Ta(l)king Shelter

There's an old joke about the weather here in the Hill Country. "Austin has four seasons: almost summer, summer, still summer, and Christmas." They're not lying. It's well into November, and I drank my coffee in shirtsleeves on the side porch this morning, on the lookout for mosquitoes. The customary wicked heat notwithstanding, Austinites do love their wool, and we're blessed with not one but several great yarn shops and a thriving craft community. One of those shops, Hill Country Weavers, was hand-picked by Jared Flood (a.k.a. Brooklyn Tweed) to be one of the brick-and-mortar flagship stores for his new yarn line, SHELTER, and the collection of new accessory patterns he's created especially for those yarns.

It's a product with an interesting story, and well worth reading about if you're hearing of it here first. Jared has put great care and effort into creating a yarn line made from American-raised wool that's dyed and milled in American facilities. It's his effort to help sustain and revitalize the centuries-old American textile industry, which I think is pretty cool. The hues and hand of the yarn are a wool-lover's dream, and Jared's new designs for it offer his usual combination of elegant style, luscious texture, and wearability.

You can surely imagine, therefore, how excited I was to be invited, along with an impressive group of other Austin-based designers, to contribute a pattern to a collection of new designs described as "Hill Country does SHELTER." Inspired in part by the beautiful creations of Church Mouse Yarns, another one of the brick-and-mortar SHELTER merchants, these new designs use all of the colors in the SHELTER range, with a distinctly Texas touch. Starting with some of Jared's favorite design elements--garter stitch, chevrons, texture that really sings--I swatched our sample skein in a motif called Welting Fantastic. (This being the Thanksgiving season, I'll express once again that I'm thankful for the Barbara Walker Treasury. Where would I be without it? I can open to almost any page and the designs practically create themselves.) This stitch is so easy to work, flat or in the round, and it creates wonderful effects in Shelter--a scalloped cast-on edge, a feather-light and drapey fabric with enough spring to keep it from sagging--and its pairing of rising increases and falling decreases is reminiscent of the gently rolling terrain for which the Hill Country around Austin is named. I immediately called dibs on the rich, grassy green color called Tent, and got to work sketching and prototyping a garment that would capture some of that famous Austin spirit. Here's my first stab at the design from my little sketchbook, which I always have with me:


That sketch and my original swatch, in turn, became this:



Hey, it looks just like the picture! (Sometimes I even surprise myself when I do that.) I'll be sure to let y'all know when the collection becomes available--we're shooting to have it ready for in-store and online purchases before the holidays. That's perfect, because this below-the-knee length is eminently suitable for the brief Austin Christmas season. The pattern's written in such a way, though, that you can also make it in Almost Summer and Still Summer versions--a hip-length pullover and a mid-thigh tunic that would be great worn over leggings with your favorite cowboy boots. Three out of four ain't bad, right? So maybe for the holidays this year knitters everywhere will be telling one another: "Gimme Shelter!"

Corking it

Have I mentioned that I travel a lot? Well, I do. I mostly love it: I have friends all over the place, so out-of-town conferences and symposia are a great opportunity to visit with them. Seeing places where I COULD be living often makes me more appreciative of the qualities of the place where I DO live. And after all, if you don't travel, you have to keep visiting the same old yarn shops over and over and over again...where you can't use the "souvenir yarn" exception if you're on a de-stash diet.

Airports and planes are great spaces for knitting, too. There are the long hours of seated waiting to fill, and I like the poetic symmetry of knitting while traveling--the yarn goes in yard by yard as the journey goes by mile by mile. I have yet to encounter airport-security static over my needles or the contents of my notions bag, which I guess makes me pretty lucky, because I actually use my knitting as a defensive weapon on plane trips. That is, it's a very ready excuse for not engaging with a chatty seatmate--"Ooh, what are you making there?" "Sorry, can't talk...counting..."

My latest trip was a real jackpot from a knitting-on-the-road standpoint: Two domestic connections followed by a transatlantic flight, then a bus ride to the train station, THEN a train ride to the lovely riverside city of Cork, Ireland--which is home to a button factory. Observe!



