Laura Kate

Cast-on Monday (and hopefully cast-off too)

Posted on March 27, 2023 by Laura Kate

Spring is in the air and on the ground! Although we had frost on the roof this morning, it is warming rapidly. I was in St. Louis for the spring equinox. When I got home last Thursday, there were hundreds of grape hyacinths blooming in the yard and the flower bed.

While in St. Louis, we visited a LYS located in a suburb. We had promised Lu that she could pick out the yarn for her next sweater. Many thanks to the tolerant staff at Yarn Com while the little one whirled through the shop, looking at and picking up every skein that attracted her attention. She carried this on while talking softly to herself. Finally, she triumphently presented me with this hand-painted merino wool skein in her favorite shades of purple and pink.

Alas, the label was torn off and lost, so I don’t know the maker.

I paired it with some lavender Cascade 220 and a soft pink blended wool in Elysion by Cascade, quickly and quietly moving to the register before she added to the stack.

The washed swatch is very soft.

On Friday I searched Ravelry and chose a pattern that fit this yarn quite well.

https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/sweet–simple-cardigan

C2013 Coats & Clark http://www.redheart.co.uk

The other item I’m working is a scarf. It has many attributes, including travel knitting, mindless knitting, stashbuster and quick knit.

The brown yarn is a wool-acrylic blend leftover from Christmas sock making. The gray and white yarns are 100% alpaca. I was given the multi-hued natural colored skein from knitting buddy Kathy. The source of the white is forgotten and unknown.

To keep from being too bored I played around with different striping patterns. To achieve the diagonal stripe, you decrease at the end of the right-side rows and increase at the end of the wrong-side rows. I’ll knit until I run out of the shortest yarn. That could happen today.

Do you have a project in process that is inspired by Springtime?

Uncategorized

Vacation in St. Louis

Posted on March 25, 2023 by Laura Kate

Hello, I’m back home after a spring break trip to St. Louis. While I’ve done a bit of knitting, I am way behind on the 100-day project. My knitting will be detailed on Monday. For now, I’d like to share a bit of what I saw at the St. Louis Museum of Art.

Fortunately for me, the museum has a very liberal policy on photography. And while it is not huge (we easily viewed nearly all of it in a 2-hour span, despite the presence of a 4-year-old in our group) it has a very nice collection. Lots of it is American art. I was able to photograph a handful of works that impressed me. Here are some examples.

In the American gallery, 19th and 20th century paintings:

Loved the depiction of light on the water in this gorgeous oil painting.

Georgia O’Keefe – my perennial favorite painter.

Moving on to sculpture – first, an ancient Chinese stone carving of Buddha

Next, an 800-year-old carving of Christ.

This sculpture was commissioned by the museum and fabricated from local limestone.

And finally, as fiber artist, I couldn’t leave until I had seen some examples from the collection.

I have a lot of free time in the up-coming week and so expect to re-double my efforts to make art. Check this space in a few days for the next installment of 100 days of art inspired by Bill’s photographs.

quilting

SAHRR 2023 Big Finish

Posted on March 17, 2023 by Laura Kate

This Friday, I have a final view of my Stay-at-Home Round Robin quilt. While I am describing it as a finish, there are several more steps I need to take before it can grace a queen-size bed. But, all the design elements are in place.

In my last post, you saw the pinwheel blocks made for Round Six. I used them as centerpieces of four large triangle sections constructed from hourglass blocks.

Viewed from this angle, the pinwheels seem to have shadow pinwheels as the hourglass blocks converge.

After sewing the corner pieces in place, the quilt still needed more width. To address this, I made strips of half-square triangles. At the centers of these strips I inserted a few more scraps from my recycled pineapple blocks, just to break up the long stretch of background fabric.

With the addition of the corners and the side strips, my quilt now measures 78 by 90.

Close up of pinwheel corner:

At this point, I admit that I am feeling a bit spent. There are problems yet to be solved (and do I add a border or not?) but there is a bright light at the end of this tunnel. Our town has a quilt shop that offers long-arm quilting services. I was overjoyed and relieved that I will not be attempting to quilt this on my domestic machine. My reservation to get the quilting done is set for June.

I will now add my scrappy SAHRR quilt to the quilt parade.

Thanks to six quilters who organized this quilt-along, especially to Quilting Gail. She is hosting the quilt parade, where you can ooh and ahh over all the beautiful tops made by participating quilters from everywhere. You can enter here:

https://quiltinggail.com/2023/03/13/sahrr-the-parade-2/

drawing, painting

100-Day Project: Days 6 through 12

Posted on March 8, 2023 by Laura Kate

For this week, I worked with a very nice selection of Bill’s photographs.

I was drawn to this one by its lines, texture and geometry. To bring those characteristics to the fore, I used pen and ink to render the cross.

DAY 6:

Day 7: Adding Sumi ink wash.

Photograph Two

In looking at this photograph of waterlilies, I got the impression that the leaves and blooms rising above the water line looked like actors on a stage, with the flat lily pads as the audience. To emphasize this impression, I used mostly pencil, and a cool wash to the background; warm, bright paint to the subjects.

Days 8 and 9:

Photograph Three.

Bill’s close up of a wood duck was begging for another paint swatch study. So that what I did on Day 10.

First, I brightened up the image using photo editing software. Using my watercolors, I discovered that it took eleven different pigments to match all the different colors of this bird. And after I finished the swatches, I was in love with wood ducks. So, I proceeded to paint him.

Days 11 and 12:

That finished out my week. Looking back at what I had done, I noticed that most of the work was realism. I’d like to challenge myself to try for more abstract images in the next week.

quilting

SAHRR 2023 Round 6: So Close

Posted on March 3, 2023 by Laura Kate

It’s the last round of the Stay At Home Round Robin quilt challenge and I’m feeling glum. By the time I finished sewing on the coping strip, row and setting triangles of round five, my scrappy quilt measured 90 inches tall by 68 inches wide.

It is large and full and colorful. Clearly it wants to be a queen-sized bed quilt. And it’s crying out for more areas of background fabric to give some calm in the storm.

I am having trouble imagining how I could wedge in some pinwheel blocks as selected by Quilting Gail.

SAHRR Round #6

But I’m no quitter. I made four not-big pinwheels, trusting that they will fit in.

Somewhere.

One thought I have is to insert the pinwheels into square-in-square blocks of background fabric, then slip those blocks into the corners of the last rows.