Victorian Spinners & Weavers Guild

I love knitting with handspun. Love it. So, in aid of increasing my handspun stash I decided to head off to the Victorian Spinners & Weavers Guild, in North Carlton. They have a gallery/ shop, see.

I caught the tram all on my own, and didn't get lost and was quite proud of myself. The Guild Hall is a 19th century Boy Scout Hall. Very large. Very well equipped with fiber, wheels-for-hire and whatnot. The gallery was still closed up when I arrived, so I contented myself with looking at the three skeins of handspun hung on a hat tree outside the gallery. One of them was nice, but not my colours. But if there wasn't much else, it'd do.

Then someone arrived to open the gallery. They threw back the double doors into a little room where two walls were stuffed full - full - with handspun. Arranged by colour. I think I spent nearly an hour in there. Everything is priced by the spinner. Labelled by fiber, weight, price and the spinner's name. The only downside was that there were not large quantities of anything - finding more than 100g of anything was a challenge. But I rose to the occasion, and left with seven skeins.


Merino and glitz, in a pretty sea green 3 ply (not navajo). It'll be a fuzzy, flopped beret for me.


This pink/ grey/ mauve tweed was my absolute favourite. Spun by V. Harding. I just love it.

More V. Harding - nice tawny autumny colours. Whoever this mystery spinner is, she has excellent colour sense.

I wasn't sure about this, but bought it because it's nearly 200g. And it's grown on me. Natural Corriedale plied with commercially dyed merino. For some reason it reminds me of newspaper pulp. In a good way.


And this is a little scratchy and a little expensive (compared to the rest), but it reminded me of irses, so I bought it anyway. The yellows pop a lot more in real life.

Job Warehouse, Melbourne

I didn't bother to go out of my way to fabric shop while in Melbourne, but couldn't help but notice the sign in the window of Job Warehouse ('specialising in vintage fabrics', or something similar). Job Warehouse, as I'm sure Melbournians know, is a freakish anomaly. It's right in the CBD, next to an extremely popular Italian espresso bar and a couple of doors down from one of the city's finest Italian restaurants.* It is a store that by all odds should've gone the way of milk in bottles.


Here is what Job Warehouse looks like. From the back of the store looking towards the door. What you can't see is that there are several doorways on the left of the photo, into rooms filled with more fabric. Unfortunately I couldn't actually get into them, because fabric bolts were stacked chest-high across the doorways.


There are no labels, and no prices. Apparently the gentlemen that work there price according to mood. Well they liked me well enough, because I paid on average $10 p/m. For three metres of 1970s tartan acetate taffeta, two metres of (80s?) striped cotton and five metres of printed panels.


That's just half a panel I've photographed. I have no idea when these are from - ideas, anyone? The full circle skirt suggests 50s, but the print and colourway to me looks more early 80s? And the best bit - look around the panel. Along one selvedge is a printed band - for a waistband or matching button-band on a blouse. There's collar panels, and two kind of pocket panels. Pocket panels! Two kinds! I bought enough for a full circle skirt for me (too much? Should I make it only a half?) and the half panel over will become an apron.


* For those that can't afford to eat at Grossi Florentino itself (we didn't), I completely recommend the Cellar Bar - the cheaper, more casual restaurant on the side of the building also run by Mr Florentino. Most meals under $20, and absolutely fabulous. Same quality ingredients, just simpler food (spaghetti bolognaise, osso bucco, eggplant parmigiana, minestrone). Most of those dishes are under $20. Best. Value. Ever.

It's a helluva town.

Alright, it's been a little quiet round here recently. But rest assured that as soon as we get home and can download all the pics I've taken on BCB's iphone there will be some Very Interesting Posts. Get home? you say. Yes, my friends, I am in Melbourne.