Ooooooooohhhh yeah. That's the stuff. I splurged, needless to say, on a few additions to my collection. Buttons are great souvenirs--no matter how many you buy you can always find room for them in your luggage. Like loose gemstones, but cheaper, and less likely to get you rapped at by an indignant Kanye West! (If you stick to the vegetable ivory, that is. If there's such a thing as "conflict buttons," I don't want to know about it. La la la la la, I can't hear you...)

The conference kept me pretty busy, but I got to prowl around the town of Cork a bit and really liked what I saw. Aside from the button factory, there's also the Butter Museum and the view from my hotel room, which was of a decommissioned cemetery, with a beautiful line of tombstones canted up against the hedge.



But I think this was the sight that really made me want to live there:



Now, if the Button Factory and the Butter Museun were all INSIDE the heliotrope-painted Library House, I would know I had arrived in a heaven designed especially for me...

From Cork I detoured back home (more train, more bus, more airport, more driving, more knitting throughout all of the former) via the small Virginia town of Culpeper. This is where the Library of Congress has their National Audiovisual Conservation Center facility, and also where the fiber-friendly out-of-towner can pay a visit to Dog House Yarns & More, a great little shop that opened earlier this year. I had the pleasure of meeting the proprietor, Rosanne, and her husband Fritz, along with a couple of their weeknight sit-and-knit regulars, all of whom made me feel right at home after two Saturdays in a row away from my regular knitting group. Local hand-dye studio Blue Ridge Yarns is well-represented in their stock, and I couldn't resist a bundle of their Footprints sock yarn. 100 yds of semi-solid for heels and toes is paired with 300 yds of gorgeously coordinated handpainted color. I got a new colorway called Redbud, which combines beautiful maroons, rusts, and browns with a loden green for the accent color. It'll make lovely autumn socks for someone...maybe me!

Thankfully, the end of this long trip (just about) coincided with the end of our blazing-hot summer in Austin. A few days after I got back, the temperatures had dropped down to the high 80s during the day, and the nights and early mornings have started to get that fall crispness. It's making it much easier to keep cranking away on my latest project: a dress made with the new woolly Shelter yarn recently launched by Jared Flood, of Brooklyn Tweed fame. More on that next time!

A word about Althea

A fellow-Raveler (who happens to have a family full of Altheas herself) just asked me how my new Althea cardigan and skirt patterns got their name. Well, their namesake is third from the right in this photo--she's the determined-looking woman in the patterned frock who's looking right at ya:



For those who don't recognize her on sight, that's none other than Althea Warren, who was City Librarian of Los Angeles, CA from 1933-1947, and president of ALA from '43-'44. During her tenure, Warren led the Victory Book Campaign, a nationwide book drive that eventually directed more than 10 million volumes to those serving in the armed forces in WWII. This project was totally in keeping with her philosophy as a librarian, which was distinctly populist. "Not all of a person's reading is or should be in pursuit of information," she wrote, in an article on "The Needs of Readers." As someone who reads at both the high and low ends of the literary spectrum, I'm down with that. Of course, Althea Warren held that opinion at a time when it was still pretty radical--when many library board members still felt that libraries should be places for people to "better themselves" or address "the higher interests of society," and that putting mystery novels and penny dreadfuls on the shelves would attract an unruly class of patrons. This debate about the fundamental public role of libraries, and how that should shape their acquisitions and services, continues to this day--it's a fierce 'un!

To pay tribute to Althea Warren, then, I designed a knitted outfit that's bold in color, but entirely straightforward to knit and quite serviceable to wear. Think of her when you wear it--and while you're at it, you could even donate a book to a soldier in her memory.

(Image courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library's photo collection.)

Who's got two needles and a scholarship?

<----- This girl!

I'm very pleased to be able to share the news about the scholarship I was just awarded from Jimmy Beans Wool and Vogue Knitting. Now in its second year, the Beans for Brains scholarship program is providing some much-needed tuition support for the many college students out there who also happen to knit and crochet. It's the first program of its kind, and JBW and VK deserve a big pat on the back for coming up with it.

