As Fast as You Can

Every year the Grove Park Inn in Asheville has a gingerbread house contest. We try to get there if we can. We went tonight. We didn't see as many houses as we usually see, but there were some pretty spectacular ones.











The best I can tell these are basically 100% edible ingredients, though many of them are only a little gingerbread.










The dentist changed his mind. He's taking out my infected wisdom tooth tomorrow. I think this is what Jim Henson died of. Or maybe not. Anyway, if you don't hear from me again, and you find this little out-of the way blog, remember me kindly.

Instruction headaches

My problem is that when I work from a pattern there are terms i don't understand. I have been knitting for about thee quarters of a year and I am getting some techniques but these terms that people just toss into the instructions are killing me. They may not mean anything.

My proposal, and I bet I'm not the first to have this idea, is that anyone putting instructions out into the public domain run the instructions by a person at the lowest level of familiarity with the operation. This goes for assembling tricycles, for cooking perhaps, but definitely for knitting.

My specific problem at the moment is Eunny Jang's anemoi mittens. They are really splendid. I am knitting them and, as usual, am learning a lot. My problem is that I keep coming across expressions I am unfamiliar with. They are not defined in the glossary.

1. "Begin working mitten body chart (first four chart rows should be worked as slip-stitch rounds; use only one strand of specified yarn)."

The first five words I understand perfectly. The term "slip-stitch round" I am unfamiliar with. I put it out at the circle on Saturday and no one had the slightest idea what it meant. Yes we all know what slip stitches are. What is a slip stitch round? One of the knitters suggested I ignore the term and just knit. "Use only one strand of specified yarn." What? What is she saying? I'd feel stupider I hadn't asked all the knitters what she meant. I just ignored this and kept knitting.

Fine. I got past it and knitted a couple of dozen rows. Now:

2. "Slip 25 thumb gore sts between markers to scrap yarn."

Sorry. I think I know how to slip stitches, and yes I have 25 between the markers and if she really wants me to slip them I will, but what does "to scrap yarn"mean?

This is not a pattern reserved for 10-year veterans, at least according to the terms of the pattern. "This pattern is a good project for knitters comfortable with colorwork in the round."


Comfortable with colorwork in the round describes me to a T.


Google pretty much gives me all these references to scrap yarn and what to do with my scrap yarn. I don't think that's what this pattern has in mind; if it does I'm even more in the dark.


I'll put it aside again until Saturday and see if anyone else can figure this out.


In the meantime I'm just making some slippers on a little nothing cable thing of my own devising. I pull them out whet I get to a wall.

Wisdom Literature

I went to the clergy spouses' retreat this weekend. It was pretty fabulous. Yoga, massage, meals, a little night theater, and whatever else we felt like doing. Fortunately, and I say this in complete modesty, we had me along.

I never ever like to talk people into doing things, exactly, but I was ready for anyone to knit who wanted to. When I get excited about something I think I just get infectious about it. My friend Cheri, who is a clergy spouse but was at the same center for a different retreat, remarked that I was always pleased to find myself the center of attention. I replied that she had certainly nailed that aspect of it, although I said (and she agreed) that I really did want to knit and the knitting aspect of it was what I wanted to do, and I would have been there knitting even if I were the only one. But yeah, that other thing too.

Eventually, anyway, there were lots of knitters doing their stuff, and, although they had brought their projects just in case, I don't know that everybody expected to knit when they came. It all turned out well. There were more knitters than hikers even, which proves my theory that good sense will always prevail.

Unfortunately I lost a pretty massive filling in my molar, and I think the molar or the jaw or something is getting infected, and the lymph node is swollen, and it feels as though there is a hard-boiled egg lodged in my neck. I called the dentist and he prescribed some penicillin and I hope he will see me on Monday and probably take this stupid molar out, which he has been wanting to do for 15 years.

The great news is that I finally, after 15 or 16 false starts, have my daughter's mittens underway. It is by far the most times I have ever started a project, and of course it's not through yet, even the first mitten, in fact it's just past the cuff ribbing, but I feel as though this time it's going to take. It was mostly a matter if the right needles and the right tension.

