I've been working on handouts for a class I'm teaching Saturday morning at Needlework Unlimited, and it occurred to me that I ought to work harder at letting the world know what and when I'm teaching.
So here's what's on my teaching schedule through the end of the year.
Saturday, Oct. 30, 10 am-noon
Knitting in the Round without DPNs
There's no need to use dpns for small circumference items, and no need to switch from a regular circ to dpns when you've done too many decreases to continue with dpns. This class primarily covers Magic Loop and the Two Circs methods, but I'll also cover the Modified Magic Loop and Traveling Loop techniques, and cover when one technique might be preferable over another. We'll also discuss needle types and lengths that are best for each technique.
(It's not too late to register for this class -- there are still a few spots left. More information here.)
Tuesday, Nov. 2, 10 am - Noon
Continental Knitting
A day time class for knitters who throw the yarn with their right hand and want to learn to "pick" the yarn while it is held in their left hand. You must know how to knit and purl already.
More information here.
Wednesday, Nov 3 and 10, 6 - 8 pm
Knitting 101
Do you have a friend who keeps telling you she/he wants to learn to knit? Get 'em signed up!
They'll learn to cast on and knit in the first class and purl in the second. Additional skills taught to those who catch on quickly.
More information here
Saturday, Nov. 6, 10 am - noon
Finishing Techniques
Bring your projects that need to be put together and learn to seam properly, pick up stitches for those button bands, or you can practice seaming on swatches.
More information here.
Saturday, Nov. 13, 10 am - noon
Oops! Fixing Your Mistakes
Tinking, frogging, laddering down -- you name it, I can teach you to fix it.
More information here.
Tuesday, Nov. 16, 6-9 pm
Twinkle Mittens
Cozy mittens made with super thick and soft Twinkle yarn can be completed in just a couple hours.
More information here.
Wednesday, Nov. 17, 6 - 8 pm
Knitting 102
Never learned to purl? Don't know how to read a pattern? Have no clue how to decrease or increase? Whatever you want to learn next, I'll teach you.
More information here
Saturday, Nov. 20, noon - 2 pm
Third Saturday Techniques and Master Hand Knitting Clinic
Through the end of the year, I'm having drop-in (or register ahead of time!) clinics. Anyone is welcome to come for help, but this is also a time for knitters working on the Master Hand Knitting program to get some feedback on techniques, ask questions and get some guidance for resources. It's also a nice time to connect with other knitters in person who are going through the program. I always bring my Level I binder (with the judges comments) and my in-progress Level II binder. (Starting in January, I will be offering Saturday clinics more frequently.)
More information here.
Tuesday, Nov. 30 6-8 pm
Finishing Techniques
Same as above. Get those holiday projects finished up!
More information here.
Saturday, Dec. 4, 11, 10 am - noon
Knitting 101
Give a friend or relative a holiday gift they won't forget -- the ability to knit!
More information here
Wed., Dec. 16, 6-8 pm
Finishing Techniques
Once again, I'll be at the shop ready to help you get 'er done.
More information here.
Saturday, Dec. 18 10 am - noon
Knitting 102
Learn whatever skill is next on your knitting to-do list.
More information here
Saturday, Dec 18, noon- 2 pm
Third Saturday Techniques and Master Hand Knitting Clinic
Drop-in (or register ahead of time!) clinic. Anyone is welcome to come for help, but this is also a time for knitters working on the Master Hand Knitting program to get some feedback on techniques, ask questions and get some guidance for resources. It's also a nice time to connect with other knitters in person who are going through the program. I always bring my Level I binder (with the judges comments) and my in-progress Level II binder.
More information here
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Monday, March 29, 2010
Toot, toot!
That would be the sound of my own horn.
I found out yesterday I won Ravelry's Bobby Award for Most Educational Raveler. A great honor, and a very big thrill!
I found out yesterday I won Ravelry's Bobby Award for Most Educational Raveler. A great honor, and a very big thrill!
Friday, February 19, 2010
Ask a Knitter archive page
For any of you who have clicked on the sidebar link to Ask a Knitter archives and have been frustrated by the fact that you couldn't actually get to the archives, then today you are going to be thrilled by this news:
The archive link works now.
That is all.
The archive link works now.
That is all.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Novel(ty) Hats
So I've decided that my heroine's brother is a Firefly fan, the type of guy who would go to Comic-Con if he could afford the airfare, and that my heroine is going to make her brother a Jayne Cobb hat. It's the perfect project for a new knitter - the worse it looks, the better, as Ma Cobb was not an expert with the yarn and needles. That's perfectly fine for Jayne, after all, as Wash said when Jayne first put on the hat, "A man walks down the street in that hat, people know he's not afraid of anything."
I hied myself to Michael's the other day, to get me some Red Heart Super Saver. All I can say is: wow. I am not anti-acrylic. I used it often for baby sweaters, and only last year I used it to make mittens for my LA-based nephews, who don't need wool, but I've always bought it at my LYS, Needlework Unlimited, which has very reasonably priced acrylic yarn and best of all, the stuff they carry is soft and the colors look good, not garish.
Not so the Red Heart, which is kind of the point, I guess, when it comes to making a Jayne Cobb hat, although I wonder if Ma Cobb would have used wool, possibly sheared from her own sheep?
I looked through several existing patterns for Jayne's hat, and compared them to what I saw in the clips.
Most of the patterns call for working 4 or more rounds of ribbing (some k2p2, some k1p1) before switching to stockinette. It's clear from photos and screen shots that there is not that much ribbing, at least around the front of the hat.
I think the reason none of the Jayne hats I've seen look quite right (aside from the fact that most knitters have appallingly even tension) is that Ma Cobb may have been doing some stealth short rows. The front of the hat has only about 6 or 7 rows of orange, and one row of k1p1 above a long tail cast on that is done in k1p1 pattern, but over the ear flaps, the orange stripe is wider, as is the ribbing. (59 seconds in to the video, you can see the side of the hat more clearly.) The hat looks like it's actually shaped to curve around Jayne's face. Cunning, indeed.
So now I have to decide if I want to make a Jayne Cobb hat that a beginner could actually make, or do I want to replicate the actual hat, which was clearly made by a very good knitter who was only pretending to be bad.
I may do both. When I fired out an email to my writer friends, asking who was a Firefly fan, three of them replied. One said, "Shiny!" and other mentioned she loved "Captain Tight Pants," and the other, when I revealed that there might be a terrible hat giveaway, raised her hand and said something to the effect of "Me! Me! Pick me!!!"
I hied myself to Michael's the other day, to get me some Red Heart Super Saver. All I can say is: wow. I am not anti-acrylic. I used it often for baby sweaters, and only last year I used it to make mittens for my LA-based nephews, who don't need wool, but I've always bought it at my LYS, Needlework Unlimited, which has very reasonably priced acrylic yarn and best of all, the stuff they carry is soft and the colors look good, not garish.
Not so the Red Heart, which is kind of the point, I guess, when it comes to making a Jayne Cobb hat, although I wonder if Ma Cobb would have used wool, possibly sheared from her own sheep?
I looked through several existing patterns for Jayne's hat, and compared them to what I saw in the clips.
Most of the patterns call for working 4 or more rounds of ribbing (some k2p2, some k1p1) before switching to stockinette. It's clear from photos and screen shots that there is not that much ribbing, at least around the front of the hat.
I think the reason none of the Jayne hats I've seen look quite right (aside from the fact that most knitters have appallingly even tension) is that Ma Cobb may have been doing some stealth short rows. The front of the hat has only about 6 or 7 rows of orange, and one row of k1p1 above a long tail cast on that is done in k1p1 pattern, but over the ear flaps, the orange stripe is wider, as is the ribbing. (59 seconds in to the video, you can see the side of the hat more clearly.) The hat looks like it's actually shaped to curve around Jayne's face. Cunning, indeed.
So now I have to decide if I want to make a Jayne Cobb hat that a beginner could actually make, or do I want to replicate the actual hat, which was clearly made by a very good knitter who was only pretending to be bad.
I may do both. When I fired out an email to my writer friends, asking who was a Firefly fan, three of them replied. One said, "Shiny!" and other mentioned she loved "Captain Tight Pants," and the other, when I revealed that there might be a terrible hat giveaway, raised her hand and said something to the effect of "Me! Me! Pick me!!!"
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Novel Knitting
So I'm back to writing fiction again after a 5-year hiatus that coincides with my complete obsession with knitting. I had previously had a very intimate relationship with knitting, and then took a 5-year break during which I spent a lot of time writing and merely nodded to knitting once a year on the occasion of a baby shower. Five years ago, I became a knitting stalker. No one has staged an intervention or presented me with a restraining order, but it's only a matter of time.
The knitting obsessiveness came in response to losing my writing voice. Writing was torture, my internal critic sat on my shoulder and bellowed into my ear with an megaphone, "You SUCK!" and nothing I wrote -- even emails -- sounded like me. I wanted to remember what it was like to do something creative for the pure fun and joy of it. So I came back to knitting, and I came back hard.
Eventually, my voice did come back, and I found myself writing more and more, but still not fiction. This fall, when I decided I wanted to write fiction again, NaNoWriMo sounded like a great idea to me, except for the part where I didn't actually have an idea for a story. I had an idea for a character, but I didn't know much about her. I had no ideas for other characters, no idea about setting, plot, nothing.
Turns out that when I have to write 50,000 words in one month, there's no time to think about what to write, and no time for my internal critic to haul herself into a comfortable spot on my shoulder and dish out negative self-talk. I owe the world to the guy who created Write or Die. If I hadn't had that program reminding me to keep writing (no thinking!), I wouldn't have made it.
So that was November. I let the book marinate for December, and signed up for a "Working on Your Novel" class at the Loft that started a couple of weeks ago. I knew I would need concrete goals and deadlines to work through revisions on this book, and the threat of public humiliation if I didn't meet goals, because I have the least amount of discipline of any person I know. Big personality flaw, but that's who I am.
Turns out that most of what I wrote will be thrown out (no real surprise), but the good part is that I have characters, those characters have external goals and internal conflicts, which means I can have plot and character arc (always good news).
One of the things I do to get the theme of the book nailed down - what it's really about - is to make a collage of the characters, the setting, and main plot points. I have collected a lot of photos and little objects that represent the book, but I want to do something else, too.
This book has knitting in it - one of the characters is an indie dyer and her grandmother/great aunt (not sure which yet) has a yarn shop she's ready to retire from. While the book doesn't center around the shop, this older woman is the catalyst for the chain of events that is the plot and she is very important to all the other characters, including the antagonist.
I want to keep my two creative processes joined, so that when I take a break from writing to knit, the knitting keeps me in the world of the story. To do that, I want to knit something that represents each character in some way.
So, for example, the older woman--Franny-- has lace curtains hanging in her kitchen. So I'm knitting a lace curtain. Not a full size one -- I would go insane doing that -- but a smaller one, shorter, and with fewer multiples, so I can get the thing done.
"Rose Leaf" Design
Curtains
First Book of Modern Lace Knitting, by Marianne Kinzel (this book would have been new when Franny made her curtains).
Yarn: Coats Opera 30 crochet cotton (the pattern calls for #60 crochet cotton, which is not half as thin, it turns out, but is harder to come by, so I settled for #30, of which Needlework Unlimited had plenty of, in lots of colors, and which seems fine enough to me)
Needles: US 1/2.25mm
For the hero, who I named Hank, even before I knew there would be yarn, I need to knit a pair of socks - the socks the heroine sees him pull on when she first meets him. Something interesting enough that she would notice them, but manly enough that a guy like him would wear them. He's a Mr. Fixit guy with carpentry skills, on a break from what he normally does to earn a living (professional poker player). He's having trouble moving forward in his life because he keeps trying to fix the past/keep things as they've always been. So I need a sock pattern that fit his personality.
