Long-Deferred Socks Complete At Last

I started knitting these socks as part of Sharon B's fiber arts community Take It Further Challenge, February 2008. My participation in her inspirational project fell by the wayside due to an unexpected work opportunity and the building of our new house, and the socks also stalled.

Originally, I planned to knit a dainty texture pattern on my smallest steel needles, with this machine knitting wool held double.

Unfortunately, fine yarn held double played the devil with all the twist-stitch patterns I tried. I couldn't keep from splitting the yarn, so I fell back to knitting this sort of wide, plain rib pattern:

It was slow going at this gauge, but after I'd knitted about four inches of the top, I knew something wasn't working well. It looked nice enough:

However, the stockingette stitch was rather loose, even with my tiniest needles, and I've found that loose-knitted socks are very uncomfortable inside shoes. You end up with a mesh pattern embedded in the soles of your feet. So, I unraveled again, and this time I knitted with four strands of yarn held together. This was bulkier than fingering weight, but finer than sport weight, and it produced a nice fabric. I chose a knit-purl design to make these fancy ribs, and I used a strand of wooly nylon to reinforce the heels and toes.

Belated "Details" Project For Take It Further Challenge

Back in March, I posted about my plan for SharonB's March "Take It Further" Challenge. I am learning or trying a new skill or technique for each month's TIF challenge--that's my interpretation of "taking it further."

March's topic was "noticing the details. I started several things, but eventually, I settled on adding lace insert details to some underwear I'd planned to sew.

It's taken me a while to get them finished, but here are some of the details I attended to in replenishing my lingerie drawer. Sometimes details are quite simple--a pretty print matched with some plush picot-edged elastic looks sweet.

The stretch lace, spandex fabric, and picot-edged elastic look as though they were bought for each other, but lace and elastic both came from "grab-bag" mail order supply bargains, and the fabric is what's left of a ready-to-wear knit top that didn't fit well.

This blue lace seemed too sheer for a cut-away effect, so I left the white fabric behind to emphasize the delicate pattern.

White stretch lace on blue tee-shirt jersey calls more attention to these details.

OK, now I've got some clothes I needed and one very late project completed. It's on to the April, May, and June "Take It Further" challenges. I've got big ideas, and a little time to catch up. Thanks SharonB, for the inspiration!

Devil In the Details--March TIF Challenge

Sharon B.'s "Take It Further Challenge" for March is "details in life". In garment construction, "detail" means matters of seam finishes, bound buttonholes, pockets, and embellishments. I would imagine that nearly everything Sharon and the many other embroidery bloggers do qualifies as "detail" by my definition.

My first project idea was to sit down and practice making bound buttonholes and welt pockets. I've made a few welt pockets, but didn't do a great job, and I always used to get my mom to make my bound buttonholes for me. I have done without them since she died twelve years ago. (I am even more embarrassed to admit this than to admit that I still don't know how to set up my Linux machine as a NFS server). However, the substitute teaching job (and the upper respiratory viruses I've caught there) got in the way this month, and I haven't had time or energy for that task.

I also want to learn how to make lace insets in garments, and it occurs to me that this could qualify as "detail work" too. Because I have a dozen pairs of "underbritches" cut out from my collection of knit fabric scraps, I have a perfect practice project set up and ready to go. Surely the making of unique embellished undergarments must count as attention to life's details!

I don't expect I'll have photos of finished projects before the end of the month, but I may make some progress this weekend, and there is a school vacation coming up in a few days.

Take It Further Challenge, February

The Take It Further Challenge for February is "What are you old enough to remember?"

Who else knows how to pack the wood on a wood stove that so that it will burn evenly long enough for a cake a rise? That's right as a country girl I was taught to cook on a wood stove. Now I have a gas stove and a microwave oven. In winter the warmest room in the house was the kitchen and we had hot water bottles to take bed now we have electric blankets, which to be honest I never turn on because I don't like them - much to my husband's dismay.

I remember washing that involved a copper and hand wringers then in my teens I had a really modern invention--a twin tub washer! Automatic washing machines were the height of luxury. I also remember out door toilets and how in winter had to grab an umbrella to dash down the path to visit it.

So this month stop and think what are you old enough to remember. You do not have to declare your age--but simply what you are old enough to remember.

One thing I'm old enough to remember is when most women made many of their own clothes at home. That's certainly how I became interested in the fiber arts--watching and eventually helping my mom and grandma darn socks, embroider dish towels, knit mittens, crochet pillowcase edgings, and run up dresses on the magical sewing machine.

For February's challenge, I decided I would return to my roots, and make a practical garment. While I've knitted dozens of pairs of socks, I haven't ever made a pair of the sort of fine-gauge knit trouser socks I remember ladies knitting when I was little.

