Whatever Happened to January?

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Well it’s February now, and somehow January disappeared in a flash. And no wonder, too — a lot has happened. I got a new job, which has been more of an adjustment than I anticipated; I went to Vancouver; I finally succumbed to the cold that’s been looming for weeks; and I’m trying two-at-a-time sweaters, which has been a learning experience.

I want to take some space to talk about a few things that have been happening in the knitting and sewing community over the last month. If you’ve been following me on instagram you’ve seen some posts and stories about it. I’ve also seen conversations like this in other spaces — the library community, the IA community, and in my non-knitterly friend groups.

Folks, it was eye-opening for me. I always considered myself against racism, and I even though I knew that we (as a society) were not “over racism”, I thought that we were still making strides. But seeing some of the vitriol that came out of these conversations and the white defensiveness on display, I can see that we have a lot farther to go. I also realized that there were a number of things that I wasn’t doing, or that I could be doing better.

I wasn’t seeking out diversity in my instagram feed. Like every other well-intentioned white person, I figured the algorithm would do my work for me, when we all know that’s completely untrue. I also wasn’t speaking up. I’m normally a quiet person — I don’t post much, I don’t talk much, and even this blogging thing seems like a lot sometimes. But when an indie dyer spouts neo-nazi sentiments and tries to back it up by saying the ‘silent majority’ agrees with her, or a clothing company actively promotes racist comments and deletes others, silence is definitely not an option. And finally, I have not been doing enough for myself to unpack my biases — because I still have plenty, even with all my good intentions. So I downloaded the Me and White Supremacy Workbook by Layla F. Saad (and became a backer of her Patreon), I bought White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, and I’ve started speaking up more.

I also diversified the heck out of my instagram feed, and I am so much richer for it. I’ve found some amazing new people to follow, and I’m ashamed that I didn’t seek them out earlier. But I know that I’m going to do better, and this feels like a good first step.

Lastly (but not actually lastly, because it’s an unending list), I’m going to participate as best I can in the #buyfrombipoc challenge in 2019, which focuses on buying fashion purchases exclusively from Black and Indigenous People of Color. I’m still working out what my fashion is and what I’m going to buy vs. make, but when and where possible I am going to seek out makers of Color and support them with my wallet.

I want to thank everyone who spoke up, because it was not and has never been easy to do that. I also know that you’ve been speaking up for a long time, and the fact that we (white knitters) are just now noticing is a reflection of how much work we still have to do. In particular, I want to thank su.krita, ocean_bythesea, astitchtowear, little_kotos_closet, transitory, tina.say.knits, and booksandcables for their engagement (and their wonderful instagram feeds!). And fellow white people, this is up to us to work on. Don’t ask PoC to educate you — educate yourself, and support PoC: buy them coffee, buy their products, buy and knit their patterns, sign up for their Patreons. Don’t take their work for granted, or for free.

And finally, I want to say: I don’t have a giant community of people following me and I don’t have a business to worry about. But this space is mine, and I will always, always work to make & keep it an inclusive space that is safe for everyone. Hate has absolutely no place here and I will always remove hateful content from my space, so don’t bring it here. And please, please call me out if I’m doing something harmful — I have so much to learn, and I’m trying, and I will always appreciate you reaching out.

All the Sweater Plans

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I spent a lot of this month knitting and sewing a lot of things for other people, which is both satisfying and extremely annoying at the same time — I love giving people presents of things I’ve made, but I don’t like having to give a thing I made away, and I also worry about them not liking it. Now that I’m done with all of those not-for-me things, I’ve been keeping a list of all the things I’m going to make next. For some reason, they’ve all turned out to be sweaters, so it looks like 2019 is going to start off with a very comfortable but slow bang.

First up is finishing my Weekender Sweater, made with Hello Stella Worsted in Lavender Latte, which I snagged from La Mercerie.

Six skeins of purple-pink yarn lay side by side.

