Anatomy of a Sweater

Remember these piles that showed up a couple of weeks ago? Well...


Can I talk some more about felted sweaters? It is almost Valentine's Day, and I do love them so... :-) From this wonderful stuff you can make blankets, legwarmers, armwarmers, scarves, mittens, oven mitts (particularly good as wool is not very flammable), the lining for tea cozies, clothes for children, stuffed animals, pillows, and the list goes on!

As a textile, it comes with it's own peculiarities when you're using it, since of course it has had a previous life. Since I'm into recycling and closing the loop, I was trying to find ideas on how to use an entire sweater with nothing leftover! So, already accounting for using the arms and body as fabric, here goes....

Take one felted sweater. Let's pretend is has a hood, pockets, a front zipper, and buttons, just to make life complicated.

buttons: (easy...I mean, c'mon, they're buttons...)

the label: mine get cut up for the snippets bin, but if I were more ambitious and oh - way more talented, I could try something like the incredible quilt by by Terese Agnew called "Portrait of a Textile Worker".

zippers: very cool jewelry by Kate Cusak

pockets: cut out to make a pocket purse, keep for cool surprise pockets in blankets, add to other clothing (I'm thinking of adding them to a spring coat for Safiya), use for legwarmers...


hood: why mess with it? :-)


And then we come to the seams. The peculiarity with felted sweaters is the seams. Usually I cut out the seams, as they are too bulky to use for most projects. And so, for over at least a year, I've been accumulating this mountain of seams, waiting....and waiting.....Until one day the light went on, I sewed the ends of all of them together and ta-da!


It makes an awesome kind of yarn. I've started crocheting a rug:


However, I think I need a bigger hook! I worked in the round so that the differences in thickness wouldn't matter so much. This stuff works up fast, and is soooo thick and cozy - it's going to feel fantastic under the toes. Even better, it will be a wool rug that's also washable, since it's already shrunk! What's cool is that while I was working on this, Betz White had another great idea of what to do with the seams...

The only thing leftover that I can't figure out what to do with are the used sewing machine needles from all the sewing! I think they look pretty in a small glass jar by the sewing machine, but I'll bet someone has thought of what to do with them.....the craft universe, after all, is a very creative place!

got any ideas?

Mon Petit Chou....

There are basic ways to make food: soup, fry, bake, salad, wrap-it-up....and cabbage is good at all of it. It keeps forever, it can be sweet and hearty or fresh and crisp. So when there's a dearth of fresh greens in the middle of February, we turn to a little slaw to brighten a meal up!

Seedy Slaw (adapted from one of those Company's Coming books...)

4 tsp sugar
6 tsp water
6 tsp oil
6 tsp vinegar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
pinch ground mustard
celery seed to taste (we use about 3/4 tsp)

Mix up, pour over grated cabbage - done! This is particularly good with some walnut oil and plain vinegar or canola oil and rice vinegar.

In passing I mentioned something to Mr. S. about making our own sauerkraut - ha! The look on his face was not encouraging....apparently Nana used to make that at her house when he was a child and the smell.....

A girl can dream though, right? :-)

Ten Minute Mittens!

Welcome! If you have wandered over here via whip up, I'm glad you dropped by! The good folks over there have been so kind as to post a tutorial I wrote for some super-quickie mittens dreamed up in a hurry one day last fall.

And as you can see, we still need mittens over here in Toronto!


Brrrrrrr......

Marnie's Marvellous 10-Minute Mittens

(Note: This was posted on Whip-up and so I'm just releasing the original version now, as per their submission guidelines.)

It's still pretty cold out here. I had this idea in the fall, and it has served us well over the winter so far. Being fundamentally a lazy person whose knitting is marginal but loves felt and likes to keep her hands toasty, this is the best and fastest way for me to whip up a pair of mittens.