Here's what it looks like at the moment:

So that was the first annual clergy spouses' retreat and I think everybody had a really great time, and I'm expecting it went well enough that there will at least be a second one. One of the cool things about being with clergy spouses is that they don't take the priests and bishops and deacons nearly as seriously as their congregations do, and, in many cases (I suspect) as seriously as the clergy take themselves.

I have a photo I took of a bunch of the group in the dining hall.

Tales of Thanksgiving

Tale 1. The hats.

Amy sent me some pics of her kids feeding chickens and wearing the hats I made. I think she wanted me to see that they were actually willing to wear them. As well she might -- they yanked them off the first time she tried to put the hats on them, and the second and the third. Later she told me that they were just being shy of dressing for me, but I admit she had to send the pics for me to completely believe it.

I was really more interested in the kids feeding the chickens. I don't think they had ever seen chickens before. It was cool.

Tale 2. The Circle.

A very short tale. Nobody came. One person came and stayed for about an hour. Other than that there was nobody but Donna, the store owner. I took some pics to show how empty it was. I assume it was just a Saturday after Thanksgiving thing. You can see the meringues I made. I don't know how it happened but at the end of the day there were only 2 left. I think the customers ate them maybe.

Tale 3. My daughter's Scarf.

I thought she did a fabulous job. This is the first thing she ever knitted. She did it at school and brought it home at Thanksgiving to show me. Extra chunky yarn and pretty big needles, from the look of it. I rarely use anything bigger than 8s and these look to be in the mid 30s. Or maybe about 13-14.

Tale 4. A Plague of Frogs.

I tried making the anemoi mittens. It is really a new and very challenging experience. I am having trouble knitting on 4 needles. 0s at that. I have frogged this thing at least 8 times so far. Finally I decided to try this on circulars. Addis. I am farther along now than the best I did on 4 dpns. We'll see.

Tale 5. Not a tale, really.

I'm going to a clergy spouse's retreat this weekend. First annual. Yoga, massage, R&R. The diocese is picking up the entire tab. I could get used to this real quick.

Braided cable scarf.

This one doesn't really show the color but it does show the pattern. Until I made this scarf I didn't think much of seed stitching. Now I've kind of warmed to it I must say.

I thought the braided cables would be kind of cool. I keep saying it -- I'm a sucker for cables.

The color in this top pic shows up a little too red -- the yarn is really light blue. You can see it much better in the second photo.


I taught my daughter to knit right before she went back to college this year -- she tells me she has a scarf knitted for someone too but I have yet to see it. I can't wait. It's really exciting to know that I'm passing something like this on.

Tomorrow I'm starting on the anemoi mittens I'm knitting for her, for Christmas I hope.

Up on the housetop

I finished my son's girlfriend's Christmas stocking tonight. This is a pattern for a stocking my siblings and I grew up with, more or less; my grandmother knitted it for us. When my kids were born my Mom knitted the same general pattern for them.

I get sad from time to time that my mom never saw me knit. In a way I'm knitting this for my mom and grandmother.

Anyway it's a third generation knitted object, and I'll be really glad to see it hanging up witht he rest of them.

Is She a Goer?

Photography. It appears to be the central skill in the blog post. Knitting and writing are perhaps distant also-rans.

It's a skill that unfortunately eludes me at present. Amy's second toddler hat, at right, refuses to to show off its cables I'm afraid. A pity I think because I'm such a sucker for cables.

I am pleased to say that the young man ran off with the hat before I had a chance to take a piccy of the finished product. Now that I'm not watching him he's willing to keep it on his head.

With any luck his sister will also develop a fondness for hers, pictured here.

My secret ingredient was two rows of K above the ribbing all the way around to give the hat more ease in flipping up the ribbing. Flipping the ribbing up can give a modest hipness to the dweebiest of hats.

BTW tonight I also made the chocolate lava cakes for tomorrow's knitting group. It's all this Belgian bittersweet chocolate and a bunch of butter and flour who knows what else. Vanilla extract I made from some vanilla beans and some brandy I've had around for a long, long time.

Hat's almost ready

This is hat # 1, pre- pom-pom. It appears to fit very snugly, but in fact it's being tried on by mom for her son. He's taking a nap at the time of this picture. We're just trying to get an approximation of the size. It was all I could do to get her to pose for the camera.

