The cleverness of other knitters

In high school, we took a battery of standardized tests at the beginning of our freshman year. These included the usual math and logic and reading comprehension and vocabulary, which were just fine. But this round of tests also included a horrible spatial relations section, which showed a series of unfolded three-dimensional shapes, with various options for how those shapes would look when you folded them up. You know, IN YOUR HEAD. In the hour allotted for finishing the section, I answered one question, incorrectly at that.

The guidance counselor that reviewed everyone's results with their parents cheerily informed us that my score in the spatial relations section landed squarely in the 'retarded' range.

So clearly, spatial relations are not my strong point. This means a lot of knitting needs to be taken on faith. Incidentally, this also makes me a terrible driver. I take public transportation for a reason.

Anyway, faith. When I'm knitting a pattern for the first time, I can't easily envision how the mess on my needles will magically transform itself into the pictured finished object.

My first socks were very much knit on faith. I knit and knit and knit the leg. I made the heel flap, turned the heel and kept thinking 'this will never turn into a sock.' I picked up the stitches along the sides of the heel flap, still thinking 'this will never turn into a sock.' But I figured the Yarn Harlot wouldn't lie, and she obviously knows a lot about socks.

Then I knit my first round after picking up the stitches. And there it was - a tube again, with a bulge where the heel was supposed to be! It would be a sock after all! Hurrah for the cleverness of knitters!

The same thing happened with my first pair of baby booties. When I finished knitting, it looked like this:



To me, this is not a bootie. This looks horribly like a pair of knitted men's briefs. But I kept my faith. And with a quick fold, it looked like this:



Dude, it really is a bootie! And with some seaming and an i-cord, I ended up with this:



Sometimes faith is rewarded. Finished Be-Ribboned Booties from One-Skein Wonders (love that book). Alas, Kristy, I am not joining the Single Sock Liberation Movement.

The "ribbons" in this case are leafy knitted i-cords. I thought they made a nice match with the zucchini-ish hat. The Daft Crafter asked about the cords, so I've included instructions at the end of the post.

Meanwhile, the new issue of Interweave Knits is out. And that means I've got something new to learn:



This spatial relations thing also makes diagrams hard to follow, but I always end up with a huge amount of leftover sock yarn, and toe-up socks completely obviate that problem. So I'll figure this toe-up sh*t out if it kills me.

Leafy Bootie Ties

Cast on three stitches. Knit two rows garter stitch. On the next row, knit into the front and back of the first and last stitches in the row (5 stitches total on the needles). Knit one row. On the next row, knit into the front and back of the first and last stitches in the row (7 stitches total). Knit two rows. On the next row, knit two together at the beginning and end of each row (5 stitches total). Knit one row. On the next row, knit two together at the beginning and end of each row (3 stitches total). Knit 3-stitch i-cord of desired length. Repeat leaf at end of i-cord.

The leaf wouldn't fit through the eyelets on the bootie, so I knit the first leaf, then the i-cord, put the live stitches on a safety pin, wove the tie through the bootie, then knit the second leaf. This has the added advantage of making it almost impossible for the tie to work its way out of the bootie.

They say virtue is its own reward

...but cute-ass baby knits aren't half-bad either.



I spent a few hours on Saturday watching bad TV, not knitting, and glaring resentfully at my unfinished projects. Then I read all your comments and remembered I don't have to knit anything I don't want to knit.

Somehow that was enough, and I immediately cast on for the requisite hat-and-booties set for The Boyfriend's new nephew.

Fruit-and-vegetable hat pattern from Ann Norling. Tahki Cotton Classic from the stash, 64 stitches, size 6 needles. No modifications. Be-Ribboned Bootie* from One-Skein Wonders, same yarn, size 5 needles, modified to knit 24 rows on the leg instead of 27 and to replace the ribbon with an i-cord drawstring, with knitted leaves at the ends. Pure fun from start to finish.

Thanks, ladies, for reminding me that knitting is something we do because we want to, not because we have to!

