My Current Making List

So we got off the road, and out of the caravan, and have landed straight back into exciting new projects. I'm still book-writing, but I'm also working a thrilling new project for The Craft Sessions that I'll share with you very soon.* And then we have a lot of life stuff going on at the moment....

Anyhoo, the thing about having exciting things in the works, is that my making time becomes really limited. And when my making time is limited I find that - as a total reaction to the time-restriction - my head fills up with distracting, shiny-eyed ideas that sing to me from the shelves and the cupboards. It's like they know I can't, so they multiply in number. Like gremlins.

So in an effort to find some clarity, by getting them out of my head and onto the paper, I thought I'd update and share my current making list.

My Making List is something that I started as part of Stash Less, but that I update in an ongoing way, to keep me on track and help me to sit in gratitude for what I have and what I get to make.

My Making List includes what I have to make for birthdays and the like. Then what I should probably make for to show others the love. And then a crazy long list of what my heart is telling me I need to make right now. Most of these will never see the light of day but by getting them out of my head I will hopefully feel a bit clearer about which ones fit the time I have available. Maybe seeing my love-to-make-but-chance-in-hell list on paper will give my swirling idea brain have a break.

There is one idea that I'm currently a little obsessed with that is causing much of the swirling. Over the last few months I've made up this cardigan pattern which uses shoulder shaping that I've never come across. I'm incredibly chuffed with it. In the words of the lovely EZ** I've "unvented" something that makes my heart sing, and I just want to keep making them. And the best bit is that they fit beautifully with my Stash Less philosophy by providing a wonderful way to be able to make something with your scraps that is colour-blocked, rather than striped, but that is also top-down and sometimes-seamless. I've been using the new pattern as a way to get rid of my ridiculous pile of worsted weight scraps. Happy Days - but distracted days.

In the last few days since I started writing this, I've managed to hoon through some of the list already.....yay!

My very favourite idea - These are Australian yarn scraps that go back many years. There is Pear Tree (non longer exist), Nundle, WoolDays, Tarndie, Handspun Alpaca, and WhiteGum Wool dyed by Nunnaba. The question is whether I would wear a sweater made in these colours??

My Making List - backend of 2017

July
- DONE! Finish smallest kid's new Stash Less cardie.
- A Stash Less cardie for my niece to prove the pattern works in this way.

August
- Start again on my middle child's quilt and then work on it until it's done. Her birthday in December. This is a lot of work!!
- DONE! Baby cardie for my cousin's first bub.
- Little vest for my delicious niece's birthday.

September
- Birthday dress for the smallest kid.

November
- Boy child version of Riddari for our Xmas in the UK. He currently doesn't have a single handknit sweater that fits.
- Birthday dress for the middle child for December.

December
- Quilt for the middle kid which is hopefully a masterpiece.

OK so that is all that needs to be done.

My I-Want-To Making List.

- Sew myself a long sleeve Glacial Tee using Nita-Jane's new pattern. I have tried this on in real life and the shoulder shaping is perfecto. NJ is a genius with the shape.
- Knit myself a Helga Isager cardy Daffodil - I can never figure out how to buy this pattern. It drives me nuts.
- Sew myself a Oslo coat with this beautiful wool I got at The Sheep Show from House Of Cloth
- Knit myself a sweater using my odd handspun balls from Cocoknits book.
- Sew myself a Highlands Wrap Dress from my beautiful Nani Iro Linen that calls to me everyday. Ridiculously inappropriate for the middle of winter.
- Sew myself a pair of the super lovely Flint pants by Megan Nielsen - I have the perfect charcoal linen in the cupboard.
- Make the kids a bunch of long sleeve tees using the best Japanese kid's book I've found since Happy Homemade V2. I think it's called Fu-Ko Basics? It's ISBN is 978-4-529-05296-2.

My Favourite Non-Necessary Making Idea

- Knit myself a Stash Less grownup version of my new cardie pattern using all the scraps I have of Australian worsted weight yarn as kind of a FibreShed-StashLess mutant. This is my very favourite idea of the moment.

Weight off chest? Swirling ideas slowing down? I'm not really sure. I'll see how I feel about all this in the morning, cause I'm feeling the overwhelm of ideas. The one thing I do know is that writing it down gives me clarity over what it is possible to get done. I can see the time I have available to me more clearly and it helps me to prioritise what is important.

Might have to head back to my visual diary to make sure I'm vaguely on track.

