Why am I so sad today

The sun is almost shining on inches of new snow, which is blowing and drifting as quickly as the roads are cleared. I came home at lunch time to find bird prints in the snow on the drive, on the steps, on the rail. Birds aren’t sad; they just look for food. Places to nest. Scraps to build the nest.

For some reason the weight of hate struck me full force today. We throw that word about too easily. We hate things too easily. The word has become cheap. Life in the world has become too cheap. Why hate people of color? Why hate people who have a different god? Such a waste. And why was it the first thing on my mind today? Perhaps because last thing before bed I scribbled a post card to Elizabeth Warren. Thanks for doing your job so well.

For the first time in years, I’m knitting a sweater. I abandoned sweater knitting for sock knitting at least fifteen years ago.  Wool socks, to keep my feet warm. Other people have cold feet, so I knit socks for them, too.  Unlike my mother, who divided every last bit of yarn into two balls in order to knit matching striped mittens, I put my ends into a bag, to be decided later.

I joined a knitting group last year. I am amazed at all the things to be knit and worn, with aplomb. I am so pedestrian; I could never swag a scarf around my neck like so many women do. But I did learn of a new, local yarn shop from these women, and went to see what I could see.  My goal was to dispose of a pound of left over sock yarn, and to that end I came home with four more skeins of sock yarn, this time in a beautiful moss green wool, to be the base color.

The young artist in residence graded the colors for me and put them little bags numbered one through twenty something. I was sorting through the bag of numbers the other day, looking for thirteen or fourteen or some such. I looked at one bag, and said “Oh no, Laura. This one says 00." I handed her a bag of purple that had 00, underlined.

“Gramma, it’s an 18!”

The wishful thinker.

A road trip

If she's on time (a novelty), Linda will be here in fifteen minutes and we are off to Art and Apples, a classy show in Michigan.

So many questions from the last post. All the towels are sold and now that I am an old lady working at old lady speed, I don't know when I might warp up the little loom. Heck, first it needs to come up from the basement and get reassembled. That's how it is.

The hat, the hat. if you knit, or know someone who does, it is ridiculously easy. I weighed it; 1.1 ounces. Very little yarn. Here's how to do it:

With size 5 circular needle, cast on 100 stitches. Join, don't twist.
Knit 9 rows. Flip the work inside out. You have the purl side facing.
Knit 9 rows.

On the last row increase 20sts evenly. (K5, Make 1, around)

Change to size 6 circular.

Turn the work to the purl side.
Knit 9 rows.
Turn to the purl side,
Knit 9 rows. 

When you have a satisfactory number of pancakes, decrease as follows:

K8, K 2tog.
Knit a round.
K7, K 2 tog.
Knit a round.
K6, K 2 tog, etc.

Change to dp needles when the circulars are too big.
When there are five sts left, pull the end through to finish off.

Work ends in.

The end.

Linda is five minutes early.
See you next week.

Pancake hat

I came across this pattern years ago, and clipped it "for the future."

I liked the hat but had no intention of making it, because it involved purling on round needles.

Nevertheless, the pattern went to the future folder.

Over the summer my granddaughter Caroline took to tucking all her hair up into a cap,

Rastafarian style. Or eleven year old whim, as the case may be.

I thought about the hat I would not make.

"Idiot," I said to myself. "Why purl on round needles when you can knit!"

The other side of knit always is purl.

At the end of every set of knit rows I turned the work and began knitting again.

I took the picture above to show the "band" that keeps the hat on,

but the pancakes still hide it. The band merely is a set of pancakes on smaller needles.

I made this from a mohair/merino blend, very soft.

The pattern called for a heavier yarn, and the hat stood up on its layers.

This is much softer and fell right into pancakes.

I must find a box for it to keep in, or my cat will be prancing off to hide the hat under Laura's bed.

Socks of many colors

I gave up the search for good cotton socks for summer some years ago, when I realized I could knit them. Not as easily as purchasing socks, but in the absence of decent socks, my last resort.

The idea actually came to me in a JoAnn Fabric store, not the ideal source of sock cotton. I went up and down the yarn aisles, and found nothing smaller than dishcloth cotton. I took a trip down the crochet cotton aisle, and was completely unimpressed with the current offering. Where is the fine DMC, eight ply, 30 weight my grandmother taught me with? Do they even make it?

I rounded a corner into embroidery floss. There on an end cap was a sampler packet of DMC floss, eight strands. I bought two sampler packs of primary colors , fired up the number two double points and made a pair of socks.

