Knitting and other pleasant pastimes

I love to knit. Every winter, I can't want until the humid weather goes away and it gets cool enough to pick up my knitting needles. I learnt to knit when I was seven (remember those knitted squares I talked about here?) and there's hardly been a year when I didn't knit something in the winter, except for those few manic years when I was studying days, working nights and raising kids in between. So when I bought some luscious wool from Bendigo Woollen Mills this year, in a gorgeous purple colour that's right in fashion right now, I was in seventh heaven. Pattern, gosh no! I had a picture of what I wanted , and I am woman, I can make anything!

So I cast on merrily and knitted what I thought was the pattern. Nope, not quite right. So I pulled it back to the basque and tried again. (Me, knit a swatch? Why?) Nope, still not quite right. And again. OK, time for plan B. I'd bought a copy of the gorgeous new Knitter magazine and there was a pattern I'd made years ago, that one where you knit double rib, cast on extra stitches and then drop them, so you get a beautiful wavy pattern. OK, that's so easy, I'll do that one. Not using their pattern, of course, which was made in cotton for English summer wear.

I knitted the back and one of the sleeves, and then it dawned on me slowly that this pattern uses way more yarn than a normal jumper. I knitted grimly on. Nope, it was clear to me from halfway up the front that there was not, in fact enough yarn. A quick email to Bendigo assured me that no, that yarn was now discontinued, even though I only bought it a couple of months before. A quick check on Ravelry for surplus yarn- no dice. Out it all came again. (Isn't it good that it knitted up so quickly?)

On my travels around the Quilt and Craft Fair in June, I found a pattern at the Bendigo stand that was just what I wanted. The First Time Around. So, older and ever so slightly wiser, I bought that pattern even though, like most knitting patterns, it wasn't designed for Fat Ladies, just so I could see how they did that pattern. Easy! A short while later and I had my first (and only) jumper this year.
Isn't it pretty? It just needs a press and it will be ready to wear. Next year.

A taste of what I've been doing

Here's a little taste of my latest collaborative project. I'm doing book pages with the Fibrecircle group and this is the very first page I did. Of course, I forgot to photograph it, so I've had to wait until it was being swapped to grab a photo. It's for Helen's book, which has the theme "Faraway Places". She supplied poems as inspiration and I chose this one by Oscar Wilde:

The almond groves of Samarkand
Bokhara, where red lilies blow
And Oxus, by whose yellow sands
The grave white turbaned merchants go.

And from there to Ispahan
The golden garden of the sun
When the lone dusty caravan
Brings cedar and vermilion.

I know where Samarkand is, but where is Ispahan? I discovered that the name refers to the modern city of Isfahan or Esfahan, in Iran. It looks like a fascinating place to visit. It was originally the capital of the Elamite Empire, of the Medes (612-549BC). Then, after some time in obscurity,it was the capital of the 10th century Seljuk dynasty, a Turkish empire that was fascinated by Persian culture and spread from Anatolia to Spain. The third golden period for the city was the Safavid Empire, in the 16th century, under Shah Abbas the Great. The modern city still contains many beautiful buildings reflecting this diverse history.

I looked at lots of photos of the city, and then made a sort of compilation sketch, using shapes from the bridges and an image of one of the mosques. For my colours, I was mostly inspired by a description from a traveller of the 1920s, Robert Byron, who wrote, "under avenues of white tree trunks and canopies of shining twigs, past domes of turquoise and spring yellow, in a sky of liquid violet blue… across bridges of pale toffee brick, tier on tier of arches breaking into piled pavilions; overlooked by lilac mountains… Isfahan has become indelible." Helen supplied the beautiful hand-painted background fabric, and I painted the mountains and buildings, and suggestion of road.

It was a hard work to photograph. The image has lost most of the detail of tiles on the mosque and the river on the right. But it does give a bit of an idea.

And now for something completely different!

Last week at Fibrecircle, we spent the day graffiti-ing fabric. We'd planned ages ago to do it, and this week, after the seriousness of all the ATASDA AGMs, seemed like a good time to be childlike again. We used a piece of donated fabric, and each person moved round the table so every part of the fabric was drawn on by everyone. Then we cut the fabric into equal parts.
Here's my section:
Isn't it fabulous?

Now I have to do something with this fabric by early next year! I am toying with adding colour - graffiti is usually coloured in flat areas, or maybe adding more texture (which I can do by stitching). Will I use it whole or cut it apart? I'm sure you'll see more of this over the coming months.

More about the book

Once I'd painted the cover picture, it was April 1 and I started work on the pages. April 3 was the first quarter of the moon in April, with the full moon on Apr 10, and the last quarter on April 17. The new moon fell on April 25. I won't show all the pages here, partly because that would be tedious to look at, but also because, when you are working quickly on the final sheet, not all pages turn out as you imagined! Here are some of my favourites:
The first page I did -

April 6, a Fibrecircle meeting day - paper tissue collage
April 11 - undeciphered scripts This page shows a page of the undeciphered script of the Indus Valley civilisation, with the letters of UNDECIPHERED SCRIPTS hidden among it. On this day, I was thinking about the parts of everyone that are hidden from view, that appear unexpectedly.

