Yarn: Cascade 128 Solid, color “Jet.”
Pattern: Smokin’.
Intended recipient: The boyfriend.
Yarn store browser tabs open at time of checkout: 12.
Mid-checkout changes of heart regarding color: 1.
Mid-checkout changes of heart regarding project: 3.
Skeins of yarn bought for self: 1.
“Repeat of the boyfriend curse” freakout level: Detectable, but mild.
Oh my god, I just put it together in my head that my friends’ tiny, adorable baby daughter with a perpetual hipster deadpan is a BABY. Like the kind you can put EXTREMELY WHIMSICAL HAND-KNITTED THINGS on, and it can’t complain because it can’t even sit up its own yet, never mind have a preferred design aesthetic beyond “does it fit in my mouth.”
Sometimes you buy yarn. And sometimes it turns up on your doorstep like the wayward stray pit bulls with smiling eyes and lolling tongues that turn up all over my town, Oakland, and you just can’t say no to it. And since I love anything with a story, I’m telling the stories of just how parts of my stash turned up with their tails wagging.
A couple years ago my aunt Arlette, the one I’m named after, packed up to move to Switzerland for a few months. Then after that, who knows? “Chile, maybe?” she would say in the months before she left. “Your mother said Argentina but I don’t just want to go shopping like she does. I want to travel.”
My aunt had been tied down by a demanding job and an even more demanding cat for several years, and you could tell she was getting tired of being boring. “I feel like an old lady,” she would say, with a look that was half disgust and half confusion. Somehow in just a few years she had gone from a nationally ranked salsa dancer and troublemaker to, as she saw it, a frustrated, bored nobody. She wore sweaters with big appliqués of kittens on them and nursed a bad knee and a Babeli, the neediest cat you ever saw, and she brooded about getting old and fat and boring.
A couple years ago, after moping for months about feeling burned out and frustrated, she quit her job. “You know that song ‘Take This Job and Shove It’?” she said, cackling loudly. “Boy, I wish I could have told them that. That would’ve been great, eh?”
Her long search for a suitable home for her cat ended when Babeli got sick and had to be put down. Tante Arlette was distraught, but as she wiped smeared tears from her face, you could tell she was a little relieved to have one less thing tying her down.
Before she left, I asked her more about her colorful history one night when she and my dad and some of my friends were over for fondue. Wine was flowing freely, along with kirsch and my late uncle’s homemade plum brandy — handmade, someone would remind me every time the bottle was unstoppered, since he had squeezed the plums in his fists to get out the juice.
This is a woman who joined the circus as a young woman to tour Europe as a dancer, and in the off seasons learned to be a trapeze artist and a gymnast. She was also the knife-thrower’s assistant — you know, the one he throws knives at.
“He was a drunk,” she said. “I had holes in my clothes because he would throw the knives too close to me and they would pin my clothes to the board. Sometimes they would catch and it was hard to get away, which was bad, because for the final part of the act he was supposed to throw the last knife right at my heart, and I would step out of the way at the last second. Finally I told them he was a drunk, no way in hell would I do it anymore. So he started using his kids instead.”
She’s a riot with a history, a bullet scar up one arm, a Corvette — and double-pointed needles. She and my mom, long before they left Switzerland for the States, were both sent to a finishing school.
“We learned needlepoint, embroidery, sewing,” my mom says. “You had to know how to fry an egg, change a diaper and knit a sock.”
After a lifetime of it, my aunt decided she was sick of knitting socks and handed me the last of her stash: an untouched skein of rough blue sock wool, a kinked-from-frogging second skein and an index card with her notes for a sock pattern. Her patterns look a lot like her recipes: minimal, verging on incomprehensible. She’s very particular, so once she finds the secret of the sock or fondue or salad she likes, she makes it the same way every time. She doesn’t need recipes, just prompts to remind her how much cheese or how many decreases to add in the right places. They’re beautiful, economical little things with precise, boarding-school penmanship.
It’s been two years, and she’s moved back to the states. She’s quieter, less pissed off, less restless. I’m not sure what to think of it, any more than I know quite what to do with the yarn. I just know I like having them around.
I have a fingerless glove pattern I’ve been working on for ages. I finished the prototype three years (!!!) and two apartments ago. The pattern itself has survived a hard drive crash, chronic disorganization, the launching of my grown-up career and the concomitant working all the goddamn time and essentially shelving my knit design aspirations, a fairly long “why the hell does the world need another fingerless glove pattern — oh, right, it doesn’t” phase, a chunk of “my god I’ll never get this stupid, stupid thing done” ennui, and finally one last bout of “the hell with it; in three years I’ve only seen a couple patterns like this, and I like mine better, so screw you, world.”
