Knittage and me

Pretty much the day after we arrived in Ottawa, I met one of my greatest friends, Greta Grip.

She was demonstrating her hacked knitting machine at an open day at Maker Space North. We have had adventures aplenty since that day 4 years ago, and Aaron and I have both done quite a bit of work to keep her Brother KH930 operational. Recently she was a huge success as the Artist in Residence at the Diefenbunker!

That installation may have been the last real hoorah for the poor KH930.

So, because I love Greta so much, and because I am great at it, I sourced a new knitting machine for her!

Grab a cup of cocoa, it’s going to be a long ride.

Knitting machines are not really being made these days. There are some new ones around, but they lack the crazy oomph that Brother, Singer and Passap achieved in the 80′s and 90′s. Secondhand ones are easy to come by in the UK, and seemingly so in the USA. Canada doesn’t seem to have many up for grabs, and often they have issues.

I did some eBay research, and discovered that a KH9xx series machine would cost around CAD1000, and would cost a fairly large amount to ship to Ottawa.

Completely by accident, I found 3 KH series Brother knitting machines in Ontario! Yay! Near Niagara! Boo! They were being offered as not working, but in good condition. Several things were missing, and the ad mentioned no power for 2 of the 3.

I contacted the seller, who said she could package them up, and I paid her, and then paid for a courier to pick them up and deliver them.

Tada!

I’d asked the seller if she had suitable packaging, and mentioned several times that the machines would need padding inside the original boxes. She seemed confident that would be doable, but sadly ...

There was soooo much damage. The cases are metal, with plastic ends, and the seller used a very inadequate amount of padding inside the cardboard box, which lead to a vast amount of smash damage.

The photos from the ad showed everything in not-smashed condition, so this really was very disappointing when I opened the boxes up.

The edges were badly damaged, and the covers for the electrical components had also suffered. A lot.

This made my heart hurt.

I had bought a KH950i, with most of the parts present, and 2 KH910′s, with no needles, carriages, tools, etc. No power cables were present at all.

The KH950i and one of the 910′s were 220v, and needed a step down transformer to run. 

Basically, I’d bought 3 lumps of broken plastic and metal.

So, what to do? One of the amazing things about these knitting machines is that they are essentially the same machine, with a few different doodads. The 950i has a data port, the 910 does not. And that is the total difference between the two model.

So, I took them apart and made the KH950i into a complete, clean and working machine!

The plastic ends of the cases were held in with plastic lugs, and they came away pretty easily.

There were enough unbroken pieces to make a new complete case.

Everything needed a really good clean, because these machines are old! There is always fluff in these machines, and old oil. This makes for oily, gummy, dirty fluff. Everything was stripped down, cleaned with alcohol, and then oiled and reassembled.

The plastic parts covering the components also got the same treatment - stripped down, swapped to put the good pieces on the 950i, cleaned and reassembled.

The needles were in ok condition, so they all got taken out, washed in alcohol and then soaked overnight in oil, before being put back. I checked all the latches worked, threw a couple away, and filled the gaps with new needles.

And then I was ready to try it out. All needles were pulled out into working position, and I cast on loosely.

It was blissfully smooth, and I knitted about 10 rows. All the needles knitted off cleanly, and there was no dragging or difficulty moving the carriage

Then I ran the carriage across the bed without any yarn and removed the knitting from the bed.

Tada! It worked perfectly.

So the next step was checking the electronic brains of the machine. We used a transformer to step down to 110v, and plugged it in. No magic smoke escaped, and the light came on. Amazing!

Then on to the data cable. Greta is a yarn artist, and uses software to input patterns. This thing of beauty below brings the 1′s and 0′s to the machine so it can transform them into knitted art.

Cute huh?

Then we tried to use the software

Another tada! We input the Square Lemon logo, and it was beautiful.

So, after the delight at finding ‘local’ machines, the heartache of the damage done by poor packaging, and the hard work of cleaning and repairing the pieces to make a single working machine, we have a gleaming, fresh, working KH950i!

Isn’t she beautiful?

Anyone notice what an incredibly hard 11 months we've had? Honestly, this has been exhausting in so many ways. Between lockdowns, masks, hand washing and all those other incredibly necessary things, it's hard to think that this time last year we were all drinking coffee in coffee shops, going out to dinner at restaurants, having social lives ...

