Knitting With Granny LJ

Good morning:

Knitting is filled with all sorts of very necessary abbreviations.  Some include:  K2tog  aka knit two stitchs  together;  YO aka yarn over; P aka purl and the list goes on and on.  But I think that most crafts have their own special terminology.  I know that a rock-hound uncle of mine introduced me to a rock called leaverite.  I was very interested in finding some leaverite until I realized I was walking on leaverite and that most of the river’s rock bed was composed of leaverite. For those who are not rock hounds leaverite is the rock you leave right where you find it. 

As noted above, knitting has its own incredible abbreviations.  One that still has me kind of bewildered is the SSK.  Am still looking at pictures in the back of magazines trying to figure that one out. I can do an SK just fine.  That is the stitch where you slip one stitch from the left needle to the right needle, knit the next stitch and then slip the first stitch back over the knitted stitch.   But that SSK still  has me bafffled.

Two really important knitting abbreviations that you will probably never find in a knitting magazine or knitting instruction book are:  WIP and UKO.

The WIP is the easiest to grasp.  It is the project that is on your needles or the Work in Progress.  Now a lot of knitters, I know, have only one WIP.  The table on the left side of my work chair is my WIP table.  At this precise moment, I have a WIP table reaching close to the height of Mt Everest.  This is because I have several sets of circular needles and have a cap cast on to all of them  most of the time.  Along with the projects are the directions for the various WIPs.  And along with the WIPs and the directions for them are the latest additions to my yarn stash, like the beautiful rainbow colored yarn I got at the Winterfest Market last weekend.  That yarn is so gorgeous that I just want to keep looking at it.  Eventually, I will find the right pattern for it.  The colorway of the yarn is pretty busy with all the color changes.  But I think I will probably make it up in a busy pattern that keeps the eyes  bouncing. 

At any rate, that is WIP. 

The next abbreviations necessary to a lot of knitters — myself in particular — is UKO.  Translated out of knitting and into English is Unidentified Knitted Object.  I have not a clue how many knitters have UKOs.  I have a lot.  I created one last weekend when I was  at the market.  Thought I had an idea for using some left over yarn and worked hard on it all day Saturday and Sunday.  Yesterday, I took it out of my little project  bag and pulled the needles out and cast on something else.   It was just that the longer I worked on the UKO the worse it got.  Eventually,  I’ll take out the stitches, rewind the yarn and let it rest and then cast it on in another cap.  The one I worked on so diligently all weekend was just too ugly for words  — the only thing reasonable to do with it was UKO the thing. 

Happy knitting.  Granny LJ

Good morning.

I have had the question come up about making a career out of knitting — as in how to.

I am not really a very good person to ask about careers in knitting. Those of you who have read my earlier blog entries know that I sort of stumbled into this capping career. 

First let me say that I am not sure that a younger person could make a career knitting.  Knitting is more of a cottage craft and the income is so variable and unpredictable that I would not recommend it as career opportunity.  Knitting and/or crafting is a great way to express your artistic side and bring in a little money while doing it.  Don’t expect to get rich, because except in rare occasions does getting rich happen.

That said, this is how I do it. 

I selected caps because I know myself well enough to know that if I did sweaters, I would probably do a back and move on to the back of another sweater.  I mean, with sweaters you have to do 2 of everything…. A front AND a back, 2 sleeves that also have a front and a back.   Mittens and socks are the same — you have to make 2 mittens and 2 socks.  And I know that I would make one mitten or one sock and never get to the other one.  I tried making long straight things that end up being mufflers.  Those were totally boring and I really do not like working on straight needles. 

I settled on caps because people only  have 1 head, I like to work in really wonderful yarns and I can work in those wonderful yarns without exhausting my budget getting enough yarn to do a larger project.  A cap takes only about 200 yards of yarn. And the left-over yarns from one cap project can be used in another cap project.  Caps are limitless.  There is no end to what can be done with 200 yards of yarn and a pair of circular needles. So I have always told myself and anyone else who would listen that when I ran out of cap ideas, I would try knitting something else.

I try to knit at least 4 hours a day.  I have set up this schedule because, given my Creaky Body Syndrome (CBS), those 4 hours are when I am most alert and focused.  I work in  some  patterns that are pretty complicated, and alternate those with simple projects like guy caps. 

My record keeping is as easy as I can make it.  Right now I am experimenting with 3 x 5 cards which give me the cap number, and where the cap is located. 

