Knitting With Granny LJ

Good morning.

Yesterday was the Saturday market.  We had a good turnout both in vendors and in  buyers. 

I was touched by a young man who came into the market to find out how to get a table for his work.   I remembered him from Shorebirds.  He was a vendor there for a while but relinquished his space a couple of months ago because he had no sales. 

This is a young man who makes rustic furniture and windows and mirrors on which he etches portraits of wild animals.  The work is good.  Almost breath taking in the detail work he does.  But his work  has to have a very specific audience — and that may or may not be available in a show,  or a market or a shop like  Shorebirds. 

He brought in some pictures of his work.  As I looked at them he got signed up to do the winter market in Yachats.  Everything he did was high end work — price-wise.  He had nothing that was low end or middle work.  I talked to him after he signed up and assured him that he might consider doing some middle to low end work and discussed what the little local markets around here would bear in terms of pricing.  I got done with my little monologue and he looked at me and said, “But I have a family to support.”  

 I told him about my cousin who does metal work and brings to the shows the things that in the affordable range and also brings a notebook with pictures of the large jobs and comission work he has done.  The young man shook his head and handed in the application for the winter market and said, again, “But I have kids to support.”  I will be surprised if he shows up for the winter market.

What I have found out in about 10 years of doing markets and selling my caps is that  very little  is predictable,  but unless you have access to a credit card machine and account, high end items are probably not going to do well at the shows and markets –especially here on the coast.

One of the reason I opted to do caps (there are several reasons) is that I could make them and sell them at a marketable price to entice the “Wow. This is  really neat, I’ll take it.”  buyers.  And I have priced the caps at fairly high rate so that if someone comes along and really wants one but cannot afford it, I can knock some money off the sale and not lose money on the yarn.   Also,  I like to work in the new and gorgeous yarns and doing a small project like a beach walk cap means I can indulge myself in the fun yarns and not come out on the short end of things money-wise.

But this young man does not see this.  My guess is that he will probably not do the show in January, and that will be too bad, because he obviously has a gift for woodworking. 

In the meantime, I have 6 or 7  caps that need to wander out of the basket and get the finish work done and get  tagged and in  the outgoing bin. I hope that the young man makes the right decision for himself and his family. 

Have a good day, and good knitting.  Granny LJ

Good morning.

Karen and I just got back from taking the dogs, Red and Parker, for a beach walk. Parker’s way of going on a beach walk is rather hard on the person who holds the leash.  It is as if everything will go away if he does not smell every smell as fast as possible.  And he wants to make sure that he gets to all of  them. 

I try not to be too dog-obedience oriented, because the way he treats the beach is the way I go into a yarn shop.  Though I am  not dislocating the shoulder of some person holding a leash, I have to go through a shop 3 or 4 times before I see everything and be sure of my decision making.

Even a yarn shop that I have been in frequently needs a 3-time go-over.  I walk in and look at all my base yarns to see if any new colors have been added.  I then look at all the speciality yarns to get an idea of what I cannot live without.  Then I go to the books and magazines and see if there something there that would be a glorious addition to my book and magazine collection.  Then I go the sale bin and see what has been tossed there and is singing “Take me home.”  The sale bin is rather like the window of a pet store, with all the puppies jumping up at the window hoping you will take one of them home.  

The second  time through the shop is a little slower and I am looking hard at everything again.  By this time I have a basket to put the treasures in.  If I have a specific yarn that I want to stock up on, I go get that first. Then I look at everything else again.  This time much slower and with more contemplation.  I stop at the speciality yarns that might make a good color accent in a cap, and add some of those to the basket.  Then I go back to the sale bin and rummage that to make sure I have not overlooked something there, and if I have, into the basket it goes.  Then back out to the books and magazines and study them again.  And if any are shouting at me to take  them home, they go in the basket, too. 

I am very glad that yarn shops do not have shopping  carts.  If they did,  I would definitely be in trouble. 

The third time through the shop, I go into each area of the shop and look again.  And I look slowly to absorb all the colors and feel the textures of the yarns.  Sometimes I have to sit down and look  and think and enjoy  the beauty of the yarns.

This is a problematic time.  Sometimes yarns in the baskets go back onto their shelves and others replace them.  Unless I am stocking up on a yarn  that I use regularly, I allow myself only one basket full  of yarn (not counting the books and magazines). That tends to keep the money outlay down a bit. 

Once home with the new arrivals, I study and ponder the books and magazines to see if any ideas pop into my head and need to be immediately cast on.  If not, then I pick one yarn from the bag to start a cap.  Then I put a fun movie into the  disk player and cast on the newest cap. 

