by this project as the (literally) hundreds of other people who wrote comments on that blog post, but as I said in my comment, the colours I could see in my mind's eye for my own version of this blanket were entirely different: fiery reds and rich deep blues, with dark neutrals for contrast.
In the meantime, I was distracted by yet another of Lucy's crocheted blankets, one that she calls Cottage Ripple. I liked the variety of two rows of one crochet stitch, followed by two rows of a different one, and so on back and forth. And I loved the riotous colour scheme she was using. But I was short on the clear brights she used for that project, especially in lighter shades, so decided I had to acquire more yarn to round out what I had. I took advantage of our trip to Vancouver in November to round out what I had in my stash. My dear husband and I had a day to spend roaming the city, and after a morning of Granville Island we drove back across the Lions Gate Bridge and into West Vancouver. It was a crisp, cold day but as the afternoon deepened, the light on the ocean and the freighters and Stanley Park and Mount Baker and the apartments in Ambleside became richer and richer. We drove to Dundarave and my dh set up his easel out at the end of the pier just as the spectacular sunset bathed the sea and everything else in an incredible golden light.
He's not happy with the painting and lost a lovely drawing pen off the pier into the drink while packing up his easel and paints. But he enjoyed the process.
While he painted, I walked a couple of blocks up from the beach and went into the Knit and Stitch Shoppe (no website, hence I can't give you a link), a Dundarave institution and a cheerfully chaotic place to while away an hour. I found some bright yarns in Cascade Yarns 220 series and bought a skein in each of seven or eight colours.
Last week I began to swatch for this project in order to test out the colours and to learn the stitch sequence. And this is what I ended up with: I hated it.
Too bright, too garish, too unharmonious, too linear. No good. So I changed my mind yet again, and decided to return to my starting point, which was the ripple blanket. I craved the more sophisticated and sombre palette I had imagined for this piece, and I wanted the undulating ripples rather than straight-line stripes. Rather than buy new yarn, my plan was to dive into my yarn stash for what I needed. However. When I dove, I discovered that my yarn stash, while still several bins strong, now includes almost nothing in either the blue or red categories, at least not in the true saturated solids I wanted for this project. All had been used in other projects. So if I was going to continue I had to buy more yarn. Again. I was by now so enthralled by the image in my mind of how this blanket could turn out that buying more yarn became inevitable. So I got online to visit my favourite local yarn store (more like a "regional" yarn store, since it's two hours away) and with a few mouse clicks had chosen nine new yarns in vivid reds and blues. I'm still waiting for those yarns to arrive in the mail, but in the meantime have been able to begin my blanket. I did as Lucy suggested and made another swatch to test colours and learn the stitch sequence and I was happy enough with the results to start for real.
So last week I finally got started. I carefully crocheted a foundation chain of 171 stitches (a multiple of 14, plus 3, as stipulated in Lucy's instructions), marking off every twenty stitches with a safety pin. I counted three times to be sure. And then I began the foundation row of the stitch pattern. This was a very time-consuming, frustrating, and confusing process: it helped a little bit to know that beginning crocheters often have a lot of trouble with this setup row but it took literally hours to do. And when I was getting close to the end it was obvious that I'd made a mistake somewhere: I was four or five chain stitches short of what I needed in order to make the stitch pattern finish up correctly. There was NO WAY, however, that I was going to take it all out and start again. So I cheated. I undid the knot in the first chain stitch, slipped my hook through a loop that presented itself, and chained another four or five stitches with the loose tail and fastened off. And finished my setup row. And honestly? I defy anyone to find either my initial mistakes in the setup row or my extra fixit stitches. Hah. From this point on, the crochet has been been a pleasure. I'm still making mistakes, but at least the mistakes reveal themselves fairly soon after I've made them, when I see that my next 14-stitch pattern repeat doesn't come out as it should. All I need to be able to do is count up to four, but every row I seem to make some error or other, working one decrease or increase when I need two, for instance. But I'm on row eleven now, and I feel in control and full of happy anticipation of the next few colour changes.