The first sock I knit from the top of the sampler to the bottom, the second from the bottom to the top.  One might argue they met in the middle, but only I knew that. No one even noticed one sock was half the rainbow, the other the other half. This was fifteen years ago, before mismatched socks were sold on purpose.

No, people just said “Nice socks!”

Except one little boy.

Somewhere in public a child screamed. I looked around and saw a small boy, clinging to his mother, pointing at my socks and screaming. His mother tried to turn him away, he couldn’t quit looking and screaming “Her socks don’t match.”

Eventually his mother picked him up and carried him off, but he continued to hang over her shoulder, wailing and pointing.

He couldn't have had a bad Dr. Seuss experience; it must have been a clown.

How to spin milkweed

In the fall, on the way home from school, did you ever pick a dried milkweed pod and break it open to release the last few bits of silk.  Or open one too early and find all the seeds inside, looking like a scaly fish.  The sticky mess on your hands…

That would be the extent of my milkweed encounters, had I not learned to spin fiber into yarn.  I learned to spin wool first, and a fair amount about sheep breeds, shearing, skirting, microns, twists per inch.  I believe I next tried flax, and you do not need a distaff to spin flax, in spite of what you may have read in Sleeping Beauty.

I spun cotton, of course, back in the early and mid eighties, when natural and naturally colored fibers were being popularized among spinners by fanatics searching them out and growing them in our southwest.  Like so much of our modern lives, cotton is standardized to a few varieties, eliminating all the wildly occurring strains known to spinners probably up to the industrial revolution.  Here’s a staggering thought:  until the industrial revolution, every thread woven into every sail in every navy in the universe was spun by hand.  That includes the navies of the American Revolution.

Spinning fiber into thread is pretty neat.  I looked for fiber to spin.  I’ve proven you can spin dryer lint.  I’ve spun the cotton wadding in aspirin bottles into decent yarn.  It’s mostly synthetic stuff.  My cats were not safe, but I didn’t have a decent long hair cat during my spinning days, and the short hairs were not fine and soft enough for the yarn to be decent.

I spun a lot of dog hair, mostly due to knowing several Samoyed owners who would “just die” to have a sweater knit from Duke. Or Snowball.  I also finished one project by knitting the sweater for the customer, too.  He wore it ice skating.  According to his wife, several turns around the outdoor rink and her husband went down like a felled tree.  He lay on his back, unconscious.  Paramedics arrived, and one stripped off the sweater.  Steam billowed up.  He was treated for heat stroke, and recovered to skate the rest of the night.  Without his Samoyed sweater.

Some obscure place I read of milkweed being used as alternative to kapok for life preservers during the Second World War.  Thread spun from milkweed even was tried as an alternative to silk for parachutes during that war.  I really wanted to spin a silken thread from milkweed!

First problem—find a stand of milkweed when you are no longer seven years old, walking home from school.  I looked along the meadow trails of several local parks and found lots of milkweeds, no pods.  This was before internet.  I spent an afternoon researching milkweed in the library, and learned they probably are the dumbest plant on the face of the earth.  Some plants are male, some are female.  It still takes two to tango, and if a stand of milkweed does not have girls as well as boys, there will be no milkweed pods.

When I spotted a huge stand of milkweeds in a vacant field next to a local car dealership, I pulled right into the lot, told several salesmen I was not there to buy a car and headed off into the field to harvest just ready to open milkweed pods.  Know how you pick a couple of tomatoes in the garden and put them in your shirt to get them to the house.  I probably should have been arrested for indecent exposure back at the car, but I escaped the salesmen and drove home with my stash.

How to work with it?  I opened the first pod in the living room.  The air filled with hundreds of silken parachutes.  The cats looked at me with suspicion.  I had young grandchildren capture them best they could, and rethought the project.  I opened the next pod in a bag and carefully extracted a few bits of silk.  Almost impossible to hold, but I was able to produce possibly an inch of thread as I twisted the fragile silk and removed the seeds.  By the end of the first pod I had less than a foot of thread for an hour’s hard work.  I set it aside.

Weeks later I mentioned my project to another spinner.  She looked at me incredulously.  “But, milkweed is a bast fiber.  Just like flax, you open the stems and process the fiber inside to spin into thread!”  I knew that.

 Everything else you want to know about milkweed.

The Ringer

 I’ve knit for most of my life, and eventually realized I needed to make yarn, too.  Sourcing a spinning wheel in the pre-internet early eighties involved a good deal of asking, and eventually my younger daughter Shelly brought home a card she picked up at a festival in Kirtland, Ohio.  It was for a spinning and weaving shop down in Chagrin Falls, tucked away in a nice enough alley.

