December 12, 2003
Around the Blogs in 80 Seconds
A quick tour of the interesting goings-on on other blogs.
First, and most important, a slightly belated (on my part) “reveal” of the Highly Secret Project and why it came into being. (Just when I start to think the Net’s only purpose is to give no-goodniks free access to our personal information, it becomes instrumental in quickly uniting 35 women from all over the country and the world to bolster someone in need. Gotta love that Net!)
Secondly, a little plug for Vaire Meondur’s new blog, The Innocent Abroad. Vaire is a Dear Reader who was instrumental in helping me wrap my head around the idea of thumb gussets. Her blog talks about knitting, ‘natch, but also about her impending move from Tallinn, Estonia, to Stockholm, Sweden, to be with her snugglebunny.
For something a little more macabre, don't miss the bowful of knitted leprosy bandages on Anne Brannen's blog, Creating Text(iles). Anne, a professor at Dusquesne University, spearheaded a campus-wide project to knit these bandages for a program sponsored by the Mormon church. Anyone else would have knit something like the Highly Secret Project but Anne, being Anne, had to go with leprosy bandages.
Robbyn has added an interesting twist to her blog, The Yarn Path. Every Wednesday, she makes a 90 degree turn and talks about something completely unrelated to knitting. Her “And Now For Something Completely Different” installments are quite fun and are something I’m starting to make a regular part of my Wednesday. So far she has talked about video games, coffee, scones, minerology, and celtic knots. (Robbyn—K and I had scones for breakfast Thanksgiving morning as a direct result of your scone entry. Think about it—you post an entry and all of a sudden people in Seattle are doing faceplants into plates of scones. It’s a good thing you weren’t touting something a little more, ahem, illegal.)
Robbyn also jumped on the Patternology bandwagon and proposed three new techniques for generating patterns: (1) assigning colors to rows and/or stitches of a familiar pattern like, as she suggested, Feather and Fan (see her blog for a better explanation than I'm giving); (2) basing a pattern on the stops, turns and straightaways of a trip from Point A to Point B; (3) or using Morse code. On the strength of her last suggestion, I looked up “morse code” on the Net and found this site which allows you translate any word or phrase into Morse, and hence into colors, and hence into a pattern! You could knit an entire short story, a love poem, a stream of obscenities, or even your grocery list into a sock! Spiffy ideas, Robbyn!
My latest contribution to Patternology is the idea of taking a photo of a skyscraper at night and basing the pattern on which lights were on and which were off. Okay, perhaps not quite as personal as your own DNA, but...
(Late Breaking News! In today's entry, Robbyn has pictures of swatches she knit based on some her Patternology ideas. Go! Visit! Marvel!)
Knitting Knews
Here is a picture of a lace swatch I worked on aaaaaaalllllll last weekend, and I mean allllllll last weekend and, for the longest time, got Absolutely Nowhere. As I mentioned in my last entry, I frogged the first few rows at least 15 times, no lie. (The weird diamond-shaped blob on the left is supposed to be there; it's not a boo-boo. If I had continued the swatch, the next repeat would have had the leaf on the left and the weird diamond-shaped blob on the right. And if I had made the actual stole, there would have been weird diamond-shaped blobs as far as the eye could see.)
First a little about the pattern. It’s a stole from the Second Book of Modern Lace Knitting called “La Traviata.” When I first saw the pattern, my heart went “kathumpkathumpkathump” so the pattern immediately became a “must swatch,” the bastard child of a “must knit.” It qualifies as only a “must swatch” because, on the short side of this stole, you cast on 234 stitches, enough to make someone who normally knits socks faint. Me, I cast on 58.
Secondly, yes, I know this pattern was obscenely easy which means the problem was me, all me. Drat, I say; drat!
Thirdly, here is what I learned:
- Knitting lace can be a pretty straightforward process. It’s the frogging that’ll kill you. I spent more time undoing the damage I created by frogging than I spent fixing the original problem. Thanks to various online groups, I know about running “safety lines” horizontally through your lace but you have to have enough rows knitted to justify a safety line, like, oh, say, 4? Long about Sunday afternoon, what I wouldn’t have given to have had 4 rows.
- No matter how much you wish otherwise, lace knitting in anything else besides laceweight yarn tends to look horsy. I knit this in the Zephyr first but changed to a fingering weight, Kool-Aid-dyed yarn from my stash after some major frogging sturm und drang. Despite the openness of the fabric, the piece still looks heavy although, by the time I was finished, it had started to develop a nice fluid drape.
- Apparently, I can be very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very stubborn when it comes to knitting. (No comment, K.) Any sane beginning knitter (which I still consider myself) would have given up after the fourth or fifth go-round but, refusing to believe that I was unable to knit such an easy pattern, over the course of the weekend, I knit, frogged, got frustrated, gave up, wrapped some Christmas presents; knit, frogged, got frustrated, gave up, took a shower; knit, frogged, got frustrated, gave up, koochie-kooed and kitty-wittyed on the Pseudo-Adopted Cat; knit, frogged, got frustrated, gave up, called The Mysterious K to see how she and Flu Junior were doing...but I always returned to the swatch, more determined than ever. Yup, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very stubborn.
- When you slip-as-if-to-purl the edge stitches, leave the yarn behind the needles until after you slip the stitch. I figured this out about an inch into the pattern.
- Always, and I mean always, figure out if the number of stitches changes from row to row. So far this pattern has ranged in stitch number from 55 to 62 with nary a warning, neither in the intro to the book nor in the pattern itself. I can’t tell you how many times I knit and frogged row 5, always finding myself one effin’ stitch off, only to finally realize that it was supposed to be one effin' stitch off. D-oh! Thank God I had knit at least one other lace item with a varying number of stitches, or the light would never have come on and The Mysterious K would’ve had to have called the men in white coats.
- Heads-down hard work and the production of gallons of sweat do not guarantee that a lace pattern will be interesting or even pretty. Long about row 31 I started to have a sinking feeling that I had frittered away a considerable number of hours on something that, in the long run, was going to prove to be as dull as dishwater. At row 47, my fears were confirmed. What I thought was going to be a delicate and symmetrical leaf motif ended up being more a misshapen blob which vears off weirdly at the end and has an ugly, heavy, decidedly unlacelike k3tog border on the top half of one side. Sigh.
On the positive side, one of the ideas that has been floating around in my head for a long time is a sock called “The Catalina Sock” which I envisioned as being a short Cascade Fixation sock knit in an extremely airy and open lace pattern, suitable for wearing in hot, California-like weather. Perhaps the “holey” part of this pattern would be just the ticket. Something to think about…