December’s sock yarn
From left, that’s Meilenweit Megaboot Stretch #711, the Lisa Souza Wild Things yarn gifted by my LSP, Trekking #101, more Megaboot Stretch (#709), Regia Banner colour #5450 (self-striping, for Jaywalkers) and, in front, some Fortissima Socka #2420 (now sadly and inexplicably discontinued).
This photo doesn’t do the Lisa Souza yarn any justice: it was gorgeous in the skein, but in the ball the subtle variations in the dark background colour show up much more clearly, and the turquoise and rust splashes really sizzle. And it’s soft. I can’t wait to start knitting it.
I almost can’t bear to start knitting the Fortissima Socka, though, since it’s unlikely I’ll ever find any more. I bought it a year or so back, and I just take it out from time to time to ogle the rich, subtle, tweedy colours and squeeze it. You know what I mean.
And still more Lizard Ridge…
…with camera wobble at no extra charge!
I wanted to show you how the candy colours of the two #95 squares really make the deeper colourways glow, and only natural light would do. Plus, it shows the satisfying 3D bumpiness of the squares in their unblocked state. 19 squares done now! although I’m pondering returning one of my earliest efforts to Mr Noro with a letter of complaint. The offending ball was not so much thick and thin as thin and thin (fingering weight in places), and the finished square weighs about twenty per cent less than the others, so it looks and feels flimsy.
December is…
… going to be sock month, in the great stash diet. I’m heading out west for nearly four weeks over Christmas and New Year, to give my in-laws time with their grandson (and vice versa), so I need some small, portable, discrete projects I can pick up and put down between meals, visiting, card playing and more meals. I’ve wound the yarn into balls for two-at-a-time-on-one-enormous-circ socks, and I’m looking out a range of patterns to mix things up a little, and take advantage of the range of space dyed, variegated and self-striping yarns I have to work with. (And they’re so purty: photos to follow when I have some natural light to take them in.)
All of which has got me thinking about my technique. When I came back to knitting a couple of years ago, I was just happy to finish projects, but the more I knit, the more impatient I become with my own knitterly imperfections. My selvedges row in and out. My ribs aren’t pretty, with the last stitch of every knit repeat invariably ending up stretched out and uneven. And, despite growing experience, I don’t seem to be able to pick up my speed.
The speed issue anyone watching me knit could immediately troubleshoot. I have an ungainly version of English knitting I think of as unmodified eight-year-old, since I took to it when I first learned to knit and haven’t changed since. I hold the right hand needle about half way down, dropping it to make every stitch, and then picking it up again. Slow? Why, yes. My right hand (which is holding and wrapping the yarn, remember, English fashion) has to travel about half a mile with each stitch. It’s probably a good workout, but otherwise it’s the knitting equivalent of two finger typing. If I’m ever to rival Eunny Jang in the productivity stakes, it’s gotta go.
The rowing out, ugly rib problem I had no solutions for until a few days back, when — in a search for a sock pattern generator that would let me customize patterns for long, skinny, low-arched feet (a.k.a. rat feet or skis, and ubiquitous in my household) — I happened across an article on combination knitting, made famous by the knitting heretic herself, Annie Modesitt. Among its other virtues (speed, evenness, cures baldness), this style of knitting is apparently supposed to be helpful for those of us afflicted with a tension difference between knit and purl, the cause of rowing out and baggy ribs. The article had photos or rib swatches attached, and I have to admit the combination sample was far prettier.
So there we have it: I just have to completely change my knitting technique and all my problems will be solved. I am happy at the prospect of a solution to my technical imperfections, really I am, but the thought of retraining myself makes this not-so-coordinated knitter want to lie down in a dark room with a wet cloth on her head. Eventually — probably quite soon — the desire to make rib, knit-purl or cable patterns I won’t immediately frog in disgust will win out over my inherent conservatism. Watch this space.
Elsewhere: LSP, I have converted the gorgeous Kureyon you sent me into three more Lizard Ridge squares. The two #95 lemon, lime and raspberry squares give the colour scheme a much-needed kick in the pants, making all the deeper colours of the other squares glow. I tend to be a bit timid with colour, going for the safe (let’s not say boring) choice nine times out of ten, and I need my hand forced now and then to make me experiment. Thank you! I’ll post a photo when I can take one during daylight.
And, in the odd quiet moment, I’m spinning up some glorious Fleece Artist Blue Faced Leicester roving. The colourway (sea greens and blues, and the softest of beiges) is beautiful, of course, but it’s the fibre I’m in love with: as soft as merino, but with enough crimp to make it simple for a novice like me to control. It really does deserve all the hype.
