There are an awful lot of people in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and possibly points further north who will be needing an awful lot of help in the coming days, weeks, and months. And I'm not talking about knitting socks or hats for them either.

If you can afford it, consider donating money to the relief efforts just getting started to assist people affected by Hurricane Katrina. Here's a link full of legitimate charties that can funnel aid to people in need.

UPDATE:

Unless you have a personal contact at someplace that's sheltering refugees, and a guaranteed way to get stuff to them (NOT US Mail, UPS, FedEx or chartered truck) - donate money instead of trying to send goods. Think about it. There's no infrastructure to distribute goods, and there's a far greater need for the assistance personnel down there to do search and rescue, transport of the vulnerable, wounded or sick, than there is for them to sort donated items for distribution.

More places accepting money donations:
American Red Cross
United Way

Still plugging along on the counterpane, at the approximate rate of one meta-motif per week. Week seven ends with this accumulation, shown on the top of the bed that it will (eventually) grace:



As you can see in spite of having completed one circuit, there's still a long way to go:



I still stick by my estimate of approximately 26 motifs (plus half motifs) to get good coverage for my queen-size bed. I might take a break this week though and use my knit-time to tend the ever growing forest of ends. That's 36 ends per meta-motif. Plus 12 more for the solid triangles shown above. Plus two more from finding and cutting a knot out of my yarn. So I've already got about 50 ends to deal with in the fragment shown above. Which should keep me busy for a bit...

The idea I hinted at yesterday has to do with magnetic boards. It's not something I can make at home, but it's a set of improvements I'd like to see made.
To recap, the standard issue magnetic board is very useful and very inexpensive, but it has some shortcomings.

Boughten

Scavenged

LoRan appears to be the leading (possibly only) seller of magnetic boards. LoRan appears to have been bought by or is marketing through the Dritz line of sewing and crafting notions. LoRan boards come in several configurations. Some have easel backs, so they stand up on their own. Some of the easel backed ones have small pencil-holding ledges along their bottom edge. Sizes appear to be 6"x10", 8"x10", and 12"x18". There are also supplemental accessories including separately packaged easel stands, plain gray metal/plastic magnet bars, magnetic bars with rulers printed on them, see-through magnifying magnet bars, and special packaged bundles of the base model boards plus accessories. There are also "after market" vendors that sell other types of place-marking magnets/magnifiers for use with magnetic boards.

My problem with the LoRan line are:

1. That it does a lousy job of protecting the charts while the work is in progress. I didn't realize exactly how lousy a job until I began using my improvised solution. The largest LoRan size is bigger than I need for 99.9% of my knitting charts. But the two smaller sizes are smaller than standard US 8x11" paper (or the standard Euro A4 size of 210x297cm, for that matter). Charts put on the boards get bashed up - even if both the board and the page are slipped into a page protector. This damage is especially bad if the board/chart combo is stuffed into knitting bags in between working sessions. My el cheapo scavenged cookie pan's raised rim did an excellent job of keeping my project together and unrumpled, and keeping the magnets in place in between uses.

2. The boards are flimsy and prone to bending and denting. Once they are no longer flat magnets have a more difficult time sticking. Again, my cookie sheet was thicker and (for non-cooking purposes at least) resisted warping and denting better than the commercial product.

3. The magnets are wimpy, and can't grab through more than a page or two, or are easily displaced in between working sessions. This one is a balancing act. There are incredibly strong magnets out there, but they would be difficult to move while working. Finding just the right amount of stick to stay put when needed and still be easy to move when necessary is difficult. Even more so when you remember that for most low adherence magnets, the magnetism slowly dissipates over time. What worked last year might be less useful this year. My cut up promotional fridge magnets did a fine job through up to two sheets of paper, but I like to keep all the pages of a pattern together when I'm working. I'd want something a bit stronger, perhaps something that could stick through a plastic protective cover, plus three sheets of paper, but not necessarily something thicker. The thicker the magnet, the more difficult it is to read Think thick rulers vs. thin rulers. Thick rulers are visually offset from what they are measuring, making taking accurate measurements more difficult.

What I want is something like this:



Wouldn't it be nifty if that transparent magnet-through plastic cover was a full-sheet magnifier page?

Now, how much more would I pay for something like this above and beyond the flimsy market standard? Not sure. If the least expensive packaging of the LoRan 8x10 sells for about $5.00 US (more or less), I'd pay around $15 for something this elaborate, provided the quality of the piece was commensurate with the price.