As it happens, I have a big cone of fine-gauge machine-knitting wool. (Princess helpfully provides scale in this photo.) Holding two strands at once, this yarn gives a gauge similar to fingering weight yarn--about 10 stitches/inch on 000 double-pointed needles. This is a type of sock knitting unfamiliar to the nouveau knitters of Ravelry, Knitty, and other hip, fashion-forward Internet watering holes.

Fortunately, for fingering weight wool I can turn to my knitting inheritance, in this case, the 1947 Columbia Knitting Manual (a bargain at 75 cents!). This sock pattern is working very well. I tried half-a-dozen different stitch patterns for "textural interest," but had to give them up. I couldn't manage twist-stitches or cables with such fine yarn held double. This plain broad rib promises to make a smooth and comfortable sock, and that is what I'm old enough to remember.

I'd hoped to have more sock progress to display at the end of February, but the unraveling and reknitting really ate into my project time, and small stitches such as these make for leisurely completion.

January "Take It Further Challenge " Complete

Here's my January Take It Further Challenge project with the ink jet transfer images, lace, and a little machine embroidery added. I believe it's complete (at least, for now). A real artist would explain the significance of the various fabrics in terms of Emma Bell Miles, her life, and art, and I'm sure I could produce such a statement. My years of writing grant proposals taught me something, after all. However, what I'd rather tell you is how I did the best I could with what I had on hand, and how I'll enjoy looking at Ms. Miles, her book cover, and her painting of the Fox Sparrow when the quilt-curtain is finished and hanging in my house.

Here's a list of all the posts I wrote about this particular project and the things I had to learn to complete it. Goodness, I was chatty!

• Foundation-pieced rayon and polyester scraps for quilt background
• Tea-dyeing some overly-bright fabrics for the block, including a list of tea-dyeing techniques
• Transferring ink jet printed images to fabric--a list of links for various techniques
• Taking it Further With Software For Linux. I found Gnome Photo Printer, an easy-to-install and easy-to-use program for sending images to the printer.
• Looking Up To Emma Bell Miles. This is the initial planning phase for January's challenge.

Foundation for Taking It Further

This is the latest step in my Take It Further Challenge window quilt block on Emma Bell Miles. I tea-dyed small pieces of hand-dyed cottons I had on hand, but mostly I used my rayon and polyester dress-making scraps, sewing them to a 13-inch square muslin foundation.

I'd planned to include the ink jet transfer images, at this step, but I couldn't work out a pleasing layout, so I pieced the scrap foundation, and sewed the images on in a third layer of fabric. The ink jet images, printed on a thin, white cotton, are rather translucent, and I've found this translucence gives interesting effects in window quilts.

On my first project, I used squares cut from a printed cotton tablecloth as foundation pieces, and backed the quilt with plain white flannel. On sunny days, the rayon scraps look like translucent gauze, and the table cloth's printed flowers are what you see. At night, with the light hitting the quilt from the inside, the tablecloth patterns are invisible, and you see the rayon scraps' patterns. I'm hoping I'll have a similar double-vision phenomenon with this technique.

Tea Dyeing to Take It Further

I've been working on the Take It Further Challenge project for January, although I have no pictures to show my progress. I successfully transfered the ink jet printed images of Emma Bell Miles and her illustrations onto a thin, bright-white cotton. I've decided to make 13-inch quilt blocks, and I've found that there's only room for one image per block, even though I thought I'd made them quite small. I intend to use the quilt blocks to make window quilts, so they must be soft and thin enough to drape like curtains. That means avoiding embellishment or quilting that would make the resulting fabric too heavy or stiff to drape well.

I'd planned to use my rayon and polyester fabric scraps, and also my hand-dyed fabrics, but I've found I don't have many hand-dyed pieces left, and what I have are bright floral colors that overwhelm the delicate, vintage images I've transfered to fabric. I'm not going to have time to replenish my hand-dyed collection this month, so I thought I'd take a few small pieces and mute them with tea dye. Because I always check the Web for directions, here are some links with a wide variety of (sometimes contradictory) advice on tea and coffee dyeing.

• Tea Time--Natural Dyes.
• How to Tea Dye
• Tea Dyed Fabrics from The Crafter's Attic.
• How to Tea Dye. This recipe has you add a bit of vinegar to the dye bath. Others suggest using salt to help set the dye.
• Tea Dyeing FAQ's: This is a compilation of QUILTNET postings about tea dying. Some of the contributors speak from experience, and some are passing along things they've heard, so read carefully and take the advice with a grain of salt (not coffee).
• Tea Dyeing and Aging Techniques for dolls and other hand-made items from Country Cupboard primitive folk art patterns, and many how-to's and links for various "old-timey" crafts.

