Hooch and Needles and a Basket Case

FINALLY the sewing machine has been hefted back to the basement and unpacked after it sat upstairs for a month, since the afternoon I came home from the Mary Lou Weidman workshop. That also means I unpacked the nine Hoochy Mama blocks I made. And here they are.

I began some hoochy flying geese, too, during the last hour of the workshop. I'll show them when they're more presentable. I considered working on the geese today, but then I got an itch to throw together a knitting needle case. As has been typical as of late, however, my brain was too muddled to do the math I needed to make a pattern for myself.

Of course, I don't even have a lot of needles yet; for only four months have I been knitting with pointy sticks rather than looms. But what provoked me into wanting a needle roll was my youngest cat. Strange creature. She loves needles more than yarn. She'll pluck an idle needle out of my knitting basket and deposit it just outside my bedroom door. Better than a dead mouse, I guess. But a roly-poly needle hurts like heck underfoot and is a rude awakening when I'm still comatose-woman walking. (Of course most of the time the cat relocates my needles during the middle of the night when she can reign supreme over anything not nailed down.)

Anyway, the first thing I did to protect my chair-side knitting was to buy a basket with a hinged lid. (I love it when Michael's or JoAnn's has their baskets 50% off.) Then I googled for a needle roll pattern and found, among many, this one by Cut Out & Keep. I pretty much followed the directions, but I needed some guidance for the widths of the needle channels. So, I used the measurements from this pattern by Bonnie Reis. I still had to do math, but by this time my mind had cleared a little. To make things come out fairly even, I sewed the following channels:

four-- .5" wide
four-- .75" wide
six-- 1" wide
four-- 1.25" wide
two-- 1.5" wide
four-- 1.75" wide

And thus have I ruined my middle-aged kitten's fun. She'll have go back to her milk jug rings and bread bag twist-ties that we wind into little springs. To make this project more fabric stash/quilting related, I made the roll with fabric only from my stash. Including the ribbon, which is much wider than what the pattern calls for. But I had it, and it wasn't doing anything else at the time.


And, oh! Through a circuitous happenstance that is the internet, I found a great knitting podcast, Cast On, by an expat. American living in Wales. Brenda Dayne has the kind of voice that reminds me of the public radio show Fresh Air: mellow and professional. I've been listening to episodes in her fourth series, and they're roughly divided into newsworthy goings-on in her part of the knitting world, a couple of essays written by others about the fiber arts, and music serving as segues between all these things. She also responds to questions and comments from the Cast On blog. Go check it out; she's great to knit to.