You’re the top…
… you’re the smile/ on the Mona Lisa…Look at this hoard of loveliness, courtesy of my wonderful LSP. That’s a 2 pound bag of gourmet beans in the middle there, people, just in time for a week in sole charge of a three year old. (The beans are for me, not him. They’re medicine.) Nestling cozily around the beans are a skein of beautiful sock yarn hand-dyed by Lisa Souza, colourway Wild Thing, and three skeins of Kureyon (2 x 95, 1 x 147), immediately destined for Lizard Ridge. And around the outside, some delicious teas, a sampling from a great page-a-day knitting calendar, some yoga mints and lip gloss, a lovely ruler with pressed flowers on it, five beautiful glass bead stitch markers, a floral calendar, Zen and the Art of Knitting, a bonsai potato kit (subtitle: Zen without the wait!) and my very own “I’d rather be knitting” bumper sticker. Plus the Mona Lisa, with sticks and string. Wow!
LSP, you’ve outdone yourself. I completely see why you were nominated for Best Secret Pal. You’re also eerily perceptive, since you managed to include colours of Kureyon I’d been eyeing up for Lizard Ridge, my husband’s very favourite tea (Moroccan mint green) and mine (English breakfast), and a card with one of my favourite old roses (Centifolia), all without any blog-hinting from me. Thank you so much!
It’s Biggles!
If you haven’t already found them, you need to check out the knitting pages on the V and A website. There you can find the pattern for this devilishly stylish WWII balaclava helmet, “made with ear flaps to ensure good hearing during telephone operations”. Just what this helmet is intended to protect you from is unclear to me (unwelcome advances? being taken seriously? Crazy Aunt Purl’s alien beams?). I’m thinking, though, that it would been the ultimate prophylactic against social diseases… especially if worn with these (which, according to the pattern, allow you to dispense with your knee caps. I thought I must have misread that, but I checked it twice).
In addition to these escapees from Rose-Kim’s What the Hell is This? Thursdays, you can check out some less absurd vintage patterns. You can also admire a collection of knitted art, and even submit your own images.
Half a Lizard
Some visual evidence of knitting progress for you at last: the first 12 squares of Lizard Ridge.
The photo’s a little dark, but you can see a rough pattern emerging: half blueish squares and half reddish (although I have only 5 blue to 7 red at the moment). I’m through all but one of the balls I bought for this project, and have begun knitting squares from the yarn left over from the squares in the photo. The remnant squares are very satisfying, if unpredictable, to knit: I never know where the colour sequences are going to take me. I’ve frogged a couple of attempts which really weren’t working, but I’ve also just finished one I like as much as any of the squares in the photo.
Once I’ve finished the remnants, I’ll have a much better sense of how much more Kureyon, and in what colours, I’ll need to finish the project. My current best guess is that 2 balls makes approx. 2 1/2 squares, but I won’t be able to use all the scraps from every ball — or at least not without having some eyeball-scorchingly unmatched squares! I think I’ll be trying to introduce a little more variety into the colour range with the remaining balls I buy — some more greens and earth tones, probably.
Finally, a big thankyou to my lovely Secret Pal for the e-giftie and your sympathetic comments on my last post. They both brightened my day, and I’m very grateful. I haven’t decided what to put the giveanything.com gift card towards, but I’m thinking that one of the Vogue Knitting on the Go books might be in my future…
I don’t know what to say
I haven’t posted in a few days, and this was going to be an upbeat post. Deb left me a comment that cheered me up about Rosedale, which has been stalled while I decided what to do about the contrast rectangle on the back. Carrying the yarn across the back of the contrast area has given it the consistency of a board, and messed up the tension on the adjacent stitches, and I’m enough of a perfectionist to be bothered by both these things. Apparently, I’m not the only person to have problems with this part of the pattern, which is encouraging to know: I’d put the unsatisfactory result down to my deficient colourwork.
But I’m not feeling very upbeat. I wasn’t sure whether I’d blog this, but here goes: I’ve just had a miscarriage. It’s my fourth, in fact, and my third within the last twelve months. I have no idea why, and neither do my doctors; all the tests have turned up nothing.
I’m trying not to generalize the misery. My life definitely doesn’t suck: I realize my great good fortune in having a patient, tolerant, funny and utterly decent husband whose few small quirks (pathological attitude to sleep, for example, and an inability to hurry up when required) are really very easy to live with, and who somehow–miracle of miracles!–manages to put up with me, my moods and my morning grumpiness. And I have my son–charming, offbeat, affectionate, smart as a button, and healthy as a horse–which is an enormous consolation many of those in the recurrent miscarriage boat don’t possess. Miscarriages aside, we’re healthy. We have a house we like, jobs that engage us, for the most part, and we’re financially stable. We’ve been lucky.
But this year has been spectacularly bad. Two miscarriages, my mother’s rapid and painful death from cancer (a cancer, what’s more, triggered by medical hardware used to repair an injury caused by a careless driver who hit her when she was crossing the road), and now another miscarriage. There’s also been a plethora of troubles, small and large, in the lives of people I care about and hurt for: bereavements, health worries, anxieties over children. I hate this year. I’m afraid to contemplate the ways it could have been worse, in case I make them happen. I just want to sink its feet in concrete and drop it into the sea.
I’m going upstairs now to spin up some merino roving. The spinning helps: it’s part physical therapy, part hopeful reminder that, with patience and gentle encouragement, the snarls and tangles can smooth themselves out and become something useful and beautiful. And if you have any good luck mojo going spare, send it our way, OK?
