Knit Sisters

Way back in December, Thea tagged me for the “Six Weird Things About Yourself” meme. Confession: I kind of actively “forgot” about being tagged, not out of malice, but simply because I’m no great fan of memes.

So sue me.

But today I figured, well, no harm in being a sport. And since pretty much every other knitting blogger has already done this little quiz, I think I can feel perfectly justified in not tagging anyone else. The madness will end with me.

And that’s the way I like it.

I’m also going to take the liberty of freely “interpreting” this request because (a) I’m late in responding so I feel I owe Thea a little extra and (b) I was never quite like the other children anyway, so weirdness is a natural part of the package. So I’d like to coopt and rename this meme, “Things about Me: A Baker’s Dozen”:

Thing 1. I can be a little pedantic, e.g., “Before one can list ‘weird’ things about oneself, one must first define precisely what is meant by the term ‘weird’ in this particular context.”

In my defense, almost all academics I know are like this to some degree. I cite, for instance, my friend Nasser, with whom I had the following conversation at a party:

Nasser: Unfortunately, you really are kind of neurotic.

Nasser: Perhaps. But what is so often overlooked in the comparative, proverbial discourse about the pot and the kettle is the veracity of the pot’s assertion. Regardless of the state of the pot, the kettle is, most assuredly, black!

See what I mean?

Thing 2. My favorite book is Anna Karenina and I went through a phase during which I would read it once a year, around the end of March.

I also went through a phase like that with Beowulf, another great piece of literature that remains a favorite, but as far as I can tell, only with me.

Thing 3. I love both to run (particularly outdoors and with my dog) and to lift weights. In the past two days, I have done both. Overdone both, in fact, which is why I currently reek of IcyHot.

When I was thirty-two, however, I was afflicted with a serious and completely unexpected pulmonary illness. I remember lying in bed during the worst six weeks of it thinking, “I’ll never run or go to the gym again.”

The recovery timeline was about two years, like a 19th-century malady but sadly without the spa time that was de rigeur in the actual 19th century. I still have reduced lung capacity, a circumstance that will probably never fully correct itself, but I am able to run! What seemed a given before now seems like a gift.

In a way I could never have expected, everything in my life became more vivid and more blessed than it had been before my illness.

Thing 4. I once dated a guy who sincerely believed that he was the reincarnation of Sir Walter Raleigh. He told me that on our third date. That was our last date.

Thing 5. My favorite cartoon of virtually all time ran in The New Yorker about three years ago and was drawn by B.E. Kaplan. It features two ducks sitting on the surface of a pond together, one of whom looks exhausted and downcast. In the caption, his duck chum says, “Maybe you should ask yourself why you’re inviting all of this duck hunting into your life right now.”

Thing 6. Sometimes there’s a hell of a lot of duck hunting in my life.

Thing 7. I love my dog all out of proportion. When Shelley dies, I fear that I will take to my bed. At least until someone has the presence of mind to get a puppy, plop it on my chest, as say, “She’s yours. You better get up and train her or she’ll be a hellion.”

Thing 8. Before I met Alex, I experienced a romantic disaster of such heart-rending magnitude that I quietly and without announcing it to anyone decided that I was finished with men. I recalled Vronsky’s dramatic declaration after Anna’s death in—you guessed it—Anna Karenina: “I may be of some good as a soldier, but I’m finished as a man!”

Laugh it up all you want, but I felt his pain. I abandoned my rather indulgent life in NYC and I went to graduate school in California with the plan of becoming my own species of scholar/nun and living a simple, ascetic life. Wearing a lot of brown. Maybe shaving my head. Trading in my hot pink spike heels for Birckenstocks and thick socks. Exchanging my NYC club-hopping ways for the silence of the library. I would be some good perhaps as a scholar, but I was finished as a woman!

None of that worked out. It was like trying to put a flamingo into a chicken coop.

Thing 9. The existence of Alex and his presence in my life comes as a constant, pleasurable shock to me. I’ve known him for almost five years and he still seems perfect. I often think that I could not possibly adore him this much if I had found him earlier in my life.

Thing 10. It is difficult for me to tell him how much I adore him as often as I should because in the marrow of my bones, I’m a hardcore WASP. The WASP hardcore does not express feelings.

We mix martinis and get heart disease.

Thing 11. Relatedly, I have a Calvinist streak about a mile wide, but I make every effort to hide it. Sometimes I’m successful. This aspect of my temperament is constantly at war with my Blahnik-wearing, club-hopping, overspending, sybaritic side.