• Find a felted sweater (or create one). The ones that are the best for mittens probably started their lives as big mens' sweaters. What you're looking for is a wrist cuff that fits comfortably and snug around your wrist after it has been felted. Put your hand in the wrong way in to see that it fits and that there's enough wiggle room for your fingers. I'm using a felted alpaca sweater (sooooo soft!). Also very important: find a helper to complete important tasks such as measuring the fabric and other random objects in the house.

• Place your hand on the sweater and trace around just the top with some tailor's chalk. This way the sides of the mittens will already be done because you are using the existing seam and side.
  

• Cut out, about 1/2" from your trace line.

• Using a straight stitch and loose tension (and a walking foot if you've got one), make a seam, following just on the outside of your trace line.

• Turn the mitten inside out and test for comfort. You can see that I made an adjustment for around my thumb. Also, I've used white thread here for clarity, but you'll probably want to match the thread.

• Trim. No need to finish the edge! Make sure to round out the thumb to avoid pointy-thumb :-)
  

• Turn inside out and ta-da!
  

• Embellish, if you wish. If you don't, the whole project will probably take you all of ten minutes!
  

It's also useful to make one pair that is really soft for a liner and make a slightly larger pair out of more dense wool felt for the outside. Then they're extra warm even on a windy day and they dry faster after outside fun.

They're also perfect for drinking hot chocolate whilst contemplating the still very much dormant garden :-)

A Little Late Night Awesomeness...

because I love the subway...courtesy of vintage Sesame Street:



The lyrics rock! This would never make it on a kids' show today:

"You could lose your purse
Or you might lose something worse
On the subway.....SUBWAY!"

Seriously......

Things That Make Me Happy on My Birthday...

the feeling of satisfaction:



having finished some items for the shop just in time for Valentine's....

and

overnight snow that renders the washing line a frozen artery across the yard:

bringing with it the anticipation of some good exercise...

and

at this moment wearing the birthday necklace that Safiya made for me, in whispers last night in the living room with Mr. S. while I worked in the basement:


and

calls from my dear friend Tim and my grandparents, singing me their versions of "Happy Birthday" (one in French, the other in two-part harmony).....

bodes well for a birthday day, don't you think? :-)

Warm Hearts, Warm Heads

As a parent, part of your brain (o.k. all of it most of the time) is on "child alert", and you will be in dire straits if you do not pay attention! If any of us spent as much time with any other human being as with our children, we would get to know them pretty well, yes? And yet sometimes we miss the cues.

Because of course the wriggle in this is that the person we spend all this time with is only just learning how to effectively express their needs in words. They've got it down pat in other ways; body language, wordless verbal skills, intonation ;-) but unfortunately as adults we sometimes are dismissive of these methods because we think we've outgrown them. So, it's a good thing we spend as much time with our children as we do to give us the opportunity to become attuned to their peculiar ways of communicating, because "Mama, it is late in the morning and I'm feeling a little hungry and while mildly interesting, I will soon lose patience with your insistence on looking at wool when in fact we should be procuring some food for nourishment" with not be forthcoming any time soon.

Usually I don't even get a "Mama, I'm hungry" as a warning :-)

And so in such a situation I found myself a while back in the cozy store Americo on Queen Street West. On an errand, I had detoured to this wonderful place at a time when any other sensible person would have been finding lunch. The wool had beckoned like a siren and my ears became deaf to all else.


The moral of the story is that there are some really wonderful people in the world. As soon as we stepped in, the two ladies (the co-owner Nicole and her son-in-law's sister, I think?) were attentive and warm, especially to Safiya. Lost in wonderland, I failed to (maybe a little willfully) realise that we really should have left already. The lady offered Safiya some lovely felted flowers, at which generosity Safiya became very upset because there were no pink ones!

sigh....

Chagrined, we left, a three-and-a-half-year-old's cries in the air, me upset at Safiya's reaction, but really more upset at myself for not paying attention! as well as I could have. To make matters worse, I'm embarrassed to admit I started chastising Safiya right in front of the store, until, trying to help, the lady came out and I snapped-to, realised what I was doing, and humbly went in search of lunch. We sat down to our food, calmed down, talked about it, and....went back to the store.