Well, that is about all from here for today.  The sun is shining and ocean is so blue it hurts your eyes.  Happy knitting.  Granny LJ

Good morning.

Today It is customary to try to look around at the things you feel thankful about. 

Like most everybody else, I have things in my life  I wish I had done differently, but I am truly thankful for my sons, my family, my friends. 

But I think of one thing that is the kind that infrequently makes the list or would be down on the lower end of a 1 to 10 list — and that is making the caps.  I am thankful for several reasons. 

 I am always a little, but pleasantly,  surprised when someone buys one of my caps.  And that is not only for the little bit of income,  but also because someone thought my work was good enough to spend money on. 

It gets me out of the duplex and into the company of real people when I do the shows.  You know how a new mother starts talking to adults like she talks to the baby.  Well, my daily company in the normal course of things is Red and Parker.  They are long on the listening to me, but real short on  back and forth conversation.  And their topics of conversation are limited to:  “Treats, now?”  “I really don’t want to be out in the rain.”  “I  really don’t have to go potty now while it is raining.”  “Are these all the treats your are going to give me?”  “When is the next walk.”    “Do I really have to go into the kennel again? I promise I’ll never tear up any magazines any more.”  Rather limited topics of conversation.  (Just a reminder:  Red and Parker are the English Cocker Spaniels who live next door.)

I have a creative outlet in the caps.  Unlike other members of my family, I have never been a really creative person.  And knitting the caps lets me make things that are beautiful as well as useful. 

I am grateful to have started knitting all those years ago though I never would have thought that it would be  such a pivotal activity in my later years. 

I look at the yarns that are piled up around me and see the possibilities of my life and not the negatives.  And when a person tries on one of my caps and then buys it — well,  it is a sort of reinforcement of being part of the human race. 

So I am thankful for my knitting and for being able to get out and do the markets and shows.  But it is something that is not on the end of my list.  It is on the top of the middle of my list — after my family and friends.

And I am grateful that we have a time, in this country, set aside to take a look at things around us and be able to say thank you. 

I hope you have a great Thanksgiving day.  One filled with family and creativity and may the good of Thanksgiving be yours all through the year. 

Thank you and happy knitting.   Granny LJ

Good morning.

I spent the day yesterday working on the mushroom cap.  I have the base finished and have started the top. It is a very simple cap to make. 

Cast on 93 stitches on circular needles (I use size 6) and then bring the first stitch  from the right hand needle and  the last stitch from the lerft hand needle together on the left hand needle and knit the 2 together.  That way you will have 92 stitches on the needles.

Then do 1 row of purl.  The purl row makes a nice finished look to the bottom of the cap that a row of knit stitches does not. 

After the purl row is done knit one row.  Then knit the second row and add a stitch every 8 stitches.  This will create a bit of a roll to the bottom and tends to mimic the base of a mushroom. 

Then have a jolly time knitting around and around and around until the base or the stem reaches about 8 inches.

When I did the prototype cap, I  knit the stem  and then purled a row and added stitches once around at about every 5th stitch.  This time I did the increases on the white stem part.  I increases every 3rd stitch for one round and then knit a round and  repeate these 2 rows  twice more.

Once the increases were done, I started the red yarn.  I did a row of knit and then purled a row and now have started the red top of the cap.  Today, I will start adding the white bobbles. 

The increases below the color change tends to mimic the underside of a mushroom cap. 

I am really eager to go to work on it this morning.  I will get to see today how  the image in my brain matches the cap when it is finished.  When I experiment with a shape or colors or whatever, it is always a bit of a surprise.  Sometimes they match up.  Sometimes they don’t.  But if  they don’t match up, then I will be able to see where I could improve  whatever  does not work correctly. 

I have talked to knitters who said that they HAD to have a pattern to be able to knit anything.  Sometimes I wish I felt that comfortable working with a pattern, and I think if the cap pattern makers had been a little less absurd with the patterns they create, I probably would have worked more from patterns.  But since a lot of the cap patterns  tend to be rather impractical — both in design and for here on the coast — I  have evolved my own way of doing things.  And it has been, so far,  a good thing.

Well, I need to get to those bobbles. 

Have a good day. And good knitting. Granny LJ

Good morning.

The weather here on the Oregon coast continues to be sunny, but this morning when Karen and I got the boys out, it was pretty chilly and the wind was threatening to head inland and pick up speed.  But it was only a threat, and we were able to walk the boys for about an hour on the beach.  I found a lovely piece of jasper with agate mixed into it and put it in my pocket along with several other rocks that needed a good home.  Fortunately I found one for them all.  We met an older couple who  had come down on the beach — he to take pictures and she to look for rocks. 

