I was up until 5 a.m. plowing through the last lace row of my mom’s Christmas shawl. As I was drawing near to the finish line, I screwed up part of the edge when I dropped a stitch that unravelled a few rows down and took several yarnovers and decreases with it.
In my hopelessly sleep-deprived state, I tried to make a go of it and reconstruct the lace, but it wasn’t coming together. I threw it down and went to sleep, figuring the exhaustion had made me so stupid that I would have to figure it out in the morning. I’d start binding off and I’d fix the broken part when I came to it.
This morning, well rested and prepared for the worst, I couldn’t find the part I’d screwed up. Whatever half-assed, beleaguered attempt I’d made had actually worked.
It’s a freakin’ Christmas miracle.
Yesterday: The great opus, started in June and seeing me through many episodes of Spongebob Squarepants and “A Bit of Fry and Laurie.”
Today: A mess of lace, blocking wires and T-pins that spans four feet and consumes three quarters of the dining room table.
Tomorrow: Christmas present for my mom.
Earflaps!
Just as I decided that what I really needed a hat with earflaps, someone on Ravelry posted a call for test knitters for a hat with earflaps.
Solved!
Instead of doing the quick braids the pattern called for, I spent almost as long on the i-cord ties with tiny contrast-color stripes as I did on the rest of the hat. It was worth it.
I’m starting to develop a taste for tiny, meticulous finishing details, especially after seeing a bunch of vintage and contemporary sewing projects with incredibly gorgeous (and finicky) stitching and accents. Striped i-cord is kind of a bitch to get right, but man, the results make me happy.
The black vertical stripes are actually cabled owls. They’re kinda hard to see, so I’m considering embroidering French knots on them, because I just learned to make French knots the other day and I’m so excited about it that I want to cover everything I own in French knots. Maybe if I make enough French knots, the embroidery gods will smile on me and fix my wobbly chain stitch!
And maybe the knitting gods will smile on me, too, for spending almost as much time on the embellishments as I spent on the rest of the hat. Anyway, the results are on Ravelry if you’re interested.
I appear to have broken a knitting record: casting off a project and misplacing it in less than a single day.
Less than an hour, even.
Honestly? It didn’t even last five minutes.
I’m retooling and rewriting one of my hat patterns, and made yet another hat from the pattern to make sure everything worked. I painstakingly grafted together the edges of the tubular bind-off, wove in the ends, and with a huge wave of satisfaction, declared it done. Then, in a move I really ought to know by now never ends well, I put it somewhere special to make sure I wouldn’t lose it.
Now, the problem with “somewhere special” is that “somewhere special” isn’t a certain place; it roughly translates as “somewhere that isn’t one of my usual places, and I’ll remember where because it’s special.” If only my brain worked like that. Instead, as I firmly think to myself this is where I am putting this thing right now in case I need it, my brain nods its metaphorical head, solemnly promises to cherish this information forever, and immediately jettisons it overboard, leaving only a tiny sensory trace in its wake. Very many clothes, drugs and important papers have disappeared this way, only to surface months or weeks later when they’re no longer needed.
So no, I don’t remember where the hat is. I only know that it’s somewhere special, it’s in my room, it was nighttime when I put it away, and that the place I jammed it so I wouldn’t lose it was soft and felt like fabric. Which is why I was up at 1 a.m. the other night, emptying my entire clothes drawer onto the floor and sifting fruitlessly through my million t-shirts, hoping that maybe, just this once, I hadn’t outsmarted myself again.
No dice, of course. I didn’t find it. I think maybe I scared it away.
I’m the kind of person who’ll try anything twice. Just once isn’t enough; the discomfort involved in doing something new keeps you from making a fair judgment, so: twice it is.
I am doing intarsia again. It’s exactly as not-fun as I remember.
Garter-stitch intarsia, a.k.a. what doesn't kill me makes me stronger.
