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lwood--ewps. I forgot that Friday night, we went to Pike's Place Market, because if I'm visiting the the Land Raven Built, it would be a good idea to re-establish parity between the "raven" and "otter" portions of the shirt collection and pick up a present or two to hand around. 8-)
Okay, on to day two: Norwegian Traditional Design with Annemor Sundbø.
This class was more a meta-class, discussing design technique, than a how-to class that explained how to apply a new technique. These both have uses!
Plus, it features scissors, glue, and mirrors. So, this entry shouldn't completely bore the non-knitters.
Day Two: Norwegian Traditional Design with Annemor Sundbø
Random pronunciation note: Ms Sundbø pronounced her own name, which has the happy side-effect of allowing the ø to fall upon my ear. It's pronounced rather like ö, but it's not nasal like the ever-problematic Old Norse ǫ (aka O-with-a-tail)
...um, yeah, that helps.
How about, "monophthongal close-mid front rounded vowel"?
No?
It's kinda like the vowel in "bird" and "hurt", only without the r. It's a half-swallowed thing that's not like the standard five English vowels. For more information, please refer to the Helsinki Valituskuoro.
Now that that's clear as mud, we can move on.
Once upon a time, a young lady named Annemor Sundbø stopped by a shoddy mill--in its original definition, "shoddy" meant:
--from there, it moved into the modern meaning, but this was one of the last of those mills in Norway. Ms Sundbø was a hand-weaver and wondered if the mill owner could teach her a thing or two that she could apply to her own work--he could, yes, but only if she would buy the mill!
In inspecting the piles of hand-knitted clothing that were the never-ending supply of raw materials for her new shoddy mill, Sundbø found thousands of garments, and picked up a thread that led back into the history of knitting in her region of Norway. There's more of this in her latest, Invisible Threads in Knitting--this class did promote that book, but the idea wasn't that you learned what the book had to say.
Instead, the idea was to deconstruct something knit with traditional motifs and recombine them in a way pleasing to us.
To this end, Sundbø had photocopied several mittens from her library, and gave a stack of eight photocopies of the same mitten to each student. Also, there were several large (US Tabloid/11"x17") sheets with only plain knitting, or a simple lice-patterned* field. Our task, with scissors and glue, was to cut apart the mittens and assemble the motives any way we liked on a new field. In the afternoon, we were to draft these out into actual stranded knitting patterns--this was made harder by the lack of knitters' (or in fact any) graph paper, but we muddled through. The mirrors were to better visualize how a motif might look doubled--with two mirrors, one could see how it might look in radial, rather than bilateral, symmetry.
I have to admit, this one made me feel pretty self-conscious, but I got over myself. I like to think I got more of the point of the exercise than some of the others--at least one person glued eight photocopied mittens to a plain knitted field and declared herself done, while I cut apart the points of an eight-pointed star and scrambled them around for my amusement, sprinkling spider motives and smaller stars among the wreckage. In the end, I had a draft half-completed that might have made a cushion, or part of a sweater.
* - Yes, that's right. Lice pattern: single stitches on a knitted field of a strong completment color (black/white are favorite) are called lice.
I love my husband. I do not love him only because he decided I need an iPhone for my birthday, but this did not hurt.
When in a strange town, and your native guide has run out of spoons and cannot guide you, it becomes darn handy to have a smartphone in your pocket so you can ask of the Great Google Oracle: "ballard restaurant seattle" and lo, you'll have listings, reviews, and clicking on an address throws the address to Google Maps to guide your way.
Note, that it's still nice to have a co-pilot to read off the turns and such, but it's still darned cool.
So for lunch,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
faeryl and I went to a good-by-California-standards burritoria, and getting to and from erynn999's stately abode was a cinch, also. Hooray, iPhone!
Tonight's Mad Social Whirl was to have dinner with T and J, two old friends of mine from my MUD days. We have crashed at each others' homes in the past, starting with me washing up on their doorstep for the Chicago whistlestops on my 2002 trainabout. We wafted through Seattle's Chinatown looking for food, and only found it on the third try after one was mobbed by two separate wedding parties (but still open!) and the other wholly closed for a private party (to go orders ok!). We went to Jade Garden, had ginormous piles of food served family-style, and gabbed until nineish, then repaired to T&J's condo to coo over their Dog of Devastating Cuteness until it was time to head back to Erynn's in Everett.