So, given that there is a general amount of stress in everyday life, I personally, and Square Lemon, corporately, decided to up the ante to Super Mega Stress level 11

How and why would you do such a thing? I can hear you all, and I understand your incredulity. I'm with you, but, as with so many things in life, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

As many of you know, The Ottawa Tool Library were made homeless, through no fault of their own, on very short notice.

We started Square Lemon in the space right next to them back in 2019. And they are a powerful force for good in the community. When I heard about their enforced eviction, I reached out to offer some of the unused space we had at our premises at Boyd Avenue for workshops.

After a meeting with Bettina - a whirlwind of a person - and a few chats with the other Lemons and my darling better half, we decided to offer a sublease on our premises. That then grew. That idea fermented and matured into offering OTL the chance to take over our lease.

Some of the reasoning behind this was altruistic. OTL's January newsletter said they were looking for a home, and, apart from Boyd being bigger than they needed, all of the other criteria matched what we had at Square Lemon. We had a large premises, with no real way to use it. (Markets are so far in the future, given the pandemic, that you need the Hubble Telescope to see them!)

So we made the offer, had meetings, made the arrangements, and now we are busy moving all of the glitter mountains, glue lakes and bead fountains into storage.

Don't worry. The online store will be continuing as normal, and I am in the process of finding a commercial property to buy which will home Square Lemon in the future! Square Lemon is here for you, in an appropriately socially distant form.

Regrets? None at all with regard to signing the lease over to OTL. Some small ones in that we are leaving our first real home.

And, in the evenings, when there's been snow all day and there has been a large amount of hefting boxes in and out of vans, a huge amount!

We moved house in June 2020. Actually we moved house on our wedding anniversary, in the middle of Covid, from a house with zero AC to a house with broken AC.  Between the AC condition, and us being unwilling to use a moving company to move less than 2km away, it was a brutal move.

Ottawa is a weird place to live. Today it is -9 and the snow is here. In June when we moved it was well over 30.

That said, I love Ottawa, and I really love our forever home! We also had our Permanent Residence granted this year, and when I wake up I am so thrilled that we live where we live.

Our home is old. It was built in 1896, and was one of the original farmhouses in the area. There’s a bunch of historical information available about it, and, despite looking like we are in the middle of the countryside, we are just minutes from Merivale Road - home to my favourite thrift stores and where I’ve wanted to be since we moved here in 2016.

Even though we are so close to a bustling shopping area, we still see a lot of local wildlife!

The garden is something I hadn’t realised I missed, until we got here, and realised we could do stuff to it and in it!

Now I have a herb garden, a greenhouse, and a couple of vegetable patches. I never have been keen on the ornamental garden, but I am figuring out how to integrate my love of a practical garden with a pretty one too. In the next year or so, I’m hoping to add a couple of apple trees and pear trees.

The greenhouse and garden will be something of a challenge. I’ve had gardens in the UK and in Ireland, but Ottawa is something else! Remember I mentioned the swings in temperature above? The greenhouse is completely covered in snow currently, and my neighbours all have little plant tents and covers for their outdoor plants. Um, I didn’t even think of that! I’m doing a lot of reading up on what to plant, when to plant, and what will grow happily in the particular soil we have. Lots and lots of reading.

The inside the house though is what made us leap at the chance to own this! Rooms. With doors. No open concept here! I have a total dislike of open concept, where I get to smell the dinner I cooked in the kitchen, when I’m sat on the sofa, blogging. The kitchen has doors, which we can close, and the fish can smell to its heart’s content!

There are some downsides. There is a lot of work to be done. That is also an upside for me, because I do enjoy making things ‘just so’.

We added the blackboard in the first week of moving in. Even though we are a ‘connected’ family, a blackboard is always a great help to communicate, and is never ‘on charge’ or ‘DND’

Hey! How is everyone? Anything new?

Chez Knittage, things have changed a lot since I last blogged way back in April 2018. And one of the main things is Square Lemon.

Let’s catch up:

The last time I blogged I was off to take part in a craft market. That market, through no fault of the organiser, was not successful. Then I attended another around Christmas of 2018, which was really, really unsuccessful!

