This knitter has just learned she is a grandma!
I am heading from San Francisco to Knoxville tomorrow.
Updates will continue sporadically. Anticipated return to normal scheduling September 26.
Restingmotion
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Project Update
"Heart-breakingly beautiful baby sweater"? Oh yeah.
I sewed this up and sewed on the ribbons on the plane Monday morning but had to wait until I was in San Franciso for sunshine and a photograph.
I enjoyed the first day of sewing camp; but this is not really a time for knitting. Sewing and eating tend to be my San Francisco focuses and so I am warning you not to expect a lot of progress here; besides, Mermaid, the only project I brought with me, is not a speedy girl.
Otto will now be thought of in my mind as the "Tabasco sweater". I mean that in a nice way; a sweater filled with happy memories. I have written before about how a sweater sometimes takes on an association with a place or event at or during which it was knitted. Tabasco was ill and we had to say goodbye to her on Friday. During the first few weeks when we learned she had pancreatic cancer she decided that Otto which was on the blocking board, and remained there at her request, was the perfect place to spend the days sleeping. As usual mom’s projects were always the best place to be. Even though it has been a couple of weeks she slept on Otto, it has taken me a little time to prepare myself for finishing this particular project. I realize now that I couldn’t put the sweater together until I knew that Tabasco wouldn’t be sleeping on it anymore, even though she left the sweater as the cancer got worse. The sweater and I both needed to wait for the time for closure. Spending time with Tabasco was a higher priority than knitting and she did not think she needed to share my lap with other activities. For once, I agreed with her.
Perhaps when I return from camp, and after our trip to see the impending new grand baby, I will feel like putting Otto together.
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Off To Camp
Here I am at 5:00 on a Monday morning, sitting in the airport waiting to fly to San Francisco for my sewing camp with Sandra Betzina. I have a cup of great coffee in my hand, perhaps a good omen that. When I cleared security and arrived at the coffee stand the manager had just made a pot of french press coffee for himself that he was unable to pawn off on any of the customers. I jumped at the chance being a lover of strong black coffee and I feel this is a lucky start to the morning.
Normally I would be in San Francisco by now, but September started off with a bang and I had an obligation Sunday evening from which I could not wriggle myself free. Besides with all that was going on construction wise, having Saturday to pack was a blessing.
And don’t you want to know what I packed to work on? Looking at the stash and pulling out potential projects, although something I dread getting started on, is a wonderful way for me to get into "camp mode" and prepare for the exciting creative week ahead. I have things I planned on bringing and a few things that just kind of fell into my hands as if they were saying "make me".
And so, what did I pack?
The green, pink and purple swirly fabric in the background is a very lightweight wool challis that I am going to make into a skirt, Simplicity4186 , the same pattern I used for the Maroon cotton skirt I made in early august. The skirt will be just below the knee and I am considering inserting a small piece of fringed self-fabric at the hemline. Then when I tire of it, I can remove it. I have a beautiful wool tween that will be made into a jacket that coordinates with this, and I definitely need coordinates in my wardrobe but I already have things that go with this fabric in my closet so I did not bring the jacket fabric with me.
Next I brought this black and white check fabric from Fabric Mart in the spring and as you see from all the things piled up with it, there are several options going on here:
I originally planned to make a skirt, inspired by Carolyn’s January 23rd Post, perhaps a little more subtle, with the slit on the side and a smaller or no bow. Although I never made it in the spring, the skirt is still on my mind and there are enough frilly feminine touches around that I believe I can still wear it.But I accidentally ordered twice as much yardage as I needed for the skirt and when I saw this Simplicity pattern:
I knew I had to try it. I don’t believe I have enough fabric for both, but I might. So I am going to make a muslin of the jacket. There are various options for linings shown in the photo.
But now they are boarding my flight and I must go.
More later.
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September Already
Here it is September already and I have little to show for my summer. For those of you who have stuck by me during my hiatus from sewing, I am very grateful for your continued loyalty. Goodness knows there have been precious few projects here and little inspiration.
But September will be different. I itch to sew. I need to sew. Next week I will be in San Francisco for sewing camp and that will be my big kick-off back to sewing, although I am truthfully hoping to get a little sewing time before I leave as well. Sometimes I seem to need a little distance. More likely I need to give myself permission to walk away from whatever else is going on and just sew.
But that does not completely account for my absence. I called this blog Sew Distracted in order to write about how sewing distracts me from the various stresses and tasks of life, but also to write about how my far too many interests distract me from sewing.
