Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Friday, December 4th, 2009
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.
Monday, October 5th, 2009
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.
(more…)
Monday, August 10th, 2009
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
(more…)
Thursday, August 6th, 2009
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.
Wednesday, August 5th, 2009
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.
Thursday, April 16th, 2009
I turned the heel on my first sock the other day. Looks perfect. Fits perfect.
I rule.
(more…)
Friday, March 27th, 2009
Aww, hell. I had to run to catch the bus this morning — it was a minute early, when the hell does that ever happen? — and it wasn’t until I was on the bus that I realized my backpack wasn’t zipped up all the way. Everything was stowed pretty tightly, except the Selbu Modern beret I just finished last week in my two favoritest colors. It was gone! Damn! I hadn’t even gotten a photo of it yet!
I was deeply upset for all of three seconds. If I’d bought that beret, I would’ve been distraught: it was the perfect design and colors! It was soft and warm and amazing to look at! But as soon as the initial pang was over, I was already planning the sequel in my head. It was the perfect hat, true, but the next one could be even more perfect: less fuzzy, with more even colorwork, and a little tighter in the ribbing so it wouldn’t relax right off my head by the end of the day.
I haven’t met many people who think the same way. Whether they’re knitters or non-knitters, most focus on the amount of work that goes into a pattern. But for me, it’s not the work. It’s all knitting. That’s why I never balked at learning new stuff. Continental knitting, two-color knitting, double knitting, two-color and two-handed brioche stitch, knitting backward, knowing seven or eight left- and right-leaning decreases and as many ways to cast on: they’re all, y’know, knitting. And the stuff I make? Just knitting. I’m always knitting, so what’s one more thing? Especially if I can do it even better the next time.
Of course, I can’t help feeling like an insufferable, more-ascetic-than-thou prat when I say things like that, but whatever! My yarn stash is way too big for me to start throwing “you should own less stuff” stones. All I know is, I get to knit an awesome hat all over again, and it could’ve been far worse: I could’ve lost my knitting bag instead of my hat!
For some reason, losing an unfinished project deeply irritates me: the potential of a project, the feeling of progress, is far more dear to me than an actual hat. I lost a knitting bag on the bus a week ago and it’s been driving me crazy. There were some decent earbud headphones in there, a Denise circular needle and a half-finished project for a pattern I have backed up on my computer. All the pieces are replaceable, but I think about that stupid bag at least twice a day and it hurts, dammit!
Monday, March 16th, 2009
“Don’t be ridiculous. Just ’cause they’re speaking French doesn’t mean they’ll notice you knitting. You’re just hyper-aware of two interests of yours — knitting and French — and just ’cause those two girls over there are speaking French doesn’t mean they’ll notice your knitting and start talking about it in French at full volume because they assume nobody will understand them, just like how Mom shit-talks in French because she knows she can get away with it around Americans. You’re being ridiculous, and besides it’s not like they would expect someone to understand them, so just sit and be quiet until the bus gets back to the East Bay and you can finally get to bed after that Ra Ra Riot show got out so late. Just sit and knit and ignore that thing that sounded like ‘I wonder what she’s making’ and —
“Oh, come on, did she really just say ‘My grandmother used to do that?!’”
Friday, February 20th, 2009
Yay! One of my favorite webcomics got it right on the nose:
(My all-time favorite, if you were wondering, is Kate Beaton’s comics — the literature/nerdery/goofiness is exactly my favorite possible thing.)
Monday, January 26th, 2009
So one thing I’m noticing as I’m working on heavily patterned or Latvian-style mittens is that I’m a nutcase — and sometimes in a bad way.
(more…)
