Knit Sisters

True to form, Icarus was my problem child to the bitter, bitter end. As promised, I finished him yesterday, but closure without tears? It was simply not to be.

But first, we shall discuss the fun part of the weekend!

Saturday afternoon Alex and I hit the Harvard-Yale Game, a.k.a. “The Big Game,” although I’ll have you know that in California “The Big Game” is between Berkeley and Stanford, so “The Big Game” is geographically relative, you see, and—as we would say in the academy—this “Big Game” signifier has no stable relationship to the signified…oh, wait…crap, it does. No matter where it happpens, what is signified, in fact, is an afternoon during which the American pseudo-aristocracy gets smashed on sangria and Heineken while wearing insignia gear, reliving their more-or-less distant youth, and verbally abusing people exactly like themselves who happen to have gone to another school.

Like so much that human beings do, it is the triumph of pure reason and good clean fun. Hoo-hah!

We never made it to the actual game, but we enjoyed the tailgate party greatly because we got to see our delightful friend, the Incomparable Kate—up from D.C. for the occasion—and meet her lovely mother and sister.

The Balersteins in full chat mode. (Photo courtesy of the Incomparable Kate.)

So far, a great weekend! The trouble began when we returned home and I decided to power through the last 2.5 rows of Icarus.

In an attempt to ease the pain of 550+ stitch rows, I turned on PBS. Soon Zeno had joined me to watch a semi-fascinating documentary program on Lee Harvey Oswald, a show which attempted to answer one of the age-old questions that still plague us today: Was Lee Harvey Oswald part of a conspiracy?

Ever since I was a little kitten, I’ve believed that Oswald acted alone.

Other questions in this category, by the way, include:
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Did he fall or was he pushed?
What puts the “ape” in “apricot”?
What does she got that I ain’t got?
Shaken or stirred?

Zeno was remarkably attentive to the Oswald documentary, which makes me suspect that he is hatching his own plot to assassinate the president.

But then just as Oswald got his fateful job at the Texas School Book Depository…tragedy struck. Yes, with only two-thirds of the bind-off remaining, I ran out of yarn. Frankly, if someone had chosen to assassinate me at that moment, I might have regarded it as a tender mercy.

Once I had recovered my equilibrium, however, I realized that solutions that didn’t involve bullets might be in the offing.

I trundled off to Woolcott as soon as it opened on Sunday afternoon. My first stab at a remedy went something like this:

Kidsilk Spray in a deeper set of pinks. What’s not to like?

Lots, as it turns out. I bound off about 50 stitches, took a look, and realized to my horror that a beautiful handcrafted item had just been turned into a “Loving-Hands-at-Home” monstrosity. The darker burgundy was lovely, but where it shaded into a loud fuschia, it fought with Icarus’s dusty pink and looked as garish and out of place as a man wearing a clown suit in a cathedral.

For the second time, I tinked back a bind-off in mohair. Only the fact that I was in a public place kept me from howling, weeping, and rending my garments.

In defeat, I trudged back to Woolcott. This time, relief and succor presented itself in the form of a ball of Kidsilk Haze in a deep chocolate brown shade the Rowan folk call “Villain.” Misnomer. This yarn was no villain! It was my savior:

Alchemy Haiku and Kidsilk Haze. Two great laceweight mohairs that look great together!

Pale strawberry feathers with a chocolate edge.

A little stitch detail.

I gotta tell you, although I know that the propensity to rationalize in disastrous circumstances is great, I really am convinced that this shawl looks better with a darker edge than it would in all one color. I am just in love with the contrast and definition that “Villain” provides. Besides, who doesn’t love an outlaw?

And please. This is Icarus. We all know darn well that if you fly too near the sun, you’re gonna singe the tips of your feathers.

Back on Wednesday with a blocked and finished object! The excitement Chez Mad Dog is almost too great to contain!

I felted the purple and pink tote bag this morning.  Here’s how she turned out:

 

Although I have a front-loading washing machine, and there has been much discussion among knitters I know about felting items in a front-loader, I myself have had no problems at all getting things to felt in my washer.  In fact, even though various instructions you read would have you open the washer from time to time throughout the cycle, I blithely throw everything in (everything being the item to be felted and some towels or rags or something), set the washer on “hot wash, cold rinse,” close the door, push the button, and walk away, only to return when the washer has gone through its complete cycle, including the spin cycle.  I realize that this demonstrates a great deal of faith on my part, but so far it’s worked out fine, and I’ve made a number of different felted things.  (Ask Ellen for a picture of Zeno’s cat bed.)

Here’s a closer view:

 

Oh, and, by the way, I was wrong about the two rows of applied I-cord at the top of this thing.  There were three rows.  Enough said. 

Hugo says:

 

“Um, no offense, Mom, but I don’t really care about your felted bag.  Can’t you take me for a little walk?”