The heroine, Penny (not crazy about this name, I'm open to suggestions), has never knit before, but will learn how. She's all about the future, wants to forget her past and where she came from. She's also an expert in deceptive language. I have a scene where she's in the shop, having walked for quite a long distance in heels and she has blisters. She puts on a pair of felted slippers on display in the shop which are shaped like cowboy boots. They're not conventional, which scares her, because she's pulled herself up from a financially strapped background, and she works hard to fit in and not appear different. But she loves those slippers. I want those slippers. I may have to design them myself. Don't you think red cowboy boot slippers, with needle-felted swirly designs on the leg would be really cool?
(Edited to add photo below)
Only felted. A search of Ravelry reveals that there are crocheted cowboy booties (not felted). Clearly, this is a void waiting to be filled.
The indie dyer (I'm calling her Sookie) needs something funky - either an asymmetrical cardi, or a funky shawl or hat or maybe fingerless mitts that make A Statement. Something that represents her artistic self and independence, and uses color in a unique, but beautiful way. This is going to be hard for me. Unique color choices scare me, because I have some color vision deficiencies.
Sookie has a love interest, a more traditional guy who owns a downtown bar. I'm thinking some sort of subtle scarf that could be tucked into the neck of his wool overcoat. Like Henry, only not Henry, because while that is a terrific looking scarf, I think I would poke my eyes out with my needles if I had to knit it. On the other hand, there's nothing that says I can't knit a very small Henry scarf. Considering the size of the lace curtain I'm knitting, I could get away with a scarf about a foot long and 3 inches wide. Hmmm.
The heroine's brother is a young guy - never went to college, but smart, works manual labor jobs, a nice guy, but with simple tastes. I'm thinking a watch cap. Navy blue, maybe gray. Or maybe he's not like his sister. Maybe he doesn't care what people think about the way he looks. Can't decide.
The antagonist is another older lady, one who needs to control her world. She's getting something made of acrylic.
The heroine's mother is awful. So awful I don't know if I can even knit for her. She's the kind of person who would find fault in anything you knit for her. The kind of person who'd rather have a lottery ticket than a hand knit anything. Huh. That's interesting. I'll have to use that.
So I'm looking for pattern ideas. Anyone?
The knitting obsessiveness came in response to losing my writing voice. Writing was torture, my internal critic sat on my shoulder and bellowed into my ear with an megaphone, "You SUCK!" and nothing I wrote -- even emails -- sounded like me. I wanted to remember what it was like to do something creative for the pure fun and joy of it. So I came back to knitting, and I came back hard.
Eventually, my voice did come back, and I found myself writing more and more, but still not fiction. This fall, when I decided I wanted to write fiction again, NaNoWriMo sounded like a great idea to me, except for the part where I didn't actually have an idea for a story. I had an idea for a character, but I didn't know much about her. I had no ideas for other characters, no idea about setting, plot, nothing.
Turns out that when I have to write 50,000 words in one month, there's no time to think about what to write, and no time for my internal critic to haul herself into a comfortable spot on my shoulder and dish out negative self-talk. I owe the world to the guy who created Write or Die. If I hadn't had that program reminding me to keep writing (no thinking!), I wouldn't have made it.
So that was November. I let the book marinate for December, and signed up for a "Working on Your Novel" class at the Loft that started a couple of weeks ago. I knew I would need concrete goals and deadlines to work through revisions on this book, and the threat of public humiliation if I didn't meet goals, because I have the least amount of discipline of any person I know. Big personality flaw, but that's who I am.
Turns out that most of what I wrote will be thrown out (no real surprise), but the good part is that I have characters, those characters have external goals and internal conflicts, which means I can have plot and character arc (always good news).
One of the things I do to get the theme of the book nailed down - what it's really about - is to make a collage of the characters, the setting, and main plot points. I have collected a lot of photos and little objects that represent the book, but I want to do something else, too.
This book has knitting in it - one of the characters is an indie dyer and her grandmother/great aunt (not sure which yet) has a yarn shop she's ready to retire from. While the book doesn't center around the shop, this older woman is the catalyst for the chain of events that is the plot and she is very important to all the other characters, including the antagonist.
I want to keep my two creative processes joined, so that when I take a break from writing to knit, the knitting keeps me in the world of the story. To do that, I want to knit something that represents each character in some way.
So, for example, the older woman--Franny-- has lace curtains hanging in her kitchen. So I'm knitting a lace curtain. Not a full size one -- I would go insane doing that -- but a smaller one, shorter, and with fewer multiples, so I can get the thing done.
"Rose Leaf" Design
Curtains
First Book of Modern Lace Knitting, by Marianne Kinzel (this book would have been new when Franny made her curtains).
Yarn: Coats Opera 30 crochet cotton (the pattern calls for #60 crochet cotton, which is not half as thin, it turns out, but is harder to come by, so I settled for #30, of which Needlework Unlimited had plenty of, in lots of colors, and which seems fine enough to me)
Needles: US 1/2.25mm
For the hero, who I named Hank, even before I knew there would be yarn, I need to knit a pair of socks - the socks the heroine sees him pull on when she first meets him. Something interesting enough that she would notice them, but manly enough that a guy like him would wear them. He's a Mr. Fixit guy with carpentry skills, on a break from what he normally does to earn a living (professional poker player). He's having trouble moving forward in his life because he keeps trying to fix the past/keep things as they've always been. So I need a sock pattern that fit his personality.
The heroine, Penny (not crazy about this name, I'm open to suggestions), has never knit before, but will learn how. She's all about the future, wants to forget her past and where she came from. She's also an expert in deceptive language. I have a scene where she's in the shop, having walked for quite a long distance in heels and she has blisters. She puts on a pair of felted slippers on display in the shop which are shaped like cowboy boots. They're not conventional, which scares her, because she's pulled herself up from a financially strapped background, and she works hard to fit in and not appear different. But she loves those slippers. I want those slippers. I may have to design them myself. Don't you think red cowboy boot slippers, with needle-felted swirly designs on the leg would be really cool?
(Edited to add photo below)
Only felted. A search of Ravelry reveals that there are crocheted cowboy booties (not felted). Clearly, this is a void waiting to be filled.
The indie dyer (I'm calling her Sookie) needs something funky - either an asymmetrical cardi, or a funky shawl or hat or maybe fingerless mitts that make A Statement. Something that represents her artistic self and independence, and uses color in a unique, but beautiful way. This is going to be hard for me. Unique color choices scare me, because I have some color vision deficiencies.
Sookie has a love interest, a more traditional guy who owns a downtown bar. I'm thinking some sort of subtle scarf that could be tucked into the neck of his wool overcoat. Like Henry, only not Henry, because while that is a terrific looking scarf, I think I would poke my eyes out with my needles if I had to knit it. On the other hand, there's nothing that says I can't knit a very small Henry scarf. Considering the size of the lace curtain I'm knitting, I could get away with a scarf about a foot long and 3 inches wide. Hmmm.
The heroine's brother is a young guy - never went to college, but smart, works manual labor jobs, a nice guy, but with simple tastes. I'm thinking a watch cap. Navy blue, maybe gray. Or maybe he's not like his sister. Maybe he doesn't care what people think about the way he looks. Can't decide.
The antagonist is another older lady, one who needs to control her world. She's getting something made of acrylic.
The heroine's mother is awful. So awful I don't know if I can even knit for her. She's the kind of person who would find fault in anything you knit for her. The kind of person who'd rather have a lottery ticket than a hand knit anything. Huh. That's interesting. I'll have to use that.
So I'm looking for pattern ideas. Anyone?
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Soft and Shiny
Sophia needed to do some research this weekend at the History Center's library in downtown St. Paul, so while she was doing that, I stopped in at Treadle Yard Goods on Grand Ave. and shopped for buttons for my Bristow Cardi.
At knitting group the other day, I was sewing in the sleeves and the subject of buttons for the Bristow came up. I told the other women I was thinking of gold buttons, but when there was a simultaneous cry of "No!" from the group it occurred to me that I might be on the wrong track. I can knit people, but I'm not the best accessorizer.
The cardi is mostly stockinette, with most of the detail occurring right next to the button bands. I was instructed to get something that wouldn't pull attention away from the knitting. Something plain. Not shiny. A dull pewter, maybe. Or mother of pearl. Maybe a matte black button.
Armed with that information, I walked into Treadle Yard Goods and headed for the counter where the buttons were on display. A lovely woman asked what she could help me with, and boy was I glad she asked. Turned out she was a knitter, too, so she understood the necessary properties of a sweater button. She had a great idea about the right color, too: some sort of pearlized black would be good, she thought.
She was right.
This afternoon I sewed on the buttons, and after the Vikings game was over Michael took photos.
Can you see the buttons?
Kind of hard to get good photos of them.
I hate seeing that gate in the background of my indoor photos, so I had Michael take some outside, too. It's downright balmy here in Minnesota -- 35 degrees! -- so no outerwear necessary.
I made a mistake where I always seem to make mistakes - right at the bust - so I'm taking more advice from my knitting group and I'm living with the error for now.
If it still bugs me after a few wearings, I'll do some surgery and fix it.
Pattern: Bristow, Knitty, Winter 2005
Yarn: Knit Picks Andean Silk (Alpaca, Merino, Silk)
Needles: US 6/4.0mm for the seed stitch borders and cuffs, US 7/4.5mm for the rest of it.
At knitting group the other day, I was sewing in the sleeves and the subject of buttons for the Bristow came up. I told the other women I was thinking of gold buttons, but when there was a simultaneous cry of "No!" from the group it occurred to me that I might be on the wrong track. I can knit people, but I'm not the best accessorizer.
The cardi is mostly stockinette, with most of the detail occurring right next to the button bands. I was instructed to get something that wouldn't pull attention away from the knitting. Something plain. Not shiny. A dull pewter, maybe. Or mother of pearl. Maybe a matte black button.
Armed with that information, I walked into Treadle Yard Goods and headed for the counter where the buttons were on display. A lovely woman asked what she could help me with, and boy was I glad she asked. Turned out she was a knitter, too, so she understood the necessary properties of a sweater button. She had a great idea about the right color, too: some sort of pearlized black would be good, she thought.
She was right.
This afternoon I sewed on the buttons, and after the Vikings game was over Michael took photos.
Can you see the buttons?
Kind of hard to get good photos of them.
I hate seeing that gate in the background of my indoor photos, so I had Michael take some outside, too. It's downright balmy here in Minnesota -- 35 degrees! -- so no outerwear necessary.
I made a mistake where I always seem to make mistakes - right at the bust - so I'm taking more advice from my knitting group and I'm living with the error for now.
If it still bugs me after a few wearings, I'll do some surgery and fix it.
Pattern: Bristow, Knitty, Winter 2005
Yarn: Knit Picks Andean Silk (Alpaca, Merino, Silk)
Needles: US 6/4.0mm for the seed stitch borders and cuffs, US 7/4.5mm for the rest of it.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Ask a Cat
Michael was hanging over my shoulder tonight with the digital camera, shooting video of me working various types of right and left twists for my upcoming Ask a Knitter column on Ravelry (should be posted Monday or Tuesday).
I got some unsolicited help.
Or maybe unsolicited criticism, not sure which.
I got some unsolicited help.
Or maybe unsolicited criticism, not sure which.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Slipping onto the Bandwagon with Felted Feet
A month or so ago, I kept seeing a thread in the Ravelry Patterns forum entitled "French Press Felted Slippers" which I interpreted (without reading the thread) to mean that someone was using a French coffee press as a device for felting slippers. You'd think I would have read the thread, just to confirm such an oddity, but I did not.
A while later, the Yarn Harlot posted about discovering a pattern she was all over called French Press Felted Slippers, which it turns out are felted slippers designed by a woman who designs under the moniker French Press. They were supposedly a super-fast knit (90 minutes!), making them ideal for Christmas gift knitting.