Image Transfer to Fabric: Link Collection

While researching fabric transfer techniques for the Take It Further Challenge, I accumulated these interesting links. There are so many pages offering advice it can get very confusing. I'm lucky Dharma Trading Company Web-publishes directions for the product I'd bought from them, because there exist many products and many different instructions. I've saved the links I found most helpful and/or inspiring below.

• Image Transfer techniques from art-e-zine compiles amazing techniques for transferring ink jet printer, color copier, and photographic paper images onto all sorts of stuff--lots of fabric directions, but also paper, rocks, leather, ceramic tiles, polymer clay--all sorts of cool stuff! Some of the techniques require specialized equipment and supplies, but others use odd things like fabric glue, "Orange-Glo" cleaner, and freezer paper. There are inspiring photos of the various artists' works.
• Live Studio: Image Transfer Techniques by: Tiffini Elektra X. A variety of transfer techniques for fabric and wood, with inspiring photos.
• Inkjet Transfer Group on Yahoo.

  This discussion group originally started for artists using Lesley Riley's method of ink jet transfer (see Files Section for original instructions). Now it is a free-flowing exchange of all sorts of techniques and tips for making transfers with your ink jet printer.

• Transferring Digital Images to Fabric With Ink jet Printers--notes by Wilma Kinder, who makes miniquilts for doll houses. She has quite a few tips that other sets of directions leave out.
• Transfer Tutorial for use with laser-printed copies, from Juliann Wasisco of odd-goddess.
• A massive list of links on printing images on fabric includes many commercial sites. This is a companion page for printing on paper, which can also draw you in for hours of browsing.

Taking it Further With Software For Linux

The Take It Further Challenge is already doing what I'd hoped--it's pushing me to try new things and learn new skills. Today I learned how to shrink jpg images, put them together on a single page, and print them onto ink jet transfer paper, so that I can iron them onto fabric. These weren't the skills I had in mind, but they are new and useful.

Because I plan to scan and manipulate some images, I've been studying Gimp tutorials. (Gimp is the Open Source image manipulation program that has many features people pay a lot for with Photoshop. It's available for Macs and Windows as well as Linux.) While searching for Gimp instructions, I found another Linux program that does exactly what I want to do, and is easy and intuitive to use.

The program is called Gnome Photo Printer, and it allows you take several images, shrink them to fit a sheet of paper, arrange them, and send them to the printer. I found this program in GNOME Photo Printer: A nifty little app--a review and how-to by Joe Barr at Linux.com. Bless his heart, Joe uses Debian Linux, so I just followed his directions to install the program. It took me about 10 minutes to figure out how to use it, and I was a bit slow on the uptake this morning. Gnome Photo Printer is meant to send your image directly to the printer, but my printer is Linux-unfriendly. No problem--I just saved the output as a pdf file, sent it to the eMac, and printed from there.

I wanted to print my images onto some ink jet transfer paper I'd bought several years ago, but the instructions for using the paper were long lost. I vaguely remembered how to use it, but I was delighted to discover that Dharma Trading Company (where I bought it in the first place) has the directions posted on their Web site: Helpful hints when using Transfer Paper. They have many other intriguing image transfer techniques, including ink jet printing directly onto fabric, and "sun printing," but I'll start with the supplies I already have on hand.

Looking Up to Emma Bell Miles

I've been working on my Take It Further Challenge this cold snowy morning. January's theme, "Who do you look up to?" made me think about making a memory quilt, with each block devoted to a different person. Aside from a family memory quilt, (which is what people usually make, and for which I've been saving fabric mementos for many years), I think a quilt devoted to my favorite naturalists would be fun.

I picked Emma Bell Miles for my first sampler block. She haunts me for several reasons. She had a short life of trouble. Only surviving child of Yankee missionaries in the South after the Civil War, she never fit in with her parents' set, the poor mountaineers they evangelized, or the more prosperous "artistes" who may have stolen some of her work. She seems to me a sad shadow of her contemporary, Pearl Buck, who prospered in spite of her missionary parents and the difficult road they set her on.

I have copies of Miles' books, Spirit of the Mountains and Our Southern Birds, as well as Kay Baker Gaston's biography, Emma Bell Miles. I want to use images from these books in my sampler block.

These are "Web-ified" versions of the images I selected and scanned for my project. The first is a photo of Mrs. Miles, in her early thirties, taken in 1912. The picture is printed on the back cover of Ms. Gaston's biography. The second is the cover of Spirit of the Mountains, and the last two are from Our Southern Birds. The frontispiece is the painting of the Fox Sparrow, and the "Bird Map" is meant to teach descriptive terms to the young birders for whom the book was intended.

