The idea for the object of today’s post came from the gracious Stasia.  She suggested creating a little cache-pot into which to put hopes, prayers and dreams as a means to help oneself focus outward on other things besides one’s own problems.  I was taken with the notion and have been mulling it over for a few days. 

Yesterday, not really wanting to work on either the sweater or the poncho, I decided to play around with Stasia’s idea.  I picked up some Sugar ‘n Cream that I had leftover from another project, some US 8 needles (two of a DPN set - the shorter the needle, the better I like it!), unhooked my logic circuit and set about it.

I cast on 20 stitches and worked 60 rows in stockinette.

This picture shows the center part finished with the stitches picked up for one of the sides.  See those purple strings on the sides of the piece?  Those were the markers I used so I would know where to pick up the 20 stitches for the side pieces.





Here the first side has been completed and the stitches picked up for the second side.  I like to leave long tails when I know I’m going to have to sew something up because it makes for fewer ends to work in later.  It can be a problem though, when those ends keep getting tangled with the working yarn :) I spent almost as much time on this final side piece untangling tails as I did actually knitting :)





This is the final piece before seaming.  Because this is stockinette and not garter, the places where the stitches are picked up pucker a little.  This actually worked well for the final piece - at least I like it.  I had been imagining something boxy and what resulted was softer, more flowing lines - much nicer, I think.





I used a backstitch to sew up the sides because it is very firm.  I had slipped each selvedge stitch, so both picking up for the edges and placement of the seam stitches was super easy.





Finally, with a contrast color, I single-crocheted an edging all around the bowl.  I crocheted three stitches together at each corner of the piece to further enhance the bowl shape.





Here, several other balls of various cotton yarns volunteered to pose with the finished item.  The bowl is about 3.5” high and about 6” in diameter.  I realize that it’s somewhat irregular but I find it rather charming anyway.

The Zen part?  Well, the yarn I grabbed (with no idea of where I was going at that point) was leftover from my Monk’s bag adapted from the Monk’s Satchel pattern in Folk Bags.  The movie we happened to be watching while I was working on this thing? The Bulletproof Monk (a very cute film, BTW).  And finally, there was a serious “Be here now” feel to the whole exercise, a real kind of go-with-the-flow feeling where preconceptions are dropped and all that exists is the crafter and the material.  And sometimes it gets difficult to tell the difference between them.

I greatly enjoyed this mini-vacation from my two bigger projects.  It was wonderfully refreshing and curiously fulfilling.  I suspect that there will be many more little containers of various sorts in my future :)

Have a wonderful weekend!

As it turns out, Myria has pneumonia :( I had begun to suspect such and it was confirmed yesterday afternoon.  So she’s resting as much as possible (I’d have to tie her down to keep her in bed) and taking the recommended nostrums.  I feel really bad; she’s pretty miserable, poor kid.  Sleeping is the real issue here - every time she lays down flat, she clogs up so badly she can’t breathe.  A couple of good night’s sleep would go a long ways towards restoring her energy and usual good spirits.

The cowl for the poncho is now about 18” long and I think I’m going to switch to ribbing for the next couple of inches before proceeding to the increases for the body.  This has, so far, been a surprisingly pleasant project and I have been reasonably pleased with the LB Homespun.  There has been a little discussion on the K-list the last couple of days about the yarn bunching up but I haven’t had the slightest problem with it mis-behaving.  And it yields a really nicely textured fabric.  My original plan for this piece was to make it only in the color shown ("Modern", it’s called) but I’ve been thinking about adding another color and swapping between the two in thick (20 or 25 row) stripes.  I’m still mulling it over...could be fun!





The kimono front is about 19” at this point and I’ll be joining a third ball when I pick this up again.  I really like the New Tweed.  It works up so nicely.  Last night I was having a bit of a problem with the yarn twisting up and curling back on itself.  Somehow, pulling the yarn out from the center was adding more twist.  I have been pulling from the center on all these balls and hadn’t had this issue with any of the others..  I wound up (ahem...) cutting the yarn, passing it through the ball to the other side and then spit-splicing it back together.  Total loss of yarn - about 3” and no more twisting problems!

I may declare an embargo on both the sweater and the poncho today.  I think I want a “play” day - just pick up some yarn and play with it to see what happens :) I’m enjoying both the above projects, but they get a little boring from time to time…

It snowed yesterday, but not as much as had originally been feared.  The sparrow on the feeder is a young male (one of this year’s crop, I think) and he hung around for quite a while, resting and enjoying the shelter and essentially limitless food supply of the feeder.  We’ve seen the youngsters do this from time to time, especially when there’s snow or when the temperature is very cold.  Adults don’t seem to be so inclined, but the kids know a good thing (and a free handout) when they see one :)

I became interested in minerals after acquiring a pendant made from an amethyst crystal set in silver.  It was so interesting looking that I was motivated to look at it’s mineral roots.  That, of course, expanded into other minerals and resulted in my becoming a collector of sorts.