This irrelevant fact courtesy of my biology paper
Ever wanted to know why wool and other animal fibres are stretchy, and silk isn’t? It’s all in the structure of the proteins, apparently: the protein chains in wool and hair form a helix, making them flexible and elastic, while fibroin (silk protein) is a strong but much more rigid pleated sheet. Some fibres, such as those produced by spiders, have both helical and sheet peptides, making them both strong and elastic.
Thought 1: Strong and elastic? Sounds ideal to me.
Thought 2: How many spiders would it take to make enough yarn for a sweater?
Thought 3: Would spider yarn pill? And could it be machine washed?
Steal this meme
Jess left me another comment, with the very sensible suggestion that I apply my overwhelming stash to making gifts. In return, I’m going to steal her meme. That’s gratitude for you.
1. Flip to page 18, paragraph 4 in the book closest to you right now. What does it say? The book closest to me is volume 3 of a translation of Proust, and page 18 is one very, very long paragraph. In fact, I think that paragraph goes on for several more pages. This is my husband’s book, and no, I haven’t read it.
2. If you stretch out your left arm as far as possible, what are you touching? A fish tank. And my cat, with his nose pressed to said fish tank.
3. What’s the last program you watched on tv? The BBC dramatization of Mrs Gaskell’s North and South.
4. Without looking, guess what time it is. Naptime for my son. (And guess what? I was right!)
5. Except the computer, what can you hear right now? A babbling tank filter, and a babbling three year old (currently counting to 12 in Italian. We are not Italian. He has picked this up from our next-door neighbour.)
6. When was the last time you were outside and what did you do? Twenty minutes ago, with my son, coming home from Ikea. We collected a couple of pretty autumn leaves. Then we spent ten minutes on the steps, while I tried to coax him into the house with promises of bananas.
7. What are you wearing? A gloriously cosy oversized soft blue possum-merino sweater from NZ, jeans, wool socks and sheepskin slippers.
8. Did you dream last night? If you did, what about? I had an extremely strange dream in which I accidentally caused the death of Britney Spears on a boat, and was charged with her murder. During the same dream someone also offered to foretell my future, and told me I wouldn’t have any more children.
9. When was the last time you laughed? Ten minutes ago, on the front steps of the house.
10. What’s on the walls, in the room you’re in right now? Two block-mounted exhibition posters from the museum where I work.
11. Have you seen anything strange lately? Not that I can think of, unless you count the more surreal moments of parenting.
13. What’s the last film you saw? Nicholas Nickelby.
14. If you became a multimillionaire, what would you do with the money? The usual, I think: pay off mortgages (mine and those close to me), save some, give a wad to good causes. Pay for no. 15.
15. Tell us something about yourself that most people don’t know. I’m considering going back to school — to med school, to be precise. I’m currently doing premed courses.
16. If you could change ONE THING in this world, without regarding politics or bad guilt – what would it be? I’d have my mother back again.
17. Do you like dancing? Yes.
18. George Bush? Only for town dogcatcher.
19. What do you want your children’s names to be, girl/boy? No comment.
20. Would you ever consider living abroad? I am living abroad! I have lived abroad (in Britain and Canada) for the last ten years.
21. What do you want God to tell you, when you come to heaven? That I can see the people I’ve loved who have died.
22. Who should do this meme? Everybody should do this meme. I tag you all.
Knitting progress: More squares for Lizard Ridge (11 and counting).
Rosedale stalled at collar, since I’m considering frogging back to the start of the yoke and leaving out the contrast rectangle in the middle of the back.
Located Charlotte shawl for aunt, which I had mislaid some time ago.
Spun some nice Kool-Aid dyed merino superwash roving bought from a local spinner (in defiance of stash diet). Planning to incorporate it into a scarf, but more on that in another post.
Much playing with stash, and planning projects.
Stash diet
Call it guilt. Call it mindfulness. Call it the shock of recognizing you can no longer close the yarn cupboard door without leaning on it (and, what’s more, that your overflow yarn drawers are, well, overflowing). Call it what you will: I’ve decided I need to reduce my stash.
So I’m going to join Stashalong, on a month-by-month basis.
Priorities for the stash diet are going to be:
- UFOs. I’m bending the rules a little to permit yarn purchases necessary for finishing projects already underway, such as Lizard Ridge, for which I’ll need some more Kureyon and something else (probably Briggs and Little) to sew it up and crochet the edge.
- Clearing out stuff I will never voluntarily knit for myself or those I have to live with. In this category go an assortment of orphan balls in respectable fibres (mostly pure wool or mohair blends) which I inherited from somewhere or someone, and either don’t much like, or can’t imagine ever finding a use for. I’m thinking charity knitting: the Red Scarf project for those nice enough to be scarfworthy, and blankets for the rest. My son’s preschool, which occasionally solicits yarn donations, will be the beneficiary of anything too nasty for blankets.
- Yarn I have stashed for sweaters, to expedite the emptying of my stash cupboard.
- Yarn for shawls.
- Yarn for socks.
At my current rate of production, I will be on this diet until 2009.