Remember - if you see this product for sale out there, you saw the idea here first. [grin]

Innovation Update

Kate from the UK has sent a lead on something that's even better than the narrow sticky notes I wrote about yesterday. She points us at removable, translucent highlighter tape.



It's inexpensive. Even better, it comes in several widths and lots of colors, and is packaged as either sheets of removable strips or in dispensers like adhesive tape. From a quick product search, it appears to be most widely used by teachers and professors for book highlighting, and by pilots for annotating aviation charts. A Google search on "highlighter tape" or "highlight tape" turns up a bunch of sources. Here are several sources that has a pretty complete listing of the available form factors (no affiliation):

http://www.windmillworks.com/catalog/c1_p1.html
http://www.crystalspringsbooks.com/products.asp?dept=333
http://www.avidaviator.com/tape.html

Some advantages include transparency - being able to "look ahead" in your pattern without displacing the mark, and availability in assorted colors. Why colors? Two reasons. First, some charts come in color. One might need to find a contrasting highlight to avoid "wiping out" one or more colors shown on the chart. Second, I'm no educational or visual perception theorist, but I know there are people who find reading much easier if they view pages through colored filters. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the chart-shy have perceptual wiring that would benefit from using color highlights, too.

I'll be looking for this stuff to try out.

More goodies in office supply stores

I've written about knitting tools that can be found in hardware stores. Now this train of thought takes me on another mental shopping trip - tools that can be found in office supply stores. Some are obvious:

• Drawing/drafting supplies - rulers, protractors, French curves, graph paper, tape measures, cartographer's measures (people who do full scale dimensioned drawings and slopers might find these useful)
  
• Calculators of all sorts
  
• Filing supplies - sheet protectors, binder and loose files
• Tote bags - Some of the smaller computer bags and the not-quite-briefcases meant for file-toting road warriors make excellent stealth knitting bags.
• Organizers - In-drawer, in-briefcase, and desktop organizers can be handy to corral knitting doodads
• Typing stands - Great for propping up charts or leaflets
  

Some are less obvious. Here's a smattering of the latter:



Transparencies - clear plastic pages that can be run through printers or copying machines. Need to grid up a picture or photo? Print a transparent sheet up with a graphed lines in the same height:width ratio as your knitting gauge. Lay that clear line-printed sheet over the image you want to transcribe to knitting. Voila! Instant knitting graph.

Circular paper clips - Instant stitch markers.

Check files - Yet another possible solution for storing those circs.

Tomorrow - another wish list item.

Yesterday's post got me thinking. (Always dangerous.)?

There must be tasks we wish our knitting or crocheting tools could do, either as tweaks to existing products, or as entirely new items. I've come up with several minor ones over the years. In the spirit of Anne L. MacDonald* At the risk of compromising patentability or re-inventing the wheel, I invite people to share ideas, and prime the pump with some of my own.

Counting Beads



I wrote about these back in my Stupid Stitch Marker Tricks post. This is intended to be an aid for people who are working row count repeats or those annoying "Decrease two stitches every sixth row" directions. It's a chain with links large enough to admit a knitting needle, and two different color beads, one at each end. On the first row, the knitter puts the needle into the link closest to the green bead. On the next row (or next right side row if working in the flat), the knitter advances the needle to the next link, and so on. If the links are used to count pairs of rows, a six-link chain could count 12.

Inch-Striped DPNs

I know I've seen photos of WWII-vintage DPNs that were striped, but I don't know if they were striped off in exact inch measurements (or 2 cm for our metric friends). If I had a set of striped DPNs I could use them to measure off length as I knit, without fumbling around for a tape measure or ruler.

Two-Tone DPNs

This idea could be used in combo with the stripes, above. I wrote about this one in the post remarking on a really bad answer offered up by Lion Brand. If one had a set of similarly colored DPNs that had a different color marking one end of each needle, one could use that color to track where rounds began and ended. (Yes, I know most people look for the tail, but sometimes it can be less evident, like when you're knitting a flat motif center out.)? The knitter would knit all DPNs with the same color end, EXCEPT for the one that starts off the round. That one would be employed with the contrasting color first. If we used red and green again, we'd knit the first needle with the green end, so that the red end was rightmost in the work. All successive needles would be knit with the red end. As the knitter traveled around the work he or she would know that when a red end presented itself, that was Needle #1.

