and just LOOK at these things.....

....and before I quit for the day, just LOOK at these gorgeous vintage buttons. We took this shot at the Manchester, NH, show......and, as I think about taking another road trip in search of more of these wonderful historical artifacts, I'm reminded that we have found buttons, buckles, frogs, all kinds of old reminders of past practices in California, Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, New Mexico, on and on. Once upon a time, all of them graced a garment or shoe or bag or cloak long since gone. What remains are the silver, Bakelite, horn, celluloid, glass, and wooden closures, the mechanisms that transformed flat panels into garments. I really love finding these things. Tap on the photo to get a closer look. We have thousands, all with the state's name on the card. svb

and thanks to everyone....

....and thanks to all of you. Larry and I just discovered that we have won some rave reviews on the Best of Detroit website -- the annual contest. We had no idea we had been nominated in the Best Fiber Arts Shop category. What an amazing string of comments!!! My dear, dear friend Julie Larson in Minnesota must have been searching for Artisan Knitworks -- she found all of this and told me by e-mail. So, if you were one of the many people who wrote so glowingly about the studio, blessings be upon your head. svb

In the Future....

..........I have been a very bad blogger lately -- so much to do, so little time. The university term has begun, and today I finally unpacked and shelved/hung the last skeins of yarn. We now have to make signs, finish button displays, figure out what to do with our wonderful jewelry and the dozens of finished garments, and generally finish.....I want to get some HUGE mega-posters that will show off Larry's incredible fibery photographs and float them along the top of the 16-foot ceilings. But that's for the future. For now, we need to think about the gala grand opening events from about September 20 through October 2, and the wonderful 7-shop crawl that will occur on the Friday and Saturday of Halloween weekend. It gives me real joy to know that we are indeed forging a network of shops, despite Michigan's reputation for fencing and guarding.

This weekend, I'm going to take some time off to drive, think, work out the kinks. I have wanted for years and years to go to the Fingerlakes fiber festival in Hemlock, NY -- smaller than the big Rhinebeck festival later this fall, bigger than a lot of others, and with some vendors I've not encountered before. So I will get into the little silver Bug and drive across Canada this Friday. I've rented a Hampton Inn room in Batavia, NY, not far from Hemlock. Then, bright and early on Saturday, I can be at the festival when it opens. I may take my time coming back. I don't have to be back in the classroom until Tuesday afternoon, and I desperately need some personal time, so maybe I'll deliberately take the long way home, stateside, and hit all the yarn shops and antique shops I can find along the way.

Of course I'll make report at every juncture, and I'll take photographs so that, at long last, you, dear reader, will have something to look at!!!! svb

Competition and Sisterhood

Well, we're moved.....at least in the formal sense. Furniture is in place; yarn and needles and books (and so on) are mostly out of moving containers; volunteers have moved in and out of the place like benevolent angels. And the place is lovely: High ceilings that remind me of a Manhattan loft, complete with girders and big metal ducts, everything a warm shade of antique white, including the ceiling metalwork. We have some minor problems with spot lighting which, I assume, a good electrician can fix in an instant. So I'd call it a success. I bought two half-moon composite planters for each side of the front door with pyramidal boxwoods; I am calling them the Elaine Clark Memorial Boxwoods because my dear friend Elaine suggested them (they make the place look even more like a loft, though perhaps a London loft.....).

Now perhaps I'll have time to knit the medium-weight version of my Orkney vest, the pattern for which Barry Klein has purchased -- he is knitting the bulky-weight version and I volunteered to create a slightly lighter version (from Tonalita) so that knitters will have two options.

But today I must say I was troubled all over again by two very important things.

The first has to do with our old location, four blocks from the Detroit city line, across the street from the Grosse Pointe Park police station, for heaven's sake.....We left because foot traffic had dropped to almost nothing and because the small shops in the neighborhood had closed. It's a recession, after all. During recessions, people go out of business.

But, now that we've moved, people have been confiding (to quote one woman a few days ago) that they didn't feel "safe" coming "down there," and are SOOOO relieved that we have moved to where they can feel "safe." Of course there is nothing at all unsafe about the old location. But the closer you get to Detroit, the less "safe" some people feel. What they are really saying is this: I don't like being close to Big Black Detroit, and so I'll patronize shops that don't force me to go where I feel uncomfortable. It's racism, pure and simple, or more precisely racialized anxiety. I have to deal with the fact that a significant number of people will continue to say that they are SOOOO relieved, SOOOO glad to see that we are located in a "better" or "safer" or "closer" place -- references that typically speak to sentiments that I despise, and which I can't bear to have associated with me. This will be my little cross to bear, won't it? All I can do, really, is to counter racial anxiety with fact and hope it is enough to cut through the ugliness.

