Tag: american wool

checking in

DiannaLeave a comment

One piece of housekeeping before I get into this post: I was notified a few weeks ago that my web host will be shutting down by the end of May. I’ll need to migrate the entire Paper Tiger website to a new platform, which will take me some time. I’ll be moving to WordPress over the course of the next two months. If you’re an email subscriber of this blog (or if you use a blog reader), unfortunately I’ll have no way to transfer that email list, but I will give you some warning before I make the final transfer. The website will still be paper-tiger.net, but links to other pages will be changing. So I anticipate some hiccups, as I’ll need to update links to blog posts or tutorial pages in a whole long list of places: pattern PDFs, YouTube video descriptions, and so on. So I hope you’ll bear with me through that process and forgive any bumps in the road. Now, on to the post…

4d933e1497ec7216-2020-03-220623201

Hello, all. I hope you’re as well as can be. The COVID-19 pandemic has turned life upside down for us all, and it’s a strange time to… well, to do much of anything. The Norwegian prime minister held a press conference on Thursday, March 12, announcing a number of initial measures they were taking to try to slow the spread, including closing schools and universities and instituting the social distancing policy we’re all now familiar with. March 12 was the first day I decided to work from home, and the press conference came as a relief, to know the government was taking the threat seriously and once they decided to take action, it was swift. My physical university campus is effectively shut down now, and employees have been instructed to work from home if they can. Looking at the calendar, today’s day 11 of isolation/social distancing/shelter-in-place/whatever your terminology. I’ve been out for walks at least every other day, and to the grocery store once, but otherwise, my partner and I are just home. There have been ups and downs, as you might expect, but overall we feel very lucky – lucky to be where we are (in this house, in this country), to not be worried about our jobs or work for the moment, to be able to go outside. We’re incredibly fortunate. We’re also worried about friends who have already lost their jobs, whose livelihoods are threatened. We’ve only seen the beginning of what this whole thing will bring.

It’s hard to know what to do to help, but I’ve been doing my best to support small businesses, both local and further afield. Even though I’ve been eager to knit from my stash this year (and I still am), I’ve been buying yarn I had no plans on buying a month ago. Buying patterns. Buying music on Bandcamp. Buying books. And feeling grateful to be able to lend that kind of support in some small way.

I find it hard to work on my academic work at the moment, and those I work with have been very understanding. I am getting some work done, but I’m trying to be gentle with myself too. And when it  all becomes too much, I knit. Or bake. Keeping my hands busy helps with the anxiety.

1b72483736cf4873-2020-03-191212511

70adf0ff7374a275-2020-03-211144471

I hope you’re taking care of yourself and your loved ones as well as you can. I hope you’re taking social distancing seriously, but I also hope you’re able to get outside and take in some fresh air when you can. It’s difficult to try and find a balance right now, but do your best – connect with others using the means we have available, but take a step away and take some time for yourself when you need to. This is a really emotionally complex time. People lives are at stake. If you’re part of the high risk group, take extra care. We’re all in this together. xx

4801f3073ba5c344-2020-03-220622491

reflections on making

Dianna2 Comments

da378e0f89332ca3-2020februaryWIPs

Halfway through the second month of 2020, I’m beginning to get a sense of how limited my time for making is at the moment (and is likely to remain for at least several more months). Hashtag PhD life, or something like that? I’m getting a little bit of knitting done here and there, but it all feels like it’s moving at a glacial pace. I have two sock projects on the go, which I sometimes bring on my commute to work on, but I’m still on the first sock of both pairs. Most of the sweaters I have on the needles are fingering weight sweaters, which prompted me to cast on a worsted weight sweater a few weeks ago in the hopes that I could bang it out, but that also feels slow and now I just have another WIP. So you could say I’ve been thinking lately about my priorities when it comes to my making this year, and I thought I’d share what I’m feeling with you all.

