I just cast on for Serenity. I spent awhile last night monkeying with the numbers and measuring and remeasuring my washed, blocked swatch to figure out what size to make and once I had made the math come out correct three different ways, I finally cast on.
I was blissfully charging into my third round of garter stitch when I noticed that holy cow, something’s weird. I’m usually a highly technical, impetuous type — I’m practically a stunt knitter. But knitting a large swatch so I could get a good average measurement? Washing and blocking it? Triple-checking my math?
Enjoying garter stitch?
I love dreaming up projects, but I get overwhelmed easily. My list of half-finished projects and promises is as long as my arm and adding to that list makes me feel pretty worthless. Enough people have bitched me out for procrastinating that now instead of committing to something and then putting it off, I commit to something, get terrified, start stalling, make myself feel guilty and ashamed before anyone else can do it, and put things off anyway. It’s a stupid process, and I’m still figuring out how to stop it.
So starting a sweater, especially when I still have another large project mostly done but not quite there, is kinda scary. I know I have all the skills I need to make the sweater; the only thing stopping me is the nasty little voice in my head that says I’m a bad person who won’t finish it. Which is stupid, neurotic thinking, I know — I mean, this is my hobby! I’m supposed to be doing this for fun!
So instead of starting a sweater, I spent two days knitting, washing and measuring a swatch and trying out different ways of casting on, all for a beginner-level raglan knit in the round. By then I’d done so much math that even my worst neurotic worries had to shut up, so when I finally settled down with a stretchy-enough cast-on, I got to turn off my brain and knit.
And oh, it feels good.
At least if the zeitgeist is thirsty for berets, it also has a serious supply of them on tap. Sarah referenced Porom, the new brooklyntweed beret, in the last post’s comments and I really liked that one. I figured hey — might as well round up a few stylish beret patterns that won’t leave your head looking like it’s been attacked by a giant, floppy sea urchin. (Except Porom, which looks like a giant floppy sea urchin in the good way.)
Since I can’t knit ‘em all, after some exhaustive Ravelry searching, I settled on the Bousta Beret — the subtle-but-complex stitch pattern hooked me immediately, and in the Ravelry projects, every variation on yarn and size looked fantastic. Best of all, it calls for DK-weight yarn, so I can use that red cashmere I mentioned. Sweet! I don’t have to shop before I cast on!
So here’s Bousta and all my runners-up, with links to Ravelry patterns and projects:
Bousta Beret. Gorgeous photo and example by FlickaFish.
Trinity Stitch Hat. Example by Reecie; check the photo for a rad tattoo! Free pattern.
Cassidy’s Cap. Would you look at those cables! Example by tammyknits.
DROPS Basque hat with lace pattern. Free pattern.
February Beret. An instant classic. Free pattern.
Porom Jared Flood strikes again!
Selbu Modern. Just look at it! It’s perfect! Free pattern.
Marronglace Beret. Crochet, for those of us who go both ways.
(Oh, just look at that title, won’t you? I’ll do anything for a “Sympathy for the Devil” reference, I will.)
Well, hello there! Now, it’s bad form to apologize for not updating your blog — it seems presumptive to assume my adoring audience would pine for my golden words while I laze around watching Cartoon Network. So this is definitely not an apology. Instead, I’ll leap right into the talking!
I just got back from seeing Neil Gaiman at a book reading in San Francisco and during the Q&A session, he got a question he and all successful writers constantly have to answer: “What’s the best advice for a writer?” His answer: “Write. The second-most important advice is: finish.” (I preferred the first question, myself: “Are you taller than your fridge?” Answer: “No.”)
Would-be writers are always looking for the magic pen, software, morning ritual, desk arrangement, hangover cure or sleep/wake schedule that will turn them from would-be writers into capital-W Writers — anything that’s not the real answer, the one that smacks of hard work and discipline: writing is what makes you a writer.
I’ve lost touch with writing, myself. I’m paid to be a Web monkey, and Web monkeys are considered coders, not writers. There hasn’t been much call for me to write. When I think about Real Writing, my brain locks up and makes a noise like a loose belt in an old Honda. I blog here, but I’d gotten caught up in the “Oh, I haven’t been knitting much; besides, I can’t blog without a photo” train of thought, which is a treacherous one to entertain. Boring! Inaccurate! The worst kind of intolerable mendacity!
