terriko

This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.

I still spend more time knitting than using fountain pens but you wouldn’t know it from the blog posts I write! So let’s do a bit of an update.

In September / October a group of fediverse folk do “Finish or Frog Along” (formerly Fall Finish Along, but now with a better name for people in the southern hemisphere!) and honestly, I’ve looked forwards to it since last year. I started with 5 things on my list then added 2 more as I finished things:

Clasped Weft weaving

Sweater Ornament

Pigeon Embroidery

Purple spin

Crown Wools

Rainbow Shawl (bonus goal)

Frog knit RPG scarf (bonus goal)

FinishOrFrogAlong is run by ConsumableJoy and I really appreciated the prompts that went with it for helping me think regularly about finishing and get a community doing the same. Plus it’s just really fun seeing everyone finishing things and cheering each other on. Especially since it’s a multi-craft affair so the projects are all so different!

I kind of want to have something similar for stash usage on the other side of the year and I’ve been trying to think about how to organize that. But for today’s post, let’s just talk about what I finished or didn’t finish!

Clasped Weft Weaving

Not finished.

A weaving in progress on a rigid heddle loom. it uses two colours of variegated yarn, one grey/brown and the other blue/green. It's a sampler showing multiple types of pattern that can be made with a pick up stick. — Image Description: A weaving in progress on a rigid heddle loom. it uses two colours of variegated yarn, one grey/brown and the other blue/green. It’s a sampler showing multiple types of pattern that can be made with a pick up stick.

I was really hoping to finish this piece which I started in April during “weaving month” as I rotated through my lesser-used crafts. But while I pulled it out and got it all set up, I only actually wove less than an inch during Finish and Frog along, so rather than being the thing I finished first like I thought when I set up the list, it became the biggest “fail” on my list.

Some of this was because I didn’t really know what to do next — I’d been iterating through exercises in a book and had to return it to the library, and when I bought my own copy I realized I should have taken pictures of all my sticky note flags so I’d be able to restart easily, and instead I had to puzzle it out.

But the other thing is that my current weaving setup doesn’t fit very well into my life, so I have to be more intentional about making time for it and I can’t do it while curled up with the dog in my recliner in the evenings, and as a result it feels like a hassle. There’s some things I can do about that: I can put the loom in a better spot where I can reach it when I’m in crafting mode not during dog cuddle time, I can grab audiobooks so I can multitask, and I really need to spend some time getting a bag so it’s easier to carry the loom and the yarn and shuttles and everything all together so it’s an option when I’m feeling overstimulated and just need to hang out upstairs or downstairs on my own for a bit.

But in the end it winds up feeling much the way I feel about quilting: I don’t hate it but it doesn’t quite fit into my life and it feels like a chore. A stranger commented “to everything there is a season” on one of my griping quilting posts with the explanation that it’s perfectly reasonable to save quilting for another part of my life when I don’t have a young child and a puppy and a full time job and a pandemic. And after two months of thinking I should make time for weaving and then just not doing it, I think it’s time to accept that this is not the season of weaving in my life. And that’s ok: I don’t have to be completely obsessed with every skill I learn or thing I do.

I will note that it’s a bit strange that I don’t feel this way about spinning, which similarly is hard to do curled up in a chair with a book. But the solution with spinning has been to enjoy it during a couple of sprints rather than do it year round: I enjoy Tour De Fleece, I get in a bit more during Finish or Frog Along, and last year I also did the 100 day stashdown from Jillian Moreno’s patreon. I think I may need to find some similar sprints for weaving if I want to do it, or (as I have with quilting) let it just be a sometimes craft in my life. I was really tempted by the Sweet Georgia winter weave-a-long that is happening now, but I’d need to finish what’s on the loom now before I could start it.

I’m still *intending* to finish up what’s on the loom now, and after I spent time writing about it I finally did pick it up in the last week of November. But it’s mostly taking a back seat while I finish my holiday knitting and stuff so I don’t know that I’ll finish it in time to really join the weave-a-long or if I should take the opportunity to pack up the loom in preparation for moving next year.

So, total fail on *finishing* this project, but it forced a lot of good introspection about whether this craft was suiting me and how to make it work better in my life.

Sweater Ornament

Finished!

Image Description: A small embroidery kit including a nice round yarn holder, a piece of felt pre-printed with an embroidery pattern (a sweater with a sheep and yarn on it) and a small bag with a camping motf.

This is from cute Christmas ornament kit that I bought last year. I finished one then, one this year, and maybe I’ll do the last next year. I remembered to put the year on this time!

Image Description: A small Christmas ornament style embroidered felt sweater with the year stitched on the back.

I have to say, I really loved these kits: Knitted Bliss really puts together a nice set with the nicer thread holders, a magnetic needle keeper, needle threader, and everything for the 3 ornaments. This may be the nicest embroidery kit I’ve ever had, with a lot of thought put into how it would be used so the whole experience is just really lovely. (No thin paper to hold thread! Everything well labelled, and big photos to go with the instructions.) I highly recommend this kit and will probably get more from her when I’ve got space for more embroidery stuff.