This tension in my personality manifests itself as a palpable restlessness that has plagued me all my life, although I think the edges of that restlessness have rounded off as I’ve gotten older.

Thing 12. When I lived in NYC—seven whole years—I never knit a stitch. It didn’t seem like a knitting town to me. I guess.

Thing 13. If I had known how much fun it was going to be to have a blog, I would have started one a lot earlier.

I have good news and I have bad news. Bad news first: you’re stuck with me this week because Sarah is taking a little well-earned vacation from the blog. What? Yes, you can be excused to go mix yourself a cocktail. Even if it is 9 a.m. where you are.

The good news is that I’ve planned an exciting week for us, full of fun and hi-jinks! Or some reasonable facsimile thereof. Hold onto your proverbial hats! Or pull up your socks. (Hmm. A particular set of thematic resonances has caused the phrase, “It’s too late to save your shoes,” to pop to mind, but I feel almost certain that it has no place here. Ahem.)

Time out of mind is progressing nicely:

Yessir, that’s my baby!

He’s even pretty when you get really close to him, which is more than can be said for most people:

No sir, don’t mean maybe!

While Icarus was my irrepressible bad boy, Time is turning out to be meditative and laid back and mellow. I found him hanging out with my Om necklace the other day, in fact.

Om shanti shanti shanti…

While Time is off in the other room chanting in Sanskrit, let’s talk. I would like to solicit your opinions, if I may. Certain design decisions regarding Time have…how to put this delicately?…not been made. Yes, it’s true. I swatched, I made a few calculations, I cast on, and I cast off! For unknown realms!

Here be dragons: I have not made any final decision about Time’s neckline. And although it may be somewhat ethically questionable to make such a momentous decision behind his back, especially given that it will have such a huge impact on his life and his sense of style and, possibly, his yoga practice, I’m afraid Time’s failure to speak out on the subject has left the matter entirely in my hands.

And now yours. I initially thought a turtleneck would be nice, until I realized that I was working with Malabrigo. You make a turtleneck outta Malabrigo, you make a sweater that—given the current pace of global warming—will be literally unwearable anywhere on this planet within eight years. An inconvenient truth.

The current thinking (and I should add here that this reflects the collected wit and wisdom of a quartet of Woolcott employees: me, the remarkable Kat, the delightful Kerry, and the incomparable Sean) favors a modification of my original, sweltering, nightmarish vision: a funnel-neck (or mock turtleneck) with cable continuity.

But there are other possibilities, of course. And admittedly, we were all hopped up on Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and chocolate chip muffins when we last discussed this, and knitters will say anything after you get a couple of chocolate chip muffins in them. In fact, some attorneys consider knitters no longer capable of giving informed consent under extreme conditions of “muffin inebriation.” Coffee does not ameliorate the impairment, contrary to popular belief.

So about that neckline. What say you all?

In a concerted effort to keep Resolution No. Seven, I have gotten a start on my self-designed sweater.

Actually, it’s less an act of “design” than it is of “bricolage.” In other words, much though I LOVE the way this sweater is turning out (so far), I never had a great creative vision that came to me from Her Kind and Merciful Highness, the Knitting Goddess. I decided that kind of inspiration was, in fact, not forthcoming. I understand my limits, people.

Truly I say unto you, this understanding is a portion of wisdom.

At the same time, it is a portion of wisdom to give new things the old “college try!” Rah, rah, go state! So ever the classic bricoleur, I took some stuff that was ready-to-hand and rejiggered those things. Heavy, heavy assists are coming from Ann Budd, Fiona Ellis, and “my people” at Malabrigo:

In the beginning, there was the Malabrigo. The ten skeins of Malabrigo in scarlet, crying out to be a sweater.

Yarn in hand, my tinkerer’s imagination was fired by Fiona Ellis’s baby sweater in Inspired Cable Knits:

The wonderful “Ripples in time.”

I adore this miniature sweater and the cables it combines, but clearly if I was going to make a similar one for myself, certain scale issues would have to be tackled. Ahem.

Enter Ann Budd. Honestly, I think The Knitter’s Handy Book of Sweater Patterns is an excessively modest title for a book like this. I’d say a book that allows the design-and-mathematically-challenged knitter (Moi? Oui, moi.) to make her dream sweater is way beyond “handy.”

