A baby blanket

This was the big project of 2024. It seems a bit unimpressive to sum up my 2024 projects with this flat rectangle of kniting, but there is quite a lot of work in it!

I have a niece now. This was made for her. The yarn comes from a HUGE haul of old cone yarn I got for free at work a couple years ago - unused yarn that had been sitting in storage for years and being a moth hazard. This particular one is Kirman by Linsieme, a 2-ply 92% merino 8% cashmere which, amazingly, survives machine washing. I tested that by running a sample repeatedly through the machine at 60° Celsius. So I knew it would be perfect for a baby project - soft and washable.

It's a mitred square blanket made more or less using the Knitting Squirrel tutorial - but I used the same yarn throughout. Kirman tripled. And size 4,5 mm needles. There's 40 squares starting with (more or less, depending on how I managed to pick up the stitches in some of them) with 40 stitches. Then I finished the whole thing off with a crochetted border in doubled Kirman, two stitches per stitch so it formed a bit of a soft rufle.

Not much else to say about this one really - other than I finished it at Christmas at grandma's, and she loved the yarn, so we agreed I would make her a sontag out of it. I believe two strands should be just the right thickness of yarn for the Godey's Lady's Book 1860s pattern floating around. Just the thing to keep grandma warm when sitting next to a window, as she does! I'll probably have to adjust the size - I do have her measurements from back when I was making a dress pattern for her. 😁

Blog awards and Sewing with Cats

Warning: a very long post ahead! It took much longer to write than I planned...

I've been awarded a blog award; actually, two linked blog awards from two people, Lady Katza of Peanut Butter Macramé and Becky of Sew and So.  Thank you both; I hope you enjoyed yours, because you both deserve it.

The rules alternate between the two blogs, so I decided to go with this (somewhat my own) set:

1. Thank the person / people who awarded you.
2. Add the One Lovely Blog Award / Very Inspiring Blogger award to your post.
3. Share 7 things about yourself.
4. Pass the award on to 7 nominees. (or 10, or 11, or how many you prefer...)
5. Include this set of rules. (or any set you prefer...)
6. Inform your nominees by posting a comment on their blog.

The 7 things about me? I like Becky's approach of "crafty confessions"; but I also realised there are several things about my blog and my online personality that never got explained here. So it's a mix.

- My profile picture / avatar? That's me standing on the shore of a lake in Ignalina, Lithuania, back in 2006, as photographed by my sister.
(Yes, Ignalina's famous for the nuclear power plant, and that's what you're most likely to find if you search for it, but the plant is actually still a long way away from Ignalina, in a completely different town, Visaginas - it's just Soviet-time secrecy. And Ignalina and it's surroundings is a most pleasant place to stay if you're into lakes and nature. But I digress.)
I really liked it as an avatar picture, because it showed me without showing me. It just shows my long hair, and my ever growing penchant for wearing things on my head, and the colours are very much me. I still like it as an avatar picture, because it's not so susceptible to change: it's 2013 now, and it still works.

- My header picture? That is (was) a small piece of fabric of mysterious origins in my stash; one of those pieces I very much regretted, and still regret, not having more of. So I immortalised it as my header. It matched the colours in my profile picture nicely.

- My nickname / moniker? Marmota? That dates back to a summer camp where I was with one of my sisters; we were divided into two groups with separate programs; the older ones (where my sister ended up) were called Beavers, while we younger ones were called Marmots (or Groundhogs, depending on which part of the Marmota genus you're familiar with). We kept the nicknames afterwards. I'm using Marmota online, instead of the Czech word, because it's more internet- and international-friendly. (Try saying "svišť"! Try saying "Na cvičišti čtyři svišti piští"! :D)

My second favourite plushie (after my old panda) is Howard the Groundhog

- The first thing I've ever sewed (and I'm sure I've mentioned this before, somewhere but probably not here), was a "top" for one of our dolls when I was about 3. I took a piece of (knit) fabric and made a number of stitches in the middle that scrunched the fabric to such an extent that it somehow stayed put on the doll. I was quite proud of my achievement. And no, I'm not going to show you: I don't think it survived to this day.

- One of the things I loved most at school was making geometric bodies. You know, cubes and such. This I've mentioned before, the turning of a flat pattern into something 3-dimensional. What I did not mention was my very, very brief foray into model-making. On the trip to Austria that photo of my panda teddy was taken on, I also designed a metro unit. Don't ask me why. I only remember it was an exercise in persepective-drawing, and I suspect my father's love of all thing rail-related was also an influence. When we came back, I tried to make a paper model of my metro, and more or less failed - not on the pattern-making front, rather because the paper I chose was not sturdy enough, and I think I just glued it with sticky tape...