Second: An old customer came in today to see the place -- loved what she saw -- and then said, "Of course this brings you into REAL competition with the Knotted Needle!" -- a fiber studio down the avenue a few miles. The frame of mind is deeply engrained: If you're in a shop, you must be in some kind of tooth-and-nail competition with everyone else in the same business. As we organized a shop crawl this year and last, we ran into the same thing: "I'd do it, but I don't like So and So," or "No, I want to keep my own clientele." Company reps have talked about the "toxic" atmosphere in Michigan yarn shops -- a zero sum game apparently, in which the sale of a button in one shop means that another shop isn't going to sell a button. Never mind that, if people are milling around in greater numbers, all the boats will rise. No. Here, we have to do battle, compete, and -- most troubling of all -- never set foot in one another's establishments. Of what use was organized feminism, I wonder, within this community of women? And have they never read anything about the history of knitting????

When my colleague Allyson and I went on one of my periodic shop visitation road trips (this time to Birmingham and other points northwest), we actually encountered one shop owner who was so hostile we fled within about three minutes -- actively not wanting us there -- glaring at my card as if it were a grenade.

So when the question was put to me, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that I would view myself in some kind of mortal combat with the Knotted Needle, I could only say, "I don't compete." I tried not to sound annoyed, but I didn't entirely succeed. I got a blank stare in return. I quickly added that the shop in question was mostly into needlepoint; that helped a little. But I also told her, and I guess I'm going to have to say this each and every time it happens, that I simply WILL NOT COMPETE. I view myself and my work and my yarn collection and my buttons as augmentations of the holdings of other shops, and as a kind of repository of historical understandings. We are sisters and brothers in the same life-enhancing enterprise, perpetuating a chain of understandings that can be traced at least to classical Egypt. We make beautiful objects from natural fiber. We teach. We enrich the human condition.

Let me be more precise: We are part of an ancient community that has exhibited uncommon generosity over the centuries -- clothing the poor, warming the destitute and the very young, healing the sick with the soothing rhythm of handwork, putting food on the table (as with the men who used to knit stockings for sale), protecting fishermen with layers of wool. When my mother and her sisters made woolen socks for soldiers during World War II, and woolen soakers for soldiers' children, they were not competing with one another, or with knitters in other cities. Modest wool shops contributed huge quantities of yarn to the enterprise, setting themselves apart from a good many other capitalists. When Mary Livermore's helpers put bandages and stockings together during the Civil War for public use, they certainly were not fencing and guarding in relation to other makers of bandages and stockings. Once upon a time, sewing needles and knitting gear were so expensive that women (and men) actually carried them lovingly from door to door in protective cases. We move as one. Other sellers of wool can "compete" tooth and nail if they want to. I can't prevent it. But they impoverish themselves. They insult our forebears. They succumb to Ross Perot-style economic barbarism, thereby losing an opportunity to show other makers and sellers of things a better way to move from one day to the next. I simply refuse.

svb

MOVING ON - AGAIN....

Today was the last day of business for Artisan Knitworks LLC at its original location, and I found myself feeling relieved. An odd reaction -- it's been a wonderful time in many respects. But the neighborhood has changed so radically -- businesses closing on all sides, a sense of physical disrepair in the building itself, and of course we're out of room again -- that I am looking forward to this new adventure 6 miles away in St. Clair Shores. It's a splendid new space. And while I'm not terribly fond of the storefront -- unrelieved grey blocks -- it nevertheless has great promise for this lovely company's business. We have painted the walls a creamy white again, almost buttery but not quite yeilow -- and I think I can control the effect of the not-nice winey carpet with a seating area with red, blue, purple, and turquoise. I have bought a stunning lipstick red sofa. Found pillows in ethnic designs -- more red blue purple, and cream. Today I picked up a bark-colored shag rug for the place at half price -- with red, it's gorgeous. So we're on our way.

There will be little time between now and next week for frivolity, much less the serious business of getting ready to teach by next Thursday. But. Where there's a will, as my mother used to say, there's a way. Tomorrow a lovely army of volunteers arrives at the old place to help us throw yarn into ginorous plastic bags. I need to figure out how to move thousands of buttons how to NOT damage all of those tools and garments. And then the small moving van and burly men arrive on Saturday to do the heavy lifting.

The real work lies at the other end. I am responsible for making the place feel warm, inviting, creative, a haven away from everything we don't like as much as knitting and crochet. So I will be laboring to create intimate spaces in the midst of all of those black metal and wood cases. I also need to figure out how to swag the ceiling (16 feet tall at least) with muslin and fasten some of Larry's gorgeous photographs on the swag ends. All in good time. First some sleep, and onward. I'll keep everyone posted on developments . I hope with photos. svb

Cinderella? Phoenix? Take Two?

Here are some in-the-works photographs of my experiments with reclaimed jackets! This one is crocheted, but the next one will be knitted and, if I live long enough, I'll make yet another one with free-form, knit-and-crochet sleeves. I just finished the crocheted parts last night at an hour I refuse to reveal (there is NOT A SPARE MOMENT in my life for ANYTHING). As a big bonus, you now have a glimpse of my close-to-heaven second-story deck. Up in the treetops. A very cool place to be, particularly when it's less humid than it's been in Michigan recently.