In a very real way, me walking on the beach looking for pretty rocks is just like what happens when I walk into a yarn shop.  Especially one I have not been in before.  I am delighted with all the color and the beauty of it.  Karen likes to go into a store and get what she wants and leave.  I do too, when it is the grocery store or a stationery shop.  But not in a yarn store — or even a bin of on-sale-for-a-dollar yarns that are all but throwaways.

One term I learned in my serious rock collecting days was “leaverite.”  My source for that term came from a man who had been rock hunting since about the turn of the century.  One day when I showed him a rock I had picked up,  and asked what it was, he said, “Leaverite.”   Then he laughed and said, “Leave’er right there.” 

Yarns can come in leaverites too.  For what I do — make caps — there are a lot of yarns that I would love to work in and play with, but I know that the kind of cap they would make would not be very practical for Oregon coast beach walks.   Before I started applying the leaverite principle to yarns I  brought home  bags  full of yarn that have no business being in a beach walk cap.  In fact, Karen is still nattering at me about the huge bag of incredible ribbon yarn that I bought for over $100 because I thought the yarns in the bag were gorgeous. 

Well they are.  And they are gorgeous hanging from a hook.  I have looked at those yarns for almost 2 years. And I have not even a whisper of an idea  — yet — what to do with them.  They are beautiful.  But, realistically,  they should have been determined to be leaverites. 

Another place in a yarn store that I search diligently is the mark-down bin.  Because I do only caps I can get by with much less yarn that someone who does sweaters.  I have been known to rummage the mark-down bin and come home with some really great  leaverites, as well. 

 Yet, recently I had a bit of justification on the leaverite issue — I matched up a pop of speciality lace yarn that I was sure would end up being a leaverite with a gorgeous rich lavender wool  yarn.  So I am going to do a two color project with that rich lavender as the base and the other as  accent.  Will have to rummage the around the work area and find exactly the correct pattern, though I might be able to do it like the Sunshine cap.  Or maybe I can figure out a pattern that will make it look like the inside of Aladdin’s treasure cavern. 

Hey, I need to go rummage and see what  ideas I can come up with. 

Have a great day.  Granny LJ

Good morning:

Yesterday was the weekly market downtown.  It was a quiet day.  I enjoy doing the markets, even if I don’t sell much.  Beginning markets can be slow to start up and many vendors get tired of going to them and paying for space without so much as the cost of the space coming back to them. 

Yesterday, we had that happen.  A young man who makes bears carved out of wood set up beside me. The bears are the size that would be fun on a patio or a deck.  They sell for about $50.  He came in and set up at the table facing the door.  He had some friends come in and a couple times possible buyers walked by and talked to him.  Nobody bought anything from him, though.  By about 1 p.m. he  packed up and left.  He had been in the space  since 10 a.m.  (Closing is at 4 p.m.)  He was one of those vendors who think a show is going to make his or her fortune and if they don’t have  standing room only about their space, they decide the show is a bust.

I had one sale yesterday.  Made my space. That was all.  The other capper, had a couple of sales.  The lady  with the rubber stamps had a sale or two.  They were both being professional and talking to potential customers about the weather or some other opening remark to the customer and then moving on to talking about their product. 

The two ladies on the other side of me were new.  One of them had gorgeous dried  flower arrangements.  The woman next to her was working the space of the new florist in town.  The lady from the florist, had a daughter that had gone bad and the daughter had a son who had gone bad.  That was all this woman talked about during our time at the market.  She sold nothing for her friend and the lady with the dried flower arrangements sold nothing either.  The two of them were too busy talking about the one vendor’s family problems. 

Eventually the lady with the dried flowers moved over and started talking to me.  We talked about shows and  the product that we make and really did a business-type conversation.  The lady with the family problems was on the phone.  When she got off  the phone she came over and started talking about all the problems again. 

As far as I know neither of them made any sales, and while we did not have a great crowd of people, about 100 or so, they lost out altogether because they were not working their space. 

How do you work a space?  I have learned the hard way.  This is what I try to do, though  I still do have lapses.  I greet the customers going passed my space.  I always have some cap in process that I am working on. If a customer stops and looks at my caps, I try to make them feel comfortable and encourage them to pick a cap up and look at it  and to feel free to try the cap  on.  Sometimes they do.  Sometimes they don’t.  If they stop we talk a bit about knitting and caps, and I have my tried and true stories to tell. If they try on a cap, I hold the mirror for them, making sure that they do not get the side of the mirror that magnifies everything.  If they decide to buy a cap, that is cool.  If they decide to walk on, I wish them a happy day.  With a smile.