New Year's Vague Aspirations

Instead of New Year's Resolutions, I have more modest expectations--call them New Year's Plans, or Projects. One year, I decided to spend one hour each day dealing with clutter. At that time, I had quite a mess--Important Papers from former jobs, a dissertation's worth of books and reprints, and many, many boxes left over from clearing out my family's farm house. This last batch of stuff included boxes my mother had cleared out of her mother's family farm house in 1963, and stuck, unopened, in a closet. It was an overwhelming tangle, but because I could quit after an hour, I worked through it, day after day. I can't remember if I logged a full 365 hours or not, but by the end of the year, rooms and closets had appeared where there had only been piles of cardboard boxes before. In the process, I sold a bunch of stuff on eBay for cold cash. It was very rewarding, in several ways.

Last year, I planned to "do more" with my blog. It was not the best-defined project, but I "did more"--I posted 323 entries, substantially more than my 147 posts for 2005. I got more interested local flora and fauna, and began compiling "mini-guides" to accompany my photographs. I also watched which posts got most page-views, and found that Google most often served up my knitting and sewing "how-to's," recipes, and link compilations.

The best part of "blogging more" has been an increase in the number of regular readers who comment or e-mail. If any of you have read this far into a rather self-absorbed post, thanks so much for reading and coming back!

For my 2008 New Year's Projects and Vague Aspirations, I've joined Sharon B's Take It Further Challenge, where I hope her monthly project prompts will push me to try new fiber arts techniques and styles. I have several ideas for January's prompt, Ask yourself who do you look up to and admire? Why? What is it you admire about them?. For several years, I've been playing with the idea of photographic images on fabric, and this looks like a good topic to push me in that direction.

I also intend to "do still more" with my blog and my neglected Web site. Vague has been working for me so far, so I'll continue with it. I've got some "health and welfare" resolutions as well, but I like to handle these on a month-by-month basis, so if something isn't working, I can revise and start over.

Slow Cloth, and a Challenge For the New Year

I've signed on to Sharon Boggon's 2008 Take It Further Challenge. Here's how she describes it:

On the first of each month I will post key concept. The challenge is to take the idea, develop it and push it towards a resolved design during that month. In other words you interpret the idea and apply it to fiber or paper.

Every month there will be two options. The second option will be a colour scheme or a design element like a shape, to develop into a resolved design. This means that if you don't like the concept you can work the colour scheme or is you don't like the colour scheme you can work with the concept. Or you can work with both.

The actual project you design can be any thing, in any medium or format you choose. It can be a crazy quilt block, a postcard, a journal quilt, a piece of embroidery, a sampler, a fabric book page or whatever sparks your imagination. It can also be...pages spreads of designs worked in a visual journal....What ever you choose to do, I am asking people to blog the development of the idea through the month (preferably weekly) and to leave a comment here with your blog address so that people can visit your site and see what you have done.

Sharon B's In a Minute Ago was one of the first blogs I ever bookmarked. Besides writing about her own needlework projects and teaching online courses, she has produced the Dictionary of Stitches for Hand Embroidery and Needlework, and she teaches and blogs about Web design, network literacy, digital culture and the visual arts at Mindtracks.

In 2007, she challenged hand embroiderers with Take a Stitch Tuesday: Each week I took a stitch and suggested people experiment with it, push it a little and see what possibilities the stitch holds. Participants posted photos of their work, and SharonB provided links to them. Although I don't hand-embroider, it was inspiring to see all the different interpretations. You could browse for days....

In the course of organizing this year's challenge, SharonB mused on Slow Cloth, a celebration of giving thought and taking time in fiber projects. I enjoyed her essay, but it has stirred up a host of comments and blog posts, a few of them of the strain "My knitting (or embroidery or quilting) is good, and pleases me; your knitting differs from mine, and is therefore naughty, wrong, and bad." I agree with SharonB that it is good and useful to consider why we choose our craft and what we hope to achieve. I'm not sure sharing our entire thought process on the Internet is so valuable. Sometimes we figure out what we like by first identifying what we don't like, and that thing we hate may be someone else's beloved goal. A screed defaming crocheted toilet roll covers will come up when someone who craves such an item searches for "crocheted toilet roll cover pattern," and hurt, offend, or inspire flame wars. One gal's brilliant expression is another gal's hideous monstrosity, and until we can articulate what we love, there's no sense in publicly denigrating other people's projects and media. (I am, personally, neutral on the topic of toilet roll covers; should I ever require one, I will probably make up my own pattern.)

I also offer an off-topic but interesting link that I discovered while reading the responses to Slow Cloth: Handmade 2.0 By Rob Walker, December 16, 2007 New York Times Magazine. It's about, among other things, Etsy.