Jamalangasta!

I saw this Finnish knitting book on the Liivian talossa and Jane Brocket blogs and ordered it even though I can't read Finnish.
It's glorious!

I'm off to the Connecticut Sheep and Wool Festival tomorrow. From their website:

"sheep exhibits, shearing demonstrations; vendors, fleece sale, educational lectures; ox cart rides, wool skirting, a sheep dog trial, fleece to shawl contests, kids corner, knitting instruction, ask the veterinarian, food, vendors, ox cart rides, festival logo shirts, music, vendors and fun."

Hope to see you there on Saturday!
- Kathy

Fryeburg, Maine

The Mountain View Knitting Guild in Fryeburg, Maine asked me to speak last week. I do a talk on "Stories of Knitting". One member, a woman who had grown up in Austria, brought this adorable child's sweater to show. All Austrian woman are taught to knit in school, and when they have children, they knit this sweater for them. I love this sweater. It is well-worn and well-loved. It the epitome of a hand-knitted garment: simple, beautiful, loved, humble.
Many of the ladies of this guild had hand-knit name tags!
They meet in a church basement.
Fryeburg, Maine is a three and a half hour drive so guild member Linda Sorensen kindly offered me hospitality for the night. She is a jeweler as well as a knitter. Below are some beautiful lapis lazuli and silver necklaces being made in her studio/workshop.
Linda is knitting a vest with the "Knit One Below" method. It creates a beautiful and dense fabric.
And Linda makes pysanky, Ukranian Easter eggs.
Her eggs are breathtaking.



I was entranced.
Linda's husband David keeps bees. This is something my husband and I would love to do.
David is a horticulturalist and he grows acres of raspberries, blueberries, currants, gooseberries and fruit trees for a "pick your own" garden called Berry Knoll Farm. They live in Eaton, NH and I am going to bring my family and go pick berries there this summer.

And when I do I will take photos of the garden for the blog. Because on this visit I only had eyes for pysanky!
Thank you Mountain View Knitters and thank you Linda and David!
-Kathy

Halloween Costumes (Knitting vs. Sewing)

From Katherine Jane in New York City:

Conversations throughout October last year generally went like this:

Person: "So, what are you going to be for Halloween?"
Me: "Well, first I have to dress up like a snake, for a dodgeball tournament.

Person: "...oh. Hmm."

Me: "Then in the evening I have to dress up like Manifest Destiny, so that I can personify the punchline to an Emilio Estevez joke."

Person: "Y'know what, forget it--I'm sorry I asked."

Now, these costumes were not quite as obscure as they might at first sound. My dodgeball tournament was with my regular team The Kobra Krew, so the decision to all dress up like snakes was not too much of a stretch. And as for the Emilio Estevez jokes--well, my friends and I had gotten on a kick of making up jokes, which all ran along these lines:

Person 1: "What do you call a guy who looks like Emilio Estevez but is into reenacting the Middle Ages?"

Person 2: "What?"

Person 1: "Emilio Renaissance Festivez."

...and so forth.

We'd been making these jokes all month, and so it seemed natural that we should go out as a big group dressed in a way that would enable us to tell these jokes to strangers in bars throughout Manhattan. My joke, of course, was, "What do you call a guy who looks like Emilio Estevez but is obsessed with the idea of western expansion? Emilio Manifest Destivez."

Now, when I started to think about costume planning it pretty quickly became apparent that I was not going to be able to do a literal interpretation of either one; a legless reptile and a ethereal concept do not good costumes make. I briefly toyed with the idea of knitting a giant snake and winding it around my person, but this would have made impractical garb for playing dodgeball. So, I had to abandon my dreams of knitted costumes (knitting is always the option I consider first) and instead think about sewing. I had bought a sewing machine over the summer but hadn't really used it for anything more than mending clothes, so this would be my first real clothing endeavor. I decided to make a dress with printed snakes all over it for the first half of the day, and a dress made from fabric featuring the states that run along Route 66 for the evening.

The dresses turned out okay; I used the pattern Simplicity 3833, which has fairly easy to follow instructions. However, I have to say that I still vastly prefer knitting to sewing, not just because my skill level is higher, but because I find the process more pleasing. There is a real joy to sewing long straight sections of fabric--a meditative quality, plus the smug knowledge that this would take about 5,000 times longer if you were doing it by hand. However, the little fiddly bits--the darts on the bodice, or getting the zipper to fit properly--do not have the same joy that the little fiddly bits in knitting tend to have, and I'm not sure what the difference is. There also seems to be a difference in mindset for me; knitting feels very linear, lines either going back and forth or around and around in an endless circle, while sewing is much more about taking a two-dimensional thing (fabric) and turning it into a three-dimensional thing (a shaped dress). My brain isn't very spacial, and so sewing for me requires constant energy to understand how the garment is shaping up--whereas knitting is about finding the rhythm within a pattern and falling into it, focusing on the loop or loops that are active and letting the whole thing unfold naturally. I guess it just feels more zen.

Anyway, here's how the dresses turned out:

My mother made the hat--isn't it fab?

From left to right: Emilio Renaissance Festivez, Emilio Undeadstivez, Marty McFly, Emilio Cutoff Denim Vestivez, and Emilio Manifest Desivez.

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Katherine Jane Arathoon lives in New York City and occasionally guest blogs for Knitting Out Loud. She also blogs at Between Ewe And Me.

wild woman knits

Above are wild bird nests at Paya Indah Wetlands in Malaysia (by the way, this wetlands is now closed and it's fate is uncertain...). Below are the wild bird nests knitted by artist Karen Jelenfy, with drawings by her twelve year old partner, Katie. They teamed up as part of the mentoring program "Branching Out" at Belfast, Maine's Waterfall Arts.
As part of the exhibit, Karen gathered knitters together on Saturday and taught us how to knit our own wild nests.
Karen's knitted nests are beautiful, each one a different shape and color.
Naturally, because we were a group of knitters, we had to see the had knits everyone was wearing. Sara Brand-New was wearing a gorgeous roomy cabled sweater which is the first sweater she ever knit, plus a skirt knit from a pattern she found at Yarns in the Farms in Beverly, Massachusetts. You can see the pattern on their website.

Adorable! And she is knitting it, below, in a larger size - from the bottom up.

Above is Astrig Tanguay, of mid-coast Maine's Fiber College. The vest is knit from a fleece she spun.
Karen's daughter Roxanne was there! In a reverse of the usual way of things in knitting, Roxanne taught her mother to knit several years ago.
We were all busy making nests...
And wearing our beautiful hand knits.
-Kathy

Connecticut Sheep & Wool Festival 2009

The 2010 Connecticut Sheep and Wool Festival is coming up on Saturday, April 24th. We had a great time at the 2009 Connecticut Sheep & Wool Festival, and just realized that we never published our photos on the blog! So here they are, sort of a preview...

In 2009 there were men in kilts, delicious lamb burgers and gorgeous yarns. The lucky sheep pictured above had already been sheared, it was a gorgeously warm (read HOT) sunny day.

Here is my neighbor (yes! I live across the street from a yarn shop!) Debbie Bergman, owner of Purple Fleece, (and my neighbor, am I lucky or what) did a brisk business in weaving, spinning and knitting supplies.

These ladies were giving a lace demonstration. I had never seen this done before. The bobbins alone are a work of art.


And here are the Connecticut Sheep Sisters, spinning and weaving. It was a lovely day. Food for the soul. And I can hardly wait for April 24th!!!
- Kathy