Flagel Knitting Files

I am back from a lovely wedding in Portland, Oregon over the weekend.  There will be a bit about it; I also want to share an event where lemons turned into lemonade very quickly for me. To be clear the wedding of my step son was anything but a shipwreck; it was transcendent.  The couple during each step of the way was able to inject their personal touches from the invitations, to the setting of the wedding, the meal and the after party.  The wedding had an unadorned elegance to it.  And through it all I was treated with as much reverence as the biological mother.  It was a honour to be a part of such an event. Here's a somewhat candid shot of the couple with my step-daughter, her husband and son.  That is one of Portland's major bridges in the background; we were outside in a park with a handmade arch built specifically for the wedding.  (There's a lot of tall going on here, the guys are about 6'7" in height and the bride is 6'.  You can see I...

WEBS, America's Yarn Shop, as they proclaim it, is now selling Sweet Georgia yarns and advertising it on Facebook! WEBS is a huge yarn shop located in Northhampton, Massachusetts.  I have been getting e-mail updates from them for years.  The shops annual sale (going on until the end of August 2016) draw thousands of customers due to their proximity to New York City.  The business started with Barbara and Art Elkins in 1974 out of the basement of their home.  The emphasis was on loom weaving at the time; by 1984 the business had to move to a new location and added knitting yarn to their stock and then moved again in 1987.  At that time Art had retired from his professorship in business management at the University of Massachusetts and began working in the store full-time.  It is about then their mail order business took off.  Skip forward to 2002 when the second generation took over, Steve and Kathy Elkins.  For more details check out the histo...

We all know them, people who are so generous, so willing to give or help that you never have to ask, they just do whatever they can to support.  I have been lucky knowing about a half dozen of such people in my life, more than my fair share.  There is no way I will ever to able to balance what I owe them, but I do try. Morrie Boogaart is such a man.  He has been helping others his entire life by shoveling snow and mowing lawns for neighbor ladies and running a local bakery.  It seems Morrie is indeed one of those persons, those who give so selflessly.  At the age of 91 he is making hats for the homeless.  Spectrum Heart Beat wrote that after he'd made 8,000 hats he quit counting. "You keep going around like that, one at a time and pull it over that peg," explains Boogaart. "Keep it going all the way around. I do it awfully slow, it maybe takes me two days to make a hat." Morrie Boogaart and his loom (photo from Spectrum Health Beat) After his wi...

I know, I know it is not Friday, but the completion of the Sleek bracelet was so close, it just had to be finished.  Over the weekend I finished the beading and today I added the closure; it is now something I can wear! The Sleek Bracelet indeed lives up to the definition of its name:    Smooth   and   lustrous  as if  polished;   glossy:   long,   sleek,   blond   hair. Able  to or  designed  to  move   efficiently   through   air  or  water;   streamlined:   a  sleek  sedan. Thin   and   elegant  in  design:   pair  of  sleek   minarets   anchored   the   skyline. All three definitions fit it.  The glass beads have such a lovely luster, the main body of beads are free allowing the design to flow and undulate between the anchor beads at the edges and the overall thin width and colour...

As I thought about the last week it occurred to me I spent it doing new things every day making the week fatiguing in a different way.  At a certain point in adulthood many of us decide to avoid taking on new things because we more than likely won't be particularly good at them.  I, too, have done my fair share of this sort of steering clear of something new, but not last week.  Here were five new things done that kept my mind active. Last Saturday I took a beading class to learn new techniques.  I used new beads and thread and risked looking pretty silly in front of others, but that was not the case.  Should I have stayed away because of fear of not looking experienced, I would have missed out on something I really enjoyed.  BTW I want to show you the now fully finished Super O bracelet.  (No more loose threads flowing about.) My exercise trainer decided to take a two week holiday, certainly a well deserved one.  She started her b...

