How NOT to ring in the New Year....!

What a joke!  Last night at midnight, when literally everyone in the world was toasting the New Year, where do you suppose I was?    You guessed it:   at the computer, completing a course syllabus and sending the draft around to a whole bunch of no-doubt-sotted students.   I need to get a life.   So over the next week, I'm going to be thinking about 2011, what it ought to contain -- what kinds of things we have the power to control, which things we simply have to do, etc. -- and I'll make report.  I was reminded yesterday, when a wonderful woman named Linda came into the studio after months of valiantly battling a fairly serious form of cancer, that the fiber arts really ARE life-giving.  She is switching gears, away from marketing and her former occupation, to art history, tapestry preservation/restoration, and classes at a great local university.  She is knitting up a storm.  So let's think about Linda right now, and all of the Lindas of the world, who confront disaster and decide to grab hold of it, transform it into a triumph.  Every one of us needs to find a way to do that in our own lives, with our own disasters, large and small, and use fiber arts as an ally in our own recovery from the ravages of the modern world.    Love to everyone, and of course happy new year.    svb

....being sick, with wool....

There is something about coming down with a truly vile case of gastro-intestinal distress right in the middle of a final examination that surpasses all other experiences.  This is not to recommend it -- only to identify it as one of those genuinely sui generis experiences, like driving a dark green vintage Jaguar while naked.......

....which, by the way, I add quickly but sadly, I've never done.

What do other people do when they're almost but not quite well?  I can't grade papers unless I'm in tip-top condition (not fair), and I don't usually write -- though reading is not out of the question.  The ideal activity is knitting or crochet.  The alpha waves set loose are healing.  The feel of the wool passing through the fingers is primal, soothing, next to godliness.  So now I'm ready to knit -- not yet well, but not as sick as I was four days ago.

What will I make?   Well, I have some experimental skeins of Ella Rae wool with some amazing, truly surprising color runs, so I am going to cook up a pullover with a rolled hem, a body made of garter stitch box stitch (big boxes), and a Henley neckline as wide as one line of boxes.  Might put a hood on it.  Might also make it into a tunic.     And I have this idea for a quite strict but LLLLLOOONG tunic jacket made of Trendsetter Merino 8 Shadow -- maybe in burgundy shades -- with wide front bands and an equally tall stand-up collar, hidden slit pockets, strict set-in sleeves, wide cuffs, with the cuffs and bands made out of Cha Cha.  A ribby but flat texture fabric, with traditional ribs at the sides to slightly draw it in.  Need to figure out how to make it look elegant instead of like a clown suit.  I want to make the bands horizontally so that the ruffles are short and side to side.  That means, I think, sewing the band as well as the cuffs onto the jacket.  (Yes, I know they can be knitted up the front row by row -- but the cuffs?  I'll wing it).  Off-center buttons with loops, and so on.   All of this will go up in smoke if the band is too stiff.

Then I have a coat in mind -- Prism's big-ball kid mohair in black (or maybe it's mink), mixed with a really fine ladder novelty yarn in jewel tones that a friend found for me at a dollar a ball (I think it's Karabella), which I'm going to use as a wild excuse for playing with triangles again.   Full length coat.  Wide sleeves, maybe cast on at the armholes.   We'll see.   HUGE jewel-tone mismatched vintage buttons.   Collar creeping up the neck quite high at the sides of the neck. 

All of this might indicate a fever.  Time to check the meatloaf.   Over and out.

svb

'Growing' Flowers....

Well, the term has ended at university -- at least class sessions have ended (we set aside for the moment the inevitability of seminar papers and final examinations and smaller comparative book reviews, and so on, most of which comes home to roost a week from yesterday).  For the moment, I am at peace in my big late Victorian house, with a black-and-white not-quite-adult katten (compound word) demanding attention by rolling on the floor, digging at door bottoms when I dare to close them, mewing pathetically.....outside, snow has fallen just enough to coat the inner and lower parts of lawns, patios, steps with icing -- as if somebody spilled a big bowl of it and tried to wipe it up but couldn't get at the joints and interstices, and ....Here I am, thinking about flowers -- woolen ones especially.

As a child, flowers were one of the few pure pleasures -- alongside practicing the piano in the morning (yes, I looked forward to it....I could be alone, completely private, lost in beautiful spaces somewhere in the back of my mind); walking in woods with my big, goofy, sorely missed father; crocheting a lace curtain.  In the gardens of childhood, at my grandparents' house in South St Paul, Minnesota, or in our own (which always had vegetables and perennials), I would spend hours pulling up weeds that dared to intrude, digging up the unbelievably broad, heavy clumps of tulips and daffodils in order to split them for next season, making dolls with huge, voluptuous skirts out of the frilly, upside-down blooms of hollyhocks.  The soil was always warm; the smell was like nothing else on earth, full of promise. 