Next, I’m going to participate in Karen Templar’s steekalong, although instead of knitting Sólbein I’m going to make a green Dreyma Cardigan, which is what I had already planned on making with my Icelandic Léttlopi haul. The steekalong coincides nicely with my existing plan to convert Dreyma from a pullover to a cardigan by learning how to steek (thanks to inspiration from Rachel Price, aka half of Spincycle Yarns), and I’m glad that my first steeking experience won’t be a solo adventure.

Then, I’m going to make a Black Heart Fade version of Andrea Mowry’s Rose Cardigan, with this amazing fade I bought from House of A La Mode. Heather is also holding a HOALM winter knitalong featuring Andrea’s patterns, so by default I’ll be participating in this one, too!

After that I might need to take a break from sweaters, but I also did just buy Dissent by Andrea Rangel, and I might be tempted to make one sooner rather than later…

2018: In Review

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I don’t always believe in arbitrary markers of time, but I do enjoy thinking about the year end around this time — it’s a good space to reflect, summarize, and make plans. A lot has happened this year: I made a Kickstarter, started natural dyeing experiments, published my first knitting pattern, bought way too much yarn, knit up a storm, and started sewing more of my own clothes. Here’s a list of my highlights for 2018.

I launched a Kickstarter to help fund my experiments in learning natural dyeing, and I had so much fun making different color combinations and seeing how different fabrics dyed up. For this whole Kickstarter rewards batch, I used liquid natural dyes from Botanical Colors.

For my last project before I learned continental-style knitting, I made a Whippet Cardigan, still one of my favorite projects ever.

My first continental knit project was La Crau by Melanie Berg, which was perfect for it - rows and rows of garter stitch and the occasional slipped stitch, no purling required! It was ridiculously slow going for the first bit, but I got speedier as I got more comfortable with the new configuration of my fingers.

I experimented with bundle dyeing, with mixed results — definitely something I’d love to practice more. I also started creating my own dyes using plants (rosemary, sage, pomegranate skins, pine cones), and am excited to see what else I can use to create new colors.

I pieced the top of a half-square-triangle quilt, dyed with my Botanical Colors dyes (indigo, madder, cutch, and pomegranate+iron).

I decided to un-stitch and then kitchener the bottom of my Tegna sweater after changing my mind about colors halfway through — another experiment that turned out really well and a new staple in my wardrobe.

I went to Iceland and bought all of the Icelandic yarn, basked in the unfathomable landscape, and soaked in as many hot springs as I could.

I took a trip to the Taos Wool and Fiber Festival, and while I was there had the rare pleasure of doing some tea-dyeing experiments with a dear friend.

I dyed a last few batches of yarn before the new year, and immediately wound up three skeins to work on while I’m on vacation.

And I knitted a Zweig Sweater, which I blocked immediately (a rarity for me) and haven’t worn yet, but which I’m sure will become another wardrobe staple.

Well, it’s certainly been a year, and that’s only the fiber side of it! I’m excited to see what next year brings, but just as excited to take a break and knit mindlessly on my Weekender Sweater for a bit.

Sleeve Island, Speedy Knitting, and Too Many Ideas

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A hanging sweater with a lacy colorworked yoke showing an unfinished sleeve with circular knitting needles attached.

I’m not often a person who has multiple projects going at once - I like to see something through from start to finish without getting distracted. Maybe it’s just this month, maybe it’s the impending holidays, maybe it’s my ideas getting carried away, but I’ve had two or three projects going at once since the beginning of November. Some of them were easy decisions - I decided to pause knitting my Zweig and start my Occhiello Sweater (unfortunately for me, it's a sample knit which means I have to send it off soon!) before my trip to Vancouver, because I knew I’d have a lot of knitting time and I didn’t want to run out of something to knit. But for that, I just switched projects entirely and didn’t go between them, so does that count? In the last couple weeks, I’ve been switching between my Zweig (where I am firmly on Sleeve Island, which for this sweater feels somehow more unbearable than for Occhiello) and two other secret projects for gifts. It feels like I’m avoiding knitting my sleeves because they’re taking forever, but with that same logic, if I just knit them instead of pretending they don’t exist then I’d be done faster!

