While doing my usual year-end review posts, it occurred to me one thing I’ve never done is tallied up my yarn usage. I have a tendency to find a yarn I really like and knit with it several times, while yarns I’m longing to try — my yarns-in-waiting, plus — sit and wait. So knitting around more has been on my mind, and knitting so many accessories last year gave me a chance to change things up more than I maybe have in the past. I wanted to take stock to see what, if anything, I could glean from it. Here’s how it breaks down:
Log Cabin Mitts Original: Brooklyn Tweed Shelter, stash+purchased, used before Grey: Hole & Sons, stash, used before (no longer available) B/W: Brooklyn Tweed Shelter, stash, used before Toffee: OUR Yarn DK, via Fringe Supply Co. stock, new to me (no longer available) Black/blue: Brooklyn Tweed Shelter, stash, used before + Harrisville Color Lab, stash, used before Verb kit: AVFKW Range, purchased, new to me (no longer available) Indigo: AVFKW Pioneer, purchased, used before
WIPs Black cowl-dickey: Woolfolk Luft, purchased+gift from Woolfolk Carbeth Cardigan: OUR Yarn Chunky, via Fringe Supply Co. stock, used before + Shibui Pebble, stash/leftover gift from Shibui, used before
. . . . .
19 FOs + 1 Partial/sample + 2 WIPs Total number of unique yarns used: 18 (all small/independent businesses) Yarns used more than once: 4 (Shelter, Far, OUR Chunky, Pebble) New to me: 13! Purchased for projects: 16 From stash: 8 Gift/yarn support: 3
I had no idea I knitted with a whopping 13 new-to-me yarns last year.
My ongoing objectives are to find ways to use some of the wool in my stash such that it will work for my climate, and to branch out into non-wools, which means almost certainly new to me. For those not from stash, I want to be more deliberate about seeking out yarns with recycled content and from companies with non-white owners.
[Edited to add: I believe all of the yarn companies listed here have white owners, except for the Snoqualmie Valley. Anna, who owns Tolt, is of mixed heritage.]
Holy moly, you guys, the #fringeandfriendssteekalong feed is a sight to behold! It is, as Mary Berry would say, “cram jam full” of stunning Sólbein cardigans in progress along with a handful of other steekables, and surprisingly few people taking many liberties with patterns. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! I think on this one so many of us are just concentrating on getting the color choices right, gathering steam for our first steek — and there are actually quite a lot of people knitting their first sweater ever! All of which I applaud applaud applaud! I couldn’t be more thrilled. And cannot believe how fast some of you can knit! There are already sweaters at or nearing completion, while I haven’t even cast on yet. If you’re still on the fence, please understand you can jump in anytime!
Meanwhile, here’s the first of the standout projects that I want to feature here on the blog, so this is our first addition to the on-the-fly panel for the KAL, and it happens to be the endlessly inspiring Kristine Vejar from Verb. She’s taking quite a few liberties, and wow I cannot wait to watch this unfold!
Yarn: A Verb for Keeping Warm Dawn. I chose this yarn because I love the fabric it makes, and also because I live in a more mild climate, which means I will get to use this sweater more than if it were knit out of Lopi.
Palette: Indigo Blue! I am inspired by this coat by Kapital. In the AVFKW dye studio, we indigo-dyed a range of shades. I will try to incorporate as many of them as possible into the sweater. I have drawn a few ideas for how to incorporate the different skeins of indigo-dyed yarn into Solbein. All of this said, I am prepared to knit and rip, knit and rip, until I get the color combination just right.
Master plan: Taking some large leaps here as I dive into the Fringe and Friends Solbein Steekalong! When interviewing yarns for this project, at the top of my list were Lettlopi and Stone Wool Corriedale. However, when I came across Dawn, I thought Ooooo, this could be really interesting. I have a zip-up hoodie I purchased in Iceland a couple years back, and I wear it on our coldest Bay Area days from about November to January. But, due to Dawn’s cotton content, I could wear Dawn year-round. That being said, there are a couple concerns at hand using Dawn. It is lighter-weight, which means a smaller gauge. And, how would it steek?
Now to tackle gauge. I went to my swatch library and pulled the swatch for Dawn. (I use YO to record my needle size into the swatch). The fabric I like best is 17 stitches and 23 rows over 4”. It has substance not too tight and not too loose. And I believe I can make the pattern work at this gauge.
The pattern calls for 14 sts over 4″. The size I would knit if I were getting gauge would be 39 1/2” (though that is a touch too big). So to compensate for my tighter gauge, I am knitting size 46 1/2″.
