It's Cat Stitch!

Day 306: When my sister-of-the-heart Patty sent me a photo of the new crochet stitch she'd just discovered, I knew I had to have the pattern. It's called "cat stitch," for reasons which should be obvious if you look at it...dozens of cats, row upon row. It may well have another name and in fact, it's based in a simple shell stitch with conjoined double-crochets forming the legs over two previous rows. I also learned a new technique here which I'm surprised I'd never seen before: using "stacked singles" at the start of each row to make a faux double-crochet rather than chaining two on the turn. It makes for a much neater edge. This piece is just a sample using yarn from my stash (Caron "Simply Soft" with a 3.5mm hook). I'm going to run out of the rust after only a few repeats, so a purchase of cat-hued yarns may be in order. Old dogs may not be able to learn new tricks, but old cat ladies can.

Waste Not, Want Not

Day 110: "Waste not, want not," or as my grandmother used to say, "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without," so I'm using up whatever I can salvage from my weaving thrums to make potholders. Since I weave almost exclusively with 8/2 cotton, this is an ideal solution. It must be said, however, that my grandmother was English. My Scottish genes came from my grandfather whose mother, so the story goes, had a dalliance with a McLeod outside her marriage. My knowledge of the backstory ends there, but the frugal DNA runs strong. That said, my grandmother was notorious for using short bits of crochet thread as centers for granny squares, even shorter than the weaving thrums I've used here.

This double-thick pattern is about as simple as it gets in crochet (both sides of one potholder are shown here). Determine the diagonal length you want for your potholder and make an equivalent chain in the fiber of your choice. Cotton insulates your hand against heat quite well (I used a double strand of 8/2 with a 2.0 mm hook). Add an extra inch, ending with an odd number of chains. Sc in the second chain from the hook, and in each subsequent chain. Without turning, sc in the opposite side of the chain until you're back to your starting point (example: I started with 71 sc, which is a nice multiple of 10 plus 1). Crocheting down both sides of the chain gave me 140 sc for the round when I got back to my starting point.) Now without turning, single-crochet half as many rows as you had chains (for me, that was 35). You'll soon see that this begins to form a bag with the chain row at its bottom. When complete, fold the bag, pulling out the closed corners. The opposite corners will be open. Now you'll need to crochet a half row (roughly) to reach an open corner. Once there, make a chain for the hanger. Sc back along the hanger chain, join to the body of the bag and fasten off, leaving a long tail. Use the tail to ladder-stitch the open diagonal (the last sc row made). You're done!

HIndsight: I made this one a little small, having forgotten to allow for the inevitable shrinkage in washing and drying. I should have allowed a few extra stitches in the starting chain to compensate. Not to worry! I still have a bagful of thrums.

Cone Crochet

Day 27: I'm not big on "cutesy," but when I found a pattern on YouTube for a crocheted fir cone, it was more than I could resist. It appears in multiple iterations on various peoples' channels, so I won't repeat it here. Select the one which is easiest for you to follow. It took a bit of fiddling to find a thread combination which would render a life-size version. I used two strands of 8/2 weaving cotton in two shades of brown and a 2mm hook. The pattern is easy but somewhat time-consuming (and by that, I mean that it took me an hour to make a single cone), so I rather doubt I'll be attaching them to everyone's Chrismtas gifts as I'd thought I might do. Still, they work up quickly enough that select friends may receive truly iconic symbols of the Pacific Northwest to use as ornaments.

A Fair Showing

Day 349: The results are in. I am pleased to announce that I took a second-place ribbon in "Weaving - Shawl, Stole or Shrug" and a FIRST PLACE in "Lace Openwork - Crochet Garments, Thread" in the Washington State Fair (Puyallup Fair). I had my doubts about the McLeod shawl taking a ribbon, knowing that I had not beaten the weft to be perfectly square in the yellow sections and, in fact, that was where I lost points although I still scored high enough to earn the second place in the category. The first place for the apron was a pleasant surprise, and when I went in to pick it up, two of the Fair officials came up to me to offer their compliments. A comment on the judges' score card said, "This is very eye-catching!" These were my only two submissions this year, and I'd say I put up a pretty Fair showing!

Three Sisters

 

Day 68: This post has been scheduled since August 12, but since the little critters shown here were destined to be Christmas presents for my sisters-of-the-heart, I couldn't reveal them before this. Their creation began when Patty, aka Goldfinch, showed me a photo of a darling little amigurumi wren, and although I couldn't find the exactly pattern for it, I was able to locate a European Robin which was similar. I made a couple of them for practice and then thought, "I've got to make a finchy for Finchy!" I simply changed up the colours and adjusted the pattern to accommodate a Goldfinch's most distinctive field markings, and then the thought occurred to make a Crow. That required creating a broader tail and a longer, heavier beak. I sat my completed Crow down next to the Goldfinch and said, "Well, dang. Where's Alison? I gotta make a Mouse for Mousie." I couldn't find a pattern I liked, so Mouse is entirely original. And there you have them: the three sisters-of-the-heart, born of different parents, separated by as much as 3000 miles, but sisters nonetheless.

