Month: February 2020

Funnel Beaker

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Hello again, and thank you for your ideas, both on and offline, about last week’s grey yarn. More about that project soon, but today’s blog post is about something completely different.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, it won’t come as a surprise that making things is an important part of my life. It’s usually something to do with yarn or wool, but I also enjoy excursions into other mediums now and then. Recently I spent a Saturday morning at a nearby visitor centre (above) making something with clay.

The visitor centre is in the same area where I once had an interesting chat with a shepherd. It is, in fact, next to the sheep fold, so I arrived a little early to say hello to the sheep. Good morning!

The sheep didn’t answer, but quietly kept munching grass and hay before starting their daily walk on the heath.

Walking on, I ran into this big guy (or gal). Whoa!

Fortunately it was just a print on a big banner on the outside wall of the sheep fold.

I’m not just including this photo here for fun, but also because this morning was about going back in time. Not quite as far back in time as this mammoth, but almost. Wikipedia tells me that the mammoth died out around 4,000 years ago. On this Saturday morning, we were going back to the funnel beaker culture, which started here around 3,400 years ago.

The morning began with a short talk about the people who became known for their funnel-neck pots, but also made pottery in other shapes. They were not the first inhabitants of this area, but they were the first farmers, and thousands of shards of their pots have been found around here. They are also the people who built the dolmens and tumuli that are still visible in our landscape today.

Well, I can’t tell you everything I’ve learnt, but I can tell you that it was fascinating.

Then it was time to roll up our sleeves and make a funnel beaker ourselves. The artist who gave the workshop had made two examples. This is one of them:

Unlike the original funnel beaker makers, we didn’t have to travel a long way to find the right kind of river clay for our pots. We were given a slab of a similar clay…

… and started by rolling it out.

Originally the base would have been shaped by hand, and that’s what some of the more experienced participants also did. For those of us with little or no experience (like me) there were moulds to use.

My neighbour at the table was more experienced and had shaped her beaker in no time.

I used too much water to ‘glue’ the next layer onto the base and had to place the beginnings of my pot on a bench outside to dry a little before I could continue, next to those of two other beginners. Mine is on the right.

Several hours later we had all made something that looked more or less like a funnel beaker. Some of the pots were fairly small, like the ones that would originally have been used to store seeds. Others were a lot bigger, like the ones used to hold water or as cooking pots.

The pottery shards of the funnel beaker culture found around here are often richly decorated. In the past, people used feathers, pieces of wood or bone and their fingernails to make the decorations. I used a spatula for the lines and a stick for the dots on my pot.

It was while I was carefully pressing my stick into the soft clay to make dots, that I suddenly felt transported back a few thousand years. In my mind, I was sitting outside, in front of a wattle and daub dwelling, decorating my pot. There was a piercing wind, but dressed in animal skins, I didn’t feel the cold. I could hear sheep bleating and pigs grunting, and I could smell the sweet smell of the cows grazing nearby. I was looking forward to our meal of lentils and foraged greens. Life was hard and uncertain, but it also had its good moments.

Fast forward to the present, I finished my pot by adding a few details in white. Originally a substance made from ground bones and some kind of binder would have been used, but we used a modern paint of which I’ve forgotten the name.

Now my funnel beaker is drying in the artist’s studio, waiting to be fired in her kiln. It should be a soft rosy colour when it comes out. I’m really looking forward to seeing how it’s turned out.

Links:

  • The talk about the funnel beaker culture was held by someone from the Oermuseum, a small but interesting museum with archaeological finds and information about how people lived and worked in the north of the Netherlands from the last ice age to the iron age.
  • The artist who kindly and expertly taught us how to make a funnel beaker was Elisa van den Berg.

In Love with Making

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Why make things when we can buy them?

For my Mum it was necessary to make things because they weren’t available in shops or she couldn’t afford to buy them. For me and for my daughter’s generation it’s different. We don’t need to make things and it is, in fact, often less expensive to buy ready-made things than to buy the materials to make them ourselves. So, why still make things?

As always, I can really only speak for myself, but I think we all agree that a home-cooked meal tastes much better than any ready-made meal from the supermarket. There is nothing we can buy that comes close to a hand-knit pair of socks. And would you ever treasure a shop-bought bed covering as much as you do the quilt or the crocheted blanket your grandmother made?

It may sound cheesy, but for me, it’s all about love. Love of the materials, love of colours, love of the people I make things for, love of the process of making. That’s why Making appeals to me so much. Everything about this bi-annual magazine speaks of the love of making things.

In the US one issue costs $ 26,00 and it is around the same price in Euros in the Netherlands. That’s a steep price for a magazine, but… it was love at first sight. And what’s more, the first two issues were themed Flora and Fauna.

