Schoeller-Stahl Big

I know I have a strict no-endorsement policy on wiseNeedle.  But this is my blog and I'm totally unpaid in all accounts. 

I'm not a big on-line yarn orderer.  I've got to fondle the stuff myself.  However many people have written to me to ask where they can get Big - the yarn that my Firefighters Socks pattern was written for. 

Big was originally a Stahl yarn, it's now listed as Schoeller-Stahl, but it looks like the same stuff.  Big has been hard to find.  So hard in fact that I thought it was totally discontinued.  It just so happens that today it popped up on Elann.com.  [More yadda, yadda - no affiliation, etc.]  If you've been looking for it and your LYS wasn't able to supply the need, you might consider looking there.

Firefighters Socks

Several people wrote to ask where they could buy my Firefighters Socks pattern.  You can't buy it.  No one can.  It's not for sale because I give it away free at my wiseNeedle website.  The links here (and in yesterday's post) will take you directly to it.  It's written for worsted/heavy worsted yarn, and if you've never done toe-up socks with a Figure-8 toe or short-rowed heel, being at such a large gauge is a good pattern for a first attempt.

Romilly-les-Chaussettes

Thank you to everyone who wrote to say that the postcards I posted yesterday were printed around WWI.  I thought that was rather obvious, so I didn't bother to note it.  Most of the others on the site I mentioned were of the same vintage, with a smattering of earlier and later cards. 

And a BIG thank-you to Spinnity, who was intriged enough by the sock card to comb through history sites (in French) to find out more about Romilly and its curious link to socks.  She left a nifty comment.  I'll summarize her theories:

Romilly was a center of sock manufacture, with at least two large factories nearby producing socks and stockings.  This line of regional specialty continues to at least March of this year, when Jacquemard, a major sock factory, closed.   The town apparently has had the name "Romilly-les-Chaussettes"  (Sock Romilly) for a very long time.  Here's her link detailing the passing of Jacquemard mills (for some reason it didn't come through on her comment post):  in French; in machine-mangled English.

Here's another Romilly-les-Chaussettes postcard:

Again we see the stripes passing north and south of the heel.  But the heel isn't a short-rowed one of the type often seen on machine-made socks.  It has a wide heel flap that wraps around the entire back of the foot, then a cupped bottom area.  It looks like after the heel unit is finished, stitches are picked up along the heel's foot-side edge, and the foot is continued tube-like from that point, incorporating live stitches from the top of the foot.

Apparently the tradition continues.  I found mention of at least two more sock factories still in operation in the area around Romilly sur Seine (Olympia, Aube Chaussettes); plus in true French fashion - a regulatory board or committee overseeing standards of manufacture and appelation.

Not in France Anymore

Having had a brief whirl through France, I turn to something that causes shudders of horror in every visitor I've ever had from that land:  American packaged bread.  Well, not the bread itself, but the little plastic tags used to close the bags.  Continuing the series on indispensible but free knitting gadgets, I put forth the humble bread tag:

What use are they?  Well, you can write on them then clip them onto things.

Have you ever been working on a garter stitch piece and forgotten which is the front?  While you could remember that the front is the side that has the cast-on tail at the right or left (depending on your method of casting on), I for one can never get that straight.  A bread tag with an "F" on it, placed on the front of the work can be a lifesaver.

Need to track the point where something tricky has happened?  Bread tags can mark armhole decreases, sleeve increases, buttonhole locations, and the like.  They attach firmly to your work, and rarely fall off.  Safety pins work well, too but the coils of standard safety pins can get tangled in the knitting yarn, and not all of us have the fancy coil-less safety pins sold in knitting and quilting shops to hand. 

I've used them for marking yarns in my stash.  If I've swatched, I'll scrawl the acheived gauge and needle size on a tag and affix it to the ball.  I've used them to identify or otherwise mark swatches submitted to pattern publishers as part of my design proposals. 

Bread tags are free and completely disposable.  You can break them to remove them from your knitting, and not feel you're tossing away a good tool.  (In my house at least they are a constantly-renewing resource and rank up there with wire hangers and AOL CDs.)  They also come in lots of colors - good for any color coding scheme you wish to devise.

In a non-knitting mode, I've also found them very useful for marking the cables that plug into my routers.  I know know exactly whom I am disconnecting when one gets unplugged, even if the shout of dismay wasn't audible. 

Finally, I know people who use them to mate socks before laundering.  A bread tag through the toe keeps the pair together, and avoids that dreaded One Sock Syndrome.

So if you're looking for a way to make in-work/on-work notations, don't pass up this humble resource.  After all, it's not like you have to rush out to buy some.

