Donna Druchunas's Blog

In my normal periodic evaluation of my goals and purpose in live, I was recently re-reading this post that I wrote on Knitting for Change in January 2006, and I've decided that I still feel strongly about this, and have no need to change the statement at this time:

My purpose will be to help make the world safer and more comfortable for women and minorities.

How will I accomplish this?

By creating things that provide comfort, such as hand-knit items to donate to charity and knitting books that allow others to create comfort, and by continuing to provide free knitting patterns and charity knitting information on my website.

By using my writing to advance reason and enlightenment and to oppose fundamentalism and the beliefs that breed hatred, violence, intolerance, and ignorance.

By valuing--and encouraging others to value--the ideas, creativity, and contributions of women around the world.

By supporting secular organizations that help women and the glbt community.

By speaking out whenever I can in private and in public to point out injustice and to defy the censorship that silences those with no political power.

In each of these areas, I will volunteer, work for pay, and develop personal projects.

With that in mind, I want to draw your attention to this article from the Denver Post.

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From S. Africa with stitches
by Colleen O'Connor, Denver Post staff writer

Leora Raikin grew up in South Africa with no television and few toys. Needlework was the evening entertainment. She learned it from her mother, who learned it from her own mother.

Embroidery "was the favorite family pastime," says Raikin, who now lives in Southern California.

In her works, colorful images - lions, hippos, rhinos, crocodiles, birds, flowers - frolic against a black background. The art form is growing in popularity in the United States, thanks to Raikin, who in 2003 started a company called African Folklore Embroidery.

This April, the art will be televised on DIY Network; this spring, workshops will be offered in Colorado Springs at Ruth's Stitchery.

"African ethnic art is about bright colors on black background," she says. "The contrast makes it exciting. What people like is they can choose whatever color they want. You want to stitch your elephant in pink and the sun blue, you can do that."

Raikin's company is affiliated with a charity called KidzPositive, an AIDS organization in South Africa that helps HIV-infected women support their families through the sale of dolls, bookmarks and other products available through aflembroidery.com.

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The rest is here.

Here are a few sites with more about Leora's work and about African embroidery:

African Folklore Embroidery and Needlecraft

African art at home

Crafting a Legacy

Here's an article about Kelly Bridges from the Elegant Ewe yarn shop in Concord, New Hampshire, and her experiences with qiviut. Like me, she has fallen in love with the fiber and has recently been using qiviut from Greenland. Unlike me, Kelly got to collect fiber shed by wild animals! The article is from the Concord Monitor.

This photo is from Arnica, the only source of yarn made from Greenland musk ox down.



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Fancy Fur

By JENIFER VANPELT
Monitor staff
January 16. 2005 10:00AM

Angora is so yesterday. Sheep's wool? No thanks. Qiviut is the fiber of
choice for Kelly Bridges, a knitting enthusiast from Gilmanton, and it
doesn't come from a rabbit or a sheep. It's spun from the under-fur of a
much larger and more unlikely beast: the musk ox.

Pronounced KIV-E-UT, the fiber is believed to be the warmest in the
world. It's as soft as cashmere, and, according to Bridges, it's eight
times warmer than wool.

It's a lot easier to deal with, too. Unlike wool, qiviut doesn't scratch
and won't shrink when washed.

It's hard to come by, though, and as a result it can be pricey.

Not for Bridges, however. She collected hers straight from the source.

Bridges, 26, has been the manager at The Elegant Ewe, a fiber arts store
in Concord, for two years, but she fell for qiviut in 2003 while on a
research trip to study air/snow exchange chemistry in Greenland through
the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.
She and her colleagues stayed at Summit Station, a science camp high
atop an icecap.

In Greenland, Bridges collected clumps of fur she found on the ground,
in bushes or blowing in the wind. Her fellow researchers helped, too.

Each musk ox sheds about 5 pounds of qiviut per year, and collecting it
in the wild from the animal itself is out of the question.

"If one of those is coming at you, you just clear out," Bridges said.

The ugly truth

Musk oxen aren't pretty.