What do you do when the ideas are coming thick and fast?

Felicia x

*If you think you might want to hear about our latest venture - which is very different in nature to what we have offered so far - then please join our mailing list. It will be worth your while I promise! We also have had a bit of a problem with our mailing list whereby people were filling out the form but it not transferring through to the list. It's fixed now but if you think this might be you then please join again.

**EZ believed that everything in knitting had been done somewhere at some point in time so we didn't really get to invent anything. Instead we were simply unventing it.....or uncovering it. I love this idea. That we are part of an ongoing community of people who are just making shit up.

The Wedding Dress

So I promised many months ago that I would share a few photos of my dress, but have been unable to download the photos until we arrived home last week. So apologies for the delay and a big thanks for all your support as I came to decide that I was not going to make it :).

For those of you that are new around these parts, here is where I tried to figure out if I should make it, here is where I tried, here is where I handed it over to the lovely Francesca.

The dress was handmade by a lovely lovely woman called Francesca DiPasquale and the whole thing is handsewn except the sideseams. She is a craftswoman of depth and skill - and kindness and compassion. She also has a wonderful laugh.

When I initially called her saying that I'd tried to make it and had hated it, she said to me "Of course you did! It's all in the fingers, working with bridal fabrics. Your fingers have to understand what to do". She followed up with some more love and understanding by saying "Well if you are used to working with cottons and linens of course it would be tricky. Silks are so slippery, your fingers would have not had the practice." So much acknowledgement and love in her words, I felt great about handing it over.

All the fabrics are from Tessuti - the silk, the lining and the lace. The women at Tessuti were super helpful and knowledgeable when I was in there totally confused about what I needed. So big thanks and much gratitude for their patience.

And the fella (who had kindly allowed me to use his head in these photos) had his suit made by the super lovely Billy of WoodyRoo. He owns quite a few of Billy's lovely shirts as well - all made in Sydney with a gorgeous Italian style cut and beautiful fabrics.

I hope you enjoy them and thanks for playing along while I figured it out. x

Felicia x

We Are All "From A Long Line Of Makers"

Back when I started The Craft Sessions, on the “About” page, I wrote something along the lines of “I come from a long line of makers” as part of my introduction. Later in the piece, I suspect I also said it on a few podcasts as well. I've done a lot of thinking between now and then, and so now, I want to apologise for my thoughtlessness.

It is true - I am from a line of women who make - but stating this was also lazy and unthinking of me, given what I believe about making. I was simply trying to write some copy about what made me qualified to start this retreat thing when I didn’t really feel qualified at all. What did I know about running retreats? Well lucky for me, I am surrounded by women who have helped me to grow the retreat into what it is today.

What is not relevant at all to whether the retreat is any good, is that my mother made and her mother made and her mother made. And if I'm totally truthful, I’m not even sure that my great grandmother did make. I could totally just be making that up as I don't know that much about her.

Anyhoo I removed the “I come from a long line of makers” statement from our website a year or two ago, as the more I thought about it, the more I felt uncomfortable with it.

That statement is an incredibly discouraging statement if this isn’t your background, and you are a newbie wanting to get started with making. It creates an “us” – those that come from a long line of makers and therefore are genetically predisposed to be skilled at making..... And an “them” – the rest of you lot, whose mother didn’t make your clothes when you were little, and therefore are less likely to be able to pick up the skills you need to make.

Do I believe this? Absolutely not.

Why was I saying it? Because that is what you say, and at the time I hadn't yet put enough thought into my ideas around making.

Is it true that the my mother made and her mother made? Yes but who cares. It has nothing to do with why I can knit and sew.

Can I make because my mother can? Yes and no.

What my mother gave me was more important that the skill of using a sewing machine. She gave me the belief that I could learn to sew if I practiced. And the belief that the skills I needed to learn in order to make were learnable.

I can’t knit because my mum was a knitter, because she really wasn’t. I don’t remember her knitting at all when I was little, and I kick her arse as a knitter now (sorry mum ;) xx). I really only learnt to knit in 2003, after an aborted attempt at knitting when I was young, getting super bored with the striped garter stitch scarf I was trying to make.*

We are all genetically wired to make. Many of us have simply forgotten that this is part of who we are. 

All of us share a common history as makers – even if your direct ancestor going back three generations didn’t make – go back another generation or two and I guarantee they did. We all had to make to survive. We had to make to clothe ourselves and feed ourselves. We had to mend and bake and stitch and chop wood. We didn’t have a choice.