Image Description: My finished embroidered sweater ornament viewed from the front. It has a yarn bowl with a sheep on it filled with yarn on the front of a white (felt) sweater with pink ribbing at neck/sleeves/hem. There is a small clothes hanger stuck in between the two halves of the ornament that were sewn together, so the hanger can be hung on a Christmas tree or otherwise displayed.

Pigeon Embroidery

Not finished, but that’s the expected result.

I mostly wanted to put this one into the finishing rotation to avoid hand strain without feeling like I should be working on something on the list. Embroidery fills a weird niche in my crafting repertoire as a hand break because it uses my muscles differently yet keeps my hands busy so I don’t wind up with repetitive strain, so I usually have one on the go with no particular deadline for finishing. I usually finish one or two of these per year unless I’m feeling particularly excited about one or doing something very small.

Purple spin

Finished!

Image Description: Long draw spinning in progress: my wooden spinning wheel set up with some hanks of fiber sitting on top as a prepare to spin.

This was another long draw spin from Tour de France Femmes this summer. I’m really enamoured of long draw and am starting to feel actually proficient. I wanted to do a 3 ply since I have the EEW lazy kates and could do it more easily, and I intentionally chose to let the colours mix in plying. It looks nice, but I think I like more of a gradient than a blend so I’ll probably plan differently next 3-ply. Still, I’m looking forwards to knitting with this and maybe I’ll like it more once it’s knit up!

Image Description: Plying setup on an EEW Lazy Kate: three plies of purple singles waiting to be plied.

Image Description: Purple 3-ply spin all done and twisted into a pretty yarn skein. There are multiple shades of purple all mixed.

Crown Wools

Finished!

This was my year-long project, slightly condensed so that it would finish in September for the event. I loved doing this and have it displayed in my office, but I do need to acknowledge that while I love the curated sets of rainbow minis that come with these sorts of things, they’re pretty much my least frequently worn items because they’re just a bit too big to be practical for the way I move and do stuff.

I’ve picked out a blanket and some rainbow stash yarn for next year’s ongoing project (it may take more than a year, I’m not sure yet). I may also consider some complicated colourwork sweater stuff for future ongoing project planning if I can figure out a nice way to divide that up over a few months. Inches per body or maybe something with colourwork that I can split up?

Rainbow Shawl (bonus goal)

Knitting still in progress, but charts are finished!

My design for a rainbow wrap in progress, showing colours going from red to blue. I had made a mistake on one side (you can see a bulge marked by a stitch marker where the problem occurred) and had to rip back two sections so I wouldn't run out of yarn. — Image Description: My design for a rainbow wrap in progress, showing colours going from red to blue. I had made a mistake on one side (you can see a bulge marked by a lollipop stitch marker where the problem occurred) and had to rip back two sections so I wouldn’t run out of yarn.

After I finished 2 things on my initial list of 5 I added a few extras and this is one of them! This was a personal design project that I started before my local yarn shop went online-only, before the pandemic. I feel like I was an entirely different person. But I’d taken enough notes and had the physical object, so I fixed up the charts and knit a bunch more repeats. I’ve got a few colours left but i decided to do a Clapotis for Knitty’s Clapotisfest and I want to make winter socks for my mom before shipping gets overloaded in December, so I’ll finish this later. I’m really happy with it and would like to actually make a good free pattern out of it eventually but I have to at least finish the knitting to take pictures before I get to that point!

Frog knit RPG scarf (bonus goal)

Frogged!

The scarf pre-frogging, showing that I only barely finished one motif and it didn't look like much. Although the photo makes the contrast look ok, it was veyr hard to see in real life. — Image Description: The scarf pre-frogging, showing that I only barely finished one motif and it didn’t look like much. Although the photo makes the contrast look ok, it was veyr hard to see in real life.

This was a neat knitting RPG concept where you rolled dice and got different charts to go with the story, but I chose yarns that weren’t working for me and I wasn’t having a good time so I bailed on the MKAL. I usually frog stuff right away but for a variety of reasons I didn’t do it right then.

Image Description: The yarn just after frogging (ripping out). It looks a lot like dried ramen noodles, all wavy.

So many years later, I had to frog and steam the yarn so it’s ready for re-use. Though I’m not sure what I’d use it in since I’d bought the yarns to be used together then didn’t like them for colourwork. Maybe some brioche instead? Problem for future me.

Image Description: The frogged yarn sitting on my ironing board with a clothes steamer, used to steam the yarn and straighten it out so it can be more easily re-used.

In conclusion…

One frogged, 3 finished, 3 still going (although one of those at least had charts finished, so that should probably count!). I had a great time finishing and frogging this year and I like that this is becoming enough part of fediverse crafting culture that I wasn’t the only one looking forwards to it.