I'm sorry to say you can't see the cables very well. These are the first pics I have taken with my new camera and I'm still figuring it out. I was trying to get a size resolution since sister is getting one as well, plus I needed a decision on the pom-pom.

Here it is from the back. I really liked the yarn. Amy picked it out as I think I have mentioned before. I like this better because it hardly stripes at all, and I was not looking for a stripey hat. So the lad has one with no stripes, and the lass has one with something like stripes. The flash showed the color a little lighter and brighter than it really is -- it's a good bit denser and darker in color than what you see here.

The only other thing worth mentioning about this hat is that, yes, it's a very simple pattern but at least it's mine. I have almost totally given up using existing patterns, except for things I've already started.

Since I was a camera warrior on the loose, I went around looking for willing victims. The only one I could find was Speckles, who, having lived through two kids growing up, really is game for almost anything. So you have two of the hat, one of the cat.

None of the cat in the hat. She's not that game.

It's been too long

Too long since I had babies I guess. Amy's toddler hats were not quite as easy as I thought they'd be. Actually I had fun knitting and the first hat turned out to look very pretty, but it turned out to be a better fit for Amy's baby's baby than for Amy's baby, if you know what I mean.

So Amy and I ended up going through her house looking for hats that were too big and too little for them so I could get kind of a size palette. I have started on the one for the little boy, then I'm going to do the little girl's again, bigger this time. It wasn't a gauge problem, exactly; I just went by an estimate of their head size instead of a measurement and I was way off.

The pattern is really simple -- I'm doing it with worsted weight Encore on 24" US 8 round needles. This time around I'm casting on 96 stitches. k2 p2 around for the ribbing -- I'm doing 10 rows, then 2 rows k, just to make a little flip easy. Then it's K6 p2 around -- so it's a multiple of 8, which is how I came up with 96. Last time I did a 6-stitch cable every 12 rows on the 6 k stitches, but I think this time I'm doing cables every other section.

Amy loved the cables. I said I could do it without but she said no she really liked them. So I'm doing cables on both hats -- just really simple ones.

I'm getting a camera of my own on Monday -- so now I don't have to wait to borrow one. Soon I'll be posting lots of pics. I hope.

If I didn't mention it before, I sent Amy down to the store to pick out and buy the yarn. When she came back she said the place is "EVIL," which is Amy's way of saying it was all she could do to get out without buying half the store. And she isn't even a knitter, she just hooks.

Hats, Ducks and Cows

My friend Amy asked me if I could knit a hat and a pair of socks for each of her little ones. She has two toddlers.

Hmmmm, let me think. I could sit and watch Daily Show reruns, or . . . .


Yeah, I think I could manage that. I am, as someone at my office might say, tray excited.


I am a huge fan of malapropisms, by the way. I knew someone once who complained that she couldn’t get some gizmo to fit where it was supposed to go, so the thought she would just hit it with a mallard.

Along these same lines, a hospital nurse once explained to us in my mom's hospital room that they would be taking my mom down to the O.R. on a guernsey.

The beautiful thing especially about these barnyard malapropisms is the images they evoke. My siblings and I, needless to say, were unable to make eye contact while the nurse remained in the room. I, for one, didn’t know who would have objected more, my mom, the guernsey, or the hospital custodial staff.

Back to the hats. I have been so busy trying to fly down the knitting highway that I’ve never even bothered with a hat. So this will be a great opportunity to show a little style. Not a lot, but some. I’m thinking of just putting a little cable or braid pattern in there.

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Clotted cream?

While we’re talking about guernseys, I have spent the last few days, or part of them, trying to track down some clotted cream. I am taking a little cream tea in to the knitting group on Saturday and clotted cream is necessary to do it right.

Unfortunately, the grocery stores in this area seem to be a little confused. I’m not talking about Food Lion and Winn-Dixie here. This is Earth Fare, Harris Teeter and the Fresh Market. Not one employee, including the managers, I talked to in those stores had ever heard of clotted cream. I don’t expect all of these stores to have it in stock, but I guess I did expect one of them to have an employee somewhere who had heard of it.