By my calculations, the resulting finished size will be approx: 38″ chest circumference 12″ sleeve circumference
I am planning to leave off the buttons / buttonholes, cuff and hem treatment. I would like to knit my “buttonband” running parallel to the sweater, rather than horizontal (which I need to research because I am not sure how to do this).
. . .
I feel like I might need to hire one of you to distract her when she’s finished, if you know what I mean! But I also feel that way about sooooo many of the other sweaters on the feed. I’m not sure I’ll be able to resist casting one on in my own size …
After a lifetime of mostly thinking January 1st is irrelevant and spurning the making of resolutions, this year I find myself so awash in thoughts and wishes and goals and reflections that I’m having trouble even beginning to put them into sentences, much less paragraph order. Not to mention I’ve had my hands (and brain) so full these past few weeks with holiday business and the new Fringe Supply Co. website and the launch of the Steekalong (etc, etc) that I haven’t been able to look any of this squarely in the face, or sit still with it, or let it talk back to me. So bear with me as I try to say at least some fraction of what I want to say.
The bottom line will be: I’m different.
I’m older than I was a couple of weeks ago. As in, the dawn of a new decade. And I have an older husband. A couple of years ago, having made it through assorted health scares and setbacks, and having my fun-loving husband back on his feet, I became wide-awake aware of the fact that I’m not going to live forever and I have not seen the world, and neither had he, and we want to see the world. A big part of moving from San Francisco to Nashville is we wanted to see the world. Living there, far from our families, and spending all of our money on the cost of living there, pretty much any travel we were able to do was to see family — and even that was getting harder and more expensive. How were we ever going to see Paris or Istanbul or the Congo? So we moved to where it’s easy enough to see family — just hop in the car — that we could do much more of that, but also save money and spend it on travel. (This was one of many factors, but a big one.)
People who know us would likely describe us as gutsy and adventuresome. We’d been all up and down the west coast hiking backcountry trails and climbing rock walls and whatnot. We’ve both seen most of the U.S. But when it came to international travel, we … well, I guess we just didn’t know how to say yes to that. It seems so daunting. So foreign! And it might have been, twenty years ago, but now with debit cards and iPhones, there’s not a lot of difference between traveling to Paris Texas and Paris France, functionally speaking. Except we didn’t know that because we were too nervous to try it. (Or “too busy” or recovering from surgery or, you know.) It was so much easier to just keep not going. Until one day we decided we didn’t want to find ourselves old or infirm and wishing we’d gone while we could.
So we decided we would go to Paris. Keep it simple, just one city, and I kinda know the language. And if we only ever made it to one place, hey, at least we’d seen Paris! We still thought we didn’t know how, but we decided if we just picked some dates and bought some plane tickets, we’d be forced to figure it out, so that’s what we did. And in April of 2017, we went to Paris. Other than the cost and length of the flights — and ok, the fact that some people couldn’t understand us and vice versa — it was just like traveling to any other big city we’d ever been in. And that was pretty thrilling and emboldening, but like we walked everywhere (took a cab twice) and never left the city. And I kinda know the language. Everywhere else still seemed sort of daunting! But we loved it and we made a pact that we would leave the country at least once a year for as long as we’re able. Which we half-did in 2018.
When I got the chance to tag along to Portugal last June, it wound up being at the expense of Bob leaving the country. (We almost went back to Paris for my big birthday last month, but decided on the desert with loved ones instead.) If you ever have the chance to travel with friends who are really good at it — or this is why people do group tours, I now understand — you should do that. Again, what I learned is it’s not that hard or different, in this day and age. And although the flights can be more expensive than domestic travel, it can be cheaper overall. My elaborate trip to Portugal was a bargain compared to our few days in SF in September. But this time I was with people who simply rented cars and plugged an address into Google Maps, just like at home, and off we went all over the country. What I got to experience there, as I mentioned at the time, left me SO hungry for more.
I want to see the world. And more important, I want to be a person who says yes more.
So far this is a long way of telling you I plan to wear more color. This year’s resolution: Wear color. Be color. Live in color.
I didn’t wear makeup for about twelve years. I simply didn’t want to. I had loved makeup in earlier years, but had started to feel like the only time I looked in the mirror and thought “ahhhh, that’s better” was when I looked up from washing my face. So I just stopped one day (the day I returned from my first backpacking trip, actually), and over time I decided I wouldn’t start again for any reason other than that it felt appealing and fun to me. I wouldn’t succumb to any external pressure to do it — because we are expected to, and you have to explain yourself if you choose not to, which seems really backwards to me. (I have a whole book of thoughts on this subject.) But eventually I did find myself actually wanting to wear a little bit of makeup, and so now I do.
