Back to Making stuff... :D

And back to Real Life... sigh. I'm still napping occasionally, but mostly my body is back in the NW US. My taste buds are still in Japan, though, which means that I'm hungry a lot of the time, because I haven't been buying anything substantial for any meal but dinner (because I'm feeding Charlie & Brendan then, too). I want Japanese food :(  I made miso soup yesterday, which has helped a lot. And I cooked some somen noodles for dinner & served them cold (floating in a bowl of ice water with nasturtiums :) with cold broth & agedashi tofu (deep fried tofu in a cold broth for summer), plus a side of fresh veggies. It was sooooo yummy! Charlie doesn't like cold noodles very much, but he said I could make it once this week & he'd survive- such a mensch! :D

Along with getting my body back in this hemisphere, this past week, I was also catching up big time with my July Nerd Wars 2 challenges. I was only able to make & post one challenge from Japan:

My little Tanabata star tawashis for the mythology challenge. They're hanging in the kitchen now, but I doubt I'll ever use them to clean dishes because they are so cute! I did make some little tawashi things, from the same book as the stars, that fit over a toothbrush to clean my tea strainers, & they work really well.

While I was in Japan I did get to make a few things for my Nerd Wars 2 dissertation (hats for kids in the Touhouko region of Japan). The picture at the top is the Bear Hat (& mittens to match), made in honour of the character of the same name from the manga "Gakuen Alice". I also made this hat:

named for the character Shikamaru from Naruto, plus matching mittens. I made mittens to match the Card Captor Sakura Hat, too while we were away. Yay! My dissertation is over halfway done, with 9 out of the 14 hats made, & I'm making mittens to match them all, so I'm feeling good about how this project is proceeding. The deadline is August 31st, so it's all good :)

So, as I mentioned, in and around shopping, doing laundry, remembering how to drive a car, etc. I have been planning & making projects for the rest of the July Nerd Wars challenges. First up, for the "Alternate Yarnality" challenge (make something out of a non-traditional yarn) I decided to see if I could hand spin dryer lint to make yarn. It was a natural, since I was doing a lot of laundry...

I knew I would have to use a support spindle if I wanted to succeed because dryer lint has, basically, no staple length (the length of the fiber is called the staple length), so it wouldn't support the weight of a drop spindle & would need huge amounts of twist to stay together. I tried a couple different support spindles, as you can see in the photo, & also used lint from two different loads, just for fun.

 The spindle that worked the best was one I made from a size 000 (or something- don't remember how many aughts...) knitting needle & 2 rose quartz beads for a whorl. I worked for about half an hour, making a huge, dusty mess in my lap, & after repeatedly adjusting my technique, I got 3 yards of yarn.

Which I steamed in the microwave after gently washing (gentle was the order of the day with this stuff). After it was dry, I was able to crochet it (gently):

I made a flower with a leaf, which you really can't see, but it makes the flower look odd. Oh, well. I succeeded at spinning & crocheting dryer lint!!

The next project was the scientific method one, & this month you had to actually do an experiment & document the results, plus end up with a finished object of some sort. The question I decided to test was if there's a difference in yarn usage between lace & regular stockinette knitting. As I thought about testing this, I decided that I didn't just want to make swatches of the different knitted fabrics, so I decided to make the swatches part of one project. In Japan I bought a cute bottle sock (to absorb condensation from your water bottle) shaped like a bunny, which works very well, so I decided to knit a bottle sock incorporating test swatches into the design.

Here's the bunny & my knitted bottle socks. I also need to relate my NW2 projects to my team (comics & manga) so I named it after on of the lace patterns (cloverleaf lace) & a manga ("Honey & Clover"), & made a little clover motif at the end of the drawstring. I used Knit Picks Comfy fingering weight yarn & size 0 circular needles & knitted it in the round like a sock. As an experiment, it was interesting but my swatches (the 3 coloured bands in the bottle sock) weren't really a big enough sample to draw good conclusions. Although the moderately-lacy bottom band used more yarn than the stockinette one, the much more lacy top band used almost exactly the same amount of yarn, even though they were both knit to exactly 2" (unstretched). I got a cute bottle sock out of it & could use this design to make others for gifts, if I wanted to, so I am ultimately pleased with this experiment.

Next up, the Giving Geeks challenge, called Puppy Love, which asked us to make something to enrich the life of an animal. I had hoped to make catnip toys for my mom's cats, Angel & Patches, but the catnip (sometimes used for herb tea)  had disappeared- I have no idea where it went. Luckily, I saw a neat pattern made by other folks for this challenge, the Kitty Pi cat bed, so I decided to make one of them instead.