I sell my caps at markets and shows and at Shorebirds.  As noted above, the sales are really sporadic and one time you go to a market and sell nothing and the next time you sell maybe 3 or 4.  It is unpredictable. And if I were making the caps my sole source of income, I would not need to be going to Weight Watchers. 

I am retired and so I have a bit of income each  month from other sources and I am able to put my earnings from sales back into  yarn and have a pretty good sized yarn stash. 

Also, I live in a county, Lincoln County, which runs real high to retired folks and it has 2 good connections to the Willamette Valley, which  adds up to  lots of tourists in the summer and fall months.  Not only does this mean customers, it also means that the Lincoln County retired people who have been waiting until retirement to do that thing that they have always wanted to do (wood carving, furniture making, herbal remedies, jewelry creating and so forth)  are also in high supply. As a result it is possible to work the shows and markets year round if you have enough time to keep the product as plentiful as the potential customers. 

Well, that is an overview of things and I will continue later with some more details and a look at other crafters, artisans and artists that I know and how they do their art and sell it, too. 

Happy knitting.  Granny LJ

Good morning.

I was rooting aound in my stash the other day and found  of two  partial skeins of varigated blue.  They are different brands and different make up, but I gave them the sunshine test and the blues are a dead on match.  Neither partial skein was enough to do a a complete cap. Together, however, they will make a  complete and interesting looking cap.

I am sometimes chided about not getting rid of my leftover yarns after I get a cap topped off.  I warehouse the leftover yarns in a couple of big baskets in my work area and keeping them seems, to nonknitters, like a waste of yarn.  I have tried to come up with an idea of something to do with  leftover yarn.  I have tried making EBs and even scarves.   But none of those efforts have really  excited the knitter in me, because both involving working on straight needles, and I have come to really dislike going back and forth and back and forth. 

But since I found these two partial skeins of blues that work so well together, I am going to root around in my leftover baskets and see if I can’t find more leftover yarns that would work well in a hodgepodge type of a cap. 

Right now, I have a side table that has several caps that need to be topped off, and several more caps that need to have the finish work done so I can get them out to either Shorebirds or the Wednesday market. 

That being the case, I had better get going on both of those tasks. 

Have a good day.  Happy knitting.   Granny LJ

Good morning. 

It has been a pretty busy week what with market last Wednesday and then Crafts on the Coast and a few minutes to catch my breath and Wednesday Market again.

A week ago, I started getting my caps ready for the show.  Shorebirds did not need my big twirling cap rack any more, so I decided to use it for the show.  I call the rack Dougie because, at nearly 7 feet tall, it is as big as a Douglas Fir. 

i spent all of Friday going over the caps in the bin and making sure that all of them were neat and ready for the show.  You know — no loose threads of yarn, the cap tags were on and correct and then folding them carefully into the bin.  I had the most caps I have ever taken to Crafts on the Coast.   After all that was done I thought a bit on things and decided to stop by the Shorebirds and take the caps from there, too.  That meant taking along another cap rack.  So I got one of  the little table-top Dougies ready to go to the show too.

My total inventory for the show was 100 caps.  For me that is a record.  I have never had that many caps to take to Crafts on the Coast since I have been doing the shows.  Some of the caps are old timers, but not quite shop sisters.  And my collection of recent caps made me feel pleased with the work I have been doing.

Sales were good at the show and I’ll go into more detail a little later about that.   It was an excellent weekend, both in sales and meeting people. 

Then yesterday was the Wednesday market again. We had excellent weather and I got a sunburn.  I have also had an enlightenment, with respect to the rolled brim caps.  I will certainly be doing more of them in the near future.  Retired one from my inventory and it was just barely big enough to keep the sun out of my eyes, let alone off my face.  So today, I will be going through the stash and finding the yarn to make a really great rolled brim cap for me to use at market to keep the sun off.

Well, I have to get to the knitting.  Good knitting.  Granny LJ

Good morning.

Was running around yesterday again.  Got groceries and took Karen to brunch.  The weather was incredibly gorgeous.  This morning, we have had a wind come up that is pretty stiff, but the sun is out and the sky is cloudless. 

Came home and put the groceries away.  And went back to work on the contest cap.  Knit all afternoon dililgently.  And got the cap topped off.  I was hoping it would turn out better than it did.  It  is still at a prototype level of work.   I have that other Noro yarn in the blues and blue-greens that I found in my stash recently and will probably cast that yarn on this morning.  I have been thinking that if I go to smaller needles and do a ribbing — probably mistake ribbing — and make the body looser — maybe it will be more to my liking. 

