AroundandAround

Eventually, The Plot Is Clear

Today is Thursday, April 6, 2006...and that means tomorrow is FRIDAY!!!

Two of my favorite authors -- John Le Carre (spy novels) and William Faulkner (Southern Gothic) -- on the surface seem to have little in common, but I notice a similarity. When you start a novel by either one, you pretty much have NO idea what is going on. Figuratively speaking, you have to relax your brain and just trust that all these loose ends right up front will eventually make sense. It's a bit like looking at one of those pictures that appears on the surface to be one thing, and then when you shift your focus becomes something else. Pretty soon (in the book or the picture) it gets to be clear.

Night Snow is like that. When I started with it, I had to really closely study the chart, follow it square by square, line by tortuous line. There was swearing, ripping, despair, and occasional exhultation followed by swearing, ripping, and despair. Now that I am into this second repeat of the Big Picture, I find I only need a glance at the chart at the start of each row. Oh yes -- this is the 2-1-2-1-1-1-4-1-4 row, I say to myself. And I find I can tell if I'm off almost immediately -- no ripping back more than 3 or 4 stitches. Imagine that!

Knitting is good. Life is lovely when I knit.

In other news, friends of mine have opened a local yarn store.

Uh-oh.

I visited on their friends-only opening day and felt I must support them, so I bought 9 skeins of Alchemy bamboo in the most beautiful turquoise...I do not have a project in mind for it, except that Summer is near, apparently -- the weather does not appear to realize it yet -- and I think I would look just fabulous in a tan and a tank made of this subtly silky, shimmery yarn. I don't trust variegated yarns, but this one looks so softly variegated that I imagine it will gentle and not...overtly stripe-y.

Also I have realized that it's time to stop stockpiling. A friend of mine once showed me his freezer, which was stocked with an endless supply of hot dogs. He commented that his only explanation was that his wife was expecting a world-wide shortage of hot dogs and had laid in a supply in order to be prepared. I realize this is what appears to be true of my yarn stash. Yarn will still be available when I have knit up all that I currently own, in approximately two years.

When All Else Fails...

Today is Tuesday, April 4, 2006.


...knitting makes me happy. Here's Night Snow to date...

This Week In Knitting

Today is Tuesday, March 28, 2006.

I have learned some useful things from my knitting in the past week. They are as follows:

1. It is not practical to use small rubber bands as stitch markers. They stretch and they creep. This causes you to think you are ending a round when really you are a few stitches into the beginning of the next round. Creeping stitch markers result in motif creep, which makes a Fair Isle sweater look more like an ink blot test.

2. Ripping back is vastly improved by the superimposition of a strong pair of glasses over one's regular prescription contact lenses. I discovered this yesterday while repairing several inches of motif creep. My husband got tired of hearing me complain that I couldn't see what the hell I was doing, and he brought me his glasses. I put them on. Looking up, vertigo ensued. Looking down at my knitting, that small world reared up into sharp focus. I crowed: I am in control of my knitting! My knitting is not in control of me!

3. Ripping back is more traumatic for a knitter's small children than for the knitter herself. As proof, I submit the following exerpt from real life:

    Nicholas, age 7: "Mom! What are you doing to your sweater?"
    Me: "I'm ripping it back a couple inches to fix the pattern."
    Will, age 10, suddenly alert even while playing Runescape seemingly oblivious to all around him: "Noooooooo! Don't do it! I can't stand it!" (falls to the floor and covers his eyes).
    Nick: "Will, it's no use. She's already doing it. We can't do anything to stop her."

This is an actual conversation, I did not make it up.

4. I am completely and utterly addicted to Fair Isle knitting, and I am plotting a summer of knitting Fair Isle hats, mittens, and socks. It swelters here in summer; knitting a full-on sweater in 105 degrees does not strike me as do-able, whereas knitting small items might be.

5. The two non-Fair Isle projects that I have going on -- a bulky yoke sweater for my stepdaughter, and a VERY bulky bag that I'm going to felt -- lie neglected in the bag I carry to work every day. Night Snow stays home. I hate my job (have I mentioned that?) and do not want it to taint Night Snow. But I ought to find half an hour here or there to work on these other poor neglected projects, so simple that work can't touch them.

6. I should not cook my husband's favorite dinner on a night when he is working on the boat he's building with a friend. Dinner was ready 45 minutes ago. The husband is not in evidence. This is not a knitting lesson, but a life lesson pondered while knitting in the absence of the husband and during the ruination of the dinner.

I have no picture update due to the above ripping out, which effectively returned me to the stage where I was when I last posted a picture. I am thinking about photographing the non-public side of the sweater, because I think it's so tidy looking. But right now the camera battery is charging. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Wounded, but Unstoppable

Today is March 22, 2006.