Melinda asked about my 5-pitch combs.  You can read more about them and see pictures here and here.  They are some of my most heavily-used tools.  I really don’t use my hand-cards since I acquired and learned how to use the combs.  Their great beauty is that they can take a dirty, messy fleece (like the one I pictured on Wednesday) and turn it into something beautiful.  It’s really somewhat addictive–seeing what’s going to come out of the combs at the end of the process.

Monica, I do think the guard hair would look great dyed in some jewel-like color.  I hadn’t thought of that–thanks for the suggestion!

Yesterday, after three hours of writing (on a fellowship application and my dissertation, of course…because heaven knows I certainly would never “waste” the morning by working on a humorous and perhaps-slightly-embellished memoir about a woman who is, ahem, not in her “first youth” but who nonetheless decides to pack up her trusty dog in an old jalopy and go to California for graduate school where countless hilarious misadventures occur, nearly all involving some combination of organic kale, Bikram yoga, surfing lessons, VW vans converted to run on vegetable oil, Oakland-based muggers, paradoxically hostile peace activists, and relentless, soul-destroying homesickness for New York City…), and five hours at Woolcott, I really needed some physical activity.

Just maybe not quite as much physical activity as I actually got.

The heart has its reasons that reason cannot know, and once I got to the gym, my heart reasoned that I could do each and every one of my weight-lifting exercises with more weight. You know, 2. 5 pounds here and there. What could be the harm?

As I did these curls and presses and whatnot there in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirrors in that Temple of Narcissism that is the gym, I thought, “Hmm, my arms really look quite nice. Good definition there, girl!”

Pride, as you know, is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Sometimes also known as Vanity. And pride, furthermore, goeth before a fall.

My arms, so powerful yesterday, are refusing to goeth anywhere today, including above my head. Well, okay, they will goeth, but they will not goeth gladly.

The big question is: will I go to the gym this evening and work through the pain? Or will I indulge in another of the Seven Deadlies—Sloth? Aided by Netflix and PopSecret brand microwave corn?

Or—even worse—will I decide to spend a week “working through” the Seven Deadly Sins instead of working on my dissertation (“…and tune in tomorrow when we’ll be doing…Wrath!”)?

Only time will tell. In the meantime, I am not so crippled that I can’t knit the final rows of Icarus:

She could only ignore my siren song for so long, people, before she surrendered to my seductive call.

The end is nigh, my friends. Eight rows and then, hallelujah, I shall be delivered!

I have a date with my blocking wires this weekend. Expect the full report on Monday…

I cast on for the felted tote bag Monday night, after posting and while watching Studio 60.  (A good show, by the way.)  Here’s my progress thus far:

 

The nice thing about knitting things that are to be felted is that they grow quickly, since they’re knit at a loose gauge on large needles.  It doesn’t bear thinking about, though, that after the expanse of stockinette, this bag ends with a double row of applied I-cord.  And then you knit separate I-cord handles.  We all know how I feel about I-cord.  We won’t go there again. 

Step away from the knitting needles and no one needs to get hurt. 

I’ve also been combing a new fleece.  It’s a gorgeous brown color, and it’s from a double-coated breed, although I don’t know which breed it is.  It’s also really dirty and has lots of vegetable matter (vm) in it.

 

Here’s a closeup:

 

The great thing about the 5-pitch combs is that they take out all that dirt and vm and all you’re left with is beautiful fiber to spin.

 

I’m pulling out the guard hair (the longer, coarser coat of the two) as a separate roving, or at least as much of it as humanly possible.  Then I pull the shorter undercoat into another roving.  The guard hair roving is on the left in the picture above, with the undercoat on the right.  You can get a little bit of an idea of how different these two fibers are from the photo, but to get a true idea you have to feel them.  The guard hair is so much coarser than the undercoat, it’s amazing that they come from the same fleece.

I don’t have any notion at this point of how I’m going to spin this fiber.  Right now I’m just enjoying the process.

In spite of the fact that the weather in the Boston area makes you feel like you’ve accidentally walked onto the set of Blade Runner, I am pleased to be back home.

I had a wonderful time in Vancouver, Berkeley, and Missouri, but it is nice to be back here Chez Mad Dog once again!

I even have a finished object to show for my time away:

Please simply ignore the hair-don’t I am sporting here. I obviously had a visit from the Hair Fairy earlier in the day. Actually, I also look a little simple in this photo, don’t I? Well, I assure you that I’m smarter than I look here. Which admittedly isn’t saying much.

In my absence, interesting developments had occurred Chez Mad Dog. For instance, my winter Interweave had arrived. Whoo hoo!:

Pictured here with a delightful ceramic doo-hickey that my father-in-law gave me while I was in California. I’m not sure what it is, but I like it very much. Thank you, Jeff!

