Moth Heaven

Happy Birthday Tuja, Mom

My mommy is visiting me.  She called me Saturday night and asked if she and my sister could come up and play with her grandson.  We have been having a lovely time, and she has been inspired by the unavoidable presence of knitting in the house--that is, an inability to sit down on any surface without having to move a work in progress or a book with post-its bristling out from the pages or to walk across a room without tripping over a spinning wheel or stomping on fiber--to pick up the needles after five years.  She moved to South Carolina, and she says there just aren't any yarn stores there-abouts.  (pssst.  Mom.  That's what the internet's for)  All it took was a wave of a picture of Tuja under her nose and she was hooked.  We dashed up to Charlotte's Web in Exeter, New Hampshire today, and she fell for Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran in pea green.  In a sincere gesture of support, I bought some Jo Sharp Silk Road Aran Tweed in Jewel to do a little family knit-along with her.  And here she is on the patio, having cast-on for her swatch in the car on the way home! (that's my Mom)  Okay, not the prettiest picture of her.  She's going to hate it when she sees it, in fact. (sorry) 
But isn't she cute? And today is her Birthday too!
C'mon everyone . . .
Happy Birthday, Mom!

Aren't Moms who knit the best?

Wait a minute, I'm a Scarf Knitter

Thanks everyone for the vigorous and un-rancorous comments.  I was afraid that I was treading a little too close to the edge there for a bit.  I know that when I say "scarf knitters" it would be easy for anyone to asssume that I was laughing at the new kids, but what I'm really after is an attitude of disinterest in what knitting could be, and so forth.  Just in case I haven't made myself clear, I don't have anything against scarves.  In fact, I'm knitting through two of them right now.  Here's my progress.

One is for the Azkaban Knit-Along that Iko is hosting, and the other one is for the Lace Along I'm co-hosting with Kate. So you see?  I'm a scarf knitter too. 

Stop the Scarf Knitters

I have been thinking about a post that Margene made last week about scarf knitters.  I have been dwelling on it, practically.  If you haven't read it, the story goes that that she checked out a new LYS and found that it exclusively carried novelty yarn for the making of scarves.  There was one size needle available in the store, and the proprietress offered to launch anyone on the journey of the making of a scarf from the yarn of their choice, even if they had never knit before.

This gave rise to a lively debate on Margene's site which I am not interested in repeating here, necessarily.  I'm not trying to start a fight, but no doubt someone may take offense.  Please understand, I have nothing against the knitting of scarves, but I don't think it's knitting.  I think that it's a craft thing.  That such yarns are sold at discount by Archie Moore and Jo-Ann Fabrics reinforces my suspicion.  I don't think that someone who can cast on 18 stitches in the loop method and garter stitch their way along for 24 inches and cast off can justifyably call themselves a knitter.  It's a start, certainly.  But it's not knitting.

Knitting is the methodical plodding (or soaring) through a pattern in anticipation of the joy of wearing or giving it.  I'm all for instant gratification, but knitting is more of a patience thing.  If I could compare it to something like cooking, the scarf knitter microwaves their food.  But the knitter is the cook who reads a recipe, or opens the fridge to survey the contents, and from thence makes a lovely meal.

I have come to bear a certain grudge against the knitters of scarves.  Not because they have made Saturdays unbearable at my LYS.  Not because recently, I was at an event absolutely without anyone to talk to, and was having high school flashbacks when a normally opaque acquaintance struck up an unusually fun conversation.  We were interrupted when an unfamiliar woman fingered my sweater and asked if I made it, and when I (modestly) said yes, she pointed to the dead Muppet around her neck and said "I'm a knitter too!" and the normally conversationally opaque woman I was speaking to in an unusual moment of lucidity turned away from me to fawn all over this creation, and then turned back to me having lost any thread of fertile thought. The muppet slayer walked away leaving me without even that recourse for pleasantries, and I was marooned again.  What ensued was mild jealously and a sense of injustice. 

