The Progress of Pansies

Sometimes I wonder if Miss Marnie thinks that I can keep up my enthusiasm for crochet in her absence. I have to admit that it is very fun when she is around, because I have someone who can instantly show me how to fix all the things that I screw up. But it is definitely spring here (some might say summer in the desert given the temperatures that we've had the past few days), and all the little seedlings in my container garden have popped their heads up while the more established perennials are in full bloom. So, it's time to pull out the hook again and make some pansies...

The entire "collection" of twelveThis does not promise to be a quick project, crochet or not, and doubtless by the time I have crocheted enough of these little flowers to pull together a binky (a binky, mind you, not a full-fledged blankie) I will probably never want to see another pansy again. But my plan is simply to continue at a slow, steady pace, and finish after I'm done making the baby if I have to. I figure these are a good pick up project, since the pansy shape is easy to memorize, so I will just keep materials on hand to pick them up here and there.

Marnie convinced me (by example, not by persuasion) that the "best" method for working this binky would be to work all the flowers first and then link them together afterwards in the manner most pleasing to me. Although I fear it, this does give me a lot of latitude with the final design. I can go square, oblong, or amoeboid at will and play around with the border a bit. So for now I'm simply creating the pansies one at a time and trying to arrange them in a pleasing manner.

With five colors to work with, I have what I think amounts to 55 different color arrangements for the pansies. Being the crazy gal that I am, I'm going to make a point of doing each and every one at least once, though. I have noticed that there are definitely color combos that work better for me aesthetically. Working under the Mason-Dixon theory of brights and dulls, it is quickly apparent that the dulls do, in fact, make the brights pop, and that leaving the brights together works pretty well, too, but when you get dull on dull - basically putting the lavender and olive together - not so much. Maybe those with subtler expectations will like those flowers better, but I do have to admit to loving the "pop."

I was pretty deliberate in my color choices on this one. I would have loved to pick up some reds, pinks and oranges (still would - wouldn't that be lovely?) but those colors scream "girl!" to me and as much as I would have liked to crochet this for a girl, this was definitely my baby's binky and I didn't know the baby's gender when I made the color choices. So... these are the most gender-neutral pansies I could muster. The brown and the olive ground it all, and the yellow, purple and blue keep it pretty. It has the subtle sophistication that I was going for in a pansy blanket, but I still can't help thinking wistfully of those oranges, reds and pinks....

Are these pansies for a girl?
Or pansies for a boy?
Any guesses on the baby's gender?
Those of you who know, keep hush!

I don't know how many of these little suckers I will have to make to get the binky to a respectable size, but I'm thinking I will just go until I only have a third of a skein of each color left (other than brown - there's lots of brown). Maybe I should have a little contest to see who guesses the final number right. Any advice on the proper dimensions of a Linus binky? I'm all ears, or perhaps all pansies.

Edited to add: For those who have asked, here is a link to the Japanese motif dictionary that contains the pansy pattern.

Everything's Coming Up Pansies

Well, not everything, but the crochet sure is. I spent a recent weekend in Portland with Marnie, and naturally was once again inspired to crochet. Ms. Marnie is one kick-ass crocheter. It was a fun, whorlwind of a time, as our weekend crafting visits always are, with plenty of things to be inspired by: the excellent Japanese bookstore, a new bright red motorcycle for Leo, and a great trek out to Abundant Yarn for Larissa's debut of Knitalong, her very first book.

To me they look like little pansy balloons, flying away..."

I'm really not sure where to start. Abundant Yarn is just that - abundant! It's an amazing store, and definitely tops my list of all-time favorite LYS's. The selection is fabulous with tons of yarn in each colorway, and the aisles go on forever. Abundant Yarn dyes its own line of yarns which are especially pretty, and they carry many of my favorite lines of yarn along with some lines that were previously unknown to me (or at least untouched!). They also have a lovely cafe and seating area, so it is a very easy place to gather and knit, or gather and watch a friend debut her book! The store catered the event (quite nicely and also abundantly) and there was a huge turnout. I haven't read Knitalong cover to cover yet, but what I have read I have really enjoyed. It's a book that has a great deal of written substance in addition to cute patterns (many by Larissa, like the fast and famous Meathead, and several by Adrian Bizilla - who wouldn't be drawn by that?). For me the writing is what is so great about it. It is definitely a book for our community and our knitting "generation" (and by that I mean the internet knitting generation of the 2000's, including knitters from all age groups). It memorializes our time in a wonderful way, and I am really looking forward to immersing myself in it. It's always great to see Larissa. We didn't try to monopolize her this time around, since she had so many other guests to attend to, but we did catch our first glimpses of Sebastian darting through the yarn in his handknit hat. What a cutie.