Personal problems and personal issues do not belong at a market.  It is a place to sell things, not to debrief how the garbage man dropped your garbage can and littered your front yard with trash and did not even clean it up, and that was the 16th time that has happened and if it happens again, you are definitely going to call his boss. 

Even in a market that is as new as the one here on Sundays, you stick to the marketing and your work and you  do what you can to make  the customers feel good about themselves.  And you stay for the entire duration of the day. 

I have the mushroom cap cast on and about 3 inches of the base done.  I will be working on that today.

Have a good day.  Granny LJ

Good morning

The sunshine is back and Karen and I took the boys for a beach walk this morning.  It was just the four of us.  We made new tracks in the sand.  I don’t know why weird things like that give me a bit of a thrill.  But they do. 

Just like when I saw the mushroom with the red cap. 

When I first moved to the coast, I found an A-frame at the end of a very  narrow gravel road that was pocked with pot holes and  I rented it.   It was lonely and  lovely, surrounded  by trees and I could hear the song of  the surf when I opened the window in my bedroom.  There was a deck out  back  that I enjoyed but it was not in  the greatest of shape.  One afternoon I walked around  on the deck looking for places where my dog could escape  and go walkabout.  I was nailing a bit of wire over a dog-escape place and that is when I saw it.  It was tucked under the low eaves of the roof — a mushroom with a white stem,  and a brilliant red cap that was scattered with white bobbles.

Since that time I have found out that the mushroom is extremely lethal, I have been told and forgotten its name, and I have been fixated on doing a cap that echoes that mushroom.  I have the white and the red yarns and the yarn with the white bobbles.   But I have not been able to figure out how to carry that bobble yarn.  I did a cap that was a good likeness to the mushroom shape.  I showed it to the lady who is a mushroom expert down here and she said, “Yes, the shape is right.” 

Well, two days ago I was rooting around in the stash and wandered through the bin that holds the “I don’t like the way this is turning out, so I’ll work on it later”  projects.  At the bottom, I found the beginnings of a black cap mixed with an orange speciality yarn that I had started so long ago, I cannot even remember when.  What I had tried to do was to get the bobbles of the orange out onto the body of the black cap, because the bobbles were butterfly shaped.  So, I carried  the speciality yarn in back until I got to the orange butterfly bobble and  then pulled the butterfly bobble through to the front.  What held the butterfly bobbles in place was the base yarn, the black. 

At that point the comic paper light bulb went off in my head and I saw how that musroom cap top could  be done.  So that is my project for today.  I will get the Sunshine cap topped and begin the mushroom cap.

Maybe I should get a book on mushrooms. Now that I have the overall shape worked out, there might be some more mushrooms that need to be immortalized in one of The Happy Capper’s  caps. 

Well, need to go get started on the day’s knitting.   Am anxious to get Sunshine topped and the mushroom cap at least cast on.  Have a great day.   Granny LJ

Good morning.

I just did a rather long email to a woman who, with a friend,  makes jewelry and is just getting into the marketing end of things.  I get the feeling that she and her friend regard competition from other vendors as a “bad thing.” 

Unless you are trying to support youself — rent, food, electricity etc  — with the money made from the sales of your work then competition could be a pretty hard thing here on the coast.  However, most of us here are often hobbiests who have kind of run out of people to give our work  as presents.  Take me for example:  How many times can I give a beach walk cap to the same people for Christmas.  My son may be an exception, because he tends to lose caps and ends up needing another one.  As a result, I have started doing “guy caps”  partially in response to his proclivity for losing them. 

Things here on the coast are a little different than over  in the Valley.  Many of the vendors are folks who have retired and have turned a hobby into a way of bringing in extra money.  Last year, I met a woman who crocheted brimmed hats out of plastic grocery bags.  Recently I was at the Sunday market in Yachats and bought some chocolate chip cookies from a man who loves to bake.  The list of people who have taken a love of something and turned it into a  marketable item is very long.  In the Valley and other places, it seems, that there is some sort of a contest of who does the better art work.  But not in this part of Lincoln County.

At any rate, competition can be a very good thing. There is another woman down here who makes caps.  We have been friends for several years.  She works basically in synthtetics and crochets her work.  I work basically in natural fibers and I knit.   We  both make caps, but we  have ended up making them so that they are not in competition with each other.  She has been doing a lot of shows and markets for several years, I have only been serious about  marketing  for about 2 or so years, because I was still working full time.

Competition is not a bad thing if it makes you look at your work and evaluate it with a customer’s eye. It could and should make you stretch your limits and continue to experiment and do better rather than getting into a rut.   I  hope that these two ladies who do the jewelry will soon begin to see competition is a very positive thing.  A way to be stimulated to making your work better and better. 

