March Take it Further Challenge

This month the Take it Further Design Challenge theme was about details. I cut my left thumb at the beginning of the month in the kitchen. Since I am left handed, holding a needle was out for most of the month. So I started thinking about machine patchwork. I have also been thinking about small pieces this month, particularly inchies. Since a 1 inch square has to be about details, I made a series of inchies using fabrics that match the month's color scheme. When I was done, I decided that a bookmark would be more useful than a pile of 1 inch patchwork squares. The end result is shown at right. I am also including some close up pictures of the inchies -- blogger would not cooperate with positioning all 5 so if you want to see them all, you need to take a look at the Flickr group for the Take it Further Challenge.




I mentioned in my last post that I have been listening to podcasts. One of my favorites right now is The Classic Tales podcast. B.J. Harrison reads classic stories and short works in this podcast. Right now he is reading Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness in installments. I have been sampling different knitting podcasts that I find on iTunes as well. Cast-on by Brenda Dayne is one of my favorites. Another is Faery Knitting by Spinning Erin. Please share your favorite podcasts with me.

March Take it Further Challenge and Spring Snows . . .

It is almost April and Spring has officially started but someone forgot to tell the weather. Last Friday, we got 9 inches of very fluffy, wet snow. That melted and then more fell last night. This picture is of my front flower bed this morning. Normally this time of year, you would see green here but not this year. I am ready for spring but the dogs are loving it. They should have been sled dogs but since they are not, they go out and eat snow, throw it at each other and wrestle in it. Then they come in and track water all over my house.
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I am procrastinating working on my Take it Further Design Challenge piece until the end of the month. This has not been intentional but it is how it has worked out. The theme is details and I decided that I would try making some inchies using fabric colors from the color scheme. The fabrics I pulled last night are in the picture. In real life, they match the color scheme pretty well. Sometime this weekend, I am going to work on my inchies and if all goes according to plan, there might be some samples before April starts.


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I did finish some knitting -- I made two clutches using the Webs Skein of the Month. This is the smaller one. It is the perfect size to hold my IPod and headphones. I have been listening to podcasts for the past two weeks and have been trying to decide which are my favorites. The larger one needs to be blocked before I finish it.

February TIF finished

Here is my finished February TIF piece. I finally decided to leave the agricultural areas plain and unembroidered and to embroider the other areas to show the development of the urban areas and their movement into the agricultural areas. The detail does not show up well in the photo, I will have to play with it some more in photoshop and see what happens.

February TIF and more knitting

I know that it is March, but I am posting another progress picture for my February TIF. I printed the image on fabric using a computer ink jet printer. I layered the fabric with a purple hand dyed cotton and am embellishing it with surface embroidery using over dyed cottons from Gentle Art. My original concept was to embroider the agricultural areas but upon further thought, I decided to embroider the urban and recreational areas instead. The embroidery shows growth and movement since the urban areas continue to overtake the agricultural ones.

I have also been knitting and finished my Elfin Hat in time for the temperature here to rise to 50 degrees. The hand spun yarn really looks excellent in the hat. I am working on a boucle scarf to match. I added several other projects to my project notebook in Ravelry, I will show off pictures when they are completed.

February Color Scheme Experiments

I have experimented with the February TIF color scheme and the results are shown here. I can't decide whether I like any of these well enough to stitch them or if I will stick with the colors from the original map. The green in the original ties in with the concept of agriculture more than the blues. I have been carrying the pictures around and thinking about them. Now you can offer your opinions as well.

I finished some knitting projects this week too but I don't have pictures yet. The Sari Silk mermaid's tail evening bag is complete. I also finished a farrow rib scarf that I started several years ago. I used a cashmere and wool yarn in black. I have two more balls of the yarn and am thinking about making a hat -- I need to work out a pattern for it because I want to have farrow rib for at least part of it.

I was able to finish the scarf because I spent 9 hours traveling from Chicago to Cleveland yesterday. Both airports closed last night due to snow and ice on the runways. I spent several hours knitting and watching the primary election commentary with a man from Munich, who was also on his way to Cleveland. He had a copy of Der Spiegel with Obama on the cover and told me that the Democratic candidates are getting a lot of news coverage in Europe. He was amused that I find parts of our primary system difficult to explain and amazed when I told him that Huckabee made Bush look like a moderate.

February TIF Photoshop Experiments

I spent some time this morning playing with the land use image from 1975 in photoshop. Here is the original photo and here are some of my favorite results:


The yellow in this photograph shows the urban area in Maricopa County in 1975. The green is agricultural and the pink is recreation. I cropped the picture to select the southeastern portion of the county to include South Mountain, the urban areas of Tempe and Mesa and the agricultural areas that I remember from that time. Then I started modifying the image in Photoshop resulting in the three versions below. I used the color scheme form the photo without modification. I could make it bluer to match the color scheme in the challenge.

The Pink Artist and a Lacrosse Cat

On Thursday, I made a 2 inch square beaded and embroidered piece for the The Pink Artist Community Art Doll Project. The title "Hopeful Heart" came to mind as I finished the piece pictured here using hand dyed fabric scraps, gumnuts silk threads, and beads from my stash of leftovers. I will be mailing it off to Alabama today.