Tens of thousands of years of us being makers does not disappear because of 150 years of industrialization. We are still wired such that if we practice a skill then we can learn it well, or at least get to a level that we are competent at it. There are very few of us that can’t drive a car – yes some can do it better than others, but we can all do it. All of us learned to walk, eat, wash dishes, write our names, sing, speak - through practice. There is absolutely no difference between those skills and the skills we need to sew and knit.

Do we all come from a long line of makers? Yes! We simply may have a little break in the chain of our making ancestory that has lead us to conclude that we are somehow a special brand of non-making-human. It just isn’t true.

We are all makers.

Do you think about this? Has this perception of makers/non-makers affected you?

Felicia x

* I also abandoned it as I was a little horrified with the back of said scarf because of how the yarn colour change looked. Pernickety but true. My ten year old self did. not. like. it.

Stash Less – SQ = Sweater Quantity = 5

Stash Less is a series where we talk about having a thoughtful stash. You can find past posts in this series by clicking here.

On social media a few days ago the lovely Rachel of @droverandclasser posted a picture of her brand spanking new sweater. In said post she referenced an early Stash Less post that talked about one of my discoveries. The discovery was simply that in order to fool myself that my purchasing behaviour was not so “bad” then I would only buy a little of something at any one time - 3 balls to be precise (roughly 1 skein). This lead to a cupboard full of yarn that was not useable.

The result is that I am still living the hangover of this behaviour a few years on. I’m working on it by making many a scrap, or single skein sweaters for the kids. This is fun and taxing and exhausting and challenging and annoying in equal measure. Sometimes I wish that I could just make something that was a little simpler than a scrap sweater, to avoid the brain strain it takes to combine multiple stray yarns into something cohesive. Sometimes I think it is an interesting and fun challenge.

Anyhoo, on Instagram the other day Rachael mentioned that the sweater she was wearing was a direct result of the Stash Less SQ rule. I didn’t know there was a rule named the Stash Less SQ rule and so I asked her what it meant.

Of course SQ = sweater quantity which in this case = 5.

I'd written many times that this was one of the outcomes of Stash Less, that now when I purchase I buy only things I adore after careful consideration, and that I buy a whole sweater quantity of it. Rachael gave this behaviour a name which has made my heart sing for days.

The SQ rule - as it is now known - is so simple but so life changing. It has definitely changed my making behaviour. By making considered purchases of yarns I love in sweater sized quantities I now have a small stash that is filled with possibility rather than problems.

A Case study of my recent purchases.

Since I’ve been away I’ve purchased three sweater quantities of wool. A lot for me these days but all three were planned.

Nunnaba yarn in Nougat.

Swatching the Linen Quill.

1.     The Nunnaba White Gum Wool
This sweater quantity has been interesting in that I’ve broken the SQ up (in this case SQ =4) and am making two girl sized sweaters. This was not my intention as I was going to steal it for myself however there was begging. A lot of begging as this yarn is pretty. That said, this is one of the benefits of a SQ-sized batch. It can be broken into two for kids. However as they get older this is changing a little. Sometimes I’m needing to use some of my scrap skeins as additions on the second kid sweater. This works a treat as the body of the sweater is normally covered by the purchase with just the collar, cuffs etc being filled in with scraps. I adore this look.

2.     Some stunning AVFKW Entwined yarn
I have lusted after Verb yarn for years in the stunning Mesa colourwary. This yarn is my favourite weight (5ply-ish) and in this case a SQ = 3. I want to sit on this one for a while as I'm not yet sure what it will be. This is good stash, rather than not-so-good stash, in that it is a yarn I adore, which is my favourite weight, in a colour I love, that I have wanted to purchase for years. A considered purchase and an exciting one. Who said that planning was boring.

So very excited about this. *

3.     Linen Quill from Purl Soho
I have been looking at this yarn in this colourway online since they launched it. In this case a SQ = 3. I don’t do much online purchasing these days, unless I have seen the yarn in real life, due to many a purchasing disaster back in ye-olden-days before Stash Less. The disaster was mainly due to the difference between what one sees on a screen and the actual colour of the yarn. I learnt this lesson the very hard way by doing it over and over again. When I knew I was coming to NY I agreed with myself that this would be my Purl Soho purchase if I loved the colour. I realise that it is fairly bloody privlidged to be able to see it in person so what I do when I won't get to go to the store in person is ask someone to send me a tiny sample by mail. Most shops are happy to do this. I can’t wait to see this knit up as a sweater – possibly another James as I am a creature of habit or a Gable as I love that shape. Again this was super planned and very exciting.

