Scrappy Knitted Projects

 

 

Why, who could this little jacket be for?  It is indeed for a special knitted creature.

 

 

Knitting this little frog was the perfect distraction: the directions were precisely written and took just enough concentration to be interesting.  The pattern is Kristina Ingrid McGowan's Frog and Toad.  It was very satisfying to knit an anatomically accurate frog.  His body was knit from the perfect green wool blend yarn I had reclaimed from an old sweater some time ago.

Eventually, after my tendonitis calms down, I'll knit him some pants, as well as a toad friend for company.

I finally finished an old WIP: a child's sweaters for donation.  Hopscotch Cardi by Rae Blackledge is a free pattern on Ravelry.  I used maybe one and a half skeins of Caron Cakes, an acrylic and wool blend that comes in self-striping colors.  I cut the colors apart to make the striping uniform.  

This baby sweater was knit from leftover bulky wool yarns and will also be donated.  I've made up this pattern, Little Coffee Bean Bulky by Elizabeth Smith, a few times.  One beauty of the pattern is that the stripes, and the small size, allow you to use up yarn left over from other projects.  In both sweaters I was able to raid my button box and found the perfect buttons.  Sometimes being quarantined at home gives me the opportunity to use what's at hand.

 

A Crazy Quilt for Mexican Jenny

I'd pieced these blocks awhile back, intending to make a quilt about Mexican Jenny, the subject of the title poem in my 2014 book, Mexican Jenny and Other Poems.  Jenny was a woman who served time in the 1920s in Colorado for killing her husband in self-defense. She had been a sex worker in a mining town, and he'd been her pimp.  He'd beat her up for not bringing in enough money, and she killed him "with his own gun."   In prison she made a crazy quilt that told some of her story, and that quilt found its way into the personal collection of quilter and quilt collector Eugenia Mitchell.  Jenny's story spoke to me as a writer and as a quilter, and I wanted to make this piece as a tribute to her and to her story, which has been told in various ways over the years.

I've finally embellished 3 blocks of this project, and now I'm thinking about it in some new ways.  Originally imagined as a quilt, I'm now thinking of it as a fabric book that will not tell Jenny's story in a narrative way, but instead render some of the emotion in her story, as well as engage the complications of representation.

My dear friend Debra has been instrumental in inspiring me to take up this project, as she's also currently making an inspired and personal crazy quilt.  Debra also gave me the idea of the fabric book, which appeals to me for several reasons.  

The fabric book has freed me to incorporate non-textile media, like the vintage button card I incorporated into the block above.  I unthreaded my sewing machine needle and carefully punched holes into the card, and then attached it to this block with a silk-threaded running stitch.  I also like the idea that a fabric book allows the viewer to look at individual blocks, one at a time.

The images of women in these blocks come from various sources:  a CD of French women from historical postcards (also shared with me by Debra) and an embroidery transfer of a Mexican woman doing laundry from a mid-20th century embroidery pattern.

 

No matter how much we feel we know about a historical person, that knowledge is always shadowed by other familiar images, in this case about women, and about sex workers.