The February challenge for the Take it Further Design Challenge is "What am I old enough to remember?" I have brainstormed a surprisingly long list of things that I am old enough to remember and am playing with some ideas for my challenge piece. There are a lot of things that I remember that we don't have any more -- tv sets with tubes, transistor radios, slide rules, rotary dial phones, library card catalogues with real cards, programming computers using punch cards and printing information off on tractor feed printers, etc. There are some things that we used to have that have come back -- I remember that we had a milk man who delivered milk, now you can have Peapod deliver your groceries and in some parts of this area Oberweiss will still deliver milk to your door. I also remember places when they were different -- when we used to go on vacations each town and city had different restuarants and stores -- now they are all the same and they look the same.

Last night, my son left his Lacrosse Goalie Stick out on the couch and our calico cat took it over. Doesn't she look like she is ready to play?

January TIF and more knitting . . .

I finished my Take if Further Design Challenge piece. I used simple stitches and a variety of overdyed threads, some stone beads, and ribbon to stitch the spirit bear and flow visualization lines on a piece of silk dupioni. I still need to add backing to the piece. I think that I will make all the pieces the same size so that they could be made into a book. I used the theme from the challenge and chose my father as the person I admired. He is featured in the "Collectors Corner Column" in the Heard Museum Shop News. He shares his love of dogs and contemporary Native American Art in the article. You can see more TIF Challenge pieces on the Take it Further Challenge blog or in the Flickr group.

I also won the first contest I entered on the Knit the Classics Blog with my pocket for Belinda. I enjoyed reading Belinda and had fun making the Mermaid's Tail Evening Bag. Now I am working on a prayer shawl for the knitting ministry at church. I finished the knitting and now have to crochet 57 little scallops on the edge. I think it may take me as long to complete the crochet border as it did to knit the rest of the shawl. I am using Lion Brand Homespun in Color 329, Waterfall, and a Lion Brand Pattern for an easy triangle shawl. The color is beautiful and the shawl is very soft. However, the yarn seems to snag easily.

A New Year, Knitting and Take it Further Challenge

I spent some time wandering around the Internet this evening. On Elaine Lipson's Blog Red Thread Studio she talks about picking a word for the year rather than writing traditional New Year's resolutions. Her word is magic. I thought about what my word would be and I think that it would be abundance. I really have everything that could possibly need but I often find that I need to be reminded to see things that way. Instead of resolutions which I think of as what not to do, I mad a list of goals for this year -- one of them is to stitch, sew and knit from my stash and to try and reduce both my stash and my collection of UFOs.

To that end, I finished the second side of a knitted pillow for my daughter yesterday. This side is worked in a purple fleece yarn with beads on it. The other side is knitted in an eyelash yarn that is purple, pink and electric blue. It will be perfect in her room once she gets her father to paint the walls purple for her.

Since I am done with the pillow cover, I am moving on to some more knitting for myself and am starting Sally Melville's asymmetrical vest from The Knitting Experience Book 1: The Knitting Stitch in a bulky wool, cotton and silk Noro yarn. I started rolling the skeins into balls and making a gauge swatch this morning. I love the subtle and bright variations in color in Noro's yarns. I think that I bought this yarn, now discontinued, 4 years ago.

I have also done some work on my Take it Further challenge piece for January. I made copies of some of the pictures and put them together in a 4" x 6" postcard size. This was my favorite combination.

Then I traced the bear and drew in some of the flow lines on tracing paper. I am going to start to put this on fabric this week.

I have a white silk dupioni remnant and some Impressions in a color called Adobe to play with. I bought the December 2007/January 2008 copy of Stitch magazine at the fabric store today to drool over the stumpwork and goldwork flower on the cover and instead saw the drawn thread and needlewoven panels on the inside of the magazine. I am envisioning a drawn thread bear -- I will have to experiment with taking apart my silk and see what I am able to do with it.

Take it further challenge --January

The January Take it Further Challenge is to create a piece of fiber art about someone I look up to and admire. I immediately chose my father as my subject. My mother has Alzheimer's Disease and he continues to take care of her at home. He is devoted to her but also makes time for himself and his passions -- playing tennis and collecting Native American art.

He spent his professional life studying turbulent flow and mixing phenomena. I helped with some of his flow visualization studies in his lab. The collection of pictures on the right are from the eFluids Gallery of Images. They are similar to some of the flow visualization experiments that he worked on. I love the patterns that the eddies form along the boundary layer between two different materials.

His other passion is Native American art. He has collected artwork for more than 40 years and donated much of his pottery collection to the Heard Museum. Pieces from the Neil and Sarah Berman collection have been included in museum exhibits around the world. He has been a friend to many artists over the years and currently volunteers at the Heard Museum. He enjoys collecting fetishes and has given us a number of them. The Zuni associate the white bear with healing. The bears come in various shapes as shown in the pictures on the left. Many of them have life lines made out of colored stone and carry bundles of gifts.

I am planning on combining a medicine bear with one of the flow visualization patterns in my TIF challenge piece. I have not decided whether I will include the pattern inside the bear or surround a white bear with one of the patterns. I also have not decided what colors to use. I don't think that I will use blue or green for my father -- he is color blind and can't see them. I have thought about adobe or sandstone colors from the desert or tennis ball yellow.