Too bad, too sad.

I went to a cooking class at Rabbit & Co. last night and Katy, the owner, said she had some clotted cream. So now I have some. So now my knitting group will have some. Come on over and have some.

I Could Knit a Lace of You

And I Would Still be On My Seat

I went to visit Viktoria today at Nasse Knits, as I do almost every day. I can’t tell you what I like so much about her blog, but I really do; it’s one of my favorites. I put my very favorites on that list over there on the right, right up at the top, in no particular order.

Viktoria was having some serious gauge trouble today, and I don’t understand why, and I don’t understand how I can keep it from happening to me. As you know if you have been reading these posts, which statistically I realize you haven’t, I am pretty new at this business and I am getting kind of a reverse parallax – unknown knitting things gain size as they recede further into the unknown.

So now another thing to fear – knitting one side of a sweater and having it not match the other. To fear but not, I think, to surrender to. Ripping has become my number one knitting style. I went so far the other day as to suggest to one of the people who helped teach me to knit last spring that perhaps they should teach the tink first and the other stitches later. The tink is to me the most liberating fact of knitting life.

I am about to get this wretched scarf off my needles, and the Christmas stocking too, and then I will start on the mittens and then I will start designing a sweater I have in my head. I will not knit this one in the round, in part because I think it was a bad idea to start off that way and in part because I want to learn a new thing.

The golden smile that introduced me to . . .

I have a very simple rule about whining. Don’t get caught doing it.

That’s the main reason I took down yesterday’s post a half hour after I put it up. I won’t even bother you with what I was whining about.

So at the moment I'm planning to finish the Christmas stocking and I’m going into the second half of the scarf. I should have that finished in a few days.

The scarf is very mundane; when I started it in June I had only been knitting for three or four months and I didn’t realize the possibilities. Now I’m finishing it in part because I don’t own a lot of straight needles and I want these free and also because it’s starting to get chilly up here in the mountains and I’m going to be embarrassed as a knitter having a woven scarf from the store.

I’ll post a pic of the scarf when it’s done not because I’m especially proud of it but because I think it’s only right to show the good, the bad and the boring.

The stocking I'm knitting now is the one on the right.

Oh, by the way, I have a question for you. She has been his first and only real girlfriend and for a couple of years; he's 23 and she's 22. We love her and she seems to feel the same way about us. Am I being pushy knitting her a Christmas stocking? Is this too much?

SAFF Saturday

I went to my friends' house to take them the last jar of last year's honey. I still have a lot of this year's left though. I started talking to Amy, who is a rug hooker, about hooking. I told Amy I was going back to the fair. Amy told me that she had never heard of SAFF. We decided she and her toddlers would come out there with me.

Amy was really awestruck. She was fascinated. Her mom knits and quilts and crafts generally, but it was all new to Amy.

"Do you want to learn to spin? And dye?" she wanted to know as we walked back up the steps and past some spinners.

"One thing at a time. I'm just learning to knit and the more I learn the more I realize there is to learn. When I'm here I want to learn to spin, but I know I have to learn more about knitting before I go any further."

We both obviously were dazzled, though, even by the beginning spinners and the beautiful yarn they were turning out.

The kids loved the alpacas, but especially the bunnies. Lots and lots of bunnies, but not too many.

I'm sorry to say that something must have happened to the camera, or else that the alpacas were so ugly that they did something to it. Admittedly, I can't tell the pretty alpacas from the ugly ones. You look at the photo and tell me.

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How ardently we admire and love Jane Austen

I just read on Two Chix that Masterpiece Theatre will be airing a Jane Austathon beginning in January. This is, as the Chix point out, good news. One reason for this is that one can in certain cases knit and take in the show simultaneously without being put to the trouble of actually looking at the screen.

I don't know how it is at your place, but there's nobody here who doesn't know the Ehle/Firth version of Pride and Prejudice line for line. Watching the show is merely a confirmation of the pictures we are already forming in our brains when we hear the dialogue.

The reverse but equal pleasure will be the apparently new versions of several of these teleplays. I am particularly looking forward to Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility.

I believe we shall all be excessively diverted.

