Good Slipper!

I feel a little Dorothy with these slippers.
Note how the sunlight glints off the faceted beads...
(Okay, in the books, Dorothy's slippers were silver)










Both pairs are constructed the same way. I think from the ankle opening down in garter stitch with increases across the front of the foot. Then it looks like the sole is picked up along the center and turned up the back. A little crocheted edging is added. Turkish ladies do like to have those finishing touches. I love 'em. Beaded Slippers!
Both these pair were given to me by Selma Sagbas who is a wonderful singer of Turkish Classical Music (and who is Texas doing concerts as I write!). She got them in Kutahya.
I made the mistake of admiring them when I visited her in Istanbul last fall. A mistake because when you praise something you'll often find it being given to you. When you try to refuse, it then becomes a point of honour on the part of the donor to make sure you leave with something worthy. Then things can get complicated, because you have to accept something, and it can keep escalating. "What, you don't like these?? Well perhaps you'll like these! Oh, and how about this? Please you must take this also!" I have learned to try and express interest and appreciation without too much fanfare but every once in a while gasps or giggles escape and I have to accept something or risk either having to carry home a large piece of furniture or insulting my host.
LuLu shares my delight in these slippers and wishes Selma joy, happiness and success with every step she takes.

Bad slipper!

Here is my Achilles' Heel.
Right now this slipper looks like a slug that crawled over a psychotropic fungi.
I did not think as I did this. I just did. And since I've been doing a lot of knitting in garter, I somehow forgot that plain knitting has more rows than stitches. Garter is more or less the same number of rows as stitches.
See that silly curl?
I could pretend that I wanted the slipper to have the Aladdin look.
However, it is not what I want. So these will be ripped back and re-heeled.
And I will be taking more stitches from the sides, a ratio of 3:4, as I knit up the heel back.

The Swift & Winder

If I could open a bar for knitters, spinners & weavers, it would be called The Swift & Winder.
And there would be a wooden table with a good swift and winder set up.
No billiards.
Good lighting.
A bar that serves drinks of quality, with and without alcohol, and a kitchen which serves suitable fare.
No cigarettes. Knitting needles and bits of kit as necessary. Perhaps skeins of handspun behind the bar. Like a movable gallery. Or a mutable one. Maybe from time to time a skein that was taken away will come back as a piece of art. And treasured as such.

The Much Better Way

I think Linda and I are entitled to say that we really went on a
Stash Enhancement eXpedition eXtraordinaire.
At midnight last night the Toronto Transit Commission went on strike. We were planning to take the TTC up and across town to the site of the Knitters' Frolic today. We had enrolled in "educational" workshops, so we HAD to go. A cab was out of the question. Way too much money would be spent on taxi fare that could be spent on lovely yarn. So we biked.
The weather favoured us, never raining even one forecasted drop. We had a bit of head wind coming home and I suppose knowing that we had to carry all our spoils on bikes might have resulted in some restraint on our parts. Well, Linda did pretty well as far as not getting toooooo much, can't say as I did. But the ride was pretty nice, easily 26 kms there and back, which is not a huge distance at all but there were some hills and for both of us this was probably the longest ride since the fall.
We did a short cut/detour through the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, stopping to say hello to some of Linda's relatives and William Lyon Mackenzie King.
Taking advantage of the TTC strike, we rode on along the raised street car tracks on St.Clair. It was like a deluxe bike lane. With our lovely new yarns stuffed into bags and strapped to our bikes it was really the Much Better Way.

Mr. Edison's Ear

Got to see a couple of films at the Hot Docs festival today. All of them left an impression. I think documentaries tend to do that. One of the short films was particularly poignant for me. Mr. Edison's Ear was a collage of largely archival footage which somehow managed to convey Edison as a complex being and underscore the impact of emerging technologies at the same time. Technologies that have shaped our lives and world, that seek to capture such essential ephemera as sound and motion. And it did so poetically. The filmmaker, Francisca Duran, chose a really unsettling sequence to close the film, the execution by electrocution of Topsy a 'dangerous' elephant in 1903. In the Q&A after the screening she explained that Edison chose that event to document because he was trying to prove the superiority of DC current and elephants are big animals. It was dramatic. She chose it because she felt it carried a lot of layers of meaning and one of the main ones was "at what cost all this technology?".

Slip-dash

Four little slippers from the Aegean coast of Turkey.

I got them over a period of many years, starting in 1989!

They all use the same basic construction from toe up. The toe cast on is quite wide and creates a rounder toe than the Sivas socks and slippers. All the detail is at the toe and ball of foot. When divided for the foot opening, the knitters switch to garter stitch. A simple heel is turned. You can see that they are not very durable. The relatively loose gauge makes them soft. The white yarn is usually a homespun while the coloured yarns are anything, often commercially made and often acrylic. The gauge is around 6 stitches to the inch, depending on the slipper.
A nice way to use up bits of yarn?

Must dash.

Flippin' hems

I hope three times is the charm, because I am making two Debbie Bliss Classic Baby Cardigans for my wee nieces JoJo & Clara in Potsdam and I hope that what I learn from the first one will make the second one go faster. It's the hem. I didn't really like the way it looked in garter stitch which is what the pattern calls for. So I ripped it up and did a turned hem.
I am not happy with this. It flips.
I used smaller needles.
I did a nice purl row to define the hem.
I thought I carefully counted the rows before knitting the hem to the body.
I did something wrong.
And you know how suddenly you notice something and -boom- it's everywhere. So it is with this hem. Knitting Daily did a posting on the turned hem. If only it had come out before I cast on. I am going to CUT just above the hem and knit a new one down. I just want to finish the rest of the sweater so I don't run out of the green in an unfortunate spot.

Oh well.

This is what I have learned.
1) Do a swatch. Dr. Knit (Denise Powell from DKC) gently pointed out that this would have saved me a great deal of time. She also suggested casting on 5% fewer stitches to allow for the thickness of the fabric. Thank you, Denise for not laughing at me.
2)Use a provisional cast on. I can pick up stitches from a cast on edge with little or no hassle so it did not occur to me to do otherwise. It might have helped.
3) Think!!!