Knit Sisters

So, I had this idea that I would make myself a simple little summer sweater, something I could wear with everything, you know?  I visited the stash (being the extremely good girl that I am) and came up with 11 balls of Reynolds “Tiara,” 70% viscose, 30% silk, worsted weight.  I swatched:

 

I not only swatched, I washed my swatch and laid it flat to dry.  I not only washed my swatch, I measured gauge both before and after washing.  (See what a good girl I am?)  Now (and here is where the plot thickens), the only problem with this lovely little swatch is that I forgot to write down the size needle I used.  No doubt I thought to myself, “Oh, I will remember.  No problem.”  (Actually, I usually make little knots in the yarn tail to tell what size needle I used, but I forgot to do that, too.)  So, I revisited the yarn label, and it says to use a #6 needle.  Knowing that I habitually go down a needle size (or two) since I tend to knit loosely, I deduced that I had used a #5 needle on this swatch.  I immediately made five little knots in the yarn tail.

OK, what I haven’t admitted yet is that all this happened several months ago, because, you see, I was going to get a jump on that summer knitting.   So, when I picked up this swatch a week or so ago, I saw five little knots in the yarn tail.  “Oh,” I said to myself, “I used a #5 needle for this yarn.”

Earlier this spring I purchased a simple little sweater–short sleeves, scoopnecked, and form-fitting.  I decided to make this new sweater as a virtual clone, shaping-wise, of this commercial sweater.  I did exactly as the knitting experts advise you to do:  I laid the sweater out on the bed and took careful measurements.  Bust, waist, lower edge, armhole depth, neckline depth, neckline width, shoulder width, length, the whole deal.  Armed with this knowledge and the careful gauge measurements I made of my washed and dried swatch, I confidently cast on (in the round) for the lower edge. 

Knit, knit, knit.  Some time later (about 2 inches later) I realized that this wasn’t looking exactly right, gauge-wise.  Perhaps it wasn’t a #5 needle that I used on that swatch.  Perhaps it was a #4.  “Well,” I thought, “that’s really not a problem; I’ll just switch to a #4 right now.  After all, my hips are bigger than my waist and I wanted some waistline shaping anyway.”

 Knit, knit, knit.  Some time later (about 2 inches later) I realized that the whole thing was looking a bit, well…large. 

 

Hmmm.  I checked gauge.  I checked my math.  I checked the dimensions of the commercial sweater–now it was measuring three whole inches smaller around the bust and waist.  How could this be?!  Well, here’s how it could be–the first time I measured it was right after I wore it and stretched it out.  The second time was after it had been washed and returned to its rightful dimensions.  Nobody told me about this!

Rip, rip, rip.  Simple little sweater.  Pah.

(Oh, by the way, this whole “involvement with the CIA” thing has been blown way out of proportion.  These days I just consult.)   

Thanks to Sarah for the post on the English five-pitch combs! Since I neither spin nor comb, I learned a great deal. Let’s be honest, y’all. That is a whole other level of craft and, even more to the, um…point, that is a whole other level of tools. Now that I’ve gotten a load of those combs, I’ve begun to suspect that my sister is living a double life: knitter, spinner, mother, and educator by day; Fiber Ninja and CIA Special Operative in Interrogations by night.

Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.

I bet Langley sends her all the really tough cases, the guys who won’t crack under any kind of pressure: “All right, Larry, if he won’t talk, I guess we’ll just have to call in…The Fiber Ninja. With her English five-pitch combs!” “Oh, God, no! No! What do you want to know? I’ll tell you anything! Anything!”

Half the time, she doesn’t even have to show them the combs. Just the idea of them is enough to strike terror in their hearts and loosen their tongues. Now that’s what we call good tradecraft! In the “intelligence” biz, that is. (You remember that book, Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten? What a lie. Everything I needed to know I learned from John Le Carré novels…)

Now, if I’ve learned anything from John Le Carré, it’s that my sister is going to deny all this. She’s going to claim she has nothing to do with the so-called “intelligence community.” You can humor her if you like, but we know the truth.

Meanwhile, although I made little-to-no progress on the Wedding Noodles over the weekend, I made the first sock of a pair (tastefully displayed with dog):

Shelley liked this sock more than I expected. Here’s what happened when I tried to retrieve it:

“I, Conquistador Shelley, claim this sock for Spain!”

I’ll get it back eventually. Though I may have to stoop to shameless and undignified bribery with Milk-Bones and Greenies.