SAFF Friday

SAFF.

Pretty much speaks for itself, ¿No?

Probably. It's still cool. People weaving, spinning, shopping, selling. People pretending to be rabbits. Or maybe those really were rabbits.

Bloggers pretending to be people. Or maybe . . . nahhh.

So my schedule is -- look Friday, buy Saturday. We'll have to see what Sunday brings.

Here's what it looked like on Friday afternoon.

The Kind of September

It's come back to me now: not every knitting project takes three months to complete. There is the occasional sock or scarf that can be done in a few days. This Christmas stocking I started yesterday is going to be finished in a few nights; certainly a week or less, and not necessarily sucking up every spare minute. I'll get back to The Sweater in not too long and it will be about half done already.

One of the reasons the stocking is going so fast is that I'm using chunky yarn and huge (for me) needles -- US #8s.

Giving me time to look forward to, and even attend, SAFF. Can't wait. I live about 10-15 miles away; my daughter, in college, is the same distance from Rhinebeck.

"Coincidence?" I ask, in the ritual formula.

"There are no coincidences," she replies slyly.


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" . . . gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speak
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day."


Henry V reminds us of the honor of having a pike driven through one's eye and out the back of the head, and other glories of war.


Happy St. Crispin's day, October 25.

You Better Watch Out

I have put The Sweater aside. It was taking over my life, and I learned to knit not only to be able to do beautiful things in wool but to enjoy myself doing so. So I'm taking a break.

For fun I switched over to the Christmas stocking I decided to knit for my son's girlfriend. She'll be here at some point on Christmas day and it will be fun for her to have this.

One of the beautiful things about this project is that it is almost entirely of my own design. Yes, I knitted a baby blanket for a friend (her first baby, now almost a month old) and it was by first journey into the land of cables, and in a sense i designed that myself but, after all, it was just knits and purls and a few cable needles.

This stocking has color patterns in red, green and white and her name knitted in. Though it's nothing in the long run, it's something for me; it's my second project in two colors and my first where the whole color scheme is mine. There are already trees and presents knitted in and there will be wreaths and other stuff too before it's done.

I'm only sorry that my mother never saw me knit. Hearing the click of her needles is one of my most comforting childhood memories. Ten years or so before she died she knitted stockings something like this (only mine are in the round) for my kids, and some time in the 50's her mother did the same for my siblings and me.

Pics of the stocking in progress soon.

Tiny Needles Make Me Warm All Over

A well-known novel describes a minor character this way: "He thinks less than he talks, and slower; yet he can see through a brick wall in time." The brick wall I’ve been looking at for the last few months is that with these small needles (I’m knitting the sweater on US #5s with US #3s for the ribbing) I’m trading warmth for speed. I knit as much as the next person, and more than many, at least many who have outside full-time employment, and yet they all seem to be finishing projects in far shorter time than I am.

I know I don’t have as much experience as most of them, but there is a point at which I have to think I’m not THAT much slower a knitter, on average, than they are.

The brick wall I’m seeing through is that there may be at least two sweaters’ worth of wool in the one I’m doing now. Worsted weight, two colors I’m carrying all the way through, and #5 needles. That’s a lot of wool, and I can feel it when I pick this up to knit it. It’s getting heavy. So I suppose that the reason this sweater is taking twice as long as I expected is all this wool.

That also means, I hope, that it will be a lot warmer when winter comes.

Progress picture on the next post. In the "on the needles" section on the right I tend to be conservative (a novel position for me) in my progress estimate.

See You There

Women Helping Women fundraising dinner tonight. Fighting breast cancer and saving lives in western North Carolina for over ten years.

While we're talking about it, check these out, if you haven't already.

And while we're still on the subject, which I'm sorry but we are, check out this site if you want. It's not working all that well as of this writing but they have cool calendars and tee shirts and stuff and no doubt it will be working better soon. It's in a good cause.

In an Old House in Paris

I'm about to go knit, but I thought I'd show the madeleines I made, before and after. Yeah, I'm proud of the fact that they almost disappeared, I guess.








You'll notice that the brie, tomatoes and grapes did not nearly so much excite the public imagination. I will concede, though, that the wine was equally popular.