And, in a completely unprecedented occurrence, Shelley and Zeno were being more or less filial in their comportment toward one another:

And the lion shall lie down with the lamb…

If you’d turn on the heat, fool, we wouldn’t have to sit this close together. Whaddya think this is, July?

Don’t imagine, however, that Zeno has changed one iota since I last saw him. No sirree.

When you die, I’m gonna gnaw off your ears.

He gave me a look when I got home on Sunday night, a look that said, “Oh, you’re back? I had been hoping that you had drowned.”

I’ll never understand why we habour this charmless creature.

We also have new upstairs neighbors, which comes as rather a shock since that apartment has been unoccupied for eighteen months. Why? Take a gander at the “before” pictures of our apartment, extrapolate, and you got yer answer.

I met the primary tenant, whose name is Anya, and she seems like a lovely person, a person furthermore intent upon improving the general appearance of the property. She has already insisted that she will strong-arm cajole Mr. Lee into getting rid of the derelict truck.

Many are the times that I myself have threatened to have the derelict truck towed away and dumped into the Charles River or to dismantle it piece by piece with my bare hands and put its parts out over a period of weeks for the garbage collectors, and yet I find the newly-probable prospect of its demise a strangely melancholy thought.

I’ve grown accustomed to its rusting, hulking presence outside my office window and the way that the cat will sit on its hood for hours meowing at me. I’ve come to admire the way that snow drifts into its cab through a broken window during the winter storms. The way the extra tires in the back are steadily decomposing as the weeks, months, and years pass. The way that upstanding, decent neighbors stop and shake their heads in horror and disbelief at this rotting vehicle that has been in the driveway for a decade.

It’s hard to imagine Chez Mad Dog without its characteristic derelict truck. So much of the romance will be taken from us! It is a derelict truck, yes, but it’s our derelict truck.

Perversely, I am unsettled by Anya’s take-charge attitude about getting rid of my busted-down truck. I mean, who does she think she is?

To just come in here and start talking big about getting rid of a perfectly useless truck that is an eyesore and probably a petrochemical hazard and that is furthermore sinking into the driveway slowly and inexorably?

I mean, really.

But seriously, I was sort of planning to use that truck for storing excess stash. You know, if it came to that. And it will come to that, dear friends. This you know as well as I. What, after all, is a LYS job for if not for mad, exuberant stashing?

Yet clearly, under this new regime, the derelict truck’s days are numbered. The truck we had to push will soon be no more. I will have to think of alternate stash annexes around the house. I will be forced to bid my defunct truck a tearful farewell and enter the sanitized world of people who do not harbour decomposing vehicles on their property.

Rest in peace, Derelict Truck. May we meet again in that great junkyard in the sky.

To start feeling frantic about Christmas knitting.  (And baking, as well, but perhaps that’s another post.)

Here’s what I have in my lineup:

1.  A pair of cabled gauntlets, in this yarn:

Filatura di Crosa “Zara” merino wool.  Wonderfully soft. 

(The above-mentioned cabled gauntlets are actually the “secret project” I was working on several weeks ago.  I submitted the design to Knitty, and it was rejected.  Oh, well.  The pattern is soon to be offered on the blog, though.  So there, Knitty!  Stick that in your pipe and smoke it!)

2.  A Moebius scarf, from this pattern:

 

And out of this yarn:

(The observant among you will note that this yarn has been pictured on the blog before.  Seems I’ve figured out what to do with it.)

3.  A felted tote bag from a pattern by Janet Scanlon of Knitkit out of purple and salmon-pink wool. 

4.  An as-yet-undetermined gift for a male relative.  Something manly, soft, and quick to knit.  Any ideas?

I realize that even this relatively minuscule amount of gift knitting flies directly in the face of my resolve to knit only for myself this year, but I am weak.  Weak.  (Plus I already own all this yarn, so I can make these gifts for free.  Thus saving enough money to buy more yarn and fiber.)  And a handmade gift always means more, right?

Why, no, I haven’t cast on for any of these projects.  Thanks for asking! 

Holiday baking has not yet been addressed.  Let the anxiety joy of the holiday season begin!

The KnitSisters, in a rare moment together, enjoying one another’s company,

chowing down on some Mexican food,

Olé!

relishing a Midwestern specialty, the bottomless cup of Pepsi-Cola,

Good! And good for you!

and enjoying treasured moments with family:

Since we’re together and able to confer, we have tablulated the votes for our contest entrants and it looks like Deb has come out ahead, but only by a nose. We have to say, though, that this was a very close contest, almost too close to call.

Both designs were beautiful, each in its own way. To give each of the winners some choice in her prize, we have decided to award the handspun in the following manner: Deb will have first choice among the three kinds of yarn and then Diane will be able to pick from the remaining two.

Once again, here is the choice of prizes:

The cabled yarn.

The tufted and shiny yarn.