Anyway, it really isn’t all that urgent because I have a broken little toe and can’t actually wear any enclosed shoes or socks. That situation recently got worse because, having followed the recommendations in Highly Technical, Advanced Medical Advice of Tomorrow…Today! (i.e., “tape your little toe to the one next to it”),

I found to my horror that after four weeks the skin on those toes was looking something close to gangrenous. For obvious reasons, I’d hate to lose my toes, so I cooked up a knitted solution that would bind the toes together, and yet let the skin breathe! The Koigu Toe-Stabilization Sleeve, in progress:

And in use:

I’m pleased to report that after only two days of wearing the Koigu Toe-Stabilization Sleeve, I have experienced significantly less swelling and dramatically less gangrene. The Koigu Toe-Stabilization Sleeve really works!*

*Results not typical. The Knit Sisters do not guarantee relief from broken toes or gangrene through toe sleeves or other knitted garments.

Well, I’m so glad you asked, Ellen!  English five-pitch combs look like this:

(Pay no attention to the messy floor/table.)

Combing is actually a very, very old form of fiber preparation.  There used to be guilds devoted to the combing arts.  (No joke.)  Basically, combing takes your messy, dirty fiber and aligns the fibers while getting rid of all the short fibers, second cuts, and what spinners somewhat euphemistically refer to as “vm.”  (VM is “vegetable matter,” in other words all those little bits of hay, burrs, twigs and things of that nature that remind you that sheep are animals and mostly live outdoors.)  Nowadays, handspinners also use combs to do all sorts of fun and fancy color-blending of fiber, as well.

I myself have grown addicted to combing after taking a class from Susan last year.  (I also bought this set of combs from her, in case you’re wondering.)  I now own not only the aforementioned five-pitch combs, but also a set of double row Louet handheld mini-combs.

If you’re thinking that these combs look a bit like weapons, well…you’re right.  They are extremely, extremely sharp and not recommended for use by the clumsy or in households with small children.  Pay close attention while using them!  The consumption of alcoholic beverages is not recommended while combing!  Make sure your tetanus shot is up to date!  (Although that sounds like a joke, it is not.)

But, they produce little bundles of fiber that spin like buttah.  It is a beautiful thing.

First the good news. The very good news. I’m getting married next summer to my perfect match, the one I knew was The One the minute I met him. And I don’t even believe in those kinds of instant, instinctual kinds of things.

But yes, it’s true. And in spite of Newsweek’s notorious, backlash warnings 20 years ago (when I was an impressionable 18-year-old) about educated women nearing forty, terrorists, and marriage (I know you know what I’m talking about), I am getting married just a few months after my 39th birthday. Of course, lately Newsweek has said, “Gee, you know, huh, huh, we were wrong about those statistics that said that you had a less than 5% chance of getting married,” but talk about a retraction that comes way too late to do any good! The information has been out there for 20 years, warping women’s lives. Thanks to them, I actually started grad school thinking, “Well this should make me completely unmarriageable, but I accept my fate.”

All I have to say now is, “Go to hell, Newsweek.”

I am happy. I am a statistical anomaly.

My friend Emily has been kind enough to volunteer to go bridal gown shopping with me. Bless her. I find the choices overwhelming and yet, after a while, they all look strangely *alike*. Okay, not entirely fair. There are five types of bridal gown that I have identifed thusfar:

1) Streamlined and sophisticated
2) Giant meringue
3) Could be your Crazy Aunt Erma’s sofa covering
4) Could be Louis XIV’s sofa covering
5) Hootchie-mama

For example, the dress chosen by the latest Mrs. Trump, that $100,000 horror, was an remarkable example of the worst excesses of Bridal Gown Category 3 & 4. It looked like she was a sofa. And here she was, a beautiful woman with all the resources in the world at her command! A terrible pity, really.

Another example: the late Mrs. JFK, Jr. picked a gown squarely in Bridal Gown Category 1. Good work, Caroline, may you rest in peace.

For the bride, like me, who is, as the Russian novelists would delicately put it, “not in her first youth,” (people, I just have to say–I love that phrase) there is really nothing for it but a gown from Category 1. Were I 23, I would seriously consider the Giant Meringue, but a woman not in her first youth in a Giant Meringue is not beautiful, but merely pitiable.

How does this affect my knitting life, though? That is the real question. Well, since our wedding is no longer completely hypothetical, I thought I should start working on my wedding shawl, which you may recognize as River.

