sucka sc: knit & crochet

The beast is blocking

Thursday, December 24th, 2009

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!

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

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.

We meet again, intarsia

Friday, November 13th, 2009

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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Smoke and chocolate

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

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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