Today, I’m presenting my desk minerals.  These sit around the desktop computer.  Most of them are quite small, though a few are larger.  I like having them where I can see them most of the time, pick them up, turn them in the light and watch the play of colors.  Yes, I’m nutty about my rocks :)

The top image is a ruby crystal and the bottom image is a sapphire crystal.  They both belong to the corundum family - in fact, they are the only members of that classification.  The red variety is designated as “ruby”.  All other colors (and there are many other colors) are designated as “sapphire”.  Neither of these crystals are gem quality.  You can see in the photos that they are opaque rather than clear.  This means that they have many inclusions (stuff inside the crystal - bubbles, minor crazing, even bits of other materials) that affect the appearance of the stone.  The colors, however, are pretty good and the crystal form is excellent.  The ruby is about .75” long and the sapphire is just about .5”.





Azurite is a carbonate and has a very long and honorable history as a pigment for paints and dyes.  Its intense blue color comes from the presence of copper.  In larger pieces, the blue may be so dark as to make the mineral appear black.  This is quite a small piece and the tiny bladed crystals completely cover the matrix.  Azurite is often found with another mineral called malachite which is a deep, rich green.  Their chemical compositions differ only by a single atom of copper.





Rose quartz is a silicate (as are all the quartzes).  It’s color comes from iron and titanium impurities.  This particular specimen is unusual in that it displays actual crystal growth.  Rose quartz typically manifests as a massif type of growth - it is usually found as big, pink rocks with no particular crystal structure.  This is a tiny piece, just over .5” overall, but the crystal formation is beautiful and the color is perfect.





Citrine is another silicate, another type of quartz.  This crystal is about an inch in length.  A couple of it’s edges are a bit rounded and there are some dings in it that indicate that it may have spent some time tumbling around in a river bed.  Natural citrine is not very common.  In most of the stones on the market, the yellow color has been created by heat treating the much more common amethyst or smoky quartzes.  I feel very fortunate to have this naturally colored crystal - they aren’t available very often.





This is fluorite and it is one of the most colorful species in the mineral kingdom - not that you could tell that from this piece :) Fluorite is a Halide (as is rock salt) and a very common mineral that appears in every color under the sun.  It is not a very hard stone and the above image is not really a crystal.  Though fluorite can grow into octahedral crystals, it usually grows in a cubic form.  The above piece was probably taken from a larger, imperfect specimen that was struck with a hammer.  The octahedral shape falls naturally out of the stone because of fluorite’s cleavage (think of it as grain) - perfect in four directions.  Cut stones are rare because the crystal is so soft, making it very difficult to cut.  This is done once in a while though and the cut stones are brilliant because of fluorite’s wonderful luster.  These stones can only be displayed, however; they are far too fragile for jewelry.

Now for a couple of larger pieces.

This is a chunk of Labradorite and is about 6” long.  This material doesn’t form crystals at all.  It is a feldspar and at first glance, you might think there was nothing special about it at all as its dull grey-to-black surface isn’t particularly appealing or interesting.  But, when you pick it up and turn it in the light, something amazing happens - deep, iridescent colors shimmer out from within the stone in an effect called labradorescence.  This excellent photograph shows a bit if that effect.  The labradorescence may show blue, green, orange or yellow colors and often runs through all of them as the stone is turned in the light.





This is a carved piece of obsidian which has a gold shiller.  Obsidian isn’t a stone at all, but a volcanic glass formed when lava meets water.  The shiller, those concentric, shining rings, are tiny bubbles that were formed in the solidifying process.  Though obsidian is considered a silicate and has the same chemical composition as quartz, it has no crystal structure of it’s own.  And, as a glass, it is fragile.





Manganocalcite gets its beautiful color from manganese.  Unlike most calcites, it is opaque.  This piece is fairly new to me and I am still making its acquaintance, though I have many other, more traditionally transparent/translucent calcite specimens.  Calcite is a carbonate and, like fluorite, can be found in many colors.  Unlike fluorite where colors are intense and saturated, calcite runs to pastels - pink, yellow, orange, green and blue as well as clear.





Finally, (thought we’d never get there, didn’t you :) this bowl holds several small minerals.  The sand in the bowl came from the southern Maine coast.  Starting at the left and proceeding clockwise, the minerals are quartz crystal, hematite, lepidolite, pyrite (fool’s gold), quartz geode, agate and the large piece is red calcite.  There are also a few shells that a friend brought back from her vacation for me.  The contents of the bowl are subject to change from time to time which keeps things interesting :)

One last note - Myria took these photographs for me.  Her eye is better than mine and her camera is much better than mine.  I could never have captured the tiny specimens as well as she did and I give my profound thanks for her time and effort!