I used various colours of Brown Sheep bulky wool yarn & size 11 circular needles, with an edging of eyelash yarn, & then felted for the first time in my agitator-less washer- something that had me crossing my fingers big time. I wasn't sure it would work, but I put a big towel, a pair of old (clean) sneakers, & 2 tennis balls in the washer with the kitty pi & after 3 full cycles it finally felted. Whew!! I photographed it with plushies because I'm massively allergic to cats :(  My mom was really pleased with it & she's called me twice since I gave it to her, to tell me how much the cats like it :D Yay!

Pause for breath...

Next, I needed to make something for a bad guy in my team's fandom, to answer the Team Spirit challenge. I chose Sesshoumaru from Inuyasha because I've just loved his character for years. He starts out as one of the major antagonists in the series, & I find him fascinating as a character. So I knitted him an omamori- remember omamori? If you followed our adventures in Japan you saw photos of omamori we'd purchased at temples & shrines all over Japan. For Sesshoumaru, I decided to make one with kanji characters for things I wish for him on one side, & then the traditional characters for "omamori" on the other side.

Here's our model of the man himself, with my wish side. The kanji, from top to bottom, are "tomo" (together), "yashashi" (kindness), & "kokoro" (heart).

Here's the "omamori" side next to a real omamori. I tried to mimic the decorative effect of the brocade as well as the kanji characters on both sides. I made it with lace weight Knit Picks Gloss yarn in colours to match his sash, & size 00 circular needles, using the Fair Isle technique (& charting the kanji & decorative edgings on graph paper) to get the colours patterning. The gauge turned out to be ~13 stitches per inch. I slip-stitch crocheted the tie & found a tutorial for the decorative knot on YouTube.

I showed it to Momo when we skyped this week & she said you can read the kanji just fine- whew!!

For my final July NW2 project, I had to do 2 (actually 3) different things. For the Nerd Culture challenge I had to pick another team's fandom, make a project, & then relate it back to my own team. Plus, for this month's Team Unity project, we decided to make things to cover digits & toes. Whew! Choosing the other fandom to honour wasn't hard- I do the Star Wars thing here & at ravelry (with my ravhandle) so I decided to make R2-D2 mittens:

I charted the designs from our R2-D2 soy sauce dispenser (of all things...) & then made the mittens identical to each other- which means that when they're worn, you see different sides together. I also found (in a bin in the basement) my Star Wars Marvel comics, purchased in July of 1977 when I was 19 years old :D to use as my team tie-in. Can't believe I not only still have them, but that I could find them...

I plan to send the mittens to Japan with my dissertation hats. This afternoon I charted an R2-D2 hat to match, which will be the 10th hat for my dissertation! I guess it was good to have so many things to distract me from the jet-lag & re-orientation. And the August challenges are just around the corner. I can't wait!!

Coming Home- A Day in St. Paul, MN

Entry to the St. Paul Hotel

What to do on a cloudy, muggy, warm day in St. Paul? If you're lucky enough to be staying at the St. Paul Hotel, you walk about 2 blocks to the Science Museum of Minnesota.

We were very fortunate to catch an exhibit of treasures from King Tut's tomb. It was big & very impressive & took us nearly an hour & a half to go through! On the way out, I bought a new duck:

It's for my duck collection :) I couldn't resist, & we've been singing "King Duck" (to the tune of Steve Martin's "King Tut") ever since...

The other really cool thing (among many) they had was the Seismophone, part of which you see above. It's a musical instrument that's connected to the internet site that senses earthquakes around the world & records them. The seisomophone plays folk tunes from the country that is nearest each recorder earthquake. During lunch, which we ate just below the rig pictured above, I was sure I heard something in the pentatonic mode... & when we checked the computer, sure enough, the most recent quake was off the coast of Japan.

We napped for a couple of hours in the afternoon, then had dinner at a Japanese restaurant about half a block away :) It's become a sort of tradition to eat Japanese while we're transitioning back to food here. Then we came back to our room & watched the PBS station for a couple of hours- they had a good special about comedy & comedians, I was able to finish the mittens for my 9th Nerd Wars 2 dissertation hat (yay!), & we went to bed after 10:00 pm!