One thing that I’ve changed this year is that I learned how to knit continental style, for a variety of reasons. I’ve always been a tight knitter — my favorite story to tell is about when I first learned how to knit and was afraid that the stitches would fall off the side of the needle, which is literally impossible — and I’m a very slow purler. After watching videos of everyone speeding along with their continental style, I figured I might as well give it a whirl. So in March, on a giant shawl that was mostly garter stitch, I re-trained my brain.

Folks, it was agonizingly slow for a while there. It took me the entire shawl to get even semi-comfortable with picking instead of throwing, and I had to stare intently at each and every stitch. But now, six months later, I managed to finish that Occhiello sweater in two and a half weeks! I still can’t knit without looking at my hands (which I used to be able to do when throwing), but I think I’ll get there eventually.

I’ll admit, I went a little crazy with the yarn buying this month, and I only have vague plans for all of them. I bought two skeins of La Bien Aimée Merino Aran at the Tolt 5-year anniversary party, I bought some Lichen and Lace and Julie Asselin when I went to Vancouver, and I bought some Bedhead Fiber and The Dye Project from pop-ups at Seattle Yarn, plus a skein of my always-favorite Malabrigo for a secret project. Add that to all the yarn I bought in October, and I think I need to take a yarn-buying break for a bit to catch up on knitting everything!

What I’m consuming lately:

I just checked out the Knitter’s Book of Wool by Clara Parkes and Yarn Works: How to Spin, Dye, and Knit Your Own Yarn by Wendy Johnson from the library, and I’m looking forward to reading through them this weekend.

I recently finished the Ancillary Justice trilogy by Ann Leckie, which I cannot recommend highly enough. Each book just keeps getting better!

And I’ve been listening to Superstition, a podcast that’s delightful and creepy and full of small desert towns and mysteries.

Pine Cone Dyeing

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There’s a pine tree outside my house. I don’t know what species of pine tree, although I know that it makes tiny pine cones that are really cute.

A large pot full of small pinecones.

At the beginning of fall when the weather started changing, they looked like berries and I thought “ooh, I wonder what color those will make!” Well, by the time I got around to actually picking some, they’d turned into Proper Pine Cones, so I’ll just have to wait until next year to pick them early and see if the color is different.

Did you know that the smell of pine cones simmering on the stove is absolutely heavenly? It’s worth the sap just to smell that for an afternoon or two.

The first thing I dyed was a yard of wool-silk blend fabric, and it came out this absolutely stunning toffee color. The next round of pine cone picking didn’t happen for a few more weeks, and with that vat I dyed a special skein of yarn that I was gifted from a friend’s coworker’s sheep and a couple yards of cotton that I think I’m going to use for a quilt back.

A skein of toffee-brown yarn lays on a light brown piece of cotton and a slightly darker brown piece of wool-silk.

They all came out the perfect colors, exactly what I didn’t know I wanted when I started out. I knew putting the cotton in after the yarn would make it lighter, and I think it’ll pair perfectly with the half-square triangle diamond quilt top that I pieced earlier this year.

Have you dyed with pine cones? What did you get?

Slow Fashion October: In Summary

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This was my first time participating in (well, attempting) Slow Fashion October, and like I said earlier, it coincided nicely with my desire to actually take a look at what I wear and what I want to wear.

There were two great things I did for myself this month, fashion-wise. The first is that I packed more handmade clothes than I’ve ever packed and took them on a trip where I knew I would be forced to wear them. I brought my Tegna Sweater, my Farrow Dress, and my Dress No. 2 in Magic Tulips (all pictured below).

Usually I bring one item that I’ve made, and then I save it for a “special occasion”, which doesn’t always happen. This time, 3 out of the 5 outfits I brought were something I made myself and I felt a lot more intentional about planning them, which is something I haven’t done often with the clothes I wear.

The second thing I did was start a Wardrobe Airtable (based on this template and inspired by Karen Templer’s blog post How to make a visual closet inventory), cataloged almost all of my clothes this month, and started keeping track of what I wore every day (almost). I made myself a couple rules: track everything, even if it’s the pajamas you didn’t change out of all day, and don’t feel obligated to wear anything.