I felt truly disheartened by the craft market scene in Ottawa, and very isolated from other crafty people.

Anyone who has read my blog, or who knows me in the real world, will not be surprised that I decided to do something about it. What may surprise those people is that I was successful in doing something about it!

At that last, really unsuccessful market, I turned on ‘Busybody Brit’ mode, and spent a few hours talking to all the other vendors there. And some of them were receptive to my thoughts:

I came from a market town in the UK. There is a market on almost every day in Stafford, and many times a month, there is a specialty market, such as a farmers’ market or a European market. Because of this, people in Stafford always know they can pick up all kinds of things at the market. Whether it’s cheese, handbags, pet beds, the market is pretty much always there for you to browse and buy.

Ottawa seemed to have very little in the way of regular markets, other than places like Parkdale Market, where you can buy fresh produce and plants, and other similar things.

Craft/art/maker markets were, and are, very seasonal. There were usually markets held at holiday points - Valentine’s, Mothers’ Day, Christmas, and so on. And at those times, there would be a lot! But nothing regular.

There were other outlets for crafters, like selling through concession at local craft and maker stores, but those had a limit capacity, and did not have the in-person vibe that craft markets have, where the maker gets to chat and interact with their customer.

And there was not a huge, easily available, in-person community.

And man, I do love a community!

What followed was truly thrilling for me. I collected contact information from a number of vendors, we emailed back and forth for a number of weeks, and then a group of us met up at my home.

Following meetings and discussions and planning sessions, we whittled away until we had a good group of people, and a name - Square Lemon!

And we ran with it.

We reached out to a local Maker Space, and took a tenancy. With that we were able to run our first workshop on March 26th 2019! And our very first craft market on April 13th 2019 - a year after my last blog post here!!

And it worked. We have spent the intervening time organising better, working out the kinks, hosting markets and workshops, and building a community. And that community rocks.

Within 6 months we signed a lease on our own premises, and now we have a home. We ran in-person markets every 2 weeks, and a whole bunch of workshops. People met people. And friendships, collaborations and inspiration happened, and grew.

Even with the events of 2020 and the pandemic, the lock-downs, the lack of social interaction, our community exists and thrives.

Square Lemon Artistic Association is a non-profit corporation, and we have a steadfast base of 3 board members and 2 volunteers. And they all rock!

Meg, Melanie, Steph and Sasha have worked tirelessly to make Square Lemon a warm and welcoming community for new crafters, artists and makers. We have an incredible social media presence now, thanks to Steph’s genius. And we have an online marketplace via Shopify to enable us to continue to offer a place for our market vendors to show the world their talents.

And when the pandemic finally leaves us and we can host in-person events again, we will have markets every 2 weeks, and lots and lots of workshops!

Have there been problems? Yes. Have we been able to work through them with the help of our amazing community, and the Lemons themselves? Yes.

I had decided not to do another craft show, but the vendors at this one are pretty darn excellent. So I’ve been prepping some of my ‘wares’.

It’s located at the Middleville Community Centre which is 4203 Wolf Grove Rd, Lanark, ON K0G 1K0, according to Google Maps.

I’ll be closing my store for the day, but everything will be reopening on Monday, 23rd April.

One of the many things I like about resin is that it is so versatile. I can brush it on pretty paper, coat unsmooth things with it, and also preserve bits of nature I find in the garden or around the neighbourhood.

I picked up some bookmark moulds recently and wondered if I wanted to make resin bookmarks.

No! I did not. But I did want to make pendants!

We cut up our Christmas tree last year, and I had bits and pieces of it all over the place. Including some pretty live edge discs I cut from smaller branches.

These got put into the bookmark moulds and then I poured clear resin over them.

Then while I was at it, I put a thin layer of resin on some earring bezels, coated some paper, and put blossoms in some of my backed bezels.

With trepidation I added some alcohol inks, glitter and a little acrylic paint to various elements and then used a hot flame to pop any bubbles.

Everything set for 24 hours.

And then I sanded, shaped with a Dremel, coated with a thin glaze of resin where needed, and added some holes.

Yes, there are some bubbles. No, not all of them are flat. But I love them! They look exactly how I wanted them to, and they have a lovely tactile quality to them!