Each week Dover books sends out several sample pages of (mostly) kids' books as come-hither advertising.  This week's freebies include four pages of illlustrations from Sheila McGregor's Traditional Scandanavian Knitting.  They offer up two pages of colorwork photos, and two pages of small graphed patterns for Setesdal jerseys.  You can leaf through all four image sets here. 

These samples only stay up for about a week, so if you're tuning in later than the beginning of September, you're out of luck.

In answer to yesterday's questions - yes, the two sleeves of the Sad Little Object are very different.  Plus one is fully seamed front and back, and the other is only fastened to the front.  Even so, the measurement across the upper arm on the sleeve on the right (the skinny one) is two inches narrower than the measurement across the same spot of the one on the left.  Truly a disturbing little piece...  I will however save it as a cautionary lesson.  Perhaps just seeing the mismatched upper sleeve colors will scare someone into springing for that extra "insurance skein" the next time they make a closely esitmated yarn purchase.

Needlework postcards

I was out web-walking late last night and ran across some amusing offerings.  Please excuse me if I've linked to these in some sort of etiquette-violating manner.  I've got two impulses here - the first is not to unduly burden someone else's server; the second is to respect their ownership of these materials by not duplicating their files on this site.  That being said, here are some nifty bits.  They're part of a collection of vintage postcards being offered for sale by Postcardman, a collector.  [No affiliation, yadda, yadda].  The site is being hammered right now because it was mentioned on Boing Boing (where I found it), so both patience and coming back later might both be in order if the images are slow in retrieving.  UPDATE:  I've gotten so many notes already asking for me to post these directly that I've done it. 

First, here's one that makes me want to sharpen my historical investigative skills:

Why was this Romilly, France associated with these socks?  Anyone know?  It's also interesting that the stripey ones look a lot like Regia Mini Ringel if one did toes and heels in a contrasting color.  Plus there may even be more than one working method shown.  The yellow heeled pair and the gray pair with the apricot/brown toes/heels look like they're worked similarly.  But the blue/yellow stripey pair in the center looks a bit different.  Examine the way the stripes terminate even with the heel on the yellow toed pair.  They don't do that on the center one.  That one looks a lot like the short-row heel socks I make from Ringel, with the stripes "splitting" around the whole heel unit. 

Then there's this one.  If you're more musical than I, please enlighten us all on the nature of this little knitting song.  (The image is too big to post conveniently, so you'll have to click on the link.)   As far as translating the lyrics, I get something like:

Song of the Needles

Knit, needles of France
Start ?
Knit with martial cadence
For the heros, the sons of France
Who fight and die down below

Countrywoman or grand city lady
In salons and in ??
Knit the same wool
Without knowing whom you will clothe.

It goes on from there to speak of fears for the loved ones, that all should undertake this work in the hour of fraternal/patriotic spirit, and ends up with

Inch by inch, stitch by stitch
We repel the German forces.
Everyone is on the battlefield,
Needles of France, go forth!

Of course my French is mighty rusty, so if anyone else makes more sense out of the thing, please let us know.

Other curious needlework and knitting related cards include Socks of the French Soldier:

The big caption works out to something like "My tools and army-provided kit."  Again, if you can get this photo to load, look at the way the socks are made, with a ribbed top and top of the instep; a heel of a different texture, and what I suppose is a stockinette foot part, ending in a pointed rather than grafted toe.  It even looks like the stockinette foot part is of a lighter weight yarn.  The strings at the end of the toe aren't there because the knitter forgot to end them off.  They were deliberate additions, intended to make keeping a pair together and hanging them out to dry easier.

There are also quite a postcards having to do with embroidery, spinning, weaving,  sheep,  and more.  The knitting ones came off a miscellanous textiles grouping.

Again, apologies if these pix don't load.  The links are VERY slow.  You may wish to save them to look at later when traffic has subsided somewhat.

Sorry guys.  No substantive post today.  I'm busy lugging my stash back from the storage cubby to install it in the new house.  Nothing will get in the way of this reunion.  Not blogs, not lunch, not children (well, if they whine enough, I'll stop to feed them).  

Stash count:  six Rubbermaid-style storage containers of assorted left-overs and conserved yarns, plus one plastic traveling file bucket full of socks-to-be. 

Aside:  Through mailing mix-ups, I find myself posessed of one extra copy of this past summer's Piecework Magazine.  If you live somewhere that Piecework isn't common (say, in another country); and wish to trade a local knitting or needlework magazine for it, please let me know.  The local mag needn't be in English.  LATE BREAKING NEWS:  The mag has been claimed and will be winging its way to Belgium by the end of the week.

