Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Jug

When I was out at Madrona I saw an uncommonly large amount of jaw-dropping knitting, including a glittering heap of works by Betsy Hershberg. If perchance you haven't heard of Betsy yet, you will. She's got a book coming out from XRX, with the working title Betsy Beads: Creative Approaches for Knitters.

Betsy's thing is beading. She does things to yarn and beads that make me gasp like a codfish on a treadmill. After my talk on antique patterns, she took a shine (you should pardon the expression) to one of the sample pieces–the 1840s Pence Jug I translated for the Winter 2008 issue of Knitty. Would I mind, she asked, if she took a whack at beading it?

Would I mind? Of course I wouldn't mind. I just asked her to please drop me a line and let me know how it went.

She did, and she did. I'll let her tell you:

As a lover of all things knitted with fine yarns, very (very!) small needles AND teeny, tiny beads, I told you that creating a bead knitted version of this little ditty had instantaneously taken over my knitter's brain.

Additionally, I've recently been focused on creating three dimensional knitted components for my own work designing bead knitted jewelry. So I was off to the races.

Here's a side-by-side of the original (knit with fingering-weight yarns in the colors called for in the original pattern) with Betsy's...version? No. Adaptation? No.

With Betsy's transfiguration of the Pence Jug.



And a solo shot, larger, so you can really see what's going on.

Betsy continues:

If you're interested in the technical aspects of this project, it is worked on 0000 double pointed needles with half strands (3 threads) of two colors of DMC metallic embroidery floss and approximately 600 Size 11º Miyuki glass Delica beads. The finished jug is all of 2" high and 1 1/2" wide. In other words, I expect the men in the white coats to come take me away at any moment.

It is important to understand that when knitting 3-D objects, using needles that would otherwise be considered too small for a given fiber is the way to go. It is the very dense gauge created with this needle/fiber combination that creates the stiffness that helps these objects hold their shape.

For the sake of full disclosure, working at this gauge and scale can be tough on the eyes and on the fingers, especially when working the K2tog's on top of a bead in the row below. It's also probably not a great a idea to use black fiber (as I did) for your first attempt at this kind of work. But it was soooo much fun! I just might have to tackle that knitted orange some day...

In other words, the second of those photos is a little more than twice as high as the actual object. Did you just break a sweat? Because I did.

How hard does a fellow have to beg to get you to do the orange, Betsy? Come on. You know you wanna.

More Summer Fun

I'm teaching at Sock Summit 2011, July 28-31 in Portland, Oregon. No, I can't quite believe it, either. I mean, I'm right there on the list of teachers, but I still can't quite believe it.