Because of course, in the middle of everything, the generous and brilliant lady (whose name eludes me) had made the suggestion that we come back some time and she could show us how to make the flowers, and we could dye them pink at home. She is someone who was born gracious, and I could've kissed her feet then and there. Tummies full, we sat with the other ladies who were there for knitting in the afternoon, crocheted, chatted a little, and that experience soon filled our hearts, its sunshine obliterating the clouds from earlier in the day.


Yesterday, finishing up a soon-to-be-listed hood for the shop, I came across the flowers and the skein of hand-spun wool that we brought from that place and decided to use them, bringing to what I was making the kindness and warmth of that memory.

Take Me With You

Doesn't our bench look cozy? It is a still day out, the silence only occasionally broken by large sheets of snow sliding off the roof - ker-thump! - to the ground.

Yesterday we went sledding. It was perfect - no wind, not too cold, lots of snow, and no sun to blind us on the way down. Today Safiya and Mr. S went again. On the way out I heard Safiya excitedly say to her favourite toy, who is a red stretchy plastic dragon named "Draggy" who has been dragged with her everywhere but apparently has never been sledding:

"Draggy, do you want to go out and see the world, Draggy?"

Oh, to be taken on that journey....

Pillows

Sarah left a nice comment about the pillow in our living room a while ago (the one with the red tree embroidery above). Which was lovely, and served as a reminder that there is a dearth of pillows around here (really just an excuse to make something :-). It is surprising to me that for people who like comfort (and who doesn't?) we had exactly two pillows in our living room (and both bought from Ikea ages ago). That is just wrong.


Having made some buckwheat hull pillows for ourselves, I snagged one of the extra pillows from the bedroom, cut it down (kudos to self for doing that outdoors - although it looked like I'd sacrificed a chicken in the front yard - good thing it snowed and covered it all up!) and recovered it in appropriate living room attire.


The back is a recycled sweater, the front a happy amalgamation of a thrifted tablecloth and pillowcase, an old pair of my cords, and one of Mr. S's shirts :-).

The ball was rolling, so I decided to try making my own pillow to cover. Beside the sewing machine is a container into which I throw all my snippets of fabric, thread, etc. (no old needles!). After a couple of months there is quite the stash, so I tried stuffing a pillow:


This is quite possibly the hardest and lumpiest pillow ever. I will have to cover it in something extremely soft to justify its continued existence :-)

And speaking of stuffing, Safiya and I have been cutting up plastic bags to turn into balls of plastic yarn (there's a net shopping bag in Erika Knight's "Simple Crochet" that I'm going to try), using gooseflesh's tutorial. But there are the tops and bottoms of the bags left-over, that don't make the cut (ha!), as it were....What does this have to do with pillows? Well, I inherited the pillow on the chair in the picture below from my Grammy, and given its rustley nature, I'm pretty sure it's stuffed with some sort of plastic detritus, and it makes a perfectly serviceable pillow, so.....why not, right? :-)


Oh - what are the colourful piles of wormy things on the table? Stay tuned!... :-)

Little Bits of Goodness

"What do you want for lunch?"

"Popcorn!"


My favourite version is a little canola oil with garlic powder, a little salt, and garam masala. Mmmmmmm. Safiya takes hers simple; oil, a little salt, by the handful :-)

Today was busy with a couple of projects on the go, but I just had to share this recent thrift find:


It's a real wool hockey sweater! The quality is superb, it felted up beautifully, and the tag on the inside says "Chateau Sweaters: Made in Kitchener". Cool. And do you see on the shoulder?


C for captain! This is destined to be something really awesome, but I can't figure out what....yet :-)

Scenes from Away and a Pleasant Surprise Which Leads to a Little Reading

Two incidents gladdened my heart while I was out of town, like blossoms brought forth from the branch above. The first occurred in my favourite bakery/cafe The Pie Plate. During lunch bits and pieces of the conversation next to us drifted over (it's a small place in a small town). I heard the words "off-grid" and "sustainable" and "yurt". When a book was pulled out on yurts, I couldn't resist interrupting (i.e. blurting across the table): "that is sooo cool!" Conversation ensued, and I found myself meeting others who were of a like mind with regards to sustainable living. This was highly surprising, given the conservative nature of my hometown environs.