These will be going up on my store after the weekend, as I will be taking them along with me to the Biggest Little Craft Market on Sunday, 22nd April!

It’s been fun playing with wire and resin, but I keep falling afoul of having the right bezels and findings for the jewellery I want to make.

So I’ve been learning how to bend, wrap and hammer wire to get what I need! And it is all going very well.

Aaron bought me Art Resin for Christmas, and I did not open the bottles for ages.

I have made a few pendants using resin, and I loved how most of them came out. However, a few of them were lumpy because I am impatient and moved them.

Having then watched all the YouTube videos available on how to fix this, I decided to paint some resin on the ones that were blurry or not so smooth.

And then I remembered the Santa decorations that I had been water-colouring! Could the resin work its magic on those too?

Let’s find out!

I priced up some doming boards here and there, and they were great products, but the shipping to Canada was prohibitive. Off I went to YouTube again, and someone suggested using the boards that are made for Hama Beads!

The next day, I had two boards, and I added some Zig glue to the ends of the sticking up bits (stop me if I get too technical!). The great thing with Zig is that you can get a permanent bond if you stick things together with it when it is wet/blue, but it works as a repositionable glue if you let it dry!

By doing this, it stopped all the pieces I was working on from moving around while I was working on them.

So on went the resin, and I moved it super-carefully around with a toothpick. Then popped a clean box on top to keep dust and so on off the sticky surface.

I cleaned up the surface roughness of the pendants shown here, and also domed the laser cut wood I had water coloured.

It’s hard to see how lovely this looks, but it does look and feel amazing.

And these here will be heading onto my store in the very near future!

I really love using the laser cutter at the library. Some of the results are available in my shop.

Some of the laser cuts I made came out not quite right. Apparently there was muck on the lens, and it affected the cut more than I realised!

So what to do with something I should probably throw in the bin?

I hate waste, and, with nothing to lose on these particular items, I decided to try my trusty watercolour pencils to see if I could save them at all.

So I sat and pencilled them for a couple of hours, and then added some water using a tiny paintbrush. Some of the colours ran a little, but that just kind of made them look artistic!

But they needed a finishing coat.

I tried Minwax.

I used polycrylic on the dishwasher magnets

It was a quick and easy process

But nothing came out quite the way I wanted it to.

Here was a quick and easy craft that Julie and I did one evening.

The wood pictures are from Santoro, and we used watercolour pencils and some water to make them beautiful!

I was thrilled to get my glass slide pendants all taped up, and then realised I needed to get on with soldering them!

It’s basically tinning the pendant, using a small amount of solder, and Aaron let me use his soldering iron, as mine just does not get hot enough.

This vice was perfect for me to tin the copper tape, and then to hold the pendants steady while I soldered the jump ring on the top.

I had been getting pretty frustrated holding the pendants in the third hand I have, and not being able to get the ring to stay in place. The machine vice worked much better and I found it much more stable.

Long time readers of this blog will know the agony and the ecstasy that knitting machines have been in my life. I am more than comfortable and capable with pretty much any brand or model of machine now, but somehow, I just don’t want to make anything on one anymore.

I picked up this Brother KH260 for a great price a while back, and spent some time cleaning it up. You can see the Qtips and paper towels in the background. The GooGone was not used on the bed, but on the case, which was covered in the stickiest sticky tape I have ever encountered!

The needle bar was toast, so I cleaned out all of the dead foam, and renewed the whole thing. So in the end, bewteen removing a lot of fluff, cleaning it all up, and making the new needle bar, I felt invested in this machine!

So I set her up on an Ikea table leg - these work so well, and are so much easier to move than a folding table - and made a wrist warmer.

And that was enough for me. I think I enjoy cleaning and maintaining machines, as well as teaching others to use them, more than I enjoy the experience of knitting with them!

I love thrifting almost as much as I love crafting, and on a recent trip, I was looking for photo frames, and ended up finding clip frames holding a bunch of postage stamps!

They were stuck onto cardboard in the frames, and they took some gentle persuasion to revert to being stamps once more!

I put some warm water into a flat bowl, and put the card and stamps in. This helped the glue to loosen enough that the stamps could be coaxed off the board.

It was actually a fun process, but the smell from all that soaked glue was kind of odd. 