1b2aad64bbec6cb4-aveiro

Firstly, after being apart from the majority of my WIPs and my stash for six months, I’m feeling slightly overwhelmed by it all now that I have it back. Not entirely in a bad way – I missed it and I feel an excitement to work on projects with all these beautiful materials I’ve collected – but what makes it overwhelming is the relatively slow pace at which I’m working on projects at the moment. I managed to work through a lot of what I had with me in the fall, which felt very freeing, and I’m just not feeling that freedom anymore. This means I’m feeling two strong desires: one is to work through my existing WIPs (16 is the current count, going by my Ravelry project page), and the other is a desire to work from stash for new projects. I really, genuinely want to be doing both of those things. And that feels really good, although it’s clearly going to take a little while to work on the WIPs. A few of them aren’t so far from being finished (like my Galore as well as this summery sweater) and trying to get them wrapped up in the next couple of months will probably help a lot.

The other thing I’m feeling really strongly is a desire to make things for friends and family. This isn’t entirely incompatible with wanting to knit from my stash, luckily, but it is somewhat at odds with trying to get through my WIPs. Nonetheless, after being reuinited with *all my knits* I’m also feeling how much I don’t need anything new, despite all the yarn kicking around in my stash. Of course there are sweaters and other things I want to make for myself that I already have yarn for, but I have plenty of yarn to do more knitting for others, as well.

2020-02-15_04.30.02_1_medium2

I know a lot of this is really in line with how many other crafters are feeling right now – The Crimson Stitchery is one of my favorite podcasts, and Anushka has talked a lot in recent videos about storage space, stash, WIPs, and desire vs. necessity. I really appreciate her approach to crafting as it’s always creative and beautiful, but also thrifty and practical. (The tagline for her podcast is “making all things beautiful and useful.”) She’s hosting an initiative called Stashless2020 in which you can join in with the aim to do one of two things: either try to work through your existing stash to become completely stashless, or put less into your stash and work more from what you already have. I definitely fall into the latter category – even if I had all the time in the world to knit this year, I wouldn’t empty my stash – but I appreciate the encouragement provided by a group effort, and knowing there are others feeling the same. If you’re intrigued by the idea of Stashless2020, I’d encourage you to check out this video where Anuskha discusses the question, “Can I go stashless in 2020?”

I am so lucky to have so many beautiful things to make with, so when I feel frustrated by how slowly my projects seem to be going at the moment, I just try to remind myself: it’s not a race.

new pattern: frost flowers

DiannaLeave a comment

fa93d20f03afb2be-2017-12-151008122

I’ve got a new pattern out today: meet Frost Flowers! I thought I’d tell you a little bit about how this design came to be.

A month or so after we moved to Montreal, I went to an in-store Julie Asselin event hosted by Espace Tricot (where, incidentally, I am now working two days a week). Julie is a yarn dyer located a few hours outside of Montreal, and she’s also one of the sweetest humans on the planet. Espace Tricot carries several of Julie’s yarn bases, but she’d brought along a few bases to sell that the store doesn’t normally carry, one of which was her Nurtured: a lofty but smooth woolen spun yarn in a worsted weight, unusual for an indie dyer. I’d first heard about this yarn when Tolt Yarn and Wool started carrying it while I lived in Seattle, but this was the first time I’d really taken a close look at it.

Most indie dyers purchase undyed yarn in ready-made bases, which is part of why so many of the bases are so very similar. Julie, on the other hand, has her bases spun for her, and Nurtured is even more unique since she dyes it in the wool. So in the case of Nurtured, she sources the wool from the US, dyes the unspun wool itself, and then sends the dyed wool to Green Mountain Spinnery in Vermont to have it spun into yarn. She outlines this process in a series of blog posts, which are excellent – you can see them in part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Flash back to the event at Espace Tricot – I was perched quite close to the Nurtured on the table as Julie talked about her yarns and answered questions, and I definitely found myself drawn toward one color in particular: the icy light blue color called Through the Looking Glass. When viewed up close, this is a gently heathered shade, with bits that are icy blue and bits that are almost light grey/natural and a few little blips here and there of a more saturated, darker blue.