It also turns out that the slippers were very cute, so I bought the pattern via Ravelry (as did hundreds of other people), and cast on with Patons Classic Wool in red. Either I was paying too much attention to the streaming video on my laptop, or I'm simply not a turbo-fast knitter, because the knitting took me about twice as long as the 90-minute claim. Of course, I was also practicing a new method of Continental purl, so that may have had something to do with it. (A new method I am now insanely happy about, but which I will save for another post. Or maybe an Ask a Knitter column. We'll see how it goes.)
At any rate, I knit the pieces, and then (as is often the case) had no fortitude to sew them together, so they sat for a week or two, little rolled up tubes of stockinette, on the floor of my office.
A few days before we left for Sedona, I decided I needed to finish up those slippers so I could wear them around the hotel room. I sewed, I felted, I let them air dry for a couple of days, and then I packed them in my suitcase, along with the decorative buttons, planning to sew the tabs on when we got to Arizona.
Here they are, felted, but unfinished.
When I pulled the slippers out of my suitcase, I realized I had forgotten to bring any yarn or thread with me with which to sew on the buttons. Lucky, lucky me, the hotel was fancy enough to have pre-threaded needles in a sewing kit, right there in the bathroom. There was just enough red to sew on the tabs at the wide end. I used the brown to sew on the buttons through both layers of fabric.
I wore them the entire time I was in the hotel room, then packed them in my carry on luggage for the flight home so that I could wear them, rather than my UGG boots, on the 3-hour flight.
I love these little slippers. My winter footwear consists mostly of UGG slippers and UGG boots. My UGG slippers are bulky and keep my feet warm, but I like to fold up my legs while I sit, which is somewhat problematic with slippers as sturdy as the UGGs.
These little babies are nice and soft and pliable, like wearing an extra-thick, but stylish, wool footie.
A while later, the Yarn Harlot posted about discovering a pattern she was all over called French Press Felted Slippers, which it turns out are felted slippers designed by a woman who designs under the moniker French Press. They were supposedly a super-fast knit (90 minutes!), making them ideal for Christmas gift knitting.
It also turns out that the slippers were very cute, so I bought the pattern via Ravelry (as did hundreds of other people), and cast on with Patons Classic Wool in red. Either I was paying too much attention to the streaming video on my laptop, or I'm simply not a turbo-fast knitter, because the knitting took me about twice as long as the 90-minute claim. Of course, I was also practicing a new method of Continental purl, so that may have had something to do with it. (A new method I am now insanely happy about, but which I will save for another post. Or maybe an Ask a Knitter column. We'll see how it goes.)
At any rate, I knit the pieces, and then (as is often the case) had no fortitude to sew them together, so they sat for a week or two, little rolled up tubes of stockinette, on the floor of my office.
A few days before we left for Sedona, I decided I needed to finish up those slippers so I could wear them around the hotel room. I sewed, I felted, I let them air dry for a couple of days, and then I packed them in my suitcase, along with the decorative buttons, planning to sew the tabs on when we got to Arizona.
Here they are, felted, but unfinished.
When I pulled the slippers out of my suitcase, I realized I had forgotten to bring any yarn or thread with me with which to sew on the buttons. Lucky, lucky me, the hotel was fancy enough to have pre-threaded needles in a sewing kit, right there in the bathroom. There was just enough red to sew on the tabs at the wide end. I used the brown to sew on the buttons through both layers of fabric.
I wore them the entire time I was in the hotel room, then packed them in my carry on luggage for the flight home so that I could wear them, rather than my UGG boots, on the 3-hour flight.
I love these little slippers. My winter footwear consists mostly of UGG slippers and UGG boots. My UGG slippers are bulky and keep my feet warm, but I like to fold up my legs while I sit, which is somewhat problematic with slippers as sturdy as the UGGs.
These little babies are nice and soft and pliable, like wearing an extra-thick, but stylish, wool footie.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Gray Silhouette
This year I'm all about sweaters, it seems, which hasn't been what I've been about, knitting-wise, for quite a while.
I first learned to knit while I was living in Dublin on a 3-month work visa in early 1986, when I was half the age I am now. I had three flatmates: Winnie (short for Winnifred) from County Roscommon, who was engaged to a boy back home, and two sisters from County Meath, Catherine and Anne, whose parents owned a shoe store. Winnie was training to be a cook, which with her accent sounded like "kook." Catherine was a nurse, and Anne worked as a secretary. I met them all when I called John, a guy I had met on a beach in Greece, on the island of Thira (aka Santorini). He and his brother were there making a video for their travel company in Dublin. I was there on holiday, taking a break from living and working in London. I had plans to get a visa to work in Dublin when my British work visa expired. They gave me their business card and told me to call when I got to Dublin. So I did. Anne was their secretary and they knew the fourth girl in her flat had just moved out, so they arranged for me to stay with her for a few days until I found a place to live. Before I had a chance to find a flat, the girls invited me to live with them for the duration of my work visa.
Our flat in Dublin comprised the entire first floor of a house. A couple of other young women lived upstairs, and our landlady, Franny, lived across the street. We had no central heat, just a coal fireplace in the sitting room. All the electricity was metered. One meter kept the lights and outlets running and the other was for the small water heater in the shower. When I say "small," I mean just a gallon or two of water. There were no long, leisurely showers. If you turned on the water just long enough to get wet, then soaped up and shampooed your hair, you'd have barely enough warm water to rinse off. If you had to shave your legs, you could either stand in the shower shivering for 10 minutes while the tank heated up again, or you could stand in the shower shivering while cold water rinsed off the soap from your legs.
We didn't actually use real coal for the fireplace. It was some sort of coal replacement, but it was delivered by a coal man in a horse drawn cart, just the same. There were several coal men who delivered on our street, and each one had a unique call he'd shout out that identified him, kind of like an ice cream truck, so you had to listen for him as he came down the street when you were low on coal.
In the evenings, we'd all sit together in the closed-off sitting room watching television and eating our respective dinners. Catherine and Anne usually cooked together, and it was Catherine's duty as the sister who made it home from work first to put potatoes in the oven to bake. The first thing Anne would ask was, "And did you put spuds in, Catherine?" Only she pronounced her sister's name "CAH-trin." Also, she complained about the way I pronounced her name, with my Midwestern nasal intonation. "My name's Anne, not 'AY-ann," she'd say. So we'd all be sitting there, eating, watching the telly, Catherine would light up a cigarette, Anne would bum one off her, and then the everything would go black. One of us, usually Catherine, would have a 50p coin ready and would run down the hall to the closet where the electric meter was. In went the coin, and back on came the lights.
I shared a bedroom with Catherine. I envied her electric blanket, because the bedrooms were cold (see: no central heat, above), but the girls dug up a spare hot water bottle for me, something I'd read about but had never seen, and I learned to put on the kettle a half hour before bedtime so I could slide into warm sheets at night.
My wages were heavily taxed while I was there, so I didn't have money to travel around the countryside on weekends. My flatmates would go to their parents' houses in County Meath and County Roscommon, leaving me alone in the cold, damp flat. I would spend Saturday and Sunday in the sitting room, tossing fake coal on the fire and watching television (there was no cable or satellite TV, and it was daytime weekend programming, so you can imagine how interesting that was). There was a large water tank behind the fireplace, and I learned that if I ran the fire all day long, by the end of the day I'd have tepid running water available from the taps rather than ice-cold water.
One Sunday evening, Catherine came back from County Meath with a knitting project. She was using a nubbly cotton yarn to make a V-neck pullover with dolman sleeves. Always a crafty person, I was immediately smitten with the idea of knitting in the evenings while we watched the telly and waited for the room to go dark. I worked not far from St. Stephen's Green and Trinity College, so a couple days later on my lunch hour, after picked up my check from Kelly Girl, I walked to a department store downtown which had a knitting department, picked out a pattern, needles and yarn, and took my supplies back to the flat.
I didn't know how to cast on, so my flatmates showed me how to do that, and then I tried to remember how to knit, which I had learned one afternoon in 5th grade and then never did again. They corrected the direction I was wrapping the yarn around the needle, but they hesitated to correct anything else, because they didn't want to traumatize me. Apparently, the nuns used to whack them on the knuckles if they held their yarn and needles wrong (knitting in school, can you believe it?). I spent the rest of the week hunched over my needles and yarn, practicing. Then it was the weekend again and they all left town, so I was left to my own devices to figure out how to purl. "It's just the opposite of knitting!" they called out as the door slammed behind them. I couldn't work it out, and I didn't have money to buy a knitting how-to book, so I spent several hours at a bookstore studying the pictures in knitting books until I could figure it out.
From that time on, I was a knitter. That first project was a sleeveless V-neck top, made with the same nubbly cotton yarn Catherine was using for her sweater, but I jazzed mine up with a red cotton yarn for the ribbing. (Big mistake. Turns out that red cotton yarn will bleed all over white cotton yarn once the combination hits a sink full of cold water. First sad knitting lesson learned.)
I knit nothing but sweaters for years. The pattern books I bought, including all those great Kaffe Fasset coffee table knitting books of the 1980's, were full of sweaters. I just never thought to knit anything else.
When I came back into knitting about five years ago, I had no thought of knitting sweaters. I knit things I'd never thought of knitting before: beaded shawls, afghans, socks, scarves, mittens, gloves, hats, even a few toys. I hadn't completely abandoned sweater knitting. About 4 years ago I started an Aran sweater, which took me a couple of winters to finish. I wear it all the time and it's probably one of my favorite items of clothing. Soon after that, I knit an entire cardigan in about a week and a half, then spent 2 years trying to sew a zipper into it before I gave up and sewed a clasp at the neck.
In December 2007 I started knitting a cardigan while we were at Disney World. I got about 75% of the way done before it went into hibernation.
In December 2008 I started knitting a cardigan shortly before winter break. I got about 70% done before I realized I was using the wrong needles. I ripped it out and re-knit it up to that point before it went into hibernation.
In October 2009 I started knitting a bulky knit pullover. I finished it a month or so later.
Then I pulled out the Dec. '08 cardigan and finished that one.
A couple of weeks ago, I pulled out the Dec. '07 cardigan and finished up the knitting on that one. I sewed the sleeves in today. There are a few ends to weave in, and buttons to find, but other than that it's finished. (More photos when it's finished finished.)
I have one more sweater in hibernation. You might guess that it's from December 2006, but you'd be wrong. It's from 1990, and I still like it.
I'm fairly certain all the knitting is finished on that one. Just need to sew a few more seams, weave in some ends, and find some buttons. It's a Louisa Harding design from Rowan 6. It's practically vintage and I've never even worn it.
In the meantime, I've started something new.
Yes, it's a sweater. A cardigan, actually.
It seems my love affair with sweaters is back.
And it's all because 24 years ago I met an Irish boy on a topless beach on the island of Santorini. Fancy that.
I first learned to knit while I was living in Dublin on a 3-month work visa in early 1986, when I was half the age I am now. I had three flatmates: Winnie (short for Winnifred) from County Roscommon, who was engaged to a boy back home, and two sisters from County Meath, Catherine and Anne, whose parents owned a shoe store. Winnie was training to be a cook, which with her accent sounded like "kook." Catherine was a nurse, and Anne worked as a secretary. I met them all when I called John, a guy I had met on a beach in Greece, on the island of Thira (aka Santorini). He and his brother were there making a video for their travel company in Dublin. I was there on holiday, taking a break from living and working in London. I had plans to get a visa to work in Dublin when my British work visa expired. They gave me their business card and told me to call when I got to Dublin. So I did. Anne was their secretary and they knew the fourth girl in her flat had just moved out, so they arranged for me to stay with her for a few days until I found a place to live. Before I had a chance to find a flat, the girls invited me to live with them for the duration of my work visa.
Our flat in Dublin comprised the entire first floor of a house. A couple of other young women lived upstairs, and our landlady, Franny, lived across the street. We had no central heat, just a coal fireplace in the sitting room. All the electricity was metered. One meter kept the lights and outlets running and the other was for the small water heater in the shower. When I say "small," I mean just a gallon or two of water. There were no long, leisurely showers. If you turned on the water just long enough to get wet, then soaped up and shampooed your hair, you'd have barely enough warm water to rinse off. If you had to shave your legs, you could either stand in the shower shivering for 10 minutes while the tank heated up again, or you could stand in the shower shivering while cold water rinsed off the soap from your legs.
