Kettle sweater.

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’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 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 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.

Things haven’t changed much since then.

Except — well, dammit, I found a project. It’s a scarf, but it’s OK –  it’s one of those mini scarves, so it won’t take me eight months, all my willpower and several speeches to myself about finishing what I start before I can wear it. And it’s got an Icelandic rose on it, which I love, and it’s got adorable style that’ll fit right in with my vintage clothes.

Aaaaand … it’s got intarsia. Slow, painful, deliberate, no-way-to-make-it-go-faster intarsia. The only saving grace is that’s it’s in garter stitch, so the stitches aren’t as visible, but that also means I have to retrain my brain not to purl along the wrong side.

As I counted out the color sections in the chart, I realized I could easily fudge it a little: I could carry one color of yarn on the back side of the work between two sections, instead of knitting each one with a separate piece of yarn that would have to be twisted with the background color on every row. “Only a true obsessive would do it the harder way,” I thought. “They’re really short floats, and maybe I could line the back of the scarf instead …”

I trailed off. Who would  rationalize doing something the easy way instead of just, y’know, doing it the easy way? You’d have to be some kind of nut to have to sweet-talk yourself into cutting corners. And slowly, slowly, it dawned on me: I am that nut. I’d rather grit my teeth and wind bobbins of yarn, constantly mutter and swear at them as they flop into my work, and pull and tug to perfection at — let’s see — four joins on every row, than carry some damn floats along the back that I didn’t want to see because they just weren’t perfect enough. And just the idea of fudging it, of doing it the easier-but-less-perfect way, was making me squirm. I’d rather do something right, even if it’s something I hate, than slack off.

Well, hell. After years spent trying to teach people around me to be more flexible, less particular,  and more forgiving of themselves and others, I turned out a knitting fascist. It’s the one area of my life where I am a harsh, merciless, bossy perfectionist. And worst of all … I think I kinda like it.

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.

Dammit how do you keep these shallow-depth-of-field photos from going all brooklyntweed on ya

The idea of saving money by only buying necessities for awhile floats and bobs before me like a soap bubble that pops soundlessly right around lunchtime, when I realize I’ve left my lunch in the fridge at home again or just forgotten to make it at all. Because lunch? Not negotiable. Totally necessary. And then half an hour and a Financial District sandwich later, I’m ten bucks poorer and that much further from liquidity.

Or I’ll drop a few bucks for a pattern and suddenly I’m at a yarn store, picking out something in a weight or blend or color I don’t have because that yarn is necessary to the project. The boxes and boxes of yarn I already have are slated for the sweaters I’ve been meaning to knit for a year; the one-off skeins in the stash are too small or too big or the wrong weight; and some are “special” and meant to be saved for I dunno what, to be used I dunno when.

I almost did it again with the Daybreak shawl I’ve been stalking since a Ravelry friend test-knitted one. I bought the pattern the day it came out and within an hour was figuring out how to fit a run for sock yarn into my day, because to get started on the pattern, I needed to buy yarn.

Wait — what?

I’ve worn holes in my socks, my other bra broke a month ago and I haven’t replaced it, and it’s been the better part of a year since I paid for a grown-up haircut. (I’ve been cutting it myself ever since, when I’m not talking my friends into trimming it with rusty scissors as we drink Pabst Blue Ribbon on the porch.) My bank account is dangerously thin, the layoffs happening all throughout my social circle and industry keep looming like ghosts, I have crap in the way of savings if something goes wrong … and in the meantime, I keep making runs to the Salvation Army with clothes I’ve gotten tired of, the trunk I keep fabric in is jammed so full it won’t close, I’ve already used up all the wall space for the posters and art prints I keep buying and framing, and I’m finally running out of places to put my yarn.

Wait — what?

Oh hell no, I thought, and nixed the yarn store. Instead I attacked my stash like a wounded lion, tearing through it mercilessly, trying to dig up something as sexy as a couple skeins of Noro sock yarn. It didn’t seem likely, since I’d been lusting after Noro Sock for weeks without a project that called for it, and half the fun of getting the pattern was gonna be finally getting a crack at that yarn.

I came to a DK-weight Malabrigo silk/merino blend — it was too thick and too dark, but it had a nice shine to it, so I set it aside and grudgingly kept digging. A minute later, I pulled up a glossy two-ply alpaca yarn in the deepest cocoa color I’ve ever seen. “It’s nice,” I thought, and plopped it onto my desk.

“Nope,” I thought as I pulled out box after box, “too bright, too dull, not enough contrast, not enough yardage, too fuzzy, not fuzzy enough — and what the hell was I thinking with this one?”

I turned back to the two I’d set aside — maybe they’d work? They were both too thick but not exactly the same weight. They seemed too dark for stripes, too, and stripes were the point of the whole shawl.

But something happened when I put the yarns next to each other. The dark brown and the dark gray both had a shine to them, but next to each other, they practically glowed. They looked deep, silky, impossibly rich. The sight of those two yarns side by side pulled me right back into a cool afternoon with friends in a wood-fired hot tub, holding an impromptu Scotch-with-chocolate tasting. As I twisted strands of the two colors together, I could practically taste the way the silky, bitter, slightly salted chocolate had eased into the dark, smoky peat of the ten-year-old single malt, and how the alcohol had glinted around the edges of my tongue.

The hell with the fact the yarn’s too thick. The hell with the sock yarn I can’t afford. The hell with never having enough when I’m up to my neck in stuff. I think I’ve found a winner.

Take a look!