This morning I woke up starving again, but at 7:30 rather than 2:30 (thank goodness). We all had the same breakfasts as yesterday because it was so yummy, then packed everything up, & are just about ready now, to catch our cab to the airport for the last leg home. The emails from home have been warning us it's hot & muggy there, too, but I'm feeling a certain immunity, after our very warm time in Japan :) I'm looking forward to becoming reacquainted with my very own bed tonight! Onward...

Nerd Wars 2 Dissertation hats- halfway there

In and around preparing to fly to Japan (this Sunday!) I've been trying to get a bit ahead on my Nerd Wars 2 Dissertation hats. I explain a bit more about the Nerd Wars on Ravelry & my dissertation in this post. I've been having fun matching hats with illustrations from manga & vice-versa. For the dissertation I decided to make 14 hats over the summer, one for each week of Nerd Wars 2. The first two hats that I made are posted here & here. I've also decided to make a pair of mittens for each of the dissertation hats, since it only makes sense to send sets. Where I'm sending them is to Knit for Japan, a site set up by a lovely woman, Bernd Kestler, who is studying at the Nihon Vogue knitting school in Yokohama, Japan. After the March 11 earthquake & tsunami in the Touhouko region of Japan, Bernd started collecting hand-made items for the survivors & taking them there. She also teaches knitting in the shelters to help people there pass the time (&, I think, to feel a bit more control over their lives, which is how I feel when I make things). If you follow the Knit for Japan link above you'll find pictured my first donations, the Twin Spica baby hat & mittens, which I made for another Nerd Wars challenge. It was such a thrill to see the picture on her site & know they'd arrived safely! Bernd sent me a lovely message through Ravelry (which is how I found her site), saying that she'd be going back in July & find a baby to give them to.

So here are 5 more of the hats that will be going to Touhouko later this summer:

The Kobato hat, based on the manga character of the same name by CLAMP:

It's a mutation of the Lion Brand earflap hat pattern that I like so much. I looked through the wonderful book of crochet motifs from Japan & found a motif that ended-up with 72 stitches around the edge, which the number of stitches you get after all the top increases. Then I made the rest of the hat from the pattern & added the motifs on the flaps, to get the Kobato effect :) I used KnitPicks Swish DK & an I/9/5.50mm hook.

This is the Tsubasa Sempai hat, for a character in the manga Gakuen Alice.

Tsubasa Sempai is an older-brother figure to the main character in the series, & he wears lots of funky hats. He's wearing an earflap hat in the black & white manga illustration. This is also the Lion Brand hat pattern, using Swish DK from the Bare line that I dyed using procion dyes.

For this little hat I redesigned a newborn hat pattern that I created before Brendan was born & have been using ever since for gifts. The pattern is part of a set of hat, mittens & socks, all using fingering weight sock wool. I made the hat a bit larger, to fit a better range of baby-sized heads, & a little longer, too. I used Deborah Norville's Serenity Sock Weight yarn, with size 0 & 2 needles. I call it the Card Captor Sakura hat, for the character from the series of the same name (also by CLAMP), I made little motifs from onion skin-dyed yarn that match the hat Sakura's wearing in the illustration. The little mittens that I plan to make will have motifs as well.

Next is the Ouran Cosplay hat, which is the Antelope Hat by Kelly McClure, pattern found at ravelry. I found the pattern, which I really liked, then had to spend some time looking for a manga character/illustration to fit it to! I found this illustration from Ouran High School Host Club of the club members cosplaying in turbans with bangles hanging off them. The hat reflects the bangles in the yarn-overs. Whew! I made it from Woolease yarn & size 2&4 needles.

And hat #7 is the Nausicaa hat (& mitten set). Nausicaa, the heroine of this manga by Hayao Miyazaki himself, wears an aviator-style hat with chin strap, like this Avitrix Hat by Justine Turner. This was another case of finding a cute hat that I wanted to make & then having to match it to an illustration, but Nausicaa came to my rescue :) I made it from Bare Swish DK that I dyed with procion dyes.

And there you have it! Half-way to the 14 hats for my dissertation & for Touhouko. This project has been a wonderfully concrete thing I could do while waiting until I could kick into high gear, Japan-trip-wise. I also plan to turn this blog into a travel blog, & I'll be posting pictures & stories from Japan as we travel around & visit friends. Stay tuned!