We didn't actually use real coal for the fireplace. It was some sort of coal replacement, but it was delivered by a coal man in a horse drawn cart, just the same. There were several coal men who delivered on our street, and each one had a unique call he'd shout out that identified him, kind of like an ice cream truck, so you had to listen for him as he came down the street when you were low on coal.
In the evenings, we'd all sit together in the closed-off sitting room watching television and eating our respective dinners. Catherine and Anne usually cooked together, and it was Catherine's duty as the sister who made it home from work first to put potatoes in the oven to bake. The first thing Anne would ask was, "And did you put spuds in, Catherine?" Only she pronounced her sister's name "CAH-trin." Also, she complained about the way I pronounced her name, with my Midwestern nasal intonation. "My name's Anne, not 'AY-ann," she'd say. So we'd all be sitting there, eating, watching the telly, Catherine would light up a cigarette, Anne would bum one off her, and then the everything would go black. One of us, usually Catherine, would have a 50p coin ready and would run down the hall to the closet where the electric meter was. In went the coin, and back on came the lights.
I shared a bedroom with Catherine. I envied her electric blanket, because the bedrooms were cold (see: no central heat, above), but the girls dug up a spare hot water bottle for me, something I'd read about but had never seen, and I learned to put on the kettle a half hour before bedtime so I could slide into warm sheets at night.
My wages were heavily taxed while I was there, so I didn't have money to travel around the countryside on weekends. My flatmates would go to their parents' houses in County Meath and County Roscommon, leaving me alone in the cold, damp flat. I would spend Saturday and Sunday in the sitting room, tossing fake coal on the fire and watching television (there was no cable or satellite TV, and it was daytime weekend programming, so you can imagine how interesting that was). There was a large water tank behind the fireplace, and I learned that if I ran the fire all day long, by the end of the day I'd have tepid running water available from the taps rather than ice-cold water.
One Sunday evening, Catherine came back from County Meath with a knitting project. She was using a nubbly cotton yarn to make a V-neck pullover with dolman sleeves. Always a crafty person, I was immediately smitten with the idea of knitting in the evenings while we watched the telly and waited for the room to go dark. I worked not far from St. Stephen's Green and Trinity College, so a couple days later on my lunch hour, after picked up my check from Kelly Girl, I walked to a department store downtown which had a knitting department, picked out a pattern, needles and yarn, and took my supplies back to the flat.
I didn't know how to cast on, so my flatmates showed me how to do that, and then I tried to remember how to knit, which I had learned one afternoon in 5th grade and then never did again. They corrected the direction I was wrapping the yarn around the needle, but they hesitated to correct anything else, because they didn't want to traumatize me. Apparently, the nuns used to whack them on the knuckles if they held their yarn and needles wrong (knitting in school, can you believe it?). I spent the rest of the week hunched over my needles and yarn, practicing. Then it was the weekend again and they all left town, so I was left to my own devices to figure out how to purl. "It's just the opposite of knitting!" they called out as the door slammed behind them. I couldn't work it out, and I didn't have money to buy a knitting how-to book, so I spent several hours at a bookstore studying the pictures in knitting books until I could figure it out.
From that time on, I was a knitter. That first project was a sleeveless V-neck top, made with the same nubbly cotton yarn Catherine was using for her sweater, but I jazzed mine up with a red cotton yarn for the ribbing. (Big mistake. Turns out that red cotton yarn will bleed all over white cotton yarn once the combination hits a sink full of cold water. First sad knitting lesson learned.)
I knit nothing but sweaters for years. The pattern books I bought, including all those great Kaffe Fasset coffee table knitting books of the 1980's, were full of sweaters. I just never thought to knit anything else.
When I came back into knitting about five years ago, I had no thought of knitting sweaters. I knit things I'd never thought of knitting before: beaded shawls, afghans, socks, scarves, mittens, gloves, hats, even a few toys. I hadn't completely abandoned sweater knitting. About 4 years ago I started an Aran sweater, which took me a couple of winters to finish. I wear it all the time and it's probably one of my favorite items of clothing. Soon after that, I knit an entire cardigan in about a week and a half, then spent 2 years trying to sew a zipper into it before I gave up and sewed a clasp at the neck.
In December 2007 I started knitting a cardigan while we were at Disney World. I got about 75% of the way done before it went into hibernation.
In December 2008 I started knitting a cardigan shortly before winter break. I got about 70% done before I realized I was using the wrong needles. I ripped it out and re-knit it up to that point before it went into hibernation.
In October 2009 I started knitting a bulky knit pullover. I finished it a month or so later.
Then I pulled out the Dec. '08 cardigan and finished that one.
A couple of weeks ago, I pulled out the Dec. '07 cardigan and finished up the knitting on that one. I sewed the sleeves in today. There are a few ends to weave in, and buttons to find, but other than that it's finished. (More photos when it's finished finished.)
I have one more sweater in hibernation. You might guess that it's from December 2006, but you'd be wrong. It's from 1990, and I still like it.
I'm fairly certain all the knitting is finished on that one. Just need to sew a few more seams, weave in some ends, and find some buttons. It's a Louisa Harding design from Rowan 6. It's practically vintage and I've never even worn it.
In the meantime, I've started something new.
Yes, it's a sweater. A cardigan, actually.
It seems my love affair with sweaters is back.
And it's all because 24 years ago I met an Irish boy on a topless beach on the island of Santorini. Fancy that.
Thursday, January 07, 2010
New Year, New Socks
My kids don't wear socks unless they have to. We live in Minnesota, and when the temperature the past few weeks has been above zero, it hasn't been by much. This weather situation does not, for my kids, constitute a "have to" condition for wearing socks. (There was an argument the other morning about whether or not a coat was necessary. It was -9 F.)
So you can imagine my surprise when Sophia's knitting request this fall was a pair of socks. Not just any socks, mind you. Knee socks. Nothing fancy, just something she could wear around the house, but with the possibility of going out in public while wearing her UGGS so that only the top of the cuff was visible. I was game, because she asked for socks, and I love knitting socks, and she asked for them. She was not interested in self-striping stockinette socks, so I was bracing myself for the idea that I might have to knit plain socks with plain yarn.
Then she picked out the pattern. Lissajous, by Cookie A.
Not so simple, after all, and she insisted on the heel flap detail, even though she never planned to wear them in public except when they were stuffed inside a tall boot. The heel flap, is, you know, a flap, which means it's knit flat, back and forth. This is a twisted stitch pattern, with stitch crossings on every row: twisted knit crossing to the right over a purl, twisted knit crossing to the left over a purl, twisted knit crossing a twisted knit, twisted knit crossing a plain knit. All that variation keeps you on your toes when you can see the right side of the fabric. It's a completely different matter to work a row of that from the wrong side.
I measured her feet, her calves, her ankles. Interesting, I thought. She has the same foot and leg measurements as her mother, who it turned out was the person knitting the socks. Which meant that reassignment of sock ownership in the future could be possible if the socks were abandoned at some point.
After I finished the first sock, she said something I never expected: "This is really cool." And she went off to look for her Birkenstocks so that she could wear the socks to school as soon as I finished knitting the second one. Which took a while, as Lissajous is not for the faint of heart.
As soon as I finished weaving in the ends, I held up the socks to admire them, and what should I see, but this:
Sophia didn't want to hear about my mistakes, nor did she want me to point them out. "I can't see them," she said. "Don't show them to me. They don't matter."
In other news, we were in Sedona between Christmas and New Year's. Michael and I took a hike late one afternoon as the snow was falling. He had his fancy camera with him and I was wearing my reverse engineered bulky sweater that I didn't have a photo of yet. I whipped off my coat and insisted he take pictures of me.
I'm thinking I should have whipped off the snow pants, too. Not a great look. But the scenery -- wow.
So you can imagine my surprise when Sophia's knitting request this fall was a pair of socks. Not just any socks, mind you. Knee socks. Nothing fancy, just something she could wear around the house, but with the possibility of going out in public while wearing her UGGS so that only the top of the cuff was visible. I was game, because she asked for socks, and I love knitting socks, and she asked for them. She was not interested in self-striping stockinette socks, so I was bracing myself for the idea that I might have to knit plain socks with plain yarn.
Then she picked out the pattern. Lissajous, by Cookie A.
Not so simple, after all, and she insisted on the heel flap detail, even though she never planned to wear them in public except when they were stuffed inside a tall boot. The heel flap, is, you know, a flap, which means it's knit flat, back and forth. This is a twisted stitch pattern, with stitch crossings on every row: twisted knit crossing to the right over a purl, twisted knit crossing to the left over a purl, twisted knit crossing a twisted knit, twisted knit crossing a plain knit. All that variation keeps you on your toes when you can see the right side of the fabric. It's a completely different matter to work a row of that from the wrong side.
I measured her feet, her calves, her ankles. Interesting, I thought. She has the same foot and leg measurements as her mother, who it turned out was the person knitting the socks. Which meant that reassignment of sock ownership in the future could be possible if the socks were abandoned at some point.
After I finished the first sock, she said something I never expected: "This is really cool." And she went off to look for her Birkenstocks so that she could wear the socks to school as soon as I finished knitting the second one. Which took a while, as Lissajous is not for the faint of heart.
As soon as I finished weaving in the ends, I held up the socks to admire them, and what should I see, but this:
Sophia didn't want to hear about my mistakes, nor did she want me to point them out. "I can't see them," she said. "Don't show them to me. They don't matter."
In other news, we were in Sedona between Christmas and New Year's. Michael and I took a hike late one afternoon as the snow was falling. He had his fancy camera with him and I was wearing my reverse engineered bulky sweater that I didn't have a photo of yet. I whipped off my coat and insisted he take pictures of me.
I'm thinking I should have whipped off the snow pants, too. Not a great look. But the scenery -- wow.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Saturday, November 21, 2009
I don't think that word means what you think it means
I have a friend who once talked me into a project which involved sewing 100 pencil cases from cotton duck fabric. Each pencil case was going to need a 10" zipper, so I went online and found a zipper company that could make me as many zippers as I wanted in whatever color I wanted and with whatever kind of zipper pull I wanted. The only problem was that (at the time) they had a completely unsecure method of ordering through their website, which involved clicking on a link that brought up a blank email, into which I was supposed to type a) what I wanted and b) my credit card number.
Well, not being a complete idiot, I didn't do that, so I called the company instead and got a person whose first language was not English, which was okay, but it turned out that sometimes what you say to a person is not what they hear.
Our conversation went something like this:
"I would like to order one hundred 10-inch zippers."
"Okay," he said. "How many do you want?"
Puzzled, I said, "Uh, I want a hundred."
I then went on to tell him what color I wanted, and all the other zipper-related details, and then I gave him my credit card number.
A few days later a somewhat larger box than I expected arrived at my door. Since my friend wasn't due to come over for a few more days to work on the project, I didn't open the box right away, but when I did, I realized something had gone horribly wrong with my order. Inside the box was 100 zippers, in exactly the right color, each of which was 110" long. I ordered one hundred 10-inch zippers, but he thought I was ordering 110-inch zippers.
I mentioned the other day that there is a sweater I want to start. I've had the yarn for months now, having ordered it shortly after I bought the book the pattern is in.
One thing has puzzled me since I bought the book and the yarn. The yarn called for is a sport weight yarn. Now, I'm not a slave to using the yarn called for in a pattern, because I understand how to make substitutions, but the yarn and the pattern have confounded me since I first laid eyes on them, because both specify using the same needle size, but each indicate a very different gauge, not just from each other, but also different from the gauge I would expect to get with that needle size.
The yarn is a sport weight yarn, and the label says it works up at 6 sts/inch, which seems about right to me for a sport weight yarn. Here's the confusing part. The yarn label says to use a size 6 needle to achieve that gauge.