Be prepared for images of the World's Most Astonishing Fabric Shop ($10 p/m for genuine 1950s skirt panels in pristine condition; $10 p/m for bird-poo stained calico; priced according to how the owners feel that day...); possibly the World's Largest Vintage Store (also selling, oddly, a stack of berets knitted to Ysolda's gretel pattern...); photos of some Very Lovely Handspun at Extremely Reasonable Prices ($6 - $8 per 50g sound good to everyone? Yep, good). Oh, and I bought the Cutest Vintage Dress Ever. 1940s, black velvet trim, fabric with little pink birds singing all over. Tres Black Apple.

Just hang on a day or two more.

edit: If customs have a tantie over my suitcase (they shouldn't - I was talked into not trying to take cheese and fresh pasta on the plane) my cover story is that I'm a fashion designer, okay? There is no other way to explain how yarn and fabric takes up over half my suitcase. Back me up, okay?

I interrupt your (ir)regular crafty programming...

for milk.

Sorry guys. I have to have a little rave about milk.

Noone in our house drinks plain milk, so we keep UHT on hand for the odd time I want to make a cheese sauce or a lemon delicious. Badly Coloured Boy drinks flavoured milk every morning (yep, we're grown ups). I do not.

Last night while prowling the aisles of Fresh Provisions in search of something that was healthy, 'snack-like' and only had ingredients that I knew what they were, I decided it was time to bite the bullet and try Bannister Downs milk. I knew it had won a lot of awards. I knew it came in the most awesome calcium-carbonate biodegradable pouch. I knew it cost $4.50 a litre (flavoured)!

I did not know that milk could taste so good. So amazingly, astonishingly good. Their low-fat chocolate milk has a mouthfeel creamier than supermarket full-cream. It was rich and cocoa-y, but not too sweet. The ingredients on the chocolatte flavour? Milk, dutch cocoa, sugar. No emulsifiers, or vegetable gums, or chocolate syrup! If I don't drink the whole litre in 24 hours I'm going to warm some up in a pan and have instant hot chocolate.

I don't think Bannister Downs is available outside WA, so, well, sucks to the rest of the world! More helpfully, all I can encourage you to do is to seek out a local, independent, environmentally aware dairy near you that cares about their product. I can't believe I have lived for 23 years without knowing that this is what milk can and is supposed to taste like. I must check with BCB, who grew up on a dairy farm (and an orchard, and has done time on nearly every organic farm between here and Nimbim, courtesy of his wandering mother) whether fresh-from-the-dairy milk is like BD. While it mightn't be practical for those families that go through a couple of litres a day to be buying BD, our low-milk consuming household shall be buying nothing but from here on in.

Socks of many techniques 3: the 'body'

The heel in these socks is going to be an afterthought heel. There are three reasons for this:
(i) I need a contrast heel because I don't have enough handspun for full socks;
(ii) I don't want to interrupt the stripes/ variegation in the handspun; and
(iii) I get bored with knitting the leg.

When I knit toe up socks, I am always so anxious to finish after I turn the heel. I get bored of knitting the legs. So I thought rather than break the flow by turning the heel, I'd just knit a long tube - I'd be finished before I got bored! After I finished the first tube, I put it on some spare needles, and started on the second. Note that I didn't knit the cuff at that point - it made sense to leave the live stitches to check that the tubes were the same length before I did the cuffs.

Another nice thing about an afterthought heel is that the sock is flat. It makes it easier to check that both socks are the same length when you don't have some crazy heel sticking out the side. Once I knew they were the same length (well, half a round out and I wasn't going to fuss) I knit the cuffs on one sock then the other. Then just the heel to go!

Zimmermann tam (or: the cute beret)

Don't I look tired? This is me, after a day at work.

Now here is an admission: I have never been very good at knitting hats. I have knit two okay ones, and two truly terrible ones for BCB. The first looked like a mushroom, and the second was comically too tight. Then I knit a Gretel for me, which, while it is an excellent pattern, just didn't work out for me, as I used the wrong weight yarn.

Then came the recipe for a tam, in Zimmermann's Knitter's Almanac. It just works. It's cute. I love it. In the 'monster tam' sizing (27" circumference as the widest part). Messing with the gauge, I squeaked this hat out of 111 yards. It has a contrast under-band. You can't really see from the photos, but this yarn is just luscious. Simply luscious. It's the most buttery soft merino, handspun by the wonderful Linda Lee. And while it looks just grey in the photo, it's actually a wonderful subtle dark grey with red, turquoise and white fibres too. Look.