How could I resist?

The people at Making always work with themes. There are always two related themes following each other: Flora and Fauna, Dots and Lines, Color and Black & White, Desert and Forest. I love the whole idea, as well as the projects, the photographs, the stories, the styling and even the ads (there are just a few, they are only on the last few pages, and they are in keeping with the theme).

Knitting is only one of the crafts in Making. There is also weaving, sewing, embroidery, dyeing, felting, rug hooking and much more, as well as a recipe now and then and essays about all kinds of interesting subjects. Some of the projects are small and simple, others a little more complicated.

I brought the third issue, themed Dots, with me on a holiday to Germany a few years back.

I enjoyed leafing through it when I woke up early in the morning. And I enjoyed studying the photographs and reading the essays in the evenings on the covered porch of our Ferienwohnung, after we’d come back from one of our long walks.

Everything in this Dots issue is in shades of indigo blue or undyed. It isn’t as if everything is covered in polka dots – the dots theme is much more subtle than that. In one of the knitting projects, the triangular Indigo Sea Shawl, the dots take the form of a row of eyelets along one side:

During the same holiday in Germany, I bought yarn for this shawl in a very special yarn shop in a former smithy, a few miles from our holiday home. The pattern specified three 50-gram skeins of a sport weight yarn. With a wingspan of just over a metre it was too small to my liking, so I bought four skeins.

I chose three shades of blue-green (what else?), and then added a grey one for a little contrast.

After we got home, I regretted the grey. (It is muddier than in the photo, with a hint of brown.) I didn’t love it and had the feeling that it sucked the colour out of the blue-green shades. I couldn’t go back to change it for a different colour, so I put it away until I knew what to do.

I dug out the yarn for the utterly simple Indigo Sea Shawl recently because I’m desperately in need of another in-between-projects project. Why?

Well, although I love making things, it isn’t always plain sailing. Just as in any important relationship, there are struggles and setbacks from time to time. Right now, I’m puzzling over a new design that isn’t working out as I at first envisioned it. I’m struggling to finish a UFO. And after weeks of waiting, the yarn I’ve ordered for a sweater for our daughter still hasn’t arrived.

So when I saw that Juffrouw Lanterfant (the yarn shop I wrote about last week) stocked the same yarn, I decided to replace the grey with another shade of blue. I photographed the skeins, wound the yarn into balls and took more photographs.

And then, looking at the photographs, I thought: hmmm, perhaps that grey isn’t so bad after all. I still don’t love it, but I don’t hate it anymore either. Maybe it will work in combination with the blues. Maybe it will even be a valuable addition.

So, what shall I do? Embrace a colour I’m not really in love with and give it a chance? Or tell it that I don’t see a future for us together and take it to my knitting group’s yarn swap in March?

Unfortunately the Dots issue is now out of print. The other issues are still available from some yarn shops and on the Making website.

Miss Lazy Daisy

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The route to the meeting I was going to attend in the city of Groningen ran right past a yarn shop. Because it isn’t every day that I visit Groningen, I packed my camera and took an earlier train to have some time to browse around and take pictures.

After a short walk from the railway station, I stood in front of Juffrouw Lanterfant (which translates into something like Miss Lazy Daisy). It is a corner shop with an old, tall and narrow door and other lovely old details. 

As soon as I entered, I was dazzled by the wall of brightly coloured skeins of yarn. I’m not entirely sure, but I think these are from Hedgehog Fibres:

Just the thing for a Stephen West design. I have met Stephen several times and know first-hand that he is a very friendly person as well as an incredibly prolific designer. Although we have very different tastes, I think what he is doing is really, really interesting and highly original.

On a coat rack there were several shop samples of shawls, loops, cardigans and sweaters. The short-sleeved top with the attractive all-over pattern and lovely neckline is ‘Sanctuary’ from Pompom Quarterly #29.

And, oh, that beautiful rainbow of colours in the small cupboard to the right of it! That must be Appletons crewel wool.

And what do I spy on the top shelf?

Several gift boxes filled with ArtYarns’ luxurious fibres embellished with beads or sequins. I once splashed out on one single skein of those, a silvery yarn with beads AND sequins. ArtYarns are a bit too blingy for an entire shawl to my taste, but in combination with other, quieter yarns – yum!

At the other end of the spectrum, the shop also stocks Icelandic Létt Lopi. A rustic, really woolly, sheepy yarn.