Now, I am a knitter who almost without fail achieves the gauge on the label using the suggested needle size. In this case, I think it would be impossible. I have no doubt I could get 6 sts/in with this yarn, but I think it would take a size 4 needle to do it. As I said, I am an on-gauge knitter. The theoretically average knitter yarn companies label their products for.
I once did an experiment where I knitted up swatches for three different yarn weights using three different needle sizes. I used a fingering weight yarn, a worsted weight, and a bulky. I used size 3 needles, size 7 and size 10 (maybe 10.5, I can't remember for sure).
Typical gauges would be as follows:
Fingering on size 3 needles would give me 7 sts/in
Worsted weight on size 7 needles would give me 5 sts/in
Bulky weight on the size 10 or 10.5 needles would give me 3.5 sts/in
What I wanted to see was what my gauges were for these yarns when I used different needles.
The fingering weight yarn worked up at 5 sts/in on size 7 needles, and 3.5 sts/in on size 10 needles. The 3.5 sts/in swatch was like cheesecloth, of course.
The worsted weight worked up at 3.5 sts/in on size 10 needles.
When I used smaller needles than the yarn typically called for, the sts could only get squished so far, but my experience has shown me that I *can* get DK gauge on DK needles with worsted yarn, which is only one yarn weight thicker than DK. I can get worsted weight gauge on worsted weight needles with Aran yarn.
So knowing that, and knowing that sport weight yarn is a thinner yarn than DK and worsted, I would expect to get about 5.25 sts/in on size 6 needles for any yarn worsted weight or thinner.
Now, looking at the *pattern*, I see that it calls for using this yarn with size 6 needles, but it indicates a gauge of 5 sts/in. Again, not the needle size I (the theoretical average knitter) would typically use to get 5 sts/in, and certainly not the *gauge* I would want for a sport weight yarn if I didn't want the sweater to lose its shape.
I wrote to the yarn company, suggesting that there may be an error on their label, perhaps they meant to put Size 4 needle, not 4.0mm (which is what a size 6 needle is), helpfully explaining that I am typically an on-gauge knitter, and that 6 sts/in on size 6 needles seems unlikely. Their response was as follows:
In the meantime, I swatched on size 6 needles, and washed the swatch. It did seem to grow while it was wet, but once dry, returned to its pre-bath size. 22 sts and 30 rows/4". I swatched on size 7 needles and got 5 sts/in, but the fabric just seems too flimsy to me. I'll have to modify the pattern based on the gauge I got which means I'll need more yarn than the pattern calls for. Luckily, I ordered more yarn than the pattern requires for my size, because by ordering more, I got a discount, making it cheaper to get 9 or 10 balls than it was to get 8. Crazy.
In other sweater news, I am chugging along on my Diagonal Rib sweater.
I'm about half way through the second sleeve, so I hope to finish up this weekend. I'm starting to get paranoid about how this thing is going to fit and I'm still not sure how I like the front neckline. I think the cable stitches (what's left of them) should perhaps extend up the side of the neck, but I also think that would make the neck too narrow.
We'll see how it goes. Easy enough to rip out the neck and redo it, if necessary.
The whole process for this sweater has been much too easy. Maybe because I'm not trying to follow someone else's pattern and dealing with conflicting gauge information from two sources. There's a lesson in there somewhere, I'm sure of it.
Finally -- I am at the brink of 36,000 words on my NaNo novel. I'm so happy to be doing this with so many of my online writing buddies. It's been an exhilarating month of don't look down writing. If it weren't for the Write or Die software, I'd have too much time to think while I was writing, and I'd stop in my tracks.
Sadly, I must mourn the loss of my "M" key. It was acting up for a couple of days, and then yesterday, it flew off the keyboard.
Broken bit
I replaced it with a key I never use
It's no wonder it flew off. Apparently, my fingernails are hard on the keys.
They are scarred for life.
Well, not being a complete idiot, I didn't do that, so I called the company instead and got a person whose first language was not English, which was okay, but it turned out that sometimes what you say to a person is not what they hear.
Our conversation went something like this:
"I would like to order one hundred 10-inch zippers."
"Okay," he said. "How many do you want?"
Puzzled, I said, "Uh, I want a hundred."
I then went on to tell him what color I wanted, and all the other zipper-related details, and then I gave him my credit card number.
A few days later a somewhat larger box than I expected arrived at my door. Since my friend wasn't due to come over for a few more days to work on the project, I didn't open the box right away, but when I did, I realized something had gone horribly wrong with my order. Inside the box was 100 zippers, in exactly the right color, each of which was 110" long. I ordered one hundred 10-inch zippers, but he thought I was ordering 110-inch zippers.
I mentioned the other day that there is a sweater I want to start. I've had the yarn for months now, having ordered it shortly after I bought the book the pattern is in.
One thing has puzzled me since I bought the book and the yarn. The yarn called for is a sport weight yarn. Now, I'm not a slave to using the yarn called for in a pattern, because I understand how to make substitutions, but the yarn and the pattern have confounded me since I first laid eyes on them, because both specify using the same needle size, but each indicate a very different gauge, not just from each other, but also different from the gauge I would expect to get with that needle size.
The yarn is a sport weight yarn, and the label says it works up at 6 sts/inch, which seems about right to me for a sport weight yarn. Here's the confusing part. The yarn label says to use a size 6 needle to achieve that gauge.
Now, I am a knitter who almost without fail achieves the gauge on the label using the suggested needle size. In this case, I think it would be impossible. I have no doubt I could get 6 sts/in with this yarn, but I think it would take a size 4 needle to do it. As I said, I am an on-gauge knitter. The theoretically average knitter yarn companies label their products for.
I once did an experiment where I knitted up swatches for three different yarn weights using three different needle sizes. I used a fingering weight yarn, a worsted weight, and a bulky. I used size 3 needles, size 7 and size 10 (maybe 10.5, I can't remember for sure).
Typical gauges would be as follows:
Fingering on size 3 needles would give me 7 sts/in
Worsted weight on size 7 needles would give me 5 sts/in
Bulky weight on the size 10 or 10.5 needles would give me 3.5 sts/in
What I wanted to see was what my gauges were for these yarns when I used different needles.
The fingering weight yarn worked up at 5 sts/in on size 7 needles, and 3.5 sts/in on size 10 needles. The 3.5 sts/in swatch was like cheesecloth, of course.
The worsted weight worked up at 3.5 sts/in on size 10 needles.
When I used smaller needles than the yarn typically called for, the sts could only get squished so far, but my experience has shown me that I *can* get DK gauge on DK needles with worsted yarn, which is only one yarn weight thicker than DK. I can get worsted weight gauge on worsted weight needles with Aran yarn.
So knowing that, and knowing that sport weight yarn is a thinner yarn than DK and worsted, I would expect to get about 5.25 sts/in on size 6 needles for any yarn worsted weight or thinner.
Now, looking at the *pattern*, I see that it calls for using this yarn with size 6 needles, but it indicates a gauge of 5 sts/in. Again, not the needle size I (the theoretical average knitter) would typically use to get 5 sts/in, and certainly not the *gauge* I would want for a sport weight yarn if I didn't want the sweater to lose its shape.
I wrote to the yarn company, suggesting that there may be an error on their label, perhaps they meant to put Size 4 needle, not 4.0mm (which is what a size 6 needle is), helpfully explaining that I am typically an on-gauge knitter, and that 6 sts/in on size 6 needles seems unlikely. Their response was as follows:
Suggested needle size is just that, a suggestion. It's a starting point. It was decided that a size 6 needle would give the desired gauge for the average knitter. I know that I would start swatching on a 4, because I'm rather loose knitter. ButCan you hear me bashing my head against my keyboard?
as you know, everyone is different.
In the meantime, I swatched on size 6 needles, and washed the swatch. It did seem to grow while it was wet, but once dry, returned to its pre-bath size. 22 sts and 30 rows/4". I swatched on size 7 needles and got 5 sts/in, but the fabric just seems too flimsy to me. I'll have to modify the pattern based on the gauge I got which means I'll need more yarn than the pattern calls for. Luckily, I ordered more yarn than the pattern requires for my size, because by ordering more, I got a discount, making it cheaper to get 9 or 10 balls than it was to get 8. Crazy.
In other sweater news, I am chugging along on my Diagonal Rib sweater.
I'm about half way through the second sleeve, so I hope to finish up this weekend. I'm starting to get paranoid about how this thing is going to fit and I'm still not sure how I like the front neckline. I think the cable stitches (what's left of them) should perhaps extend up the side of the neck, but I also think that would make the neck too narrow.
We'll see how it goes. Easy enough to rip out the neck and redo it, if necessary.
The whole process for this sweater has been much too easy. Maybe because I'm not trying to follow someone else's pattern and dealing with conflicting gauge information from two sources. There's a lesson in there somewhere, I'm sure of it.
Finally -- I am at the brink of 36,000 words on my NaNo novel. I'm so happy to be doing this with so many of my online writing buddies. It's been an exhilarating month of don't look down writing. If it weren't for the Write or Die software, I'd have too much time to think while I was writing, and I'd stop in my tracks.
Sadly, I must mourn the loss of my "M" key. It was acting up for a couple of days, and then yesterday, it flew off the keyboard.
Broken bit
I replaced it with a key I never use
It's no wonder it flew off. Apparently, my fingernails are hard on the keys.
They are scarred for life.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
At Last
I am happy to report that due to the genius that is Write or Die, I am still alive, and I'm nearing way past 25,000 words on my NaNoWriMo novel, which is good news for so many reasons.
Other good news:
My Manon is complete.
This is the cardigan I knit 70% of twice last winter before putting it into a time out due to my being completely sick of it.
Here it is from the back.
I took it out this summer and knit the sleeves, and one evening while I was at the yarn shop, Brian, knitter extraordinaire made a comment about how certain yarns, like the one I made the Manon from, have a tendency to grow when washed.
This type of yarn, where where are lots of plies that twist many times in a short period. I've heard that referred to as a tight twist, but the yarn itself isn't especially tight. I mean, it isn't firm. I wish I knew more about these things, but that would no doubt lead to learning to spin and I am actively avoiding learning to spin. I don't have room in my knitting room for a roving stash, and my backyard is too small to keep sheep (because you know that would happen eventually).
The cardi went into a time out again while I contemplated my future grief regarding the growth of my knitting.
After a search of Ravelry this weekend, I noticed that in the comments on the yarn I used (Sublime Cashmere Merino Silk Aran), one Raveler specifically mentioned that this yarn had more drape after washing, but that it did not grow. That gave me hope. I sewed in the sleeves.
I still haven't washed it. It could use a wash and block, to calm the cables at the sides, but I still have a niggling fear at the back of my mind. This yarn is wonderfully soft, shows cables really well, and the sweater fits me.
Oh, Manon, don't let me down.
Now that I've finished the Manon, I have permission to start another sweater, one for which I already have the yarn. Except I remembered that I already started a new sweater last month, without permission, so I think I should finish that one, too.
It's my Reverse Engineered Diagonal Rib pullover, only guess what? I apparently didn't write down much of anything when I knit the back, at least not on paper. A search of my hard drive revealed a chart for the diagonal ribs, and eventually I finally discovered some fairly cryptic instructions in my project notes on Ravelry. It was enough to get me started, at any rate. It's bulky yarn, and an easy stitch pattern to memorize, so I'm clipping along. I finished the front, and I'm about 1/2 way done with the first sleeve. I may rip out the neck and re-do it. I'm not sure I like the way the cables end abruptly.
The question now is: do I have to finish up one of the other two nearly-complete cardigans in my closet (one is from 1990) before I get to start the new sweater? Will knitting two more Quincy hats be enough of something new to work on to keep me from starting a whole new sweater, or will the fact that I've already knit three Quincy hats make me feel like it's the same old, same old? I also have Sophia's second Lissajous to do, but that's just repeating something else.
I wanna start something new.