A grid view showing several items of clothing captioned by their names.

A few years ago I had a secret blog called “What the fuck did I wear today” because I was so terrible at remembering what I wore and was also anxious about somehow repeating my outfits in a way someone would notice. The house I was living in at the time had a great long mirror setup and it was easy to take a picture of myself every day before I left for work. When I moved to Seattle, the mirrors weren’t as long and the lighting was less good, and I stopped doing it so often. And then I started wearing leggings and t-shirts to the office anyway, so who needed to track that?! The people I work with already know what I look like — I don’t need to try to impress them.

But after a while, leggings and t-shirts get boring (though no less comfortable). And taking time to care about your (my) fashion isn’t about impressing anyone else — it’s about impressing yourself, and making choices that you (I) enjoy. I’ve been working on this for a while, figuring out for myself what is enough effort, what I enjoy wearing, and why I wear (and make) the clothes I do. For me, I don’t want it to be how I am perceived by the world. I want it to be more about how I feel in the clothes that I wear and whether I can (and want to) take pride in that.

Anyway, if you got all the way to the bottom of this: thank you, and tell me how you feel! Are you in the same boat as I am?

P.S. If you haven’t heard of 99 Percent Invisible and the new podcast series they just did on Articles of Interest, I highly recommend checking it out. I keep trying to pick a favorite episode, and I can’t!

The Coziest Wiksten Kimono Jacket + Knitting for Days

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This month has been busy, but I finally got a chance to make my Wiksten Kimono jacket from a spontaneous fabric purchase (I only wanted the pattern and I got carried away!) — I love that my weekends are primarily full of knitting or sewing projects, especially now that it’s been raining nonstop for days.

I’ve worn it almost every day since I made it, and I keep forgetting to take proper pictures of it, but here’s one I took for my new Wardrobe Airtable (more on that later):

A black jacket with light grey polka-dot lining is on a hanger.

I used a very drapey black twill for the outer and cotton for the liner, and split the collar in half — the under-collar is the lining, and I love when it peeks out a little bit. I also couldn’t decide between a Medium and a Large, so I split the difference and made myself a M/L, which I’m ridiculously happy with — the fit is exactly what I wanted. It’s the coziest thing I’ve ever made and I am just going to keep living in it until it gets too cold for that.

I already have plans to make about three more of these, but I think next up on my outerwear list is the Kelly Anorak.

I also started knitting my Zweig Sweater this week - it’s been on my list for a while, and I finally found the perfect color combination. A couple weeks ago I drove over to Tolt Yarn and Wool for their Farmers Daughter Fibers trunk show, and picked up this gorgeous skein of Foxy Lady with pink, white, and grey. On the drive home I decided I would use it as the contrast color for Zweig, and would find a nice grey somewhere for the main color. A couple weeks later, I was going through my stash to find an easy travel project came across these three skeins of Fidalgo Artisan Yarns back in February at Madrona, and would you believe the colors matched perfectly?!

Four balls of yarn - three brown, one white and pink variegated, in a diamond pattern.

I’m halfway through the lace part and love the way they’re knitting up together. It’s funny, when I knit fingering weight sweaters I always bounce back and forth between “wow, this is going so quickly!” and “I’ve been knitting this one row FOR EVER”. Is that how everyone else feels?

More Mason Jar and Yarn Pictures

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After our evening adventure dyeing with mason jars, we wanted to do a photoshoot while everything was together. We later split the yarn in half - I took three, and my friend took three.

Six mason jars are lined up on an adobe bench with a built-in window.

The B&B we stayed at had a lovely area that was just perfect for taking photos and we ended up taking a bunch. but these are my favorites.

A sideways view of six mason jars full of tea-dyed yarn on an adobe bench.

Some of them (you can tell from the pictures!) were too big for their mason jars, like I mentioned in my previous post. Sienna took the turmeric-dyed (second from the left) and I took the nettle-dyed (second from the right), which were the worst offenders. Once I got back home, I re-dyed my skein using the rest of my nettle tea. I knew using tea wouldn’t come out as green as fresh nettles, and I was right — but it came out a nice pale green/brown that I really like.