This is not a planned colour sequence by any means. I'm working this blanket in much the same way I make a quilt: by making a decision or two or three, doing a bit of stitching, and then making a few more decisions, and then stitching a bit more, and so on. I love the rhythm of decision-making (cerebral) alternating with handwork (restful and meditative).
So there it is, a new project for the New Year. And here is an update on a project that's been underway for a few months: my part in the Midway Museum triptych quilt. Last week I assembled the main parts of the building, namely the roof and the side.
I'm happy with the fabric I chose to represent the shingled roof, because paying attention to the orientation of the broken horizontal lines on the fabric allows me to indicate the changing planes of the roof. And I managed to get the grass and the picket fence in the foreground in place as well. Sorry about the terrible light: it was well after dark by the time I got around to photographing this day's progress.
And then I devoted a studio afternoon to the windows, which I'm 90% happy with. And you might also noticed the additions to the tree, deeper tones to represent the shadowed areas in the interior of the tree, which I hope create a sense of three-dimensionality.
So I'm nearly done with the stage of sticking on adhesive-backed fabric pieces. One of the things I enjoy about making headway on this project is that as I make decisions about which fabrics to use, I can put back into their proper storage places all the other fabrics that I was auditioning for a just-completed part of the quilt. The studio is gradually becoming less cluttered as a result.
Since I last wrote, Christmas has come and gone and I thought I'd share with you a couple of moments from our quiet Yule. One was a variation on a long-standing tradition in our home. Each year for the past several years I've knitted my dear husband a pair of socks and also written him a poem. The poems began as short explanations for unfinished socks and gradually evolved into epic ballads of many, many stanzas and ever-more improbable narratives, all involving these hand-knit socks. This year, however, I didn't get a wearable pair of socks even started and certainly didn't have the energy for a major poem. So here's what he got instead. The pen is there to give you a sense of scale.
These little bits of whimsy are knitted at a gauge of eight stitches to the inch, and I gave them to dh with paperclips so that they could immediately become tree ornaments. I wish you could have heard his laugh when he saw the socks. THAT was a high point of Christmas, for sure. And the poem? It became a series of haiku, each offering a clue to the contents of a wrapped gift. I learned a good lesson this year: when life throws a person a curve ball it's best to roll with it and scale back on one's expectations of oneself.
And here is one of my dh's wonderful gifts to me: two packages of Kaffe Fassett and Philip Jacobs fat quarters.
Don't they look like fabric jewels? I love those saturated colours.
Finally, the end of the year gave us some incredible moments of luminous outdoor loveliness, and some equally lovely moments without much light at all. Here is the view through the west kitchen window at sunrise, and then again in the afternoon. I love the way the icicles catch the light.
And here is my dh opening the gate to start morning chores, with Dixie and Ben waiting for their oats, alfalfa, and beet mash. And the next one is of Ben waiting for his dinner. In the first, the sun hasn't yet reached our property, and in the second the sun has long since disappeared behind the ridge west of us. Not much light this time of year.
And this is what it's like here today, though I took this picture last week during another day of heavy snow. I was standing in the doorway of the studio, and much of the world had disappeared into the whirling white. But the chores still had to be done.
Oh, what hardy folk we are, critters and humans alike. Cough.
And lastly, a few candid moments. This first one is Dixie pretending to execute a getaway through the open gate. No fear of that in reality: she knows on which side of the gate her breakfast will appear. The rest need no explanation.
The last one includes another of dh's great gifts to me this Christmas: a new axe with which to chop firewood for the studio.
Happy New Year to you from the snowy wilds of Boundary country.
I, too, love Lucy's blog and her sense of color. Me---the grey-girl---has actually made a couple of her crocheted blankets! Two of my grandkids have received them....two I've kept. She's amazing, and her instructions are meticulously written and for some reason make sense unlike most crocheted instructions!!!!
Posted by: steph | 01/08/2015 at 09:25 AM
I think I was dimly aware that you'd made a couple of Lucy-inspired crocheted blankets. But now that I think about it, yes! I am surprised that you, the queen of neutrals, enjoy Lucy's colour sense. But then, I really love your greys too. Hmmm.
Posted by: Anne at Shintangle Studio | 01/10/2015 at 02:10 PM