Other good news:
My Manon is complete.
This is the cardigan I knit 70% of twice last winter before putting it into a time out due to my being completely sick of it.
Here it is from the back.
I took it out this summer and knit the sleeves, and one evening while I was at the yarn shop, Brian, knitter extraordinaire made a comment about how certain yarns, like the one I made the Manon from, have a tendency to grow when washed.
This type of yarn, where where are lots of plies that twist many times in a short period. I've heard that referred to as a tight twist, but the yarn itself isn't especially tight. I mean, it isn't firm. I wish I knew more about these things, but that would no doubt lead to learning to spin and I am actively avoiding learning to spin. I don't have room in my knitting room for a roving stash, and my backyard is too small to keep sheep (because you know that would happen eventually).
The cardi went into a time out again while I contemplated my future grief regarding the growth of my knitting.
After a search of Ravelry this weekend, I noticed that in the comments on the yarn I used (Sublime Cashmere Merino Silk Aran), one Raveler specifically mentioned that this yarn had more drape after washing, but that it did not grow. That gave me hope. I sewed in the sleeves.
I still haven't washed it. It could use a wash and block, to calm the cables at the sides, but I still have a niggling fear at the back of my mind. This yarn is wonderfully soft, shows cables really well, and the sweater fits me.
Oh, Manon, don't let me down.
Now that I've finished the Manon, I have permission to start another sweater, one for which I already have the yarn. Except I remembered that I already started a new sweater last month, without permission, so I think I should finish that one, too.
It's my Reverse Engineered Diagonal Rib pullover, only guess what? I apparently didn't write down much of anything when I knit the back, at least not on paper. A search of my hard drive revealed a chart for the diagonal ribs, and eventually I finally discovered some fairly cryptic instructions in my project notes on Ravelry. It was enough to get me started, at any rate. It's bulky yarn, and an easy stitch pattern to memorize, so I'm clipping along. I finished the front, and I'm about 1/2 way done with the first sleeve. I may rip out the neck and re-do it. I'm not sure I like the way the cables end abruptly.
The question now is: do I have to finish up one of the other two nearly-complete cardigans in my closet (one is from 1990) before I get to start the new sweater? Will knitting two more Quincy hats be enough of something new to work on to keep me from starting a whole new sweater, or will the fact that I've already knit three Quincy hats make me feel like it's the same old, same old? I also have Sophia's second Lissajous to do, but that's just repeating something else.
I wanna start something new.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
A Quincy on the Head Can be Quite Continental
I loves me the Quincy hat.
So stylish. So asymmetrical. So cool.
This is the first one I made (some time last month, I believe) and it's for me. Yarn is Classic Elite Ariosa, soft as a cloud and I love the color. (It's the same color I used for Nina's Urban Outfitters knock off cabled hat.) I managed to cross it the opposite way intended, but I love it just the same.
The last time I got together with some of my local writer friends, I showed them my Quincy. I can tell when people really do like something I've knit because they instantly ask me to knit them one, too. These are women who I would lie across railroad tracks for, among the few who receive gift knitting from me, usually just at the holidays, but sometimes other times, too. I always cook for them when we get together (everyone brings something, but I cook the entree), it reminds me that I used to love to cook before I had kids who complained about the food on their dinner plates. My friends appreciate that I cook for them, they think whatever I make is delicious, and I don't have to clean up. You can understand why I would lie across the railroad tracks for them.
So this Quincy is for one of those friends.
It's my third. (The second was for a toddler in a DK weight, stitch count adjusted for the size needed) There aren't many patterns I return to over and over. Usually, making something once is enough, but this is one of those rare patterns I will want to do over and over.
The pattern calls for a bulky weight yarn, so I'm using Malibrigo Merino Worsted doubled to achieve gauge of 3.5 sts/in on size 10.5 needles. It ends up exactly the same size, but a bit more dense than the one in Ariosa. I love this color, it's a beautiful cobalt blue that Malibrigo calls "Buscando Azul," which translates to "looking blue" (I like "Buscando Azul" better, don't you?). Two of them requested deep blue hats, so I bought three hanks. I used just over one for the garter strip, so I figure by the time I'm finished with the two hats, I'll have 3/4 of a hank leftover to do something else with. Perhaps a pair of Fetchings.
I took a break from NaNo-ing yesterday afternoon to rake 5 more bags of leaves, bringing the total bag count to approximately 1,873,491 (give or take a million). I followed that up with the Quincy graft, delighting myself by getting it right the first time, no swearing involved. Go me! The first hat took me so long to graft the garter stitch correctly that I couldn't remember what I finally did to get it right. The second one I ended up grafting so that I have a row of stockinette on the inside of the hat, but because it's reverse stockinette (purls) on the outside, it hides well. I finally figured out that you have to work an odd number of rows for the graft to work (the pattern tells you to knit an even number of rows).
I'm working very hard not to do any knitting until my word count goal is reached. I don't think grafting counts.
Yesterday's word count was just under 2000. Not bad. Today I've already done 1000, in just a 30 minute block, thanks to the Write or Die website. Exactly the sort of psychology that works on me. I may just be able to catch up to my overall goal with the help of Dr. Wicked and his dastardly tools. Mwahahahaha.
So stylish. So asymmetrical. So cool.
This is the first one I made (some time last month, I believe) and it's for me. Yarn is Classic Elite Ariosa, soft as a cloud and I love the color. (It's the same color I used for Nina's Urban Outfitters knock off cabled hat.) I managed to cross it the opposite way intended, but I love it just the same.
The last time I got together with some of my local writer friends, I showed them my Quincy. I can tell when people really do like something I've knit because they instantly ask me to knit them one, too. These are women who I would lie across railroad tracks for, among the few who receive gift knitting from me, usually just at the holidays, but sometimes other times, too. I always cook for them when we get together (everyone brings something, but I cook the entree), it reminds me that I used to love to cook before I had kids who complained about the food on their dinner plates. My friends appreciate that I cook for them, they think whatever I make is delicious, and I don't have to clean up. You can understand why I would lie across the railroad tracks for them.
So this Quincy is for one of those friends.
It's my third. (The second was for a toddler in a DK weight, stitch count adjusted for the size needed) There aren't many patterns I return to over and over. Usually, making something once is enough, but this is one of those rare patterns I will want to do over and over.
The pattern calls for a bulky weight yarn, so I'm using Malibrigo Merino Worsted doubled to achieve gauge of 3.5 sts/in on size 10.5 needles. It ends up exactly the same size, but a bit more dense than the one in Ariosa. I love this color, it's a beautiful cobalt blue that Malibrigo calls "Buscando Azul," which translates to "looking blue" (I like "Buscando Azul" better, don't you?). Two of them requested deep blue hats, so I bought three hanks. I used just over one for the garter strip, so I figure by the time I'm finished with the two hats, I'll have 3/4 of a hank leftover to do something else with. Perhaps a pair of Fetchings.
I took a break from NaNo-ing yesterday afternoon to rake 5 more bags of leaves, bringing the total bag count to approximately 1,873,491 (give or take a million). I followed that up with the Quincy graft, delighting myself by getting it right the first time, no swearing involved. Go me! The first hat took me so long to graft the garter stitch correctly that I couldn't remember what I finally did to get it right. The second one I ended up grafting so that I have a row of stockinette on the inside of the hat, but because it's reverse stockinette (purls) on the outside, it hides well. I finally figured out that you have to work an odd number of rows for the graft to work (the pattern tells you to knit an even number of rows).
I'm working very hard not to do any knitting until my word count goal is reached. I don't think grafting counts.
Yesterday's word count was just under 2000. Not bad. Today I've already done 1000, in just a 30 minute block, thanks to the Write or Die website. Exactly the sort of psychology that works on me. I may just be able to catch up to my overall goal with the help of Dr. Wicked and his dastardly tools. Mwahahahaha.
Monday, November 09, 2009
Forget the apple, hand me some candy
The weekend got away from me. It was fall yard cleanup weekend at Chez Rox, so no writing on Saturday and Sunday. This here's a post about Friday's results.
Here are the completed Bella mittens, a holiday gift for a Twilight-loving friend of mine. I had Nina pose with my snack of choice, which is not an apple. (Although, really, this is not my snack of choice. My snack of choice is chocolate, but I did not want to reveal to my kids where I had it hidden.)
These mittens will keep my friend Chris far warmer than Edward Cullen ever could.
Also accomplished: I exceeded Friday's1667 word goal. Actual word count: 1809.
The housework goals are never fully realized, even when I'm not doing NaNo, but I did manage to terrorize the dog with the giant sucking wand and horrifying wetness spreader. Laundry is still piled up in the laundry room. Oh, well.
I have found a better procrastination activity than housework, one which involves writing (although, sadly, does not count toward my NaNo word goal). I went through my Ask a Knitter column list of questions, and wrote a bunch of them on green post its (a glance across the room tells me there there are 11 green post its on the wall at the moment). So when I take a break from the novel, I work on answering one of those questions and try to figure out how much knitting and picture taking the answer is going to involve. What's sad is there are a ton of other questions in my Ravelry inbox, that haven't even made it to the post it stage yet. I fear that by the time I answer some of them, the knitters who asked the questions will have moved on to crochet or quilting out of disgust.
I just looked at how many words I wrote while procrastinating. More than I wrote for NaNo. It's a lot easier to write stuff that you know is true than it is to make up stuff you know isn't true.
Thursday I couldn't find my camera battery charger, which I felt sure must have been buried on the end table next to my chair, amongst the various PDFs of knitting patterns, mysterious notes I have written to myself that say things like "p2, X, p2, dec \" with an arrow pointing to a line drawing a 5-year-old could be proud of and many, many miniature candy wrappers. I wish I could say I sorted through all the papers and filed them appropriately, but really what I did was move them all to the card table I set up across the room as a sort of photo studio. (The card table has not improved my photos, but it has improved my ability to stack more papers.) What I found under the end table made my heart swell:
Little Bo Peep has found her sheep. My Lantern Moon Black Sheep measuring tape, that is. I thought I had left it on the plane in Milwaukee.
Meanwhile, the battery charger was located in my laptop case.
Today's writing goal: 2500 words (to help make up for none this weekend). Also, one question from my Ask a Knitter pile.
Today's knitting goal: I am this close to having my Manon cardigan complete. I sewed up the seams and put in the set-in sleeves this weekend. I need to do the decorative stitching to hide the jog in the ribs at the seams, and then wash it. I'm teaching tomorrow night and I would love to wear it to class. I also made the garter stitch strip for my third Quincy hat, and will try to at least do the graft some time today.
Also, there are still many leaves on the front lawn, even though we raked and bagged 35 30-gallon bags full of leaves, so that will be today's active procrastination activity. I have to do something to get myself off my butt. It's going numb.
Here are the completed Bella mittens, a holiday gift for a Twilight-loving friend of mine. I had Nina pose with my snack of choice, which is not an apple. (Although, really, this is not my snack of choice. My snack of choice is chocolate, but I did not want to reveal to my kids where I had it hidden.)
These mittens will keep my friend Chris far warmer than Edward Cullen ever could.
Also accomplished: I exceeded Friday's1667 word goal. Actual word count: 1809.
The housework goals are never fully realized, even when I'm not doing NaNo, but I did manage to terrorize the dog with the giant sucking wand and horrifying wetness spreader. Laundry is still piled up in the laundry room. Oh, well.
I have found a better procrastination activity than housework, one which involves writing (although, sadly, does not count toward my NaNo word goal). I went through my Ask a Knitter column list of questions, and wrote a bunch of them on green post its (a glance across the room tells me there there are 11 green post its on the wall at the moment). So when I take a break from the novel, I work on answering one of those questions and try to figure out how much knitting and picture taking the answer is going to involve. What's sad is there are a ton of other questions in my Ravelry inbox, that haven't even made it to the post it stage yet. I fear that by the time I answer some of them, the knitters who asked the questions will have moved on to crochet or quilting out of disgust.