The next two are pair of pages about limitations, associated with the changing season, the waning moon and my life at the time.


Tissue poppies for Anzac Day, for those dead in war and the new moon, with the words of the poem that begins "in Flanders Fields the poppies blow", written at Ypres by Dr John McCrae, who himself did not survive that terrible war.
A fantasy landscape, just playing around with colours. Painted with Setacolor paints over the original blue background.

It actually took me until mid June to assemble the book in its final form. I added colour with Prismacolor pencils to the end papers, and added text.

This was a brilliant project to do, I really had a ball. It was structured enough that I wasn't trying to find things to make each day, but free enough to let me follow whatever elusive thread captured my attention. I learnt a huge amount by doing it, although I now see ways I could have done things better (of course!). I think I got way more out of it than I would have done making a quilt (or a bag) for the challenge. If you want to see the other challenge pieces, they're on the Kambra Challenge blog.

Lots of new stuff to share

I've been quiet here lately because so much of what I've done lately has been secret. Finally I can share one thing that took up a lot of my life back in April. I belong to a group that does a challenge every year. This year, the challenge was to make something with these fabrics, a pack of 40, 7in squares of 20 Hoffman 1895 Bali Watercolors, blue-green color roll.

I was away for some of the challenge period so I wanted to make a small project, that I had a good chance of finishing in the time frame. I thought about making a bag, or using the square to embellish a garment. But when I looked at the fabrics, they reminded me of phases of the moon, so I decided to make a book that referenced the moon phases over one month. The moon in astrology relates to emotions, and receptiveness to change, since the phases of the moon mean it is in constant change. In the past, I've made diary-style year quilts, which were about what was happening in my life during that year, but I wanted to make something that focused on my inner life, what I was thinking and learning, rather than what I was doing. So I made April Moon. (I worked through lots of possible fancy titles, but in the end, simple seemed best!)

I decided I needed to keep the pages separate until after I had done whatever I was going to do, so I was free to stitch them if I wanted. Then, as I went, I could assemble flat sheets into signatures, and stitch the signatures to the spine tape, so final assembly wouldn't be too time-consuming. (I'm never really motivated by those final fiddly bits!) The Bali fabrics would be used to edge each page, so the colours would show the moon phase. I also wanted the book to be able to stand up, but each page to lie flat when it was opened, which influenced me towards a more standard book binding, with a spine tape attached to a cover, with end papers.

First I made the cover and the base pages. I didn't want to be daunted by cream quilters' muslin pages, so I painted all the pages in shades of blue. I used the same paints to make monotypes for the end papers and the cover. The end papers were printed from a glass plate with rubber bands scattered on it. The cover monotype was pulled from paint on the glass plate. (The overlay shows where the spine was going to be) Then I began to sketch in paint details of my imagined moon garden. It was utterly absorbing, as the more I added, the more areas I could see needed more work. Eventually I stopped, and this was my moon garden cover:

Oh yeah...

Remember this one? It was for a challenge called Purple Prose from my quilt group, Bees Knees, way back in - gee, can it be 2004? I did a little more work on it recently too. It now looks like this:
I need to do a little more work on the division between the edge of the wall and the rubble behind it (funny how you can see these things when you take a photo!) and then it might be ready to stitch.

And what did I buy at the show?

Actually, I didn't buy a huge amount. As everyone who knows me will attest, I have been saying for years, "I have an obscene amount of fabric and I don't need any more!" If I begin making quilts now and continue 24 hours a day until I fall off my perch, it will still be a case of "St Peter, don't you call me, 'coz I can't go". Despite that, fabric has a way of wandering into my life uninvited...

I did buy these gorgeous silk sheets, all ready to go through my printer, from Lynne at Batik Oetoro. They don't count as fabric, do they? Perched on top is one of the little Ezy-Carve printing blocks. I bought a large one of these from Lynne some months ago but it's being saved for Something Special. So I bought a small one just so I can have a go at using this medium. You know I love making stamps to use in my textile work - you can see some of the latest, made from cheap erasers, on the Fibrecircle site.

I also bought an Embellish-Knit, one of those gadgets that make French knitting at a mile a minute, instead of laboriously stitch by stitch. So you can expect to see French-knitted embellishments on everything I make in the foreseeable future. I remember making French knitting with a wooden cotton reel with four nails hammered into it, a pin and some of my mother's leftover knitting yarn. Times have certainly changed.. A big thank you here to Prudence Mapstone, from whose stall I bought this little beauty. I also bought the reprint of her book, Freeform, and when she heard it was for the ATASDA library, she gave us a very generous discount. Thank you so much, Prudence, it's very much appreciated!

Of course I haven't mentioned the fabulous Indian wooden print blocks that I bought from Batik Oetoro a week ago. But that wasn't at the show, so they don't count, do they?