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.

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:

• Soft, 100-percent wool items are comfortable and stay warm even when wet.
• Tight hats and long mitts are warmer and are less likely to get lost.
• You can knit or embroider information like arrest hotlines into the garment, on the inside where they’re less likely to be noticed. (For the Bay Area, the National Lawyer’s Guild San Francisco chapter’s arrest hotline is (415) 285-1011 ).
• You can double- or triple-strand worsted-weight yarn to knit quickly at a bulky gauge.
• Fingerless mitts knit up really quickly, but in less temperate climates, mittens are warmer.
• If you’re donating yarn and knitting supplies (there are knitters out there!), you can add printouts of simple patterns that require minimal gear or can be knitted flat and sewn up.

Here are some pattern suggestions for bulky and super bulky yarn:

Hats knitted in the round

• Ribbed Beanie
• Chunky Slouch Cap
• Really Warm Hat
• Hat Shaped Hat
• Open Source Kitty Hat

Hats knitted flat and seamed

• Hannah’s Hat
• Speedy Cabled Beret

Crocheted hats

• Truffle Shuffle Skully
• Blue Tweed Hat

Mitts knitted in the round

• Fast and Fearless Fingerless Mitts

Mitts and mittens knitted flat

• Ash Mittens
• Motley Mitts
• Lovely Mittens

No, seriously. Leg warmers.

This is a pretty serious concession. Born in 1980, I saw the ’80s and early ’90s as baffling, fashion-wise. As a weird outsider whose was thoroughly and unintentionally androgynous well into my teens, clothing didn’t really make sense to me until the advent of Riot Grrrl and, later, Britpop. Mad mixes of clothes that crossed and confused class, generation and gender lines? Sure! I was already asking my dad to bring me work shoes just like the ones he wore to the auto shop and wearing them to my spendy private school. But most of what I remember of the ’80s is being treated as some kind of bizarre alien for failing at girliness. Neon colors? Those awful asymmetrical ponytails? Leggings? Leg warmers? Gah.

Then I saw Mosey.

NEEDED IT. Faved it. Forgot about it, until this winter, staying at the boyfriend’s place for nights in a row with no change of clothes, wearing the same short skirt to work four days running … during a cold snap I had failed to provision for. I ended up going to the drugstore across the street from my work, buying two pairs of legwarmers and putting them all on at once. My cosy-legged bliss inspired the following Twitter post:

This is just to say / I have bought the legwarmers / you were probably deriding / forgive me / they were wonderful / so stripy / and so warm.

But, like most drugstore items bought suspiciously cheaply, they were sorta crap. The edges started fraying immediately, and the thin acrylic yarn resisted repair. They wouldn’t stay up; I ended up improvising sock garters with 12″ Velcro straps, which worked well for holding them up but made them fuzz and fray.

I can do better, I thought. And I remembered Mosey, whose flared silhouette edged them safely into 1970s fashion, a decade I have plundered since high school.

It’s a simple pattern, but god, did I make it unsimple, as per usual. I made the small size, swapping out the Aran-style X-and-O cable for a staghorn cable because they’re my favorite. Everything blazed along incredibly fast, until I realized halfway through that the fit was going to be shorter and tighter than intended, and that I wanted a longer folded-over cuff at the top … the very first part of the pattern. Crap.

So: Start over, or no?

The hell with it. I knitted all the way down to the end, where I ditched the rolled edge for a turned hem with a surprisingly neat knitted-on seam I sorta invented, I think? That done, I cut off the top just above the cable, lengthened the ribbed cuff, threw in my first vikkel braid, knitted another repeat and a half of the cable pattern, and — here’s the badass part — grafted the whole affair to the bottom half. Hey fuckin’ presto! Legwarmer!

I blazed through the matching one with no mishaps, and knitted a total of about five feet of i-cord without even blinking.

In short, it was typical me: take something incredible simple, and find a way to throw in modifications, a brand-new technique (vikkel braids), some half-ass thing I mostly made up (my top-down turned hem), something daunting (grafting across cables) and something I hate but decide to do tons of anyway (the i-cord).

What the hell, dude. Why aren’t I this good any ANYTHING ELSE except making quesedillas?

There’s some work involved: raw piles of data aren’t helpful, but over-filtered information gets kinda samey. I try to get around it by finding other people to do the work for me: For music, I follow music blogs and have a handful of friends who report to me with the names of bands that OMIGOD I HAVE TO CHECK OUT, and occasionally google phrases like “the Vietnamese Tom Waits” to inject some unfiltered noise into my comfortable habits.

On Ravelry, I watch my friends’ activity like a hawk, and I obsessively check test-knitting groups. It’s a great way to scope out new patterns, and I like occasionally signing on for a test knit and donating a little extra time to proofing patterns.

New hat!

Hence: This hat! It’s brioche stitch, which I love; the cables are awesome; and with bulky yarn, I cranked it out in no time flat. It’s warm and plush and RED. The test pattern was already pretty polished, so I didn’t have to spend a lot of time counting and double-checking. Total cakewalk. And as an inveterate indie-rock hipster-wannabe, it’s like getting into a band before they’ve even released their first EP: total bragging rights.

For some reason, I think better on graph paper.

I picked out his favorite shade of electric blue, with a good saturated red for the squirrel design, since he loathes brown. (My favorite color? Fire-engine red. We tend to check in before dyeing our hair to make sure we don’t end up with the same livid red or magenta. We are not subtle people.)

I did a quick check for squirrel charts on Ravelry, but the charts were small and heavily stylized, so I’m drawing them myself. Translating small, round, spastic animals into big, chunky blocks without losing their essential squirrelness is fun. I’m primed by an extremely nerdy childhood hobby: origami. As a kid, I’d fold and fold and fold, then hold up the finished product in front of someone and demand “Can you tell what this is?” If they guessed wrong, I’d go back to folding. The best response I ever got was “OH MY GOD IT’S THAT THING FROM STAR WARS!” when I figured out how to make an X-wing.