I just looked at how many words I wrote while procrastinating. More than I wrote for NaNo. It's a lot easier to write stuff that you know is true than it is to make up stuff you know isn't true.
Thursday I couldn't find my camera battery charger, which I felt sure must have been buried on the end table next to my chair, amongst the various PDFs of knitting patterns, mysterious notes I have written to myself that say things like "p2, X, p2, dec \" with an arrow pointing to a line drawing a 5-year-old could be proud of and many, many miniature candy wrappers. I wish I could say I sorted through all the papers and filed them appropriately, but really what I did was move them all to the card table I set up across the room as a sort of photo studio. (The card table has not improved my photos, but it has improved my ability to stack more papers.) What I found under the end table made my heart swell:
Little Bo Peep has found her sheep. My Lantern Moon Black Sheep measuring tape, that is. I thought I had left it on the plane in Milwaukee.
Meanwhile, the battery charger was located in my laptop case.
Today's writing goal: 2500 words (to help make up for none this weekend). Also, one question from my Ask a Knitter pile.
Today's knitting goal: I am this close to having my Manon cardigan complete. I sewed up the seams and put in the set-in sleeves this weekend. I need to do the decorative stitching to hide the jog in the ribs at the seams, and then wash it. I'm teaching tomorrow night and I would love to wear it to class. I also made the garter stitch strip for my third Quincy hat, and will try to at least do the graft some time today.
Also, there are still many leaves on the front lawn, even though we raked and bagged 35 30-gallon bags full of leaves, so that will be today's active procrastination activity. I have to do something to get myself off my butt. It's going numb.
Friday, November 06, 2009
Writing: 1, Knitting 0
I'm back on track with the NaNo writing, having exceeded my daily goal of 1667 words yesterday. (I'm still behind on my total word goal, but I can't let myself get worked up about it.)
As for the knitting, I was at an afterschool event for 7th and 8th graders and their families. There was a lot of sitting and listening, so perfect time to knit, right? I was at the point where I needed to move the thumb gusset stitches to waste yarn, but I had forgotten to bring any along. I improvised from the contents of my sparsely supplied notions bag and used a bunch of those those interlocking stitch markers, about 3 sts for each one, and praised myself for my resourcefulness. I was practically like MacGyver. I worked all the way up the hand of the mitten until I started the decreases and right off the bat I saw I was short by two stitches.
I put too many stitches on those itty bitty markers. This is what is so great about NaNoWriMo. I don't ever delete any words. They can be crappy, but they stay. Not so much with the gift knitting.
Yesterday's To Do list looks like this now:
Oddly, I did not manage to get my procrastination activities done. I blame it on a college friend, Karen, who found me on FaceBook and immediately added me to an email list of other women we shared a house with in Ann Arbor for a couple of years. It took me a while to read through what they're all doing -- lawyering in Florida and Colorado, living on a horse ranch in Australia, running a consulting firm in South Africa. You can understand why I had to skip the vacuuming, right? Reading about all that accomplishment made me too tired to push a sucking wand around the kitchen floor.
Here is today's to-do list, written with Sharpie so that humans can read it without the aid of forensic computational devices.
That looks doable, right? The only one I'm worried about is the one on the lower right.
As for the knitting, I was at an afterschool event for 7th and 8th graders and their families. There was a lot of sitting and listening, so perfect time to knit, right? I was at the point where I needed to move the thumb gusset stitches to waste yarn, but I had forgotten to bring any along. I improvised from the contents of my sparsely supplied notions bag and used a bunch of those those interlocking stitch markers, about 3 sts for each one, and praised myself for my resourcefulness. I was practically like MacGyver. I worked all the way up the hand of the mitten until I started the decreases and right off the bat I saw I was short by two stitches.
I put too many stitches on those itty bitty markers. This is what is so great about NaNoWriMo. I don't ever delete any words. They can be crappy, but they stay. Not so much with the gift knitting.
Yesterday's To Do list looks like this now:
Oddly, I did not manage to get my procrastination activities done. I blame it on a college friend, Karen, who found me on FaceBook and immediately added me to an email list of other women we shared a house with in Ann Arbor for a couple of years. It took me a while to read through what they're all doing -- lawyering in Florida and Colorado, living on a horse ranch in Australia, running a consulting firm in South Africa. You can understand why I had to skip the vacuuming, right? Reading about all that accomplishment made me too tired to push a sucking wand around the kitchen floor.
Here is today's to-do list, written with Sharpie so that humans can read it without the aid of forensic computational devices.
That looks doable, right? The only one I'm worried about is the one on the lower right.
Thursday, November 05, 2009
If it's Thursday, I must be writing
Oh, NaNoWriMo, how you taunt me with your promise of "just writing through" the story. You make these promises that you expect me to keep while I'm wandering around in the dark with a broken pencil, no paper, and no freaking idea of what it is I'm writing through.
By the end of Tuesday, I was at 4000+ words. I can't remember exactly how many, it's not important. What's important is to know that I failed to make my Tuesday goal (I hit 675 instead of 1667), because what is writing about if not an opportunity to criticize yourself for not writing enough, for writing crap when you do write, and for finding other things to do to fill your time that do not involve writing. Things like eating leftover Halloween candy.
So yesterday I was frustrated, but I had knitting group in the morning, which always makes me feel better, even if I get an appallingly small amount of actual knitting done. There was pumpkin cheesecake and Earl Grey tea, and good conversation, and then I went home to write. Ha!
I haven't been at the start of a brand new story in a long time, so I forgot what my process was, or if I ever knew, it's changed since then. I hadn't really done any pre-NaNo "pre-writing" activities, like coming up with a plot (I'm afraid no amount of pre-writing will ever help me come up with a plot, mostly because no amount of actual writing seems to do the job, either) or figuring out who my characters are and what they want that's tangible. I'm very good at coming up with their emotional baggage and what they want internally. Not so good at finding the tangible representation of that emotional goal. Which would be the plot.
Turns out I actually have to have my characters interact with each other before I can figure out what they want and why they want it. Who knew?
So yesterday while I wasn't writing I came up with a list of 10 scenes that I need to write for the story setup (the first Act). I know who the scenes' protag/antags are for each one, and where they take place. And an idea of what I think the point of the scene is. Note: I do not know the actual point of those scenes. I only think I do. The actual writing will lead me to the point. Eventually. Long after NaNo is over, most likely, because it's through the rewriting and polishing that I discover the real point. Damn subconscious. Some day I'm going to invent a writing efficiency machine that will allow me to know my point before I start. I'll make millions.
Now that I have my list of 10 scenes, I have a little flashlight in the dark which I used to find the pencil sharpener and some paper, so today I will write.
I found my camera, by the way. So here are the Bella mittens (or the first one, anyway) that I started on Monday.
I'm about half way through the second one.
Here is today's to-do list, on the wall of my office:
Here's a little surprise I found in my Ravelry projects page:
Someone favorited my husband. Or maybe it's the hat they favorited. Better be, because even though he says he looks like someone on the 10 Most Wanted List in that hat, he's still my favorite.
In other news, this morning while I was drinking coffee and not writing, I figured out an insanely brilliant way to pick up stitches in a situation that is not common, but not rare, either, and way better than the existing known options. I love it when my brain comes through on esoteric knitting techniques. Some time this week I will write this up. Come to think of it, this would be a way better procrastination activity than mopping floors. I don't know what I was thinking.
By the end of Tuesday, I was at 4000+ words. I can't remember exactly how many, it's not important. What's important is to know that I failed to make my Tuesday goal (I hit 675 instead of 1667), because what is writing about if not an opportunity to criticize yourself for not writing enough, for writing crap when you do write, and for finding other things to do to fill your time that do not involve writing. Things like eating leftover Halloween candy.
So yesterday I was frustrated, but I had knitting group in the morning, which always makes me feel better, even if I get an appallingly small amount of actual knitting done. There was pumpkin cheesecake and Earl Grey tea, and good conversation, and then I went home to write. Ha!
I haven't been at the start of a brand new story in a long time, so I forgot what my process was, or if I ever knew, it's changed since then. I hadn't really done any pre-NaNo "pre-writing" activities, like coming up with a plot (I'm afraid no amount of pre-writing will ever help me come up with a plot, mostly because no amount of actual writing seems to do the job, either) or figuring out who my characters are and what they want that's tangible. I'm very good at coming up with their emotional baggage and what they want internally. Not so good at finding the tangible representation of that emotional goal. Which would be the plot.
Turns out I actually have to have my characters interact with each other before I can figure out what they want and why they want it. Who knew?
So yesterday while I wasn't writing I came up with a list of 10 scenes that I need to write for the story setup (the first Act). I know who the scenes' protag/antags are for each one, and where they take place. And an idea of what I think the point of the scene is. Note: I do not know the actual point of those scenes. I only think I do. The actual writing will lead me to the point. Eventually. Long after NaNo is over, most likely, because it's through the rewriting and polishing that I discover the real point. Damn subconscious. Some day I'm going to invent a writing efficiency machine that will allow me to know my point before I start. I'll make millions.
Now that I have my list of 10 scenes, I have a little flashlight in the dark which I used to find the pencil sharpener and some paper, so today I will write.
I found my camera, by the way. So here are the Bella mittens (or the first one, anyway) that I started on Monday.
I'm about half way through the second one.
Here is today's to-do list, on the wall of my office:
Here's a little surprise I found in my Ravelry projects page:
Someone favorited my husband. Or maybe it's the hat they favorited. Better be, because even though he says he looks like someone on the 10 Most Wanted List in that hat, he's still my favorite.
In other news, this morning while I was drinking coffee and not writing, I figured out an insanely brilliant way to pick up stitches in a situation that is not common, but not rare, either, and way better than the existing known options. I love it when my brain comes through on esoteric knitting techniques. Some time this week I will write this up. Come to think of it, this would be a way better procrastination activity than mopping floors. I don't know what I was thinking.
Monday, November 02, 2009
Is it Monday already?
NaNoWriMo word count
Day 1: 2022
Day 2: 1456
Knitting score: one Bella mitten. If I could find my camera, I'd post a photo.
Also looking for conflict in my story.
Day 1: 2022
Day 2: 1456
Knitting score: one Bella mitten. If I could find my camera, I'd post a photo.
Also looking for conflict in my story.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
BloKniWriMo
Here's a little number I knocked off this weekend.
It's a knock off of an Urban Outfitters hat Nina wanted. I reversed the cable crossings.
I'm calling it the Knock it Off Cabled Hat.
Yarn: 2 50g balls of Classic Elite Ariosa, 90% extra fine merino, 10% cashmere. A delightful, 1 ply yarn that is consistent in thickness. This color is Azalea.
Needles: Size 9 for the ribbing, size 10.5 for the body of the hat.
Gauge: 3.5sts/in in stockinette.
The photos are a little dark because I took them with no flash last night.
It was a nice mental challenge, because of the way the cables moved diagonally, so I had to figure out how to deal with the beginning of the round so as to avoid a jog. (Thank you, Cookie A for your Sock Innovations book that has a nice chapter on working with patterns like this.) Then I had to figure out how to deal with the decreases so they worked out nicely, maintaining the pattern as long as possible.
Nina seems to like it. Sophia seems to like it more. She's been wearing it all morning. I'm guessing she's getting away with that because Nina is still in bed.
In other news, it's NaNoWriMo time (National Novel Writing Month), and I'm participating this year, plunging myself back into the world of fiction writing with a new book that I don't know much about yet. 30 days and (I hope) 50K words from now, I'll know a lot more.
I've got some friends I'm doing this with, and we'll be cheering each other on, which is good, because I'm terrified. I'm hoping to post a little update every day, both with my writing progress and whatever knitting I may have done, too. So it's really BloKniWriMo (Blog Knitting Writing Month) for me.
Mmmph. I think I may have bitten off more than I can chew.
ETA: Nina just woke up. First thing she said was, "Get that hat off your head."
It's a knock off of an Urban Outfitters hat Nina wanted. I reversed the cable crossings.