Likewise, I used to wear more color than I do now. I’ve never been an Anna Maltz or a Libby Callaway or even a Meghan Fernandes — to name just a few friends whose facility with color I admire — but there was color. In particular, pink.
Here are three of my favorite outfits of my life:
1. Going off to sleepaway camp for the first time at age 12 or so, and feeling even more pressure about what I wore than any first day of school, I wore a tube top in a hot pink and white awning stripe under pale pink overall shorts with white Keds. 2. Working at JC Penney in high school while there was a trendy co-branded collection with a hot British brand (these were early Madonna days), I bought the hot pink sleeveless cotton mock-neck sweater and — how did I never make this connection before — a long tube skirt in hot pink and white awning stripe. And I had a perfectly matched pair of hot pink flats. 3. Heading to family-friends’ house for Christmas one year when we were all alone in CA, and feeling kind of glum, I wore my security-blanket grey sweatshirt with my raspberry pink chinos and black boots. I called those my happy pants.
I had fun getting dressed when I was in my teens, twenties, even thirties. I was more playful with color and shape — easier because, as we’ve well established, I was constantly refilling and reinventing my closet. Ever since committing to making more of my own clothes (and thus wanting the effort to pay off) and trying to be more mindful of what I’m putting into my closet, I’ve been playing it safe. Partly it’s because I moved across the country with so little and had to reestablish those basic building blocks of a functioning closet — all the more important in a small closet with slow turnover.
Are you still with me? Here’s what all that travel stuff had to do with this: I’m going to India this year.
I’ve wanted to go to India for as long as I can remember. I’ve a lifelong obsession with the literature and history of the continent. Photos of India fill me with longing like no other place. One of my closest friends from that pink-striped tube skirt era (we originally met at JC Penney) is Indian, and her family had offered back then that if I ever wanted to go with them on one of their trips, I could. To a suburban midwestern teenager with a severe anxiety disorder, that was like being offered a seat on a flight to Mars. It was fun to think about, but are you kidding me? I was so young and dumb then that I didn’t even partake of her mother’s Indian cooking. (Talk about regrets!)
In recent years, my wish to go there had intensified. And then there came a point where I decided it just wasn’t meant to be. Bob has no interest, and it’s not like I’m going to go by myself. So when? How? I’d have to content myself with books and movies, and it was sad to think that way. Then about six weeks ago, the opportunity presented itself — a chance to go with a friend who’s been. I talked it over with Bob and we agreed I should do it. And I took a hard gulp and pushed a button. I said yes. And I felt like the top of my head was going to fly off, I was so indescribably excited. Within 48 hours, three of those friends of mine who are so much better travelers than me — but who are all equally humbled at the idea of actually going to India — also said yes. There has hardly been a single day since that I haven’t said in disbelief, either in my head or out loud, I’m going to India.
I’m not sure which is the chicken and which the egg, but I feel color coming on, and it feels very much related. I find myself desperately craving not grey but pink. I want those raspberry chinos back, and to figure out how to make more vibrant color work for me again. If I can go to India, I can do anything — I’m pretty sure. (Honest to god, I was listening to an interview on NPR the other day about the inevitability and nearness of colonizing Mars, and I was like “I’d book a seat for that.” Ha!)
If there’s one thing I truly believe it’s that we never really know what we’re capable of. Deciding to wear pink pants is nothing compared to deciding to go to India. But I think it’s important to listen to ourselves and hear those rumblings. To never box ourselves into our own or anyone else’s narrow definition of who we are. We contain multitudes.
So here’s the other thing I want to say, and I wish I had gotten to it sooner than the end of a remarkably long piece of writing. Last month I was reading this post about self-care on Mason-Dixon — about negative self-talk and specifically about negative body talk. I don’t really do the latter — or haven’t in the past decade or so — but I do have an inner nag. She’s mean and demeaning and she almost never shuts up. I am really not living up to her standards on a daily basis. But what I realized while reading that particular article is that my inner bitch is not just mean; she is specifically a fearmonger. I’ve been through a lot in the last thirty years — divorce, failed business, toxic work situations, foreclosure — all of which I treasure as growth experiences (I wouldn’t be where I am now), but I have a certain amount of PTSD. Since our ability to feed and clothe ourselves right now depends entirely on the continued success of Fringe Supply Co., she’s always taunting me about what will happen when I figure out how to screw it up, which of course she feels certain I’ll do.