The occasion was a cast-off swap and local hospice fundraiser. Last year it was for the battered women's shelter. The idea is that all the women bring accessories (there were even some shoes this year) they don't want. Some people last night brought bags and bags. The suff has to be in good condition. No rule about ugly.

The items are arranged on tables and other horizontal surfaces. About 70% is usually earrings, bracelets and necklaces. Guests are assigned a color and then colors are drawn by lot -- people of that color get 5 minutes to pick 5 items. Then the next color goes.

At then end of the night somebody from the nonprofit organization gives a little talk and some or most of the party goers write a check. All the stuff that nobody takes goes to the nonprofit's thrift store. In the end everybody's happy, mostly the people who got rid of a whole bucketful of jewelry and belts they don't think much of any more.

Walking off the Ledge

Well I can see the end of the sweater from here. On Saturday I sat down with my knitting friends, most of whom can crochet and one of whom was willing to teach me. After talking to them and looking at the pattern, I feel reasonably reassured that there is an ending in sight. The crochet steek stitches are not going to be that much of a hurdle.

The lesson I really learned, though, is that a large number of new things to learn does not translate into an impossible task. Yeah, ok, we all know that, but to get that knowledge settled in the working part of my brain is a welcome increase of my knitting education. When I started this sweater I had no idea how to bring in a second color, or how to crochet, steek, add sleeves, cast off for a crew neck, do a sleeve gusset, or close up the shoulders. A sweater that looked undoable now doesn’t.

This is good news for other knitting projects.

I am finding that as life goes on I am more and more willing to take chances, and it is very liberating and empowering. I call it "closing your eyes and walking off the ledge," and it has worked for me over and over. I mean for the big life-changing decisions, not only little things like deciding what to knit next.

I made the madeleines and they were, in my opinion, yummy. I know everybody is going to rave about food you bring in but all I can say is that they were all gone when I left, and no, I didn’t eat them all. I tried several recipes and only one was not too eggy. These are really good, almost like little pound cakes. One recipe makes about 2 dozen standard size madeleines.

I’m making some more for a party tomorrow night (the knitters were my guinea pigs), only these will have lemon zest in them instead of orange peel as the recipe calls for. I'm also adding about half a tsp of lemon extract.

It's funny about cooking and knitting -- I feel perfectly comfortable about free substitutions of ingredients and amounts in cooking and baking, but still kind of nervous about making any changes in a knitting pattern. But to give myself a break (one of my favorite activities) I've been cooking since I was little and only knitting since February.

I didn't take pics of last Saturday's batch for the knitters but I will post one of this new batch. If I can commandeer the camera.

Wasted Patience

Winnie-the-Pooh claimed to be a "bear of very little brain." I fear I must make the same claim, except for the bear thing. I cannot figure out how to get a working button onto my Blogger page.

JenLa spelled it all out SO very carefully and patiently and yet, I’m sorry to say, I cannot get it to work. I think, aside from my very little brain, it must have something to do with the protocols that Blogger has put into its editing features. I can put the picture on but not the link. I can put the picture and a non-working link up, but it won’t show the picture and the link doesn’t work. Part of the problem, but only part, is that they allow you to add a picture to your page but will not permit a link line to be added in. When I try to add an HTML/Java edit the link just won’t function.

I’d say "HELP!" but in doing so I would have to acknowledge that actually I have no readers for this page. Maybe one on a day when the tourist bus comes through. This would result in a collapse of my little system in which I imagine that people read these little writings I put up. But after all, why should they?

So all I can say is that I don’t understand how to make this work. JenLa, if you ever could hear me, I would let you know that it’s your button after all I would like to put on my site. I just love your blog and the rest of your web site.

Liberation

I’ve given up on Thanksgiving as a deadline for finishing the sweater. If it happens, fine, but I doubt it will and I’m not going to let it spoil the fun of knitting this thing.

I am, however, learning more and more about doing steeks. This pattern calls for armhole steeks and I have realized that this is going to be the central feature of this sweater, insofar as learning to knit goes.

After reviewing the available literature, I have decided to use a crocheted steek stitch for the armhole steeks. This means that I am going to have to learn to crochet, at least enough to do a steek stitch.