Here is what you do: Go to your favorite resale store. Find a jacket that fits you, or fits the person for whom it's intended. I went to a Value City (Value World?) where they have hundreds of high-quality wool jackets for both men and women; this jacket, which is about a size 4 women's jacket, was originally a hugely expensive, tailored blazer made of herringbone with a slight burgundy-blue stripe pattern. It's very strict and unrelieved in its lines. The idea is to give jackets a new lease on life by replacing the sleeves and buttons, and perhaps embellishing the piece here and there (though not too much). This is one of about six jackets that I bought for less than 2.50 each (!!!). Some were originally made for men: I've discovered that really cool , boxy women's 'boyfriend' jackets can be made from them.

First step: Carefully take out the sleeves. You'll need a seam ripper and a sewing machine. If you don't have equipment, take the jacket to a tailor. Once the sleeves are out, you have to zigzag or serge all around the armholes, taking care to reattach the jacket lining all around. I chose not to remove the small shoulder pads to preserve the original tailoring. You can take them out. But be sure to remake the arm scye (armhole) because the shoulder fabric has been cut to accommodate a pad. Do NOT throw the old sleeves away.

Second: open the underarm seam so that you can use the old sleeve as a template. You will need to get a sense of the old sleeve cap -- its height and width. (You also could eventually cut up the sleeve into bias strips and use them as part of the sleeve design -- I will try that with the freeform version). Make a paper pattern of the cap; and you might want to measure the sleeve length from top of cap to make sure the replacement sleeve is more or less the same length.

Third: Make up new sleeves! And I do mean, make them up. The sleeves shown here are very simple affairs -- pinned loosely into the armholes, but you get the idea...... Starting at the cuff, I crocheted a sleeve about 18 inches wide, straight up, in a trellis stitch. At the start of the armhole -- the placement of which can be determined roughly by referring to the length of original sleeve, or to your own measurements from center back down the shoulder to the wristbone , or both -- shape a cap. Leave an underarm shelf at each side of 1.5 to 2.0 inches and simply work up from each side of the shelf. For these simple sleeves, I decreased at each side on every RS row until the cap rose to its present height (about 4.5 inches). Wool is malleable; it can be smoothed into the armhole with steam and in the sewing process.

For these sleeves, I went back to the beginning and picked up another layer of fabric about 4 inches up and worked another layer of fabric downward. It's about an inch longer than the original rectangle. I then worked shells along both pieces of cuff fabric. The idea is to create a full ruffle at the cuff in two layers. The trellis stitch makes it easy to run a drawstring at the top of each cuff. But that will happen later.

I put the sleeves roughly into the armholes so that you could see them at this early stage. These are made of yarn from my stash (these are experimental jackets -- I did this the first time at LEAST 20 years ago, so I'm rusty) -- in this case, Noro Kureyon, which isn't as buttery as I'd like for the purpose (best to choose an easily molded wool). But the colors are wonderful, and they pick up on the burgundy-blue pencil stripes in the wool.

Clients at the studio are going to want a 'pattern' for all of this -- and I'm going to resist the demand. Part of what's good about this kind of project is the fact that you really DO have to feel your way along. That will be the whole point of the class I've organized to make these jackets.

Next step will be working a row of slip stitch all around the cap (to smooth it), and then picking up stitches all around the jacket armholes, first with blanket stitch (in sleeve yarn), then with single crochet. Gauge will have to be the same as the slip stitches around the sleeve cap. I'll insert the sleeves, sew the underarm seams (these could be done in the round, but they then become harder to insert -- you might need a tailor's ham), make and insert drawstrings to ruffle the cuffs, and sew on buttons. I have in mind mismatched tagua nut (vegetable ivory) buttons in five colors -- I've pinned the stack at the neck of the mannequin (see photos). They'll be deep orange, olive, blue, purple, and ashy gold. There are only 2 buttonholes on this jacket, but I will put on five buttons fairly tightly arrayed across from the holes -- I doubt that anyone will use the old holes anyway. I then will look at the resulting jacket -- I think I'm going to do a very discrete bit of surface crochet at the very top of the back basically over the neck bone, maybe with another small tagua nut button. But we'll see. It's possible to ruin this kind of thing by overdecorating and not knowing when to stop.

I'll keep you posted on the project's progress. We are moving the studio to St. Clair Shores over the next three weeks, and there is the small matter of my day job (!!!) -- THE SEMESTER STARTS ON SEPTEMBER 2. So. If I don't post for awhile, that's why!!!!!!!!!!!! svb

VW COZY?

For those of you who haven't seen it: have a look at the Beetle Cozy (knitted) at http://www.foundshit.com/volkswagen-beetle-knit-car-cover/ NEED ONE!! svb