No.  I bear a grudge against the knitters of scarves because they sell them in flea markets and clothing boutiques.  I bear a grudge because of this heart-breaking woman who has been coming to my knit group this summer.  She is on a fixed income, and has seen these scarves for SALE at flea markets and shops, and she has taken it into her head that she can make some extra money selling scarves that she has knitted.  The desperate thing about this tale is that she has squandered a small fortune on trendy sparkly fluffy glittery bargain yarn from Archie Moore, AND can't knit.  Her eyesight isn't what it used to be.  I have been trying to help her, in fact to the exclusion of any of my own knitting at  knitgroup, and there has been glacial improvement.  But she has a looming deadline, and has determined to have an inventory by then.  It's all that I can do not volunteer to make the blessed things for her.

It is the "Oh, I can do that!" phenomenon that moves me to pronounce that scarves are not knitting.  They are a cruel hoax. 

So here is my request.  Take a scarf knitter aside today, and inspire them to move on.  Tell them to stop selling their wares in the shops and leading my friend the fixed-income knitter down a primrose path.  Tell them about your favorite book of sweater designs.  Show them magazines.  Teach them about the purl stitch. Take them to your LYS and march them past the candy aisle and make them buy something with some protein content.

Good Luck.

Messy Mess Mess

Thanks everyone for the input.  There was for awhile a clear majority, which seems to be slipping at the contrarians weigh in with their persuasive ideas about it.  As for myself, I still haven't made a decision.  As I wrote in repy to Sharon's comment, I was thinking that the pattern carried over on the sleeves seem be a little dated, (the pattern is from the early 90's) and I had been looking at The Poetry in Stitches book where many of the sweaters I especially covet have sleeves with the colourway reversed from the body, and I thought. . .a-hah!  Sleeves that don't match! I can cheat!

However, with brooding indecision, I tried last night to pull the cast-off shoulder edges apart so that I could at least do a three-needle bind-off to really solidify the seams of what will otherwise most certainly stretch out of shape.  But I couldn't figure out which direction I had knit from at any given point, so I ended up having to re-knit everything north of the first neck decreases.  I had my head down in concentration and my fingers going and I completely lost track of time.  Walter made dinner, and ran through News Hour and the previous night's Daily Show on the Tivo without my looking up once.

Walter finally said to me at 10:40, "Are you going to eat dinner? Or should I spoon it into your mouth for you?"

One cold chicken pot pie and a glass of warm Chinon later, I finally packed it in around midnight.  I think already need some distance.

In case anyone is interested, the gloves I am hell-bent on making are the ones that I saw on the French Julia's website, made in orange and red mini-Ringel.  I have the winter 2003 Interweave Knits glove formula dug out to help me with the math.  I have decided, on Margene's encouragement, to make them sooner rather than later.  They'll be the treat knitting I take with me on vacation.

And on a refreshing non-narcissistic note, Kate and I have several new Lace-Alongers to welcome, like Christy who has pledged to make Stephanie the Harlot's Snowdrop Shawl.

There are more, but they are Kate's readers, and she is eating her dinner (it's later in France, you know) and will clue me in soon as to their identities.  She is a busy woman, that woman.  Designing, educating petits francophones, blogging, planning a wedding, and all while living in Paris.  ::Sigh::  I just feel a little more cosmopolitan when I read her blog.   

Okay, Kate, you can laugh now. 

Opinions, Please

So many things going. . .can't decide. . .knit three rows. . .want to make gloves. . .want to knit baby sweater. . .want to finish SOMETHING!
Ah, knitting angst.  When I started writing this blog, I thought that with some complete strangers looking over  my shoulder, that I would knit a litle faster and a little better and actually get some more accomplished.  Kind of like Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel. But instead, my knitting has developed a life of its own, and I've found myself caught up in the compulsion to knit for the blog.   As Stephanie the Harlot has said many times, "Must Feed the Blog." I find myself with five projects on the needles, and not a finished object within sight.  This has got to stop.

So I have two weeks vacation coming up in July in a cabin in Michigan, with childcare.  I have two weeks knitting freedom.  Here is my solemn vow.  I will take the lacy shawl and the linen drape sweater with me to finish, because they are meditative and easy to pack.  And in the meantime, I will work on the Insomnia Monster sleeves.  Now.  I have a question to ask of you. 