* And yes, I do realize booties traditionally come in pairs, but I've got some important laundry to do. Tonight's goal: lower the Laundry Alert Level from Critical (Crazy Lady with No Underpants) to Moderate (slightly disheveled college student).

Temptation strikes

I have some works-in-progress, and I feel almost no desire to knit on any of them.



Mostly, it's socks. One pair actually has one sock finished and a goodly start on the second sock, in the always-charming Meilenweit MegaBoots Stretch.

The other pair is only one half-started sock and a fun knit, but I've run into some serious pattern issues with the Interweave pattern (admittedly, this may be entirely me and not the pattern). Lengthy rant forthcoming, complete with incompentent basic knitting math and, most likely, a few f-bombs.

I also have a sweater. A sweater with a body and one arm, sans cuff. However, this particular sweater has been relegated to the corner, where bad sweaters that sink into the Knitting Black Hole go to think about the consequences of their misbehavior and hopefully learn to be better and faster knits.

Stupid, stupid sleeves. Why can't sleeves be more like socks, with a nifty entertaining bit in the middle to keep me interested?

Plus, it's spring time. And the entire world looks kind of like this right now:



How can I knit a heavy wool sweater when the weather is this nice? And why would I knit boring beigy-browny socks when there is yarn like this I could be knitting?



Cherry Tree Hill supersock in Potluck (Blues/Greens). AKA "The Temptress."

Oh, this yarn...I've been making goo-goo eyes at it every time I go to my LYS, but I have resisted, because I already have plenty of sock yarn.

But then I had a particularly bad week at work awhile back and decided I needed to "just visit" the yarn on Friday after work, without buying anything (ha!). Of course, "just visiting" turned into "being unable to resist the yarn's wicked charms," and - realizing no one but me is surprised by this - I ended up taking the yarn home.

Since then it's been lounging on my living room chair, just looking beautiful. Beautiful enough that it cheers me tremendously each time I see it.

But looking beautiful isn't enough for this yarn. This yarn wants attention. If it were an animal, I feel like it would be presenting its reddened hindquarters or puffing up its feathers or doing a naughty mating dance. However, because it's yarn (and therefore immobile and lacking reddened hindquarters), all it can do is sit there, looking all blue and green and knittable and delicious.

So why haven't I been knitting with it? I love this yarn. But I have two other pairs of socks in-progress (that I will admit to) and another pair I really should start for gift purposes.

Plus, The Boyfriend's sister just had a baby (welcome, Oscar!), a bit earlier than planned, so I'm way behind on baby gifts. And with work and school and, well, Season 2.5 of Battlestar Galactica to watch, I just don't have a huge amount of time for knitting.

I feel like my knitting time needs to be focused and productive. Not self-indulgent and silly. Please, please, convince me otherwise...

All wool all the time

Or so I like to pretend. But I actually have a dark past. As the craft pirate already mentioned, we had a yarn swap at our last knitting group meeting, and it was there that my dirty little secret came out.

For the swap, I really tried to strike a balance between unloading some crap (because, um, one woman's trash is another woman's treasure) and finding nice yarn a deserving home.

With that in mind, I parted with some Soy Wool Stripes and a skein of Malabrigo that I loved but knew I would never, ever knit up (wrong colors), as well as a few solo skeins of Lamb's Pride in colors I just didn't love. They've all gone to good homes with knitters who will appreciate them.

It's possible I also balanced out the good stuff with a rather larger cache of, ahem, fun fur than I usually admit to owning. While I firmly believe that there's no such thing as horrible yarn, some of this stuff came pretty damn close.

Fun fur was my gateway yarn. Let us never speak of it again.

I also had the pleasure of meeting Valerie, of Knitting in Pink, that night. She was working on an Hourglass Sweater in the exact Classic Elite Skye Tweed I bought at Webs. That yarn knits up really, really pretty. And since I own the yarn, I totally felt pleased and proud of her Hourglass, just as if I had knit it myself.

