Mary Jane Mucklestone

Hand Knitting Blog & Knitting Patterns

colorwork

Knitting Poetry

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Neruda_Bird

April is National Poetry Month. Inspired by a favorite poem, I knit a little coaster to celebrate the season. I used motif No.52 from my book 150 Scandinavian Motifs. Instead of knitting it stranded, I tried my hand at intarsia. I’m a little rusty and just off the needles it’s a bit bumpy, but I think it will calm down with a nice blocking.

I actually saw a cardinal today, sitting on a branch just outside my window, sweetly singing. The birds are different here in my new home in the city. I am making new friends and learning new songs.

Spring
Pablo Neruda

The bird has come
to give the light:
from each trill of his
water is born.

And between water and light that unroll the air
now the spring is inaugurated,
now the seed knows that it has grown,
the root is portrayed in the corolla,
at last the eye lids of the pollen unclose.

All this was done by a simple bird
from a green branch.

 

La Primavera
Pablo Neruda

El párajo ha venido
a dar la luz:
de cada trino suyo
nace el agua

Y entre agua y luz que el aire desarrollan
ya está la primavera inaugurada,
ya sabe la semilla que ha crecido,
la raíz se retrata en la corola,
se abren por fin los párpados del polen.

Todo lo hizo un pájaro sencillo
desde una rama verde.

What’s your favorite spring poem?

You want this book! 
Full Woman, Fleshy Apple, Hot Moon: Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Harper Collins
ISBN 0-06-092877-8

For the coaster I used Quince & Co. Lark yarn. In egret, delft and leek. More specs on my Ravelry  page.

 

Icelandic Insoles – Part One

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Iceland has been on my mind since Cirilia Rose has been instagraming from Iceland along with her buddy Steven West. You have to check out their photostreams – so entertaining!!! This picture of fish skin shoes had me remembering the time Gudrun and I spent at the Textile Museum up in Blönduós. It turns out that the traditional knitting of Iceland, or rather the antique knitting of Iceland, isn’t the ubiquitous Lopapeysa yoked sweaters, but  garter stitch insoles for fish skin shoes. I’d heard about these from Helene Magnusson’s fantastic knitting books, especially Icelandic Color Knitting: Using Rose Patterns.

While wandering the galleries, I was so enthralled with the insoles that the kind women at the museum offered to show me some of the collection not on display.

It is about time I shared them with you!

Is_insole.1

Is_insole.2

Is_insoles.4

Is_insole.3

Is_insole

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Here’s how they are stored.

box_o_insoles

Ok that’s all for now, soon I’ll show you the shoes and some more examples.

New Skills from Peru

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I’ve been practicing my newly learned skills. On the left is the beginnings of a intarsia colorwork hat made with a corded join. We’re viewing it from the public side. It is actually made by purling from the inside. There are practical reasons for this, working from the “wrong side”  it is easier to control all the little bobbins, and make sure they are properly twisted when encountering a new color. It is also easier to wrap every stitch if you’re obsessed enough to desire this elegant interior. I vacillate between making everything super tidy and amazing with every stitch twisted, to the slightly quicker stranding, which is pretty in its own way.

On the right we see a some grutas, or lumps….like you’d find in your oatmeal…only these will be soon be found adorning a sweet and cheerful baby hat.  I’m making strands of grutas, a fairly new development in gruta technique. What at first seems tedious, quickly becomes habit forming. Practice at your niece’s soccer game, and you’ll be surprised how quickly your ribbons of grutas grow!

…now that I wrote that, maybe they were called grumitas, which I have written in my chicken-scratch notes in another place. When I look up in Google translator, I find bultitos for little lumps…any one out there know? In Quechua or Spanish?

Update!

reader Trudy says:

“I just looked up in my big Spanish dictionary – gruta is a “cavern or grotto”, grumo is translated as “lump” – as in a lump in sauce, or a clot 9(of blood), or cluster or bunch (of grapes). So I think it might be grumo – and the diminutive would be grumito(s)”

So you Spanish speakers and Andean textile experts can have a laugh on me…taking about making stranded grottos…which sounds kind of nice, really, like the hotsprings outside of San Miguel de Allende, that are linked pools from deep and cold following streams to warmer, all the way up to the final hot pool that is ….yes!…in a grotto. La Gruta…that must have been the source of my mistake.

Extra! I found I noted down “kurpa” when Phetra from Pitumarca was teaching me the knitted in variety…

Extra! Extra! Cindy found the translation for “kurpa”

Runasimi (Quechua) – English
kurpa
adj. crisp
[Sikllalla Runasimi]

s. a flat clod of earth; clump; clump of earth; sphere; bullet; ball; clod of dirt; dirt clod
[Sikllalla Runasimi, Qosqo]

ta da!

I’m test-driving a workshop in these techniques this week in Boston.

I’ll also be informally demonstrating grutas at the Maine Fiber Arts booth at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens at this weekends Garden Fair: The Maine Gardeners and Artisan’s Festival. The festival will feature garden luminaries Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch, woo hoo! I’ll be there Saturday and Sunday afternoon.

Costal Maine Botanical Gardens
132 Botanical Garden Drive, Boothbay, Maine
GARDEN FAIR     Friday-Sunday • June 18, 19 & 20 • 9-5

3 Chullus

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cuscochullo

I found these scattered across Peru, the one on the far left in Lima, the middle one in Cusco, and the one on the right in Aguas Calientes, by Machu Picchu; they are all typical men’s hats of the Cusco region. There are subtle clues which might let us know where they are from. The two on the left are very similar, notice the earflaps have similar patterning and are constructed the same way, only the one on the far left has been fancied up with buttons. The color arrangement of their top pompoms are identical.

The chullu on the right has a different earflap construction, the  center is knit downwards like the other two, but with a sewn on edging which matches the motifs in the diamonds above. It is perhaps my favorite hat, personalized with the name of the makers village, his own name and even his phone number – a sure way to get the girls!

Notice how many different colors are found in every row, each of them requiring a separate bobbin. I counted 34 colors in one row! The stitch gauge makes traditional fair isle knitting seem positively bulky! The center chullu has teensy tiny stitches-20 to the inch. The other two are 15 and 14 to the inch.

The technique for all three is what Cynthia Le Court Samaké named a “Corded Join”, inevitably there are several ways of doing it. The man I watched, didn’t knit at all, strictly purled…up to the cord, wrap and back around the other way, purling in reverse, never turning the work. The “Knitted Float Intarsia” I mentioned before, achieves the same result in a different manner, without the cord.

I’m practicing and trying to learn, but I feel all thumbs, which is helpful really, you use your thumbs a lot, makes it easier. Some of the people I saw in Peru were not especially fast knitters, but the ones who were – were blindingly fast – little bobbins bobbing along.

diamonds

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Read other accounts of “A New Skill”: google knitcroblo4