It’s been so long that I can finally test-knit it myself, since I’ve completely forgotten the intricacies of how the pattern works and can look at it like a stranger — a very, very confused stranger, as good lord did this thing contain some baffling errors and do my baroque design solutions only make sense while I’m working them out. When I hit a design snag, for a week or so I exist in a fever state, constantly knitting and shaping and folding and testing gauge in my head, until the whole solution springs whole from my forehead and onto the desk, like an Athena trailing yarn ends, stitch markers and uncountable illegible chicken scratches on envelopes all over the house.
But, after plowing through it twice in the last month, I can proudly say that I fried the last pattern bug with a metaphorical magnifying glass yesterday, and the pattern is now tested.
In one of three sizes.
AUGH.
I had nothing to do with these colors, if you're wondering. It was a request.
Kettle sweater, kettle sweater, kettle sweater! What an awesome phrase. I could say it all freaking day. It’s even better than cellar door.
Or, the horror: kettle cozy.
Ugh, cozies. I have an ingrained distaste for cozies and granny squares. It runs deep, like my lifelong hatred for the color pink. A tomboy from the get-go, to me, pink meant “girly,” and girly meant a whole slate of mystifying behaviors, interests and likes, codified and policed by girls, boys, teachers, and family.
“Girly” meant getting a Barbie every Christmas from relatives, not showing off your Swiss army knives, following a strict beauty and fashion regimen, not liking “gross” things and having the boys close ranks one day on the schoolyard, saying “Girls don’t play four-square” when my turn came up.
Later, “girly” meant not talking too loud, having polite opinions, wearing the right body-conscious-but-not-sexy clothes, liking what people assumed I’d like, automatically deferring to men and authority figures, and — still! — not liking “gross” things. Sorry, skull collection. “Girly” meant “pink.”
By middle school, I had a hate on for anything girly. Girly made my life miserable and I wasn’t about to forgive it anytime soon. By high school I was as anti-girly as you could get, launching myself into not-girliness so hard the windows rattled.
I discovered that there were grown-up girly things, too. I’d picked up sewing, cooking, embroidery, knitting and crochet without much cultural baggage; They were things I’d learned from my Swiss mom, and were generally considered too quaint to resonate with popular culture. Knitting was the girliest thing I did, but I did it solo, rolling my eyes at the constant “Wow, you don’t look like a knitter!” comments. It was easy to hate granny squares, ruffles, cozies and other things: Things that were kitschy. Earnest. Homemade. Simple. Useless. Tacky.
Girly.
The yarn store where I worked years ago was the first mostly female space I spent a large amount of time. It was the first thing approaching sisterhood I’d found, and it was weird. For the first time, I was around women most of the time, and lots of them liked ribbon yarns, pastel colors, baby clothes and ruffles.
And I kept bumping up against weird cultural artifacts, especially in older women: Many seemed to need permission to make mistakes before they could learn something new. They apologized for not perfectly performing tasks they’d learned just five minutes before. They called themselves stupid when they made mistakes, something I rarely hear men do. Many who’d been knitting longer than I’d been alive would say “Oh, I couldn’t do that, it’s too difficult” when I offered to teach them something new. It felt like half the teaching I did was creating a safe place for them to make mistakes without anyone, including themselves, judging them. I’d spent a lifetime learning to shrug off the fear of judgment that so many women carried with them everywhere.
Hella girly.
I guess I like some pink things now.
Hella pink.
For a long time, I needed to hate girliness, because it had made me so miserable for so, so long. I’d be damned before I’d knit a tea-cozy. But at the yarn store, I started to see that the enforced girliness I hated so much had left long, permanent scars on all the women around me, even the girly ones. Especially the girly ones. They weren’t the enemy; they just liked different stuff.
Maybe girliness wasn’t bad, per se. In my head, I’d let “girly” and “weak” and “bad” become the same thing, and it took a long time to unravel them. There’s already enough cultural bullshit against women, and the most insidious of all is the kind women and girls do against ourselves. Hating “women’s stuff” for being girly is a subtle kind of poison.
If there’s one thing I’ve been trying to practice, it’s this: Don’t hate the ruffles; hate the system that says “ruffles are for girls, so all girls must love ruffles.” Some girls like ruffles. Some of the folks who like them aren’t girls.