A close-up of a skein of yarn dyed with nettle tea that is a brownish green color.

Yarn, Tea, Mason Jars, and Hot Water

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I went to the Taos Wool Festival this weekend, and in between buying all the yarn and seeing the sights, my friend and I thought it would be fun to try some dyeing experiments while we were in the same location. I bought a variety of bare yarns from Knit Picks and mordanted them ahead of time, then one evening we gathered up some quart-sized mason jars, snuck into the B&B’s kitchen to boil some water, and filled everything up with yarn, tea, and hot water.

A line of six mason jars filled with yarn and tea in a dimly lit room in Taos, New Mexico.

We learned that quart size mason jars are not really big enough for 100g of yarn, especially if that 100g of yarn is a very fluffy single ply worsted.

A diagonal view of the same six mason jars filled with yarn and tea, in varying states of dye. One mason jar has some purple dye creeping up the side, and another has a toffee/brown color starting to expand.

We also discovered that the best part is watching the color seep into the yarn from the tea bags, and that Hibiscus tea is definitely our favorite for watching the color change.

A close-up of one mason jar full of yarn and hibiscus tea, with some of the yarn still white and some of it a light lavender purple.

Next up? Well, when these dry I’ll take more pictures, and next time I want to see if brewing the tea before adding the yarn changes the way it dyes up. Plus, I’ll probably pick a container with more space!

Slow Fashion October

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Over at Fringe Association, Karen Templer is heading up Slow Fashion October, a chance to examine our wardrobes, where we buy from, and how we take care of our clothes. It comes at a good time, because I’ve been thinking for a while that I want to re-examine what kinds of clothes I have, how they work for me, and what I want my wardrobe to actually look like.

Our week 1 exercise is figuring out our look, which I am still figuring out (unless jeans/leggings and plain shirts is a look). Part of why I don’t think I have a “look” is because I’m often uncomfortable in my body, and shopping makes me anxious - so I tend to buy the first thing that looks halfway decent and then deal with it, even though 85% of the time it’s not perfect for me. And then I wear it, and I keep wearing it, because it’s in my closet. What I should do is get rid of the pieces that don’t work for me, so they won’t even be available for my weak morning-brain.

I’ve been making things my entire life, but I haven’t always been making them with intentionality, making them to complement other pieces in my closet, making them to last years. In high school and college, I would pick a pattern, find some leftover fabric in my mother’s stash, and make something that I’d wear for a couple months and then forget about. In grad school, I didn’t sew much but I picked up knitting, which for the first five years or so included only things that didn’t need sizing (mostly scarves and shawls).

The other part of it is that I’m scared - what if the sweater I’m knitting doesn’t fit right? What if I misjudged the dress size I’m making? What happens when I mess up a dart and the whole thing is ruined? But that’s also part of the excitement, and I’m getting better at leaning into that - learning how to adjust on the fly, making test muslins and swatches (swatching! my least favorite thing!), and always, always, trying it on as I go.

The other part that’s scary (for me, at least) is then wearing the things I’ve made. Am I confident enough to pull it off? Will people think it’s strange that I make my own clothes? Will I have to talk about it all day at work? What happens if I ruin the piece, and all my hard work is wasted? Again, this is something I’m still figuring out how to lean into. I made this thing, dammit, and I should wear it!

On Thursday I leave for a trip that’s half-fun and half-work, and I’ve spent the last two weeks trying to figure out what I should take with me. How many outfits do I need? What will I be comfortable in? But maybe most importantly, what do I want my look to be?

I was going to start October off with a bang by attempting to make a Wiksten Kimono in one evening. But then I got derailed by a giant box of free pomegranates at work and misplacing my sewing scissors (don’t worry, I remembered where I put them at midnight while I was trying to sleep!). So I’m going to wait until I get back from my trip, and focus on taking the time to make a versatile piece and enjoy the process. And then, I’m going to figure out how to wear more of the pieces in my closet that I love.