Footnote: the three of us have a tradition we call "the Twelve Days of Christmas." Each of us sends twelve gifts to the other two, and then starting on December 14, we gather on line to open one prezzie from each of our two counterparts every night through Christmas Eve. The last present is opened on Christmas morning, but not simultaneously. Last night was Day #6, and the Three Sisters made their appearance.

Fiber Artist In Residence

Day 57: Just so nobody thinks I'm slackin' off during the pandemic, I thought I'd pull a few of my current projects together for a group photo, emphasis on the words "a few." There are others which, for want of space, simply couldn't be accommodated, like spinning, weaving on the floor loom, piecework for another quilt. I do not believe in letting my hands rest idle unless they are holding a book or puzzle, and as I have said repeatedly to friends of late, I have the attention span of a nervous gerbil. Some processes demand longer stints of activity than others, but many of these crafts are such that I can do a row here, a few throws there, fifty stitches in another place and then move on to something else. This keeps me from getting bored (a mood I fall into all too easily), and a bored Crow is a cranky Crow, and a cranky Crow should really come with a big red warning label.

A bit of backstory here: one of the first full-time jobs I ever held was that of art-needlework consultant for a chain of three stores on the east coast. I was already well-versed in many forms of needlework, although at the time, I leaned more heavily toward knitting than anything else. It was during my employment that I learned to tat with a shuttle, rounding out a knowledge base of the most common types of needlcraft. As I matured, I kept searching out other needlework methods: tvistsom, Russian knotwork, netting, cardweaving. Admittedly, I found that I didn't enjoy each as much as the others, and some were abandoned forevermore (I will never be a fan of macrame, although I love marlinespike work). For the most part, I prefer to work with finer threads than with yarn, although knitting still ranks among my favourite pastimes, and when I do crochet, I seldom use a thread larger than size 30. Weaving, whether on the floor loom or my small rigid heddle, is also high on the list. It is a rare day when I don't have a knitting project in progress or the big loom stands empty.

So...to the details, then. My living space has been occupied with one quilt or another for at least the last four years straight, so the Hexagons form an appropriate background for (top left, going counterclockwise): kumihimo (beaded), crochet (a pineapple tablecloth motif using ecru vintage thread), peg-loom knitting, rigid-heddle weaving, nalbinding (an Ugly Yarn project), knitting, and last, hanging on an inprompu loom in front of the fireplace bricks, sprang (again using the Ugly Yarn seen in the nalbinding legwarmers). Ya think I have enough to keep me busy for a while?

Fiber Frolics

Day 238: Despite the fact that I don't feel as if I'm spending any more time at fiber arts than usual, a mound of completed projects is growing almost daily. Admittedly, my attention span is quite short these days: ten minutes at the loom, a row or two of crochet, half a dozen rolags spun into yarn, two or three threads put into Mousie's quilt pushing the limits of my focus, but as they say, "a little of this, a little of that" adds up. Some unrelated crafts are interdependent, e.g, in order to spin more single-strand white wool for plying, I have to wind plied wool onto the warping board to free up spindles. To do so means that I have to remove the measured warp for my next weaving project from the warping board, and I can't do that until I get the current project off the floor loom. Perhaps this is why we speak of "web" in so many fiber arts. My studio space (crafts room, living room and to some extent kitchen) would make Arachne proud.

Pooled Colour Crochet

Day 187: The internet would have you believe that pooled-colour crochet was a new thing. It's not. In fact, I first learned about it when I was working as an art-needlework consultant in the mid-1960s. It didn't achieve any great popularity at the time due to several factors, largely access to instructions which were easy to comprehend. As I recall, Bernat drove the bandwagon with a number of regularly space-dyed yarns which were supposed to yield a tartan pattern when crocheted or knit. Most people (myself included) gave up after spending many hours frustrated by sections of colour which were either too long, too short, or an "in-between" shade which threw the pattern off. Technology has given us many advancements in dyeing techniques and while still not perfect, the "pooling" yarns on the market today are vastly improved from those of 50 years ago. I thought I'd give it another try, and after ripping out my work several times during the course of the morning, I finally got decent results. Be advised that not all space-dyed yarns can be used for colour-pooling. The colour intervals must be regular, although there can be variation between individual colours, i.e., purple, blue and green could all be 12 inches long spaced apart by six-inch sections of yellow and rose. The trick is in keeping track of how many stitches can be made with each colour. Even so, it's fiddly work, requiring a lot of pick-back even after you've mastered the basic technique, but it's fun to do, and gives a great "poor-man's plaid" effect.

Lozenges Lap-robe

Day 104: As you might expect for someone who knits and crochets as much as I do, I wind up with a lot of tag ends of yarn in a very wide array of colours. Thrifty Scot that I am, these can't just be assigned to the bin. They have to be used down to the last few inches. One of the ways I use up the longer pieces is in "scrap-ghans" where each horizontal row is a different colour, but usually with a unifying colour repeating at regular intervals. Here, seven rows of lozenges are separated by an eighth row in black. The edge of the afghan will also be worked in black. This one is destined to be sold at Mount Rainier National Park's Christmas party silent auction. Proceeds benefit the employee fund which in turn pays for the Christmas party. It's a self-renewing loop!