I have in my hot little hands...

two return tickets to Melbourne, in October. Question is, what do I do when I get there?

Suggestions, anyone?

Little Arrowheads Shawl

At a craft show recently I bought two skeins of Frog Tree alpaca in this luminous purple colour, because it struck me as being a very 'in' colour right now, and I've been feeling a little unfashionable recently. And I was sort of sick of my faithful Noro entrelac scarf. I wanted a new scarf.

I decided to go for a little shawl instead, because (a) the gauge was close enough, and my yardage right; and (b) I dig how cute a little triangle tied in a knot looks around the neck. Much more chic than a long rectangle, I think.


This puppy followed the free Interweave pattern exactly,* and was done in ten days (I surprised myself!) I have to admit that I didn't particularly love the look of the arrowhead stitch at first (or the name of it - it sounds so dull!), but the look of it has grown on me. The name hasn't, so in my head I secretly call it 'holly stitch', because the little solid sort-of-diamonds look like the sort of wibbly way I drew holly leaves when I was a kid.

I am completely sold on shawl-ettes now. Next I want to make Laminaria, in a grassy green. And another Little Arrowheads Shawl for my nanna for Christmas.

* I lie. I didn't follow the pattern exactly. On the last row I didn't do any of the decreases, I just knit across instead of decreasing, so that I could block the edges into points. The points along the edge of a shawl are the best bit. Why would ever make a shawl with a straight edge?

Socks of many techniques 2: The toe

I forgot in my last post on this topic why overspun yarn isn't a bad thing for socks. Overspinning makes the yarn much tougher, more resilient. And thus really quite suitable for socks.

These socks are going to make that handspun go as far as possible, so the 'body' of the sock will be in handspun, with the toes, heels and cuff in some the onion-dyed Lang merino.

I usually use a short row toe for my socks. I like this toe because by the time you have to put things on a circular needle you've got lots of stitches and enough knitted-stuff to weigh them down a bit. I find magic cast-on impossibly fiddly - too few stitches, too hard to wrangle them without getting tangled.

But I recently finished my first pair of top-down socks, and I've decided that I really do like the look of a toe with those nice neat decreases better than the short rows. But I want to use every single scrappet of handspun, which means I need to knit the socks toe up.


Solution? Easy. Provisional cast on, then knit the toe down, and graft the end closed (just like in this picture). Then unzip the provisional cast, and start knitting the foot from the toe up. I get my neat looking toe, I get to use up all my yarn, and I don't have to wrangle small numbers of stitches on a circular needle.

For those that suffer second-sock syndrome, this method of starting socks has another benefit. You can knit one toe, straight after the other. Because the provisional cast on keeps the toe from unravelling until you're ready to use it, you can do both toes before going any further. Just store the toe you're not knitting onto somewhere safe until you need it. Then, when you're all "Ugh! I sooooo can't be bothered to do the second sock!" you can pull out your pre-made toe, and you're already on your way. No fiddly cast on or anything, you're already about a sixth of the way through, and on to the good bit (if your sock has a fancy stitch pattern and you regard knitting the fancy stitch as a good thing).

Observation of the day

So I was catching the train home tonight. And on my train was a guy playing with a Rubix cube. Solving the Rubix cube. Like, every face a solid colour solving. It was half done when he got on the train, and he solved it a couple of stations later, and by the time I got off a few stations after that he'd messed it up and halfway solved it again. It was fascinating - the guy moved with such speed and skill! He was so confident with his movements. I couldn't stop watching this young, very hip looking guy doing something you just don't see people do anymore, something a bit anachronistic, something so interesting to watch.

And then I realised - this is what knitting on the train looks like to everyone else.

(image by Russell Bernice, used under creative common licence. Trains in Perth look a bit nicer than ones in NY though. Pretend all that grey is white and green and yellow, and the windows are much bigger).