Remember I wrote about a trove of patterns from the '50s and '60s, given to me by someone here in town who knew I was interested in knitting?  Well that priceless box was accompanied by the remnants of yarn stashes she had picked up at local yard sales.  It was a huge bag, mostly '70s vintage acrylics, and is now destined for charitable donation.  Schools in particular are always happy to receive acrylics for weaving and crafts projects.  Other causes I've donated to include groups knitting for Project Linus; local elder care day centers and residential homes; and groups associated with hospitals and animal rescue leagues.

Buried in the bottom of the yarn bag were a couple of sad little UFOs (unfinished objects).  This one in particular is worthy of inclusion in someone's Chest of Knitting Horrors^TM for many reasons:

First, lest you think I'm picking on some poor unfortunate unknown knitter, I really do feel sympathy for her (or him).  I do think though that the best purpose this toddler-size piece can serve is as an object lesson because it embodies SO many problems.

Yarn Choice.  You can't touch this item, but if you could you'd be surprised at how coarse and scratchy this yarn is for an acrylic.  It's a standard Aran weight of the type that gauge creep in the lower priced yarn bracket is now calling "worsted."  However, the hand is harsh and stiff, especially for a little kid's sweater.

Yarn amount.  Yup.  You spotted it.  The knitter ran out of the original yarn and tried to use another yarn to finish the top of the raglan sleeves and to seam the piece together.  This second yarn is VERY different in color and gauge from the first. 

Gauge.  The yarn should probably be knit at around 4.5 to 5 stitches per inch, especially for a design with embossed patterning like these bobbles.  It's knit at a very uneven 3.75 to 4 stitches per inch.  On the inside of the (mostly) reverse stockinette body you can see the giant gaps left by unevenly worked knit and purl rows.  The purl rows are MUCH looser and gap.

Texture pattern.  Although all the bobbles look to be there, they are not all formed in the same way.  The knitter apparently forgot to do the extra bulk-building rows on about a third of them.  In others she or he forgot to do the closure stitch that gathers the thing together neatly, opting instead to drop the stitches or put them on a holder, then go back later and do the gathering with a needle and thread.

Garment pattern.  I don't have the original pattern for this piece in the box of goodies, so it's tough to say how off it really is.  The length and width are about right for a 4-T/size 5 kid's sweater, although the sleeves are a bit short for that size.  The front and back however are of different lengths, even without taking the neckline cut into consideration.  I haven't counted row by row, but it does look like the knitter forgot a couple of rows after the ribbing on the front.  There's something screwy going on in the raglan decreases, too as the sleeve raglan areas are three inches longer than the front or back. 

Knots.  Everywhere two strands of yarn meet, they're tied together in a loose knot, and clipped about a half-inch away from the knot.  Even if you wanted to untie the knots and end off the danglers properly, you couldn't as there isn't enough left to darn in.

Seaming.  The seams are sewn haphazardly, with no attempt to match sides, stitches, or pattern.  In some spots, they're just overcast (in the contrasting color yarn).  In others they are back-stitched.  In a couple of places, an attempt was made at Mattress Stitch, but it was done inside-out so that the seam allowance ended up on the outside of the work.  The extra length of the raglan areas on the sleeves were squished down to fit on the shorter raglan areas of the front and back.

Spill.  Again, you can see the color variation on the unseamed sleeve.  I don't know what spilled on the piece (possibly bleach), but there are discolorations up and down that sleeve.  It also smells terribly of mildew.

Now I have no idea whether this piece was produced by the lady whose box of vintage patterns I received.  I rather suspect not, as the piece doesn't belie skills commensurate with her level of interest.  It might be a kid's project, rescued by Grandma and lovingly stored away in spite of its flaws.  It might have been a beginner's first sweater, abandoned but never tossed that eventually ended up in a yard sale.  Whatever the provenance, you have to agree it's a bittersweet little piece.   I have no idea what I should do with it.  The yarn can't be saved (even if I wanted it); the piece is unfinishable.  Perhaps I'll stow it away to illustrate Things That Go Wrong when I teach.  I have to admit, I am tempted to toss it.

Moral of the story:  Buy enough yarn; work hard to get gauge; follow the instructions; seek out help for the hard spots, like seaming if you're not sure how to go about them; and don't be afraid to rip back and start again.