The shop lady was knitting a humongous shawl from it, in black, grey and white with fluorescent pink accents. She said it would be about 4 metres long when finished. Here it is, laid out on the reading table:

I love it when a yarn shop has a big table like this, even though (or perhaps especially if) it is rather messy. Nowadays, yarn shops aren’t just about buying yarn. They are also great places to find inspiration, leaf through new knitting books and meet other makers.

Having said that, I did buy something – one beautiful skein of yarn to complement several others I once bought in Germany:

If you’re ever in the area, do pop into Juffrouw Lanterfant. Their address and most (but not all) of the yarns they stock are on their website.

This blog post isn’t sponsored in any way. I sometimes write about yarn shops because I love chatting about the materials I choose and use, and also because I think it may be of interest to other knitters. I feel a bit silly repeating this every time, so I have now altered my ‘About’ page to explain once and for all that I don’t have a hidden agenda.

In-Between-Projects Project

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Pale, medium and dark grey, with a some clear blue thrown in now and then – that’s February skies. For people in the Southern hemisphere, like some of my relatives and friends, it’s a different story, of course. But if you’re in the North and tired of dreary days, I hope this blogpost will work as a spot of colour therapy.

A long time ago, I bought a big bag full of alpaca yarn. Single balls in many different colours and some neutrals to offset all that brightness. I was going to crochet a granny square blanket, something like this:

After crocheting just a few squares I realized that the yarn wasn’t suitable. At least not to my taste. It had zero elasticity, which meant that it lacked the squishiness and coziness factor that a blanket needs. It was also very smooth and slippery, and I was afraid that all those woven in ends would soon unravel.

I put the yarn away until I had a better idea for it.

Many years later, I thought of starting an ‘in-between-projects project’ – something simple to knit while I was finishing another project, to prevent that from becoming a UFO. Something that I could easily put aside when I was ready to start something new, and pick up again when that was at the finishing stage. It needed to be rather boring, or I would still be in danger of creating more UFOs.

I chose this pattern:

It is simply called ‘Stole’ (Ravelry link) and was designed by Theresa Gaffey. Basically it is no more than a huge expanse of ribbing. My alpaca yarn would be ideal for it – nice and drapey. There wouldn’t be too many ends to weave in that could come undone. And I had many colours to choose from.

I thought it would be nice to do one half in neutrals (black and greys) and one half in cheerful colours. This was my original colour choice:

But when I was on to the last colour but one, I wasn’t happy. The medium pink looked ‘dirty’ beside the bright fuchsia, and the whole thing seemed out of balance. So I tried out all kinds of alternative colour combinations, always keeping the neutral half intact.

I tried some very bright colours next to the original red and fuchsia. Cheerful, and a lovely contrast with the neutral half…

… but not really ‘me’.

Some purples next to the red and fuchsia then?

Not bad, but not great either.

Okay, what if I ripped out the red, fuchsia and pink entirely? That would mean many, many hours of knitting down the drain (there were 400+ stitches on my needles), but I didn’t mind. This wasn’t about finishing something quickly.

So, what if I chose a gradient of pinks and purples, mirroring the gradient of neutrals?

Nice. Well- balanced. But I wasn’t in love with it.

How about a gradient of blues instead?

Ahhh, yes, that felt good. But, really, blues again? Very predictable and not very exciting.

In the end I went with the blues anyway. I ripped the stole back almost entirely to the neutrals, but decided to make it a little more exciting by leaving in a very narrow band of red.

Here is Theresa Gaffey’s Stole finished:
(I wasn’t feeling very photogenic and cut my head off. Don’t worry – just in the photo.)

Well, it is no longer Theresa Gaffey’s stole, but very much mine. I used her pattern as a starting point, but cast on more stitches, made the ‘ribs’ several stitches wider, added I-cord edges, chose a very different colour combination, and used 11 colours instead of her 9.

That’s one of the nice things about knitting. You don’t need to be hugely creative to make a project your own. Just choose different colours, tweak a few details if you like, and you end up with something unique.

With its 0.70 by 2.20 m / 27’’ by 87’’ it is a huge stole – almost a blanket.

I didn’t use blocking wires to stretch the knitting out. I just soaked the stole in a no-rinse detergent for 30 minutes and put it in the spin-dryer. Then I stretched it out on the floor, using my hands to smooth and stretch the knitting as much as possible. As an alternative it could be stretched out on a bed, or perhaps even folded double and stretched out over a drying rack. Warning: Some colours may bleed!

Now I still have more of the alpaca left.

Would I like to make another stole like this? Hmmm, maybe later. I loved the meditative nature of this project. And my idea behind it seemed to work – I haven’t created any new UFOs for quite a while. (I haven’t finished any old ones either, but I’m working on that.) But I think I’ll first choose something else as my next in-between-projects project.