These links tackle and illustrate some ideas I’ve been thinking about over the weeks that I haven’t been posting. They represent creative uses of materials and experiments with pushing boundaries, the act of making and what its meaning is.

1. Yurt Alert: A felter decides to take on a large project with local materials, crocheting a yurt with hand felted wool cord. After that – experimentation with other materials? This could have really interesting implications for people interested in alternative living spaces, and possibly post-disaster and conflict zones?

2. A link from Yurt Alert: Kwangho Lee’s furniture page, showing a study in use of materials, mainly knotted synthetic cord, to create different shapes.

3. Make and Meaning: Community in Conversation – I’ve enjoyed every entry I’ve read in the past week and look forward to more. Various contributors share and pontificate about creativity, creation, ideas, meaning, and the act of making. From their About page:

Make & Meaning: Why We’re Here

Acts of making are important – whether they involve yarn and knitting needles, wood and tools, pots and pans, brushes and canvas or anything else.

When we make things, time and worry fall away. We’re more aware, engaged, and excited – and we find it easier to connect with others. In truth, making connects us to our best selves.

We believe in making, and we love the fact that the internet allows makers to meet and geek out together, regardless of geography. There are many, many websites that celebrate making in all its forms. We created Make & Meaning to celebrate all the ways making enhances our lives, and all the things it causes us think about.

Also check out links to some of the contributors’ blogs: Kim Werker, Craftivism, Dudecraft.

Here’s to a wonderful 2010!

I just found out that my Garden Shawl won a second prize in the Skein and Garment Competition at SAFF. I’m not sure which category? (Design: Evelyn Clark. Yarn: Avillion Farm.)

And what better prize for knitters than skeins of yarn! I can’t wait to find out what it looks like. [Thanks Elaina!]

Here’s my yarn substitution question, which is kind of specific – if you are familiar with Ella Rae Silkience, can you think of a yarn that would do nicely instead? Unfortunately Silkience has been discontinued…

There is this thing that happens to me when I become overwhelmed with obligations that I don’t want to think about. My brain switches over to this other track where, in the back of my mind at work, I think about when I get to leave and go home and knit. This week has been all about going home and knitting. I was in the office late once, and now for the second time in three days, but when I leave, I do not want to socialize or read or do much of anything else.

I can handle a couple of podcasts, and I’ve been working my way through Season 1 of The Wire. Which is awesome. And you should all listen to the Radio Lab podcast on parasites to find out why hookworm might be good for you. Lots of learning during my knitting. [Lots of learning about things that may affect me more in Kinshasa than North Carolina? Lots of learning about why building latrines encouraged the economic resurgence of the southern US a bunch of decades ago?] Go ahead. Click. It’s right in the sidebar. Hookworms, asthma, economic rebirth: who’d have thought they’re related?

In between working a little bit on this and a little bit on that, I’ve been spinning up some mystery fiber that was given to me for knitting some socks. Oh, just looked it up in my email, it’s actually 65% Border Leicester lamb, 25% tussah,
and 10% superfine kid mohair! Just a bit more of 4oz. to go, and I’ll be ready to ply.

Normally this work is about unwinding, and about spending a little time creating.

The more I get into my new job, the more I feel like this unwinding and creating time is a necessity rather than a simple choice of how to spend my down time. I’m retreating a little bit from social activities, but hopefully with the result of recharging and feeling a sense of achievement of something I can feel proud of.

Hey what do you all think of my idea for a knitted pillow? Only, an image of knitting on a throw pillow! This cracks me up for some reason. I think I’m going to send my mom one for Christmas. And I’ll probably get one for me!

Knitted throw pillow!

If you have to have one, too, click the link. There are some other items I pasted this image to, like tiles, totes, and Siggs. If you want a t-shirt of some sort, let me know and I’ll put one up!

[The photo is of my Parker Cardigan stitching.]

[Additional update: I won the photo contest yesterday! Thanks to everyone that voted!]

Completely selfish plug here, but if I don’t do it, who will? OK, Amber will! She convinced me to enter a photo in a weekly contest in a whose theme is “city life.” If I win, it will be featured on a Baltimore-based site “b” and in the print version this weekend. I entered this photo and you can vote here.

Just a brief update on how the SnB Kinshasa is going – I now have almost a Stitch ‘n Bitch! I say almost because there were several non crafters and many non stitchers, so I called it Craftster Kinshasa instead of SnB. We met once with lots of snacks and wine, and have a 2x/mo schedule set up.

Now to the meat of things.