It seems like I can't please everyone.  Either people write and ask to ask why I'm ignoring knitting, or people write to ask if I'm still working on the crocheted dragon panel.  I am - and here are my results to date:

I'm chugging along through the right hand border, still not quite sure how I'm going to manage attaching the top and bottom strip.  I have however gotten several notes of encouragement, not the least of which was from my old friend (and crochet expert) Kathryn Goodwyn.  I'll keep plugging along and report what tangled thought processes I encounter along the way.

Ugly Ducks and Eye Candy Avalanche

Other questions have come in about my needlework and my duck confit.  A couple of people have asked when I get all of this done.  I point out that I've got the advantage of being able to dig up stuff I've done over many years.  You see it all tossed up here now, but much of what I've shown isn't recent production.  The red yoke is from the mid-70s.  The strip sampler is about 10 years younger than that.  The blackwork sampler is from 1983.  The putter cover is from the late '80s.  The lobster sweater is three years old now.  Eventually I'll run out of this type of stuff and things to write about it all, but for now I'm still armed and dangerous.

On the duck, we've done it several times now.  Usually some time in the spring or summer we'll stumble across a special on fresh ducks.  We'll bring two home and plan our Ugly Duck Dinner.  Why Ugly?  Because we take the brace of ducks and remove the thighs and legs, leaving ugly, partially hacked carcasses.  We heavily salt and pepper the lower extremities and put them in the fridge for a day or two.  Meanwhile, we cook the rest of the duck.  Depending on the season and what we feel like doing, we either leave the hacked carcasses whole, steam them then roast them to finish; or we split them, steam them, then barbeque them.  The steaming serves two purposes - first, it's a great way to melt off tons of fat.  If you didn't steam them first, barbequeing would end up as a general invitation for the fire department because all that fat would lead to severe flare-ups and burned meat.  Second, it makes the ducks - usually not as tender as chicken - meltingly soft.  

Once the fat is steamed off the ducks, we save it for the confit.  To do this right, we usually end up using all the fat from the two ducks, plus a bit rendered from previous ducks or geese that we've stored in clean jars at the back of the fridge.  We take the legs and thighs and pat off some of the salt.  Then we put a little bit of fat in a cast-iron Dutch oven, and lightly brown them in a single layer, skin side down.  After that we completely cover them with the reserved fat, turn down the heat and let them simmer in the barely bubbling fat for about an hour and a half, until they are soft.  While they're still warm, we put the legs and thighs into scalded jars (dried off, off course), then pour in the fat to cover. 

The resulting jars of duck and fat then sit in the back of the fridge (or freezer) until mid-winter.  Some time in the cold months we get a yen for cassoulet, which is nothing more than a fancy version of beans and hot dogs.  In our case it's small white beans, tasty smoked sausage, and some of our preserved duck.  Add friends, a crusty crumb topping, some crunchy bread, and several bottles of wine and I guarantee you'll find the effort well worth the trouble.    This year we'll be toasting to Julia, without whom we would never have attempted such nonsense, nor have learned how much fun it can all be.

I was poking around my hard disk in the wee hours, and happened upon this illustration.  Since summer is in rapid retreat, it looked like a good idea to get it out there before we all return to our wooly cocoons for the winter. 

Yes, I used to wear bandannas this way.  Now I'm old and not ready for fall.  [sigh]

I was showing something about twisted stitches to a knitting pal the other day, and I thought that other knitters might like to see it too.  I know that  I've discussed them here before as part of the post about knitting backwards, but I'll recap.

Twisted stitches are made when you knit or purl into the back as opposed to the leading leg of an existing stitch.  Sometimes people make them inadvertently when they work a stitch as usual, but that stitch was mounted with the leading leg behind the needle:

The person I was working with does exactly what my mother does - forming stitches so that she routinely ending up with leading legs behind after working a knit row, then untwisting the stitch on the purl row.  If mom is working stockinette in the flat, the final product looks like everyone else's knitting, but if she's working stockinette in the round, they end up with all twisted stitches because there are no purl rows on which to de-twist.  My knitting pal was having the same problem.  We worked on being able to tell the difference between legs in front and legs behind so that she could choose to either compensate or alter her technique.   While learning to recognize and compensate is certainly a good solution, it is a limiting one.  To this day my mom prefers knitting in the flat and working intarsia to knitting in the round or doing texture patterns.  She especially dislikes texture patterns that do not include rows of plain purling in between the rows in which other manipulations occur.  With no plain purl rows to un-discombobulate her stitches, she runs into that same twisting problem.

But twisted stitches aren't entirely bad.  Sometimes there's good reason to make them. They're great decorative accents, and have structural uses as well.  I happen to like using twisted stitches in my work.  In terms of structure, I find them particularly useful for working ribbing on cottons, silks and linens because they are a bit firmer than regular knit stitches, and help the ribbings in those fibers keep their shape between washings.  That firmness and crispness of line is also a great tool to use in surface decoration.  Here's an example from a pattern available on wiseNeedle.

