I've been discussing laundry options with Shirley via email and she says that washing soda is not recommended for use with silk or wool. So if you make your own laundry detergent, don't put silk or wool items in the wash.

I hand wash all my knitted items (along with some special shirts and a beaded sweater) with Ecover dishwashing liquid. I was reading Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping a Home by Cheryl Mendelson and she said that anything that is gentle enough to put your hands in can work for hand-washing. I started using Ecover dishwashing liquid and was pleasantly surprised with the results. It is cheaper than Eucalan and it gets our knit socks much cleaner.

Late last night I had a bit of a scare. All of a sudden I heard these odd bumping noises in one of the bottom kitchen cabinets. I debated whether or not to wake up DH but decided against it. I slowly opened the cabinet where the noises were coming from, standing as far away as possible.

And I discovered the culprit.

Looking through canvas. Małgorzata Ata Warias

This is definitely too gray, too melancholy, too self-abandoning. Looking from left to right, into the end, curving himself from somewhere where the beginning hasn't even started - straight into the blue, self-effacing space. And look at his look. A sight that has more shadow than seeing.
I like it.

Fortunately I finished DH's anniversary gloves about an hour before he came home. I used Nature Spun sport weight and the pattern is the men's geometric gloves from my glove booklet . I made some adjustments for his personal preferences - longer ribbing and rounded fingertips. I also changed the thumb gusset for his wide thumb angle - more details on that on the Glove Knitting KAL.



There's more Red Sox baseball today plus I have to do some cooking. Here is our latest CSA offering - strawberries, a leek, red leaf lettuce, mangoes, grapefruit, avocados, roasted green chile, apples, an artichoke and some Swiss chard. Peaches has already started sampling the bounty.

Sticks

Contemporary art could be described as the look-out for presence. There are very pragmatic ways in which presence can be experienced. If anything can be art when given the right focus, we need to look for ways of better focusing. So when we get it, we get it. Thus, it is a constant game between what we know and what we think we might have known, had it been a slightly different setting. Darren Harvey-Regan is a beautiful example of finding what is already there, of creating what had already been there and just giving it that delicate push which makes us grow our of here and into the work.
And if you think you know exactly what it is, it might just mean you need to look more carefully, and take the time to see the landscape he has found.

Off topic: Playboy celebrates 31 years in Brasil

Cowscapes by Rachael Sudlow

You can spare yourself the trouble of reading the artist's statement. These landscapes speak for themselves. See the online gallery here. I labeled this post as 'funny', though I don't consider it just a joke. It has real beauty (come on, stop chuckling...). Somehow, though, I didn't label it as land art.

Technorati: photography, land art, art, contemporary art, vvoi

Simply enjoying design

The two lowest steps of this staircase are used as shoe drawers. Found here.

This is what this chest sounds like. Unfortunately the people that make them seem to think children are the only ones who would enjoy this type of furniture. Found here. This rings a bell - I remember discovering an amazing installation, a table where one would hear sounds through the vibrations going through your body. Does anyone have a clue?

There is a pleasure in the usable object that is simply magical. This glovy feeling - it fits like a glove, and it feels like a glove, and it can be the most exquisite thing. Some sort of harmony, I guess. As if design gave us the world as we had imagined it ought to be, though only now does it live up to expectations. Artsy art rarely seems to head that way. (If we insist on distinguishing the two).

Technorati: design, interior design, furniture, art, contemporary art, vvoi

Intarsia

Stranded color knitting is not the only method of knitting with more than one color. Another method is intarsia knitting which is shown in the lovely sock pattern below from Borealis Sweaterscapes . (Slip stitch knitting is an additional method to accomplish color knitting patterns.) Both stranded color knitting and intarsia use color charts and have many ends in to work in after you're done knitting. Most knitters who enjoy knitting with multiple colors will eventually find themselves with a pattern that requires at least some intarsia and it is often up to the knitter to decide which technique to use for various charts.



In stranded color knitting you carry all the colors you're using along the entire row; in intarsia you do not. In stranded color knitting you end
up with a thicker fabric because of the stranding and floats on the inside of the work; with intarsia you only have a single layer of knitted fabric.

In intarsia you twist the yarns around each other every time you get to a color change (called interlocking); this is not done in stranded color knitting. Most stranded color knitting is done in the round; intarsia is most frequently knit flat. In intarsia you'll see bobbins, yarn butterflies, or long strands of yarn hanging from the back of the work; in stranded knitting there is usually just several skeins of yarn attached to the back of the work.

