Knit Sisters

In spite of some lovely weather and the ongoing amazement of the fall leaves,

things have been a little—how shall we put this?—suboptimal Chez Mad Dog this past week.

I have a cold, which would be bad enough even if I weren’t the world’s worst and most impatient patient. But I am.

Let me offer you this bit of perspective on precisely how bad I am: last time I had a cold, we were in the midst of watching Bleak House on PBS. Alex thoughtfully pointed out that Esther Summerson was behaving more nobly and courageously about having smallpox than I was about weathering a minor respiratory virus.

That might seem like a mean thing to say, if it weren’t so true.

Shelley doesn’t care if I’m sick and still wants to be walked:

We are also experiencing major leakage in our basement due to a corroded pipe. I think. But how would I really know? Our landlord (who we shall call Mr. Lee), a personal favorite of mine as you know, took an entire week to send someone out to look at it.

Last night, this lovely Chinese handyman showed up around 8 p.m. He immediately won my heart by declaring Shelley “so beautiful,” in spite of the fact that she was trying to jump up and kiss him.

Unfortunately, despite the immediate bond we formed over the indisputable beauty of my dog, we proceeded to have some communication issues.

Alex and I don’t speak Chinese and Mr. Yu spoke limited English. But everyone involved was giving it the old college try. Alex took Mr. Yu down to the basement to see the accumulated water damage of the past week. Yu seemed a bit puzzled.

Alex said, pointing first upstairs, “I will turn on shower,” then at Mr. Yu, “so that you,” now pointing at eyes, “can see.”

Mr. Yu nodded, still a bit puzzled. Alex ran up the stairs with Yu in pursuit. Alex turned on the water in the shower. Alex and Yu ran back down the stairs to the basement.

“Ah!” Yu said. “Too much water!” He seemed delighted with the flood. Or maybe he was just pleased that we had finally clarified the problem.

Yu worked for a while then emerged from the basement.

Mr. Yu: Okay, you call Lee.

Alex, puzzled, pointing to self: We should call Lee?

Mr. Yu: You call Lee!

Alex, puzzled, again pointing to self: I call Lee?

Mr. Yu, pointing to himself: No, no, Yu call Lee.

Who’s on first?

I’m not sure when the basement leakage will be fixed, but I do feel a bit better now that Mr. Yu has been here.

Icarus has a few more feathers:

Please say that you can see the progress. Even if you have to lie to me.

And I’ve been making my first efforts at Fair Isle knitting, with the help of the marvelous Kat from Woolcott:

Yes, it is embarrassing that I’ve been knitting since I was about six or seven and I still do almost nothing with multiple colors. But as you know, I’m sick right now. We can discuss the full shame of this multiple-color avoidance in depth at another time…

And now I must sign off so that I can swig some more DayQuil and make another pot of tea and sniffle quietly in the corner.

And yes, I would like some cheese with that whine. Thanks for asking.

Ellen and I had a chat over the weekend and decided that, seeing as how neither one of us has finished our own submission for the leaf-themed Fall Challenge, we wanted to extend the deadline for submissions.

So we are pushing back the deadline until October 31.  Yippee!  (And there was great rejoicing throughout the land!)

Because, after all, it is still fall.

So, knitters, when you get your designs finished, send a pictures (or pictures) along to one of us at:

ellen at knitsisters dot com   OR

sarah at knitsisters dot com  OR

pastryknits at cs dot com

I thought I would take this opportunity to entice you by picturing the handspun yarn that I have picked out to offer as prizes.

First prize:

                             The cabled yarn (100% wool)

Second prize:

                                                         The tufted yarn (75% superwash wool, 25% rayon, approximately)

Third prize:

                                                    The purple wool and mohair 2-ply (60% wool, 40% mohair, approximately)

Sisters’ Choice Award:

                                The skein of handpainted wool and mohair 2-ply (60% mohair, 40% wool, approximately)

So, Deb, you have a couple more weeks!  I can’t wait to see the shrug/sweater!

You know, graduate school is mostly an enriching experience. Except that sometimes you spend a whole day reading things like this:

“The future, which as an open, multiple, contested, undefineable site, never exists in general, but is always pluralized in singularities—each future being different. The challenge to the sub-politics that thrive in a risk society, then, could be formed more effectively if we were to find ways of actualizing particular connections between technologies and their futures.”