When I first started knitting, I got a copy of “Stitch ‘n’ Bitch” and plowed right through it. I think I only made one actual pattern from it, but I threw myself at every technique in the book. Cables? Sure. Knitting in the round? No problem. Full-fashioned increasing and decreasing? Absolutely. Fair Isle, lace double knitting — I took on whatever it could throw at me. The only one that seemed like more effort than it was worth was intarsia: lots of adjusting tension, endless tweaking and fifty bazillionty-eleven horrible little bobbins to keep untangled, all for a blocky, 8-bit picture of a ’80s-looking sheep? PASS.
Well, sort of. I only decided to give it a pass after I soldiered my way though a handful of swatches and proved to myself that I could make neat, even intarsia designs on demand. I needed to prove that if I wasn’t doing intarsia, it was from lack of interest, not lack of ability.
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By god, I think I’ve done it. I haven’t bought yarn in over a month.
I like to think it’s because of my gradually decreasing materialism, but I have a nasty feeling that it’s because I ran out of room in the closet.
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Good god. Judging by my knitting habits, my headstone’s gonna read “COULDN’T LET WELL ENOUGH ALONE.”
I’m on my second project in a month where I decided I wanted to make something, found at least three different patterns for it, and scrapped all of them for not being perfect enough and decided to knit my own. And I am! The latest is coming along gorgeously, now that I’ve rejected nearly every single possible method I could use to build the thing for not being utterly and fanatically true to my vague vision.
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Knitter, blogger and urban gardening adventurer Crazy Aunt Purl has something radical to say about saving money:
I have found over and over again the number one way to increase the amount of money you have in the bank is to just stop spending it.
More than once, I’ve thought about doing just that — the way I think about, say, climbing Everest on a package tour; or getting my back and shoulders and arms tattooed like a Japanese gangster’s, all covered in secret ink under my clothes; or throwing out all my clutter and painting my floors and walls white like in a chic Swedish apartment; or what it would feel like to walk on the moon and whether it’d feel crunchy under my feet; or the first thing I’d do if I became President.
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I love my room. It’s a smallish but gloriously breezy room in a 1913 Craftsman house up the hill from a lake, with hardwood floors, windows on two walls and a glass door that opens on a little balcony that nobody uses but me and the cat. The neighborhood is safe and well-lit at night, and I’ve rolled up my hill alone and pleasantly tipsy from my neighborhood bars plenty of times without a thought to my safety, with occasional hails from smiling neighbors.
But one downside of the “well-lit” part is a streetlight up the hill that lays one incredibly brilliant stripe of light over the top of the house, across the balcony, in through the door, across my bed and straight into one eye. The precision is amazing, as is the intensity: it’s like having a pet laser that lives to dump orange light in my face.
So I made a curtain.
Blocking a million miles of curtain
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MOTHS MOTHS MOTHS MOTHS
AAAUUUUUUUUUUGGGHHHHHH
I’d been seeing the occasional lost-looking moth in my room for the last month or so and idly wondering where they might be camping out.
The answer: IN MY YARN STASH.
There are four skeins (one relatively pricey, the others a gift) of Snow Leopard Trust handspun camel yarn in my stash that are bitten into pieces, crawling with tiny larvae, embedded with little moth corpses and shedding tiny sand-like crumbs of moth crap.
AAAAUUUUUUGH
Fortunately, the other items in that bin are mostly stored in plastic bags and seem untouched. I guess the moths were so enamored with the twig-laden, gloriously unprocessed and still slightly musty camel yarn that they didn’t notice anything else.
OK, I’m gonna go run to the closet and start tearing everything apart RIGHT NOW.
Making another shawl
I am knitting a shawl. Again.
I finished a small Laminaria shawl for myself and, incredibly, wanted to knit another. Right now it’s taking a back seat because I have more time-sensitive projects in the works, but goddammit this thing is gonna be done for my mom’s birthday. Or else. It’s in her favorite (and my favorite) fire engine red, and since it’s washable, she can spill on it as much as she likes without ruining it.
Only thing I can’t protect it from is the inevitable snags and catches it’ll run into. My mom, like me, is a hurricane in motion, and the constant dropping, snagging, tangling and general clumsiness are just a fact of life for the both of us.
