Here's another pic of my recently finished doily. A place I was visiting had round tables so I draped it over to show off what it looks like when it's actually on a table. The table would have needed to have been a little bit bigger to display it to perfection, but eh, that's OK.
I finished another charity hat. This one is black, same pattern and needle size and everything else as I normally do.
This might be my last charity hat for a while until I can acquire more free yarn. I have partial balls left but not enough to make a full hat with. Maybe I'll use two strands and fewer stitches and crank out a few more. We'll see.
Other than that, I've been working on my travel shawl when I'm traveling or at meetings or otherwise need to keep my hands busy. I've also started to make some progress again on the Appledore gansey now that Lavori 07/30 is finished. I'd like to get it done this winter so the recipient can get some use out of it while it's cold. I won't include photos since they look a lot like last month's photos. I really concentrated on finishing the doily these past few months, to the detriment of everything else.
Since this is quite likely to be the last post of 2025, why not do a bit of rambling about the past year, at least for those things that this blog is occupied with?
I acquired another rescue wheel, which came with a rescue rigid heddle loom. So I did my first-ever rigid heddle weaving project. The wheel is fixed up and spinning, too -- it's a very nice vintage wheel, very basic and plain but quite serviceable and steady.
I've done other spinning this year, too. And I've also been knitting with handspun. The fiber stash is roughly steady-state thanks to a bit of stash acquisition that happened at fiber fairs and elsewhere. The fiber fairs are always a lot of fun and I like supporting local people, so no regrets.
I learned how to do sprang and also explored several new-to-me tablet weaving techniques and braiding techniques. Those are beyond the scope of this blog, though.
I did some knitting, too. Duh. Cat beds, travel shawls, hats, and, of course, doilies. It was a productive year for doilies, ranging from small and quick to large and more time-consuming. Hopefully I'll continue to knit doilies next year. I want to knit some fingerless mitts for a friend so those are on my to-do list for "soon", and I want to finish the sweater I'm knitting so I can knit more. I might want to knit another cat bed, too.
I ended up not knitting any socks this year, either. Sigh. I really do need to cast on another pair, but keep not doing it. I like knitting socks but I keep choosing other things when it's time to start a new project.
The people I hang out with for knitting are a delight, as always, and it will bring me great joy to continue hanging out with them. I still want to get involved with some of the local guilds, though in general, I'm not really a guilds type of person, so who knows?
What do I want to do next year? The usual. More doilies, more shawls, more hats, more mittens (and fingerless mitts), more socks, more sweaters, maybe another cat bed, plus anything else that strikes my fancy. See? The usual.
For spinning -- continue spinning, and continue using my handspun. I think that some of my handspun would work very well for weaving if I feel like rigging up the loom. What would I use the cloth for, though? I'll try not to buy any spinning wheels this year, though no promises should something come my way. I'd like to sell some of my rescued wheels that I don't use very often -- they deserve to be in the hands of people who will use them more regularly.
Maybe this will be the year I start dyeing again. We'll see! And hopefully I'll continue posting on this blog.
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Apparently Barbara Walker passed away about a week ago. She was 95, so had a good long life, well lived. She was one of the big names in knitting in the 1970s and 1980s, as women turned their intellectual abilities towards knitting and other similar crafts. There's a lot to be said about so-called women's work, the feminism of the era, and the way that women who'd been restricted to women's work began to focus on and respect the worth of that work.
Barbara Walker is known for her collections of stitch patterns and also for her work on generating top-down templates for knitting various kinds of garments. Her work in combination with Elizabeth Zimmermann's work were entirely liberating for me and many others. I couldn't really follow most published patterns since I didn't fit the size range the patterns were in, and I couldn't get help from the store owners because I knit "funny" (i.e. continental style at a time when everyone around me did Anglo-American), and because I didn't like sewing pieces together. I went looking for a book on how to design your own things, discovered Zimmermann and Walker, and never looked back.
The work of these new voices, along with the then-new interest in historic and ethnic knitting, helped to revitalize knitting in the 1970s to 1980s. This is part of why knitting was such a big part of the early internet years. Or pre-internet, depending on what you call things like bbs and delphi forums and early newsgroups and the like. A lot of STEM majors in the university system were knitters, and of course they took those interests with them as the interconnectivity of the early internet started to develop and evolve. Everything is of course related to everything, but modern knitting very much is a direct descendent of the STEM majors and other knitting artists who were influenced by people like Walker.
Barbara Walker was also into feminist mythology and tarot and other fun topics in feminism and spirituality, and apparently was active in modern dance. She had a major impact in several fields. I won't say it's a huge loss to the community -- she'd slowed down a lot in recent years, and she made her enormous contributions to each field decades ago and then moved on to yet other subjects -- but it's still a huge loss to all who knew and loved her, and she deserves a great deal of honor and respect for her many accomplishments over her very long life.
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