There is very little that I love more than learning new things. It runs in the family. When my Dad had an untimely and accidental death at 90 last year, he was still enrolled at the local university, even though he had gotten his undergraduate and graduate degrees in the 1930's. Last year he was taking courses in anthropology and medieval history.

Of course, I’m going to love having the sweater too. I get cold very easily, and I’ll be wearing it a lot, even here in North Carolina. In partial defense I'll plead that I at least live in the mountains.

I also learned that I’m going to have to have some new thought on decreases. Though this isn’t a classic fair isle pattern, whatever that may be, it’s close enough that I’m going to have to pay careful attention.

Also, I can’t wait for SAFF. The Western NC Ag center is less than a half hour from my house, so it will be easy to get to. Some other blogs are really beginning to talk it up. I have borrowed the above photo from one or the other of them.

A year ago when the SAFF was here I was just starting to get serious about deciding to learn to knit. It reminds me a little of a poster I saw when I was in college – "A year ago I culdn’t even spell ‘colledge stoont’ . . . now I are one."

Ultima Thule

When I decided finally to learn to knit this past February, I assumed that it would be years and years before I would be able to do something as complex as a sweater.

My friend Sally, who has been knitting since childhood, assured me otherwise. "One scarf, one pair of socks, one sweater," she told me.

Sally is someone I trust so much that, if I were sitting in a room in a chair, at dawn, and she went to the window and said, "hmmm, the sun is rising in the west today," I wouldn't even bother to get up to go to the window to double check her.

And so, here I am, actually with a few scarves and socks and some booties and baby blankets, but little else behind me, knitting the sweater shown in some previous posts.

I love doing this in part because there is so much to learn. I am going to know so much more about knitting at the end of this sweater than I did at the beginning (and already do) that it will be a much bigger experience than simply having a sweater that I knit myself.

That having been said, my knitting ship is rapidly coming in sight of the edge of the known world, or "Ultima Thule" as the ancients called it.

According to Wikipeida,

Ultima Thule in medieval geographies may . . . denote any distant place located beyond the "borders of the known world."

Some time between today and Tuesday (the sooner if I can tear myself away from this computer) I will be getting to parts of the pattern where I don't even understand what they're trying to tell me to do, much less have any sense of how to do it.

Fortunately, my Saturday knitting group has a much bigger Tuesday counterpart which often includes some of the Truly Knowledgeable, who come and sit and knit. I am going to use my lunch hour and take myself and my partially-finished sweater to this repository of accumulated wisdom and see if someone there can help me slowly, and perhaps over a period of weeks, transform Ultima Thule into just another well-mapped part of the knitting universe.

Neither Do they Spin

I just signed up for the Kanuga Knitting & Quilting Retreat, January 17 - 20, 2008, in Flat Rock, NC, not too far from Asheville.

The theory I think is that knitting is a path to spiritual something. Maybe it's the western equivalent to some Hindu or Buddhist path called knittayama yoga; who knows? I’m a bit of a skeptic, but true skepticism requires keeping one’s mind open in all directions wherever reasonable.

In any event, it’s part of 4 days and all of 3 nights of knitting and Episcopalia; mostly knitting I imagine. It will be fulfilling in at least one sense; anything beyond that, for me, is gravy.

Sweatember

10 days down, 49 to go.

Still I like the way it's looking. Not quite like in the photo but ok on its own. I'm going to learn a lot of new knitting stuff on this sweater, like sleeves, a neck, armhole steeks and new way to bind off.

One thing at a time. I'm working my way up. Right now I'm learning to knit a sweater.

Let everyone else enjoy Socktoberfest; for me it's still Sweatember.

No more Jetsam

Augggggghhhhhhh!!!!

Five hours. Two colors. 1740 Stitches. 7/8 of an inch. How in the world am I ever going to get this sweater finished by Thanksgiving?

On the good side, it will be heavy and warm. Lots of wool. But I am working on it maniacally almost nonstop from the time I get home from work and shove down some supper until bedtime. And most of the weekend. It’s a race against time and usually I win those by pushing everything else aside and driving single-mindedly on.