Long, Thin Sticky Notes

This one is left over from my stitching days, although I sometimes do use sticky notes to mark my place on knitting charts. I want a pad of sticky notes that's six inches wide and less than an inch deep. The sticky should be along the long edge, not at the tab end. If it had? 10 to the inch rules on it with prominent decads, so much the better. I want to use it to mark off the active row of an active knitting or stitching chart. Having rules on the thing would help me keep my place on the chart and if the chart's scale was 10 to the inch - allow me to do "speed counting."

Anyone have any other innovative ideas for working tools, storage ideas, charting aids, or other new thoughts for here-to-for unknown tools or tweaks to existing ones?

*Anne L. MacDonald is best known for her book No Idle Hands:? The Social History of American Knitting, but she also wrote Feminine Ingenuity: How Women Inventors Changed America.

It's no secret that I don't see as well as I used to. Between eye infections and all-purpose aging, I need help. For most things glasses work just fine, but there are a couple of minor annoyances even with glasses. One is the teeny labels etched onto most circ needles - especially the ones smaller than US #4s.

Now, if I were one of the Super Organized, I'd have a system for storing my circular needles. Perhaps one of the sorting hanger thingies (see below), or a binder notebook full of pockets. But I have a lot of circs and little patience for filing things away, so I make do. Most of mine live in a hand-me-down wood box that once held a bottle of gift wine. The lucky few among them get replaced in their original packaging. Not all of my needles are lucky. The less fortunate among them live in an incestuous tangle, stuffed into that same wooden box. Figuring out which needle is which is always a challenge that involves finding the size gauge that's supposed to live in that same box, and playing "size me" until the right one turns up. Either that or calling over one of my offspring whose eyes function better than mine and having them do the squint work for me.


I'm not this organized.

Enter my latest acquisition, hot off the gadget rack at my LYS.



It's another clever invention from Nancy's Knit Knacks - the Circular Needle ID tag set. (No affiliation). Tags are packaged in two sets - one for US#0-4, and one for larger needles. (Engraved labels on larger needles are easier to see, so I didn't buy the larger set.)?

I can find and read these tags in my needle jumble with no trouble at all. Needle ID bliss! Of course one still has to remember to put the tag back on the needle after the project is over, and manage not to lose the thing in between - but that shouldn't be too hard. I've stapled the little plastic zip bag of tags in the circ box and will stow the tags there between uses.

I also note that Nancy's has been busy, issuing a new needle sizing gauge that goes down to 000 (always welcome, although I wish it went down to 00000), and an electronic version of the old katchaa-katchaa style counter. I don't use the things but I know that many people do swear by them. It looks like the electronic one can subtract, which is nice if you need to rip back. I'm surprised though that it seems to have only one memory register. It would be even more useful if it could remember two things at once (like total rows, and rows in the current repeat).

High tech

Low tech

No affiliation here between Nancy's and me. I am however impressed that they manage to identify and market to so many niche needs, including the whole Knit Kard info system, the yardage gauge, and the WPI tool. There are lots of companies selling knitting notions, but most seem to be content with the old standards. Nancy's is one of the few that seems to be actively seeking out innovation.

Last week was a very Life-Dense week. I didn't get as much time to knit as I usually do, so progress isn't as dramatic as it otherwise might have been. Still, I got another meta-motif done and sewn onto the ever-growing counterpane:



At the rate of one meta-motif per week, I think I'll be working on this queen-size blanket for another 25 weeks or so. That means March or April '06 is my earliest possible completion date at the current rate of production. I'd better start (or resume) another project and work on the two in tandem just so that I have something interesting to report on. Production on this piece will slow down if I'm time-splitting my nightly hour or two of knitting. Possible completion well into 2007?? Stay tuned...

Yesterday during the attack of Life that kept me from blogging, I did find a minute to answer a question about winding balls from hanks. I tried my best to describe how to do it, but was very frustrated not to be able to show how. So this morning The Small Child and I dug out some scrap yarn and took some pictures.

Start by spreading out the fingers of your left hand (right hand if you're a lefty). Stash the free end (as opposed to the end attached to your hank) between your index and middle finger.



Wind the yarn in a figure 8 around your thumb and little finger until you've got a hefty butterfly going.