Gradually the stamps started to float free and I collected the individual ones onto kitchen paper. They needed to dry, and, after washing a lot of gummy glue off the backs, I stacked them in paper towels, and put some books on top to encourage them to lay flat.

And here is the haul dry and ready to use! I love that there are many the same, but there are also sets.

I have some very talented friends. I know machine knitting monsters, a superb hand knitter, and some Jills of all Trades.

Because of diversity in our loves of craft, we all ended up making some Christmas presents for each other.

Julie made me this fabulous wall hanging. It’s made of reclaimed wood, resin, a dictionary page, and a maple leaf. Aaron and I are trying very hard to be Canadian, and so this piece was particularly lovely!

Our family name is stencilled on the bottom, and the dictionary page features the definition of Canadian!

Julie is also the proud owner of Earth Made Goods and will be opening a dog daycare and aquafit centre soon in Ottawa!

Sarah is astonishing! A full-time mom, and also makes stained glass beauties like this fabulous light-catching air plant holder!

I love how the light comes through the glass! Sarah is also a crazy wood worker, and loves geometric shapes!

Her family make Craigmont hair pomade, the very best in the universe, and it is regularly in mine, Aaron’s and Dylan’s hair!

Christmas was a hoot! Between all the travelling back to the UK to see the kids, and having the whole very first Christmas craft fair experience, we were all set for a quiet and gentle time. And for once, that’s exactly what we got!

I made a fake Christmas tree, using the library’s laser cutter, some plywood, cheap baubles, and some lights!

So Aaron and Dylan retaliated by buying a bloody enormous real Christmas tree! And set in stone the new tradition of dragging it home, through the streets, with Dylan moaning all the way!

Despite us not needing anything more in our lives, we all got presents! And Dylan got a Star Wars droid kit. Which is epic. And which we can disguise as a carton of milk on wheels whenever we like!

Greta presented Karen and I with some beautiful napkins, and some fabric markers. A lot of my holiday days were spent blissfully colouring!

And then we went on a family vacation to Niagara Falls. 

So very, very cold! The falls froze! And so did we!

Resin is a really interesting material. I have been watching a great many YouTube videos and looking at blog posts, and I had a go at making a couple of pendants with my friend, Julie.

One of the things I really like about resin is how it can be used to preserve and present natural things, like blossoms, wood, and so on. But it’s winter (kind of) here in Ottawa, and very little seems to be alive under all the snow and ice.

I was thinking of buying some already dried blossom or lavender to add to some pendants, but then I looked in my garden, and despite the cold and snow, there were still some old blossoms and seed heads about.

I spend some time with pointed scissors snipping the pieces I wants from the very damp and icky stalks I had brought in from the garden. And then popped the results onto some coffee filters I bought on a whim a year ago for my embossing powders (yup.)

Now, according to established wisdom, all I needed was a very heavy book, and the patience of Job. Anyone who knows me is aware that I am not a particularly patient person. And I really balked at the idea of waiting weeks for dried and pressed flora from the garden.

Thank heavens for the trusty internet! Turns out you can dry blossoms and flowers with a clothes iron! Yay!

So I covered the seed heads with another filter and ironed. I used my iron on a very cool setting (synthetics, on my iron) and pressed for 15 seconds. Then I let the paper cool, and repeated the pressing.

I did turn over the whole thing once or twice, and there was a lot of moisture! But each pair of filters was good for pressing 2 batches of blossoms.

And voila! My dried bits and pieces from the garden.

The blossoms from the Somethingorother tree by the garage are a little ragged looking, but I kind of like the look. The mini tree looking things are the seed parts that the blossoms were on. The seed heads remind me of both heather and lavender.

It only took an evening! And that time included me snipping little bit and pieces off. And my craft room smelled pretty lovely too.

I have been working on my Shopify store HotelCharlieBravo.

And I have to say, crafting is so much more fun that stocking and preparing an online store!

I have taken a lot of photos. Then messed about with the photos. And then had to think of cool stuff to add to the descriptions of these photos!

Aaron had bought a portable light box/kit, and some new tripods, so I did manage to go to town on some pretty excellent shots!

It’s now live - my store - and you can buy things. And one day I’ll even finish photographing the still tonnes of craft things I have in boxes all round the house.