It’s taken some work, but I don’t hate granny squares anymore. At least, not conceptually. I still think they’re butt-ugly, but that’s more about openwork-related pickiness than cultural signifiers. Thanks to a boyfriend with a penchant for magenta hair, I’m coming around on the harder shades of pink. Pastels can still blow me, though, and nothing under the sun will make me like ruffles. And cozies … well, I guess I don’t have to hate them, as long as they don’t have any features I hate. Which means I hate most of them.
So even though the kettle sweater I made was a gift, I made it like one I’d make for myself: streamlined, muted and wooly.
With adorable vintage mother-of-pearl shank buttons from my mother’s button stash.
I want nothing more in life than to roll around in a bathtub full of those buttons.
I live six blocks from Occupy Oakland. My neighborhood sounds like a war zone. I don’t have any real activist cred, but I believe the Occupy protests need room and protection. And I’m a knitter. I want to keep people warm.
There’s already a beautiful hat pattern on Ravelry dedicated to the Occupy Wall Street movement, but if you’re thinking of donating knitted goods to your local Occupy camp, especially as the temperatures drop, here are some things to consider:
Here are some pattern suggestions for bulky and super bulky yarn:
Hats knitted in the round
Hats knitted flat and seamed
Crocheted hats
Mitts knitted in the round
Mitts and mittens knitted flat
Dear self:
If you publish a pattern for gloves, mittens or fingerless mitts, if your main pattern photo includes mittened, gloved or mitted hands doing the following:
… go punch yourself in the mouth.
The tossing-leaves thing: Don’t. Cute, but overdone.
(Also note: I’m not picking on a particular pattern; since I tend to study clothing photography way too closely, I actually did this list from memory. But a quick glance through new Ravelry patterns yields all of the above except the last one, which — whoop, never mind. Just found an apple.)
And before you say anything, ask yourself: Have you ever gingerly cupped a (tea rose / boxwood / star jasmine / piece of readily available hedge) with just the pads of your fingertips like it’s ten hours into a trip and you’ve just discovered how utterly beautiful and interconnected everything is and that the whole universe is contained in that simple, perfect thing? Were you wearing fingerless gloves? No? See? EVERYTHING IS LIES.
Now reach out and cradle that bad boy like your life depends on it.
I live in an apartment by myself now. I have room for both of my army surplus six-foot steel worktables (one is in the living room!) and when I turn on all the lights at 1 a.m. to take pictures of yarn, I don’t have to explain it to anyone but my pets.
Lookit all that red!
More Noro.
Awesome.
Stressful job is stressful, sewing-room setup is moving at a crawl, social life is hypersocial, and knitting is … well, a swathe of ambitious, half-finished designs from my own patterns scattered around my house like acorns planted by a drunk squirrel.
I’m knitting on an incredibly simple project straight from the pattern (OK, OK, with an added cable and at a recalculated gauge, but still so straightforward I could do it in my sleep) on big needles with soft, round yarn the thickness of a squirming nightcrawler and my god, people, I forgot knitting could go this fast. A high-level yarn organization binge the other week (read: I retrieved all the skeins stashed in oddball places around the house — under the bed?! — and put things into bins vaguely sorted by weight. Mostly) proved that most of my yarn maxes out at worsted weight, with more recent purchases hovering more around sock- and sport-weight that takes about a million years to knit.
My pattern tastes tend toward the innovative, heavily constructed and technically challenging. If I can graft instead of sew, I do. If I can complicate the cast-on for something stretchier, sturdier, more reversible … I do. So this? Stockinette. Knitted in the round. Raglan. This project is wildly, fabulously, mind-bogglingly, unbelievably fast.
… except for the part where I decided I would switch the nearly five feet of long-tailed cast-on to an icord cast-on. Knit a total of four stitches to make a single cast-on stitch, making 20 minutes of work into a two-day snake-wrestling match that baffled nearby mass transit riders?
DON’T MIND IF I DO.
I am on my last test knit for awhile. I have promised/blackmailed myself into not knitting anything that isn’t from one of my own patterns for a bit, and that means no test knits no no no don’t even look into those groups unless you’re posting things yourself. it’s gotten to where I have pages and pages of sketches and patterns mostly worked out or half-finished or just in need of testing, and I’m starting to feel like a sham for posting on designers’ groups on Ravelry, and I miss working in InDesign so much that it hurts.
Knitting to Fry and Laurie, and Fry is knitting back!
So: more movies, more knitting, more sitting still. More doing. More MAKING!