Here we are again almost four weeks since my last post and once again I have so much to share. I can’t believe we’re sprinting towards September already, but it has definitely been feeling a little like fall outside. We’re finally able to sleep with the windows open again now that the humidity isn’t quite so bad, and one of our maple trees has been dropping leaves like crazy – I don’t know what’s wrong with that one. It’s always the last to get leaves in the spring, and the first to drop them in the fall. An underachiever, I’d say. I keep trying to chalk it up to stress from heat and humidity, but Kyle isn’t buying it as he giddily pulls sweatshirts out of the closet and talks about Halloween and building fires. I struggle with change as I’ve mentioned here so many times before, so of course I am trying to hold onto summer as long as possible, but you can’t stop the changing of the seasons.
A few weeks ago, I traveled to Minnesota for my brother’s wedding and it was a beautiful outdoor ceremony in his back yard. I don’t get back to MN very often and it was great to be able to see 10 out of my 11 siblings while I was there. The last (and only) two times I have gone back to MN, I didn’t have a chance to see much family, and didn’t see any of my nieces and nephews. My brother’s wedding was adults only, and though I tried to see as much family as I could – and I’m very glad I did manage to meet my niece for the first time despite her being almost two years old – I still missed out on seeing several niblings. Next time I visit I’ll have to be even better at planning in advance to make sure I can get around to see everybody.
For my brother’s wedding, I decided once again to continue my tradition of sewing my own shirt for the occasion. When I first learned how to sew, it was one of my main goals to be able to make button-up shirts for myself to wear to the office. Through all of the changes in the past several years – the pandemic, moving to NC, quitting my job – I don’t have much reason to wear button-ups anymore, so I always jump at the opportunity to make something special when I have reason to. In my last post, I had mentioned that I was essentially going to take my familiar pattern and cut the sleeves at an arbitrary length to make a short-sleeve shirt and hope for the best. I honestly anticipated a fair amount of trouble with that casual approach, but it actually turned out fairly well. As expected, I did have to make a few adjustments to the sleeves once everything was put together, but even those changes were easier than I initially thought they would be. There were two changes I needed to make to the sleeves:
You can see the before and after above. The first change is that I didn’t like how much the sleeve flared out; there was just too much fabric. That much wiggle room works just fine for a long sleeve, but looked odd here. And the second change was that I had cut the pattern pieces just about an inch shorter than I should have. I thought at first that I would have to cut new sleeve pieces and sew them in, but with just a minor change to the way I sewed the cuffs I was able to extend the length and when I sewed the seam up the underarm I just tapered it in to remove the excess fabric from the circumference and voila! Much better. An added bonus is that I actually like the stitching detail on the new cuff better. I think it makes it looks a little more polished (not that anybody other than myself would ever notice.)
All in all, this project was quick and relatively painless. Making it short-sleeved eliminated a lot of the fiddly work around the cuff and I’m thinking I may need to make a few more shirts to add to my wardrobe for when I need something casual, but a bit dressier than a t-shirt.
I’m terrible at remembering to take pictures when I’m actually dressed for the occasion, but luckily my siblings all shared their action shots from my brother’s wedding and I was able to borrow a few.
And now that the cat is out of the bag, I can finally share the finished quilt I was working on last month as well. As you may have guessed by now, it was a wedding gift for my brother and my new sister-in-law.
I wanted to do something a little special, so I stitched their wedding date into one of the corners before putting everything together. I kept forgetting to hide that detail when taking progress pictures and had to keep retaking them so that I wouldn’t ruin the surprise when posting on Instagram.
If I remember correctly, this was a queen-sized quilt and for that reason, in addition to time restrictions, I did not go crazy with the complexity of the actual quilting otherwise it would have never gotten done. Not only that, but trying to wrestle with a queen-sized quilt while trying to stitch on my regular sewing machine required every ounce of my patience.
All in all I am really happy with the finished product. I used a wool batting for added warmth and comfort for those cold Minnesota winters, and found a backing fabric that really complemented the front.
This is only the second quilt I have ever completed and it is really making me want to get back to my own winter quilt to finish it up. The clock is ticking, and if the lazy maple tree outside my window is any indication, it’ll be no time at all before I start wishing I had it to cozy up under.
Congratulations Patrick and Katie! It was a beautiful wedding and I am so glad I was able to make it back to Minnesota to celebrate you.
A negative side-effect of traveling is that shortly after I got back home, I tested positive for COVID which put me out of commission for about a week. I must have picked it up at the airport either on the way there or on the way back, but I am so glad to know that nobody else at the wedding got sick which makes me happy. Also shortly after I got back home, our second chicken coop was delivered.
Kyle still assures me that this was not purchased with the intent to expand our flock, but simply to keep the roosters separate from our hens, or to quarantine a sick bird if necessary. Dear reader, I’ll play along with his games, but as the saying goes… I wasn’t born yesterday.