I'm pretty sure I'd think that even if they hadn't awarded one of the scholarships to me. (But they did, so a huge THANKS to you, Laura, and all the great folks at Jimmy Beans!) Having paid off the loans and debt from two college degrees myself before heading back for a third, I'm a big fan of scholarships--and ones that take care to recognize special talents and well-rounded students are just the berries.

It's nice to see the link between craft/creativity and academic achievements being made, too. I've grown considerably as both a knitter and a scholar since starting the degree program I'm in now, and I think those two pursuits have informed one another in some interesting ways. For one thing, practicing and communicating about both knitting and information science was radically transformed by the Interwebs, which continue to have an influence on trends in both fields. (Examples? Ravelry. Google. Discuss!) Absorbing difficult new ideas can be discouraging, but as I plowed through the really dense articles and books for my introductory doctoral research and theory class, I'd tell myself that if I could learn to knit lace, then the theoretical traditions of information science should be cake.

Perhaps most importantly, though, I've been publishing knitting patterns pretty regularly for the last few years, and that has definitely made me more comfortable with the idea of publishing in general--one of the imperatives in academia ("publish or perish," they say). Whether it's a journal article or a charted lace design, you're putting yourself out there when you publish. You know your readers are going to be a bunch of people who have a keen interest in the subject, often know waaaaaay more than you do about it, and won't hesitate to call you out--publicly!--on the bits you get wrong. The work ultimately has to stand on its own, and you have to stand by it. Scary, right? It really can be...but for me, having a sort of alter ego who publishes knitting patterns (and has to push out the occasional revision-with-apologies when a sharp-eyed knitter finds one of the goofy errors that are entirely my fault, and occur despite, not because of, the efforts of my fine technical editors) keeps the academical me more philosophical about the peer-review process, and the inevitable setbacks and rewriting that good, responsible scholarly publication entails.

For Jimmy Beans and Vogue to be sponsoring an award that recognizes students who knit, then, means to me that there might be a lot of people out there for whom knitting (and crocheting, of course!) is more than just a retro hobby. It's a true creative outlet, an intellectual challenge, and maybe a way of working on something that engages the "play" part of your brain while the "school" part is chewing on something tricky. It's also what I do on the bus to and from campus, and with my best non-school friends here in Texas, so it's a way of staying sane and grounded and having something other than my research interests to discuss at cocktail parties.

BTW, the nice photo that I grabbed for this post appeared with the front-page article on my receipt of this award that my school paper ran (slow news week, I guess!). It's by Tamir Kalifa, who is clearly a very talented guy. He gets extra points for somehow minimizing the infamous Knitter's Double Chin...but someone gets points off for naming the image file "DOM2010-09-01_Knitting_Lady." Yowch--apparently, even though I'm a student, I'm a lady now, and my girl days are behind me. In all fairness, though, I think I have underpants that are older than the reporter who interviewed me for the article. I may in fact have been wearing them when that picture was taken.

Yellow is not my color. Oh, wait, I guess it could be.

Aunt Lydia's Design Studio
Originally uploaded by snowdenbecker

When I look at a picture like this from a vintage pattern book (in this case, "Aunt Lydia's Design Studio," from sometime deep in the 1970s), my first thought is neither "Looks comfortable!" nor "Boy, don't I wish I my crochet skills were up to something that complex!" nor "That model is clearly bereft of any kind of undergarments." No, friends, these are secondary notions. The first thing to churn to the surface in my brain is actually, "Does it come in any color BESIDES yellow?"

I have friends who look amazing in marigold, sunshine, canary, butter, and topaz, but I never have. In fact, I've never given the hues that fall between green and red on the color wheel much of a shot. Lately I've dabbled in orange, which would feel considerably more daring if I didn't live in Austin, Texas. Burnt orange and white are the UT Austin colors, and Austin is heaven for orange stuff: If something orange is very, very good, when it dies it will wake up and find itself here, whether it is a car or a cardigan, yarn or yard equipment. It's really only natural that, as I enter my fifth year of seeing people wearing UT shirts ALL OVER THE PLACE (including to their actual classes AT the University on non-game days, which seems to me kind of like wearing the band t-shirt to the concert of that band...but hey, maybe I'm wrong about that), I would be coming to accept orange as something wearable, even by me. Burnt orange I still don't know that I love on me yet, but I've gotten daring with some stuff in the vermilion and tangerine families lately, if you can believe that.

