Dances with Wools

We spun a bunch of yarn. We thought it looked pretty cool. We took photos.

What do you do when your knitterly adult daughter comes to stay for two weeks while she is working in Portland? You squeeze in all the fiber your diet can hold. (In spite of all the eating out you may plan to do...after all, we do live in the land of food carts and coffee)

Jo, my grown daughter, stays with us periodically for various events, life stuff, etc. Whenever she comes to Portland, we have a great time eeking out ways to spend time knitting together, pouring over knitting book and patterns, shopping at knitting stores, or otherwise enjoying a wooly good time.

Sometimes it gets tough when we are all working, and this last visit from Jo was no exception. She was here working at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts as a dance teacher for a kids' arts camp. Regardless of the sparsity of our time while Jo was teaching modern dance during the day, we made time for a few dances with wools, no matter how few they were.

Pattern from The Joy of Sox book

This visit, we spent a bit of time in Portland and a few nights and mornings knitting on my little front porch on some cushy chairs. Jo brought a few projects and some tiny bits of yarn. The projects included a cabled scarf from Lily Chin's Power Cables, and one from The Joy of Sox.

The bits of yarn were things she did not know what to do with and included 3 colors of yarn she had used for various projects including some socks. She gave them to me. I thought I could save them with other sock yarn to eventually make socks or gloves in whatever stripes strike my fancy as I knit. But then I thought it might be cool to see if we could come up with something that would completely use up just one of the tiny balls.

Bits of magic

I thought a headband just the ticket.

So we took out the Walker stitch dictionaries, among several others and layed them all over the floor. We decided on one that is called Sea Foam in Vogue's stitchionary, but has other names depending on the writer.

It has a 2 pattern repeat over 10 stitches, but I wanted a triangle sort of shape with the pattern. So, I did a row with only one pattern and one with 2. In between those rows are 3 knit rows. The result is pretty promising, really stretchy. Good, since my head is huge. (No, huge. Like the kid in Mike Meyer's movie, So I Married an Ax Murderer.)

Stretchy is goooooooood

Jo and I fiddled with the headband a bit, but honestly, the time was too short. It is still not done, though it has been weeks. If I finish it, I will share the recipe.

As it is, the fun was over too soon. She is returning this week, however, for her 24th birthday and my dad's 81st birthday picnic. We may have to sneak away to some nearby trees and see if we can secretly spin some moss into gold. Or at least into yarn.