Once it's too big to wind this way, take it off your fingers and fold it in half. Note that I've still got the free end between my fingers. The end that I'm winding is hanging down in front.

Now hold the folded butterfly in your left hand, with your finger sort of encapsulating the thing. (When I teach kids to do this, I have them think about holding a baby bird in a sugar cage.) Winding your yarn around your fingers, begin to build up a ball. Wind a bit in one direction, then shift your grip and wind in another.



The goal is to make a very soft, squishy ball so that the yarn isn't flattened or stretched out. When my fingers are full (like in the photo above), I pull my fingers out, rotate the ball in my left hand and start winding again in a different direction.



Eventually the ball will outgrow your grip size and you won't be able to fit it between your fingers as you wind. Don't worry. Continue to wind LOOSELY until you're through, preferably over at least one finger to introduce extra "give" into the wind so the yarn isn't stressed. If you want to use the thing as a center pull, avoid capturing the free end as you wind. (It's just above my thumb in the photo above). Keep going until you've finished.



The end product. A nice fluffy ball. You can see the center pull end trailing off past my thumb, and the outside end trailing off the bottom.

Even though I have a ball winding machine, I wind more than half of the yarn I use this way, mounting the hanks on my swift, but making the balls by hand. The biggest exception is lace weight yarn. Anything that comes in hanks of more than 700 yards is going to take an eon and a half to wind by hand. That's worth hauling out the winder and wrestling it into submission.

After Friday's post on using Microsoft Visio for graphing knitting patterns I received some questions:

What's Visio?

Microsoft Visio is a professional level drafting/drawing program - something I've co-opted into serving as a pattern development tool, not something that was designed for that purpose. It's main use is technical and scientific illustration - Gantt charts, flow process models, flowcharts, conceptual diagrams, infrastructure diagrams, business graphics, organization charts and the like. For example, network planners use it to lay out routing diagrams for offices, as it not only can handle a dimensioned architectural drawing, but it can also keep count of the networking hardware placed on the drawing, producing a "need to buy" list as the plan progresses.

In my work life, I'm a proposal writer working in engineering and telecommunications companies. I use Visio extensively to do? technical illustration and project planning. Visio isn't the sort of thing that most people have lying around the house, but because I have worked as a consultant I have had to buy my own copy. I use Visio Pro. Visio Standard (the entry level version without some of the industry-specific bells and whistles) is about $200.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX010857981033.aspx

What's a stencil?? Can I use these with other programs?

One feature of Visio (both versions) is the ability to establish a collection of standard shapes, and call that collection up when needed. These collections are called stencils. I created a set of stencils for Visio that contain knitting stitch and graphing symbols. I attach the stencil to the active drawing, and then using all of Visio's drafting features - draw up my chart.

Visio stencils are unique to that program, and cannot be used with others. There may be (emphasis on uncertainty here) one other program that can import them, but I do not own that program and have not tried it. It's called SmartDraw, and the suite edition that includes templates sells for just under $300. It purports to import Visio output, but there's nothing there that says it takes the stencils directly. I suspect that you'd need to take the sample Visio drawing I include in my template set, then use it to create a new SmartDraw symbol library. As far as lower cost/hobbyist targeted programs with the same functionality - I don't know of any that import Visio stencils. Please chime in if you do.

Can you do everything in Visio that dedicated programs like Aran Paint or Stitch and Motif Maker do?

No. I'm NOT using a program that knows the slightest thing about knitting, or that is optimized for this sort of thing. There are no limits that keep me from using impossible combos of stitches, and no tools that let me do things like replace all the red stitches with pink stitches everywhere in the active document. There's no blank canvas that can be flood filled by a background stitch. Instead I have to build my diagrams stitch by stitch, adding my stitchs (or groups of stitches) like a kid laying out a doll's dance floor of alphabet blocks.

What I do have is an unlimited size and shape canvas on which to work; and the ability to group, layer, copy/paste, rotate and reflect my custom symbols as needed. If I'm doing colorwork, I have an infinitude of possibilities, and even do color matching by Pantone or other color codification system. I can make up custom symbols on the fly, adding to my library as I go along and am not limited to the symbols present in a knitting font package (in fact, I don't even bother with one). I can also export my designs to all standard web graphics formats, or paste them into other documents as desired.

Is Visio easy to use?