More Nerd Wars 2 Projects

Hi again! I've been really busy creating & it's a good thing, because otherwise I'd be thinking too much about the fact that we are getting on a plane in 2 1/2 weeks & flying to Japan! Don't get me wrong, I am very, very excited to be going back & seeing friends & eating wonderful food & just being there. But I also get very, very nervous when anticipating travel (particularly traveling halfway across the world!), so it's been a wonderful thing to be working on my Nerd Wars 2 challenges & not thinking too much about the traveling just yet.

For the "An Adage a Day" challenge (make something that illustrates a saying or adage) I chose the Japanese saying "ひゃくぶんはいっけんにしかず" which is very similar to the English "a picture is worth a thousand words". And to illustrate this adage, I made this pair of thumbless baby mittens using the 2-colour knitting technique (aka Fair Isle Knitting) which I learned from the photos in the book "Fox & Geese & Fences" by Robin Hanson. The yarn is KnitPicks superwash merino DK which I dyed using procion fibre-reactive dyes, plus a bit of pink Swish DK for the bunnies. The pattern is my own design.

For the team spirit aspect, the bunnies represent the character Haninozuka Mitsukuni (Honey Sempai) from Ouran KoKo Hosutobu (Ouran High School Host Club) by Hatori Bisco. As you can see in the picture, this character carries a pink bunny around (even though he is a senior in high school!). I found the bunnies charted for embroidery in a Debbie Bliss book, but worked them as Fair Isle instead.

Then there's this little bag, crocheted with KnitPicks Simply Cotton Sport & a size D/3/3.25mm hook. This was for the Team Spirit challenge "There is No I in Team". The challenge is to make something that expresses your feelings for your particular team/fandom. This one took some thinking... & I learned a lot during the research part of it. I settled on making something for a character in one of my favourite manga (& anime) series, Bleach by Kubo Tite. One of my favourite Bleach characters is the 13 Bantai (squadron) Taichou (captain) Ukitake Jyuushirou.

You can see him, with the white hair, in the pictures behind the bag. Along with being a beautiful & elegant man, he is also very wise & kind. He's an amazing warrior, too (he's a shinigami, a defender of the realm of the souls of the dead) in spite of having had a chronic illness (believed to be tuberculosis) most of his long (1000+ years) life. He's often shown drinking tea (when not in battle) & this led me to think about tea/tea ceremony/tea ceremony accoutrements. As I researched tea ceremony I learned about shifuku, which are fancy bags that hold tea utensils & canisters of tea. I combined the idea of shifuku with a design in Kumiko Sudo's book "Omiyage" for a sewn kusadama (traditional flower ball decoration, often made from origami) bag that is suitable for tea utensils.

I chose the "Granny Pentagon" motif from Heather Lodinsky's "150 Knit & Crochet Motifs" because, when made in the colour combo I chose, it looks like little, 5-petaled sakura blossoms. The white reflects Ukitake's white hair & Taichou Haori (kimono jacket), which is white & lined in the reddish-brown colour at the top of the bag. I really like the way it turned out! I think I'm going to make another one in a slighly different colour scheme for a friend in Japan whose birthday we'll be celebrating while we're there...

I also finished hat number 2 for my dissertation project, shown above modeled by Yoda :)

I'm calling it the "Naruto & his Mom Hat". In chapter 498 of the Naruto manga, we finally meet Naruto's mom (who died not long after he was born). The chapter is entitled "My Mom's Red Hair".  Naruto's hair is yellow, like his dad. This hat combines the yellow & red of their hair & celebrates their reunion- even if it was in Naruto's mind/soul. It was very satisfying to finally learn the back-story of Naruto's parents, who made the ultimate sacrifice so that their son (& everyone in the whole village) could live. I dyed this yarn also, using the KnitPicks superwash merino DK & procion dyes. I crocheted it using an I/9/5.50mm hook & Lion Brand's crochet earflap hat pattern (one of my favourites).

So, thank you Nerd Wars 2! You are providing me with great distraction when I really need it, the opportunity to learn things I might not have otherwise have learned, & a great sense of accomplishment, as 4 out of the 6 June challenges are done!! 

Naturally-Dyed Gallery

Hot on the heels of my recent natural-dyeing adventure posts, I thought I'd put up a gallery of things I've made from yarns that I've naturally dyed over the past few years. It was kind of like a treasure hunt, looking around the house, in the winter woolies basket, & on the bodies of my son & husband for things to photograph.