I would like to actualize a particular future singularity in which these people would no longer be allowed to write books.

I’d rather be nosing bees than reading that crap. Even if I end up getting stung.

In the event—unlikely though I’m certain this is—that the above quote was not completely clear to you upon first reading, I, having had the benefit (if that’s the right word for it) of context, have rendered the following translation from Jargon into English:

The future hasn’t happened yet, so any number of different things could, in fact, happen. It would be better if some of those things happened rather than others. I sure wish we could figure out how to make the positive things happen rather than the negative ones!

See how simple?

My advice to you is this: as soon as some Jargon Cowboy starts talking about “multiple, contested, undefineable sites” that are “pluralized in singularities,” you should reach for your gun. Them’s fightin’ words!

In light of this obscurantist garbage abstract material that I am confronting, I’m sure you’ll see why I say that it is good for a person’s soul to knit during graduate school. Because knitting is an activity that is both sensual and concrete. I have, for instance, “actualized particular connections” between my yarn and needles to make this sock for Alex:

This Trekking XXL sock is most assuredly not “pluralized in singularities.” Although there are multiple, open, and contested feet in this picture, some have been actualized as paws.

Close-up:

Specs: Trekking XXL, color 71; “designed” by me from various sock components including eye-of-patridge heel flap, pointed toe (instructions from Nancy Bush), and k2, p1 rib for the leg and foot. U.S. size 1 needles, 69 stitches.

To soothe our (or maybe just my) troubled spirits, I have composed the following haiku, which are dedicated to Icarus, who has recently sprouted some new feathers and is taking a truly unseemly delight in draining away my life force with his 400+ stitch rows and his incessant demands for vodka tonics:

Yeah, I got feathers. And by the way, that’s “Mr. Icarus” to you.

Icarus Haiku #1:
Forty rows left now
Your feathers: pink agony
What was I thinking?

Icarus Haiku #2:
I think I hate you
although you are so handsome
in fall’s dappled light.

Icarus Haiku #3:
Five hundred stitches:
even the fabric of life
itself has fewer.

Icarus Haiku #4:
Night passes to day.
Autumn to winter then spring.
I’m still knitting you.

Have a good weekend everyone! I’ll be—does this sound familiar?—knitting Mr. Icarus. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

I wrote on Tuesday about how I really like mohair.  I got to thinking about that, and about how much mohair really is in the stash.  In the interests of full disclosure, I offer the following photographs.  Keep in mind that I have photographed a representation of each yarn, and that many, many more balls of each exist in the stash unphotographed.

My name is Sarah and I am a fiberaholic.

 

1.  The cone of purple mohair.  I have two of these cones.  Someday I am going to make a beautiful little cardigan/jacket out of this.

2.  The white half-ball of mohair.  Actually, this yarn is almost gone. (Although there is more than I have pictured here, naturally.)  That’s because I made my sister a sweater set out of white mohair several years ago.  (You’ll have to pester her for a picture of that one.)

3.  The ball of lilac mohair.  I have about 12 of these balls.  One word:  Ebay.

4.  The ball of black mohair.  About 15 balls.  Same word.

5.  The primary handpainted mohair.  This is from Ellen’s Half Pint Farm (not our Ellen) and it is beautiful.  There are 3 big balls.  It is awaiting a fate as beautiful as itself.

6.  The ball of sage green laceweight mohair.  2 balls of this.  It is gorgeous and someday I will make something gorgeous from it.  Promise.

 

7.  The green ball of mohair.  I think I have twenty of these.  It was on a great sale on elann.  What can I say?

8.  The grey ball of mohair.  See #7, above.

 

9.  The gigantic Ziploc bag of unspun kid mohair.  We’ve talked about this before, haven’t we?

10.  Not pictured:  lilac/teal/pink handpainted mohair.  Purchased at Rhinebeck many moons ago.  I was swatching with this in a quilted pattern this summer.  Remember?

Okay, this is the meat of it.  What I haven’t included:  yarns that are wool/mohair blends, like Brown Sheep’s Lamb’s Pride, of which I have a largish amount destined for a sweater.  And then there’s the blue mohair blend, and the handspun mohair skeins, and the Dale yarn which I’m pretty sure has mohair in it…

I can quit any time.