If anyone out there doubted the magic of blocking, doubt no more. Like all lace, this piece (unblocked and still on the needles, of course) looks like a pile of noodles. Not exactly inspiring.

The truth is, I hate working with mohair and I am agnostic on knitting lace. But the problem is, I always forget this when I see a nice pattern for a shawl in lace-weight mohair. It seems like such a *good* idea at the time. In reality, I’d always rather knit something like Rogue, preferably in an oily, water-repellent aran weight yarn that enables you to stand by the Irish Sea for hours on end, looking brooding and mysterious. And possibly deeply wronged and dangerous. Not that I am brooding, mysterious, deeply wronged, or dangerous, heaven knows, but I like the idea of a version of myself who is like that.

Knit not for who you are, but for who you want to be!

P.S. As a limited, non-spinner, what are English five-pitch combs? I’ll have to ask my sister.

I bought this:

here last June and put it through my English five-pitch combs to turn it into this:

They’re pretty little balls of fluff, aren’t they?

Then I spun it up into this:

I spun it as singles to preserve the long color gradations because I had this idea that I wanted to knit this yarn into an entrelac scarf.  Sort of a la the Eleanor stole in Scarf Style.  I was hoping that the long yet random color gradations would give me little blocks of solid or almost-solid color in the way that the lovely Noro yarns do.  Also, then if the singles biased a bit, the multi-directionality of the entrelac would offset that.  Good plan, right?

The only fly in this oh-so-charming ointment is that I have never tried entrelac before.  So this yarn is still sitting at the top of the stash awaiting judgment.  I take it out now and again to show it off to people, but I haven’t even wound it into balls yet. 

One of the problems with one-of-a-kind handspun yarns is that they often end up being so beautiful (if I do say so myself) in the skein that it’s very hard to actually use them.  What if what I knit doesn’t turn out as pretty as those skeins are right now?  It’s a dilemma, and the only way I see out of it is to lose the “preciousness” of those handspun skeins.  How to do that, you may ask?  Well (I knew I would get to this point sooner or later), the best way I can see is to have lots of stash and devote more time to spinning and knitting.  Then each skein isn’t quite as precious.  Isn’t that a good rationalization for stash-building and ignoring housework and cooking?

I’m Ellen.

And I’m Sarah.

And we’re the Knit Sisters! Welcome to our blog. For several months now, we have been concerned about apparent dearth of knitting blogs written by sisters, or what we call “The Sister Gap.” So we’ve taken it upon ourselves to fill this obvious need. What, you may ask, qualifies us to render this service?

Oh, let us count the ways…

1. We are actual, biological sisters. Although we hasten to add that we consider all knitters our metaphysical and spiritual sisters and brothers!

2. Those of you with children may feel heartened to know that now that we are 35 and 38 years old (respectively), we’ve finally stopped quarrelling and are ready to launch a joint project.

3. We knit. We’ve pretty much always knit, having been born, remarkably, with stitch markers and tiny balls of superwash wool in our little fists. This was all the more astonishing given the fact that our mother DOES NOT KNIT. She claims that she is unable to knit. But more on this highly suspicious claim elsewhere…

4. Sarah spins. Ellen does not. Yet Ellen beholds Sarah’s spinning with appropriate awe and wonder. Ellen also frequently scores major, major stash-enhancing handspun from her sister. She is exceptionally grateful and wonders what she did so right in a previous life to get this lucky.

5. Location. Location. Location. Sarah lives in Missouri and Ellen lives in Massachusetts, so we’re kind of like regional correspondents on knitting and spinning. Or something like that.

6. In spite of the fact that cats are the accepted mainstay domestic animal of knitters, we are dog people. We live in households with cats, so occasionally one will whizz by, entangling itself in our yarn, but we do not as a rule have truck with cats.

No, we feel that dogs are infinitely better knitting companions. You may have heard of “emotional support dogs”? These are highly trained “knitting support dogs”:

Hugo:

and Shelley:

7. We like to write and talk about knitting.

8. We like to write and talk to each other about knitting.

9. We feel it’s time that others got in on this conversation.

10. And as they used to say at the beginning of every episode of The Six Million Dollar Man (we know y’all remember this, too), “We have the technology!” We’ve got computers, we’ve got digital cameras, and we’ve got Alex, Ellen’s fiancé, who generously designed this site and is standing by to bail us out whenever we get in over our heads. Technologically speaking. Thank you, Alex!