Distractions are always present. This is the price of being interested in too
many things, the price of being too scattered in my attentions, the cost of a
continued lack of focus. But I hope there is a cohesiveness somewhere if only I
can find it; perhaps then I will also have found my voice as concerns this
blog.Lately it seems the distractions have been legion:
Here I am next to the cleomes in the overgrown flower bed that is blocked by the temporarily located spa, dumpster, gravel pile and a ton of construction debris. The cleome have grown quite tall, determined to be seen over all the obstacles to their viewing. I am 5’9" for comparison.
And of course the wealth of summer produce has kept me happily occupied for hours in the kitchen. Shopping the farm stands, planning menus, cooking…. all this pleasantly occupies hours of each day. I’m not complaining here either. I will miss this in the dead of winter when there is no decent vegetable to be found. Of course I will have more sewing time then as well.
And the construction crews are back. Even though I am not doing the work, there seems to be an endless variety of things to be done, people to talk to, little tasks to be undertaken. And then there is the time spent following the progress, watching one’s house be transformed. That is distractin enough.
But a little fiberly progress has been made:
I finally cut out all the pieces for the nursery room set. How many weeks ago did I wash this fabric and set it aside? There is no point in counting the days. What is done is done. It took me bits and pieces of two days to get this far: Saturday and Sunday. Nothing further has been accomplished since, at least not on the sewing front.
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Is Dutillieux really harder to appreciate than Haydn?
The opening concert of the South Mountain Chamber Music series was this afternoon, and, as usual, it was absolutely wonderful. The Mendelssohn Quartet gave a wonderful performance of Haydn, Dutilleux and Mendelssohn with an encore of Puccini. It was a lovely Autumn Sunday. How quickly the seasons have seemed to change.
The Dutilleux was difficult but interesting, and the audience applauded politely but was not probably universally thrilled. I thought the piece was interesting, but not as ethereally breathtaking as the cellist described it before the performance. And this dichotomy has made me think about music and new music (although a piece written in 1978 is hardly new) and how we listen and approach music.
I have only fairly recently come to an appreciation of Haydn. In my youth it bored me and I found it uninspiring. I was exposed to classical music, but mostly of a later period, Beethoven through Brahms, perhaps, but Haydn missed out. In my adolescence I discovered the romantics; much more appropriate to the hormone-ridden years. Only recently have a really listened to Haydn, discovered what a great composer he truly was, and come to appreciate the beauty and complexity of the music.
This appreciation did not come in a vacuum however. I listen to music. Composers are influenced by each other. Popular pieces are played over and over, are incorporated into soundtracks, commercials, movies, and televison shows. If you have lived for a few decades and attended any concerts you come to have an expectation of what you will hear at a concert. If you attend local symphonies or listen to classical music CD’s you begin to recognize certain genre’s or composers. “That is Baroque” you might say. Or, “That sounds like Brahms” even though you are not a musical scholar or particularly music-minded.
But this does not apply as much to 20th century composers. The music is difficult because we do not hear it every day. We have little or no frame of reference because it is not performed often. We fall back on the familiar sounds. But I seem to recall that even the “great” classical composers were not always appreciated in their time. I also recall that some of the complaints we make today, “but you can’t hum it” were applied to composers of the caliber of Mozart and Beethoven, the most humable of composers by modern standards. Perhaps if we listened to modern music more it would become part of our mental framework and we would appreciate it more. Perhaps I would have picked up on that “ethereal” tone. Perhaps it would even be humable.
Perhaps future generations will look back on our time and wonder how we couldn’t “get” Dutilleux.
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Mermaid
A small effort has begun at starting Mermaid by Hanne Falkenberg. I am making colorway #6: light gray, slate gray and dusty rose:
The opening attempts have gotten me as far as the gauge swatch and beginning i-cord edge, but no further.
I went up one needle size, to 3.25 in order to get gauge. Once upon a time I would have said this was quite unusual, and it certainly would be were I knitting with cotton or silk, but my knitting tensions have changed in the past year or two, so nothing really surprises me anymore. Once I get gauge, I tend to be pretty consistent though, except for minor annoyances like that silly event with the blue baby kimono last week.
The i-cord is not perfectly neat but steaming might help, and I think I can straighten up any idiosyncracies while i pick up the stitches to begin the garment. I-cord is extremely tedious, and although it would probably come much more naturally with time and practice, it is not the kind of thing that I am certain that I want to force myself to practice.