....and then there were the flowers that my brilliantly resourceful mother and I made out of felt, cloth, pinwheels, all kinds of shapes and materials, to decorate everything that seemed to need some attention.  We invented some felt tray covers, embellished them with felt flowers and beads/sequins, and then had the idea that we could sell them as kits -- So off we went to buy bolts of cheap felt, some stencil paper, bulk sequins, and we made kits with a label that said Van Bee Originals (I am NOT making this up).  Mom then took the kits to big department stores, where one buyer actually ordered three dozen (!!!!).  They didn't re-order; in retrospect, the kits were pretty amateur, with their mimeographed labels and stapled tops.  But what a joy to see our flowers and plastic-backed circles of felt in a Donaldson's department store window!

...and I think, more recently, about Val Devine, whose crocheted flowers embellished shawls and jackets and coats -- Mags Kandis, who encouraged two students at a Stitches camp in Riverside, CA, to cover over a less-than-artful section of a small handbag with ravishingly beautiful embroidered flowers -- and of course Karen Klemp.  I saw Karen recently at the annual crochet and knitting guild conference, and hauled her around to one side of our booth to show her the big tray of crocheted flowers.  She smiled and smiled -- no doubt recognizing that some of them were inspired by a class that I took with her at a TNNA meeting so that I could reconnect with some of the blooms of my own past.  I especially love the idea that we can cover over moments of pain or ugliness with beauty, simply by crocheting or knitting or embroidering shapes that originate in gardens.

....a customer came into the studio the other day in search of crocheted flowers.  She bought one of mne and then asked me if I could make a dozen more for her.  She designs scarves around individual blooms.  When I cut the price, she was astonished.  But......flowers bring peace, don't they?  They take us back to those long-lost gardens of childhood, where hollyhocks could be dolls.  Such joy to make flowers for her late at night, when the world is utterly still.  I can be 12 years old again.

svb

The Crawl.....!

It was a ROARING success, this latest multi-shop crawl.   We organized it over a mere two weeks' time, at the instigation of the people at Labor of Love in Romeo.  Three of us were 'urban' establishments (our Artisan Knitworks, of course, and then City Knits Mt. Clemens and Crafty Lady Trio in Macomb, MI).  What a splendid troupe were we!!!  Everyone was smiling.   I took our client Jean Engerson around for the entire 6-shop tour this past Friday, and both of us were thrilled half to death with the rush of urban and rural landscapes, the splendid sunshine for most of the trip, the crisp autumn atmosphere.

And the people!  Everyone was having a spectacular time.  In some respects, the mood seemed even more festive than during our Halloween crawl.  I arrived at the last stop in Romeo too late to take pictures -- it was only 5:30, but the sun is vanishing at a remarkably early moment these days, so no possibility of snapshots.  But we managed to get home before night was very far advanced.  All in all,  a marvelous day.

Two shops bear special notice.  They are mostly unfamiliar to Metro Detroit artisans, and so I urge all of you to take a road trip, first to Sweet Pea in St. Clair, then to Knitters' Hideaway in Armada.


Here is what the Sweet Pea shop looks like on River Drive in St. Clair -- and here is also what the river drive looked like from the car (and from the St Clair Inn's dining room, where Jean and I had lunch):

 Once inside the darling Sweet Pea, which had some wonderfully unusual yarns, we found NATHAN and his mummy.  Here is the young lad with his amazing handcrafted hat, with Penny, owner of the shop, on the right, and mummy on the left...!

....and then we got to Knitters' Hideaway, which is just the cutest thing.   Isabell and her husband have carved a darling shop out of the second floor of their shed on the farm -- which has horses as well as a vintage Sinclair gas pump. 

All in all, this was just a marvelous, marvelous event, a warming moment for new friendships, and perhaps a prelude to a much longer process by which the walls come tumbling down, one by one, beween all of the fiber-related enterprises in Metro Detroit.       svb

Dealing with Recession...

The question arises:   How do we get through the present economic emergency?  If only we could say when it would ease!  But the experts agree only that it will go on for awhile.   If only we could persuade people to begin spending some of their inactive cash!  We do know that 70% of the American economy is driven by consumption.  (Whether we like it or not!).  But.  For now, it simply IS.  So we do what we can do.   At Artisan Knitworks, we are dealing with it by making choices that are likely to succeed (though I confess to have bought some hats and super bulky yarns that I KNEW wouldn't sell right away -- there is the problem of my taste for the uncommon, the beautiful, the idiosyncratic....!