I still hate my job and find refuge in my knitting. I notice that the way I am planning for the possibility that I'll quit my job before having another one, or for the possibility that I'll have to take a pay cut is -- I buy yarn for a project out of every paycheck. Never mind food and shelter! Yarn is what I'm stockpiling.

What? Is there something wrong with that?

Here's Night Snow. It's still sailing along and I'm loving it. The other night the knitting needle broke through the skin of my right index finger. I applied three layers of bandaid and continued sailing. I will not be stopped!

 
I bought the only other Alice Starmore book that seems still to be commonly available -- Fisherman Sweaters -- and I may be ready to tackle one of those next. Wow, what a talent that woman has.

Smooth Sailing

Today is Wednesday, March 15, 2006

It's SFCKAL update day....and lest everyone think I have accomplished nothing on my Night Snow sweater, I am scrambling to upload a picture. It's going swimmingly! My only regret is I can't work on it day and night. Once I start, it's so hard to stop...

So, what have I learned from this experience so far? There are the simple obvious thiings...things like making sure your work isn't twisted even when you thought you were beyond that stage in knitting experience (no such thing as beyond that stage, maybe), and following your gut where color choice is concerned. But there's something less evident, and that's the role of repetition, practice, and the development of muscle memory. The first time through (to be more accurate, "times" would be fairer), I had to really study the motif pattern and concentrate actively on what I was doing. By now, the muscles of my hands and eyes are trained to do and see what they need to do and see without my conscious mind having to get too involved. It's still true that if I'm not focused I will mess up the motif, but as long as I focus and don't try to have meaningful conversations or balance my checkbook in my head while knitting, I can rely on myself to get it right with ease.

More in life is probably like that -- letting go in order to get it right...

I Counted My Chickens, and Then They Hatched

Today is Thursday, March 9, 2006.

Yesterday in this space I effused about my exciting progress on Night Snow. It was a lovely moment. And that's just about all it was, a moment.

Because then I went to re-photograph (because remember my smart card corrupted), and when I laid out my nascent sweater on the table to pose it for posterity, the awful truth was revealed.

It was twisted, I am mortified and ashamed to confess. How did I miss that? The number one sign that your knitting is twisted is when your circular needle cable itself is twisted into a figure eight. Duh.

I have not had this happen in a long while. It was demoralizing. Yet I cast on again. I knitted two inches. No twists -- but...man, that thing was just huge. So I counted my stitches. Not 308, the prescribed number, but 408. This is what I get for listening to the tragic conclusion of Michael and Natasha on my iPod while counting cast on stitches.

Sigh.

I have ripped and cast on again. I have placed  a marker every 50 stitches, so I can't lose count. I have knitted two rows and ensured no twist. Remarkably, my attitude remains sunny. It feels like everything I'll ever know about knitting, I'm going to learn at the feet of this sweater. Probably the hard way, the way things are going.

I hate my job...my brother in law was telling me this weekend about a movie that came out awhile ago, where a guy just decides not to go into work multiple days in a row. A friend asks him, "Are you going to quit?" He says no; I'm just never going there any more.

I WISH I had that luxury. I loved this job three months ago, and now...

sigh.

I love my knitting, even when it goes wrong and even when I make stupid mindless mistakes that I have to re-do and re-do and re-do. I trust my knitting. Can't say the same about my job.

Does that sound sunny? It FEELS sunny, strangely enough...

I'm the Happiest Girl in the Whole USA

Today is March 8, 2006, I believe.

I'm not sure of the date because Will woke up with a fever this morning, so I stayed home from work to take care of him. I am somewhat aware that it's Wednesday, but If I'm not at work, I have little use for such things as dates and clocks. Actually I started the day intending to work from home, but the Powers That Be put the kibosh on that one after they got my e-mail saying I was going to work from home. So from 1:00 on, it was just me and Will, and Nicholas when he came home from school. Will variously played Runescape, lay on the floor moaning gently, and slept. Nicky did the usual race-out-of-the-car-to-play-with-the-neighbor-kids-without-even-bothering-to-
close-the-car-door, and we haven't seen him since. Me, I knitted.

This brings me to the theme song I've cued up for today's entry -- The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA. Snow Sky, which I am renaming Night Snow due to my color change from the original charcoal and silver to black and silver, is coming along famously. I mean gorgeously. I mean there is not an error in it. The floats are not showing through. The contrast is stunning. I have even successfully used Rebekkah's on-the-fly error correction -- but only once or twice, that's how few motif errors I've made! I am so excited about this sweater I just want to hop, skip, and dance.

The only damper on my enthusiasm is when I went to take a picture to post, to prove to you all that I Have Made Progress, I had an upload snafu. Last Sunday T persuaded me to let him take my picture and he had a whole smart card full of black and white shots. I decided to add my one shot of Night Snow in progress. When I tried to read the pictures off the card reader to Photoshop -- crash. Yikes. The whole card reader file is corrupted. There went T's painstaking pictures of me, and I might never let him do that again. WHY can I not look like Elizabeth Taylor at 19 when I'm captured in still life???