It suddenly dawned on me, just this evening, that I have nothing to knit in the car tomorrow on the drive up to Pittsfield. I do not trust myself to pick up stitches in a straight line along the i-cord in the car, which means of course that I will have to do it tonight when we return from dinner at our local Mexican hole-in-the-wall.
Oh the price we have to pay to practice our art.
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Friday Update
Yesterday
morning it looked like we would end up crushing my favorite flower bed, but
careful planning saved most of the flowers. While we working in the
garage and driveway (which occupies most of our front yard), the masonry crew
was in the back setting up a truly maze-like array of forms for the concrete
pour which is scheduled to occur on Wednesday. We are now off for
the weekend, but the masonry crew will be back on Monday despite the holiday.
It will truly be a laboring Labor Day here, as the crew has a lot of work to do
before the building inspector, two engineers, and various other contractors
appear to walk through the site and hopefully get approval on Tuesday afternoon
so the pour can proceed on Wednesday.And I seem to be becoming the "homeowner from Hell" as I once again
was out on the site, blueprints in hand, explaining plans, pointing out was not
being done correctly and generally trying not to be too much of a nuisance
while insisting that things be done correctly. When they try to ask
G he always refers them to me "She’s the engineer" he says. And
to think I never knew I would love reading blueprints so much.About a quarter of the work done today is not correct, but it is a particularly
complex portion of the job. Unfortunately by the time the crew got to
that portion, the foreman and general contractor had both left and only the
non-English speaking crew remained on-site. My pathetic attempt at
explaining the engineering issues and how the form construction was wrong in pidgen
Spanish was not effective. I desperately need to refresh my language
skills, although this was never my strong point.
truly be a busy day as I go over the site with the foreman before he progresses
further. I am not worried that the pour will go wrong. The engineer
who designed the set up for the electric pool cover will be here Tuesday, as he
prefers to oversee the preparation for and pouring of, the supporting concrete
for his part of the project, and the current framework will not accommodate the
housing for the motor and reel for the
pool cover. The structural engineer is
known for his meticulousness and being a stickler for detail as well so I am
not worried about the final job. But I do hope to avoid further delays
and get the set up correct on the first try. -
Construction resumes
Something’s happening behind the house:
The crew is here to frame for the pour. They are behind schedule. The plan is for inspection and conference Tuesday morning with the pour Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday. However it is doubtful that the forms will all be in place today and the crew is supposed to finish up tomorrow (Saturday) a day which is also supposed to be filled with heavy rains due to the travelling plans of Ernesto. My apologies to Florida, but I wish he had stayed further south.
Meanwhile the powers that be (men in boots driving trucks, and my own darling husband) have decided that the only place for the dumpster is next to the spa and the "Iris bed" that I built last summer, with the door to the dumpster opening out over my flower bed. G has decided, wisely, to lay some boards over the flower bed so that we will all be tromping over the boards, flattening my flowers but not tamping down the soil as well. I think the whole shebang will just miss my irises, which are starting send up flower stalks for the second bloom and I think I have the boards laid out in a way that only knocks down the glads and cleomes and the annuals in front but those are short-lived at this point anyway. I think it is well enough laid out that even big clumsy men who don’t think about flowers will miss the iris buds.
The mixture of lillies, cleome, and gladioulus at the back of the bed has been quite successful. The first lilies were devestated by the deer when they started to come up so they were replaced with white lilies. This was fortuitous because the white cleome with the white lilies have been really beautiful and the pale purple gladioli have been just the perfect accent.
cleome
gladioulus.Unfortunately I did not get photos of the lilies in bloom. Next year.
Luckily for this weekend’s construction the chrysanthemums I planted on the west end of the bed did not come back up this year, well only 1 out of 5 and it is still terribly small. It fits under the lumberwalkway I just set up. I don’t know why I can’t grow chrysanthemums. The sedum in the same position on the other end of the bed have grown fabulously. They are over three feet tall, thick and lush, after only one year’s growth. Here they are just beginning to bloom:
I will put some more sedum in the bed on the west end, after all the trampling has ceased. l worry that by matching plantings on the two ends, one side will do better than the other and it will look even worse. Well, can’t be worse than non-existent chrysanthemums.
But now, I must go help haul lumber and other detritus so that we can get as much accomplished as possible before the rains.
