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Twist CollectiveLessons in Goat Rearing: Part Three
Text and illustrations by Amy King
If you’ve been following along since the Spring/Summer 2014 issue (Part One, Part Two), you’ve gotten to know quite a bit about my goats. So much happens on our little farm that it’s difficult to sum it all up in a few articles. So I’m going to end this series with a beginning: the birthing of baby goats. It’s a mess, but if you've had your own children or witnessed the birth of others, you know that’s it’s a beautiful mess. This is my girl Nikki's birth story.
Sip, Sip, Knit
By Franklin Habit
If you're a knitter, I sure as hell don't need to introduce you to Elizabeth Zimmermann.
Hers is simply a name that people who knit recognize, much as people who love horse racing or tennis know Secretariat or Billie Jean King. Her bracing, empowering first book, Knitting Without Tears, has been continuously in print since its debut in 1971. Chances are you own it, or have at least read it. Fifteen years on from her death at age 89, Elizabeth continues to be omnipresent, her influence inescapable.
Blast Off
By Lela Nargi
From Katharine Cobey’s bird-headed cape fashioned from garbage bags to Dave Cole’s steel and fiberglass teddy bears, contemporary knitting sculptors have long embraced unorthodox (and in the case of fiberglass, downright dangerous) materials in their explorations of texture and the meaning of fibercraft. Since 2006, Seattle-area artist Carol Milne has been undertaking an ongoing experiment with the vagaries and complexities of knitted glass
Swatch It! Winter 2014
By Clara Parkes
Fisherman's rib is a deeply satisfying stitch, one that's easy to work and produces a plush, hearty fabric. I'd never worked it in two colors before, and the minute I saw Ashley Rao's Epicenter, I knew I had to give it a swatch.
Rao chose a classic wool yarn for the original garment. Classic Elite Mountaintop Crestone is an evenly spun, traditionally plied yarn with spunk and soul. It walks that fine line between crisp and chaos in a way that's perfect for any fisherman's rib.
In fact, pretty much any traditionally plied yarn will look beautiful in this pattern. Knowing that, I decided instead to veer completely off-road and see how a novelty texture would work. It needed enough uniformity to render the stitches with reasonable clarity, and it needed enough innate elasticity to hold the ribbing in place. Tube yarn—call it tape, cord, what have you—fit the bill perfectly.
Lessons in Goat Rearing - Part Two:
Have You Any Wool? By Amy King
In the Spring/Summer issue of Twist, I introduced you to my rapidly growing herd of goats and the piles of poop they produce. This installment deals with a more genteel caprine product: their gorgeous mohair fleece. Angora goats provide quite a bit of that. As a spinner, that's exactly what I want. The trick is getting it off the animal and onto the spinning wheel. |
