In July of 2012, I attended Convergence, a biannual fiber conference, this time held in Long Beach, CA, about an hour north of where I live. I chose two workshops, both with Nancy Roberts, one being Machine Knitting To Dye For and the other was machine knitted edges on woven fabric.
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Nancy Roberts' Exemplars
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In the photo to the left, you can see what a wonder color sense Nancy has. It was like eye candy. She had everything from sweaters and vests to gorgeous hats, machine knitted scarves and handwoven scarves.
As part of the Machine Knitting to Dye For workshop, we machine knitted blanks, using several different techniques - one where you knit so many rows at one tension and then one row at a much looser tension, then resume the first tension, etc. There were variations on this theme, but I opted for using this method and knitted up 2 blanks for her Ventanitas bag pattern, which was on the cover of the Fall 2006 Spin-Off Magazine. Had I decided upon machine knitting the bag, I would have needed 4 blanks, 2 for each side of the bag, since you cannot fit the entire width on a knitting machine. So I opted to hand-knit this bag.
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| Ventanitas Bag |
Day 2 was spent dyeing our blanks, and I chose a lavender to gold colorway for one blank and a shading from dark teal to medium yellow green for the second colorway. It got a little tricky getting the lavender grayed, then adding more gold for a gray-gold, and finally the gold. We steamed our blanks overnight and picked them up the next day.
As soon as I got home, I washed out my steamed blanks, rolled them in towels for about an hour and then laid them out on my sun porch until dry, after which I, of course, had to start knitting them right away, as I was anxious to see how my color choices turned out.
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| Finished Ventanitas Bag |
When I was all done knitting the body, there was the interminable I-cord edging to go around the handle holes and the edges. I don't think I've ever done so much I-cord edging. That being said, I love the result, even though it was tedious.
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| Note Nancy's Alhambra Vest directly above (Knitwords - Summer '08) |
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| Nancy's Handwoven Scarves |
Last but not least, I fulled the bag by throwing it in a gentle washing machine cycle in my frontloader washing machine for about 8 minutes, per the pattern instructions. I used little dryer balls to agitate it slightly, since the frontloader does not really agitate much, and I didn't want terry towel or anything else adhering to the finished fabric.
Here is another photograph of my finished Ventanitas bag:
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| Completed Ventanitas Bag |