The pattern is for a lacy blouse with a wide vee neck and clingy fit.  The combo of the diagonal lines of openwork and the vertical ribs makes it especially flattering to the zaftig among us.  Here the firmness of the twisted stitches is put to use making the cotton yarn hold its ribbed, body-hugging shape.  Also the verticals formed by the twisted ribbing really stand out.  I chose to do them synchopated, so that the K2, P2 ribs don't line up after they've been intersected by the eyelet diagonal.  That movement of line makes the piece more lively, with a more interesting total surface effect.  (Or so I think.)

Here's another nifty use for twisted stitches.  In this case, I can take credit only for execution.  The pattern is from Reynolds, and was put out around four years ago in a summer book for their Saucy Sport yarn.  Look at the nifty way the twisted stitches are used to make the lobster's outlines, feet, feelers, and to differentiate the textures of the filled-in areas in head, body, tail, and claws.  All in all, a very clever design:

Apologies both for the quality of the photo, and for the wear-and-tear on the lobster.  This is one of my favorite summer sweaters, and he's no longer fresh from the trap. 

What yarn are these two samples knit in?  It so happens that I used the same yarn for both.  It's Silk City Spaghetti, a cotton sport-weight woven tape, now long discontinued.  I love this stuff, and even though it does shrink in the wash (my lobster sleeves are now about an inch too short), I'd buy it in a flash were I to find it still available.  I do have enough left over from my cones of the khaki and paprika that I might be able to do a shell out of each.  Or if I could countenance the resulting color combo, combine them in some sort of a two-tone piece.  The jury is still out on the color combo thing.

Reaching back into time (and into the bottom of a box that surfaced during unpacking yesterday) I come up with my first-ever attempt at both knitting in the round on DPNs, and at stranded colorwork in the round:

I did it a couple of years after I started knitting, about the same time I began becoming rabid about knitting in general.  I used a bunch of Shetland scraps raided from my mother's stash.  Like most samplers I do, I didn't bother planning or charting anything out before hand, I just did it on the fly, experimenting with technique, color, size of floats, number of DPNs (I tried out everything from 3-6 on this piece), and pattern. 

Now.  Have you guessed what this thing is?  It's not a mitten or glove.  It's not a sock.  It's not a piece of gentleman's intimate apparel, either (were it so, the size alone would make it pretty spectacular, athough the itch-factor might be somewhat limiting). 

It's a putter cover I made for The Resident Male.  He took up serious golfing around the same time as I picked up serious knitting.  No connection between the two pursuits other than this item. 

There's a social history lesson connected with this cover, too.  I knit on this mostly at lunch hour at work, and on a couple of business trips because I wanted it to be a surprise gift.  My boss at the time saw me knitting away on the thing in the airport, and upon our return to D.C., called me into his office. 

He gave me a long lecture on why I should **never** let anyone who knew me in a professional capacity **ever** see me doing needlework.  He went on to say that I should **never** wear or display my own products at work, because no one would take me seriously in the world of work if they connected me with domestic pursuits. 

To be fair, even though it was the mid '80s, I was working in a big-time construction/project management firm - in an extremely conservative industry largely devoid of women.  But this particular workplace was backwards-thinking in the extreme.  To illustrate the mindset there - I once got an employee recognition award given to me in public, with the introduction "And here's the little lady who put the lie into the statement that you can't have boobs and brains both."  [shudder]

Back to knitting,  I can report that I

1. blissfully ignored his advice and kept knitting,
2. moved on to another employer after it was explained to me that my promotion track as a fem was nil; and
3. to this day, proudly wear and display my products everywhere I work.

For those of you born after the Carter administration, the attitude displayed by my former boss was common.  Another oft-heard diatribe was that women shouldn't do needlework, because all forms of needlework were artifices that  restricted women's sphere of interest and creativity.  This attitude was more hurtful, as it largely came from other women.  (If you think I'm kidding about this, look into the book The Subversive Stitch by Rozsika Parker. )  For a long time this attitude was in part responsible for the decline in interest in knitting and stitching among younger women.

I am delighted today that things are on the upswing.  I can be an aging grrlnerd, and have interests and accomplishments as diverse as fine embroidery, lace knitting, computer gaming, and SCA heavy list fighting, and no one will think the less of me for doing or having done any of them in particular.  Now if only I could do something about that "aging" part, as it is having a real drag effect on employability...