I'm calling it the Knock it Off Cabled Hat.
Yarn: 2 50g balls of Classic Elite Ariosa, 90% extra fine merino, 10% cashmere. A delightful, 1 ply yarn that is consistent in thickness. This color is Azalea.
Needles: Size 9 for the ribbing, size 10.5 for the body of the hat.
Gauge: 3.5sts/in in stockinette.
The photos are a little dark because I took them with no flash last night.
It was a nice mental challenge, because of the way the cables moved diagonally, so I had to figure out how to deal with the beginning of the round so as to avoid a jog. (Thank you, Cookie A for your Sock Innovations book that has a nice chapter on working with patterns like this.) Then I had to figure out how to deal with the decreases so they worked out nicely, maintaining the pattern as long as possible.
Nina seems to like it. Sophia seems to like it more. She's been wearing it all morning. I'm guessing she's getting away with that because Nina is still in bed.
In other news, it's NaNoWriMo time (National Novel Writing Month), and I'm participating this year, plunging myself back into the world of fiction writing with a new book that I don't know much about yet. 30 days and (I hope) 50K words from now, I'll know a lot more.
I've got some friends I'm doing this with, and we'll be cheering each other on, which is good, because I'm terrified. I'm hoping to post a little update every day, both with my writing progress and whatever knitting I may have done, too. So it's really BloKniWriMo (Blog Knitting Writing Month) for me.
Mmmph. I think I may have bitten off more than I can chew.
ETA: Nina just woke up. First thing she said was, "Get that hat off your head."
Friday, October 30, 2009
Hippy hippy shake
A couple of weeks ago I came home from knitting group, checked caller ID and saw that my mother had called. She never leaves a voice mail, so I didn't bother to check and just called her back. Al (her husband) answered and after a confusing couple of minutes in which he assumed I had listened to a voice mail he had left me and I had continued to assume I was calling my mother back, not him, I got the point. My mom had fallen the night before and broken her hip and had just been rolled into surgery for a hip replacement.
They live just about a mile or so from the hospital, so Al was at home checking on the dog, having left the hospital after they rolled her into surgical prep.
That call was on a Wednesday, and as the next couple of days passed, I made plane reservations so that I could be there when she got out of the hospital and help out where needed.
Most of my help consisted of sitting around and knitting while my mom was napping, or talking to her while she was awake. Al normally takes care of the cooking, cleaning, and laundry so I didn't really have much "work" to do there. He's a former career Army mess sergeant, so he always has everything well under control. Also...the food at Chez Mother and Al's is top notch.
I took a lot of knitting with me -- my Manon which needed to be sewn up, little Quincy-ita, which was in progress at the time, a pair of socks for my sister-in-law that I'd been knitting as a demonstration for my sock class, and just needed to finish the foot. I also brought yarn to make Bella Mittens for a Twilight-loving friend, as well as two balls of sock yarn. I was prepared.
I was not prepared for my direct flight to be canceled and to be re-routed through Milwaukee, where I left my notions bag in the seat pocket. The notions bag that contained, you know, all my knitting notions, like my black sheep measuring tape, two very expensive Signature Needle Arts dpns, a 2.5mm circ for knitting socks using the sock yarn I brought with me, my scissors, my needle gauges, stitch markers, crochet hooks that belonged to my grandmother, and all my darning needles.
I finished knitting my SIL's second sock while waiting for my flight out of Milwaukee, which is when I discovered I no longer had my notions bag. It was too late to go back to the other gate, which was in another terminal. Milwaukee's airport is set up like a wheel, with each terminal coming out of the main ticketing terminal like spokes. In order to get from one terminal to the other, you have to go through security. I didn't have time to go through security twice with all my stuff in order to report a missing notions bag. So I couldn't graft the toe. I also therefore couldn't graft the Quincy-ita hat band. I couldn't start a pair of socks with the needle holding my SIL's sock, and I couldn't start a new pair with my other sock needle, because the other sock needle was in my notions bag.
I decided to start the mittens, only it turned out I hadn't brought the pattern, I had brought a PICTURE of the original Bella mittens used in the movie, which I had slipped into a page protector. It wasn't even a picture of the pattern mittens, so I couldn't just read the knitting in the picture and figure it out. Besides, the picture was a bit blurry. You can imagine how happy I was at this point. Luckily, I had my Kindle with me, too, so I could at least read.
My mom lives in Ludington, Michigan, a lovely resort town on Lake Michigan which is inconveniently located to any sort of mass transportation hub other than the Lake Michigan carferry, which was closed for the season. So after a delayed flight, notions bag loss, and a 2 hour drive from the Grand Rapids airport to Ludington, I finally got to see my mom, who amazingly, was ambulatory. Sort of. We had a nice long talk, and the next morning, I headed out to the excellent local yarn shop, Nautical Knits, intending to rectify my notions deficiency. I bought a new notions bag, darning needles, a needle gauge, and interlocking stitch markers. I figured that would get me by.
Okay, I also bought two balls of sock yarn, but that's to be expected, isn't it?
Back at Check Mother and Al's, I grafted SIL's sock toe, and moved on to weaving in all the ends on my Manon. Done. I was ready to sew in the sleeves, except I couldn't because I forgot to bring along the yarn to sew it up. It turns out that when you forget things like patterns and sewing-up yarn, and lose 2.5mm needles that can't be replaced out of town, bringing all that other knitting stuff isn't as big a packing overkill as it first appears.
I started a pair of socks on the freed-up 2.0mm circ using yarn I had brought with me, a beautifully bright yarn from Regia's Kaffe Fasset line. The two original Fasset lines were Mirage and Landscape. Landscape had defined stripe sequences (that's what I made my brother's Big Foot socks from), while Mirage came in the same colorways as Landscape, but worked up as a variegated yarn, appearing more like a camo pattern.
This yarn I brought with me was called Exotic Color (colorway: "zany") I was intrigued by the striping pattern, as there were places where the transition between stripes worked out to be more like interconnected waves. It was pretty neat. I started the first sock Tuesday afternoon and was finished with it some time Wednesday. I then started the second sock, and the pair was complete Thursday evening. Fastest pair of socks I ever knit, in terms of total elapsed time from start to finish. My mother exclaimed that they were beautiful. Our feet are the same size, so I had her try them on. They're hers. The woman was sitting in a chair with a walker next to her. How could I not give them to her?
I took some photos of them on my own feet out on their deck.
When I got back home, I called the airline about my missing notions bag. You're supposed to contact the airport where it was lost, but because of 9/11, airports don't post their phone numbers on their websites anymore (I know, I don't get it either), so the woman at the airline called three different numbers at the Milwaukee airport and no one would pick up the phone. And they don't have voice mail. She suggested I drive to the Minneapolis airport (well, first she suggested I go to the Milwaukee airport), make a claim at their lost baggage counter and have them forward the information to Milwaukee. Whatever.
My mom is doing very well now. She's ditched the walker in favor of a cane, at least for part of the time. I'm betting she'll be back at Pilates in no time at all.
They live just about a mile or so from the hospital, so Al was at home checking on the dog, having left the hospital after they rolled her into surgical prep.
That call was on a Wednesday, and as the next couple of days passed, I made plane reservations so that I could be there when she got out of the hospital and help out where needed.
Most of my help consisted of sitting around and knitting while my mom was napping, or talking to her while she was awake. Al normally takes care of the cooking, cleaning, and laundry so I didn't really have much "work" to do there. He's a former career Army mess sergeant, so he always has everything well under control. Also...the food at Chez Mother and Al's is top notch.
I took a lot of knitting with me -- my Manon which needed to be sewn up, little Quincy-ita, which was in progress at the time, a pair of socks for my sister-in-law that I'd been knitting as a demonstration for my sock class, and just needed to finish the foot. I also brought yarn to make Bella Mittens for a Twilight-loving friend, as well as two balls of sock yarn. I was prepared.
I was not prepared for my direct flight to be canceled and to be re-routed through Milwaukee, where I left my notions bag in the seat pocket. The notions bag that contained, you know, all my knitting notions, like my black sheep measuring tape, two very expensive Signature Needle Arts dpns, a 2.5mm circ for knitting socks using the sock yarn I brought with me, my scissors, my needle gauges, stitch markers, crochet hooks that belonged to my grandmother, and all my darning needles.
I finished knitting my SIL's second sock while waiting for my flight out of Milwaukee, which is when I discovered I no longer had my notions bag. It was too late to go back to the other gate, which was in another terminal. Milwaukee's airport is set up like a wheel, with each terminal coming out of the main ticketing terminal like spokes. In order to get from one terminal to the other, you have to go through security. I didn't have time to go through security twice with all my stuff in order to report a missing notions bag. So I couldn't graft the toe. I also therefore couldn't graft the Quincy-ita hat band. I couldn't start a pair of socks with the needle holding my SIL's sock, and I couldn't start a new pair with my other sock needle, because the other sock needle was in my notions bag.
I decided to start the mittens, only it turned out I hadn't brought the pattern, I had brought a PICTURE of the original Bella mittens used in the movie, which I had slipped into a page protector. It wasn't even a picture of the pattern mittens, so I couldn't just read the knitting in the picture and figure it out. Besides, the picture was a bit blurry. You can imagine how happy I was at this point. Luckily, I had my Kindle with me, too, so I could at least read.
My mom lives in Ludington, Michigan, a lovely resort town on Lake Michigan which is inconveniently located to any sort of mass transportation hub other than the Lake Michigan carferry, which was closed for the season. So after a delayed flight, notions bag loss, and a 2 hour drive from the Grand Rapids airport to Ludington, I finally got to see my mom, who amazingly, was ambulatory. Sort of. We had a nice long talk, and the next morning, I headed out to the excellent local yarn shop, Nautical Knits, intending to rectify my notions deficiency. I bought a new notions bag, darning needles, a needle gauge, and interlocking stitch markers. I figured that would get me by.
Okay, I also bought two balls of sock yarn, but that's to be expected, isn't it?
Back at Check Mother and Al's, I grafted SIL's sock toe, and moved on to weaving in all the ends on my Manon. Done. I was ready to sew in the sleeves, except I couldn't because I forgot to bring along the yarn to sew it up. It turns out that when you forget things like patterns and sewing-up yarn, and lose 2.5mm needles that can't be replaced out of town, bringing all that other knitting stuff isn't as big a packing overkill as it first appears.
I started a pair of socks on the freed-up 2.0mm circ using yarn I had brought with me, a beautifully bright yarn from Regia's Kaffe Fasset line. The two original Fasset lines were Mirage and Landscape. Landscape had defined stripe sequences (that's what I made my brother's Big Foot socks from), while Mirage came in the same colorways as Landscape, but worked up as a variegated yarn, appearing more like a camo pattern.
This yarn I brought with me was called Exotic Color (colorway: "zany") I was intrigued by the striping pattern, as there were places where the transition between stripes worked out to be more like interconnected waves. It was pretty neat. I started the first sock Tuesday afternoon and was finished with it some time Wednesday. I then started the second sock, and the pair was complete Thursday evening. Fastest pair of socks I ever knit, in terms of total elapsed time from start to finish. My mother exclaimed that they were beautiful. Our feet are the same size, so I had her try them on. They're hers. The woman was sitting in a chair with a walker next to her. How could I not give them to her?
I took some photos of them on my own feet out on their deck.
When I got back home, I called the airline about my missing notions bag. You're supposed to contact the airport where it was lost, but because of 9/11, airports don't post their phone numbers on their websites anymore (I know, I don't get it either), so the woman at the airline called three different numbers at the Milwaukee airport and no one would pick up the phone. And they don't have voice mail. She suggested I drive to the Minneapolis airport (well, first she suggested I go to the Milwaukee airport), make a claim at their lost baggage counter and have them forward the information to Milwaukee. Whatever.
My mom is doing very well now. She's ditched the walker in favor of a cane, at least for part of the time. I'm betting she'll be back at Pilates in no time at all.
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