So, to hell with that. I’ve cleaned my room, sorted my yarn in a way that will probably make no sense to me a month from now, cleared my desk off and put all my scissors into an old metal biscuit tin with a cartoon of a little Japanese man on it that would probably strike people nowadays as kinda racist, and I’m ready to blog! I’m here to bring you my message, as loud and clear as I can:
If I have to look at another beret pattern on Ravelry, I’ll fucking kill myself.
Hah! I know how this game goes. Now I’ve said that, I’m immediately gonna queue four completely innovative, technically challenging, cleverly constructed and totally gorgeous berets. Fuck you, fate! I’m ready!
Really, though. Go through the patterns on Ravelry lately, and you’ll see: the zeitgeist is thirsty for berets. I even saw one on a boy yesterday! Granted, he was young and confused-looking, and it was outside an art supply store, which I think the United Nations has declared a safe haven for tragic fashion choices, but still. Not everyone has the guts, insouciant charm and cute knee socks needed to pull it off. Certainly not that poor, charcoal-smeared wretch.
Fortunately for what’s about to happen to my queue, I do, and could totally see myself in a candy-apple-red beret. I even have some cashmere yarn in exactly that color. I mean, if I gotta do a beret, why not go for one that’s not afraid to say “JESUS CHRIST, WOULD YOU LOOK AT THIS GIRL’S HEAD?!”
The funny thing is, as much as I could use a hat that’s not one of the ten I already own, I’ve been hesitant to start a new project before I finish the double-knit scarf I’m working on.
I know, right? You’re gasping like landed fish right now with shock and dismay, admit it! I’m waiting to finish something. I’m getting the vapors just thinking about it.
I dunno, I think my three-year campaign to get rid of clutter is finally paying off in the weirdest way. I go into shops now, pick something up and carry it around the store for a bit, then go “Eh” and ditch it where I found it. The quick thrill of buying it just doesn’t pay off the way it did before. I guess at the wise old age of OMIGOD I’M ALMOST 28, I’m finally growing wiser. Better start checking my brain for new wrinkles and my underwear for gray pubes! It only gets better from here!
Merino handspun from
UndyedYarnpire, a friend from the stitch ‘n’ bitch, getting the Glamour Shots treatment for Ravelry
My sleep schedule has been in ruins lately. I’ve been mopey and meh since the sweater curse kicked in again. I found a great Banana Republic sweater for four bucks at Out of the Closet and offered to reknit it from the armpits down to fit the boyfriend. A couple weeks later, the boyfriend cut me loose and now I’m single. I guess promising to knit a partial sweater for a significant other means that instead of a regular crappy break-up, you get a well-reasoned, respectful, amicable parting of ways over totally understandable differences in your life goals.
GAH.
So for the past couple days, I’ve been distracting myself after I get home from work by compulsively photographing my yarn stash on Ravelry and cataloguing it. I’ve also got to take the semi-abstracted close-up shots that make me want to reach into the monitor and squeeze the yarn. It’s the same kind of impulsive tactile craving that had me desperately wanting to bite my friend’s iPhone when they first came out. Which means long hours spent trying to make a bunch of string look sexy.
I’m usually not so type A about my stuff, but it’s been an absorbing distraction. I also figured that getting all my yarn catalogued would be a good way to curb my habitual yarn-buying. It’s easy to think “Aw, I have too much yarn, but what’s ten more skeins?” and click “buy.” It’s another thing entirely to think “Hmm, I wonder if that yarn goes with anything in my stash. Let’s see … y’know, maybe I wait until I’ve made a dent in the EIGHT SWEATERS’ WORTH OF YARN I already have. And why do I only ever buy anything in brown and gray?”
Though I’ve already staked out one exception to the yarn ban: Meridian Jacobs yarn. I’ve got a thing for the demented-looking skulls of multihorned Jacob’s sheep — I have about four hanging on my wall, and vague plans of getting a tattoo of one — so I have to check out the Jacob’s wool an hour’s drive from my house. It also fits in with my resolution to buy local, indie, sustainable, and less.
I’m also trying to buy less yarn and produce more of my own stuff. I’m laying the groundwork for some pattern/site stuff in the next few months, like I’m always promising to do. We’ll see how that goes.
How come high-fashion mitten models look so damn silly? Yeah, yeah, I’m picking an easy target, but there has to be better art direction out there than “Our vision is kind of a ‘Egyptian sarcophagus’ meets ‘The shrooms just kicked in so my head feels like a kickball and it’ll roll off my shoulders if I don’t prop it up with my hands.’”