Well, everything is already aside here. It reminds me of one of my favorite Mark Twain stories. One of my favorite stories attributed to Mark Twain. (I found out once not to depend on sources for quotes. I had a list of four or five P.T. Barnum quotes, and it turns out he never said any of them, including "there’s a sucker born every minute.")

Here’s the story as Twain tells it to his audience:

There was a man once who was in failing health. At last he became so worried he went to his doctor, who gave him a thorough examination and sat the man down for a stern lecture. "You cannot possibly survive these ailments unless you instantly give up drinking, give up smoking, and give up chasing women."

The man looked distressed. "But doctor," he pleaded, "I don’t do any of those things."

At this point Twain looks mournfully at his audience, puffing on his big cigar:

"I tell you truly, ladies and gentlemen, this man was a sinking ship with nothing left to throw overboard."

I too have nothing left to throw overboard. It’s just me, several hundred yards of yarn, and the clock.

On the Needles

Many knitters seem to have certain oddities in common.

One is of course that we are always counting. A friend of mine mentioned this to me -- she was over visiting and I was, of course, knitting and talking. She said there seems to be a lot of counting going on. I laughed and said, you know, you ought to hear it when a group of knitters get together:

Alice: "So, Linda, have you warmed up to your daughter's boyfriend at all?"

Linda (whispering): "sixteen, seventeen, eighteen . . . (aloud:) not really."

Another oddity is that so many of us can't seem to knit one thing at a time. I have never heard a satisfactory explanation for this. I don't know if it's a short attention span or a desire to fool ourselves into thinking that we can finish more things in a shorter time if we are working on five things at once.

Despite my fervent desire to finish the Faroe sweater before Thanksgiving and the Anemoi mittens before Christmas, I just started a Christmas stocking for my son's (long-term) girlfriend. It's to match the ones that my grandmother knitted for my siblings and me and my mother knitted for the kids. I don't know how long those Anemoi mittens will take but I really don't see how I can finish all three projects in time. Something's going to have to give. I'll probably let the stocking go until next Christmas, though I hate to do it. We luvvv the girlfriend.

Complexity.

This is what Alice Starmore is telling me it's supposed to look like. So far so good. I might once have thought it was too complicated but it's just following a pattern. As I started knitting I realized that the complexity, if any, was not in knitting it but in designing it. Maybe not even that. Maybe it's just in looking at it.

Normally I prefer simplicity to complexity and the classic to the novel. That's just my personality. I felt that way even when I was in my teens. I really think this sweater is beautiful though.

Seeing in Color

"And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales." – The Book of Acts.

Why didn’t somebody tell me. I started adding my second color last night and it was really cool. It’s not nearly as hard as I thought it was going to be and it’s going to make a really pretty pattern. And what’s more than that is that I can suddenly see making patterns of my own.

Oh yeah, I know everybody does that, but everybody is creative as hell and I have never ever been. I always wanted to be creative and never have been able to be.

Suddenly I see a world of knitting designs opening up before me. I want to finish this sweater and Eunny’s mittens and then I want to design a million things, and knit them.

"And woe to those who try to stop me!" -- Wicked Witch of the West.

My first

My first:

blog entry,
sweater,
two-color knit.


This is the bottom two inches of a Faroe sweater similar to the one in Alice Starmore's Fishermen's Sweaters. I can't find a photo of it anywhere on the net so until I get my photo and a scanner together I'm going to have to just show my progress here.


The bottom two and a half inches are shown as bicolor in the pattern but I don't think much of the way that looks, so I'm doing a solid k2p2. Yarns are a dark navy Berroco Peruvia (with a hint of lavender giving it an iridescent look) and natural (local) merino/alpaca 50/50. The needles are a US #3 Addi turbo for the bottom and #5 AT for the body.


I'm a little apprehensive about doing something this complicated (for me) in two colors but you have to start somewhere.


When the yarn comes in I'm going to knit my daughter (in college up north) a pair of Eunny Jang's Anemoi mittens in her school colors. Don't tell her -- it's a surprise. (I already have the needles and the pattern). Anemoi is well named -- the ancient Greek word for the four winds, and she's up where it's a lot colder and windier than it is here in North Carolina.