The photo at the top is of some Latvian-style mittens (patterns from Lizbeth Upitis' Latvian Mittens book) that I made about 7 years ago. Most of them were given as gifts or to charity knitting projects. They are a mix of indigo, cochenille, & yarrow-dyed yarns, & naturally brown & white yarns. (On a side note, I'm really glad that I have been photographing things on-and-off over the years, because I absolutely don't remember making these. I remember getting the book & getting all fired-up about making stuff, but have no real memory of making this many pairs of mittens...)

Another of the older photos that I found is this one, taken on a beach in California during a 2004 family trip to San Francisco. It's my version of the Mobi-Q Shawl, designed by Margo Carr, from Handwoven's Design Collection 19. I wove it on my Mighty Wolf loom from all handspun & naturally-dyed yarns & it's one of the crowning glories of my fibre-life. I had always wanted to weave something useful like this from my handspun, & the natural dyeing was just icing on the cake. I used all of my usual plant-based dyes and most of the wool is Corriedale spun on my Lendrum double-treadle wheel over a few years.  I took the shawl apart after a few years because it wasn't as functional as I'd hoped & is sitting in lavender-soaked cotton balls, waiting for an idea to strike for it's next incarnation.

This is the last of the real oldies, & the only photo I have of the Gansey sweater I designed & made for Brendan when he was 8 years old, specifically for this sailing vacation around Cape Cod. I indigo-dyed Lion Brand Fisherman Wool yarn & put Gansey patterns Brendan chose from a book on the front. When he outgrew it 3-4 years later, my mom wanted it (it fit her :) so she has it now.

Here's the vest I made for Charlie for our 20th anniversary in 2008. Many of the yarns are from the experimental dye pots from the summer of 2007, including birch bark, rhubarb leaves, & alkanet. He has a list at work of which stripe is which plant material because some folks like to know :) Also, I decided that just striping it would be boring, hence the patterned edges on each stripe.

The year before I made the anniversary vest, decided I wanted to make him a red vest (I usually make Charlie a vest for our anniversary because it's in early December, right when he needs warm clothes :). So I dyed Knitpicks merino worsted yarn with brazilwood (all skeins in the same dye bath) to get the heathered red of this vest. (A side note on the vest pattern: it's adapted from a WW2 Red Cross pattern that I found in Charlie's grandmother's things. I made it longer (he's a tall guy) & adapted it to knit in the round. I love it because the armhole & neck edgings are knit at the same time in garter stitch, so there's no pickup afterward. It's about the only vest pattern I use these days.)

Here are Charlie's snow-shoveling gloves, made from Elizabeth Zimmermann's "Winter Spruce" pattern, from Knitting Around.

And here are this year's winter gloves, made from shibori-dyed Knitpick's Gloss fingering weight yarn, dyed with yarrow & indigo, to get shades of yellow, blue, & green. The pattern is from Ann Budd's the knitter's handy book of patterns. I've placed them in the photo so you can't see the mends :( These gloves are destined to be felted & recycled as something else, as about 4 fingers have either mends or holes in them...

And, last of the photos of Charlie's stuff, a pair of shibori-dyed socks from Knitpicks' fingering-weight sock wool. The plants I used were birch bark & Rose of Sharon. Pattern- my own.

These are the front & back of my Adult Babies & Bears' Sweater from Cottage Creations. I used lots of odds & ends of the usual dyes & combos, & made sure that no 2 colours were next to each other for the whole sweater :)

This mitten & leg-warmer set were made from some yarn I dyed back in 2002. A friend had brought me some skeins of single-ply dk-weight yarn from New Zealand & I dyed them in golden marguerite, onion skins, brazilwood, indigo, & marguerite in indigo for green. These are the mittens I've used this winter, warm but light.

Here's another pic of my big flowers shawl, made with the popular motif from Nihon Vogue's motif book & Lion Brand Fisherman Wool, in lots of natural colours, after the 2007 dyeing. Among the plant dyes used were alkanet, indigo, yarrow, onionskins, brazilwood, rhubarb leaves, birch bark, & safflower.

I posted this bag back in September. I made it from Knitpick's bulky weight yarns from dye pots I ran the summer of 2008. I noted that the yarrow dyepot lasted 3 full dyebaths before exhausting, giving very nice golds-to-yellows. The pale red is brazilwood exhaust, with the rusty-red being from the first dye bath. The purple & green were brazilwood & yarrow over-dyed in indigo.

For some other finished examples from naturally-dyed yarns, please see my Shibori 1 & Shibori 2 posts. Let me know if you're inspired to try natural dyeing!