The second was even more delightful. I had the chance to catch up with an old friend and her new husband over dinner. Now this friend is probably the sweetest person I've ever met, so I knew dinner would be enjoyable regardless (and my Mom was babysitting so yay! adult conversation!) I hadn't met her husband yet and it had been a couple of years since she and I spent time together, so at first we exchanged autobiographies and caught up as people do. And then over the course of the evening one thing led to another and someone said "peak oil" and there was a pause and an inward gasp and each of us realised that we weren't the only crazy ones in the room.

And then the conversation really got going. And it was good. The great thing about it is that, on the surface, you would never think it to look at this couple. Which sounds superficial, but I'm not going to apologize. They are lovely, professional, upper-middle class, church-going folk from a fairly conservative town. That is the limited description that a passer-by would get. If they were off-grid vegans, well.....

So, peak-everything is everyone's concern. Isn't that nice?

And they were kind enough to lend me Jane Jacobs' book Dark Age Ahead (here's an interview with her by Jim Kunstler). That to top off the ridiculous number of books I got from the library, after having gone through Sharon's list of books, the "best books about nearly everything".


The librarian left a message at our house asking if i could please come and pick up the box of books that were being held for me. When I picked them up, she merrily asked me to show her pictures of my garden when it's done.

What a nice idea! But the real question is, does she want pictures of the composting toilet as well? :-)

It Could be Worse

I have not been languishing on the couch for two weeks. Shortly after recovering, Safiya and I went out of town to hang out with Nana, who is Mr. S.'s grandmother, and who lives with my Father-in-law usually, but he went on a well-deserved vacation. So we Nana-sat for a week-and-a-half. Nana can take care of herself, but she's at that stage in her life where if she falls, there needs to be someone there to help her right away - someone to check in on her every day at least.

One of Mr. S.'s favourite utterances is "it could be worse!" Hence the book above, which is a charming re-telling of the folk tale where a small house is crowded with too many people getting on eachother's nerves and then the wise one in the village advises them to bring in all their farm animals and then eventually tells them to remove all the animals and hey presto! the house isn't quite as crowded as it was before and everyone is happy.

With the house closing in on me in the middle of January, fighting sickness, and tired, as I told a friend, of the perpetual twilight of the city, I was craving darkness and quiet and room to breathe. Nana-sitting? Perfect. They live on the outskirts of a major town, in a quiet condo/townhouse/subdivision arrangement, but close enough to the countryside.

Ahhhhhh, how useful a change of scenery can be. For realising how good you have it, that is. I forgot about the driving. There is no public transit where Nana lives, so the car it is - for everything. Not even a corner store. And everyone drives, so there's noone outside to acknowledge even if you did go for a walk to....nowhere. And the sameness of said subdivision could make you cry - the unmoving facades of identical houses staring back, unblinking, when you hopefully look out the window in search of scenery. The isolation is oppressive.

We did enjoy visiting, sharing everyday rhythms with Nana, watching game shows, watching her thoroughly enjoy harassing me about what are you going to eat? (she wouldn't touch anything I made - claimed that the only thing I eat is seeds :-) and listening to her mutter about how I don't understand any of her language (enough to understand the swearing, Nana! :-) I brought the dictionaries to translate, we even managed a shopping list together, and we laughed at my ineptness.

But I'm glad to be home. Home where a quick errand outdoors gives me the opportunity to chat for 5 minutes with my neighbour and say hi to another. Home where the kids walk to school, gaggles of them laughing and their parents haranguing them up the sidewalk. Home where I can use my legs to get around, for which I am rewarded a healthy glow instead of a car-induced headache.

Thank goodness for a little perspective. It could be worse!

The Antitode

Still recovering on the couch. And the antidote to "Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf?"