Miraculous, more like. Here’s what I have so far:

Close-up of cables:

In honor of Fiona Ellis and her original sweater’s homage to time, I have decided to call my sweater “Time out of mind,” yet another act of bricolage since this phrase was shamelessly and blatantly robbed from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Dirge without Music”:

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground./So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind…

So it is, so it will be.

Have a lovely weekend, everyone!

“The best thing for being sad…is to learn something.  That is the only thing that never fails.”

                                           T. H. White   The Once and Future King

This is one of our mother’s favorite quotes, and now and then it runs through my mind like a mantra.

With this in mind, then, I decided to “learn” a new wool this evening.  This is the Suffolk lambswool that was given to me by my friend John last summer.  I washed all the wool over the summer, and it’s been sitting in a big bag upstairs in the stash since then, patiently awaiting my attention.

It has a pretty short staple, too short to comb on the 5-pitch combs, so I’m using my double pitch handheld combs here.

                                            Laying the fiber on the comb.

                              First pass with the comb.

                                        Second pass.

                                            Third pass.

                                           Fourth and final pass.

                                          Starting to pull the sliver off the combs.

                                             Pulling the last of the fiber off the combs.  The very short ends are left behind on the comb.

 

                                               Spinning.

Perhaps if I can learn enough new things, this sadness too shall pass away.  

I refer you to Resolution No. Nine of my original resolutions list, something along the lines of doing foolish things and doing them with enthusiasm.

And maybe even completing them:

To me, that’s a nice, neutral glove.

The gloves strike a rare ladylike pose:

Specs, in case you wish to duplicate my folly:
1 ball Trekking XXL in colorway 131,
2 24″ circular needles, U.S. size 1,
2 jazzy buttons,
1 pattern from Not Just More Socks.

I now know that pattern like the, well…

back of my hand.

Since doing foolish things with enthusiasm is not mutually exclusive with admitting that, as the Reagan Administration used to so skillfullly put it, “mistakes were made,” I will now review the list of things I would have done differently.

1. Although it isn’t that obvious in the photos, the lower part of the hand is somewhat too big for me and the gloves are therefore rather ill-fitting. All of this even though the pattern claims to be sized for a women’s medium! I would have thought my hands were nothing if not medium, but perhaps I have been laboring under a delusion all these years. Anyway, if I did it again, I’d either reduce the number of stitches I cast on or knit the pattern using U.S. size 0s.

2. We have previously discussed my struggle with the mitten top. Nothing further shall ever be said on this subject. If you bring it up, I will deny that it ever happened.

3. I cast off a couple of the fingers while watching rather tense parts of the BBC’s production of Smiley’s People. Do not try this at home. You’ll regret it the first time you wear the gloves and your index finger turns purple from reduced circulation. Then you’ll have to reknit those fingers while “hanging loose,” something not all of us are really that good at doing, in order to avoid gangrene. Ugly.

I am nonetheless pleased with the unabashed riotousness of the colorway,

Brother, can you spare a dime?

and the general unconventionality of the finished article.

Unhappily, I have bad news to report. Coming on the heels of the sudden removal of our derelict truck—from which we have, as you can imagine, barely recovered—the revelation that Shelley had been “invited to leave” her graduate program in paleontology came as a terrible blow.

My advisor never liked me.

I am zipping along (well, relatively speaking) on the Handsome Triangle shawl, despite having had a stunningly bad day on Saturday and spending most of the day in tears.  If I sound like I am making a shameless play for sympathy–well, I guess I am.  Nevertheless, I knitted through my tears and made some real strides.

 

I think this will be really beautiful when it’s all done and blocked.  I am planning to put the ruffled edging on it, like the Handsome Triangle shawl pictured in the very back of the book.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the shawls I have knitted, what I like about them, and when and how I wear them.  One of the ones I have worn most is the Kimono shawl (I think that’s what it’s called) out of Cheryl Oberle’s Folk Shawls.  (This is a terrific book, by the way, that I recommend to anyone who is interested in knitting shawls.  She includes a great range of projects, and they are all gorgeous.)  Anyway, I made this shawl out of a laceweight cotton/silk that I bought from Elann many moons ago.  I just kept knitting on the durned thing until it was tremendously long, but as it turns out, that’s one of the things I like about it.  It’s long enough to wrap around you more than once, and the cotton/silk yarn is also fine and drapey enough to be wound around your neck like a giant scarf.

