When I first saw Katarina Brieditis’ knitted face pattern, the earworm was automatic and instantaneous. Without even thinking about it, The Doors’ song “People Are Strange” started playing in my brain and has stayed there for the last seven months: People are strange when you’re a stranger Faces look ugly when you’re alone Women seem … More Faces Come Out of the Rain
When I first started knitting faces using Katarina Breiditis’ face pattern, my plan was to knit a few faces as practice for a more complicated conceptual piece, in order to learn the structure of the features and use the structure as a jumping-off-point for my own adaptations. Then I would join the practice pieces together … More DNA
Yarn talks to me. Its colors tell me stories about time, place, and memory, and sometimes it tells me about the Big Issues in Life. It doesn’t happen because the colors are pretty. It happens because the colors have a message. In fact it’s more likely to happen when the colors are strange, even unappealing … More Love and Death
The last time I machine-knitted a scarf, then dyed and felted it, what I learned from the experience was what I wanted to do differently the next time using different dyeing methods and better-honed techniques using the knitting machine and its tools. As a permanent beginner in my machine-knitting skills, that earlier scarf taught me … More I Love the Fiber Goddess and the Fiber Goddess Loves Me
I liked my original idea. I still do. It was going to be a machine-knit version of a felted, dropped-stitch scarf pattern called “Les Miserables,” which has a deconstructed look that attracts me, but not enough to suffer through hand-knitting all that stockinette. After machine-knitting it and gently felting it, I was going to fold … More The Fiber Goddess Said, Forget Your Idea, This Is Better
Over the past nine months I have been experimenting with the basics of plant dyeing using scavenged materials. The thrill of uncovering beautiful colors hidden inside ordinary plants that I never noticed before, or food waste that I would have thrown away without a thought, could almost have distracted me from the fact that I … More What Happens After You Dye?
When I’m on Ravelry, where I see the world’s best knitting and crochet, I fave project after project that were created using skills that are unfamiliar to me, and think “someday”. These last couple of years, I have designated January as that someday. January 2016 was my first swatchathon, and I learned how to crochet and to follow … More January Swatchathon
Last summer, my sister and her husband kindly invited my husband and me to their cottage rental in Cape May for a few days. There were so many things to love about sharing the space with my extended family and about the space itself, and I encapsulated the experience in a long series of photographs … More The Painted Ladies of Cape May
When my swatch of Natalia Moreva’s Coral Reef pattern first began telling me it wanted to become a summer top in Hawaiian shirt colors, I had to decide how I was going to shape the garment. Coral Reef is a stacked-stitch pattern whose stitch count triples on the increase rows and returns to its … More A Wedge Issue
The phrase I have always used to explain why I knit is “to answer a question”, but I’ve had trouble putting the question into words that express what I’m trying to find out. On one level, the questions are simple. Maybe I want to see how a certain set of colors work together, what happens … More Manifesto: The Nature of Nature