Clearly, "All About Eve"!

Be Afraid

Yesterday, sitting on the couch, sick, Mr. S. and Safiya out for a walk, I watched for the first time "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?". I think it worsened my condition. The acting is brutally good, but what toxic characters. So now I'm recovering, trying to get George and Martha out of my mind.

Little Girls and Why I'm Off Dr. Suess

My mother doesn't know that the lovely anthology of Dr. Suess that she gave Safiya for her second Christmas has been "disappeared". A year ago, as we began to read more Dr. Suess to her, there dawned on me a growing realisation that there were no, but no, female characters in his books. It grew more and more infuriating and uncomfortable the more we read. The absence of "she" (even in the pictures) made even me as the narrator feel cast out from the world, and I wondered what how this misrepresentation is processed by children. Feeling slightly crazy and tired of having to change pronouns all the time, telling nobody, we disappeared what for many is quintessential children's literature.


Today I splurged and picked up "Fearless Girls, Wise Woman and Beloved Sisters", by Kathleen Ragan. It's not a picture book (no illustrations), but an anthology of folk tales from around the world. On the way home, I read one of the tales to Safiya, and she sat and listened as the subway train swayed. Anxious to read more, I was leafing through the book and happened upon this, in the introduction (and if you use the link above you can preview some of the book, including part of the introduction):

"The more I read, the more uncomfortable I became. I couldn't find any female characters in these books. I found myself changing the pronouns from male to female when I read the stories to her."

She goes on in detail how she researched the books by...Dr. Suess. So we're not crazy. However, that's not the real point. Her introduction does better justice to the point than I can (and it's hardly Suess-bashing for all you Suess-lovers out there), so I'm just going to point the way to this lovely book.

And then there's this:


Nothing more wholesome than an apple, a glass of orange juice, and reading "Little House in the Big Woods" aloud, right? We started reading these aloud to Safiya last summer (she plays quietly and any time I stop because I suspect her interest might be waning, her little head whips up and she says "But why did you stop Mama? Don't stop reading!" And so I don't...) But oh my the racism (although when a child, my brain only picked up the opposite from these stories, somehow), the strict gender roles, the authoritarian obedience. I loved these stories when I was a child, and they are someone's story, so we edit some of it out, sure that when she can read she'll find her way. Maybe the story will just change slowly.

But this? I think I'll just rip this page out :-)


Just a little editing....

Cozy

Yesterday the world was thick with beautiful, heavy snow. The kind that is good for snowballs and sledding, and makes trees look like strange sea anemones waving gently in the wind. Inside, however, it's toasty and warm:


The first window quilt is up, with others underway. Nothing fancy (nor ironed :-), just a piece of thick wool sandwiched between cottons, hung up with cup hooks. I used bias tape for the loops 'cause I'm lazy and I've yet to add the bottom loops so that you can actually do up the quilt to look out the window. This one is in the spare room, currently occupied by my law-student brother-in-law (I'm working from most drafty to least). It's reversible, and I put a not-quite-sure-it-matches-but-making-do-with-stash print on the other side in the event that this room gets transformed into a room for Safiya some day.


A newly thrifted bedspread was going to be cut up to make a window quilt for the main bedroom and to cover a small extra blanket, but when I brought it up, it was just too too pretty to cut up.



And so it will stay, spared the scissors, to warm our toes and cheer my heart.

Anew

Happy New Year! It is a beautiful snowy day outside, and I'm starting the new year celebrating. A blanket long overdue for dear friends is finally done! Hooray! The top is made from a combination of felted and non-felted wool sweaters, and the back is a soft brushed cotton.



It's their wedding gift, made to reflect their love of climbing....grey::bedrock, brown::soil, green::grass, more greys::mountains, blue::sky. The red thread at the bottom is the thread that binds two together. I once heard of a belief that when two future loves are born, they each are bound at the waist with a thread that connects them, no matter how far apart they are. As time goes on, the thread becomes shorter and shorter and finally draws them together.

I hope the New Year finds you drawing close to those you love.