While large parts of the thing would be intuitive to anyone familiar with other drawing programs, Visio isn't the easiest program to learn if you've never used any drafting program before. There are lots of inexpensive training courses out there, some web-based, and some at local community colleges. Or if you're adventurous you can do what I did - just start monkeying around with the thing.

Can I do the same thing with other drawing programs?

I'm pretty sure you can, although not every drawing program works in exactly the same way. ? In ages past, I co-opted Aldus Superpaint (on my late lamented Mac) for doing stitching and knitting diagrams. That one was a hybrid drawing/drafting program. I set up a series of ground textures that corresponded to filled and unfilled grid squares (some with specific symbols in them). Then I created a paintbrush the same size as one grid square. By selecting the background fills and using the paint brush as a stamper, I "daubed out" my charts. This is how I did all of the charted illustrations in The New Carolingian Modelbook.?

I also have convinced Canvas to serve as a knitting/stitching design aide, but that was a bit more painful. The version of Canvas I used did not have a robust stencil capability. You could make libraries of symbols, but they weren't as accessible as in Visio. I ended up making one document with reference copies of my symbols. Then in a new document I established a snap-to grid equal to the size of a stitch square, and copied/pasted the symbols from my library document into my new design. It worked, but it was cumbersome.

I also know that some people use non-drawing programs for this purpose. Others have written quite extensively about creative adaptation of Microsoft Excel and other spreadsheets (and even MS Word) as stitch chart creation programs.

If you've smacked another drawing program around for this purpose and have some hints to share with others please feel free to add your comments to this pile.

As you can see, motifs continue to accumulate on North Truro:



The observant will spot more evidence of my continued existence in the photo's lower right. Apologies for the quality of this shot. I recently replaced the hand-me-down 1.3 mega pixel camera I had been using with a hand-me-down 3 mega pixel camera. In theory, the best quality setting of the latter should be better than the best quality setting of the former. Apparently there is room for contention in this theory. Still, you can see how the design continues to grow. Next week's progress shot will feature the thing on the top of a queen size bed so you can see how far I've got to go.

I'm afraid that while this piece remains interesting to knit, I'm rapidly running out of things to say about it. I don't anticipate any earth shaking discoveries until I get up to the bit where I have to improvise half motifs to go around the edges:

Since I prefer the look of a nice straight edge and matching edging to the rippled look of a "bare motif" spread, I'll also have to invent something to eke out the east/west sides. Plus the actual edging of course. You can see the full motif smack in the center of this layout (full yellow hex in the center). The half hexes are in blue. They'll pose a bit of a challenge because they'll have to be knit flat as opposed to in the round, but since I chart my patterns by repeat, I don't need to do any redrafting - just remembering the circ/flat inversion and only working three rather than six "petals."? The squares on the edge next to the half hexes also need to be modified. There will be left and right halfies to preserve the pattern's lines. The hardest part will be the half triangles needed to eke the thing out east and west. Fiddly but easy to do. I never quite like the way they turn out.



Thought for the day:? Life is only as complicated as you make it.

I've blogged about using Microsoft Visio to do my charts here before. At great length.

In short, I've devised a set of stencils (shape templates) that covers many of knitting's basic stitches. I assemble them like a wall of alphabet blocks to make my charts, and have used them to build all the knitting and embroidery pattern graphs here and at wiseNeedle.



That ever insistent inbox of mine has disgorged a couple of requests for my Visio templates, so I've decided to post them here, free for the taking. Eventually I'll remove them from this blog and file them up on wiseNeedle where they will enjoy a more permanent home.

To use these templates you'll need a full registered copy of Microsoft Visio 2000 or later (up to and including the latest Office 2003 edition) - any flavor, for Windows. Sad to say Visio is not a inexpensive tidbit of a program one can pick up on a whim. It's a major tool used in offices and schools, mostly for engineering and other planning type drafting, and is priced accordingly. Still, I am sure there's a subset of technoknitter nerds who like me use the thing in home businesses, or who have access to it during lunch hours at work or as a student in a media center.

I might have tweaked the symbols a bit since I last updated this set, but nothing major has happened to them. I include three templates - one for basic symbols, one with cable crossings, and one with an extended set of increases and decreases, all bundled into this handy compressed *.zip file. Download it, then copy the *.vss files into the Visio template space on your local hard drive (probably the same place as the folder entitled "Visio Extras"). If you do that you should be able to access them off the standard Visio stencil menu.

