resurrection fern

nahanni : a hand knit hat

 

 

 

This is really quick and easy to make. You can finish it in a few hours. 

Materials:

 about 100 yards of bulky , preferably hand spun yarn. This was yarn I spun last winter. I was so pleased with how it looks knitted up in such a textural pattern.

a 16 inch size 10 mm circular knitting needle or a set of four double pointed needles

a large holed yarn needle for finishing.

Instructions: 

Cast on 40 stitches and join to form a circle. 

Knit one, purl one ribbing for 10 rows. 

The next round knit in the front and back of each stitch thus doubling the number of stitches in a round to 80.

Place a stitch marker at the beginning of the round.

*Wrap the yarn twice (w x 2)  around the needle in your right hand and then knit the next two stitches together ( k2tog) . Continue pattern until you have completed a round. 

Next round knit plain.* Knit the double wrapped stitch as one stitch. This will allow you to maintain the same number of stitches in each row.

Continue these *two rows*  for 4 more sets. ( 8 rows total)

Now **wrap the yarn twice around the right hand needle and then knit the next three stitches together. Continue pattern until you have completed a round.

Knit the next row plain as before.**

Repeat these **two rows** two more times .

Now cut your yarn so you have an 8 inch tail and thread it on yarn needle. 

Thread all your remaining stitches on the thread and pull to gather them together. Sew the remaining threads in firmly.

There you have it your own warm mushroom hat. I am going to make another one , a little longer to give it a more slouchy look. 

Here is a picture I took with the partially knit hat and wool on the page with images from Nahanni National Park. Don't they look great together.

 

 

 

knitting is golden

 

Nature and its continuously changing display always inspires me. This weekend it was mostly shades of golden yellow with accents of brown, orange and purple. I really needed to knit to give my crocheting tired fingers a rest. I grabbed some wool I spun last winter, my largest knitting needles and made a scarfette using my very own pattern. Instead of vintage buttons I made a fabric covered button from the little purple owl embroidered on liberty tana lawn. I added a trim of velvet ribbon dyed with sumac. 

 

Some of this was knitted on the porch while staying warm drinking butternut squash soup. I am coming to terms with the fact that there are very few porch afternoons left before winter comes.

 

 

 

This project can be completed in only a few hours and only requires one skein of bulky yarn. It is super easy to knit.

 

A few other golden images ( lisa congdon's birch painting and rummage sale finds on the line)  from the weekend and of course since it is monday a very pumpkin filled bench monday shot. Even the hand knit socks ( thanks Bekki) match the post. 

 

  

blue sunday

Not in spirit but what I am noticing around me in nature, treasures , etsy purchases (thanks melissa)  and works in progress. 

I have so many projects on the go it is perhaps a blessing we are expecting a rain filled week leading up to our thanksgiving weekend. Are you even a little bit curious as to what some of these might be. I was looking for something after I wrote this post and found a long lost little collection of felt purses and necklaces the children and I made many years ago. Why am I telling you this ? More blues here of course and because the medallions that I used to make remind me so much of the work of melissa ( tiny happy). 

the swine flew

There are times in my creative life where I just drop everything I need to do or have to finish and I start a new project on a whim. Yesterday I had just such a time. Obviously the current swine flu situation has been occupying both my professional and personal life as it has for most of us over the past week. Things have reached a cacophony of anxiety and fear. We sit on the brink of the WHO's pronouncement of level 6 pandemic alert and read the most recent statistics -- As of 18:00 GMT, 4 May 2009, 21 countries have officially reported 1085 cases of influenza A (H1N1) infection .

 I can't help but be reminded of the book my husband read and shared with me a while back called : The Chicken's FIght Back : Pandemic Panics and Deadly Diseases That Jump from Animals to Humans by Dr. David Waltner-Toews. In this book Dr. Waltner-Toews, an animal doctor examines the problems in society that make these diseases possible . These include poverty, slums, overcrowding, poor sanitation and a sparsity of consistently clean water. I guess in our present situation it is the pigs that are fighting back. 

It is not the pigs that are to blame for the present situation but "us".  It was interesting that a day after I created this little softie on a whim I read an article on line by Mark Henderson, science editor for the times UK which concluded with the following paragraph. 

"While a swine flu pandemic remains the greatest danger, a threat that passes will carry grave risks of its own. If it promotes misguided suspicion that surveillance, public health plans and antiviral stockpiles are a waste of time and money, it will leave us ill-prepared the next time around. And there will be a next time: pigs will fly before influenza stops mutating. Our pandemic defences should not stop at flu: we also need to guard against flu fatigue. It can be almost as hazardous as the virus itself."