Yeah, there were plenty of beads in the house so I could move forward full throttle on a beading project I have been eyeing up for months, Jill Wiseman's Sleek Bracelet. Photo from jillwisemandesigns.com This bracelet is so beautiful IMHO.  I love the glittery gold edges with that dark centre.  Jill advised the bracelet is both light weight and flexible and in fact it is.  So last Saturday I took my shopping list of needed supplies with me and purchased what I needed. The bulk of the bracelet is made up of Delicas, a small type of cylindrical seed beads in two colours.  There are also bugle beds that make up part of the edging.   The only stitch used to make the main part of this bracelet is the flat square stitch.  The stitch requires making a square around each pair of beads as one is added. Image from fusionbeads.com Once a row is created the beader runs an additional line of thread down the second row from the end and back up ...

This post has absolutely nothing to do with spinning, knitting or beading directly.  However it does offer a solution for keeping cool on hot days.  By hot here in the Greater Lower Mainland I mean 25C or about 80F.  Today's post is simply a public service announcement for my U.S friends and family about a Canadian specialty, at least to me. Tim Horton's is a beloved Canadian fast food chain, now owned by Burger King.  The chain has stores throughout Canada and even a few in the U.S.   (The name belongs to a famous Canadian hockey player, of course, who was one of the founders.)  Its claims to fame include donuts and coffee, but it also serves chili, sandwiches and other types of beverages.  It has also added breakfast items and more lighter fare recently. Every summer Timmy's, as it is affectionately called here, rolls out a summer drink called Ice Capp.  This drink includes coffee, cream, sugar and very finely chopped ice (think Slurpee ic...

I am still fiddling with chain plying today and there really isn't much new or exciting to report on that front, yet.  Surprise, surprise it is harder to do than it looks .  Instead I will reveal my problem spin from a while back.  Keep in mind I wrote this post about a month ago so references to time are off.  And enough time has past that you might not find the topic too maudlin either.  (I know, I just revealed the fact there is self-editing going on behind the scenes for this blog!) ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Last week I did try to spin with wet roving.  I have no good explanation for why I thought there was a remote chance this might work.  We never did anything like this in the class I took last Fall.  Of course the main problem was poor planning on my part.  The roving wasn't washed with enough advanced time to dry. I should really start by giving you a description of the roving I used.  First there was the 25 grams of yak and ...

I take satisfaction in knowing I am not the only one to make enormous, colossal, gigantic, monumental mistakes in knitting.  There are plenty of such mistakes almost every time I pick up the needles.  Some I can fix without too much effort, some are fiddly, some can be finessed into looking OK, and others just have to be frogged.  In short, if you knit you also need to know how to appropriately correct your knitting. Stephanie labeled this photo "dammit" (photo from yarnharlot.ca) The photo above is from the Yarn Harlot blog .  Stephanie Pearl-McPhee is knitting from a Schoolhouse Press publication called Latvian Mittens by Lizbeth Upitis.  Aren't these Fair Isle beauties exquisite.  Stephanie writes with great satisfaction about her attention to detail as she worked the braids on the mittens with the left mitten's facing left and the right, right. But as you continue to look at those mittens you start thinking your eyes have gone awry.  The...

As mentioned earlier in a post, I have been working behind the scenes on Anisette .  It has been satisfying to create this lovely shawl.  Once I created and then actually found an accurate chart (which can be found here ) things really started taking off.  Sure we had a few minor setbacks and hiccups, but all in all this project was what I would call a smooth one.  I started on June 30 and by August 15 it was done which is not bad considering all the other things I created during that six week period and how little time I spent knitting (due to doctor's orders, which have now lapsed).  And the hard deadline is August 24, so there was no nail biting for this project's completion. The yarn is Lang Yarns Merino 400 in two tones of blue with these colour choices foisted upon me.  I started with a 50 gm cake of the darker yarn thinking two balls would be enough; but as I continued to knit it became clear my thinking was off by a very large factor.  S...