Yes, I know that there are whole companies that do nothing but sell Visio template solutions, and here I am giving one away. It's "teachware." If you use it, teach someone else how to do something (especially something knit, stitch or fiber related), and I'll consider myself well paid. You may use my templates to create original knitting and stitching charts of your own. A credit for the tool would be nice if you publish any of the resulting charts, so that others can find it and use it too. You may not however repost these templates on another site nor may you claim them as your own. (If you do, major demons of vile vengance will haunt your dreams forever, should your kneecaps escape me and my trusty stick.) Linking back here is fine and dandy.

When you try out these templates you'll find that the symbols are not use constrained. You can stack the stitches any way you want, there's no effort on the part of the template to limit use to "knitting legal" configurations. But I did include a minor bit of shiny with the template symbols themselves. For most of them (except for some of the really esoteric cable crossings) hovering your cursor over the symbol in the template stencil window will pop up a how to knit annotation for both right side and wrong side application.

If you do play with these, please let me know. Suggestions for additions, improvements, or other use case advice are most welcome.

Several people have asked about the blocking board Laura used for her Paisley. I've sent the question to her, and will post any reply.

In the mean time, here's another suggestion. When I'm not being lazy slinging things down willy-nilly on towels, I do follow a bit more of a method. First, I clear out furniture in the room with our largest area rug (I've got no wall to wall carpeting). Then I lay down a heavy cotton quilt type blanket to protect the carpet from any moisture, and to give me more depth into which I can pin. Finally I cover the blanket with a rally check patterned sheet, one of two I stumbled across in a discount store. Once all is smooth and ready, I pin out my item, using long rust-free pins:




The item above is my Spider Queen shawl. It stretched out to be about 7 feet across. I began with a rough estimate of how large my finished item should end up being, then I started at the center points of each edge. I pinned them first, working from side to opposite side and tensioning the piece across between counterpoised pins. Then I stretched out the corners and did them, too. After that I just zipped back and forth across the piece ping-pong style, pinning in the middle of each remaining unpinned length until I had placed a pin in each of the edging's points:



About the only caution I offer (beyond being prepared for the labor intensiveness of this effort) is that the cheap Dritz pins I used were long enough and rust-free enough, but they were too thin and too fragile. They bent going in and the little bead heads pulled off when I pulled the pins out. Not fun.

I know that rally check print sheets are not an every day item, but any even check or Tattersall or windowpane style plaid will work equally well. So would yard goods in gingham or similar "graph paper" type patterns.

My friend Kathryn gently chides me about blocking my Kinzel Rose of England, languishing in my Chest of Knitting Horrors? since 1991. While the method above would work for that piece it's not on my current schedule. ROE was the first bit of lace knitting I ever attempted. It's a testament to the precision and logic of that pattern that I was able to do it with no prior lace experience.

At the time though, I wasn't very appreciative though of my materials. I used a mish-mash of size 30 white crochet cottons from various makers, bought at different times. You can see where each purchased lot begins and ends, some by slight color difference, some by texture. I got about four courses of leaves into the final outside area and stopped at the point where I ran out of thread (again) and when I was no longer able to delude myself that the thread lot problem wasn't noticeable. I'd need to figure out where I was, buy more mis-matched cotton, finish out another course of leaves, and do the final crochet-off finish before I could even think of blocking. Either that or ravel out a course or two of leaves and finish the thing from that point. So you can get an idea of what the (eventual) goal is, here's Judy Gibson's ROE.

I know some people are asking about when I will be blocking my Alcazar shawl. I'm afraid the Larger Daughter took a fancy to my loud rally check sheets and took them off to sleep away camp. No large item blocking will happen here until she and my sheets return.

I get a big kick out of seeing what others have made from my patterns or pattern pieces. It's a bit like meeting up with old friends years down the road and finding out what they've been up to. I'm delighted to be able to show off any photos of their work here in the Gallery section.