Other than that, the weekend was very quick and spent predominantly on the sofa in front of one of Leo's legendary fires, crafting away. I utilized every spare moment of my Marnie time to get versed in the language of crochet charts (I love charts - the universal language!), and produced a pansy and a cute little chain. I think that except for when I encounter the occasional exceptionally difficult manuever I should be alright crocheting solo for a bit. My plan is to make many of these little pansy motifs and string them together in a blanket-like fashion to make a binky for the baby. Nothing very big, as I would surely go mad from over-pansying, just something to hold on to, drag around and enjoy. I love the brightness of the cornflower and lavender colors, but to give the blanket a little sophistication I added in several duller shades as well. The dulls seem to help ground everything, but the brights sure are fun to play with.

It's a Hoolia Wheel! Crochet and Creativity

I've had a bit of monkey mind lately (just what it sounds like, but here's a link), probably induced by cabin fever. Whenever monkey mind strikes, I feel the need to experiment a little, with no particular goal in mind. Sometimes I am able to do this with knitting (and that 's a great thing), but my knitting is pretty structured, so in the last year or so I've turned to crafts that are newer to me to blow off a little creative steam. These are things I'm not nearly as systematic about - spinning, cross stitch, crochet - and so I feel a lot freer to just do without any planning ahead, and see what happens.

The Hoolia Wheel.I am very inexperienced in crochet. Whenever I have Miss Marnie around for a few days I can make what would seem to be great progress, but as soon as I am without a guide, I tend to get lost. I have a hard time remembering how many times to wrap what and how to get from one spot in a motif to another elegantly. I have an easy enough time understanding the charts in Japanese craft books, but I'm not sure exactly where to start and there are techniques and conventions that I just don't "get" yet. I cannot read "written out" crochet patterns to save my life!

Yesterday, inspired by this beautiful washcloth, I decided that I would attempt yet another crochet motif. The only motif that I have ever completed without getting lost halfway through is the granny square. An accomplishment? Yes! Cute? Yes! But I kinda need to move on from there. So I looked through my crochet stitch dictionary and found several "intermediate" motifs that I liked. (Apparently there is no such thing as a "beginner" motif - even the granny square is "intermediate". Seems unfair.) The problem was that all the directions were written out, and I could not for the life of me figure out what to do once I got to the second round of anything. So, back to square one. I decided that since there were illustrations of the single crochet, half-double crochet, double crochet and triple crochet, I would work through those systematically, and learn to use them in rows and rounds. I did that, and I think I understand the stitches better, though to be honest, I have to go back and re-read how many times to wrap the yarn around the needle, etc. again before making a particular stitch to remind myself that I do know how to do it.

I got bored with these exercises, and I really, really wanted to make a motif. Reading the written out directions I just could not get it, though. So I decided that I would just make one up instead. I know the stitches (or can look them up! Einstein said that you should never bother to memorize anything you can look up...), I can work in rounds, and I understand the basic principles of increasing from knitting. I can do this, right?

I did! Voila! The Hoolia Wheel! Can I just say that I love it? Now, I know that I have surely just re-invented the wheel (pun intended) because what I did was so simple that I am sure someone (and perhaps many someones?) have crocheted it before. But. It's new to me, I did not learn it from a book, and so somehow it is more mine than many other complicated things I've done. It's just freaking glorious.

Okay, so here's the creativity part of the title. I had a boyfriend right after college who was wonderful at drawing. He did a self-portrait that I will never forget, both because it was so well-rendered and so introspective - he was really able to capture an aspect of himself that would be identifiable to anyone who knew him. But he would never call himself an artist. Only a draftsman. He explained that a draftsman was someone who was trained in the technical execution of drawing, but that an artist was someone who created organically without having to know the rules, working from within himself rather than from within the context of "art." I question whether he was right about himself, but I think there was a lot in the definition that he gave me.

Again. 'Cause I like it.Almost every knitting friend whose designs I admire has told me that she started designing because she found it to be too much trouble to work from a pattern. I realize that in my early knitting days this was the case for me, too, because although I did have access to Vogue Knitting, for the most part there weren't a wide array of commercial designs that appealed to my 20-something sensibilities. I heavily modified a lot of things - a Filatura di Crosa tank became a mini-dress! - and designed some of the more complicated pieces I've done. Not because I was trying to design (I certainly was not resizing!), but because it was really the only way to make things I liked. They had to come from my head. I wasn't limited in the techniques I used, because I didn't have a knitting community to help me gauge what was difficult. I just had June Hemmons Hiatt as a guide, and well, she did everything.