1d2c214eb0b20214-through-the-looking-glass

A skein came home with me and once I had it, the idea for the overall palette took hold. I procured two more skeins of Nurtured, one in a heathered grey (Fer à Cheval) and one in a natural, undyed white (Natural), and started charting my colorwork ideas. It’s no surprise that I gravitated toward this combo, because it encapsulates winter to me – I even knit up my personal pair of Hearth Slippers in a similar combination.

I loved working with this yarn and I’m sure I’ll use it again in the future. I’m also looking forward to trying more of Julie’s yarns (I love her sock yarn, Nomade, which I used to knit my Amalia socks last year). Frost Flowers went live on Ravelry today, and you can check out the pattern page right here. It feels good to have a new Paper Tiger pattern to share – I didn’t do very much self-publishing while I was working on my degree in Norway, since most of the time I had for designing went to my third-party work. I’m excited to start publishing more Paper Tiger patterns again this year, and I’m looking forward to sharing what I’ve been working on with you all.

d8c0d9fafe504691-2017-12-151008141

a rhinebeck weekend

DiannaLeave a comment

ee9dfb917f39daa1-2017-10-230759391

This time a week ago I was at my very first Rhinebeck. I took the train back to Montreal last Monday, a journey which is much longer than it seems like it should be (nine hours!), but I’m glad I had a little bit of time to myself to decompress after a whirlwind weekend before diving back into real life. What a wonderful weekend it was.

I’ve wanted to write about it, but how is it possible to say everything I want to say about the weekend? While I enjoyed the festival itself, it was truly the magical combination of the festival, the fall colors and atmosphere, and especially the presence of a huge number of friends I don’t get to see very often that made the weekend what it was.

2fb5e80c28aa929d-2017-10-220350141

It’s admittedly a little strange to finally attend an event you’ve known about and watched others go to for years and years. There can be a lot of expectation tied up in the experience – is it is good as everyone says it is? Will I see everything I want to see? Do the apple cider donuts live up to the hype? (For the record, they do.) I think that for me, this trip came at exactly the right moment. I have been treading water a little bit since I left Norway and came to Montreal, trying to work out exactly who I am in this new city. Perhaps that sounds silly – I’m still me, after all – but I had become so accustomed to how I defined myself and presented myself to the world with Norway as a backdrop, that removing that backdrop and replacing it with something else left me feeling a little uncertain. Big moves and transitional periods don’t always allow for a lot of self reflection in the moment, it turns out. It’s after the fact that you realize there’s something different about the person looking back at you in the mirror and you haven’t figured out exactly what it is yet.

So it was wonderful to have a new experience that made me feel very much like me, getting to spend time with friends I haven’t seen since last year’s Oslo Strikkefestival, or Edinburgh Yarn Fest 2016, or friends I’d never met in person but I’ve known a long time. This wooly knitting industry is overall a very warm and supportive place to be, and I am so glad for all of the people I get to call friends within it.

6183dceffbf3832b-2017-10-230752401

I saw a lot of wonderful stuff last weekend. I fell in love with a number of yarns, but mostly stuck to my plan to buy one sweater’s quantity as a souvenir (a few extra skeins came home with me, since Harrisville did a beautiful limited edition run of an irresistible blue). I was taking mental notes, though, checking out yarns I might want to try out in the future. I fell pretty hard for the naturally-dyed hues of Tidal Yarns‘s Romney wool, pictured below, and her booth was a reminder of why shows like this are so special – she doesn’t sell her yarns online at all, but she does do around 15 shows a year.

57a2b281a1843e74-2017-10-230759392

a399ac53bc5f4a85-2017-10-220347492

In the end, I didn’t end up with a Rhinebeck sweater. I had been knitting away on my Circlet Shrug for a month and I got very close to finishing it – I was two cable repeats away from finishing the back. But with the weather in the 70s (fahrenheit), it worked out okay in the end. I finished knitting it on Wednesday, and will block it and seam the sides soon.. I did enjoy checking out the sweaters of those dedicated knitters (and crocheters) who wore their completed garments even in the heat. I also enjoyed checking out the animals.

19855034584a854b-2017-10-230752392

How could you not?

I came home feeling refreshed, motivated, and creatively inspired. Thank you, New York Sheep & Wool, and thank you to everyone who made this weekend so special.