They look a little prehistoric . . . and they are. They coexisted with
the mastodons and mammoths and are built to live in the harsh arctic
climate of northern Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Norway and Siberia. As a
result, they're covered with 24-inch-long hair all over their wooly
qiviut undercoats to protect them from frost and to provide insulation.

They have large, humped backs and can grow up to seven feet long. They
weigh up to 1,000 pounds, and both the males and females have long,
curving horns.

It's hard to believe a fiber as soft as qiviut comes from an animal like
this.

For Bridges, foraging for qiviut in Greenland was productive. At the end
of her trip, she had amassed a hefty pile of brown fur. That's when the
work began.

Before her qiviut could be spun into useable yarn, all the guard hairs
had to be removed - by hand.

"(It) took me about two months (to clean and spin it)," Bridges said.

In the end she had about half a pound of yarn, which she used to knit
two hats, a scarf and a wimple (a tube that can cover the head, neck and
shoulders).

Despite the hard work, it was a bargain.

According to online shops, two ounces of qiviut - about the amount
needed to knit a scarf - could cost $120. The amount of sheep's wool
needed to make the same scarf would set a knitter back about $10.

Those who don't knit can expect to pay anywhere from $230 to $330 for a
qiviut scarf and up to $1,100 for a sweater.

Though Bridges says qiviut takes dye well, she chose to leave hers
natural. The qiviut is a rich cocoa brown, but because some of the tufts
she collected had been out in the sun longer than others, their color is
faded. This variation in hue gives a soft, random gradation to her
knitted projects.

A call for help

During a second trip to Greenland, Bridges hit the qiviut jackpot.

A local man working with her research team noticed that she and her
colleagues were collecting the fur and told her he had a garage full. He
later sent over two boxes that weighed in at about 20 pounds.

It didn't take Bridges long to figure out that it would take her a
lifetime to remove the guard hairs from 20 pounds of qiviut. With a
little research, she found Mini Mills, a mill on Prince Edward Island,
Canada, that specializes in qiviut, buffalo and other unusual fibers.

For $600, the mill processed the 20 pounds of raw qiviut into 10 pounds
of cocoa brown, three-ply yarn. Some weight is lost in the cleaning and
de-hairing process, and some of the fur just isn't long enough to spin.

Unwilling to waste any of the precious fur, Bridges had the mill use the
short fur to fill a down comforter.

"It's so warm," she said.

Bridges doesn't have plans to return to Greenland any time soon, but
thanks to a few big, hairy, Arctic mammals she's weathering the New
Hampshire winter just fine. And she's got enough qiviut to keep her busy
for quite a while.

Arctic Lace is featured on the Knit Picks home page! If you can't afford qiviut at $70US per ounce, check out the inexpensive yet luxurious yarns Knit Picks has used to work up the North Star Tam and Scarf projects from Arctic Lace!

This is just disgusting. It does not belong in modern society. What is this frakking world coming to?

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FRANKFURT, March 22 — A German judge has stirred a storm of protest here by citing the Koran in turning down a German Muslim woman's request for a fast-track divorce on the ground that her husband beat her.

In a remarkable ruling that underlines the tension between Muslim customs and European laws, the judge, Christa Datz-Winter, said that the couple came from a Moroccan cultural milieu, in which she said it was common for husbands to beat their wives. The Koran, she wrote, sanctions such physical abuse.

News of the ruling brought swift and sharp condemnation from politicians, legal experts, and Muslim leaders in Germany, many of whom said they were confounded that a German judge would put 7th-century Islamic religious teaching ahead of modern German law in deciding a case involving domestic violence.

The woman's lawyer, Barbara Becker-Rojczyk, said she decided to publicize the ruling, which was issued in January, after the court refused her request for a new judge. On Wednesday, the court in Frankfurt abruptly removed Judge Datz-Winter from the case, saying it could not justify her reasoning.

"It was terrible for my client," Ms. Becker-Rojczyk said of the ruling. "This man beat her seriously from the beginning of their marriage. After they separated, he called her and threatened to kill her."