My latest vicarious bit of happy warmth was provided by my knitpal Laura Need. She decided to do the Interweave Knits Paisley Shawl from the Spring '05 edition, but to finish it off with the simple edging I noodled up. She sent me the picture below and gave me permission to post it:



Laura used Zephyr, and her Paisley pinned out to about 46 inches square. She did a much more even job of the knitting and blocking than I did. Plus she had the wisdom to use a solid color. You can see the difference:



Laura's paisleys and eyelets really pop out. You can see the edging especially well. The piece's texture patterning isn't fighting for your attention with ground color variations. That's a big improvement. I took the lazy way out of blocking, using my wires rather haphazardly and patting them in place rather than pinning them down to tension the work. She did it the more labor intensive way that produces better results - pinning out the individual points evenly on a dimensioned blocking surface. (Hers also pinned out to be six inches larger than mine.)

All in all I'm extremely impressed and quite pleased that Laura found fun in my minor contribution to this pattern. A great job!

Here's a curious piece that came to me from the same grandparents as my fly bowl (I've been told that it's actually a bee dish, not a fly bowl).



This is an original pen and ink line drawing that appears to depict a piece of stumpwork embroidery. It bears a sigil of the letters HCs (possibly CCS) but has no other signature on it. It hung in my grandmother's library for years, and always held a certain fascination for me when I was a kid. At that time I didn't realize the embroidery connection. At seven I liked the whimsical little animals in the corners, and the fact the central figure was a queen. Anecdotal family tales say the title of this piece is "Queen Esther."

Years later when I began embroidering in earnest (started on that path by the same grandmother), I stumbled across the stumpwork style and recognized the drawing for what it was. I'm torn. I'm not exactly sure if this is a copy of a piece displayed in a museum, or if it's a freehand drawing inspired by that style. I rather suspect the former. There is supposed to be a stumpwork piece depicting Queen Esther n the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, but I haven't seen a picture of it, so I can't say if my pen and ink drawing shows that particular artifact.

Stumpwork (raised or embossed embroidery) was popular in the 1600s, tailing off into the early 1700s. It has enjoyed a couple of minor revivals since. It's characterized by three dimensional effects, and is gaining interest right now, in part fueled by the popularity of ribbon embroidery and Brazilian embroidery, two other more modern styles that also employ three dimensional effects. There are also traditional forms of padded stitching practiced in Thailand and Cambodia that also use heavy stitching on separately embroidered motifs that are affixed to a ground over stuffing.

In stumpwork, much of the stitching is done over raised grounds, separately stitched and sewn onto a backing fabric. These motifs and slips are stuffed underneath with batting or even little wooden forms. Additional raised effect is provided by the inclusion of detached stitching, much of it based on detached buttonhole, hollie point, or other "free" lace stitches. On some pieces, further embellishment is provided by the liberal use of gold and silver threads, sequins, spangles and even beads. Some say that the little wooden forms used for stuffing are the "stumps" that gave the work its ungraceful name, others say that the name is a corruption of the word stamp, as many of the faces of the figures were printed by stamping rather than being stitched. It's heavy and encrusted looking except in its very lightest manifestations, not well suited for wearing. Instead it was employed mostly for decor - panels, mirror surrounds, book covers, cushions, and most especially small chests (cabinets) that were covered inside and out with the stitching.
Creating a cabinet was a crowning glory for the amateur needleworker of the late 1600s. They were expensive to do, required better than average skill, and represented a sort of needlework "graduation" for teens just about done with the course of informal study that passed for most girls' educations at that time.

There are several articles on stumpwork available elsewhere on the web, but precious few pictures of historical examples: This one has a useful bibliography, Janet Davies has some photos of artifacts that show the dimensionality of the stitching on her stumpwork and raised Elizabethan embroidery pages, CameoRoze also offers up an article on the modern revival of the style. In a Minute Ago also offers up a nice round-up of stumpwork and related styles as they are practiced today.

In the mean time my Not Embroidery hangs in my bedroom, where it complements a larger blackwork panel.

Four motifs done. My guesstimate is that four represents about 15% of the total finished area. That means I'm looking at something like 26 or so in total, with some of them being halfies.



It looks like the trillium background shapes will form rings around the star motifs. I'm really looking forward to seeing that develop. My next step though may be to work out the half-width motif set. That would include a half-hex, three normal triangles, one normal square and two half-width squares.

UPDATE - Looking for past posts here

I do try to post stuff here that I hope is useful. I also realize that much of it might not strike a reader as being useful today, but might stick in memory somewhere and pop up when the specific need is encountered. I've gotten a couple of questions (including a comment early today) about how to find past posts. I've tried to provide tools to do that.