I’ve really done very little knitting, what with Red and her mom in town and all those wonderful tombstones to photograph.

I have a bit more of Alex’s Trekking XXL socks:

Their most exciting feature is their eye-of-partridge heel:

Get a load of that, will ya?

Eyes of patridges aside, I believe the fall weather and the turning leaves have gotten me into a rather Proustian mood.

Red’s recent visit may well have been my own personal madeleine, conjuring up tableaux of the past that I had not revisited for a long time. Tableaux in which she was a baby, and I was her twenty-one-year-old babysitter. So much had not yet happened.

Now the seasons are inexorably shifting.

Then again, my autumnal mood may have to do with my experience of campus as an “older” graduate student.

There are many strange and wonderful things about going to graduate school in your thirties, but the most magical and poignant moments occur in the fall, in September and October, when there is a slight edge to the air in the mornings but it isn’t really cold. Yet.

All the students are back on campus. There is a sense of renewal and possibility.

You feel the diffuse promise of the new school year even when you are nearly forty and you don’t have quite your whole life ahead of you.

And yet, my life on campus creates frequent Proustian moments when the past and the present collapse into a singularity. I look across the quadrangle and see a boy with curly black hair leap athletically into the air to catch a frisbee and I think, “Oh, look. There’s Phil.”

For just an instant, my friend Phil is there, embodied, eighteen years old, lithe, full of good cheer, airborne.

Then I remember that Phil would be forty or nearly forty now himself. He’s probably greying a little, his shoulders are rounding slightly, he is most likely more earthbound, he probably has his own children.

The leaves are turning.

In keeping with this bittersweet theme, on our way back from our walk yesterday afternoon, Shelley and I passed by the former Dame School:

The Old Dame ain’t what she used to be.

But then again, there’s the very real possibility that she’s becoming something better.

I took the little skein of tufted yarn and knit up a little swatch last night, just to see how it would look when knitted.

The knit side:

 

The purl side:

 

It’s kinda cool-looking, I think, although for me it was really more fun to spin than it would be to knit with.  For that reason, I am going to offer this tufted yarn as one of the prizes in the Fall Challenge.  Someone should have lots of fun with this yarn, I hope.

In general, I think I lean more toward smooth yarns and the kind of detailed knitting one can do with them than the fuzzy, hairy, and otherwise bumpy novelty yarns.  With a couple of exceptions, of course.  I have a minor love affair with mohair, of which I have lots in my stash (and covet more, especially laceweight–are you listening, she-who-works at-her-LYS?) and I can see that angora is fast sucking me down as well.

I finally made it to the underarm division of Blue Bamboo and started the fronts.  I am knitting these simultaneously, since that ensures that they will both be the same length.

 

 

Uh….I’m starting to think I might not have this sweater done by Oct. 15 for the Challenge.  This is somewhat lowering, since I am the one who issued the challenge.

I’ve said it before but I don’t mind saying it again:  working really gets in the way of my knitting time.

If you come to visit us in Boston, you will have to visit the large number of 17th- and 18th-century “burying grounds” with which Boston is richly endowed.

It’s frankly non-negotiable.

We are historians by trade so we are fascinated by these memorials to early Bostonians.

Certain individuals have maintained that we are just morbid and temperamentally macabre, but they will not be invited back.

This Columbus Day weekend, we have been delighted to host Red and her mother (who you will remember from the Outer Banks adventure of early August).

Red here comments to her mother on how much she enjoyed the last four cemeteries we just visited and how eager she is to visit a few more. At least, I think that’s what she was saying…

Alex, meanwhile, contemplates the grave of Joseph Tapping. By the time Tapping was Alex’s age, he had been dead for two years.

It is a sobering thought.

Here’s the detail of the carving on the Tapping stone:

Time and Death put on their boogie shoes.

What with all these rather grim reminders of our own mortality, a trip to our nation’s oldest continuously operating pub was clearly in order:

Said oldest pub is the one to the left, but the one on the right isn’t any spring chicken. These pubs are located directly across from Boston’s quite affecting and powerful Holocaust Memorial, which probably hasn’t hurt business either.

Then it was off to Quincy Market:

Paul Revere used to have lunch at the food court inside here almost every day. He especially liked the surf ‘n turf combo, including as it does one selection from the land category and two from the sea category.