Read the rest here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/world/europe/22cnd-germany.html

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What a load of shit. This is why separation of church and state is SO important. This is what can and will happen in America if the religious right is allowed to retain and gain power. This is not a world I want to live in, where medieval bullshit is given precedence over modern morality. Yes, that's what I said modern morality. People who think morality comes from the Bible or the Koran are sadly mistaken. These ancient books are filled with immoral rulings created by tribal civilizations. This kind of thing should be laughed at like the backwards garbage that it is and not cowtowed to because it comes from someone's holy book. Modern civilization is based on constitutional law, not on ancient superstition. And I for one would like to keep it that way.

Now that I've probably pissed off half of my readers, we shall return to our regularly scheduled knitting content.

Hi All, I just wanted to let you know that the Mile High Lace Knitting Conference is open for ala carte registration. If you live in Colorado and just want to sign up for one class, you can do that. If you love lace knitting, don't miss it!

April 18-22, 2007
Denver Colorado

Keynote Speaker: Margaret Stove

Instructors:
Nancy Bush
Joan Schrouder
Galina Khmeleva
Donna Druchunas

Gracie Larsen will also be there.

http://milehighlaceknitting.com/

Are you crazy about Knitted Lace and Lace Knitting? Come play with other lace enthusiasts at the beautiful Marriott Renaissance Hotel located in Denver, CO, for a five day conference with internationally renowned teachers, vendors, and awesome exhibits!

(I'm not affiliated but I am teaching at the conference.)

While we're on the topic of sexy crafts, here's an interesting story about Polish lace (not knitted, but gorgeous).

Here's the story from the Associated Press, because I've been doing too much typing the last couple of days, and I have a lot of work to do this coming week....


Malgorzata Stanaszek holds up a hand-stitched lace thong in the village of Istebna, near Koniakow, Poland, March 2, 2007. Koniakow lace long graced church altars, but the lace tradition was dying out until Stanaszek's company turned to making thongs and bras, reviving the sagging cottage industry. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

Lace Thongs a Hot Topic in Poland
RYAN LUCAS | AP | March 16, 2007 03:45 PM EST

KONIAKOW, Poland — Delicate hand-stitched lace from this mountaintop village has long graced the altars of Polish churches and tables of Polish homes.

But now tradition has taken a modern twist with thongs, G-strings and other racy undergarments _ offending some villagers but giving new life to a 200-year-old cottage industry.

"Lace wasn't selling in the quantities it once did, and the tradition was starting to slowly disappear," says Malgorzata Stanaszek, co-owner of KONI-art, the company that stitches the lingerie. "Our friend then said, as a half-joke, 'Why don't you make thongs? They're popular now.'"

Stanaszek, 32, recruited her mother and two sisters into the business, and they started stitching the thongs and selling them on the Internet in 2004. Now Stanaszek says she employs 65 women who work from home churning out lace panties, G-strings, thongs and bras for customers around the world. Orders come from across Europe and as far away as Japan, China, New Zealand and the United States; a Koniakow thong sells for about $20...

The sexy designs are a far cry from the stodgy doilies, curtains and table runners of the past, leading some residents to view the thongs as a slap against the village's lace-making tradition.

"It's really not beautiful at all what they're doing," said Joanna Pielka, an elderly woman on her way to church in Istebna. "Do there have to be so many holes?"

Here's the rest of the story: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070316/poland-thong-town

Here's a link to the company's website, where you can learn more and buy both traditional (stodgy) and new (sexy) lace products: http://www.koniakow.com/index_en.php

Up to the last year or so, you wouldn't have thought "sex" and "knitting" could be used in the same sentence, could you? But lately, all kinds of interesting and sexy knitting projects have been cropping up. Here are a few new fun books and websites that feature naughty and nasty knitting.

http://www.naughtyneedlesknitting.com/ is the blog of Naughty Knitting author, Nikol Lohr. This book is really a lot of fun. I don't think there's one practical project in it, but there are lots of projetcs to spice up your time in the bedroom. And there's a really cute condom cozy (excuse the alliteration) that is shaped like a toy owl.

Knitting Lingerie Style by Joan

McGowan-Michael is more like Victoria's Secret than like Frederick's of Hollywood. Even if you're (like me) the type of person who normally prefers to keep your underwear hidden under your clothes (at least in public), this book will have something you'll love to make or to dream about making.

