I’m not knitting lately, at all, because I moved crosstown, to my own apartment. I hired movers for the heavy stuff and the furniture and the things I needed to set up a house right away, and the odds and ends are at the old place, piled onto the balcony and mashed into the closet, with all the yarn at the back. I have no idea where my knitting needle sets are.
But, knowing how my hands and brain start to itch when I don’t make anything for a few days, when I made a mad lunge back to the old place to pick up mail, I grabbed an overflow stash organizer (god, I’m becoming that kind of stash freak) (Becoming?) (Shut up). The freestanding cabinet that the birdcage sits on still holds my collection of vintage red, yellow and green Boye straights. I loaded a couple patterns on my iPad that I guessed would suit the yarn and needles I’d have at hand, and I’ve promised myself that once I unpack a few more boxes tonight, I can sit in my easy chair and listen to the radio and knit for the first time in a couple of weeks.
And since I have two and a half rooms and two and a half closets all to myself, the little shallow half-height closet is going to be just for yarn.
I am wearing 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?
I struggle with avoiding the echo chamber. If I’m not careful, I end up listening to the same music, reading the same news, hearing the same friends and, of course, browsing the same knitting patterns. I’m hardly a novelty freak, but it’s important to not cut myself off from new things completely.
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.
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!
What’s it been, six months? Then it’s about time for an update!
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.)
I made a bag!
I sewed a bag, to be specific. A knitting bag. I have a couple of bento bags I picked up in Japantown at the dollar store: squat, square-bottomed drawstring bags that are the perfect size for a ball of yarn and a small, portable, mass transit-friendly project.
These little guys are perfect for carrying small projects around before you absentmindedly stuff them into the back of a closet or into the "I swear I am going to go on a finishing spree; next week, maybe" box.
I didn’t use a pattern (but this pattern is pretty close), since I was using whatever scraps were left over from some too-long pillowcases. The red thread I already had on my sewing machine matched perfectly: not because I’d spent any effort on it, but because I keep buying such a narrow range of reds (”safety” through “fire engine” and “candy apple,” to be specific) that everything matches — to the point where last week, I accidentally-on-purpose dyed my hair the same vivid color as my little red satchel.
I went a little nuts on the construction: after having a couple of my earlier sewing projects fray in the wash, I’ve become militant about enclosing seams. In this one little bag there are French seams, flat-felled seams and rolled hems — I even broke out my new hemming foot for my sewing machine! Any stray fabric that could shed threads, snag a needle or catch a pair of scissors is sewed down to within an inch of its life. This little dude is bulletproof. There’s even a pocket inside with a tiny compartment for my tiny, tiny sock needles.
I sweated over this little bastard for two hours, pinning and ironing and getting my corners EXACTLY right, making sure the exposed hem on the front of the pocket was lined up just so. The cotton yarn I used for drawstrings at first seemed too thin, so I ended up crocheting a few feet of chain stitch out of a neon orange acrylic yarn I’d picked up for making amigurumi. Once it was done, I popped a ball of yarn into it, tucked a set of tiny DPNs into the pocket, and tied the top shut with a flourish, to admire my handiwork.
And what I had was … a little red bag. A little red bag with a pocket you can’t even see.
That’s it?
Good lord. I think I’ve set a new personal craft record for overthinking the obvious.
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 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.
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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