Keeping Warm and Daydreaming

I have been enjoying a relaxing and lazy 6-day weekend at home with my husband and it has been so nice to have my biggest concerns be putting wood on the fire and feeding dogs (and cats. I always forget about the cats). No deadlines, no work calls… just pajamas, hot cocoa and whatever crafting I want to do in my spare time. This is the longest I have been off work since the first week of January, which was spent moving cross-country, so I really needed this time to recover from everything that 2022 threw at us and to just be for a while. Unfortunately, tomorrow it is back to reality, but I feel a little more refreshed and ready to tackle my inbox when I am back to work in the morning. I will have to savor these last few hours as much as possible.

The “arctic blast” that just swept through the country really was no joke! Being from Minnesota, I admit I scoffed a little bit when people down here in North Carolina were posting in forums on Facebook talking about preparing for the cold weather headed our way, but I was quickly reminded of two things: 1. I may live further south now, but I also live in the mountains and at these elevations, cold means cold! and 2. Houses down here are not insulated the way they are in Minnesota. We were actually quite lucky compared to several other people down here in that we never lost power and we didn’t have any pipes burst. However, Kyle did wake up one morning at 2am to find that our mini splits just could not compete with the -20 wind chill and gave up, leaving us with an indoor temp of 40 degrees. Poor, sweet guy spent the rest of the early morning piling wood on the fires as fast as possible. Again, we are very lucky that we have a secondary heat source and we only use the mini splits at night so we don’t have to keep stoking the fire, but that was a coooooold morning! We did have a few pipes freeze (ironically the hot water line to our bathroom sink, as well as the water line to our toilet) so for the past four days flushing the toilet meant relying on a bucket of water, but all of our other faucets were ok so we lucked out there. I have never seen the creek frozen over the way it has been this weekend.

Today the temps climbed back above freezing for a few hours and the ice is beginning to melt, and by this coming weekend it looks like we should be seeing 60 degrees. I am so thankful this weather isn’t sticking around! Of course, having absolutely no desire to step outside in the cold was a great opportunity to keep working on my Cobblestone pullover. I now have both sleeves done and I am working my way up the body of the sweater, starting from the bottom hem. Once the sleeves and torso are done, they are all connected to knit the yoke up to the neckline.

So far this has been exactly the mindless, no frills project I needed. I am happy with how quickly it is coming along and I can’t wait to have this sweater in my closet again. I am about 4″ into the body and now I have nothing but round after round of stockinette (with small panels of garter stitch up the sides) until I reach the underarms. This sweater is so satisfying in its simplicity and it takes absolutely zero effort to keep it moving along. I love it. And to make this project extra enjoyable, my friend gifted me with these awesome stitch markers for Christmas!

These are from Twice Sheared Sheep and my friend picked them up while on vacation in Washington earlier this year (oh my gosh, I just clicked on that link and I am warning you right now, do not visit that website unless you are prepared to spend money). I absolutely love mermaids, I would be one if I could, and these stitch markers are the perfect bit of color and sparkle to add to my knitting bag. I put them to use immediately on this sweater project and I smile every time they pass me by as I knit around. It is really making me look forward to warmer weather this summer when I can hike with friends and swim under waterfalls again.

I also received some really wonderful books from my sister-in-law that I cannot wait to dig into. There are 12 kids in my family, so for Christmas growing up we always pulled a name out of a hat and that would be the person that we buy a gift for, Secret Santa style, although we have always called it Kris Kringle in my family, KK for short. (Does anybody else use that, or is it just my family? I have only ever heard other people say Secret Santa. I just googled and Kris Kringle is the traditional gift-bringer in German tradition. Hey mom, if you’re reading, did we get this tradition from your mother?) Now that we are all adults, this tradition has expanded to include significant others, and a separate pool for all of the nieces and nephews. This year my sister-in-law drew my name and one thing I love almost as much as actually knitting is a good book about knitting or textile traditions.