Have a good day.  Good knitting.  Granny LJ

Good morning. 

This morning over breakfast, I got to thinking about The Practice Factor.  Back in the old days when I still had brown hair, I was a martial artist.  I often got the responsibility of teaching the kids.  I have no count on the number of times I heard a kid say, “I can’t do this.  It is too hard.”   Over the years, I developed a speech on the Practice Factor.  The beginning kid’s class was usually 5 or 6 kids.  I would ask if anyone had ever taken music lessons.  Usually one or even two kids had taken lessons.  I would ask what they played and how long they had been studying music.  The next question was:  “Are you better at playing (whatever the instrument was)  now than when you started?”  The kid would nod.   Then I asked, “Why are you better now than when you started?”   Most of the kids could come up with the response, “Because I practice.”  I would whoop and say, “YES!!!  Because you practice.”  And then launch into a little speech about how everything in their lives, mostly, they could do if they were willing to Practice.”

I have no idea how many times I have sat at a show or a market and had someone tell me that they had tried knitting but they couldn’t learn it.  They could crochet or quilt or paint or do some other art form but not knitting.  A couple of times I have responded (without the whoop, of course) that it was a matter of practice and the willingness to put the time in to develop the skill.  But I quit doing that because most of the ones I would try to encourage would just shake their heads and walk away from my show space.  So when I get the “I tried to learn to knit, but could never do it.”  line.  I say, “Well, I’ll bet you have something  that you do very well.”  And usually they have a skill that they have taken the time to develop. 

I can see the practice factor working in the caps I knit.  The first bunch of caps that I made was many years ago when the local Women’s Crisis Center had a newspaper article about making and donating caps as Christmas gifts to the kids who were  with their mothers in Shelter.  I decided that the moms needed caps just as much as the kids did.  So I got some yarns and made about a dozen adult sized caps.  Looking back, I am dumbfounded that I could have actually taken those caps to  the Crisis Center.  They were ill-made.  Obviously a beginner’s work.  And I had done them on straight needles so the caps all had a big seam up the back that I could not figure out how to minimize. 

Now, 20 years down the line, I look at the work I do now and wish I could have done better on those caps all those years ago.  Those early caps are an embarrassement when I think about them. 

Are all my caps perfect, now? No.  But with practice I have learned to kind of cover up the mistakes and make positives out of negatives. Though I  do have to admit that I have a cap in the finish basket right now that I need to tear out because I did not start the topping when I should have and it turned out like something the Cat from Dr. Seuss would wear. 

But on the whole, due to the Practice Factor, the caps I make are fun to make, fun and useful to wear. 

Encouraging someone to try to knit is not exactly like teaching a kid to fall on the mat safely, but the principle of both is the same.  If you practice  you WILL get better. 

Have a great day.  I got one cap topped yesterday.  Will get another done today.  Granny LJ

Good morning.

The weather has changed back to November at the coast.  It not raining but seriously thinking about it.  Karen and I got  Red and Parker down on the beach for a good walkabout.  There was only one other walker.  So it was mainly the four of us.  The boys got a good run and got to sniff a lot of good things.  And leave messages to other dogs. 

I got home and took a look at my work table.  The Sunshine cap is ready to top off and the other 3 or 4 that I had waiting for top off are still waiting.  So I have ordained this day as a day of topping off.  If I can get all these new caps topped and finished I will have about 10 new caps for Shorebirds for December.  Which means that I’ll be able to move caps that have been in the shop to my market inventory.  I am pretty pleased with the caps that are ready to top.   And am anxious to have them out to be seen by shoppers.

Topping off is one of the hardest things I do with a cap besides the finish work. That is when all the little errors start to show up.

There are many ways you can top off a cap.   When I was first doing caps and following patterns, I would top off as outlined in the pattern.  Eventually, I had to ask myself why was I topping off like the pattern said.  And not being able to give myself a good answer, I picked a top off method that I liked and started doing that one on all the caps.

My top off is a simple 7-point top off.  Count the stitches and divide by 7.  Frequently the stitch count is not exactly a multiple of 7.  If the stitch count is  more  than 5 above the needed “divided by 7″  count, I decrease 1 stitch per space as I am getting the cap onto the double pointed needles.  If the count is 4 or less I increase the necessary stitches as I put the cap onto the double points. 

When I first started working this way, I was sure that the cap top would be lopsided,  but it isn’t. In fact, given some of the yarns I use, you can’t even see the increases or early decreases.  

Well, there are a bunch of caps that need to get on double pointed needles and get their tops done.  I need to quit ruminating about it and get to it. 

Have a great day.  Granny LJ