I know from living this long that things are good and then they’re not so good and then they’re good again and then they’re bad again … — it’s cyclical, not a straight line through some difficulty to happily every after, as Hollywood would have us believe. So she spends every day lying in wait for the moment when it goes bad next, and reminding me it’s coming. Which makes it hard to just enjoy the good while it’s good, you know?
So once I realized all of that, I punched her in the face. I’ve booked a trip to India. I put our house in order, figuratively speaking. (Still working on the actual piles!) And in 2019, you’ll see me wearing pink pants.
RIP, fearmonger — I’ve got a life to live.
. . . Here’s the too long / didn’t read version of my 2019 Resolutions: -Experiment with wearing more color -Travel to India -Say yes to more things that make my head explode with joy
If you haven’t heard, there’s a shiny new Fringe Supply Co. site that went live as the ball dropped on New Year’s Eve, and among its many lovely traits is that you can sign up to be notified when an out-of-stock item returns. So if you’re waiting for the next Town Bag update, for example, the new process is to simply click on the big blue “Notify me” button, plug in your email address and wait to be notified! (If we receive X of an item, the first X people on the list will get notified first, and so on. So the sooner you get onto a list, the better.) If it’s the army-green Porter Bin you’ve been waiting for, that’s now back in stock!
And if you haven’t seen the #fringeandfriendssteekalong feed yet, you must — but good luck resisting a cast-on if you haven’t already made the leap! Those are some insanely tempting WIPs over there. Happily my yarn is here, so I’ll be casting on this weekend!
When I was putting together my 2018 Favorite New Favorites and looking back through the year’s best (in my opinion!) knitting patterns, there were several things I regretted not having gotten onto the blog yet. Chief among them, these two enticing cable hat patterns by Sari Nordlund:
TOP: Marlon Hat is gorgeous and worsted weight, which means I have countless yarn options in my stash
BOTTOM: Utu Hat is gorgeous and written for Woolfolk’s weirdly compelling bouclé yarn, Flette, which I happen to have two skeins of (because they sent them to me) and so much curiosity about that I’m seriously sitting here thinking “would I knit a hat on 2s …?”
I finished knittingBob’s sweater vest in plenty of time for him to wear it out to dinner on New Year’s Eve, and the man could not be happier! Nor could I, honestly — this vest turned out so much better than I imagined. And that’s due to two things: a highly detailed pattern paired with some very nice yarn.
You may recall I had bought a skein of this at Stitches West last winter, and Bob basically picked it off my shelf one day and said “I want a sweater out of this.” It’s Plucky Knitter’s Yakpaca in “Pinstripe” — a 50/50 blend of yak and alpaca — and there’s no way he would wear a full sweater in such warm fibers, so thankfully what he wanted was a vest. And after poking around a bit, we settled on Churchmouse’s His Vest pattern.
My gauge was slightly bigger than the pattern gauge (I knitted the yarn on US6 needles at 4.75 sts/inch) and for such a straightforward garment, it would have been super simple to just wing it. But there were so many subtleties to how the pattern is written — very fine attention to the armhole shaping, shoulder seam placement, neck treatment — that I wanted to try to use the pattern. Since all my numbers were different, that got to be a bit of a headache (and I wound up not doing their tidy little neck selvage trick) but I’m glad I did it, and if I were to make this again, I would knit it precisely to the pattern.
Apart from the slight difference in gauge, the only change I made was to tweak the length — we wanted it to hit right at the front pockets of his jeans — and raised the neck, which meant going my own way on that whole part.
It’s a really lovely, simple garment, and a perfect case of how much yarn choice can matter. The fabric this yarn creates is so soft and elegant that I had this hanging on the door to my room for about 24 hours and I just kept staring at it having that “wow, I made that” feeling, even though it’s such a simple thing! It just looks so luxurious.
It was 70 degrees on New Year’s Eve and he wore it anyway, looking perfectly dapper. Sorry I didn’t get a photo!
FINALLY! I know it’s been hard for a lot of you to wait to start knitting (and some just couldn’t stand not to cast on), so I’m extra happy kickoff day for the Fringe and Friends Steekalong has finally arrived. There is no firm end date. The feed will have my focused attention through Feb 17th, but feel free to knit at your own pace. Ultimately, this is not about deadlines or prizes (although see below) — it’s about challenging yourself, having fun, and making a sweater!
