Eskimimi Knits knitting blog

Beautiful fabric, spun from the silk of Golden Orb spiders

Those interested in the fibre arts are finding it easier to source ever more exotic fibres to run through their fingers and weave around needles and hooks, especially with the advent of the internet and the spread of knowledge about the beautiful yarns available to crafty folks.  There are some real luxury yarns on the market, perhaps the zenith being the almost mythical Qiviut/Qiviuk – the downy undercoat of the musk ox.  As light as air, as warm as a 1,000 tog duvet and with a softness you cannot imagine (or so I am told, at least… I am unlikely to ever get my pauper’s hands on any), this prized fibre seems to be the height of luxury, but is that about to be surpassed?

Simon Peers, British art historian, may have eclipsed the combers of must-ox bellies in seeking out the most unlikely and labour-intensive fibre-source.  The beautiful golden brocade-like fabric above is in fact spun from spider-silk.  Spider silk, in fact, that has been collected from a team of no less than one million Golden Orb spiders.  Quite a feat, especially as the silk was collected from living spiders, harnessed together in groups of 24 whilst the end of their silk was gathered together and slowly extracted, being hand-spun and wound delicately onto a spool.  Four strands of this 24-ply thread were then plied together to give a 96-strand yarn to use in the weaving of this magnificent cloth.  It has been said that at no point in the weaving of the cloth did the spider yarn break, so no spit-splicing and no extra ends to weave in, at least.

There are plants to make a second cloth come next spider-season in Madagascar, where the Golden Orb spiders were harvested.  It’s all but impossible to imagine that such a yarn would ever find its way onto the knitter’s market, but it is sometimes good for those who knit and crochet to stop and remember the sources of the yarns that we enjoy working with, and to remember what wonderful jobs the creatures that produce some of those yarns actually do in manufacturing their own thread creations.

I was going to post a photo of a golden orb spider but they are huge and I'm a wimp.

Sometimes life gets in the way of knitting, but occasionally there are projects that you have to get finished for a specific deadline. I’ve been rushed off of my feet over the past two days, without a moment to spare towards my efforts to help save the bees but luckily I have a willing volunteer to whom I can deputise any urgent crafting activities, so Giantmonk has gallantly taking up the hook and the ever-growing scarf in a bid to get it completed and posted in the next couple of days, ready for some fund-raising.

Giantmonk will stop at nothing to help his busy little friends.

A play for two people, taken from an actual conversation I had with my other half yesterday.

[Two people, a man and a woman, are sitting on a sofa, a hand-wound ball of wool between them.  The woman gets up to shift her bum into a more comfortable position, and the ball of wool rolls off across the floor]

Man Did you wind that up yourself?

Woman Yes.

Man I have been reading about how you start to hand-wind a ball of wool.  You have to hold your fingers like this [makes random and gesture] and loop it round in a figure eight.

Woman Oh?

Man Yes, I was reading in that book.  It was here, somewhere… [looks around] … you know, you had it here… ‘Knit like a prostitute‘, something like that.

Woman Er…? [looks confused and searches around seat before reaching beneath the sofa and finding the book in question]

fin

is a wonderful fund-raising drive backed by the Cornwall-based clothing company ‘Seasalt’.  This year Seasalt is asking for volunteers to snatch up their needles and hooks to make a handmade scarf to raise money in support of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust.  Extremely important to our local ecosystems, bumblebee populations in the UK are in dramatic decline, and the hard work of the folks at the BCT is in need of some financial support.

Seasalt is helping out by taking donations of handmade scarves from craft folks which they will sell in their store, all proceeds going towards the BCT.  Last year a similar fund-raising effort by Seasalt saw 605 scarves donated, raising  £2898 for The Cinnamon Trust, all thanks to generous, wonderful, gorgeous knitters.  So, how can you get involved?  Well, you’ll have to be a busy bee as the first lot of scarves goes on sale on the 1st of October.  The scarves will be displayed in the windows of Seasalt throughout October, each with a large tag displaying the knitter’s name and, if the knitter has one, a website address.  If you think that you can spare the time to make a scarf for this wonderful cause, details of where to send your scarf donations are below. The Seasalt blog can be found here for those looking for further information.

Please send donations of scarves to:

Kathryn Wild
Seasalt
1 Church Street
Falmouth
Cornwall
TR11 3DN

There are times when the lily just begs to be gilded.  I’m all for the elegance of simplicity, but there are times when you just want something a little bit extra, and flowers are a feminine and timeless way to embellish garments and accessories.

