So. This story begins a long time ago, when I had first fallen in love with spinning, was at the peak of my yarn-and-fiber-acquisition-period and I joined a fiber club. I’m still in said fiber club, but two years (and not nearly as much spinning as I’d hoped) later, I am amassing fiber at an alarming rate relative to the rate at which I am spinning it. Having noticed this a few months ago, I set a goal of spinning the fiber that arrived each month before the next month’s shipment turned up and, all excited about my fresh idea, I trotted out the spinning wheel, sat down to spin a fairly recent fiber acquisition and… well, suffice it to say that several months went by and no spinning was accomplished. Until last week.

In a moment of realizing that online shopping and budgeting worrying generally about the acquisition and organization of STUFF was not only failing to make me happy but was in fact making me miserable, I thought two words: Make Something. And I looked over at my spinning wheel and, instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, decided to just work on the project that was already sitting right there in front of me. (It happened to be a portion of February’s shipment, Stone Fruit — I used the coral-colored Targhee). I made a decision that I was just going to spin singles of a weight that felt comfortable for the wheel and the fiber and my hand, and that I would worry about what those singles would become later — I reasoned that if I didn’t like my yarn as a 2-ply, I could always ply it back on itself to make a 4-ply cabled yarn or ply it with another yarn or thread or fiber altogether. Or (as I discovered upon opening my May shipment, a lovely burgundy and grey Polwarth/Silk blend) I could spin another chunk of fiber and blend it in with my two plies.

I am happy to report that I now have a delightful, dense 3-ply yarn with a lot of depth… and once I spin another .5 oz of the polwarth/silk blend (and ply it with my remaining targhee singles), I believe I will also have a decent amount of yardage. Definitely enough for mitts, maybe even enough for a pair of ankle socks. And a beautiful reminder that I don’t always have to plan for every eventuality at the outset… even in spinning, there are many opportunities to change my mind in the service of a project.

(Okay, I realize I’m a couple weeks late on that one, but really, as mellow as my greeting to 2012 might have been, the days since have flown past full of… well the things that fill my offline life).

I figure it’s never too late to celebrate, though, and I’m excited to announce that a new pattern, Sophisticated Scribbles, is up (at long last) for sale in my Ravelry store! I know it’s well into the new year already… but I had my reasons for holding this one back.

The biggest, of course, is that I wanted something to commemorate my first year attending Vogue Knitting Live! I’m pretty excited… I’d wanted to take Catherine Lowe’s couture knitting class when it was offered at VK Live in LA, but it was not to be (somehow, planning a bridal shower was just not conducive to planning a road trip for a 3-day knitting class…), so now I’m taking it in one of my favorite cities, NYC!

I’ve also got a couple lectures lined up, and I’ll be at the party at The Yarn Company after classes this evening. Hope to see you there!

]]> http://silverillusionsknits.com/wordpress/archives/462/feed 1 http://silverillusionsknits.com/wordpress/archives/461 http://silverillusionsknits.com/wordpress/archives/461#comments Thu, 24 Nov 2011 05:13:37 +0000 Liz http://silverillusionsknits.com/wordpress/?p=461

(Fortunately, I still remember how to use my serger).

Then I realized that what I really want to say is about something much more important (and a bit less self-indulgent) than how I feel about my persistent failures at knitting complete sweaters during the month of November, even though I can totally knit a sweater in less than a month, have done it many times, etc. etc.

The thing is, what I like about National Make Something Month (whether the something is a sweater or a series of blog posts or a draft of a novel or whatever) is that, in giving us support for taking the time to dedicate ourselves to a project and to work deeply at something and a community to share it with, a month of intense Making encourages us to be aware of how much time and work goes into things that we consume every single day.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as I’ve watched emails advertising Black Friday and Cyber Monday and hey, why not the rest of the weekend, too sales pile up in my inbox, and my thoughts only got compounded by reading this blog entry and its attendent comments.

