It has been a crazy long time since I have posted to this site. I could blame the pandemic, but really I decided I needed to spend every ounce of extra energy I had to help change the political climate here. I wanted to make sure that, if it didn’t change, it wouldn’t be because of a half-hearted effort on my part. So I wrote letters and postcards not blogs. Now I realize that I can’t quit working for more justice and more sanity, but I can now work a little harder at integrating those efforts with my creative impulses (and hence declutter my mind a bit). All that said, I didn’t stop knitting, spinning, and weaving – it is healing activity for me – but I sure had trouble concentrating on any one thing.

Sweaters

Somehow, I kept making sweaters. No, I don’t need any more sweaters, but for some reason they were particularly intriguing for me this year. And I haven’t stopped. I currently am 1/3 done with a sweater and am plotting a new one. Maybe it is partly because it certainly consumes a lot of my older yarn – definitely a COVID goal – or the feeling of making something that is useful. Or not. I am not sure. But knit sweaters I did.

Amazingly I had sweater quantities of several types of yarn so I dug into my stash to finally make the visions I had when I purchased the yarn. The gray/red/white sweater is a combination of two patterns – something I have started doing for striping and other color work. Why accept a construction you don’t like because of a striping pattern you do? Of all the design elements, that is the easiest to move from structure to structure.

My daughter requested a hoodie sweater which was a fun knit. Hoods take an enormous amount of yarn – probably close to 1/4 of the yarn for the whole sweater. My recommendation is to do the hood as soon as possible in the construction if yarn quantity could be an issue. Woolstok yarn is great for sweaters – 3 of this year’s sweaters were knit from that yarn. It has enough “body” to wear well but is soft enough to feel cozy.

One thing about selecting yarn from your stash is it is often necessary to combine yarn from different dyers/manufacturers. Someone once told me in a class that, if you like the dye you created, you will probably like how it works with any other dyes you created. Our internal palette is our internal palette, essentially. The same is true from most indie dyers. If you like one of their creations, they will likely play with with their other yarns.  This does not carry across dyers, however (note the collection of yarns to the left – can you guess which ones are from different dyers?), so it is possible to end up spending a lot of time just trying to put together the yarns that will work. At the top of the post you can see what I put together in fingering weight yarn. I really like each of the yarns separately but I wasn’t 100% sure about whether I liked them in a sweater. Funnily, the combination worked but I ended up not really liking the sweater. I am very glad my husband did like it and wears it.

And so it goes…

Today we get our second vaccine dose. I hope this helps me feel more positive and less fractured as I move through this year. In any case, onward!