CHICKPEA SEWING STUDIO

Purple is Beautiful

Did you notice? Purple is everywhere this season, lavender, mauve, cassis and so on. As an habit I don't go near this color until one day I did. I am starting to wonder if we can just decide what color suit us just because we say so...

(caption: yes, my nose is red, guess what I have another cold!)

Fuzzy picture above to prove my point. The slouchy hat, ( I vowed never to wear those once) is made from a great pattern called Pasha by Jane Richmond. You can find it on Ravelry too. The yarn I dyed a few weeks ago. I love this pattern, so much so I want to make another one right away, which is like the reverse of the second sock syndrome.

To return to my last post about homesickness, I was very touched by your comments. As expats we seem to have very similar experiences. Feeling like a stranger back home, not fitting in completely here as soon as we open our mouths to speak (with an accent), even though America is home now and probably forever. I mused this summer that if I move back to France, I would have to live in Paris, is it because half the people there are not French? I miss France but I don't feel french, when I speak french to Finn, he gets stressed out. Not unlike most that take the language in high school I bet! I am starting to see the romance through american eyes and it's pretty weird, take this song for example, I think it's lovely. The video is fan made, and the song is from an old album. I covet an MP3 file of this so terribly, does anybody have it? Shameless plea...

Hi there!

It's been a while since I showed my face here, so here it is, with no make up on in the bathroom mirror.

The hat is fresh off the needles and I have been wearing it a lot. I don't like slouchy hats but I like berets, that makes life complicated. I made this one very small so it fits snuggly. Not that you can really tell on this picture...

And I almost forgot to write about the coolest give away ( Which I hope to win myself very much). On Montague is giving away a gorgeous calendar here. Her photographs or just the daily inspiration I need.

Mittens

To make a pair of thumb-less mittens for Finn, I separated a skein of Patons (cheap) Classic Merino Wool into skeins and dyed them different colors. It's very economical for a tiny project like this one, since it requires so little yarn to complete and the perspective of having to buy a lot of different colors didn't appeal to me.

Here are the completed mittens, so fast and easy:

The really hard part is to get Finn to put them on and KEEP them on.

Berry-flavored yarn

These two skeins were dyed last Monday during one of Finn's longer afternoon nap. The goal was to try "space-dyeing" and it all went according to plan with the purple experiment. With the pink I had more trouble, mostly because I started with a less than agreeable color mix. After 10 frustrating minutes of stirring and grumbling I just threw every goblet of dye mix in the pot with an annoyed sight. And bingo! a saved skein again, pink like a berry yogurt.

These two will become cowls, one for my mom and one for moi.

Inspired.

These beauties popped out of my lawn this week, they know that they are safe with me! Nature is giving me a gentle kick in the rear end to finish a Noro cowl. The pattern is really beautiful and I will be making many more of those using smoother yarn, dyed by me ( more on that tomorrow when my camera is juiced up once more). Noro yarns really know how to interpret nature, or so it seems:

 

All together on another subject, my new pattern is coming out at The Sewing Republic in two days. That is very exciting news (for me that is) and to celebrate I will be sure to have a really good give-away. So stay tuned and you'll be glad if you win this one.

wink wink

Teal

My Rose Red is now accomplished and drying on a plate. This drying business seems to take ages, I am so impatient to put it upon my head and walk about. It's not cold enough to wear a hat anyhow, since I am drying it in the warm evening sun as I type...

I feel good about the hat, because over 80 blocks did get sewn for the shop quilt on Wednesday, which means that even though there's a good 70 to go, I feel so much less lazy and loser like. Good Job (pat! pat!)

I should be sewing...

I really need to get sewing, I have so much to do in that drawer... A large quilt for work, a Sewing Republic  project, a bigger sleepsack... I am getting more and more stressed about it, it's always in the back of my mind. Every morning it's the same, "go on, set up the Bernina, the rest will sew itself!" but it's just not happening and I go to bed with the knowledge of my procrastination...Unless I get to it today? I need to.

Instead I have been picking up this beret every evening, and it's almost done. I have been loving every minute of it, not a single "lazy" row.

 

October is Sock Month

Did you know that October is Sock Month?  I didn't but now I do and yesterday evening was spent looking for the "one". The perfect sock pattern to use with the dusty mauve fingering yarn I dyed in the morning. Another fact that had escaped me is that to make knee high sock you need lots and lots of yarn, if you want the socks to have cables you need 800 yards of yarn! Keeping this in mind, I opted to dye a little more than 1000 yards of superwash merino yarn. I want to show you something that I find important about the way yarn is presented in shop, being web shops or local stores. When the yarn is still a skein it looks like the picture on the left:

 

After more than an hour of winding the yarn using a ball winder and two chairs, it now looks like the picture on the right. I think that it's a much better representation of what the yarn will look like when it's knitted. My friend Karin asked readers to express an opinion about whether you would rather buy yarn as skeins or balls. I know that it's somewhat breaking with tradition but I would love to see what the yarn looks like in balls before I buy. Maybe listings could include both a picture of the skein and a picture of the resulting ball. I would love it if you would leave me a comment with you opinion or if you want you can go to Karin's post and comment.

 
Getting back to the perfect sock pattern, an ethereal concept at best, I think I have a good candidate to offer for your consideration. The pattern is by Cookie A and looks like this:

I am using her picture here, I hope she doesn't mind. The pattern comes with all the modifications you can dream of, all the feet, calf, height sizes possible. I can't wait to try it. Although I need to read quite of few pages of the pattern to determine my size first. If it goes well I might enter those in next year State Fair, that would be fun!

The things we make ourselves

I want to thank all the people that took time to leave me a comment this past few days, I am really touched by your enthusiasm with my dyeing experiments. I have been lousy for months at answering most comments personally and I decided to answer questions in the comment section instead of directly to the sender. Just rest assured that I read and enjoy everything you write here.

xoxo

Back to business!

Last night I started knitting my hand dyed yarn into Isolda's Snapdragon Flip-top mittens. I was overwhelmed with the sweetest feeling of achievement. Looking at the variations of the yarn form little clouds of color in the knitted stitches, was ridiculously exciting. Pointing to the tiniest of spots, look, look! It reminded me of the drunken joy I feel when Finn learns new things. The uncontrolled clapping that follows... If knitting my own yarn makes me feel this high, I am going to do a lot more of it, while I wait for the little one to amaze me by pointing to his nose.

 

Much fussing over colors

Taking accurate picture of complex colors is hard work and I have been working hard at it. With moderate success. Teal has to be my ultimate nemesis today, I am starting to hate teal's guts, I don't think it's healthy.

 

 This is the best shot I could take of a slightly greener, slightly deeper skein I dyed on Saturday. I love the color gradations in the yarn, I think they will knit up well (fingers crossed). Thanks to/because of Teal, I now know how to set up a custom white balance and use a grey card. The grey card was in fact printed "a l'arrache" as the French would say from this web page. I am sure it printed all wrong and yet the pictures are much better. At this point I don't really care.

 

And this is the best I could do, for a slightly deeper, slightly purple-er skein also dyed on Saturday.

Both those skeins are Henry's attic Kona 100% superwash merino, in DK weight. They are meant for great things, when I recover!