Two Tuesdays a month I’m at the hospital for tests and treatments.  Today was one of those Tuesdays.  Also, as the weather predictions for this area have been moderately dire, I needed to shop just in case we got stuck indoors for a few days.  And I needed to get to the bank…

And, I figured I’d stop by my Dad’s house.  I generally visit on Wednesday or Thursday but given the weather ‘o doom notices, I thought I’d better get over there today...since I was out.  I see Dad a couple of times a week; I like to keep an eye on him - he is 80, after all, though in astoundingly good shape for a man his age.  I can’t really do it more often, as he is an incredibly independent cuss (something I quite understand as I inherited the characteristic) and he would get testy if he thought I didn’t feel he was entirely and perfectly capable of...well...anything :)

So I was out running around most of the day and didn’t get to the blog thing until just now.

No, there aren’t any pictures.

I’ve gotten a good bit more done on the Kimono and a fair bit more done on the poncho.  More about that on Thursday.

Tomorrow we’ll return to the mineral world in small :) Lots of pictures!

I thought I’d do my Monday post now rather than wait till morning.  See, I am hoping to sleep in tomorrow morning and if the back of my head knows I have a blog post to do, it’ll never let me rest.

Healthwise, things have been a bit rocky this weekend here at casa de wolfandturtle :) Myria is still wheezing and coughing and I have been having similar problems.  We’ve apparently picked up a respiratory virus (all in the family, right?) that seems to just love us.  Neither of us has been sleeping well.  To be fair, neither of us thinks this is anything serious - it’s just incredibly annoying and seems to be gleefully bent on making us as miserable as it can before our immune systems toss it out on its RNA.  Feh…

Got a bit more done on the sweater - but just a bit.  I’m not a speed knitter under the best of circumstances and this weekend the needles seemed to weigh an awful lot :) But I had to do some work on it and things are progressing.  In fact, I’m pleased with how well things are progressing so I’m not going to beat myself up for not getting this front piece finished.  We’ll get there.





Remember this stuff?  I wrote about it back in November when I first attempted to work it up.  This is the most beautiful yarn I have ever seen and felt.  It is soft and luxurious to the touch and the colors are absolutely radiant; they practically glow! 

Working with it is a whole ‘nother story.  It manages to be both slippery and sticky.  Is that one of the ordinary properties of rayon?  The yarn blithely slides around/over/off any needle I’ve tried to work it on, though the Clover bamboos in the picture have given the best result.  I’m not sure how such a seemingly friction-free fiber manages to be sticky at the same time, but just try to frog this stuff.  I’ve had better luck frogging mohair and, as my mother would have said, that stuff sticks like sh*t to a blanket.  The rayon is also totally inelastic - no stretch to the stuff at all.  But don’t think it’s like working with cotton - with cotton, you can at least tug on the yarn and the stitches (if need be) to get them where you want them.  Know what happens when you tug on a piece of this yarn?  You wind up with two pieces of yarn :)

Sigh…

Anyway, when I first saw this chenille, I fell head-over-heels in love with it and purchased two hanks.  Very shortly after I tried working with it for the first time, I knew the affair was over and it has been sitting in my stash cabinet for the last few months.  Finally I decided that it had cost too much for me to just let it go so I dug it out yesterday and began this simple scarf/stole thingy.  I can’t say that I’ve actually wrestled it into submission, but we seem to have reached an armed truce.  This is intended to go with my brown velvet for formal evenings on my next trip in March.  Whether it will get any use after that is highly doubtful.  Sadly, while I now know that it’s true nature is of the vilest guttersnipe sort, it still looks, to me, like the angel of dawn.

Myria’s amaryllis blossomed for us this weekend and it’s beautiful!  One bloom was fully opened by Saturday evening and the second has been opening today.  The third will probably start opening up sometime tomorrow.  It has been a real treat to watch this flower grow.  Anybody know if it’s possible to store the bulb so we can do this again at some future point?





Finally, the twin terrorists have calmed down enough so that they aren’t constantly following me around.  Everything’s relative though, Fuffy (on the right) jumps on me the minute I wake up in the morning.  I’m not sure how he knows I’m awake, but my current theory is that he can hear my eyes opening…

Well, this is going to be one of those days.  Neither of us is feeling up to snuff having acquired some kind of bug over the last couple of days.  Poor Myria is wheezing like a ruptured accordion and I’m at the stage where I’m perfectly amazed by how much grody stuff you can have in your nose and still be able to breathe…

Anyway…

I got a bit more done on the kimono sweater last night, finished the seed stitch and moved on to the stockinette.  Unfortunately, I didn’t remember to switch from the size 6 needles (for the seed st) to the size 8s (for the stockinette) which resulted in frogging.  But it was only a couple of rows plus a few stitches.  Thank goodness I remembered before I had gotten half the piece done!