But there are other things that can be done, and some of them have unexpected consequences.  We have organized two multi-shop crawls, e.g. -- one of them over the Halloween weekend, and another upcoming on December 3-4.  The first one involved 7 shops ranging from Grosse Pointe to Plymouth, a distance of perhaps 40 miles.   The new one moves in the other direction, toward the small town of Romeo, with six shops.   There will be all of the usual benefits -- discounts, small bags with surprises. (all of which affords shops an opportunity to get rid of valuable items they haven't sold or otherwise want to eliminate -- we also give away copies of our own patterns).  The proceeds go to a charity -- in this case, a wonderful shelter for women and children in Mt Clemens, Michigan.  And of course that's one consequences -- the shelters run out of money at this time of year, just as the weather turns ugly, and at the bottom of a nasty recession, both of which increase domestic violence under the best of conditions).  We'll have another huge crawl in mid-summer, when all of us experience the summer doldrums.  And I'm trying to arrange a kind of 'visiting professor' program with friends in Ann Arbor, by which we will teach classes in each other's shops for travel expenses. 

But look at what has happened!  When the recession lifts, we will have forged links with people we barely knew, enriched our own lives, and grown as artisans through interaction with new people.  I had never met the wonderful women from Sweet Pea and Labor of Love, far to the north of us; now, we can visit and talk and compare notes.   Perhaps more important:   Everyone talks about the politics of yarn shops in Michigan (a phrase actually used by a yarn rep); we can break down walls, make it USUAL rather than unusual for owners to mix and mingle and visit and share.  This will be a lasting legacy of an economic disaster.  We will have succeeded in chipping away at those walls in ways that have not happened over 20 years of prosperity.

Second, and in some ways most important, we have been forced to fall back on The Local, our own resources -- local teachers, local resources.  I now carry a huge supply of Stonehedge yarns from East Jordan, Michigan - gorgeous medium and fine-weight woolens, including Deb McDermott's exquisite mill-end yarns, which our people have been fashioning into socks and amazing little sweaters.  No two skeins are identical.  Local talent, local materials, and local self-reliance.  Cultivating one's garden.
During World War II, there were victory gardens; we have gardens of knotted wool.

What a joy to contemplate all of this.    . svb

For those of you who've asked...!

..........Here is what she looks like.   Who, you say?  Well, Lisa James, of course, the maker of those amazing sheep-spinnings  (yes, I got a new supply at the New York Sheep and Wool Festival, for those of you who snap them up when I have them in stock!).  Her sister (in the purple hat) has one around her neck:

She's also wearing one of her astonishing hats.   We have three of them in the place right now -- a red one (like the one she's wearing, though not identical, of course), plus two other warm colors.  There is a story here:   Lisa has a friend who makes felt constructions (I don't know exactly what kind) and she takes the voluminous leftovers and sews them into hats -- It takes amazing creativity, because the leftovers have been cut into a myriad of shapes.   Pick one up and look at it.  And imagine the spinnings on cuffs, lapels (they can be both knitted and crocheted, though with big tools), handbags, or needle-felted into hangings.   How about handles?  Or just do what Lisa has done.   She's a force of nature -- someone who reminds me of the region from which she comes (the southwest).   svb

Copyright violations and resistant women...

...and today I had another jolting encounter with yet another woman who doesn't REALLLLY believe that pattern writers have copyright.   Or so I gather.   I will describe this briefly because it really annoys me.  A couple of weeks ago, a woman came into the studio and was rifling through "the stash," which is what I call the discounted yarn supply in the middle room.   I asked her how I could help, and she explained that she had bought my pattern for a slouchy beret (one of the patterns in our own line of patterns) and now wanted to get a number of different kinds of yarn so she could make a whole lot of them for sale.   I said, Well, you know, that design is under copyright, and you can't make copies for commercial purposes -- have a look at the back of the leaflet, and so on and so forth.  She said that all of this was news to her and looked annoyed.   But she bought a small supply of yarn and disappeared.   Today, she reappeared with yarn and the pattern and prouldy explained that she had made a lot of the hats for sale.   At that point, I hardly knew what to say, so I simply said, Why would you do that?  And she said, quite remarkably, that nobody else paid attention to this copyright thing, so why should she?   And she was smiling!!!!!!    I'd like advice from others as to how to deal with this persistent problem.  There may be no answer, so long as women continue to think that copyright applies to everything except things that fall within 'women's sphere,' where everything is supposed to be shared (otherwise we're selfish), and where women continue to starve to death -- Remember that women continue to make 60 cents for every dollar that men earn for the very same work.   Selfish indeed.     svb