The next logical step would be for me to branch out into yellow, right? Well, I might want to count St. Moritz (Ravelry details here) as that step. It's my design contribution to the new book Knitting it Old School, edited by my pals Caro and Stitchy, which is sure to be the must-have pattern book for this fall. (I've provided an Amazon link just off to the left there, for your convenience. Wasn't that nice of me? Just click on the li'l ol' Buy Now button, kiddo...THERE you go!) They asked me for some ideas for a vintage-inspired piece and then sent me the yarn to make it with, and I was, I must admit, kinda sorta horrified when I opened the box and saw exactly what "lemon ice" looked like. There was just an awful lot of yellow in one place there. More than a law firm's worth of legal pads. More than a cageful of canaries. Like a handful of highlighters had leaked all over a nice bag of cream-colored yarn, maybe. OK, not as bad as that last one, but whew, definitely more yellow yarn than I'd ever thought I'd be using on one project.


As I swatched it, I fretted. Yellow is so LIGHT. I'd have to wash my hands each time I picked up this project! The beginning of the garment would get all soiled, and the end of it would be all bright and fresh! I'd have to keep it in a plastic bag if I took it anywhere, in case I spilled on it! And waaah, I don't like yellow! As it turned out, working this yellow garment ended up instilling some better knitterly habits in me. You should always wash your hands before picking up a knitting project, after all, and ladies, if you're putting your knitting in a handbag that has EVER carried makeup, too, you should put it in its own clean bag. (So sayeth the girl who has had to gently rinse lip-liner crumbs out of a ball of lace weight cashmere.) And of course the color grew on me. (Who saw that one coming? OK, cleversticks; you win. You're smarter than me.) This stuff really DOES look like lemon ice--even though I was working on it during two of the eleven-point-five wicked hot months we have here in Texas, it didn't seem like as steamy a lapful as other (less refreshingly-colored) sweaters I have knitted. The upshot is that knitting with yellow yarn is now on the list of things I won't automatically rule out, which makes me feel ever so adventurous and broad-minded and whatnot.

In fact, I had such a good experience with this yellow yarn that the very next week I ordered a bunch of yellow sock yarn to test-knit my Myrtle design in, figuring I'd give the finished garment to one of my yellow-wearing friends. But when THAT yellow yarn arrived, it was--I'm truly sorry to say this, because I love the company I ordered it from, and they're usually quite tasteful with color--Fuh. Gly. Like, it REALLY looked like a highlighter leaked in there. I couldn't even swatch with it--this yarn was way, way over my yellow limit. So I had my friend Stephi dye it green. Baby steps, folks, baby steps...

RIP Panache...but viva la Capra!

Oh, keeping secrets is SO hard, especially when they're SO good: Not too long ago, the fabulous folks at Knit Picks very kindly offered me the chance to test-knit their newest yarn, Capra, which is a merino wool-and-cashmere blend DK. And let me tell y'all, this stuff is primo! It's also finally available, so I can finally talk about it. I've created a new design especially for Capra--two new designs, in fact. The Althea sweater pictured above (in a fab FO photo by Splityarn/Caro Sheridan) is available now, and a matching skirt will be coming as soon as I can make the finishing touches on the pattern. Together, they make a gorgeous and cozy knitted outfit that's perfect for autumn (just check out that delicious Tiger Lily orange--it makes me feel warmer just looking at it! Oh, no, wait--I feel warm because it's still 100 degrees here in Texas. Will autumn ever come??), but they work equally well as separates.