Yesterday, Ryan asked what colors I was going to do the front/neck band in.  When I bought the yarn for this sweater, I took advantage of a sale on this color only and made sure I ordered enough to do the whole sweater.  I figured doing the band in the same color as the body would be maybe slightly less interesting, but would make for a more versatile garment over all.  Ryan’s comment got me thinking though.  I probably can’t afford to part with the money another three colors would cost (it would amount to half of what I spent for the original 18 balls).  But if I have enough left over after the body and sleeves are completed, I might try dying the remainder.  I have been wanting to try the kool-aid technique anyway and this might yield some interesting results.  That decision is a ways away yet, but it glimmers with possibility in my mind :)

I also started this hat last night.  The idea and pattern came from Pam at Fibre Frenzy.  I’ve never been much of a hat wearer but, given the average temps here in New England this winter, I should be wearing one - otherwise I get earaches :(.  This looked interesting and so I decided to have a go at it.  I’m still debating whether to switch off colors every now and again; I think I’m going to do it.  It will add some funk and just be more fun - both to make and to wear :)

Off topic note:  I set up “Space Cowboys” to run on my laptop while I was working on the hat last night.  Great, fun film.  The plot is slender, but Eastwood, Garner, Sutherland and Jones worked together as though they had always worked together.  Definitely worth seeing - a couple of times :)

This is an amaryllis that Myria got before Christmas.  It’s been growing on the kitchen table (the kitchen has the best light in the apartment) and is about to flower.  It’s been interesting to watch it’s progress as it grows very quickly and has to be turned each day to avoid acquiring a permanent lean towards the window.  I’ll post another picture when the flowers have opened up.  We were only expecting one bloom but, as you can see, we’re going to get three!  Cool beans!

Stay warm, stay happy and stay creative!  Have a great weekend folks!

I cast on for the other front-side of the kimono sweater last night.  Managed to get most of the seed stitch done.  I have to check it against the already completed front piece, but was too lazy to pull it out last night :) If there’s any more to do, it’ll only be a couple of rows at most.  As I’ve said before, I love the way seed stitch looks, but am not thrilled with the working of it.

My luggage finally arrived (delivered by the airport) at 11:45 PM, Sunday night.  Luckily we were still up but that’s a hell of a time to be delivering bags!  When I opened the suitcase the next day to unpack, I could see that it had been gone through.  Fair enough - it hadn’t gotten through customs in Costa Rica which is why it never got on the plane in the first place.  I had finished Myria’s replacement eyelash scarf during my trip and when I packed, I had placed it on top of everything else.  When I opened the bag to unpack, it wasn’t there.

Instant panic…

Fortunately, Myria found it, tucked in between a few other things where it couldn’t be immediately seen.  She wore it yesterday with her smashing fuschia sweater (which I did not knit).

Gorgeous combination!  She got comments on it too, from an elderly woman who wanted one just like it :)

These are the yarns that I mentioned on Monday.

I have pretty much decided that I don’t want to do another diagonal short-row scarf, though that would showcase the yarns beautifully.  But I really do want to put these babies together.  Any ideas?  I’ve got lots of the Phildar chenille (the one at the top), two balls of the Binario railroad (bottom right) and two balls of the fun fur - though I could get more of that.  I would be really interested to know how you all might see this stuff working up - to see it through your eyes, sort of :)

Ryan (of Mossy Cottage fame) offered this URL in a comment the other day.  Go and take a look.  The cable in the featured sweater were created with the help of dice.  Tossing the die determined when the cables were twisted.  I would have thought that the amount of randomness in this exercise would make a chaotic and unattractive garment - and I would have been wrong.  It’s a very intriguing idea and definitely worth playing with!

The Dos Amigos haven’t left me alone since I got home.

Fluffy (the one on the left), especially seems to feel that I owe him every waking moment and both hands for the forseeable future.  And that’s okay for now because I missed him too and am still susceptible to his guilt-making tactics.  Next week I’ll feel differently but for now, I happy to cuddle on demand :)

I have been working on the poncho too but I’ll wait until I’ve started the increases and have something different to show you to post another picture.  It’s coming along well though and is simple, simple to work as it’s just knitting around and around and around.  Makes really good TV knitting :)

I hope you’re all having a great day.  The weekend’s approaching - have faith!