Anyway, in the course of reformatting the card, the camera battery went dead, so it's on the charger. I have high hopes that another picture can be taken and uploaded. But I just couldn't wait to post...because I am SO happy!

Life is good when you can stay home all day and knit. When will someone ever finally decide to pay me for THAT, instead of for what they pay me to do now?? ;>)

It's Official. I've Rounded the Bend.

Today is Thursday, March 2, 2006.

I just tried to claim it was March 2, 2003, when I typed the date. Must be my trembling hands...hands that have just spent an hour ripping Snow Sky. All the way. Or perhaps I am wishing it were 2003, before the idea of Snow Sky was even a twinkle in my eye. Just kidding.

First there was the flurry of posts about ripping back on the SFCKAL discussion list. There was ripping back to correct guage that had mysteriously gone awry. There was ripping back to change a color that wasn't looking right. There was ripping back to fix errors in motif and errors in construction. There was a gnashing of teeth, but also a certain bravery and an air of commitment in all that ripping.

Then, over at Bobby's place, there was ripping out to abandon one sweater in favor of another. He was ripping out and dying, too. Not that he was dying, he was dye-ing, so he could use the yarn from the abandonned Celtic Knots to knit the Afghan jacket. More bravery and commitment.

All that ripping caught on with me. I had a good 6 or 7 inches of Snow Sky on the needles. There were some mistakes in it, but I knew they wouldn't be noticeable in the whole field of the completed sweater. And yet...those colors. They weren't working for me. In the picture in the book, the darker color looks more black than gray, and the contrast is much more distinct than my knitting was looking. I just...didn't like that dark gray. It mushed together with the silver.

This morning, commuting to work, I said to myself, "So. I'm going to spend hours knitting this sweater only to not like the colors? I don't think so." I called Schoolhouse Press and they are sending me black to replace the charcoal gray. Eleanor commented, "I can see why you'd like more contrast," perhaps hoping to soothe me with the balm of reassurance. Tonight I came home and announced to the children, "I'm going to rip the sweater." A great wail escaped their small gullets. They both knit (because they're Waldorf children!) so they both know from ripping. No, Mom! No! Don't do it!

But I did it. And now all that is left of Snow Sky is a couple wonky balls of charcoal gray and silver yarn. Six skeins of dark gray are going home to Schoolhouse Press tomorrow. Meanwhile my stepdaughter will be gratified to find that while I await the black, I will be knitting her sweater, which for the last two weeks has been relegated to lunch-hour knitting on weekdays...a simple, mindless, colorful yoke sweater in worsted weight on size 7 needles. Man, that thing is just flying off the needles.

I was going to photograph the wonky balls of yarn. But how exciting could that possibly be?

My Soul Can Escape

February 27, 2006

I'm pleased to say, I got my camera to work...finally! I have completely forgotten how to use it, so my pictures are going to be pretty wimpy til I have time to get out the little instruction book, but at least I can put pictures with the blog.

Here is Snow Sky in progress. Notice that sizeable error. I'm not even going to point you to it, I know you can see it. I was going to reframe the picture but T said -- what, is this like Playboy, where they airbrush out all the real life? I guess not. Anyway I have three thoughts about this error.

1. I'm not ripping again.

2. Perhaps it could be a design element, where the snow as it falls down the length of the sweater begins to dissipate.

3. Native American blanket weavers (according to Susan Gordon Lydon in The Knitting Sutra) intentionally weave in errors, so their souls can escape when the work is done. That's it! I meant to do that.

Overall I am very pleased with Snow Sky. The fabric feels wonderful, now that it's doubled. The motif is lovely. And I'm making progress!

 

The Snow Sky Waltz

February 24, 2006

I have made peace with my Snow Sky sweater, and, even more than that, I have discovered that it likes to waltz. Meg Swansen says in A Gathering of Lace that every pattern row has a song. For me, it's more like a rhythm, and once I found the rhythm in Snow Sky all my troubles faded away. There's a strong three-quarter time to it: ONE two three, ONE two three.

I was thinking, while I knitted away on it this afternoon (a day off from work! and 70 degrees outside! heavenly), about taking the boys bowling last weekend. They'd never been before. T told them, take four steps and then let go of the ball. At first they looked so awkward...stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp, and then pitch the ball. Bumpers in bowling alleys are a fortunate convenience! But after about an hour they found the rhythm. No more stomping, no more sending the ball caroming off the bumpers. They looked nice and smooth. Not unlike me and Snow Sky. I had to spend a couple weeks stomp-stomp-stomping before I learned how it wanted to dance.

Just a few minutes ago, Nicholas, who doesn't know the name of the sweater and has never seen snow falling,  looked over my shoulder and said, "Mom, that sweater looks just like I think snow would look falling down from the sky." 

That's good enough, I'd say.