I love to start projects. I have a million ideas. But finishing is another matter entirely, and this extends to many areas of my life. Not finishing knitting isn’t the end of the world, though, so I’ve kind of gotten over the need to finish everything I start, and the tendency to treat a knitting project like a work project.

There is a lot of satisfaction in finishing, though, so even though I’m still following a kind of diffused, possibly even ADD approach, I’m trying to rein in some of the items I really did want to complete.

(L) Zick Zack Tunic in Jaggerspun Zephyr – I’m now working on the cowl neck!
(R) Sophia from French Girl Knits – this is a terrible photo but I’m working on side seams (this pattern was written without them, but I messed up…) and bottom edging; I have blurry, nonuploaded, modeled photos for … next time?

And there is, of course, the secret Bonobo project, which currently looks like this:

And last but not least, a project resurrected from the really ancient archives of 2003 (where archives = some box it got smushed into during international transits): The Man Sweater from the original SnB book for my brother. (If you click that link, you’ll see the sweater I knitted in the mean time…)

This now has almost two sleeves and a front, and is practically ready for finishing. Yes! So what if it takes over 5 years?

For those of you only interested in a photo:

Bins of colorful fleece from MDS&W in May

Yesterday I had lunch with a new fellow at one of our agencies. She receives a housing stipend but is a graduate of some genre of Catholic school that has a worldwide guest house system. So, during her stay here, she decided to live with the nuns. In a city as expensive as Kinshasa (for expats), this is an incredibly economic move.

She seems to be enjoying living with the nuns – they watch movies, mostly West African, each Sunday as part of a cultural program linked with the cultural center next door. They feed her daily, so she has nourishment and community.

And, we were talking about tonight’s inaugural SnB meeting, and she told me that one of the nuns is a prolific and dedicated knitter.

Now this may not seem too out of the ordinary, knitting in front of a movie, but I know only two other people (and only one of them Congolese) in Kinshasa that told me they know how to knit. There are very few formal stores to speak of in this country, so definitely no yarn stores, although I wonder what you could come up with in the local market. I would imagine the quality would be along the lines of a worsted acrylic, and not produced locally. There was only one place that produced cotton cloth that I know of in Kinshasa, and it recently changed its focus to eliminate the cloth…

There are also no fiber-producing animals to speak of. Heck, you can’t even find a milk-producing animal in Kinshasa. After more than one year living here and three + years traveling here, I finally spotted cows a few weeks back. There are a lot of goats around, outside of the CBD, but the cows are mysteriously not in evidence. In fact, I caught sight of the herd only after dark, and turning a corner off the main road to some secret location around the corner. The main reason, I guess, aside from poverty, is twofold – the weather in the eastern part of the country is cooler, but these more tropical temps don’t support large livestock, and also it is not easy to maintain a hygenic product. Today at lunch, I asked a Kinoise woman about the locally produced drinkable yogurt (which I don’t necessarily recommend, also for hygiene reasons). She said she suspects it is made from powdered milk. There is NO fresh milk to be found here!

Guess what! This Thursday is going to be the inaugural meeting of the Kinshasa SnB! I can’t wait! I don’t know that we have many knitters, but I have two more friends interested in learning, and it should be educational to have other types of stitchers there, too.

I meant to do some photography over the weekend to update some of my Ravelry project descriptions, but, well, I guess I worked on knitting instead. And I was talking to one of my non-knitter friends about knitting, and I got so excited I pulled out a plastic bin of knitted goods, and we took every one out of the bin and tried it on. That would have been a photo opp, socks on hands, hats and scarves and sweaters piled on.

She said, you have a LOT of knitted things.

We sat in the AC with sweaters on and drank tea and talked about Shetland yarn (she’s Scottish), and I knitted. It almost felt like fall on the east coast.

These photos are from the Fells Point fest in Baltimore the weekend of October 3rd, some other types of handmade items instead of my own.

Is it a bonobo?

Who else was obsessed with these 20yrs ago?

Makes me want to buy some eggs

Also, thanks WordPress, I hadn’t used the “caption” function before but I like it.

I’m going to start a Stitch ‘n Bitch Kinshasa.

So far I have a sew-er, a quilter, and the former is a wannabe knitter.

Look out, Kinshasa!

Suddenly I have an urge to share with you some of my backlogged photos, so the spate of new blog entries continues!  Back in May, I took one of these home.

And I took some of this home.

And I spun and I spindled and I plied my little heart out.

And I ended up with this.

It is 50/50 wool and silk, about 0.5oz and 85 yards. I have quite a lot left of my 4oz of roving, plus one ounce of pure silk (the right braid above). Yummm! What will I ever dream up that will be a worthy project for spun gold?