I love hearing your stories about how Stash Less (alternatively known as my trip through my chaos) has changed how you see your purchasing and your making. I’d love to hear if more of you now do this? Buy SQ worth? Or have you made up other rules that help you?

Felicia x

* I not-so-good purchasing I mentioned in the last Stash Less Post has already been knit up....

Giving Yourself The Freedom To Suck

So I've just been at the wonderful Squam - and what a joy it was. But that isn't what I wanted to talk to you about today. I'll show you a couple of photos about the joy another day.

What I wanted to talk to you about, was one of my classes and a short conversation I had that reminded me, to remind you, to allow yourself the time and freedom within your making to totally suck....

So I did two classes at Squam. I did a colourwork class with the incredible Mary Jane Mucklestone and then I did a brioche class with the incredible Andrea Mowry of Drea Renee Knits. Both were wonderful teachers. Encouraging, generous, interested, and boundary-pushing. Just what you hope for in a teacher. I learnt a lot in both.

But colourwork was really the class where I banged up against my stuff. I wanted to push myself. I've talked about the story I have running around in my head that "I'm not very good at colour". That I don't understand it and that I can't do it very well. I know that it is just that - a story - but I still crash up against the story time and time again.

That said, over many years of putting myself in the middle of situations like this class, I have shifted the story a little. These days the story is something like "I'm don't find colour easy, but I sometimes make things I like". Which is better, but still has quite a lot of expectation and pressure in it.

I want to shift the story. I know that the process of making is a place where I can do that so I try to push myself. I intentionally jump out of my colour comfort zone in order to see if I can see it from a different perspective.

In this case I arrived from the land of Oz with no yarn for my class. I'd forgotten I had to bring it. And so I had to shop (more on that another day too :)). I went to the wonderful Gather Here in Boston on my way up to Squam, and purchased colours for the colourwork class. I intentionally purchased colours that were not just silver, blue and charcoal. I purchased pink and orange and brown and well yes...the odd bit of blue. It was hard and I was still a little jetlagged, and so I stared at the wool for about 2 hours. Pulling balls in and out of the combination to see if I could get something that worked. Confusing and hard.

Some of Mary Jane's gorgeous work!

But I did it and I went to class. And I found it really confronting.

Mary Jane has a rule that you aren't allowed to rip it out - a wonderful rule really as I would have ripped in anger and never learnt the lessons I needed to learn about colour. And this post would not exist.

Her point was that you sometimes don't know what it looks like till you add the following bit of colour, or the piece is done, and so you have to make a swatch to really understand the relationships between different colours. How they make one another sing, look like mud, disappear or suck.

Not being able to rip mine out was painful. I had to sit with things that I didn't like, and things that I didn't think worked. I was trying to step out of my comfort zone and use colours I wouldn't normally. I was trying to be brave and it was hard.

So what is the pain about? Why would it matter? Who cares if it's ugly? Who cares if it doesn't work?

It turns out I do. It turns out that part of the story I have made up about my making, is that I will like what I make, or keep trying until I do. I want to be proud of my work. And having to sit there with work that I didn't like made me really uncomfortable.

Again why? Why am I making it mean something? Why can't I allow myself the time and freedom to suck at it.

Obviously I theoretically believe that mistakes are how we learn and that we are all practicing in the gap, and yet when forced to live with my mistakes rather than being able to fix them I didn't like it at all.

Is it simply my ego? Have I mentally attached the work I am making to some meaning about me? I'm smiling as I'm writing this because it really is a good lesson for me. A lesson that, in spite of all I've written about, and in spite of all I know, my tiny brain still struggles with this the idea that I suck at something.

But we all know that sucking is often a big part of the learning process. We suck at piano, and skiing and spelling while we are learning. Why not craft.

I was speaking to a lovely woman at dinner one night and she was struggling with the same thing in a different class. She was an accomplished crafter and it struck me that maybe she was struggling with sucking because she was used to being accomplished? And that maybe that was what was happening for me....

Allowing ourselves the time and freedom to suck, without allowing it to mean anything, is the only way forward. I know it, I forget it and then I get a kick in the pants that reminds me that this is truth.

So tigers - can you guess which one is mine, remembering that I'm outside my normal colour palette?

Felicia x