enough is enough

Having been brought up to believe that you shouldn’t start a new project before you finish the previous one, it came as a bit of an epiphany for me about twenty years ago when someone giving a talk on creativity suggested that it was actually good to have more than one project on the go at the same time. Some people might suggest that I have taken this advice too literally and gone a bit far in the opposite direction.

On the whole my creative stash lives in my workroom in the basement, but knitting and crochet are sociable crafts that can be practised sitting on a comfortable chair while watching the telly. This has meant that my yarn craft project bags were beginning to silt up at one end of the sofa. It was getting difficult to find what I wanted and generally stressful. So a large part of today has been devoted to sorting out this horrible space.

In the process I discovered that my main current project was in a bag far too small for it, so extra balls of yarn were lolling around here there and everywhere. That has now been sorted into one large bag.

There's a large bag full of the knitted squares for blanket-making that I blogged about last week. These need to stay at hand or I will forget to do anything with them.
I also found at least three bags of random/leftover/spare yarn; a scarf project started and (probably) abandoned; and a bag with two colours of recycled sari yarn which I have yet to find the right project for.

Then there was the bag that holds my in-between-other-projects/use-up-leftovers project - a crochet sampler blanket that will eventually be sewn together in strips.

This is definitely not abandoned, but needs to be on the back burner at the moment because of other things on the go. That and the random bags have been relegated to the basement depths.

As has this little project bag with the yarn and pattern for Fugue tam and mittens by Kate Davies. I have actually knitted one of the mittens, but it came out too small so I need to start again. I can't risk relegating this one for too long or I will miss the hat and mittens season.

Also begging to be sorted was my needle bag and another tube of needles. When it's organised this bag is incredibly useful as it also contains a ring binder for patterns. While Steve was at the cinema this afternoon I sat on the floor with all the needles and a needle gauge sorting out pairs and batches of double-ended needles. All my printed-from-the-internet patterns are now in plastic sleeves in the ring binder.

Hiding under all sorts of other stuff was a jar of buttons that I didn't know was there and would definitely have been looking for sometime soon.

There were also two sewing projects that had come upstairs for one reason or another and now need to go back below stairs.

All has now been reorganised and restored. To the casual observer it probably doesn't look too different, as there are still two large project bags and a work basket in the corner, but I know what's there and I can lay my hands on it, so this post it brought to you with a smug sense of relief and I can spend the evening knitting!

UFOs

Most knitters/quilters/embroiderers will confess to a couple of UnFinished Objects in their work basket. Some are abandoned happily, others we’re always meaning to get back to. My daughter Ruth and I recently had the experience of picking up someone else’s UFO and bringing it to fruition.
In one of those convoluted six-degrees-of-separation ways we were put in touch with someone we already knew who was looking for a quilter to complete a quilt for his mother. His mother is very elderly and ill and he had come across a quilt she had started some years ago and thought it would be good to get it finished.

What Ruth and I were presented with turned out to be eleven completed square blocks which had been constructed in a variety of hand-sewn methods and quite a bit of spare fabric. We were given free rein to get on with it as we saw fit. It seemed important to us to use what we had been given as simply as possible and not get fancy with it. After some initial consultation we made our decisions surprisingly quickly and became a sort of quilting tag team.



Ruth created one more square based on some partially assembled scraps. I finished off the sashing borders around each square. Thus far we stuck with the hand sewing, but knew that we would have to get out the machines to finish it within a reasonable time.

I put the squares together and assembled the quilt top by machine. Then Ruth took on the assembly of a backing piece using a variety of fabrics from the work basket.

She added a binding strip and, using some quilt wadding from my stash, pinned together the quilt sandwich. I took it back and spent a couple of evenings hand-quilting very simply along the seam lines of the squares. I hand-stitched the binding fabric to finish the quilt. The finished article is about the right size for a cot.

In all it took us about a fortnight to finish - much quicker than we would have been working alone! We both enjoyed the process, delighting in the sense of continuity with another needle-woman. It was such fun to rummage through someone else’s workbasket (finding a couple of other UFOs in the process).

We were both also pretty anxious about taking liberties with someone else’s work. We had no idea what the original plan had been and worried that the lady in question might feel affronted by some of the decisions we had taken. Thankfully this proved not to be the case. I was taken to meet her and deliver the quilt on a day when she was feeling reasonably well and visiting neighbours for coffee. The quilt soon became the focus of conversation and memory as she pointed out some of the fabrics which had originally been used in her children’s clothing. I have heard since that the project is still proving a successful talking point in the family.

It makes me wonder what unfinished items will be hanging around in my work-basket when I die.
(I didn’t take work-in-progress photos I’m afraid, so what you see is the finished quilt in all its squidgy, lumpy glory – very difficult to photograph)

lace knitting - gah!

When I first started looking at knitting sites and knitting blogs I noticed that a lot of knitters favour lace knitting and produce lovely shawls and scarves. At the time I thought – no, this is not for me, anything finer than double knitting is just too fiddly for me, especially as I generally have to reduce my needles by two sizes to get the correct gauge. Then I realised that lace knitting may be a fine yarn, but it is knitted on larger than expected needles (and gauge for a shawl isn’t crucial) and I also discovered the wonderful world of beautiful hand-dyed and hand-painted yarns. At the Knitting and Stitching Show this year I was seduced by a gorgeous skein of Fyberspates Scrumptious Lace in a pretty lettuce-y green. I chose Swallowtail as my pattern and even had a friend in mind as the eventual recipient of my work.

However, it turns out I was right – it IS too fiddly for me. I have had five attempts at getting started, keep ending up with the wrong number of stitches and it’s all too fine and fiddly to identify my mistakes. I think I will come back to it next summer when there are longer hours of daylight to knit in, but for now all that frogging is beginning to damage the yarn, so it will be put on hold.
Meanwhile I have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous and am knitting an eco string bag on big fat needles.

another continuity announcement

This is probably not the most beautiful or original thing I have ever made - a canvaswork cushion cover worked in wool in tent stitch, but like so much needlework it is replete with memories.

My father moved into a nursing home in 2001. The house was an old priory and there was a pleasant garden to sit in. I thought that if I had a bit of simple needlework I could sit in the garden with him having desultory conversation or companionable silence as the fancy took us, which is when I bought the initial materials for this. In the event it was not many months before Dad's dementia meant that he moved to the top floor of the nursing home into the EMI (elderly mentally infirm) unit and we didn't get to spend that much time in the garden, though I did carry on stitching from time to time when I visited him in his room. The stitching was incomplete when he died in 1984 and I've only picked it up occasionally since. Suddenly, around Easter this year, it was finished and set aside to be rediscovered when I had my workshop clear-out. It was very distorted by stitching and took a LOT of blocking to get it back to a square enough shape to be turned into a cushion. Now it's done - on a chair in the sitting room and full of happy/sad memories of my father and a difficult time in our lives.

Edited postscript. Obviously (as Alice has pointed out in her comment) he died in 2004, not 1984 - don't know how that got in there!

continuity

Whenever I have a workshop clear-out I come across this.



It's a canvas-work rug that my mother started in the sixties. She spent quite a lot of time on it, but never finished it. When she died in 1992 I took it on, intending to finish it myself. Clearly, this hasn't yet happened. I have done some work on it, but the wool is very fibrous and makes my eyes itch. It's never going to be a rug now as one of the wool colours has virtually run out, but I think I could just about even off the ends and turn it into a big fat floor cushion. One day!