The class was taught by Kellie of Kellie's Bead Boutique in West Maple Ridge.  I have shopped at the store before because it is getting difficult to find bead shops in my area.  Every time I check another one has closed its doors.  Kellie' has a wide range of jewelry supplies, except bugle beads.  For some reason her supply is rather small in this realm. We had been instructed to show up at 1 pm with the supplies already purchased.  So being the on-time type I am I showed at the store at 12:30 pm to make sure I had plenty of time to make the necessary purchases.  All this information is a long winded way of saying I had too much time to stock up on beads. First go here to see all the beads available in this shop.  I will post my favorite of the group below.  As you can see from those photos Kellie's stocks supplies for the gamut of jewelry making techniques.  Lucky for me it is a good 13 miles/21 kilometers away. Photo from kelliesbe...

I decided to bead this Friday by re-purposing something I started last winter.  You might remember these little flowers made with super duos, seed beads and a large pearl center.  If not let me show you them again. They were supposed to be strung together to create a Jill Wiseman design called the Pretty Posy ornament cover.  But I don't need another ornament cover; there are already 10 in the house.  So I decided to make a Pretty Posy bracelet instead.  This one will be pint size to fit a small wrist.  You know who I mean, don't you. After a couple of hours, here's what I completed. It still needs a toggle clasp which I will purchase today at the beading class.  Speaking of which, perhaps I should get ready to go to it.  More about the class tomorrow.

My knitting buddy, Tena, took a trip recently to see her mom in Manitoba.  While there they took a road trip into Ontario.  During that trip they stopped off at Elgi's Sheep Farm Ltd ., a small business started in 1952 when the Swedish couple, Robert and Margarit Egli, emigrated to Ontario.  Elgi's carries all sorts of woolly goodies from moccasins to sheepskins to woolen socks, shirts and blankets, to finally yarn and roving.  Tena was kind enough to purchase 100 grams of a Corriedale roving in the colour Cupcake and gave it to me.  (She picked this colour because she knows there is a certain amount of pink knitting happening in my life due to the grand daughters.) This roving (or roping as they called it) looks just like a cupcake topping of pink buttercream frosting So on Spinning Wednesday I prepared the roving, took out my lace flyer (different sized flyers spin different weight yarns) and spun for a couple of hours.  My goal was to improve to th...

The trip from my home to Sweet Georgia Yarns (SGY) takes 45 minutes when traffic is light.  I had to run another errand this morning which took me within 17 minutes of SGY so it made sense to stop by. Sweet Georgia's main purpose is hand-dying wool, a labor-intensive activity to be sure, but one that doesn't really take up that much space.  I expected the space would be small, but both the retail and dyeing space were really very small when I first walked in. These shelves represent about one-half the retail shelves I first saw. This is the dyeing space which was warm and humid on this cool rainy day. No one was around in the retail area so I walked in the dyeing space and asked if I could take a picture and if there were roving braids for sale.  As the dyer located help for me, I took the photos above. But the colours of the yarn were the main attraction for me.  They are so bright, vibrant and clean; I just smile every time I see them.  Felicia ...

As I thought about beading on Friday it became clear there weren't the right type of beads in the house.  Since I am taking a class about beading at a bead shop on Saturday, August 13 I decided to focus on spinning instead. The periwinkle dyed Perendale spun last Wednesday was quite an improvement over the poor honey fig coloured merino that was butchered during spinning the week before.  On Thursday and Friday I went about seeing what I could find regarding spinning lessons.  I was also investigating Sweet Georgia Yarns because that merino braid came from there and I want to do another braid of it justice. Photo from the Sweet Georgia website Sweet Georgia Yarns have been on my radar for some time.  Felicia Lo, the owner, began the company in 2005 in her kitchen .   She has over 10 years later created a successful business in hand dying yarns and roving for knitters and spinners.  Many LYS in the Greater Vancouver area carry her vibrant yarns and...