Okay, now it's off to Hrafnar's Dead Guys' Night. More tomorrow!
-- Lorrie
Okay, on to day two: Norwegian Traditional Design with Annemor Sundbø.
This class was more a meta-class, discussing design technique, than a how-to class that explained how to apply a new technique. These both have uses!
Plus, it features scissors, glue, and mirrors. So, this entry shouldn't completely bore the non-knitters.
Day Two: Norwegian Traditional Design with Annemor Sundbø
Random pronunciation note: Ms Sundbø pronounced her own name, which has the happy side-effect of allowing the ø to fall upon my ear. It's pronounced rather like ö, but it's not nasal like the ever-problematic Old Norse ǫ (aka O-with-a-tail)
...um, yeah, that helps.
How about, "monophthongal close-mid front rounded vowel"?
No?
It's kinda like the vowel in "bird" and "hurt", only without the r. It's a half-swallowed thing that's not like the standard five English vowels. For more information, please refer to the Helsinki Valituskuoro.
Now that that's clear as mud, we can move on.
Once upon a time, a young lady named Annemor Sundbø stopped by a shoddy mill--in its original definition, "shoddy" meant:
Woollen yarn obtained by tearing to shreds refuse woollen rags, which, with the addition of some new wool, is made into a kind of cloth.
--from there, it moved into the modern meaning, but this was one of the last of those mills in Norway. Ms Sundbø was a hand-weaver and wondered if the mill owner could teach her a thing or two that she could apply to her own work--he could, yes, but only if she would buy the mill!
In inspecting the piles of hand-knitted clothing that were the never-ending supply of raw materials for her new shoddy mill, Sundbø found thousands of garments, and picked up a thread that led back into the history of knitting in her region of Norway. There's more of this in her latest, Invisible Threads in Knitting--this class did promote that book, but the idea wasn't that you learned what the book had to say.
Instead, the idea was to deconstruct something knit with traditional motifs and recombine them in a way pleasing to us.
To this end, Sundbø had photocopied several mittens from her library, and gave a stack of eight photocopies of the same mitten to each student. Also, there were several large (US Tabloid/11"x17") sheets with only plain knitting, or a simple lice-patterned* field. Our task, with scissors and glue, was to cut apart the mittens and assemble the motives any way we liked on a new field. In the afternoon, we were to draft these out into actual stranded knitting patterns--this was made harder by the lack of knitters' (or in fact any) graph paper, but we muddled through. The mirrors were to better visualize how a motif might look doubled--with two mirrors, one could see how it might look in radial, rather than bilateral, symmetry.
I have to admit, this one made me feel pretty self-conscious, but I got over myself. I like to think I got more of the point of the exercise than some of the others--at least one person glued eight photocopied mittens to a plain knitted field and declared herself done, while I cut apart the points of an eight-pointed star and scrambled them around for my amusement, sprinkling spider motives and smaller stars among the wreckage. In the end, I had a draft half-completed that might have made a cushion, or part of a sweater.
* - Yes, that's right. Lice pattern: single stitches on a knitted field of a strong completment color (black/white are favorite) are called lice.
I love my husband. I do not love him only because he decided I need an iPhone for my birthday, but this did not hurt.
When in a strange town, and your native guide has run out of spoons and cannot guide you, it becomes darn handy to have a smartphone in your pocket so you can ask of the Great Google Oracle: "ballard restaurant seattle" and lo, you'll have listings, reviews, and clicking on an address throws the address to Google Maps to guide your way.
Note, that it's still nice to have a co-pilot to read off the turns and such, but it's still darned cool.
So for lunch,
faeryl and I went to a good-by-California-standards burritoria, and getting to and from erynn999's stately abode was a cinch, also. Hooray, iPhone!Tonight's Mad Social Whirl was to have dinner with T and J, two old friends of mine from my MUD days. We have crashed at each others' homes in the past, starting with me washing up on their doorstep for the Chicago whistlestops on my 2002 trainabout. We wafted through Seattle's Chinatown looking for food, and only found it on the third try after one was mobbed by two separate wedding parties (but still open!) and the other wholly closed for a private party (to go orders ok!). We went to Jade Garden, had ginormous piles of food served family-style, and gabbed until nineish, then repaired to T&J's condo to coo over their Dog of Devastating Cuteness until it was time to head back to Erynn's in Everett.
Okay, now it's off to Hrafnar's Dead Guys' Night. More tomorrow!
-- Lorrie