Edgar was napping beside me as I embroidered these wings enjoying the warmth and fresh spring air out on the porch yesterday. 

Edgar tried the wings on for size before they were sewn onto the little hand knitted piglet. 

This was just sent to me with the line: Don't do this and you should be okay.

A Few Good Eggs

To pass the time before my little shop update I wanted to share some "good" eggs with you on this , the sunniest "good" friday I have seen in recent memory. My son was working on an "egg" poem for the friday poetry and pictures installment but I am afraid it isn't quite ready to be hatched yet. 

This morning I reread the poems "in the egg" by Gunter Grass and "nest eggs" by Robert Louis Stevenson . If you have any "egg" poem recommendations I would love to hear about them.

I hope your weekend will be filled with all the hope, life and potential an egg can contain. The last egg I want to share with you is part of my mom's collection and although it is cracked and chipped it is very precious and worth preserving. It is the only egg that remains that my father decorated. He decorated a few eggs with colored paper and glue to look like kings and queens. 

The Red Bird of Courage

“You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.” ARISTOTLE I have been blessed in my professional life to have gotten to know a number of very courageous people but the ones that I want to honor today with this post are the veterans of the great wars. It is because of their courage that I have been able to build a nest ( my home) , find love and have a family. It is because of their courage that I do not fret and worry about my safety and the safety of my children and this allows the time and energy to be live a creative life. Lest we forget , our children owe so much to these brave men and women. ( I made this little nest with a fiber from Habu that looks like barbed wire but is actually 100% linen with persimmon extract and is actually made from recycled fishing nets. It is very special although a little difficult to work with. I ended up knitting the nest because it kept breaking when I tried to crochet with it. I needle felted a red bird with merino wool and a tiny bit of yellow for the beak. I didn't embellish the bird because I wanted it to be very simple and striking in the nest. The egg is a silk cocoon. You can just imagine how the three kitties in the house were interested in this little project. I will share some funny pictures of this with you later. )

Felted Stone Buttons and a New Top

If you look back at some earlier posts in this blog you will see that I love to knit additions onto thrifted or purchased inexpensive tops. I found this lovely grey cotton with a touch of cashmere top at my mega grocery store a few weeks ago. I sewed a strip of picot lace trim to the top edge where the collar starts and then picked up stitches through the lace openings with some beautiful red manos del uruguay yarn. I knitted a very simple collar about three inches long and case off. I crocheted three button hole loops on one edge. The whole idea behind this really simple top was to have something to showcase some small felted stones that I was planning to turn into buttons. I love to turn things around. Most people would make a top and then find buttons to match. I do the complete opposite. make some felted stone buttons and then create a top to display them on. I chose the flattest stones that I had recently felted and sewed them on the collar with red flat vintage buttons on the reverse side for support and also for fun. This top can be worn with the closure in the front or back but I just took pictures of it one way. I really love those colors together. Oops, that's Byron the newest cat in the house being so naughty. He must have read Rob Ryan's tile on the kitchen table. I think felted stone buttons have become one of my new favorite things. The nest and bird were made this weekend and I will talk about those tomorrow perhaps with some more naughty kitty stories. For now I will let your imaginations run wild. West Elm opened up their first Canadian shop in Toronto and I visited it this weekend. Guess what they had for their christmas decorations. Crochet covered glass balls and snails. I had this strange feeling that they may have been reading my blog. Hmmmmm. Don't forget to leave a comment on yesterdays post for yet another awesome giveaway.

The Color Red

RED: Symbolizes virtue and truth. Red wards off evil and its vibrancy is life-affirming. It is the color of life, luck, prosperity, power, glory, and happiness. That is a picture of my kitchen table the morning after the american election. Last night as I watched the election coverage and caught up on my emails I was knitting with red wool and felting stones with greys and a touch of red. I had no idea that red would be the focal color of the newly elected american presidential family but I am not at all surprised. I have been thinking about how much Barack Obama reminds me of my favorite canadian Prime minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau. I am not the only one who sees this similarity . And now look at the newest Trudeau on the political scene, newly elected to parliament and talked about as a possible future candidate for the liberal leadership race, Justin Trudeau, one of Pierre's sons. Before I run the risk of turning this into a political blog I will share with you my WIP. I am knitting a yoke on an inexpensive grey top I purchased recently. I am using manos del uruguay yarn in the color red. I needed some buttons for this so I decided to felt some thin smooth stones in greys and red to use some of them as buttons. The last few days the weather has been amazingly warm. It was my really long work day today but I managed to escape for a walk in the woods at lunch time and I brought along my newest stones to photograph in a very special area not far from work called " Happy Valley". Very apropos wouldn't you say. You might recognize this view from earlier pictures but now the trees are bare and the leaves on the ground are all brown . The smell of the leaves and earth was wonderful. The brightness of the green moss and ferns against the brownness of the leaves and greyness of the trees certainly made me happy. I had fun looking for interesting places to photograph the stones. I will definitely post some pictures when the top is finished. Thanks so much for your show of support, I really appreciate each and every one of you.