 

A detail of the lace pattern:

 

Another long rectangular stole that I own was not knitted by me, but was made by and given to me by my own dear sister.  This is from a Knitty pattern, and the yarn is 100% silk.  This stole is much heavier than the one above, and it has a wonderful drape and flow when worn.  (Of course, it goes without saying that the workmanship is superb, as well.) 

 

Diane asked if I had a shawl pin that I wear with my shawls, and I do, indeed.  It is a turquoise pin from Designs by Romi, and it is truly beautiful.  I get compliments on it whenever I wear it.  In this photo, you can see it adorning the front of my Nicola cardigan. 

 

I usually do wear a pin with the burgundy silk stole, because I find that it really helps it stay in place.  The nice thing about the Designs by Romi pins is that they are sharp enough to be pinned through the shawl to the clothing or even a bra strap beneath.

But what I like most about wearing my shawls?  The romantic heroine/glamourpuss feeling I get when I wrap up in one of them.  At these times, I feel confident that I really can be the star of my own life.

I regret to inform you that the derelict truck is no longer with us. As is so often the case, he hung on through the holidays and saw in the New Year with us, only to be cruelly and suddenly taken from us in the early, bleak days of January.

Zeno meditates upon the grievous loss of our derelict truck, which sat for so long just outside this very window, the window where now there is but a void!

The derelict truck lived a good life, and an exceptionally long one—much longer than most would have predicted or, in some cases, even wished—although in his declining years his mobility, which indeed had meant everything to him, became extremely limited. And yet he never complained, even as his tires sank into the asphalt and all of his oil leaked out onto the driveway.

Or onto Zeno’s back when the cat took shelter under his rusting engine, which was nearly every day. In jest, the derelict truck once suggested that Zeno had absorbed so much oil into his fur that he almost qualified as an alternative energy source. But we knew that under that gruff, rusted exterior and behind the joking suggestions that we convert Zeno into heat or fuel, the derelict truck truly loved his kitty friend.

Exactly the way we all do.

I am SO still in the anger phase…

Born circa 1980, the derelict truck is survived by his best friend Zeno, of the home, by some of his own tires, of the garage, and by his loving family Ellen, Alex, and Shelley, also of the home.

I’ve seen all I can bear.

“Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang…”

Your time with us was too short, but we take comfort in the sure knowledge that you have passed on to your reward, and are now providing transportation for James Brown and Gerald Ford on that Great Highway in the sky.

Rest in peace, derelict truck.

I’ve been working diligently away on the Handsome Triangle shawl.  However, like Icarus before her, she really doesn’t show that much progress in photos.  That didn’t stop me from taking one, though.

 

Also, like all lace, she looks quite unpromising unblocked–all shrivelled up.

When I started knitting again as an adult, and by that I mean really knitting–always having more than one project going, thinking about knitting when I wasn’t actively knitting, and most of all, stashing–I got back into it with the purchase of Shawls and Scarves: The Best of Knitter’s Magazine.  I spent many happy hours looking at and reading that book, and dreaming of the beautiful lace shawls that I would make.  I’m a bit embarrassed to say that in actuality I only knit one scarf out of the book.  It served me as more of a “gateway” book, really.

I did knit this variation of Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Pi shawl, though.  (Instructions for the basic Pi shawl can be found in Shawls and Scarves.)

 

A detail:

 

I made this shawl out of handspun which I purchased on Ebay, before I knew anything about handspun.  It’s not bad yarn, by any means, but it’s alpaca which has a lot of guard hair in it, which makes it pretty rough to the touch.  It’s very warm, though.

Now I own many more lace knitting books, and about a year ago I finished this Faroese shawl out of Stahman’s Shawls and Scarves. 

 

An edging detail:

 

I highly recommend this book if you have any interest in shawl-making at all.  This is the shawl that I wear most, because it’s so warm and substantial, and because it stays on the shoulders better than most shawls.  (A design feature of Faroese shawls.)  The circular shawl above, for instance, tends to slide right off your shoulders if you move at all, which, let’s face it, is pretty hard not to do in everyday life.

Next week:  A discussion of rectangular shawls (or stoles, depending on which word you like better).

I told you all that the Jordana Paige knitting satchel was going to change my life. And how! Look what crawled up out of that bag today:

The first acid green Trekking XXL glove makes it appearance on the great stage of life!

