DesigKnit

Let me introduce you to my newest tool: a tablet/inkle loom.

Now, you might think that a new loom is the last thing that I really need, since I’ve had so little time to spend crafting lately. And you’d be right.

But, as always happens with crafting, one thing leads to another, and last week I broke down and bought a tablet loom.

It all started last summer, when I bought a phone too big to fit in the pocket of any clothes I own:

I needed a way to carry it around, and so whipped up a quilted phone purse to fit (I don’t know if it’s possible to buy a simple phone purse in the appropriate size now, but it wasn’t last summer when I last looked).

Well. After less than a year of use, it looks like this:

The fabric hasn’t held up at all, and quite frankly, it’s looking pretty ratty. Clearly, I need another phone purse.

It occurred to me that weaving might be a better way to tackle this particular problem, since it’s easy to weave a 4″ strip of fabric, and it will be a heavier material that will stand up better to wear. So, I set about thinking up a woven design. But I didn’t really want to weave the strap on my regular loom. I started thinking about weaving bands, which I’ve never really explored before. This is where I got myself into trouble.

After a couple of Youtube videos, I could suddenly begin to see the advantages of inkle and tablet looms, where the warp threads are manually manipulated and so give you a lot more pattern flexibility than the 4-shaft loom that I have here. (Of course, you can do manual manipulation on a shaft loom, too, but that’s really not what it’s optimized for. And, well…shiny new toy, and all that.) And so, bit by bit, I edged closer to trying out a new weaving technique.

I read some blogs. I watched a bunch of videos. I bought some books. And then, of course, I bought a loom.

Earlier this week, Branden made me some tablets on the laser cutter at the local hackerspace. Two old cereal boxes, and I have more tablets than I’ll need anytime soon.

I started weaving up a thin band, just to play a bit with the technique and see how it works.

I still need to find time to sit down and try some of the more complicated (i.e. exciting) designs, but it’s a start. The problem – and the beauty – of crafting is that every project has the potential to turn into another rabbit hole, destined to send you hurtling along paths you never knew existed or never intended to follow. It will be interesting to see where this one leads.

In other news, I have finally finished the body on Branden’s sweater, and just cast off at the hem last night. It is 29″ from shoulder to hem. Only two sleeves left to go!

As of last Friday, my first year of teaching is done. Students are graduated, grades are in. There are (of course and always) a few loose ends to tie up for this semester, but the most active part is finished.

I am exhausted.

I’ve pushed harder than I really could afford to push all year, and then I’ve been pushed farther by a department hungry for service. I wish I could say that the year ended with triumph at graduation, but really it was more of a falling over the finish line, gasping for breath. By all accounts, it was a successful year, but making it so has taken a lot out of me. (The fact that I’ve been too tired to knit for most of a month says a lot about just how much.)

Next week (as in tomorrow), I have three students starting in my research lab to work over the summer, so this past week was my only chance to recover a bit before diving back in. I ended up having to go in to work for two days of the five (sigh), but other than that I stayed home and did not much of anything.

I spun up a couple more skeins for the embroidered shetland sweater. I knit a few more inches on the body of Branden’s Blue Eyes sweater. There is hope that I will one day reach the end of it. I finished up the weaving on some tea towels to make room on the loom for new projects. And, yesterday, we spent all day finishing the landscaping in the back yard. Just the plants left to add, now.

Mostly, though, I kind of wandered around aimlessly and worked on projects when they happened to fall into my hands. I don’t have the brain power yet to be creative and think of new projects, though by Friday I was starting to see some glimmer of hope that it might return someday. I can’t say that I’m back on my feet quite yet, and I’m really not ready to start all over again tomorrow, but at least the pause let me catch my breath a little bit before the rush begins again.

I knew this year would be hard, and I intentionally cleared everything else from my schedule to make room for it. There were no ambitious projects, no outside activities. Simple stockinette with no deadlines, and no projects that required a lot of thought. There’s a time to buckle down and focus, and this year needed to be it. Next year is the year where I need to find some kind of balance, or (more probably) some kind of off-balance oscillation that allows me to exist outside of work for at least some portion of the year. I hope that means more time for crafting, among other things.