I forget where I heard about this book, it may have been an ad in Spin-Off, or Handwoven magazine, or Threads… but I immediately added it to my list of books I wanted for my bookshelf. I cannot wait to start reading this one. The history of textiles and how intricately textile production and cultural development are linked has always been so interesting to me and this book looks really well researched and written. Kyle was making fun of me last night because one of the first things I said after opening this was “wow, this has a really extensive bibliography!”, which did nothing to disprove his earlier claim that he had married a nerd. I guess I will proudly wear that one on my sleeve.

One of my favorite types of crafting books to collect are books about historical or traditional textile designs, patterns, techniques… Any time I see a new book about traditional knitting, it gets added to my never-ending list.

This book does a really good job of marrying traditional patterns with modern style and there are so many projects, it is hard to decide what I want to make first. I often see collections of patterns touted as being “traditionally inspired, simplified for the modern knitter!” which immediately turns me off and many of those books have not landed a place on my shelf. I prefer true explorations of historical garments and fabric, presented without “modern” interpretation or modification. In this case, however, I think the projects in this book are really well done in a way that doesn’t lose the traditional inspiration, but is also appealing to a wide range of knitters. And we (the royal we… me, I) also can’t forget that many of these knitting traditions didn’t go anywhere and are still being expanded upon and updated and modified even today. This book really has everything from head to toe. Hats, scarves, sweaters, mittens, socks, slippers… it is a great collection. The pullover on the cover that the man in the middle is wearing is what pulled me in, but inside there are so many wonderful projects.

I love how graphic these mittens are with the large motif, and it is so creative the way it is broken up between the two mittens. I’m already thinking of the perfect yarn in my stash that I could use for these.

This sweater would look so cute on my husband, and I knew even before I showed him the picture that he would love the colors. Very retro/mid-century/70s kitchen appliance.

Great scarves in this collection, too. The one on the left, very similar to the sweater on the cover that first drew me in, might be in my future. I just love flipping through a good knitting book and daydreaming about future projects. I haven’t done that in a while and I forgot how inspiring it can be. This is getting me thinking about goals for my own crafting in 2023 and what that could look like. I don’t want to get carried away.

I have just gotten started on my latest weaving project as well. As I mentioned in my last post, this project is taking up the full 40″ weaving width on my loom and while I am very excited to see this project grow, it is also coming with its own… “opportunities” as we say in the corporate world. The loom I weave on is one that I purchased used on Craigslist from a woman who had refurbished it – originally built in the 60s. It really is a fantastic loom, but there are certainly aspects that could be improved upon with some investment. One of those investments would be to replace all of the heddles that are currently on the loom. The heddles are suspended within a frame, or shaft, and each individual warp thread is fed through the opening in a heddle.

When one of more shafts are raised, those heddles move up and that is what creates the shed, the opening through which the weft yarn is passed to create the woven fabric (on my loom. On some looms the shafts move down. On some looms they move up AND down.)

Ideally all of the threads at the top and bottom would be perfectly aligned, making a very clean shed and making it easy to pass the shuttle through without creating unintended floats – skipped threads. While functional, you can see that the shed created on my loom has threads at all different heights, which means I have to be extra careful to make sure the shuttle is going over the threads it should, and under the threads it should. The width of this particular project just exacerbates the potential that I might throw a pick with errors if a thread is too high or too low within the shed. One of the reasons why my shed looks like this is because I have four or five different types of heddles on the shafts, and each one has the eye of the heddle at a slightly different height. By replacing the heddles with the same type on all 10 shafts, I would have a much cleaner shed.

All of that is to say that while I have finally gotten the loom set up to start weaving, the weaving itself is slower going that I expected because I am being extra careful about floats with the width of this project, and I am still getting used to how much force it takes to throw a shuttle all the way through that shed to my other hand.

Despite this learning curve, I like the way this is weaving up so far and I think the pattern will be even more defined once this is off the loom and washed. (And I know I am being very vague when referring to this project – mostly because it is going to be a gift and the person receiving it could possibly be reading. So while I am showing you what I am working on, I am also intentionally keeping you in the dark as to what I am making so that I don’t ruin any surprises.)

Whew, that was a lot of chatter. Time for me to go knit!

Until next time, stay creative.