Much love to VK and their awesome mitten patterns, but have they heard of modeling mittens by, say, throwing snowballs? Or handfuls of shaved ice that look like snowballs?
Every once in a while I stumble on something that, though perfectly innocent, offends my sensibilities like crazy. There’s nothing at all wrong with the item, it just offends me. Like cilantro. Or lemongrass.
Or APPLE COZIES.
Jesus, people. APPLE COZIES. That you knit or crochet to protect your apple from bruising. Talk about solving a first-world problem … and don’t we first-world-problem kind of people not even eat enough fresh fruit to necessitate this kind of travesty?
Anyway. Don’t mind me. I’ve had a hacking cough for three weeks and my patience with just about everything is criminally low.
I just moved last week about five miles north within Oakland, from a down-at-heel industrial area stocked with artists and poor families barricaded behind six-foot iron fences to a suburban neighborhood filled with flowers and neat old cars. It’s quite a change, I tell ya. I’ve gone from zero corner bars to five (one’s even a piano bar!) and I’m down the street from a beautiful old theater, and a mile and a half from the Parkway, a second-run theater with beer and pizza and couches! This feels a lot like the neighborhood where I grew up, but better. It’s friendly and safe in a way that triggers all my white guilt for liking it so much. And none of it smells like piss!
I’ve also gone from having no neighborhood yarn stores to two — Piedmont Yarn and Apparel and Article Pract are within two miles of the new place.
Then again, I’m not sure how much yarn I need, since my yarn and fabric stash took up two medium-sized, three-cubic-foot moving boxes, and my clothes only took up four, and maybe a third of my closet will go to storing stash. It may not sound like a lot, but for a wannabe minimalist, it’s hard to justify. At least it’s nowhere near as bad as my t-shirt problem: 60 and counting, and three more just showed up today. Yikes.
I’ve finished my Simple Knitted Bodice and, other than being completely alarmed at how fat I seem to have gotten since I cast on (WTF, desk job? WTF, buying unhealthy lunches downtown every day? How could you do this to me?!) I’m very pleased with it. The fit’s great, which it had better be after I abandoned the pattern as written to custom-fit the damn thing to my spreading body. I think there are a couple of loose ends of yarn still dangling inside the thing, but they don’t poke out too often, so I’ll wait until I’m having a Type-A, caffeine-induced OCD kind of evening to take care of them.
In the meantime, I’m making Coachella. It’s a relief to be following a pattern mostly as written, though I’m doing a slipped-stitch pinstripe instead of plain stockinette and I’ve tweaked the armholes a little to fit better. As I posted in the comments of the author’s blog:
As I’ve been working on it, I’ve been thinking about the initial blogland squawking about wearing it with a bra and I think I might’ve cracked it. When I first saw the pattern, I thought “No way could I wear that! I have to wear a bra!” and it wasn’t until I read through it that I realized it was meant to be worn with a halter bra.
The thing is, a halter or convertible bra for a D cup is significantly bigger than one for an A or B cup. The strap around the back can be close to 2″ wide, and the cups extend much further to the side, almost in the armpit. A D-cup halter bra needs way more armhole and middle-back coverage. Mine would be sticking out all over in a Coachella as written.
Knowing that, I’m moving the bottoms of the armholes up, closer to the armpit, which should solve that problem for me. It’s an easy fix, and I’m stoked! Yay!
It’s got bust shaping, too, so I’m stoked all over. Though I’m knitting it in 100 percent cotton, which really, really shows off the stitches, and any imperfections you make along the way. I’m not making any errors, but I sure as hell am paying attention to how I weave in ends, and I have a feeling I’ll be unpicking a couple of those weaves and redoing them.
I’m also keeping a close eve on the rolled hem, since as a rule I hate rolled hems and this one’s rolling into itself in a thick sausagey curl that I don’t like at all. I have a feeling blocking will take care of it, but in case it doesn’t, I’m constantly poking at it, trying to guess how much work it would be to crochet it in place. I’m probably doing the bottom hem in ribbing, to keep that from rolling, since I’m probably not crazy enough to unpick a cast-on edge and reknit it … though I’m not ruling that out completely. It’s a bunch of extra work either way, but I’ve given up on talking myself out of my pathological disgust for things like rolled hems, cilantro and instant miso soup, and if this one doesn’t convince me, it’s history.