The X-wing, if you’re wondering, is the only origami that’ll get you laid. Fold one of those out of a peeled-off beer label, and you’ve got a fast ticket into nerd-boy pants.

I don’t practice origami much anymore, but since I am a born fidgeter, I end up making most of it when I’m out at bars. The boyfriend has a small collection of tiny drunk paper animals: a few cranes, a bright pink manatee, a shark twisted out of the sticky label from a bottle of Poppy Jasper. Last Friday I went out with some officemates after work, and got to see a drunk coworker charging around the financial district, cheerfully yelling and counting off from the fortune teller he held in one outstretched hand, which I’d folded for him out of a torn-up bar menu.

The challenge of origami, or drawing charts, or caricaturing, is figuring out how to get across somethingness with the smallest amount of real estate. What says “squirrel”? That big question-mark tail; the long smooth curve of the back; eyes; a large head; those wide-mounted eyes. Squirrel!

Stop! Squirrel time!

Still knitting, but not much of my own. I do have a dozen sketches for patterns inspired by my city, Oakland. I’m also in the extremely initial, awkward stages of sketching some designs based on Joshua Tree, California.

Well, sorta. See, it started out as “Oooh, designing from places is fun. I should pick more places! Where else do I love?” but after a week, when I should’ve been spilling over with ideas, all I had was a couple of doodles of the spiny ends of yucca plants, drawn from memory. I pored over photos on Flickr of the Mojave and faved some glorious sunrises, but still … eh. Nothin’. I summoned memories of sitting in a deck chair under a lavender sky listening to coyotes howl up the sun; swimming in the pool at the Joshua Tree Inn and poking at the empty airplane bottles of tequila on Gram Parson’s shrine; seeing bands play under the stars at Pappy and Harriet’s; the edges of a pond swarming with tiny frogs an inch long.

Aaaaand … more nothin’.

I tried to remember some of my own Joshua Tree photos, but all that jumped out at me was one of the Simi Dabah sculptures that line Highway 62:

This one's my favorite.

So I drew that.

And then I remembered the art of Noah Purifoy, who built bizarre castles out of cast-offs and plywood, and the way the white house paint fades in the unremitting desert sun, and the circles and circles and circles Purifoy built over and over again:

Everything about this place is amazing.

I thought about how Purifoy might make a shawl, and I drew that.

So I guess I’m not drawing based on Joshua Tree, but the art and people of Joshua Tree. Which makes sense, since the last couple times I’ve been there, I haven’t made it into the park at all. I was too busy downing margaritas, seeing bands, getting stuffed French toast at the Crossroads Cafe, going to the swap meet and hanging out with my friends. And admiring the art that lines the walls of cafes, fills galleries, creeps up buildings, climbs straight up out of backyards and stretches out along sandy shoulders along Highway 62.

(If you’re interested in the idea of designing clothes and don’t know where to start, I recommend this book. It walks you through how to immerse yourself in a topic and come up with designs. I had grabbed an armload of books at the library to beef up my sketching skills, including this one, and spent the entire time I was reading this one impatiently nodding and muttering “I know, I know,” because it pretty much exactly described how I capture ideas and turn them into sketches.)

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 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.

First the edging in the one pattern I kind of liked wasn’t right, see, and I wanted an i-cord cast-on, but what should it be, two or three stitches wide? Then the first row of stitches was too loose, so I had to figure out how to fix that, and then the staghorn cable wasn’t wide enough, and then it wasn’t, well, staghorn enough, and all of that was after I figured out that ribbing the rest of it just wasn’t gonna work, and should I or should I not leave a purl gutter next to the seed stitch I settled on instead of the ribs?

Which is why it’s taken me three days of knitting to make … let’s see …

… two inches of a fingerless glove.

On the plus side, the yarn is fantastic to work with, a wool/alpaca blend that is totally itch-free and plush as a kitten. And, sadly, discontinued. Which is unfortunate, since my single large skein of it, while gamely playing along with the yarn-eating cable I chose, will never reach my elbows.

Damn. So close.

Now that my knitted spats are done but for the buttons — all existing spats patterns were rejected, by the way, because I couldn’t knit them with stripes going up instead of across — it’s only a few more days until I finally, finally, finally get to knit something just by following what a pattern says.

Crazy.

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

I swatched several crochet patterns: I wanted something not too fussy or remotely granny-square-like. I settled on a simple stitch with a strong vertical stripe, then started hooking. It took a couple months, two trips to Michael’s for yarn, some nonconsensual striping and about all the patience I could muster to finish it, and when it was finally done, I had nowhere to block it. My nine blocking squares are great, but nine square feet is nowhere near enough the surface area of a five-foot-long curtain.

I figured ah, hell, I needed to wash the sheets anyway, and I stripped the sheets off my bed, folded back the memory foam pad, and soaked the cotton curtain in water until it weighed about a ton, then pinned it to my mattress and stretched it out until it cried.

And there it sat, damp, bathing in a mild, dry breeze from the open window and reveling in its dampness. For hours. Damply.

By 10 that night, I’d already resigned myself to a night on the mattress pad on the floor when the boyfriend called to ask about the vegetables he’d left in my fridge.

“Um … would you mind bringing them over?” he asked.

I flicked my eyes toward the ceiling. So I’m a vegetable delivery service, huh?

“You can stay the night!” he added.

My eyes came back down to the miles and miles of soggy cotton stretched out on my bed.

And that’s how my hobby kicked me out of bed last night.

It sure is red, isn

[See this project on Ravelry]

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.