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.
I turned the heel on my first sock the other day. Looks perfect. Fits perfect.
I rule.
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Oh, man – I just found the site for color hounds out there (myself included): Kuler. If you’re the kind of person whose mouth starts watering and whose spine starts tingling when colors match up just right, this site will make you purr.
You can see other people’s swatches, mark your favorites, download swatches for use in Adobe applications and, best of all, make your own with their awesome color editor!
Here’s one of mine, with that classic denim/strawberry mix I love so, so much:
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!
“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?!’”
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.)
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.
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Somewhere around the holidays, I got suckered into knitting a pair of mittens, a pair of arm warmers and a matching beanie for friends at work. I’ve been cranking like crazy trying to get them done because even though it’s only January, the fickle Bay Area weather probably has maybe three or four weeks of cold left before we’re up to our necks in blissfully balmy weather.
We’ve already had our first week of unseasonably warm weather: 70 degrees and sunny for most of a week, in mid-January. It’s crazy! Everyone I know has been getting spring fever early, digging their bikes out of storage, going for long hikes, trekking to farmer’s markets or just reading in a sunny patch of the living room and falling asleep mid-paragraph. We’ve also all been trying to stifle a nagging low-level doomsday anxiety and making lots of nervous jokes about global warming.
Portland, however — Portland is cold. I was up there last weekend and the knitter in me was all excited that I got to pack my knitwear and actually use it! The spoiled Bay Area native in me, though, was just pissed that I had to wear all of it at once to keep from freezing.
As soon as I got back to the sunny, golden, perfect Bay Area, all my knitting looked pretty … well, it looked pretty stupid. Two-color knitting with worsted yarn on size 3 needles? Warm and solid, but so’s a bulletproof vest, and at this rate the bulletproof vest would be lighter. A sweater made with an alpaca/silk blend? Gorgeous, but only useful if I take up long rambling walks by the edge of the bay at night … with no pants on.
But wool’s wool, so I’ll keep knitting it, confident that the weather will do another about-face right into cold, gloom and rain and I’ll have an extra few weeks before it’s time to start in on another round of unfinished summer knitting.
(And in the day and a half since I started this post, it’s done exactly that — cold, rain, the whole deal!)
I think this is the year that I buy my friend a present instead of knit one.
We’ve been friends for near six years and for most of that, I’ve knitted him something for his birthday. No sweaters or anything, but beanies with devil horns; fingerless gloves with prison tattoo-style embroidery; sturdy scarves that he can’t use much in San Francisco where he lives but that come in handy for snowboarding. He loves them and loses them anyway, and I don’t mind; he loses them because he uses them constantly.
A couple weeks ago I was pondering what to make him and it hit me: the lucha libre mask from “Son of Stitch ‘n’ Bitch” (here’s the Ravelry link), but done up like Strong Bad from Homestar Runner! I’d have to chart Strong Bad’s face for the pattern, buy the yarn, then knit like a fiend for the next week or two, but it’d be totally doable. It would be perfect!
The perfect pattern — again. Every year, I come up with the perfect present and turn in the finished product, sometimes way past deadline, often with an additional present. He loves them, but doesn’t exactly reciprocate. Come to think of it, I can’t actually remember if he’s given me a birthday present at all in the last couple years, never mind an elaborate handmade one. I’m not the kind of person who keeps tabs on that kind of thing; it’s just hard not to notice when I bust my ass on something good for him and he doesn’t remember to call on my birthday — especially when mine is only three days before his.
He’s busy, working a lot, and kinda distant lately as our lives have started peeling slowly away from each other. Neither of us has brought that up yet, and I don’t know when or if we will. Not to mention his girlfriend’s a beginning knitter, and the product of all my badass technical knitting skills wouldn’t mean much stacked next to one of her totally simple and totally earnest scarves.
He’s not a bad friend, by any means; he’s still one of my best. But I think it’s his turn to remember this time.
Here’s some trivia for ya: I was wondering about use of the word “rocket” before this century, and looked up rocket on an online dictionary to get a look at the origin of the word. I’ve been looking up words since I was very small, which is part of the reason I have a stellar vocabulary and kill at Scrabble. And here’s what I saw:
Origin:
1605–15; < It rocchetta, dim. of rocca distaff (with reference to its shape) < Goth *rukka
See that? Distaff! We call them “rockets” because they’re shaped like old-school spinning tools! There’s always a little more old tech in our new tech than we realize, and language is some of the oldest tech around.