Next up: The Nieuwmarkt Pullover. I’ll do it as a zippered cardigan, since the fickle San Francisco weather doesn’t lend itself to big wool sweaters that you can’t adjust. I’m also toying with the idea of doing it as a hoodie, because damn I love hoodies, and they’re one of the only exemptions from my decluttering, “don’t have ten of everything” rules. (The others are neckties, skulls, and art. Though since I now have twice as much art as wall space, I might have to ban new art, especially since I’m moving this month to a room half the size of my current one. Sheesh.)
I’m still working on the simple knitted bodice. I reknitted the bottom and overshot the mark by a few inches, realized I needed to make the front a little longer, figured out that even knitting the seed-stitch hem on needles two sizes smaller still didn’t keep it from flipping, and ripped back several inches. And if I redo that hem, I have to redo the sleeve hems to match, which is fine because they were a little too short anyway. And one stitch just below the lace panel came loose (eek! dang things are so slippery) and worked itself back a couple rows. Yee-freakin’-haw.
On the plus side, I have plenty of extra yarn and the thing is this freakin’ close to fitting like a dream. And, even better, it’s this close to DONE.
Overall, I’m remarkably cheerful about it. That’s because I’m probably stalling. I’ve still got a stack of patterns, but thanks to a computer crash I don’t have that copy of InDesign anymore on my work computer, and it doesn’t look like I get to replace it. So sorting that out and getting the patterns all proofed seems way less pleasant than several inches of seed stitch on size 3 needles.
Urgh.
Mike just dropped off the copy of son of Stitch ‘n’ Bitch that I won from a Y Knit contest. And it’s signed by Debbie Stoller!
I’m not sure what my favorite part of the whole exercise was: meeting another Internet knitter (I *heart* all of them), meeting a knitting podcaster (I’m a podcasting early adopter, so it’s always been a little glamorous to me), realizing how extremely local he is (we’re both Easy Bay residents), reading Mike’s Moo card that was tucked into it (man, I love those things) or entering the book into my Ravelry library.
Sweet! I love it when the Internet crosses over into real life. It’s a little awkward in the dating world, but freakin’ great when it comes to hobbies.
A corner of the chart for Torque, which has been eating my life.
Anyway, in usual me fashion, I’m being eaten alive by one of my designs, which I’ve named “Torque.” (And no, I don’t give a damn that there’s already a knitted “Torque” out there; I like the name, and it’s not like anyone could confuse my fingerless gloves with a split-neck pullover. I mean, I guess they could, but if they did they’d have far greater problems than how much yarn to buy, y’know?)
I have a habit of making patterns way more complicated for myself than they need to be, in the hopes of making the knitting process a little more graceful for the end user. The end result may look effortless, but they sure as hell aren’t that way to make, and even knitting it can do pleasantly weird things to your head (as a certain early adopter of my Double Dutch hat can attest). I had a feeling, though, that there was a way to get the thumb gusset on Torque to flow properly in a reasonably easy way, and all it took was a month of frustration and determination to come up with something. And now I’ve got to figure out how to do it all over again … backward. With cables on every other row.
I’ve been knitting bits of this one every night for a week, and stealing time at work to try to puzzle it out. Unfortunately, the first thumb gusset was one of those solutions that comes rippling out of my fingers in such an effortless, intuitive wave that I’m convinced I’m a total genius by the time it’s done. When it came time to do the other one, though, I got the mental version of the blue screen of death. My spatial skills are getting better as I grow older, but staring at my transcription and trying to visualize the mirror image of whatever contorted logic I was playing with gave my brain that horrible blank gray feeling just behind my forehead, in the same place that feels funny when I cross my eyes.
Fortunately, graph paper can solve pretty much any problem, from mapping things (all the straight lines are right there on the page!) to relationship problems (stuff enough graph paper into the other person’s mouth, and you’ll no longer have to put up with their crap) to world hunger (which’ll work as soon as humans learn how to digest cellulose). I charted and charted until I had a good, solid understanding of how the shaping worked and how to mirror it. It took about three evenings of drawing, doodling, erasing, reknitting and cursing to get it right. It also helped that I was all fired up about what is possibly the best notebook ever: Mead #09000, a composition book with half-graph-paper, half-ruled pages that looks like it floated right out of 1966.
My goal is to have the pattern in beta by Tuesday so I can get a couple copies to some test knitters at my stitch ‘n’ bitch. I can’t wait, because I’m really excited about the photography and layout work for it, and then selling the pattern through Ravelry. Also, I’d, um, like to have my life back.