Knitty.com had a feature on Knitting & Sex way back in 2004! Check it out. Do you love your stash or do you LOVE your stash? How are knitting and sex related? Read the article to find out.

On The Publishing Spot find out what author Joel Derfne has to say about knitting in an interview about his upcoming memoir on being the gayest person on the planet.

On a more serious side, I have started working on a new project. It's going to be a booklet called "Safe Sex and Dangerous Knitting." The title comes from a topic I wrote about on Knitting for Change last February. The piece was inspired by condom amulets designed by Naomi Dagen Bloom. Naomi and I have been talking a lot by email during the past year, and we've decided to work together on a knitting booklet that will contain patterns by several different designers. The projects will be extensions on the idea of condom amulets--a sock with a condom pocket, a bra with a secret pocket for a condom, a jock strap with a condom holder... The booklet will use knitting as a way to promote safe sex and awareness about STDs. All of our profits will be donated to a charity (we haven't chosen one yet.) It may sound silly, but we've got to do something. Why? .....

Because our leaders in the US are not doing much to help fight HIV and AIDS. In fact, some are woefully ignorant of the entire issue. Here's a recent interview with John McCain. Someone running for president of the United States who is either complelety ignorant of this major health issue, or who is pretending to be so he can pander to the religious right. What's really going on here? You read the interview and decide. All I can say is PLEASE don't vote for anyone who won't do everything possible to fight the spread of diseases and prevent unwanted pregnancies. Vote for someone who cares more about health than about ideology. This is, frankly, disgusting.

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In yet another example of straight talk from John McCain, here's his take on contraceptives and HIV/AIDS prevention:

Q: "What about grants for sex education in the United States? Should they include instructions about using contraceptives? Or should it be Bush’s policy, which is just abstinence?"

Mr. McCain: (Long pause) "Ahhh. I think I support the president’s policy."

Q: "So no contraception, no counseling on contraception. Just abstinence. Do you think contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV?"

Mr. McCain: (Long pause) "You’ve stumped me."

Q: "I mean, I think you’d probably agree it probably does help stop it?"

Mr. McCain: (Laughs) "Are we on the Straight Talk express? I’m not informed enough on it. Let me find out. You know, I’m sure I’ve taken a position on it on the past. I have to find out what my position was. Brian, would you find out what my position is on contraception – I’m sure I’m opposed to government spending on it, I’m sure I support the president’s policies on it."

Q: "But you would agree that condoms do stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Would you say: ‘No, we’re not going to distribute them,’ knowing that?"

Mr. McCain: (Twelve-second pause) "Get me Coburn’s thing, ask Weaver to get me Coburn’s paper that he just gave me in the last couple of days. I’ve never gotten into these issues before."

Excerpted from this New York Times article.

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Maybe McCain needs one of these owl condom critters? A cool project would be to knit up thousands of these and mail them to him, each with a condom inside. Maybe these little wise owls could impart some wisdom to Mr. McCain. What do you think?

Here's a sneak peek at one of the designs from my next book, Ethnic Knitting: Discovery, coming out in October. The book does not have patterns for specific garments, but instead it has recipes where you can choose the charts, colors, yarns, and gauge of your choice and do a little 'rithmetic (with my help), and knit your own, custom sweater. The charts and recipe ideas are inspired by traditional knitting styles from around the world, with tips for updating them for a more modern fashion and fit.

So, except for the cover (which I posted a few days ago), there are no photos of sweaters in this book. Instead there will be fashion illustrations that show the garments I envision to help inspire you to design your own custom creations.



Each recipe includes three variations:
1) A schematic drawing where you fill in your own numbers. If you're an experienced knitter, this is probably all you need to design your own sweater.

2) A spreadsheet to help you with the calculations if your're not ready to dive in on your own.

3) Step-by-step instructions for those who have never designed a garment before and for those who like a little more hands-on help.

Well, here's the sneak peek at the basic Danish pullover with simple knit-and-purl stitch patterns. It's a rough, but you can get the idea on what the book might look like after we (really the artist and my publisher) clean up the details....