Close-up:

That button was a stroke of genius for which I have my friend Kat to thank.

And finally, on the hand:

I am only carrying on and behaving so shamelessly triumphal about this single glove, whose mate is currently on the needles, because it turned out to be more difficult to complete than I thought.

That mitten top? The convertible piece? I knitted that sucker three times. Third one was a charm, but the first two were complete bollocks.

And why? Simple. After knitting the cuff and hand according to the pattern instructions and finding it a tad large for me, I lost faith in the pattern and decided to strike out on my own. I felt I knew better.

After two attempts, both of which resulted in a mitten top that was painfully short, I ripped it back for the second time and—now chastened and at least moderately wiser—reknitted it…according to the instructions.

You know what they say: if all else fails, read the directions!

Sometimes I just have to do things my own way, even if they are destined for disaster. I am reminded of an incident when I was a very small child—maybe three or four—involving an ice cream cone. I felt at the time that it was overly hidebound and unimaginative always to approach the ice cream cone from the top, where the ice cream sits. Why not, I thought, eat the cone first? What a brilliant innovation!

My father tried to tell me that it might not be the best idea. I felt I knew better.

I started eating from the bottom of the cone. Within a few seconds, the ice cream had melted enough to slip through the shattered ruin of the cone and land with a plop on the sidewalk. But not before I myself had become fully enrobed in chocolate ice cream.

I learned my lesson about ice cream cones, yessirree! I never did that again.

But as you can plainly see, the unquenchable spirit of stubborn refusal to see sense, the mulish conviction that the wheel must be reinvented, the obstinate compulsion to climb the mountain just because it is there…or if it is not there, to build the mountain, by God, and then climb it because it’s there now—they can’t take that away from me!

Now, back to that second glove…

Oh, and one more thing. Alex asked me to direct you here if you need a laugh. Naturally, the suggestion comes from him because, as we have learned recently from Christopher Hitchens, women aren’t funny. I was going to write something in response to the Hitchens article, but then I decided that even the minimal intellectual effort I’d need to put into dismantling his woolly-minded “argument” was…beneath me, frankly. Besides, I’m obviously far too busy cracking jokes.

So in lieu of a tedious rebuttal, I’ve decided that it would be entirely more fitting to make my point by rewriting my great-grandfather’s favorite joke:

A woman walks into the editorial offices of Vanity Fair and steps up to the magazine’s editor. “When,” she asks, “will the last misogynist, intellectually shallow, essentializing article that reduces women to nothing more than incubators on legs by means of a windy ‘Just-So’ story cloaked in sloppy, psuedo-scientific reasoning be published by the mainstream press in this country?”

The editor replies, “You should live so long!”

Life is short, and crap is long. And now, once again, back to that second glove…

I finished the sherbet socks and have since worn them twice (and washed them once).  Here’s a shot of them adorning my feet–I call this “Socks with Dog Butt.”

 

And a closeup:

 

As it turns out, I did have enough yarn to finish both socks, thus saving me a painful stash dive for some sort of mismatched odds and ends to finish the second toe.  Whew.  This also bodes well for the remaining 400 several balls of this yarn that I have in the stash.  Now I know I can actually get two full socks out of each ball.  I’ll tell you, I slept more soundly this weekend knowing that.

Unfortunately for my other Christmas break projects, I too have succumbed to the siren song of a new project.  I started the “Handsome Triangle” shawl out of Victorian Lace Today last night.  I’m using the fuchsia merino/cashmere that Ellen sent me in her luxury fiber care package last month.  So far, it’s shaping up nicely.

I also (somehow, I just don’t know how it could have happened) started spinning the brown double-coated fleece the other night.  This is the undercoat, and my goal is a laceweight yarn.  Some of the shawls in the Victorian Lace book are made out of the author’s own handspun yarn, and they are truly beautiful.  That inspired me to spin one of my naturally-colored fleeces into a laceweight yarn, and I think a shawl made out of this fleece would be gorgeous.

 

Oh, yeah, and I also started a new pair of socks for Rob.  I’m almost to the heel on the first one, but I didn’t take a picture, since they’re a bit–um, how shall I say?–boring.  You know, manly colors and all that.  But they’re going fast, because Rob likes his socks quite plain.  It’s actually sort of nice to have something mindless, small, and portable to take with me when I leave the house.

Tomorrow, it’s back to work for me.  All good things must come to an end.

My best wishes for a very happy new year to you all!