I cooked this up on Paint to look at my options for the sleeves.  On the right, is the sleeve as envisioned by the original pattern, with the red keyhole pattern at the cuffs.  This is nice, but my antipathy for knitting this part of the sleeves has served as a very effective deterrent for my casting on.  On the left is the sleeve with a simple repeat of the straight fair-isle pattern.  So here's my question: Is the right side so much more attractive and consistent with the body of the sweater than the left that I should just hunker down and do as the pattern dictates?  Or is the left just fine, or in fact better looking than the right, and I should feel free to just go with it? 
Please weigh in on this you lurkers.  I need some advice.

Lace Along Casting On

Yesterday at approximately 1:30 p.m. Eastern Time, Margene and I did a simultaneous casting on for our Lace Along Projects.  It was a universal moment, two projects linked by the magic of the internet and the shared desire to make holes in our knitting.  Maybe you felt it too?

I had been contemplating the provisional cast-on all week, all 121 stitches of it, and dreading the amount of time it usually takes me to do it, laboriously wrapping the yarn around a carrier.  I do what the Vogue knitting book calls an "Open Cast-On" because I have never been happy with picking up stitches out of a crochet chain. I have never seen anyone do an open cast-on, so I have learned form the pictures I've seen in books.  There has to be a trick to it, but I end up wrapping the knitting yarn in a figure eight around the carrier yarn and the needle, and it leaves me with tangled yarn and a nagging resentment that no one ever taught me how to do anything beyond the basic stitches.  Who knew there were so many ways to cast-on?  And why didn't I ever learn a few of them besides the long-tail?  And then I realize that I'm just feeling sorry for myself. 

But then it occured to me that if I treated the carrier yarn as something fixed and under tension, like a clothesline, then wrapping could become a mere dipping and picking up the knitting yarn from one side of the carrier yarn to the other like this:

Suddenly I don't need three hands to do this!  And it went very quickly.  I am so pleased.  I finished two repeats of the Trailing Leaf pattern, which gives me one complete leaf to show you, if you can see it.  What this is supposed to be is two leaves on a center stem, pointing at a forty five degree angle, more or less, but don't get out your protractor yet.  It is a kick to see the pattern form, almost like a game.  I'm gonna go make some more. 

Hey Teresa! Hey Stephaine!

Beth from my knitting group invited me to her house for a dye party Saturday, and I had not an ounce of undyed fiber in the house.  I called the incredibly helpful Fairy Godmothers at Halcyon, who shipped me a pound of corriedale in time for the Ball.  You know you're desperate when you are willing to pay as much for the shipping as you pay for what's in the box.  But I considered it my fee for the learning experience. 

My flea-marketing husband, in his continuing attempts to be involved in the mystery of knitting, has begun to bring me crockpots from yard sales and curbside trash piles.  Yep, curbside trash piles.  That's him at the end of your driveway Monday night picking through your cast-offs.  I won't let him drive anymore because he gets completely distracted by anything put out next to people's garbage cans.  He can identify trash at 40 miles an hour.  Sometimes we play that game where we drive by an unassuming tangle of rusty ironing boards and halogen floor lamps and he can tell me what is in the pile, sometimes down to the brand name.  And sometimes we have to stop.  This is the part where I slouch down in my seat and hope no one I know is driving by at that moment, or worse, lives in the house he is picking from.  Honestly, I think of it as recycling, and I am at peace with his fascination with other people's trash.  It could be worse.  This I know because I have a dear dear friend who is married to a man who brings anything home that isn't entirely ruined by mold or rust.  Lumber. (everybody needs lumber!)  Broken scooters (great wheels!).  Shredded kiddie pools (we can patch it!)  When the time came for them to buy a house, the husband insisted that they have enough storage space for all the stuff he's picked up over the years.  A bigger house.  So they spent 20% more to be able to fit all the free stuff, most of which she spends her free moments plotting to get OUT of the house.  So I count myself lucky.

But I digress.

Thankfully, I had a crockpot.
I learned that dying is not rocket science, but it is really messy. It looks really scary in the books, but it was very simple.  I learned to not use too much water at first.  To keep everything hot, and not to stir the wool because you think the dye won't make it to the bottom.  It will sink, if you keep adding colour as the wool absorbs it.  Stirring equals muddy colours. 

And picture above is of my results.