The owner of the shop was very knowledgeable, but couldn’t read my mind or my future, and in my ignorance I left the shop with a double drive band Saxony wheel with the most tichy mother-of-all ever.  I spent more than a year teaching myself to spin on that wheel, and really didn’t become a good spinner until I bought a chair style wheel from a local craftsman.  His wife spun; he watched her and figured out how to do it better.

Of course, one thing leads to another.  If you spin you may learn to weave.  You’ll probably find a guild to join and then you learn a lot faster.  Pretty soon you’re caught up in the whole thing—washing fleece.  Dying fleece.  Carding fleece.  Signing on with your fellow guild members to be a team in a Sheep-to-Shawl contest.

A sheep-to-shawl contest is a juried competition of several teams of spinners and weavers, generally held in a fair or festival context, offering a cash prize to the team that spins and weaves a shawl, washes and dries it and presents the shawl for judging according to the stated rules.  Beside judging at the end, the end, the judges walk around observing warping, weaving and spinning technique.  It can be a long three hours.

Along with some other local guilds, ours sent a team to a local contest.  We began gathering about nine in the morning, getting space assignments, setting up looms, leveling spinning wheels.  Then two out of county trucks pulled in and another loom was unloaded, together with three more wheels, and assigned a spot.  A local judge whispered to one of our more experienced members and the word spread quickly.  The Washington Court House team!  Four hours south.  They got up mighty early in the morning!

I was the weaver that year and Jan was one of the team of three spinners who produced the yarn I wove.  I wove to the end of my warp, we set about the finishing, turned it in and waited.  When we got the results, our weaving was good, our spinning was good, our shawl was judged short of the required length.  The team from Washington Court House took home the money.

Undeterred, our guild put together two teams for a contest the next year.  Jan would be the weaver on our team, and we made at least one practice shawl.  Then, with days to the contest, one of our spinners had to drop out.  Fielding two teams meant our guild didn’t have a reserve spinner to make up the required team of three spinners and one weaver.  The two of us left spinning knew output was not the problem; the two of us could keep up with Jan.  We needed a ringer.

Shelly was in the tenth or eleventh grade then.  Heck, she could have been in first grade as long as she passed as a spinner.  I broke the news as soon as she was home from school.  You’re going to be a ringer in the Sheep to Shawl contest Saturday.

The only wheel I had for her was my double drive band impossible to tension mother-of-all Saxony wheel.  I didn’t tell her all that, I just told her she had to make it look like she could spin.  By the day after tomorrow.

Shelly did nothing on faith.  She had to question everything.  Understand everything.  Analyze everything.  Eventually I grabbed my car keys and told her I would be home when she passed for a spinner.  I came home from my girlfriend’s house, hours later, and found her taking off a bobbin of nicely spun yarn.  My ringer was the real deal.

At the Sheep to Shawl contest our guild’s teams took first and second places.  Washington Court House was disqualified.  They thought they had tipped the scale by appearing with a painted warp.  But the other teams protested the violation of the plain wool warp and they were disqualified.  Shelly’s bobbins of wool went right into that shawl, along with mine and the other spinner’s. 

I was so pleased with her skill and effort that after the event I offered her to buy her a wheel.

“No thanks, Mom.  I got my ribbon.  That’s all I wanted.” 

The Ringer

A Saxony wheel.  Image borrowed from the Michigan Fiber Arts Guild.  The drive band is twice as long as seen, and doubled.  One  strand of the band rides along each side of the wheel.  The other end of the drive band does two jobs.  One side drives the flyer that holds the bobbin and the other side drives the bobbin.  The entire assembly, two uprights with the bobbin between, rides in a groove and is connected by a screw thread on the knob in front.  This assembly is called the mother-of-all, and must be tensioned properly in order to make wool spin to yarn and take up on the bobbin.  Wooden screw threads don't lend themselves to fine tensioning.

He may be entirely innocent

I came home from work, and Jan said I might be interested in pictures on my camera.

Half a sock and four needles, but no ball....

Through the kitchen (and back, but that's the end of the story)

Out the other end of the kitchen

Across the hall into the cat room

Around the leg of their chair in front of the register,

Across the hall into my room,

Around the dresser leg,



Back through the kitchen.



Jan gathered it all up, and suggested to me



He may have saved the sock from a wild attack of Mexican jumping beans,

Or not.