Baby we can work it out
By god, I think I’ve done it. I haven’t bought yarn in over a month.
I like to think it’s because of my gradually decreasing materialism, but I have a nasty feeling that it’s because I ran out of room in the closet.
sucka sc: knit & crochet
Stubborn just isn’t the word
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.
Read more…
Smoke and chocolate
Knitter, blogger and urban gardening adventurer Crazy Aunt Purl has something radical to say about saving money:
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.
There’s a monster in my bed
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
AUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGHHHH
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.
More lace
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.
First socks; next camera
I turned the heel on my first sock the other day. Looks perfect. Fits perfect.
I rule.
Color junkies: Check out Kulerful
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:
Masquerading as a minimalist
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!
An internal conversation on the bus
“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?!’”