First, for the knitting projects and some broad subject areas, I've set up category tags. You can see them in the right hand sidebar (you might have to scroll right a bit because of an over-large graphic I posted last week). Projects all are named something like "Project - Lacy Scarf" and index all the posts that mention each project. The broad subject categories also work that way. Clicking on the "Reference Shelf" tag will bring up all the posts that I thought people might find especially helpful, likewise "Embroidery" should find all the posts that discuss that subject.

Some particularly popular posts have merited direct access under the major category "References," also in the right hand sidebar. Yarn Labels 101 and 102 for example are two posts that get lots of traffic from people just becoming familiar with yarn labels and how to read them.

Finally for all those search needs that keyword indexing didn't anticipate, there's a search box in that same sidebar. You can type a word in there and bring up all posts that mention it, or you can click on the "advanced search" tag right below that box to do more complex multi-word or time-limited searches. Typing "booties" in the search box should find the posts I did on A. Krekel's pattern for booties that really do stay on.

I know I said I wasn't going to bore anyone with further progress on my North Truro Counterpane, but I did get to an interesting point yesterday, and my inbox has been graced with several questions.

First, the show and tell:



As you can see, I finished a couple more side squares of Motif #3, and seamed in most of the other little triangles that I knit over the weekend. That let me join #3 onto the two units I had already completed. I like the accidental trillium flower of negative space that forms where three motifs join. I'd love to say that was intentional, but it wasn't. There's lots that science doesn't know about this designing stuff, yet.

Now for the mailbag:

Aren't you going to have a bushel of ends to deal with?

Two bushels. Even though I'm knitting the squares out from the hex center, there's two for the center hex, plus two for each for six squares, plus two each for six triangles, minus one for the hex end I use to do the first square, and one for the end that doesn't get started at the outset of that first square. 24 in all for each motif. As you can see in the pix, I like to leave them long so they're available for sewing the motifs together. As I get further into the thing, I'll know WHICH I need to leave particularly long, and which I can plan to be shorter. Still, I plan on darning in ends incrementally as I go along rather than waiting for the end of the entire project.

Why aren't you blocking the motifs before sewing them together?

Good question. Sometimes I do block the motifs before I assemble them. This time I didn't. This particular no-name yarn and needle combo seem to produce motifs that lie relatively flat, showing the openwork well without the block. I suspect my squish problem WOULD be partially fixed by blocking, but leaving the hex motif live on the circular as I finish out the squares isn't exactly conducive to the knit-block-assemble production method. Plus pinning out each night's production means leaving the ironing board up to do the blocking, and I don't want to trip over it for the next umpteen months.

Are you going to leave the edges wavy?

I could. You can see that the lower edge makes a nice gentle wave. I could leave the thing raw, edge it with I-cord, or sew on a (yet to be designed) complementing edge strip just as it is. But I probably won't. Just on the principle that the biggest fun comes from the most abstruse and useless effort, I'll probably do up half hexes and half squares to produce a nice straight edge, then affix that as yet mythical edging to it.

Lovely crib blanket! You're nuts for spending so much effort on a baby blanket.

Huh? This is destined to be an oversized Queen-size spread for my own bed. (I've knit a blankie for each of the kids, why can't I have one, too?) If you think I'm addled for attempting this as a mini-throw, I'm sure you think I'm a gibbering raving loon for doing one that big.

I was busy this weekend past.



I worked out the plain triangle and made two. Both are sewn into the growing group. One is indicated by the arrow. I do have a bit of a scrunch problem, but probably not so much that it can't be ignored. The sides of my triangle are less tall than its base is wide. Therefore, when I'm sewing the bases of the patterned triangles onto the sides of the plain one, I have to squish them up a bit. You can see the slight rumples that result.

I do however like the way the points of the stars align. While the orientation I tried last time had more movement in it, because the stars were offset, this one will have less background area.



For those who have asked how I add arrows or other annotations to my photos - I use Macromedia Fireworks to slim, retouch, or otherwise manage my images. I cheat - the arrows are Wingding font "letters" added with the text tool.

Shoe size chart

Some people have pointed out that their European shoe sizes are off a bit from the chart shown yesterday. Mostly at the upper end. The chart's represented equivalent for US shoe sizes Women's 9 and above seems to work out one unit larger than people are reporting. So a 10.5 would be closer to a 42 than a 43. Grains of salt are advised.