That warm fuzzy feeling

   As a long time avid knitter, I have built up quite a wardrobe of knit items for myself. Once in a while I do some knitting to donate.  It is some of the most satisfying knitting there is. My current favorite group to donate to is Afghans for Afghans. In spite of the name, they have now tend to focus their emphasis to sending small garments such as socks, mittens, and hats for babies and children. A quote from their web site:

Save the Children says that providing a wool cap to a newborn is one of the most cost-effective techniques to ensure child survival in the first few months.

With the difficulty and expense of shipping all the generous donations they get, they realized they can keep a lot more people warmer with many small items.
  This year I knit these baby socks for a campaign they ran. Aren't they cute?

Then I knit these mittens for someone about 7 or 8 years old. I think.

The great thing about knitting for donation is that the exact size is not critical. They will find someone that is the right size. Afghans for Afghans periodically announces campaigns when they have a group to partner with in Afghanistan. I encourage you to take part in one of their campaigns or find another group that accepts knitted donations. It will give you a lovely warm feeling. Here's a page on Ravelry that lists all kinds of organizations that distribute knitted items to people that need them.

Incan inspiration

  When we were in Peru several years ago, I acquired some beautiful weavings including this bag.

The quality of weaving and natural dyeing in Peru is amazing. As a former weaver, I am in awe of the weavings they create with the simplest of technology.
   Starting in Peru, I acquired the questionable habit of buying a ball or two of alpaca yarn in colors that appealed to me whenever I found them. This is probably the silliest way there is to begin to design a sweater. Finally I chose yarn from my stash and knit a sweater for myself combining stripes and waves. The wave motif is very common in Peruvian textiles and easy to transfer to knitting even though it's far less detailed than in fine weavings.

    I used bands of wave patterns and for my larger motif I designed a double wave inside a tilted rectangle.

   Many of my sweaters evolve as I knit them. For example, I often decide what to put on the sleeves once I get there. Instead of doing all kinds of math to figure out the sleeve decreases I lay out a sweater I like and put the new sleeve on top of it. Then I do my decreases to make it the same shape. As I knit the first sleeve I record what I do so I can make the second sleeve the same way.
   As I was sitting around admiring my handiwork on my almost completed sweater, I noticed a big boo-boo on the front where stitches in one row went astray. You can probably see it right away. (In this picture it's on the top wave band on the right side.) How did I not see that when I knit it!? Perhaps I was watching TV.

Fortunately there was an easy way to fix that with duplicate stitch.

Now I could show the front in public without being embarrassed.

I used steeks for the arm holes and the front band. After I cut the front steek I picked up stitches and knit the bands and their facings. Anything other than a zipper would have interfered with the pattern on the front bands. I found a company on-line that sells lightweight separating zippers in a plethora of colors so I was able to buy one that matched my band color very closely. Mr. Rududu drilled some small holes in that heavy plastic part at the bottom of the zipper so I could sew it down by hand.
  The sleeves are slightly inset for a better fit. After setting aside a few stitches for the underarm, I added my steek and decreased a stitch every other row for a couple of inches on each side of the steek. After grafting the shoulders, I cut the steek and picked up stitches around the arm hole. The sleeves were knit down to the cuffs and finished with a facing, as were the collar and bottom band. Purling two rows before the facing makes for a very neat edge. By the way, I started the sweater with a provisional cast on and added the lower band after I had decided what the bands would be like. All part of my "method".
  Most people use patterns and I've heard that people who design their own sweaters generally plan them out in advance. These people lead far less exciting lives than I. Failure to plan ahead can lead to exciting trips to the local yarn store in search of something very specific.  Perhaps the ladies at the yarn store wondered why I hadn't just bought all the yarn specified in the pattern. Wait a second. What pattern?

But now I do have a pattern. I'm so smitten with the feel of the alpaca and the lovely colors available I plan to continue collecting colors and some day I will turn to Peru for more inspiration.

In search of unknown fruit

  I love fruit and in Costa Rica I've tried quite a few that were new to me. Let's start with what is a favorite fruit and one I've only seen in Costa Rica: caimito. It's a sphere, purple on the outside and shading from purple to white on the inside. I like to eat it with a spoon as the texture is a bit like custard. A lot of Costa Ricans don't like it because it has some latex which makes your lips sticky. A tip I haven't had a chance to try yet: after eating caimito rub your lips with some oil to remove the latex. I find the flavor so beguiling that I don't mind some stickiness.

   Did you know that the cashew nut we eat grows on the outside of a fruit? Every nut represents a fruit, perhaps explaining what cashews are so expensive. Native to Brazil, Ticos and other Spanish speakers call the fruit and nut marañón.  People make a juice of the fruit and it's one fruit I just don't like. It smells bad to me. I'll stick to eating the delicious nuts.

 

   The following photo shows two fruits: the red manzana de agua or water apple and mamón. Water apples, originally from the Malay peninsula and nearby areas, are quite bland and juicy. I guess they would be really good to quench a thirst on a very hot day. Not a frequent need in Monteverde so I don't eat them often. Mamón, a South American native,  has a crisp shell around a large seed. In between the seed and the shell is a small layer of tart flesh. It's fun to peel the shell off with your fingernail and pop the insides in your mouth so you can gnaw the fruit off the seed. The fruit doesn't come off the seed easily so it's a good way to pass some time.

