As I keep saying, I find plain stockinette tedious to hand knit, which is why I have a knitting machine. All the while I was handknitting my Kurt, a pattern by Japanese designer Junko Okamoto for an oversized pullover of modular patchwork squares, I laboriously handknitted one stockinette square after an other and daydreamed about … More Machine Translation
I wasn’t the kind of mother who knitted “Mommy and Me” matching sweaters when my daughters were little, but I seem to be making up for lost time now that my younger daughter is an adult. The way that generally happens is that I try out a new idea for myself that would work well … More My Baby and Me
When I previously wrote about using the machine knitting method Diana Sullivan calls “sew as you go”, which joins a new piece of knitting to the edge stitch of a previously knitted piece, I had made three variations on a sweater formula I’d developed and a pair of socks with a wavy shape built into … More More Panels
I had aged out of Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad books by the time they were published in the 1970’s, so they were a delightful new discovery when my husband and I came across them during our daughters’ early childhood at the beginning of the 1990’s. I remember we even had a VHS tape of … More Down the Rabbit Hole with Frog and Toad
For my first couple of years of dyeing yarn using foraged local plant materials, a good true orange was the color I craved and never achieved. It took me a while to realize that the fulfillment of my desires was in the trash and the pantry. I have written about the magic transformation I get … More A Bunch of Oranges
I’m not the first to have noticed that the limitations of my skills and equipment stimulate designs that get around those limitations or turn them into design features. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all. Or is it “mother is the invention of necessity”? Or “invention is the necessity of mother”? Whatever, last spring … More A Panel Discussion
Q: When you’re retired, what’s the difference between everyday life and vacation? A: Packing. I’m being facetious, but that reflects the fact of my privileged little life, in which what I do every day is what I want to do every day no matter where I am. Every summer, preferably in July to escape Baltimore’s … More Continuity of Operations
Last fall, when the pokeberries were ripe, I experimented with extracting their color by soaking them in vinegar in hopes of getting a more durable dye than I had previously gotten by fermenting the berries in water. In October I collected bags and bags of this invasive species and stuffed them into 2-quart plastic tomato … More Moldy Oldies
In the last month, I have dyed a wide range of yellows, oranges, and pinks, using plants that grow wild in the park at the end of my short little street. This summer I learned about using an afterbath of baking soda dissolved in tap water at a pH of 8 to 9, and it … More Pickled Pink, Pots of Gold
July in Baltimore has my least favorite weather of the year because it’s hot and humid and you can’t wear sweaters. I dread July so much that I especially appreciate those moments when the weather isn’t so awful, when there’s a refreshing breeze, when the frogs at the frog pond are sitting out in view … More A Spoonful of Magic Powder
The Interior of My Brain: A Knitting and Fiber Arts Blog 