It really is a nice coop, though. I love the walk-in run (our other run is only 4 feet tall and I keep throwing out my back when I have to crouch and climb around in there with heavy food or water bins) and the coop itself is nicely elevated for easy cleaning. Perhaps as recompense, Kyle bought me some more coreopsis and planted it in my dye garden which, naturally, was immediately overtaken by said chickens. Alas.
It has been a while since we’ve talked knitting here on the blog, which feels so wrong to me, but when I looked back at past projects I was shocked to discover that I have only knit ONE project so far this year! As my sister put it, I have too many other hobbies now that keep me away from my knitting. I did end up taking my vest project to Minnesota with me to work on when I had down time. If you recall, I had to rip everything out from the underarms down to the ribbing at the bottom in order to add about 4″ worth of stitches to the circumference before starting again. Once I made that discovery, it sat in time out for several months before I actually ripped out the yarn and washed the skeins to get rid of the kinks. But now we’re making forward progress again.
It’s not much to look at because it’s just stockinette in a single color, but I’m happy to see it growing. Another thing I mentioned in my previous post is how much I hate reknitting yarn after it has been ripped out, mostly because the yarn is so squiggly and looks all lumpy once it is reknit. To counteract that, I wound the yarn back into skeins and washed them to let the yarn relax before reknitting, except for the few inches you see above the ribbing. Do you see what I mean about it looking bumpy compared to the smooth fabric above it? It’s truly not a huge deal and it will all even out when I wash and block the finished vest, but it’s annoying all the same. I’m really looking forward to getting past the underarms this time around so I can finally start the colorwork yoke. I just realized that it’s possible the reason I have only completed one project this year is because everything I’m knitting at the moment is kind of… boring. My handspun sweater, the only completed project, was beautiful and special and I loved making it so much, but it was almost entirely in stockinette stitch. And now this vest is all stockinette stitch. And the other project I have on the needles is, you guessed it, stockinette stitch.
Maybe I need to find something with an actual pattern to make me want to get back to knitting. At least the project above had a color change, but even that was just because I ran out of yarn and had to come up with a solution. This is a hat that I had started making with some handspun Shetland wool that I processed from a fleece that my friend gave me. The yarn didn’t go nearly far enough for this project, so I found an odd ball of leftover yarn in my stash and just added on when I ran out of the handspun. When finished, this hat will be doubled over on itself so I’ll just fold the blue to the inside and it won’t show, but now I’ve also run out of the blue yarn and will have to find yet another substitute in my stash so I can keep going. It’ll get done some day, I’m sure.
Which brings us to weaving and I can’t believe I have to post this kind of update on my blog yet again, but y’all the towels I was working on are finished and sold out before I could even tell you. I wove 15 towels this time around, and 11 of them were spoken for before I could even list them for sale on Etsy. I am so so so grateful that people love my towels so much, and I am also working on a few adjustments to my loom/setup that will allow me to more easily put on much longer warps so that I can make bigger batches of towels when needed.
I really loved making these towels. It just felt like the colors and design came together so effortlessly and I knew they were going to be a hit. Sometimes when I’m designing a towel I feel like I spend hours and hours tweaking little details, going back and forth, substituting colors, adjusting the weave structure, etc. but this time it felt like I just sat down, plotted out the color sequence, overlaid a complex twill pattern (which I rotated 90 degrees from what I had originally planned) and after figuring out the hems and a small adjustment to the selvedges I was ready to go. I wish all of my designs came together this easily. And something I couldn’t have even planned for if I tried is that the texture of these towels is so three-dimensional and satisfying. I really love them. I may have to revisit the design in different colorways in the future.
Now that these are complete and out the door, I spent the majority of yesterday planning my next run of towels. I always try to stay ahead of the loom when it comes to designs so that I have time to order yarn and have everything ready to go so I can start my next project right after the current one is done, but in this case the design still needed a bit of tweaking. I had figured it out enough to be able to order the yarn I needed, but the little details about color placement and design layout still needed to be finalized. These next towels were not an effortless design and I had to keep coming back to do everything I mentioned above – staring at the screen until I was cross-eyed, substituting colors, adjusting the treadling sequence or tie-up to get the right weave structure, moving colors around, inserting stripes, removing them, inserting them again, asking Kyle for second opinions… even now I’m thinking of one or two tiny adjustments I think I’m going to make before I consider it final, but come hell or high water tomorrow I will begin winding the warp for my next set of towels.
I’m going for a bit of a retro vibe with these colors and I’m looking forward to seeing the cloth come together. The graphic is a little bit different than my usual towels – to me at least – but I’m hoping there’s enough of my aesthetic in there to still make them identifiably mine. I’ll talk more about what I mean by that once I begin weaving the towels.
I hope ya’ll enjoy the rest of your August, and we’ll chat again soon!
Spring Creek Textiles 
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