Normally, kickoff day is when I introduce you to the panel of knitters who’ll be featured here on the blog throughout the kal, but I’m doing things a little differently this year — or rather, taking a sort of hybrid approach from past FAFKALs. As of today, the “panel” consists of just me and Mary Jane, and I’ll be looking for standout contributors to the #fringeandfriendssteekalong feed, assembling a sort of panel on the fly.
For the next three or four weeks, I’ll pick projects that are of particular interest, and post a q&a with one of them roughly once a week. (Maybe exactly once a week, maybe less — we’ll see how it takes shape!) And then for any of those panelists that finish in a timely fashion (i.e. by end of Feb or so), I’ll also do an FO interview here just like I’ve done with panelists in the past, so everyone can see how those projects turned out.
So if you’d like to see yourself and your project featured here, the way to do that is to post about your plans on the feed! Photo quality always counts, but so does having an interesting approach or story or plan of whatever sort. Are you making some clever mods to the pattern, inventing your own, doing something interesting with your yarn choice? Setting some other sort of goal or challenging yourself in an inspiring way? Tell us about it! And you could wind up on the panel of featured knitters, which will also come with a gift from Fringe Supply Co.
YOU COULD WIN PRIZES!
Apart from the chance to be added to the panel and featured here, there will be random prizes everyone has a shot at. On February 17th, I will draw 5 knitters from all of the qualifying posts on the #fringeandfriendssteekalong feed and those 5 knitters will each win a Field Bag of their choice!
“Qualifying” means: – You must be following @karentempler@mjmucklestone and @fringesupplyco – You must have made at least 3 posts to your feed along the way (using the #fringeandfriendssteekalong hashtag obviously), showing your plans and your progress and sustained participation in the event.
Winners of the random drawing will be announced here on the blog on Feb 18th.
. . . . .
MEET THE PANEL
So there’s still the matter of telling you what MJM and I each have planned! You ready?
Master plan: As we’ve just gone through a December that hovered in the 50s, 60s, even some 70s, and I’m unable to wear all of the sweaters already in my closet, I had to face the fact that I would not be making this gorgeous sweater for myself — so for who then? Partly because of my color concept (below), I started thinking about all of my beautiful little nieces I’ve never knitted for, and realized if I were to knit this at worsted gauge, it would come out kid-sized, and they could pass it around depending who it winds up fitting. So that’s what I’m doing! (And I’ll also finally be taking this opportunity to cut open my purple lopi sweater.)
Yarn: Obviously when you’re knitting for kids, you think a little harder about the yarn. I want a nice wool that will cooperate with a steek (so nothing too gooey soft) but that will be acceptable to the littles (so not too woolly). So I think I’m going with Germantown. I know from swatching with it for the Anna Vest that it is quite flexible about gauge, and since I may be mixing yarns for the colorwork, in order to the get the tonal gradation I want, that feels important. I’ve ordered some at the last minute, and will swatch and see the moment it arrives!
Palette: I’ve mentioned that I’ve really been craving yellow lately, and ever since reading about Mary Jane’s initial inspiration for the yoke — the flickering of sunlight — I’ve been wanting to see this sweater in a nice bright yellow with paler yellow and off-white colorwork. The reason I say I may be mixing yarns is that Germantown offers what I think (from online photos) will be just the sort of saturated, cheerful yellow I want for the main color, and a natural for the lightest, but not a nice soft buttery yellow in between. The skein pictured above has been in my stash for several years — it’s an older offering from my friends Camellia Fiber Co. , an aran-weight Merino that was naturally dyed with marigold petals, by my friend Rebekka. I’ve been saving it, not knowing for what, and I know the girls would love this story — plus that will give a little extra softness to the neckband. So I’m going to see if I can make it work with the Germantown. If not, I may try my hand at dyeing my own middle contrast color! The girls might rather it were purple or pink, but I’m pretty committed to the yellow idea.
Plan: I think I’m going to put a zipper in this one. Either that, or knit the button band before I cut the steek. Both are things I’ve seen in real Icelandic Lopapeysas.
Yarn: I’m using Léttlopi because I have it and because I love it!
Palette: I think it will be 3 colors of red because I have enough of them in my stash. Two of the colors are really close … I’m going to swatch first. I have a favorite discontinued red I might use if I can find it, otherwise it’s going to be kind of a fade effect, which could be nice!
The colors kind of remind me of melted candle wax. Might not be a great visual for some but I find it kind of intriguing.