- Mom taught me the basics of knitting, and the basics of crocheting. The first thing I ever knitted was a blanket / sweater for a rubber weasel toy that happened to be Russian in origin and have a price tag pressed into its side (hello, centrally planned economy!). The first thing I ever crocheted must have been a plain string, which, of course, also adorned a toy. (And I find this fitting; apparently, knitting was more my thing from the start.) After mom taught me the basics, she very wisely gave me a knitting booklet and let me figure out the rest on my own. I still do that.

Meet Weasel

- The other big influence, other than mom and my Wonderful Crafty Grandma, was an art school / course teacher who is more of an artisan than artist, and thanks to whom I realised the same about myself. She did things like weaving and felting with us, and somehow taught me that no inspiration was too small and insignificant. She's one of my real-life heroes.

This clay pendant was inspired by a smudge on my worktable.

So now that's off my chest, I can nominate people. :-) People who have lovely blogs and are inspiring bloggers, hmm... If any of them have received the award already - I'm sorry for making it duplicate, and thus taking it away from someone else who could have got it... I hope not, though.

More on lace - guestposting

Today, I have a guest post up at Steph's place, 3 Hours Past the Edge of the World. It is a result of my previous rather ranty post on the subject of crochet vs. bobbin lace, and my correcting Steph on the same mistake. She asked me to write a guest post on the subject, and I tried to be more precise in my explanation.

It is a bit of a strange feeling, to have (relatively) expert knowledge on a bloggable subject, especially compared to someone like Steph, who is a perfect example of a knowledgeable sewing blogger who does not shy away from sharing that knowledge. I'm definitely not an expert on sewing, or any of the other things I usually write about. And I'm not such an expert on this either, compared to other people, but it's something I know more about than your average sewist. And that's the strange feeling.

So, to get away from that - here are some more vintage/antique laces I got from my grandma. :-) The first two are crochet, the one inserted into fabric is bobbin lace, the last one is, again, crochet. Notice how the maker of that one forgot one of the picots. :-)

Crochet or bobbin lace? - A little guide to lace types (for online sellers?)

I'm not very good at crochet, and I still have not finished that first bobbin lace bookmark. But I understand what the techniques are about, so I was growing increasingly surprised (and slightly annoyed) when I saw many online sellers (including the very knowledgable proprietor of Vintage Textile!) describing what I knew to be bobbin lace (even if of the machine-made-type) as crochet. Why is that? The techniques are completely different! Not only do they work in completely different ways, they usually look different.

It probably would not bug me so much if it went both ways, but it's always bobbin lace labelled as crochet. Are people simply not familiar with the technique of bobbin lace? That would surprise me with Czech sellers; bobbin lace is rather big here. (As in, traditional and admired.) Is crochet somehow considered "desirable", as opposed to bobbin lace?!

I do not want to sound like I'm looking down my nose on crochet because I can't get it right. Consider this:


This is a vintage/antique crochet trim I got from my Wonderful Crafty Grandma. (It was probably originally sewn into a bedding piece or something like that.) It's approx. 4,2 cm wide and 1 m long. All handmade.

So, yes, consider this, as an example of what crochet looks like - click on the picture to see it in detail. Of course, this is a specific style of crochet (filet crochet), and there are other ways that make it look different, with scallops and picots and what-have-you.

(The only other example of crochet lace I found at home...)

But it's still crochet: a technique that works with one continuous thread, working it into chains and what is called "stitches" (English sucks here; it's called "columns" in Czech, which gives you a much better idea of what it looks like). There is never, I repeat, NEVER, a simple, "unworked" thread to be seen in a crochet work.

Unlike here:


This is a machine-made bobbin lace trim (again from my grandma). As you can see, hopefully, bobbin lace is completely different. Bobbin lace is, essentially, a type of weaving. It works with several threads and weaves them together. Sometimes it's quite open, like here.

Sometimes, there are tighter-woven motifs, like here:

But it's still very different from crochet. Simple, "unworked" threads. Weaving structure. Obvious on first sight.

The mix-up would not surprise me so much with this trim:


This is machine made just like the two examples above, and seems to be playing up to the crochet similarity. (BTW, as far as I know, there is no machine-made crochet. Feel free to correct me if you know otherwise. If you know it for a fact.) But if you look closely, you can still see the weaving structure here: there are several threads, not a single continuous one.

So here, that's the one signature difference, and now you should be able to tell crochet trim from bobbin lace.

(Note: Some types of sewn lace can look similar to bobbin lace, but those are rarer. Also, I'm only dealing with the cotton thread kind of lace in this post - I'm not as knowledgeable on the techniques involved in the making of other types of lace, like the - usually artificial fibre - stuff you find on your underwear.)

EDIT: Here are some more examples of what bobbin lace can do, from my grandma's work:





This, by the way, is the butterfly my sister wore in her hair to the Latvian exhibition opening.