Admittedly, selling a $150 hat at certain kinds of crafts fairs is not likely to go over well, even if the same hat would look dead cheap if it were sold in say, a museum store or some kind of juried art fair (knowing one’s audience is key in establishing a fair price for something), and putting 18-20 hours of work into something does not mean that the work alone justifies its cost. But there’s an important point to be made in the post which is that, as a society, we have become very distanced from the raw materials and labor that go into making many of the things we consume. We live in a culture of interchangeable, disposable items, and are inundated by hundreds if not thousands of messages every day that tell us that we want or need more stuff. It’s no surprise, then, that we tend to buy based on price and therefore assign value in terms of cost to us (and in terms of what we think things should cost based on our observations of the prices of similar items). That in turn means that it is sometimes easy to dismiss the value of handmade things, not out of malice, but out of ignorance.

A woman once told me she’d pay $29.99 for a sweater that I’d knit out of a very yummy merino/silk artisanal hand-dyed yarn. I had to stop myself from being truly offended that she thought so little of my work… it’s easy, as a crafter, to get started on mental tirade about how the materials alone cost more than her offer and then there was my time and the work of skilled craftspeople is undervalued on the whole and society is totally broken and and and.

The thing is, though, she meant it as a high compliment. In her mind, $29.99 was an enormous sum to pay for any article of clothing (I suspect that she was the sort of person who did the vast majority of her shopping at various and assorted discount stores where the average price for a t-shirt is $5.99 and a full man’s suit can be acquired for $49.99). As far as I could tell from our conversation, she’d never been a maker. She might not have even known a maker.

Therein lies the rub. The truth of the matter is that until you’ve tried to make something yourself, it’s really hard to see and appreciate value in things that are handmade. The mere act of making something, whether it turns out well or not, whether it’s made of high-end materials or repurposed materials or the last remnants of a practically-giving-it-away sale bin changes us. It gives us one small moment to reflect on what we’re really doing when we buy clothing that’s made in sweatshops in developing countries and helps us to appreciate what we have and to maybe, just maybe, become a little more willing to value another person’s handiwork.

National Make Something Month. I’m a fan.

You can probably imagine why the idea of “let’s all knit the same sweater, but they’ll all be different because we can use different colours of yarn for it” seemed a bit foreign to me. (Not that it stopped me from participating in a few before I realized that no, knitterly as they might be, KALs did not work the way I work).  Plus there’s that whole I’m-not-very-good-at-not-changing-the-pattern-unless-I’m-test-knitting-and-really-working-at-it thing.

The thing is, though, there’s something really awesome about having an appreciative audience with whom to share your work.  Enter the open-ended knitalong… the kind of knitalong where the idea is more along the lines of  “let’s all knit something out of Madelinetosh” or “let’s all knit something with cables”  or even “let’s all knit green socks.  Any kind of socks you want, they just have to be green!”

They’re like knitalongs for people who “don’t do” knitalongs.

Which is probably why, when The Loopy Ewe announced their 4th quarter challenge (knit something that uses a full skein of Madelintosh, and oh by the way, if you buy yarn this week and finish by January, we’ll give you a discount on the yarn AND double frequent shopper benefits, which absolutely made my little bargain-hunter-with-expensive-taste heart soar) and the Anthropologie knits group on Ravelry announced the Cable Crush fall knitalong, and I’d already decided that I’d really dithered much too long on getting the pattern together for a certain pair of knee socks that just happened to fit with both of these themes, well, I realized I’d run across a pretty magical confluence of circumstances.

Dear readers, I am knitting a wonderful pair of knee socks out of Madelinetosh Pashmina as part of a giant knitalong.  I am sharing my work with a different group on Ravelry as part of another knitalong.  (They’re going very well — I’m just past the heel on the second sock.  58 rows and a toe and I’ve got a spiffy new pair of stockings!) I am loving every minute of it.

 (p.s. The pattern is nearly ready for testing; I’ll be putting up a testing call sometime next week.)