Capra's been a long time coming, as far as I'm concerned, because the yarn that made me a Knit Picks customer in the first place was Panache. Ah, Panache. Now, THERE was a yarn! A decadent blend of wool, silk, and cashmere, it was perfect for hats. I took one tender pat of it at a knitting circle meeting, demanded to know where it came from, and then darted home to Google "Knit Picks," which I seriously had never heard of before that day, and order enough Panache for half a dozen watchcaps. (Now is as good a time as any to thank Staceyjoy Elkin for her Marsan Watchcap pattern. It's the Platonic ideal of knitted hats, and the fact that she's made the pattern available for free is something to be truly grateful for.) And some Alpaca Cloud lace yarn. And, um, I may have gotten some sock yarn with that first order, too; I really cannot recall, your Honor.

But then the dark day came not long after that--or not long enough, as far as I was concerned--when Panache was discontinued. Sniff, sniff. I still have a couple balls of dark gray in the stash that I'm saving for a very, very special project someday. A cabled cozy for a gold brick? Baby sweater for a newborn empress? No, I mean something REALLY special...in the meantime, I'll be using Capra to feed my cashmere-blend jones. And lest you think this post was all one big commercial for Knit Picks, well, coming up with the Althea pattern and the Billington Bag have both reminded me of how great it is to work in something other than fingering and lace weight yarns. Althea works up super-quick--I cranked out the below-the-knee skirt in just over a week--and it's well-suited to any DK weight yarn you like. The Sublime cashmerino-silk DK is a particular pleasure to work with, in my experience. (Just make sure you're not mixing balls of the DK and the aran, like I did on the prototype for my Harriet sweater.) So go to town! I already told you that you can't have the last of my Panache, so you better find something else out there you like to knit with...

Now available: The Billington Bag

It's finally ready! My first handbag pattern...and she's a peach. The Billington Bag (click for Ravelry details) is now available for download through my Ravelry store; it'll also be available shortly from Knit Picks. It's a felted wool bag with fabric lining and cute little button feet, perfect for carrying your latest knitting project around. The extremely groovy texture comes from a twisted-stitch motif in one of the Barbara Walker treasuries, which I just cannot get enough of--the design practically invented itself as I looked at the chart in the book!

Billington the bag is named for our current Librarian of Congress, Dr. James H. Billington. He's a heck of a guy--check out his 40 honorary doctorates in addition to the one he earned as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford!--but I hold him in special esteem for the work he's done to acknowledge important works by amateur filmmakers, having named several remarkable home movies to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. (One of my all-time favorites is "Disneyland Dream" by Robbins Barstow, who is also a heck of a guy. You can watch it in its entirety via the Internet Archive.)

I'm particularly excited about this pattern, because it's the first one for which I'm pledging a portion of the proceeds to a cause that's really important to me: The Center for Home Movies. CHM runs the annual international Home Movie Day event, which is coming up on October 16 this year. On Home Movie Day, film archivists in cities around the world set up venues where members of the general public can bring in their family films (and sometimes videos) for inspection, assessment, and best of all, viewing. Many people haven't seen these family memories for decades (if ever) due to lack of a working projector or concerns about their condition, and they're therefore at risk of being lost due to neglect or simple ignorance of their rich contents. Several of the home movies now on the National Film Registry were re-discovered through Home Movie Day events, but every film that's shown at a Home Movie Day is special in some way.

In fact, home movies are stereotyped as being boring and badly shot, but I think they're actually a lot like handknits: They may run to hundreds or even thousands of yards, they're rich in color and visual texture, and they become so much more meaningful when they're handed down from generation to generation. All home movies and handknits are one-of-a-kind--not mass-produced--and so they uniquely reflect the people who made them, as well as the place and time in which they were made. They also take a little extra care and special handling to look their best, but the effort of storing them carefully and preventing snags and tears is definitely worth it. Showing them off to people who appreciate them is a special treat, too!

50% of the net sales from Billington Bag patterns will go to CHM to help support their work on preserving, presenting, and encouraging the use and study of historic amateur media. I've been involved with CHM since their very beginnings, and know how much they can do with even the smallest contributions. I hope you'll take a moment to mark your calendar and make plans to check out the Home Movie Day nearest you this year. You can bring your knitting!

$1.99 PDF download for Billington Bag pattern (includes separate PDF with chart enlarged to 11 x 17"). Ravelry membership not required.



Photos this post (c) 2010 by Caro Sheridan/Splityarn. That's her adorable cat, too.