So when I came home, the pressure to spin was irresistible, and I finally sat down with my new wheel.  This is from the green Linda Diak batt that Kathy brought me from Fiber Frolic.  It's a little tricky pre-drafting it for this newbie, but I think I found a way to make it work. 
Today I promised Margene that I would cast on my shawl for the Lace Along.  I sent Kate an email letting her know that I would be sitting down to that at 1:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time in case she is ready.  Pray for the girl, my friend.  She has a wedding to knit for.  According to her counter, it's 102 days away, and she's yet to choose the pattern for her Kidsilk Haze.  And I don't think I'm being helpful.
I'll post a picture Monday to prove I did it.

The Maven's Relent

Once upon a Friday dreary,
as I knitted meek and weary
of linen draping evermore,
came a shift in the chart.
I've come to the lacy part!
Jaipur no longer is a bore.
A yarn  over bit!  Humdrum eased!
Frustration with stockinette appeased!
My need to eat and sleep ignore.
My needles quickly tap tap tapping,
No more find me nap nap napping.
I'll reach the completed object shore
and work on Jaipur evermore!

Happy Dance

Ah. That's all I have to say about this today. Just "Ah." If you've been following my arduous journey of making this, you know what I mean. Now for something completely different. Yarn that loves you back. I fell so in love with the koigu kerchief that Emma has been making several versions of, that I used her link to Foxy Knits and ended up on the phone with Mary, who helped me pick a colour right for me and this arrived in the mail from California two days later. I can't get over how much I like the colours in this little skein of yarn. I know that Koigu does this to people, but MAN. I wanted to take this on vacation to knit on the shore of Lake Superior in July, but I may not be able to restrain myself. Mary asked me to say that she's about to go on three weeks of vacation, so filling orders will slow down while she's gone. Part of her vacation will be spent in Canada, buying more Koigu. Okay everyone, I know what you're thinking, so say it with me: CAN WE COME?

Another Day, another ball of linen drape

I love that Alison posted a picture of the cardboard tube from the center of the Linen Drape with the ball band dropped around its knees.  It conjures all sorts of unpleasant similes to mind, most of which reside in the part of my cerebrum that I thought that I had walled off shortly after high school graduation.  But since Linen Drape and I are on friendly terms now, I will restrain myself from any comment other than my bemused and wickedly crooked smile.  I have knit another one of those balls into the endless abyss of Jaipur today, forever approaching the armhole decrease, and the much anticipated lacy bits around the neck, but I still have about eleven thousand and seventy six rows before that will happen, so instead, I will give you something much more entertaining than another picture of linen stockinette or another run-on sentence:

UPDATE: In no particular order, here is the list of objects that the amazing and brave knitters who have signed up for the Lace Along have decided to make.  I can't wait to see:
Katies' Alice from Rowan Magazine #35,
Chelsea's the Fiddlesticks Lotus Blossom Shawl in the discontinued and therefore utterly desirable wine colour,
Margene's Alice Starmore Seaweed Wrap,
Leigh's orange tencel doily,
Norma's undetermined something out of custom-spun laceweight with beads!
Larissa's Gibson Girl pullover from the latest Interweave Knits out of Koigu.
Teresa's Victoria Tank from the summer IK.
Carrie's Frost Flowers shawl from A Gathering Of Lace (it's already amazing!)
Alison's  Fiddlesticks Garden Shawl,
Nicole's lacy shawl from the summer Interweave Knits,
Linda - lacy cardigan from a recent Jaeger magazine,
Becky's unspecified lacy cardigan,
Jessica's Birch (even if she still hasn't posted our button on her blog yet,
Abby's something great (maybe a bookmark?),
Amanda's mystery something,
Brynne's waving lace socks from the Spring 2004 Interweave Knits,
Marjorie's two-pronged project of a lace top using Jaeger Albany and a free Rowan lace pattern,
Jenny's Victoria Tank from Summer 2004 Interweave Knits in Schachenmayer Catania,
Caroline's Shetland Shoulder Shawl from Debbie Bliss' treasure Traditional Knitting from the
Scottish and Irish Isles, AND
whatever Kate finally decides to make as her Kidsilk Haze wedding stole. 

Whew.  What a collection of holey knitting there is going on here.