The wool-mohair yarn.

Last but not least, honorable mentions go to Lorinda and Monica, for explaining a very bad translation from the Russian that contained the unusual word “besom.” See this post for more on that and for their clever responses.

Deb and Diane, be in touch with Sarah with your choices and your contact information.

Congratulations to our winners! Happy knitting and designing to all!

First, by popular demand, I have written up the pattern for the Wildflowers Scarf:

You may find it for free right here! It will also soon be available on the sidebar under “Free Patterns.”

For the origins of this scarf, here’s the backstory. It came out of a moment of weakness, you see.

Sarah and I, now reunited in Missouri, will be announcing the contest winners tomorrow. So stay tuned!

Meanwhile, we are about to enjoy a rare family dinner during which we will enjoy spaghetti with meatballs, retell all the old stories, and continue to wrangle my mother’s bassett hound.

Ain’t that right, Izzy?

Bon appétit!

Still hanging out in Berkeley. You know, feelin’ groovy and generally diggin’ the scene. I’m leaving tomorrow, though, which is fortunate, because my supply of groove—never abundant—is really running low.

But I’ve been enjoying reconnecting with old favorite attractions, like the bear fountain in the middle of what we call “The Circle,”

the wonderfully recherché Oaks Theater on Solano Avenue,

the sunsets,

the weird decorations outside various bungalows,

One can only hope and pray that these are left over from Halloween, but in Berkeley, there’s no telling.

and the omnipresent scampering dogs on campus.

Quick, Scottie! There’s squirrels to be had!

This morning, I took a run over to my last house, just to case the joint. It looked much the same as when my delightful housemate Laura and I lived there with our two dogs, nine ducks, and two chickens. Except that a lot of stuff had been cleared away in the back yard and, come to think of it, even the front yard.

This could be because under the Laura and Ellen Regime, the house was busted by the municipal government for, “accumulations creating rodent harbourage.”

There’s nothing more embarrassing, let me tell you, than being suspected by the Berkeley City Government of accumulating crap in order to harbour illegal rodents. We really weren’t into rodent harbourage per se, you see, but there was a restaurant nearby and sometimes one of the, ahem, larger rodents (okay, they were rats) would wander into the yard.

The horror is beyond expression.

Laura walked out one morning to find several rats cavorting on the front lawn and overheard a passerby—who had paused to contemplate the gleeful rats—comment to her friend, “You know, I think the people who live here must be Buddhists.”

I know what you are thinking. But in Berkeley, it really was the most likely explanation.

After what came to be known as the “they-must-be-Buddhists” debacle, Laura decided, in a very un-Berkeleyan moment, that the “non-violent solution” to the rat problem was simply not working and she initiated Operation Rodent Apocalypse.

We won’t go into the details.

Ah, those were good times. Good times.

But there are new things in Berkeley, too. For instance, there’s a new joint called “Cafe Gratitude.” They have a prominent awning on which is printed, “What are YOU grateful for?”

Dude! You asked the right question.

I am grateful for Alex, for Shelley, for knitting, for friends new and old, for family, for flowers in November,

for avocadoes, for good wine, for good books, and for so many, many other wonderful things.

But most of all, dude, I am grateful that I no longer live in Berkeley.

Reporting from Missouri on Friday, where the KnitSisters will be reunited!

Until then, my friends, keep on channelling all that “positive energy” in the universe. Maybe if you get good enough at the energy channelling, you can save on your heating bills this winter.

Just a thought.

I’ve been spinning something new the last week or so.  I started combing the naturally-colored grey Romney, and started spinning it on my wheel’s highest ratio, creating a soft-spun single with just enough twist to ply back on itself.

 

I was able to spin two full bobbins fairly quickly, with frequent breaks for combing more wool.  Then I plied the two soft singles together.

 

 

It’s hard to see in photos just how lovely this yarn is.  Soft and spun with just enough twist to really let the fiber breathe.  Sometimes I have a tendency to spin fibers with a bit too much twist, and the finished yarn ends up feeling a little “hard.”  Not so with this wool.  It also retains some lanolin, so the yarn has just a bit of that wonderful “sheepy” smell.  I know there are those who don’t enjoy that smell, but I for one really love it.  I don’t even mind the smell of raw wool, come to that.

The fleece itself has a range of grey color in it, and I decided early on not to obsess about keeping the color consistent.  You can see in the second photo how the color varies throughout the skein.  I’m operating on the assumption that it will all even out in the end.  And anyway, I am liking the way it looks.

I have approximately 4 pounds of this wool, so I’ll be spinning on this project for a while.

I’ve also been working on Blue Bamboo.  Here’s the finished leaf motif on the upper back.

 

And I’ve started the first sleeve, from the top down, naturally.

 

My new mantra:  Must finish Blue Bamboo.  Must finish Blue Bamboo.