I have to say that I am looking at the ever-increasing list of things added to my workload for next year and wondering how on earth this is really going to happen, but I’m sure that somehow there must be a way. Hopefully the summer will be a place to work on that a bit, since most of the work for the summer months is long-term projects and building foundations for next year. These, at least, are things that depend on me alone, where I can set the pace. The list of things to do is overwhelming any way that I look at it, but at least the schedule will be my own and there will be fewer interruptions and emergencies from external sources (I hope). In the meantime, I fished a lingering UFO out of the closet to become my purse knitting this week, and I might just be able to reclaim my commuting space for knitting over the next few months.

So, yeah. Not much crafting at the moment, but at least a hope that there will be space for more soon. Yay for summer!

There hasn’t been a lot of knitting progress lately. The Blue Eyes sweater is slowly growing:

And this week I managed to ply off a couple of skeins of the oatmeal yarn for the next Shetland sweater:

Mostly, though, I’ve been working late, attending end-of-year campus events, and getting distracted by the nice weather outside.

The daffodils opened last week, and we have quite a happy display by the front fence now:

Then, the tulips began to make an appearance. (We just added the grape hyacinths today. I love grape hyacinths.)

And this week, our front yard has turned purple with violets. I am so glad that there are some out there; I had been thinking how perfect this yard would be for violets, but they take several years to really establish themselves. Fortunately, it seems that someone before me thought to add a few to the front yard, and now there are millions of them, and it seems that there are more every day.

While all of that is going on in the front yard, we’ve been moving mountains in the back yard, too. When we moved into this house last August, one of the big downsides to the property was the fact that the back yard was, quite literally, a sheet of astroturf held down by some red tiles. It doesn’t get a lot of sun, and apparently the landlords decided that they were tired of dealing with a lack of grass. So, they covered everything in mulch and landscaping cloth, and added a touch of green with a 10’x30′ patch of plastic grass. To their credit, they did a really professional job of laying the landscaping cloth and the mulch, and the whole yard was nicely done. But, astroturf.

Usually, I’m ok with things that are simply functional, but in this case, it made my gardeners’ heart weep. So, this spring we asked them if they’d mind if we did some (pretty major) landscaping. They said to go ahead and do whatever we wanted to do. (Have I mentioned that I really like our new landlords?)

I’ve been plotting and planning all spring, and for the last month we’ve spent almost all of our weekend time digging holes, filling those same holes with a ton and a half (no kidding) of rock, renting a plate compactor, learning to lay tiles properly, and installing in a trellis fence along the back edge of the garden. It’s far from finished, but it’s getting there. We installed a small patio for sitting, and another to hold the new grill. Then, we put in landscape edging to make some strong lines, and last weekend we started laying out the raised bed. Today, we filled it with soil, and we bought our second big round of plants.

This will be a mix between an herb and a flower bed; a few flowers and a lot of foliage plants to add green and texture to the yard. There’s a hibiscus for the center, and a couple of colors of begonia for a ring around it, with nettles, white licorice, sage, thyme, rosemary, cilantro, parsley, and a few others I forget at the moment, for an easy-access herb ring around the outside. We’ll need to go somewhere else to find savory and tarragon, and the basil and oregano will come after the last frost date. It promises to be a flavorful garden, though!

Most of the plants will get put in the ground in a week or two, probably, since there are a few that are frost-tender and we’re not quite out of the woods here just yet. But it’s a start, and the yard is actually starting to feel like a garden now that the plants are all sitting there in the middle of the bed. That was a 4-foot high heap of dirt this morning, and it feels really good to see progress every weekend. We still have a couple more panels of trellis to install, lots of planting to do, and we still need to finalize the garden path and install some more landscape edging, but it’s coming. And, if you ignore the huge piles of tools still sitting around the yard, this view from the patio is starting to actually look like a yard you might want to spend time in.

We poached those hosta plants from my grandfathers’ yard a few weeks ago, since his were in serious need of dividing. There are bleeding heart bulbs in behind the hosta, and calladium bulbs in the front. No signs of life yet, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they’re coming soon. There are also some lily of the valley planted off on the side that I’m impatiently waiting to see poking up. I wasn’t too sure about the quality of those bulbs, so it’s hard to know if they’re really coming, but I hope so.

It’ll be a few more weeks before we have everything tidied up and settled, but it’s been fun to see it coming along, and it will be even more fun to have a nice place to spend time outside this summer. Who knows…I might even manage to knit out there once in a while…