Month: February 2007

When I got home from work yesterday, I had a bag of yarn from Discontinued Name Brand Yarn waiting for me on the stoop. Inside? The eighteen skeins of discontinued colors of Lamb’s Pride Worsted that I’d ordered—and more! I don’t know if they always include extras in their mailings or if this was a first-time buyer deal, but my bag also included a skein of a very glitzy black yarn (perfect for knitting a small evening clutch or maybe a case for some opera glasses), sample cards for two South West Trading Company yarns, three different patterns (including a cute t-shirt style knit top from Cherry Tree Hill), and a pair of 10″ US 1 needles. Wow!

Let me tell you—I would order from these folks again, with or without the bonus items. Their prices are great and their shipping is fast.

And do you have any idea how huge a bag with 18 skeins of Lamb’s Pride is? When I saw that package on the stoop I knew what had to be inside. (For those of you who are interested, I ordered six skeins each of Plum, Mahogany, and Turquoise. They had Medieval Red a while back, and I’m kicking myself for not ordering any of that.)

So until I find some Malabrigo in stock once again that suits my color sense, I will keep playing with felted bag patterns using the Lamb’s Pride.

I also got email last night from Kathryn Connelly, of Hilltop Yarn Shop, who designed the beret pattern in One-Skein Wonders that I used as the basis for my bulky-weight pattern. She’s graciously given permission for me to post my reworking of her pattern, so I’ll get that up in the next two days, along with some photos. (Apparently a One-Skein Wonders web site is in the works—more about that as it develops.)

I’ve successfully felted version 1.0 of my Malabrigo bag. The first time round, I just washed it on warm for fear of turning it into something suitable only for Polly Pocket, which resulted in virtually no skrinkage at all. The second time around, I washed it on hot and got a nice, thick fabric, with about 15% shrinkage. (The thing to remember here is that since the bag shrank 15% in every direction, that results in about a 30% loss of volume overall.)

I’d worked the top part of the bag in 2 x 2 K, P check to see if that affected the texture of the finished project. The answer: “no.” Or, “maybe, but only if you’re a complete loon and run it through your fingers doing everything you possibly can to convince yourself that one section does have a bit of a boucle feel to it.”

Using the shower curtain rings to get openings for the drawstring worked nicely. Now I just have to knit another half-mile or so of I-cord so I’ll actually have a drawstring to run through the holes.

I am already planning version 2.0, which will begin with 200 stitches cast on, instead of 120. Unfortunately, while I love Malabrigo, I don’t especially like many of the colors it comes in, and they don’t necessarily go together in ways that please me. Yesterday I went to the LYS that carries Malabrigo and stared and stared at the yarn, but couldn’t find three colors (or even two) that went together in a way that said “happy” and “sunny weather ahead” and “knit me now” (which was what I wanted them to say), so I actually left empty-handed. I will just have to keep cheking back regularly and hoping the gods of yarn roll the dice in my favor one of these days. (Meanwhile, I do have a number of skeins of Lamb’s Pride Worsted in dicontinued coloways coming to my house, so I can play with them—but I’d like the final product to be in Malabrigo.)

For now, I’ll go back to kids’ clothes/accessories in cotton and see if I can come up with something better than the mutant yarmulke I wound up with last time.

This morning, Melissa and I set off to photograph the completed “Urban Trekker” hat at Wildcat Canyon Regional Park, the site of Dr. Belgum’s Grande Vista Sanitarium during the WWI era. (Text from one of the original advertising pamphlets here.) Nothing remains of the sanitarium now but some overgrown foundation stones. However, in its day it was the ideal place for wealthy San Francisco and Oakland residents to send their addled/inconvenient relatives as it offered a highly civilized, but very out-of-the-way location and featured comforts like evening concerts and weekend dances. The site seemed appropriate for our photo shoot as the hat does give one a bit of an “elderly mad” look.

Here is the Urban Trekker modeled by a stick.

Here is the Urban Trekker modeled by Melissa. (You can’t see it, but Melissa is perched on a bit of sanitarium foundation stone.)

The former sanitarium’s grounds present the sort of jumbled flora that typify our part of the California coast: oaks, palms, eucalyptus, spring bulbs, and various brambles.

I’m adding a close-up of some of the flowers, just for the sheer delight of seeing them pushing their way into the world.

As I write this, the Malabrigo bag is thumping about in the washer getting felted. I asked myself a “what-if” question: What if I attach shower curtain hangers every few inches along the opening of the bag to make nice, round holes to thread the drawstring closures through? The answer to that question and comments on felting Malabrigo coming up soon.

My contribution to the Second Annual Brigid in Cyberspace Poetry Reading. A bit didactic perhaps, but always worth thinking about.

QUESTIONS FROM A WORKER WHO READS
by Bertolt Brecht

Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished,
Who raised it up so many times?
In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live?
Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?
Great Rome is full of triumphal arches.
Who erected them?
Over whom did the Caesars triumph?
Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants?
Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it,
The drowning still cried out for their slaves.
The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar defeated the Gauls.
Did he not even have a cook with him?
Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down.
Was he the only one to weep?
Frederick the Second won the Seven Years’ War.
Who else won it?
Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?
Every ten years a great man.
Who paid the bill?
So many reports.
So many questions.

To which we might add our own questions about the families of those workers and soldiers, women at home unable to protect those they love from the real harm, so instead they knit up scarves and hats and mittens and whatnot to protect them from the harm that they can fight.