Intarsia is also called picture knitting . If a color chart requires really long floats or 12 colors per row, you'll want to choose intarsia. If you want to knit a large initial on a sweater for instance, you'd use intarsia. If you want to knit authentic argyle socks or knit most of Kaffe Fassett's beautiful designs, you'd use intarsia. Duplicate stitch is also often combined with intarsia for more intricate patterns.

The best way to tell if something is knit using the intarsia color knitting method is to look at the back of the work. The first photo shows the back of stranded color knitting with the ends woven in using reverse duplicate stitch; the second photo shows the back of an argyle sock with the ends woven in using a diagonal split stitch method specific to intarsia knitting.





There is definitely an art to get good tension in intarsia knitting - it isn't as simple as just interlocking yarns every time you get to a color change so to learn more here are some links to excellent intarsia information.

Borealis Sweaterscapes has an info page HERE and a free pillow pattern to get you started HERE. Check out some of their gorgeous intarsia sweater and sock patterns.

Vicki Meldrum is an expert intarsia knitter and has some info HERE.

Lucy Neatby has some intarsia tips HERE.

If you'd like to learn even more, this small self-published booklet is the bible of intarsia knitting. Intarsia: A Workshop for Hand and Machine Knitting by Sherry and Keely Stuever. It is inexpensive and last time I looked Elann sold it. It is full of color photos and diagrams of all sorts of intarsia techniques.

Pretty science

And now for something completely unrelated.

Technorati: science, beauty, visual art, art, contemporary art, vvoi

Rent a Wife

What the hell is going on?
Wives for rent? For an unlimited time? Chose your preferred category?
Of course, Rent-a-Wife is a joke. But is it an artistic joke? A provocation joke? A silly joke? A horribly sexist joke? Or is it?
If it is an ironic look at the way women are seen by today's society (not only male), than why does it seem strange?
Because there is a catch. (Duhh...) And it is not about feminism. It is about renting DVDs. As what we have here is an ad for DVD rental.
How far is this from Vanessa Beecroft installing her objectified women in a shoe-shelf, to sell shoes?


Could I be accused of the same hypocrisy, exposing something by exposing it?

Oh, and if you think it's getting pretty much impossible to look at gender issues in a witty way without being accused of this or that, the desert is for you:

Technorati: commercial, publicity, funny, parody, art, art, contemporary art, vvoi

I am late but I wanted to do an Earth Day post. Here are most of the ingredients for my homemade laundry detergent for use in the washing machine. It is less expensive than regular laundry detergent and kinder to your clothes and septic system. Plus you can make your clothes smell incredible. I change the scent each time by changing the essential oils I add - I generally use about 20 drops of either rosemary, tea tree oil, lemon, or lavender essential oils or a combination. Also, I now use Trader Joe's peppermint liquid castile soap which is cheaper than Dr. Bronner's.



The actual laundry detergent recipe is HERE in an article I wrote along with some other of my nontoxic homemade cleaning recipes. NOTE: This recipe contains washing soda which is not recommended for use with silk or wool. While I'm at it HERE is an article I wrote for some fun herbal iced tea concoctions. The Hibiscus/Jamaica tea is my fave.



I have so much to do this week and the most important item is finishing a pair of gloves for DH in time for our anniversary Friday. Fortunately I have Jack the cat helping me with any excess yarn.

Thickening light: Emilia Bergmark - Jiménez

There is a melancholy light in Emilia Bergmark-Jiménez's work that makes one want to stay there.
By «there», I don't mean the place that is being photographed, but rather, the space of the photography itself. The picture seems not so much to portray something, but rather, to use it for its own means, as if the image had a goal of its own, quite separate from the object matter, or even the photographer herself.
What is left of the person? What form can a person have if light goes through her and plays with her seeming irrelevance? Maybe, the person becomes distant. Translucent.
Yet there is something about that form that appeals precisely because it is being put so close to forgetting.

This may well be what remains of memory, when what is left to oblivion, is rescued by thickening the nearly empty space, the traces gaining contours that are not what was left behind, but are some ambiguous form we vaguely recognize as ours, as belonging to us, as representing this left-over area that is neither the object we knew, or the eye of the beholder. It is this lovely, strange in-between.(via)

How can you tell it is going to be a great weekend? First, your handsome husband is home from a trip to Montana. Second, the Red Sox and Yankees are playing and you actually get to watch 3 of the games despite losing the Extra Innings package. Third, you have plenty of good knitting projects to keep you going during all the baseball.