One thing that really  has me baffled, though, is that I did the top-off on  prototype 2 exactly like I did on prototype 1 and it is not as neat, somehow, as proto-1.  I have not a clue why that should be.  If there are any knitters out there who might have an answer to that question, I would love to hear from you.  I sure can’t figure it out.

At any rate, I have to get myself a little bit out of the contest-cap mood for a while and get the caps on the finish table topped and ready for finish work.  I have some good ones that  need tops and need to get out to the cap tree at Shorebirds. 

This weekend I emailed Dodie, my friend and knitting mentor, and asked if she would like to go to the knitter’s convention in Portland in March.  She does not drive either, but she has a husband who is willing to drive us around a  bit. I have never  been to a show that caters to knitters and crocheters.  I would love to go and smell the yarns and see what other people are knitting — yarns, patterns, needles the whole ball of wax. 

I had a note from my granddaughter, Sasha, this week.  She has been reading these blog messages and says that they are cool.  What a compliment!  I hope others are reading them, too.  And enjoying them as much as I enjoy writing them.  Makes me feel like I am in a circle of knitters, knitting and visiting. 

Thanks again, Sasha, for the card and for letting me know that you are reading my blog.  Hope you have a good week.

Have a good day knitting.  Granny LJ

Good morning.

The weather was wonderful this morning and Karen and I were able to get Red and Parker down on the beach for a run.  The first in a couple of weeks for all of us.  The storms have been  pretty strong recently  and the beach looks like one of the old lumber mill yards where the bark and the discarded wood used to be tossed before it went into the  scrap burner.  The burners are all gone now.  But as you can see on the beach there is plenty of scrap coming from somewhere up river. 

An after-the-storm walk on the beach is a thing of wonder.  It is a treasure hunter’s delight.  This morning we found a small orange float that is just right for a fetch-it game with the boys,  a dead pelican,  a few pretty rocks, and, of course, the drift wood.  When I wasn’t being pulled by Parker down the beach and I had a minute or two to look at the beautiful debris, I wished that knitting were not quite so back and forth. 

Karen took her camera and got some good pictures of the boys and some of the other treasures we saw. But I kept seeing the way the storm surf had carved the sand around the drift wood and the way it had worn the wood away on some of the logs and branches and stumps.  The one thing about knitting is that it is so back-and-forth.  Unless you are using circular needles, of course.  But it would be wonderful to be able to recreate the ripples of the sand from  the water or the erosion of  the wood on a long submerged log, or an image of a beautiful collection of sand and wood in the body of the cap.

Knitting  does not lend itself well to really fanciful kinds of designs.   I’ll have to think about it some  more.  Maybe I can come up with a way of making a wearable and practical cap with some of the casual beauty of the beach after a storm.

In the meantime, I have the EB to work on.  I got some really gorgeous olive green wool out of the stash yesterday and cast on a new EB.  This is going to be the prototype for the rest of the EBs that I do.  I hope.  I have the lenght and the width and the cast-off figured out.  The last hurdle on the EB is connecting the two ends.   But I don’t really see any problems with that. 

Well, that is about all from here for this morning.  It  was good to be able to get back down on the beach again and walk and watch the boys gallop around smelling things.  In fact, the way they treat the beach is a little like the way I go about looking for yarn in a new yarn shop. 

Hope you have a good day.  Good knitting,  Granny LJ

Good morning. 

Sorry about the bit of break in the notes on this site.  But my neighbor, Karen, got a very  bad cold from a customer at Shorebirds and then she shared it with me.  It is a real humdinger and I will be glad when it is finished its tour of duty in assorted parts of my head and chest. 

I was able to get out for the market on Saturday.  Thought we would have a lot of people in, since it was the last show before Christmas and we had hoped to  have a few Christmas shoppers.  But we had about half the number of people coming in to shop than we have had Saturdays prior to this one.  I heard rumbles when I was grocery shopping yesterday that a lot of people were making a quick run to the Valley to get last minute shopping done. 

So it was a quiet day at the market.  I started a new cap from some Noro yarn that I found when I rummaged the stash.  It was slow enough that I got the base and the increases done and so got it to the point where it is knitting around and around and around.  I love circular needles.  All those years ago, when I did the caps for the Women’s Crisis service, I was working on straights.  I never could figure out how to do that back seam without having it show like something from Ringling Brothers circus. 