After a few years, I discovered Rowan Magazine, and I fell in love with patterns. I found more and more designers I really loved in Vogue soon after that (can we say Norah Gaughan?), and by the time Melanie Fallick's Knitting in America was released I was a goner. I was such a pattern junkie (still am!), and I gained a lot from that transition, but I lost something, too. Somehow having so much available to me caused me to stop creating things myself. There were good aspects to this - I could learn a lot by following someone else's footsteps and enjoy a way of thinking other than my own. But the more I learned, the more "rules" my structured little mind created. I became more proficient over time (and to toot my own horn I think I became a very good knitting teacher), but I also really boxed myself in. "Designing" and "knitting" became separate things.

My design "technique" now mostly comprises piecing together known elements in new ways. There is nothing wrong with this, and I think it can be helpful to think of design in this way, because for many of us, this is exactly what it is. You see a neckline that you like and think, "Now how could I incorporate that into something lacy and delicate?" and you play around and find a way to mesh things that you'd like to see together. There is creativity there, but for me it's much more at the "draftsman" (craftswoman?) level of creativity - nicely done technical execution with the "flair" originating in the combination of elements.

When I think of artistry, I think of designers like Mary Walker Phillips, Norah Gaughan, Teva Durham, Annie Modesitt, and Debbie New. You may not love, or even like, everything that these women create, but their designs often reach heights that other beautifully rendered but contextualized, structured pieces will never attain. There is something undeniably special about them. These are not the workhorses of your closet that will get everyday use - they are the statement pieces that uniquely define us.

I think that the artistry of these designers comes from transcending the rules of knitting and looking beyond the techniques that are known and on into those places in their own minds which still just contain possibility. For my own little mind, the easiest way to do this is to not know the rules. Structure is so much a part of how I learn that if I have it in place, it is nearly impossible to leave behind. I have to push myself to mess around and do "creativity exercises" if I want to come anywhere close to pushing an envelope. I work to be artistic, and often that takes so much work (almost always, actually) that I revert to being a sound craftswoman - it's my natural mode. Now again, I am not poo-pooing myself or saying that I don't enjoy that kind of creativity, because quite honestly I do, and if I never engaged in it there would be fewer of those great staples in my closet that I rely on. But. There is a real thrill when you do something that is totally out of the blue - really just out of your head - and look at it and think "That is good."

Making the Hoolia Wheel was that way for me. A small thing, really - just a motif - but at the same time a personal revelation. Because of this, I've decided to do two things: First, push myself to do a few more of those "creativity exercises" in knitting, and second, go about crochet an entirely different way. I am not going to seek out the rules, read patterns ravenously, or study it up in the way that I do with everything else. I'm just going to do it and see what happens. It will probably kill me - wish me luck!

I've gone over to the dark side....

I think the picture says it all. Back in March, when I visited my girlfriends in Phoenix, I found myself at a "crafternoon" gathering with nothing to work on, because the only thing I brought with me was the Harvey Vest that I was making for Ellen's baby shower. Since she was present, I couldn't very well pull it out for seaming! Instead, Ellen happily gave me a ball of variegated cotton and a crochet hook that she had abandoned and said that I was free to try it if I liked, because she was done with crochet. Unwilling to be without yarn in my hands while surrounded by women knitting and stitching, I decided to try my hand at a single crochet square. I made some mistakes (like not making a loop at the end and consequently decreasing on every row for a few rows!), but overall it was pretty cute. I use it as a coaster on my night stand.
Marnie's pretty square (top right), my wobbly first square (left), my "volcanic" attempt at crocheting a circle (bottom right)

Truth be told, I have been contemplating crochet for a long time, as two of my closest knitting pals, Marnie and Mary Heather, are excellent crocheters and have made some beautiful things. I have long been able to do simple crochet edgings for knits, but I've always said that I just crochet to get by, and have never taken the time to learn more. My little foray into crochet in Phoenix got me curious, so the next time Marnie visited in April, I recruited her to teach me how to make a granny square. By the time she left, I still couldn't read a pattern, but I could look at something she crocheted and mimic it. Then on my trip out to Portland early this month, I immersed myself completely and picked up some crochet pamphlets from Joann's and some wonderful Japanese crochet books. Since then, I've been playing around with crochet when I get the chance and have even started experimenting for a crochet design that I have in mind. It will be a while before I work on that in earnest, but it's been a fun diversion to tinker with.

For those who are curious, the last two weeks have been hellacious at work, which is why all I've managed to produce for you is a picture of me getting dressed in the morning! I have found time to work on Mishka, my Create Along design, though, and have almost finished the first piece. I'll post an update when I next find a chance. I've had no time to make the blog rounds or engage in proper correspondence, so I will just say here that I'm thinking of everyone and hoping you are well. Thanks so much for your sweet and thoughtful comments - I enjoy reading them!