In the basket are the geometric gloves for DH - all I have to do are the fingers. Also, I'm starting those gorgeous Selbu mittens on the cover of Selbustrikk in red and black Palette. I do think that might be the most beautiful Selbu pattern ever.



For other baseball fans, check out THIS web site for some free .PDF charts for most of the teams you can add to your knitting projects. For other Norwegian knitting fans, Nordic Fiber Arts has 3 new cool booklets of knitted accessories to go with the Selbustrikk booklet. They're in Norwegian but they offer a translation of some common terms.

Now I'm really sure spring has arrived in New Mexico. Here is a lizard sunning himself on the window screen.

Marina, an incredibly talented Fair Isle knitter, wrote in the comments yesterday that J&S is unfortunately discontinuing some of their colors of Shetland yarn - here's a list of the actual numbers being discontinued so stock up while you can.

While I'm at it, here are a few more recent blog posts of interest to other color knitters - OfTroy offers some great ideas for using small amounts of leftover yarn, KnittingonImpulse has an excellent post on optical mixing, and while I'm at it, HERE's an older blog post with some great photos of knitting with two colors in your left hand.

My best stash color selection is in worsted weight yarns. I'm perfectly happy with Peruvian Highland wool, Wool of the Andes, and Cascade 220 and am building up my color choices.



The container at the bottom holds just purple yarns. In the past two months I've been buying all the purple yarns I could find from those three sources for a project I'm beginning. I plan to knit a bunch of thick socks using at least 4 shades of purple (hopefully 2 or 3 times that many) for myself.

The snows have melted and spring has returned. This is especially good news for fluffball house rabbits with a serious love of dandelions.

I have a large container of sock yarn not photographed (mainly things like Essential and Kroy - I wear out socks too quickly to use the expensive stuff).

Here's my container just for Knitpicks' Palette. I bought some years ago and then added all of the colors recently while writing the glove booklet. I just love it for gloves and want to try it for socks soon. I did a little test with the new skein of red Palette and an old skein of red and it turns out that only the old skein of red was bleeding dye. Go figure.



I have a container of Shetland jumper weight yarn (aka fingering weight) but I don't use it often. I find it scratchy to wear so anything I knit with it goes to someone else. I have noticed I have a lot of red and green in this container so I hope to knit something Christmas related with it.



In this photo Peaches seems to be thinking, "I'm large and in charge."

This week I thought I'd do a tour of my yarn stash. Try to contain your excitement! The photo I last showed was from several years ago and here is the current incarnation.


There's one other large Rubbermaid container of sock yarn not included in this photo. Still, I think the stash has shrunk. I really am trying to "manage" my yarn more to ensure I have enough colors in the weights I use.

I rarely use multi-colored yarns so I am trying to stop buying them. This isn't always successful when I see a big sale. I also rarely use DK weight yarns so I have stopped buying them. Last year I only bought yarn for the glove booklet but this year I may increase my color selection. I don't really have many heathered colors except in my Shetland yarn stash.



Here is one container full of vintage Brunswick Nylamb baby & sock yarn which is almost impossible to find anymore. It is one of my favorite yarns - soft and durable as it has wool and nylon. The color selection wasn't great but I do enjoy using it for non-colorwork projects like lace or cables. I bought a few bags of the dark green color on Ebay a few years back with the intention of making the Starmore Cape Cod sweater from Fisherman's Sweaters. I need to live somewhere colder to knit sweaters though.

Yesterday we visited one of my happy places, Ta Lin World Market. My challenge was to find some fun stuff while spending less than $1.50 for each item. I bought a big bag of baby bok choy, enough shallots to last me a few months, Mexican oregano, asadero cheese, fideo noodles, dried shiitakes, Oriental chili bean sauce, some tomato sauce with chipotles, dried passionflowers (I like to make my own herbal tea concotions) for 69 cents, Mexican hot sauce and a weird malt beverage DH chose that tasted like carbonated molasses. My favorite bok choy recipe is Rice Noodles with Tofu and Bok Choy from Cooking Light. It is a terrific simple meal for a busy day.



Here are my knitting projects in progress. I am making a pair of geometric gloves from the Glove Knitting booklet for DH in Nature Spun sport weight. I am making some modifications to the sore thumb gusset chart to fit his wider than usual thumb angle. Also, you can see a sock in progress in the basket although part of it is going to get ripped out until I come up with a better color chart.