Stick around folks! We got a million of ’em. And we’ll be here all week!

Red enjoyed some fried dough with extra powdered sugar:

Happiness on a plate.

Speaking of reminders of one’s own fleeting days on this planet, did I mention that I used to babysit Red when she was a baby? Now she’s here in Boston looking at colleges. Because she’s actually going to college next year.

How is this possible?

When I was a kid, I used to hate it when adults said things like that.

But to everything there is a season:

At the end of our long day out in the city, we returned home for a revivifying spot of tea. Fortunately, I had, at Alex’s request, just knitted some highly functional hexagons to serve as a teapot trivet and matching coasters.

The yarn is Main Line from Knitpicks, 75% cotton, 25% wool, in colors “Red Velvet Cake” and “Cocoa.”

I must have been feeling peckish when I put in my order.

The idea for the hexagons and the basic instructions came from Norah Gaughan, whose wonderful book arrived shortly before our guests.

So many delightful arrivals, and such a lovely weekend.

Burying grounds and all.

I spun on the wool/angora blend last night while watching the two-hour season premiere of Battlestar Galactica.

I realize that Ellen posted about this very show just the other day, and I have to admit that I had never watched a single episode.  But my sister-in-law Pam is a big fan, and she was at our house last night and wanted to watch the show.  So naturally we all watched it too.  Well.  This is a good show, folks, despite what Ellen may say.  (I suspect that she secretly really enjoys it, but is just too proud to admit it.  Because, when I spoke to her on the phone just before the show started and told her that we were about to watch the season premiere, she said in an extremely wistful voice, “You get the SciFi channel?”)  Now I’m hooked.  It helped that Pam was there and could fill me in on what had happened in the previous two seasons.

But back to the angora blend.  I’m spinning this pretty fine, so my progress isn’t too dramatic.  Plus I had to stop spinning and comb some more of the fiber.  I love this angora.

Putting this picture up is a little like watching a TV cooking show:  nice enough in its own way, but there’s only so much a picture can convey.  You get the idea that it’s good food, but without the senses of smell and taste, true understanding is somewhat limited.  This angora is so, so soft you almost cannot feel it in your fingers.  You’ll just have to take my word for it, I guess.  (Or you could go right out and find some angora fiber of your own.)

And lest you think I have forgotten Blue Bamboo,

I have 18 inches done.  Knitting 21 inches straight of anything is pretty boring.  Enough to make you want to stick a pin in your eye.  But I am persevering.

Oh, and I washed the tufted yarn this morning.  I’m happy to report that the rayon ribbon did not immediately shrink up, but the yarn is still drying.  I’ll have a full report and a picture next week. 

Further home improvements have occurred Chez Mad Dog! Many of you will recall the magical transformation of the porch formerly known as The Sunporch of the Damned that Alex effected, as if by feat of ledgerdemain (where, after all, did all that crap go?), while I was on the road. Now he has outdone himself by installing sunporch bookshelves:

Still life with James Joyce and dog butt.

I hadn’t really wanted to bring this up before, but the sunporch transformation is just the last in a long series of heroic efforts we’ve made over the past eighteen months in order to make our apartment liveable and turn it into a suitable and wholesome home for our pets and my yarn stash. Our landlord, a greedy, neglectful scoundrel busy man with multiple properties, had done little or nothing with our house over the years.

Let’s see some before and after photos, shall we?

The living room was…well, let’s just say that spending too much time there virtually guaranteed an emergency call to your psychiatrist and a steeply increased dosage of whatever psychotropic drug you were using at the time:

Why someone had installed a board above that bay of windows is a mystery that shall surely remain unsolved. But the funereal vinyl curtain is a nice touch, don’t you agree?

We leapt into action and came up with this:

Sadly, there was simply no way to include the black vinyl curtain in the new decor.

Every room in the apartment was some variation on the horror that was the living room. Here, for instance, is the original bleak kitchen:

which featured loose wires hanging out of huge gouges in the wall. (I “fixed” these, by the way, by blithely pushing the wires back into the wall, spackling over them, and painting over that. I faintly heard one of the wires wheeze, “For the love of God, Montressor!”)

Paint and some furnishings produced this:

And finally, the original incarnation of my office, with various pieces of furniture left by previous tenants:

I want to call your attention to the fact that the mirrors had been affixed to the wall with some sort of infernal epoxy and then painted around at some later date. I understand that the person who did this is “no longer welcome” at any of our nation’s Home Depot locations.