Besides having exceptionally good taste in sweater yarn, Valerie is also one of the yarn pushers proprietresses of Yarn4Socks. You might not want to visit if you are at all weak-willed. There are sales. You've been warned.

The lovely ladies of my knitting group also joined forces to buy irresponsible amounts of yarn at visit the Gore Place Sheepshearing festival yesterday.

My friend Megan (of the dainty feet), who will become a Knitter if it kills me, joined us, despite the fact that she thinks she doesn't "really" knit.



Don't you just want to roll her up in a ball and carry her around in your pocket like a really nice bit of alpaca?

She did have some stiff competition in the cuteness department, though, what with these guys:



And this handsome fellow:



And, well, a whole bunch of these:



And, most adorably, these:



And where there's that many fiber animals, there's a whole lotta fiber, too.(Still-Blogless) Jessica, the aforementioned Pirate, the Daft Crafter and Megan were clearly feeling the fiber love (those bags? Full of fiber), as well as enjoying one of the other perks of festival-going: the food.



In the least obscene way possible, I do enjoy a big sausage now and then. I also scored a sweater's worth of tweedy purple yarn that was sheared, spun and dyed by New England farmers, and a really gorgeous skein of Lucy's merino-tencel sock yarn in a variegated purple and green.

You'll have to wait a few days for pictures of all the loot. Megan is currently in possession of all of my festival yarn. I am working on not being nervous about this.

Thanks ladies, for such a great afternoon!

Illusion vs. reality

Against all evidence, I like to think of myself as organized and dedicated and conscientious. I also like to pretend my life looks like a Real Simple photo shoot, where all my knits lounge beautifully against carefully coordinated backdrops and my yarn is carefully stowed in a clever, yet attractive, space-maximizing storage system.

Having a blog really helps with this. I blithely pretend not to have a half-dozen half-finished projects piled untidily around the house. Plus I get to carefully select only those pictures that look like my fantasy life should look. I can even crop out the yucky bits. If only real life were that tidy.

So in the interest of bloggerly veracity (and embracing reality), I present How My Stash Really Looks.


Those big plastic bins? Full of yarn. Those big glass canisters? Full of yarn.

It's also possible there's yarn tucked away in other corners of the living room. (Incidentally, some of the yarn hidden here is the exact same yarn the Craft Pirate bought at Webs a few weeks after I did. Great minds, baby, great minds.)


Much as I am learning to embrace the untidiness of my knitting habits, I have finally embraced being a process knitter. You know how knitters are said to fall into a "process" or a "product" category? I really, really thought of myself as a product knitter, despite the relative absence of said "products." But the Yarn Harlot's new book changed all that.

She has a quick quiz to help determine whether you are a process or a product knitter. One of the questions goes like this: your latest sweater is turning out gigantic. Upon realizing this you a) say "does anyone know a cold elephant?" or b) rip it out - because handknits are for wearing.

I'll be the one looking for a cold elephant. And happily casting on the next sweater.

Holy bloglines, batman!

Sheesh, a girl stops checking the blogs for a week or two and you all just produce and produce and produce. As Inigo Montoya once said, "Let me explain. No there is too much to explain, let me sum up."

There are things I have not been doing: blogging, reading blogs, commenting on blogs, taking pictures, checking my email, cleaning my apartment, cooking, seeing my friends, enjoying springtime, or finishing works-in-progress.

And there are things I have been doing: working.

We're at a crucial stage in my current project at work, doing the final rounds of testing for a new systems implementation. This means late nights and early calls and mandatory overtime (including weekends). It also makes for one seriously exhausted Librarian-in-Training. I realized things had reached a crisis point when I had an entire nightmare-filled night of dreams where I was alternately attacked by vicious flesh-eating monsters and testing our new system. What my subconscious lacks in subtlety, it more than makes up for in inventive and graphic gore. Yuck. And even with all the gore, I honestly couldn't tell which dream-fate was worse.