100 flowers to knit and crochet by Lesley Stanfield - RRP: £10.99

Lesley Stanfield’s beautifully produced book promises 100 flowers for knitters and crocheters to make and use in their own work, but the title is a slight misnomer.  The book actually features patterns for 70 flowers, rather than 100, the remaining patterns being for a mixture of vegetables, various bugs, acorns, fruit and leaves.  This does not detract from the book, however – these additions compliment the flower designs very well and can be combined with the actual flowers to make larger motifs.  Apart from the asparagus – that’s just weird… and wonderful.

As a knitter who is only vaguely familiar with the wonderful voodoo that is crochet, I was slightly disappointed to find that the designs are rather weighted towards those that wield hooks.  Only 40 of the designs are knitted motifs, and of those there appear to be quite a few that only vary slightly in their design – the patterns for ‘large leaf’, ’small leaf’ and ‘citrus leaf’ do not present enough variety in their design to make them particularly distinct; the dahlia and chrysanthemum are also very similar in finished appearance.  There are a couple of beautiful knitted flowers – the sunflower and arum lily are wonderfully constructed, but in this book many of the more interesting designs are designed for the crocheter.  This may turn some people off, but for others it might just act as that extra push to pick up the hook and try twirling some yarn.

Knitting instructions are in written form, crocheted patterns are both written and charted. Patterns are divided into beginner, intermediate and advanced sections.

So, is it worth spending your money on?  Well, there’s the pinch, really.  It was only after buying the book that I was made aware that many of the designs included in the book were available online, for free, from the Lion Brand website in the stitch finder section.  If you only intended to use the book to occasionally find a little embellishment for a hat or purse, then you might well be satisfied with the selection available to you on the Lion Brand website without cost.  If you then find that you enjoy these patterns and would like more of the same, then it is certainly a charming little personal knitting library filler and be one of those books that you turn to when you want to make a standard garment that little bit special.

Contain your excitement…

The embodiment of monkey physical perfection - Giantmonk

So… several people (ok, two – the beautiful and intelligent Getknitics and Mooncalf) guessed that yesterday’s blob was a leaf!  It was a fig leaf, to be precise – a pattern taken from Lesley Stanfield’s ‘100 flowers to knit and crochet’ which arrived in the post on Saturday. This was a book that I’d wanted pretty much since I started knitting, but wasn’t sure if I could justify spending £10 on a book about ‘frivolous embellishments’, because it was hard to see how they might have any practical value, until I realised the obvious and pressing need for crocheted, felted fig leaves:

Michelangelo's David? No! It's Monkeyangelo's Giantmonk.

For those astute viewers that might rightly note that the original, slightly less magnificent statue by Michelangelo does not actually figure a fig leaf, this is quite true.  However, in reserved British style, one was made for the cast of the statue at the V&A museum after Queen Victoria expressed shock at the sight of the statue.  Nowadays, however, David usually likes to be a bit more free and easy, much like Giantmonk when he’s not trying to help me justify buying a book of crocheted and knitted flower patterns.

Felting is an inexact science at the best of times. Add to that the fact that I cannot really crochet (I have tried to teach myself a few times, but I always forget how to do it as soon as I put the crochet hook down) and what emerged from my washing machine today was a little green mangled lump of inevitability.

Science crochet finally solves the age old question - 'what would a gecko look like if you dropped a house on top of it from a great height?'

Made from Rowan Pure Wool DK, it resembles a comedy lump of slime.  I’m not even sure you can make out quite what it was supposed to be.  I’ve pinned it out to block as I think it has a certain charm to it anyway, and I don’t have the heart to throw it away.  What did surprise me is how much lighter the felted item looks from the original yarn:

But how can you be my daddy?

As I have used this same ball of yarn for a few different projects now I have seen that it does lose quite a lot of colour in a cold wash even, but I wasn’t expecting the colour change to be quite so drastic.  I am not sure if this change in colour is due to the washing process or if the fluffiness of the now fulled/felted fibres alters the appearance of the yarn and the way it behaves in the light, but I haven’t noticed this drastic colour change in any other yarn I have so far used in my stumbling journeys through the alchemical processes of felting.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to find a use for my new lumpy creation, but I’ll have a think about how it might be put to use.  If anyone has any suggestions, please list them in the comments and I’ll see if I can act on them!

A modern yet classic little dress

I thought I’d try and get a bit more Christmas knitting done and decided on a dress for Annaleese, my niece.

I’m not sure what my sister will think of the colour choices – I know that brown is not a traditional choice for babies, but I do so love the combination of the brown, pink and cream with the little pearl buttons.  It’s a colour combination that I’d like to wear myself, and I think the shape lends itself to enjoying trying a few different colours.  This dress reminds me of something vintage that one might wear with a string of pearls, which is why I chose the buttons that I did.

cute, feminine, little pearl buttons.