The only place where the seam shows, when I use the circulars, is on the base but that is such a modest display that I hardly even know that  it is there.  It really does feel good to get a problem figured out that makes the cap better made.  When I started doing the caps on circular needles there was a little  blip in the base that I asked my mentor, Dodie, about.  She showed me how to move a stitch from the right hand needle to the left and then knit the two stitches together.   No more little dip in that first row.  Even now, when I run into a problem, I contact Dodie to get me back on the track. 

Well, that is about all from here for today.  It is very difficult to  be creative and energetic when there is so much problem breathing and dealing with the coughing.  Next time Karen gets a cold, I am going to tell her to share it with someone else. 

Good knitting and merry Christmas.  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.

We had a storm blow through this week.  It might have been two or three storms back to back.  Sometimes it is a little hard to tell. This morning though we woke up to sunshine and no rain.    Walked on the beach with my neighbor and her dogs, Red and Parker.  There was enough of a breeze that I was glad that I had worn one of  the caps that wandered out of inventory onto my head last spring. 

A man met us on the beach as we were heading north and he was going south.  He had on a  baseball cap and had his shoulders hunched up to try to keep the breeze off his ears.  With a brashness that has come with passing the age of 65, I told him that his ears would be a lot warmer if he went to Shorebirds down town and got himself a watch cap.  He laughed and said that he thought it was a good idea.  Then my neighbor and I and the boys, Parker and Red, headed over the billow of wet sand to get to the trail up  the hill. 

As I walked on the beach and home, I kept trying to decide what I wanted to work on.  My project table is filled with projects started, half complete, ready for top off or just having been cast on.  But a few weeks ago, I got an idea for a sunshine cap with a white body and a yellow top with the yellow starting about midcap and working up from single stitch of yellow that gradually grew wider until the whole top was yellow.  I rummaged my stash and found several yellows  that would work.  One was a silk yarn that is very thin but is the mother of all yellows.  Then I found two almost identical yellows  by Plymouth and Lamb’s Pride. Finally I found a gold Chinchilla.  My stash, it seems, does not run high to yellow yarns.

I put all four yarns by the skein of white  base yarn  in a place near my work chair so that I could look at them all with the white before I made my decision.   After the walk on the beach today, I have decided on the Chinchilla gold because that was what every thing on the beach looked like this morning — golden. 

Well, I have to go cast on that cap.  And enjoy the sunshine on the leaves and grass and the shore pine needles. 

Granny LJ

Good morning.

There is a concept among knitters called “Stash.”  I suspect that Stash is not an unknown concept outside the knitting world, but try explaining the idea of Stash to someone outside the knitting world and it is an alien concept.  Stash is the accumulation of items related to a craft that are not immediately needed, but may be needed in the future.

Sometimes I go to a yarn shop with a very specific idea of the yarns I want to get.  Usually I see some yarns that I had not known existed before walking into the store and have no idea what I am going to use them for if I take them home.  I don’t care, usually, that I don’t know what I am going to use the yarns for because I have faith that I will get an idea down the line.  In the meantime my work area is surrounded by gorgeous yarns and that seems to be enough in itself.

The most recent episode of Stash buying was about 2 weeks ago.  My neighbor had gone to the Dollar Store to get some things.  I was not a big fan of the Dollar Store until this day.  I found  all sorts of fuzzy yarns (Lion Brand) that  were tossed helter-skelter in the bin.  Some were out of the paper wraps and tangled terribly in other skeins that were also tangled hoplessly.  I managed to find 4 colorways that had pretty much intact wraps and got two skeins of each. 

I had intended to use one set of those yarns to do an IO cap that looked Christmasy, but got home and the red yarns that I had immediately available  had a blue undertone to them and were really dark.  I went outside and studied all my hopefuls in the light with the fuzzy yarn.  No go on any of them.  I grumped a little bit to nobody in particular and put the fuzzy yarn aside.  A day or so later I was rooting my Stash and found a red yarn that looked almost orange.  I grabbed up the fuzzy and this yarn and headed outside to double check.  And THEY WORKED WONDERFULLY together.  I was so excited you’d have thought I won the lottery. 

I now have that orangey-red  Christmas cap on needles and have started working the fuzzy yarn into the body of the cap.  Have about 2 inches done.  I am doing it with a shallow ribbing so there is more fuzz than  base yarn.  I am really excited about it.  The IO caps tend to sell well, but that does not distract from being terribly pleased with myself over finding those fuzzy yarns and finding the  base yarn to go with it.

Well, that is about all from here.  I need to go work on that cap and see how it turns out.  Granny LJ