Toto, I have a feeling we aren’t in Kansas anymore…

I arrived safely in Memphis, quite an uneventful trip.  As a matter of fact, I wish it had been a bit longer…  I’ll elaborate in a minute…

I’m actually not teaching in Memphis, but just over the border in Hernando, MS.  My hostess picked me up, with her lovely daughter and 9 month old granddaughter.  Eva and her daughter are both weavers, and they will be taking the three day jacket workshop.  Eva and her husband own a small air strip, and the brand new studio where I’ll be teaching is on top of the airplane hanger.  You have to see this to believe it.  Partly because I’ve never been in a more spectacular space, set up with tables for the workshop, but will eventually house 11 looms, and partly because there is a balcony that looks down on a group of small colorful airplanes, artfully parked within the hanger, and I promise I’ll get a photo and update the blog tomorrow.  This will be a first!  Bad weather is due in this weekend, otherwise I was assured that all of the homeowners along the street, with airplane hangers behind them instead of garages, would be out flying on the weekend!  And we will be too busy sewing to watch…

There is a downside to writing a blog.  I gleefully post all my new projects, things I’m working on, thinking of working on, and they are sent out into the world, read by a few hundred people and now I have this little pang of guilt when I don’t follow through and finish.  There are only a handful of UFO’s lurking in the blog archives, so it isn’t so bad, but one of the lurking UFO’s has been lurking on more than 6 years, you can read about how I dug it out and the history of it here…

I started working on this sweater years ago, that would be a knitted sweater, not something I wove.  I actually knitted a lot when I was a teenager, I wore sweaters I had knitted, and of course, when I learned to knit and crochet, granny squares were the rage.  Thank God we are past that little fashion trend…  But I was a pretty competent knitter back then, its just, well, there have been other fiber mediums that have called to me more, and I tend to pick complicated projects so it isn’t like I can just bring my knitting along and listen to the speaker at a guild meeting while I’m doing it.  So I was largely out of practice when I undertook the knitted shell, a Lily Chin design adapted from her book Knit and Crochet with Beads, published by Interweave Press.  The actual shell was featured in an issue of Piecework Magazine, Jan/Feb 2005.  That’s how long I’ve been working on it.

In February, before I started all my traveling for the year, I dug the sweater out, and decided to make an attempt to actually finish it.  Problem was, and this is why I put it away after my January ’09 post, was the back half, knitted five years after the front half, didn’t match.  My knitting had tightened up, and the original half was droopy and loose, and the second half was tighter but now too short, since I was following a cable pattern with beads, I had to match the two stitch for stitch.

At the February weavers guild meeting, I asked for advice, and there was nothing to  be done but rip out the second half, back to where I started binding off for the armhole, and knit it longer, and then completely rip out the first half, and re knit it to match the second half.  A couple of guild members held my hand while I carefully ripped out the entire front, winding the yarn gently onto a card, and we all shed a tear or two in sympathy.

So in mid February, I mostly started the whole sweater over, and I worked on it in airports, in hotel rooms, watching the Olympics, and on planes.  I had a woman sitting next to me on a plane drooling all over the sweater, which in my unskilled opinion is still too loose, exclaiming what a true artist I am.  Forgive them, for they know not what they say…  Poor woman, I tried to explain that really, I’m just following a pattern, and I didn’t design it, and I’ve ripped the entire thing out  once already, but she wouldn’t budge.  Of course the irony was I was wearing one of my handwoven coats the whole time, and she never mentioned it.  Oh well…

I managed to actually finish the second side, actually the first side re-done, while sitting in the terminal today, and then I put the two together.  I got the sides sewn up, and then picked up the stitches with a small circular needle, and I’m knitting the funnel neck of the sweater continuing the bead pattern.  I was disappointed when the pilot said we were coming in for a landing, I wanted to scream, “No, I’m not finished this round yet!”  I’m enjoying working on it, and it is looking like I may actually finish it on this trip…  That would make me really really smile…

I’m staying in a hotel for the first leg of this trip, a simple Super 8, but it is quiet, and I have free wireless, and I totally need a break, and I have my sweater…

This is what was waiting for me on my bed when I arrived.  They will be picking me up for dinner, but the snacks and fruits were very welcome, and the basket even had a handwoven Welcome card in it.  How fun is that?  That round wine colored fruit in the front is a plum.  Still early in the season, it was delicious, and my first plum of the year.

Stay tuned…