Monday, October 29, 2018

Weekend creative pursuits…


Dear Creative Adventurers,

On the weekend I try to put the paint brush down and explore other creative avenues. As the months get cold I have turned my creative downtime efforts to knitting.

I read a book recently where one of the characters knit kitchen towels. At first I was like hmmm… Then one day while mopping up a spill. I was quite undone by how ineffective my kitchen towel was working. Here in Germany a proper kitchen towel is cotton and thin. While pretty not very effective in mopping spills. Then there is the fact that I cannot find cream and dark gray to match my kitchen to save my life. I got to thinking…then researching…

I have knit my first cotton kitchen cream and dark gray towel. The pattern looks like the screen of a white and black TV fuzz. While not exactly beautiful, quite functional. I have tried to knit these before but ran out of interest before I had it started. I definitely needed a pattern with a little challenge to keep me going. So this is the pattern I found https://www.pinterest.de/pin/291537775874519172/. I began and then discovered my thread was too thin. I still have not figured out where on the package the thickness is. As it was half the thickness I required I put both colors together. Making a colored patterned dishcloth at that point seemed beyond my abilities. Here are the results of my labors:



I am currently on towel number two. Since I have managed to make one kitchen towel that can mop spills up why not another? Only something with a two color pattern. I have never knitted a two color pattern before. https://www.purlsoho.com/create/2013/06/16/whits-knits-slip-stitch-dishtowels/. As I only had two colors I went with the navy and white, only cream and dark gray. While trying the pattern out it was clear I was not understanding some of the pattern. I turned to Fiber Spider on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4W0j8kjJjtk He did a brilliant job at showing how to pull one color up into the next row. I could have read that pattern forever and just never got it. Seeing Fiber Spider pull the underneath stitch to the next row made complete sense.  I nearly completed the second one here it is pictured:


I have found knitting particularly helpful to keeping my nerves in tact. If I spend too much time listening to German I get lost in the tangle of German grammar. When I knit my fingers are busy, my mind is free to explore the conundrum to what I am hearing. Ask my husband, last night we watched a German Krimi. I kept checking if I was understanding everything properly. If you want to know about how to build a rocket engine he can explain it to the very last spark plug in either language. Keeping track if the trainer slept with the daughter and the mother he is board. So the joke is I ask then explain and he says yes you are right… Or straightens out where my translation became my fantasy. LOL

What do you do that fills your creativity and calms your soul?

Sincerely,
Emily Frömel

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