I Miss my Snails

That was one of the last pictures I took of one of my garden snails this autumn before they went into hibernation. It has been weeks now since I have seen one nibbling on some garden greens and last night I was searching for something in google images and came across this amazing photograph of a snail tree. That made me think about how I missed my little friends and it was then that I had an idea for a little whimsical covered stone. I knitted a tiny armless cardigan for a stone that just happened to be lying next to me near the couch. ( those sea stones are just about everywhere inside and outside of my home :) The cardigan even has button holes, a tiny little pocket and three lovely blue/green vintage buttons. It was then that I noticed a cute little orange felt fellow sitting inside one of my shells admiring the cosy little cardigan. I turned my head for a moment and when I looked back he had crawled out of the shell and into the little pocket. He didn't even leave a slime trail. He said the pocket fit like a glove and it was then that he decided it would be his temporary home at least until winter had passed . Of course I had to agree it was the perfect arrangement. He ended the evening by handing me a small bouquet of bittersweet flowers , well because his favorite color is orange and its hard to find flowers in the garden in mid October. I thanked him and told him that this evening had been only sweet and not bitter at all. We both went to sleep . Me in my cosy bed with the warm down comforter and my friend in his cosy pocket of the woolen cardigan. I was wondering if you would like to suggest a name for my little orange pocket friend. He was so cold when i found him that he must have some kind of hypothermia induced amnesia and he can't remember his name.

My Dream Home is a Yurt

 That's right a yurt. I would love to live in a colorful felt yurt in a valley with a stream , a beautiful climbable mountain of the north side and a friendly forest to explore on the south side. The stream would run by the yurt in an westerly direction , starting where the sun rises and ending where it sets. This would be the official clubhouse for the Guild of the Forest Fern which by the way is always taking new members. The other day I was when I was feeling rather lazy with a viral infection I looked at the pile of needlepoint wool that I had found at the thrift store , in colors that were very Matte Stephenish . I started to knit a pattern of alternating squares using two colors picked randomly from the pile of yarn. I told you I was feeling lazy. I made a rectangle not knowing what it would become but I was really enjoying the pattern that arose from my needles. When I had used every possible color I stopped. I was thinking of turning this into a softie of some sort but then I remembered Matte had posted an illustration he did for a travel magazine recently . It was a picture of a yurt. That is how I decided this rectangle was going to be part of a yurt. I added a plain green knitted dome shaped section and then sewed the yurt onto a large piece of mustard yellow felt ( also found one day at the thrift store). I used matte's illustration as a guide to add the details : windows, door, entryway, supports ( this is a raised yurt incase of flooding from the stream) , antennae ( we need internet access so we can blog and post on flickr) and trees of course. The details were embroidered either with cotton embroidery floss or the same wool the yurt was knitted in. Here is a picture of it all put together and some detail views. Something about this just didn't feel right. It was too loose and I could only imagine the wind blowing through all the openings in the knitted stitches. Not to mention the fact that the definition of a yurt is that it is made of FELT!!! I thought about this for about 2 seconds and then grabbed it and headed down to the basement and immediately through it in a washing machine filled with warm water and a little soap. It was risky. I had no idea what would happen. I didn't know if the knitted section and the felt portions would shrink together of pull away from each other. After one cycle I fished it out before the spinning started and I loved what happened. The colors melted together in the yurts fabric and made it fuzzy and warm appearing. The lines of the details became less straight and almost seemed to give it a life. It started to look less like an object and more like a character. I love what happened to the smooth flat felt background . It took on a textured surface like cobblestones. My very risky experiment was a success. Here you can see for yourself. Welcome to the new official clubyurt of the Guild of the Forest Fern.