 Here's another picture of water apples, a grenadilla and some green jocotes. A fruit from the cashew family originally from Central America, jocotes are now also cultivated in Asia. You eat jocotes whole, skin and all. Perhaps I would like them better if Costa Ricans let them ripen but here they are sold while still green so they are tart. I think maybe people sprinkle salt on the them, the way they do with unripe mangoes.
  Grenadilla is a fruit related to passion fruit. The outside has a crisp, papery layer. Inside the many small seeds are each inside a small packet of juicy fruit.  I scoop the insides into a blender and run at top speed briefly. Next I use a sieve to remove the seed particles. The seeds are edible so a few bits of seeds getting through isn't a problem. Then I make a smoothy with some yogurt, sugar, and ice. It's very aromatic and quite similar to passion fruit.

 The following fruit is the one that inspired me to write this post. One of my English students brought some as a gift for me from her family farm. It is called rose apple or manzana de rosa. I've never seen this fruit for sale. It's  peculiar in that the seeds are inside a hollow space. The fruit is a bit crunchy and has an astonishing perfume like roses.

My Guatemalan temari adventure

   On our recent trip to Guatemala, I was inspired to take some blank temari balls in the hopes of finding someone to put embroidery on them. Guatemala, of course, is justly famous for wonderful textiles including embroidery, but I've never seen it applied to a ball.
  We stayed about a week on Lake Atitlan. In Panajachel I found Berta Mendoza who was willing to try her hand on this project. She usually embroiders in the style of Santiago Atitlan, which is full of birds. I spent quite a few hours in Berta's shop with her and her daughter Sofia. Sofia is a university student studying child development and she lent a hand with the embroidering. Sofia also happens to speak three languages fluently and several others enough to function in the shop. Berta is somewhat more limited linguistically as she only speaks three languages. By the end of the week I was completely in awe of them.

  Besides talking about life in general and having many laughs, I showed them how to make temari and explained how they might make a good craft item to sell given the popularity of Christmas tree ornaments in North America.
  All the embroidery was done freehand without any reference material. The birds are rather whimsical—I wish these beautiful species really existed. This one looks a bit like a parrot.

 Below is a bird in flight on the other side of the same ball. Berta and Sofia took great pride in their work. I was surprised that they wanted to  carefully outline the birds because I thought they looked quite nice before that time consuming step. However I did agree after it was done that it added a lot.

A second ball I took was black and the birds they put on it were even more extravagant.

I'm looking forward to seeing Berta and Sofia on my next trip to Panajachel and to seeing in what direction they take temari balls. This project was an amazing way for me to make contact with real artisans and I'm very grateful for the experience.
 

Temari: stars and stripes

  This season of temari stitching brought a new accomplishment: figuring out a design from a Japanese book, even though I don't read Japanese. With experience in reading the diagrams and stitching temari this should become easier. I hope so because there are many wonderful patterns in those books. The pattern is, I believe,  from Fun with Temari (Tanoshii Temari Asobi) by Toshiko Ozaki, ISBN 4-8377-01035. I'm not completely sure because when I came to Costa Rica this year I just brought of copy of page 50 and 51 from one of the several Japanese books I own. These little confusions crop up when one is living in two places.

   Another pattern featuring stars is from TemariKai.com. It's pattern ST07 by Shelley S. It's done on a 10 combination division and the pattern is built up by stitching a five pointed star around each of the pentagons. It's fun to do because the pattern gradually emerges as you work around the ball. I put pins with little numbers in each pentagon so I would do them in the same order. That makes it easier to not miss a star on one of the rounds.

Sometimes I can now figure out how to do a temari by just looking at a photo. That was the case with one I saw on Pinterest. One thing I don't like about Pinterest is it sometimes is impossible to know who is responsible for something lovely. In this case the link took me back to the Yahoo Temari Callenge group but I don't know which of the many members did the ball.  Barb Suess did a similar ball but her last round is different because the triangles and pentagons aren't outlined. Doing it this way dramatically changes the look of the ball.

All over the place with temari

  Recently I stitched a few balls that are completely or almost completely covered with embroidery. This style of temari is called kousa. This kind of design demands a much great degree of accuracy in the roundness of the ball, the marking, and the stitching. And because of all the stitches needed to cover the ball they take relatively longer to do.
  Once again, thank goodness for the internet where I found these lovely patterns. The first all-over design I did—shown on the left— is pattern GT31 by Ginny T. on TemariKai.com. She describes it as being fairly forgiving for this type of design. That was definitely a good thing for my first attempt at kousa.

The ball on the right is also from TemariKai.com. It's pattern CP02 by Colleen P. The same ball can be seen from a different angle in the photo below. It's quite magical how the pattern forms as you stitch and do under and overs.

 

The ball on the left is a much simpler design. It's pattern SC02 by Susan C. on TemariKai.com. It's on a simple 10 division with a spindle stitched in each section. Then an obi of the same color as the base (black in this case) is woven through the spindles. Simple and very effective. On all of these balls I chose my own colors. This one used some of the wonderful greens I bought in Guatemala last year in perle 8, which is finer than the size 5 I usually use.

Rainbow season

In Monteverde, especially in January and February, there is often both mist and sun. Something I didn't realize before living here is that rainbows in the morning slowly sink as the sun rises and rainbows in the afternoon rise as the sun gets lower. Of course one needs long-lasting rainbows to notice this. Here are a few photos I took this rainbow season, which sadly, is now over.
  From our house.

 

Over the shopping center.

  

From a farm in lower San Luis.

From a coffee farm in upper San Luis, a rainbow that is about to set.