I washed the walls five times, I pried the mirrors off, I painted:

Same corner, folks. Veni, vidi, vici!

But wait! There’s more! What about the derelict pickup truck in the driveway?

Yes, that one. The one we had to push back several yards in order to close the gates to the back yard (which we were attempting to secure for Shelley’s use).

I solicited advice from my friend Tony shortly before Operation Derelict Truck Push because I foresaw difficulty. Extreme difficulty. And he’s the sort of person who would know what to do with a derelict truck that had been sitting in the driveway for so many years that it had sunk three inches into the asphalt, creating its own wheel wells.

Me: So, uh, Tony, what’s your advice? I mean, supposing we can overcome the inertia of this moribund truck that has sunk under its own weight into the driveway and has four semi-flat tires?

Tony (authoritatively): Well, the main thing in these situations is not to lose control of the truck.

Tony is a wise man, a truth that was only reinforced some minutes later when the now-freed truck began to roll with increasing momentum and speed down the driveway toward a parked car.

Imagine the good-natured fun and high-jinks as I tore through the thicket of brush on the driver’s side of the truck, gripped the driver’s side door handle and—now bleeding from various cuts and scratches—ran screaming alongside the truck as it barrelled driverless down the sloping driveway!

When I could leap inside and pull on the emergency brake, disaster was narrowly averted. See how just living here provides a high-adrenaline existence of constant danger and adventure? You don’t get that with just any rental property!

While we’re talking about things outside the house itself, it bears mention that when we moved in, the back yard was overgrown in thigh-high weeds

that Alex was forced—in a truly 19th-century afternoon—to cut down with a scythe. It was just like in Anna Karenina when Levin goes out to mow with his serfs.

Inconveniently, however, we have no serfs.

But I feel satisfied that after all that work, we’ve created an inviting and pleasant home environment. Otherwise, why would all these balls of Trekking keep following me home from Woolcott?

They know a good home when they see one.

And let’s look on the bright side. If I run out of space for my stash in the house, there’s plenty of room. In the cab. Of the truck we had to push.

I got all fired up about making my own ribbon yarn this past weekend, went up to the studio, and dove right in.  I found some brocade fabric living on a shelf and the instructions for making one’s own bias tape (aka yarn) and started sewing.

I used a French seam, in the hopes that it would discourage ravelling on the on-grain cut edges.

 

So basically, you cut a largish square of fabric, cut it in half along the diagonal, and then sew the straight grain edges to one another.  You end up with a tube of fabric which you cut around and around on the bias to create bias tape, or, for the purposes of our discussion, ribbon yarn.

Obviously, the bigger the square, the more yards of yarn you would end up with.  Of course, this is partially governed by the width of your fabric, or in my case the length of fabric yardage that was on the shelf to begin with.  It’s a little bit time consuming, but fairly simple really.

 

I wound up my yarn, taking care to keep it flat.

 

After rummaging around in the stash to find a likely candidate for a coordinating, much lighter weight yarn, I came up with some purple angora blend.  I had unravelled this yarn from a thrift store sweater some time ago, and then, because it was so extraordinarily thin, plied it on the wheel into a 3-ply yarn.  (OK, I realize I am starting to sound somewhat nuts–I suppose this would be the “pathological” part of the post.)

I started out using size 13 needles, and after 8 inches or so realized that the lace wasn’t looking as scribbly as I wanted it to.  So I ripped.  Maybe not such a good idea.  The ribbon that I ripped out pretty much fell to pieces:  it got very frayed and the seams just fell apart.

I began again with size 19 needles.

 

Much better.  It’s not particularly easy to deal with, though.  If I were to do it again (which I might), I’d change a few things.

1. Use a less slinky, less ravelly fabric.  This brocade is prone to just ravelling away under your hands.  There must be a happy medium somewhere between a fabric that has a nice drapey hand but isn’t going to create fringe when you breathe on it.

2. Cut the strip a little wider.  I aimed for 3/4 inch; maybe 1 inch would be better.

3. I’m not sure the French seam was really necessary.  Perhaps a straight stitch next to a zigzag would be sufficient.

I still see lots of possibilities here.  Oh, I’m crafty, all right.