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Let Me Hear the Music
I realize that I have been very bad about posting lately, here and elsewhere as well. As you know the entire summer has been busy and distracting and there have been many threads pulling at my time.
The last two weeks have not been busier, but they have been more distracted. I realized that I never even posted about the second Bard Music Weekend because my thoughts were drawn elsewhere almost immediately. I still have the notes. I might try to reconstruct my thoughts just because I too might like to remember. But then again it might be too late.
We did receive the newly rebuilt woofer’s for my old EPI speakers (last week actually) and I installed them last night. We have been talking about repositioning the speakers and rearranging bookcases, and so I had put off the installation. But it finally occurred to me that this remodeling is just in its early theoretical stages and if I wait we will never hear music. I don’t see how these speakers are going to be moved during the remainder of 2006.
Of course I had to test the stereo system. We listened to Gorecki’s Third Symphony, The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, and it was spectacular. I had forgotten how good these speakers were. Oh I am sure they are not the world’s best speakers, but they are better than anything G had when I met him, and with the new Woofers installed, my 26 year old EPIs sound incredible! The deep base at the beginning had shivers crawling up my spine and I could feel the vibration in the floors and walls.
Obviously the woofers had degenerated over time and we had been losing sound quality without even being aware of it. What an incredible difference.
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Fall Stash
Thursday night knitting was a source of great temptation as new fall yarns and pattern books were arriving at Yarn Central and it was hard to just sit and knit as all the lovely yarns were piled all around us. I picked up a couple of patterns from Classic Elite, and I kept interrupting my knitting to flip through them and wander around the store looking at the yarns.
Interrupting the knitting was not hard as I was having relatively rare gauge issues. There was one section of the body I just could not get even, and I ended up ripping that portion 7 times before I got it straight. Every time, I would rip past the floppy place, reknit, and look at the work I got the same piece of stretchy, wonky row right in the middle, and it looked like it was at the exact same place every time. I was beginning to think there must be some kind of strange lack of twist in the yarn at that point or something because I had trouble believing that even I could make the exact same mistake at the exact same place with such precision.
When I got home that night, I sat down in the darkened house and knit that section yet again, this time with great attention and mindfulness, pulling the yarn so tight through the suspect stretch of yarn that I feared I would cut the circulation off in my fingers. Success finally. But by then I was sick of Blue Baby Sweater and it has been cast aside while I have indulged in a mad passion for closet and pantry cleaning.
But, back to knitting group. Do not be lulled into thinking that I came home with only the pattern books. Two bags of yarn came home that night as well. Yarn I really don’t need, and yarn not intended for any of the plethora of patterns I have shown you so far.
I fell wildly in love with this Manos yarn the instant I saw it. I came back to it repeatedly during the evening. There was never any doubt it would come home with me.
I don’t know exactly what it will be yet but I do have several ideas. In fact every time I think about it I come up with more possibilities. I will spread out the patterns and have to make some swatches just to see how the variegation lines up when actually knitting. But I still need to start Mermaid first.
The new yarn and my general restless spirit prompted me to reorganize the yarn cubicles in the sewing/yarn room, switching out the summer yarns which I have decided I am not going to knit this year, and replace them with fall inspirations. There are still some cottons and summer things mixed in; things either I am still thinking I might knit, or yarns that earned a place just because I loved the combinations of colors in the cubby.
It looks like it is going to be a wine/red/burgundy kind of year:
The large group of 7 wine colored yarns you see in the bottom of the upper left cubby, on the left side, were also purchased Thursday night: Waterlily from Classic Elite. I intended to make this sweater but somehow I got all discombobulated with the Classic Elite books and I failed to purchase that particular book. I must try to remember to pick it up this coming Thursday. Of course there are untold other sweaters I could knit at that gauge, so no commitments are yet being made.
Here are the other two cubbies of the yarn stash. The colors are much more muted here and were much harder to photograph: deep plums, grays, blues and greens for the most part.
The big dark mass on the bottom right is some RowanSpun DK half deep inky blue and half deep bottle green. The camera can’t seem to distinguish. They had been in bags before, but I realized after I stashed the yarn in the cubbies in the spring that I don’t like looking at the yarn through the plastic bags. I can’t see the colors and the texture well, so I just ignore. Banish those bags.
Of course, we all know that I will not get all this yarn knitted up this winter. But there are many hours of happy dreams wrapped up in this little patch of real estate.
Autumn Ho!