So I decided I needed to slow down a bit, to make time for the things that matter to me. I went to my knitting group last night for the first time in weeks, and it was amazingly restorative. A few hours of knitting and chatting was exactly what I needed. Plus, I found out one of the my fellow knitters is a knitblogger, and a damn good one at that. Imagine, the Craft Pirate. At my very own knitting group. What a pleasant surprise!

And there actually has been some knitting, but entirely of the mindless variety. Only things I can knit a few rows on, put down and pick up days later without having to check a pattern. This includes Wicked, at long last almost be-sleeved.


I don't think I'm in love with the top-down method. I think bottom-up, where you knit the sleeves separately, then join them with the body to knit the raglan decreases is the method for me. Heaving the entire gigantic flopping weight of the body around while knitting the sleeves is a bit of a pain.

That said, I do leave him draped artfully over the living room furniture, so I can admire him in passing and give him an affectionate stroke even when I don't have time to knit.

I've also been swatching up the J Knits sock yarn I got on my Yarn Safari.



I'm thinking Waving Lace socks from Favorite Socks. I'm going to keep my fingers crossed that they'll magically fit me, even though my foot is nowhere near the pattern's 7.5" around. My friend Megan (of the dainty feet) may be getting more socks.

And for subway knitting, there's a basic stockinette sock, in Meilenweit MegaBoots Stretch. The same yarn I used for My Pretties, in a different colorway. I'm still loving the subtle gradations of color and finding it tremendously motivating to know a few more inches will bring me to the next exciting change of color.



Check out the green just peeking through. Nice, no?

F-ing an O

My best friend has been in town the past week, so there has been minimal knitting, but rather a lot of drinking wine, talking about our lives and our plans and our goals, and more than a little shopping.

I did squeeze in a bit of knitting time, enough to (finally) finish the Sunshine Yarns Jaywalkers. I feel like I've been knitting them for such a long time that they barely even count as a finished object. But, here they are:



Edited to add project details:
Pattern: Jaywalker, by Grumperina
Needles: size 1 DPNs
Yarn: Sunshine Yarns in Daffodil
Comments: I would definitely knit this again, but I'd use size 2s.

They've been gifted to my friend Megan (she of the tiny feet), a mere three weeks late for her birthday, and she was very pleased. I also tried Eucalan for the first time while blocking the finished socks. It eradicated all traces of wooly itch and smelled awfully nice to boot. I've been converted - no more half-assing the blocking process using Method laundry detergent.

But now for the shopping! My company will likely be sending me on a number of trips in the next few months, to a variety of interesting locales (Singapore, SF, Milan, etc). This is exciting and terrifying all at the same time, but the real problem is that I don't have a solid two weeks of appropriate business attire to wear on this trip. I do not, in fact, own a single suit. My office is business casual, with an emphasis on the casual. My boss wears hoodies at least once a week, and not always on casual Fridays. The offices I will be visiting are not hoodie-friendly. Thus the shopping.

Enter my best friend. Besides being one of the smartest people I've ever met (and funny as hell), my best friend has a finely developed shopping instinct, honed by generations of Quinn women who view clothes shopping as very nearly a vocation. She takes this shit seriously. She finds an armload of clothes for you to try on, brings appropriate accessories into the dressing room to complement your outfit and is not the least bit shy about informing you that a particular item does nothing for you. She even re-hangs the clothes you've tried on while you try on the next batch, to expedite the process.

After an intensive afternoon and evening of shopping, I am now the proud owner of a new black suit and a number of funky-yet-professional shirts to wear beneath said suit. Plus quite a few remarkably cute tops and skirts, and cool jewelry. All I need is a pair of coordinating black pants and a good pair of power heels and I can rule the world. Or at least look the part. And I do clean up well, if I do say so myself.

In fact, Quinn's taste is so excellent overall that she, a non-knitter, even has excellent taste in yarn. When instructed to pick something from the sock yarn stash, she chose this for her socks.



Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in Happy Stripe.

Now I just need to pick out a pattern...