Edgy

So far, Irtfa'a has not been an exercise in restraint. I would race to it in every spare moment, knitting away until my wrists ached with the strain. I raced through each row, each section, greedy for the next pattern. I found myself at stray moments imagining myself working on it. And I have thoroughly enjoyed every moment of anticipation, looking toward the day I can admire it, off the needles, blocked.

When I realized I was finally ready to begin the final edge section, I was nearly floating on the ceiling. It was 7pm. I had 3 more hours before bedtime. Plenty of time, added to the few hours before and after work, then the weekend, and I would surely be done by New Year. I think I may have even mentioned it in my last post. Well, that just goes to show you what I know.

What I know now is that there is lace and then there is lace. When I first started knitting, the whole decreases and yarnovers thing was way beyond me. The first time I had to sl1k2psso, my head nearly exploded. It was awful. But as will happen, in time I became proficient. Then I started understanding lace to the point where I could read the knitting, and I could even drop back a row and fix a missed yarnover. By the time Irtfa'a came along and I started dropping 6 or 8 rows back over 12 stitches and reknitting sections to make them better, I was getting downright cocky. Double yarnovers? Why not quintuple? What the hell, I am one bad ass honky mofo knitter. I knew I still did not sprechen zie Shetland, but I was still an intermediate level force to be reckoned with.

So when I started row one of the edging, I was cool. Another fun pattern to learn. A few easy rows to memorize and I'll be sailing through the last bits at Knitch on Sunday. Row two, wait a minute, there's yarnovers here too, I missed a row. No, I didn't, did I? Holy crap, what is this?

Not since the earliest days of my knitting adventures have I been so tensed up and, well, edgy about knitting. I can't relax into this, not yet, and I really am trying not to fight it as hard as I seem to be fighting it. There's pressure, too. I've gotten this far and I don't want to ruin the shawl, but I have never done this before and I can't tell what's going on at all. Fortunately, I am able to knit this well enough not to ruin the overall piece, but wow, the going is slow. I just hope that when I finally do catch on to this (undoubtedly in the last 3 repeats) it will not look so different that I will have to rip it all out and reknit it.

Don't get me wrong, the pattern is still brilliant. And it is beautiful. It just turned a little too brilliant for me. They say that which does not kill you will make you strong. I don't know who "they" are, but I'd like to smack "them" around a bit right about now. I'm not even going to tell you how many hours have gone into this little bit of knitting. But I will persevere. I am nothing if not stubborn.

Dear edge pattern, I really do love you, and I want this to work out, really I do. It isn't just the way you look, all feathery and perfect, it's more than that. If you were just another pretty pattern I'm sure we could have fun for a while, but you know as well as I do that relationships have to be built on more solid footing than looks alone. You are complex and challenging as well, and those only add to your charms, but I'm afraid I'm not ready to give what you need from me right now. It's not that I'm scared of commitment, that's not it at all. I just need time before I can jump into something this serious. I need you not to push me right now. I know that one day I will be ready, and when that day comes we will be happier together than either of us can imagine. I just need a little space now and then, and you can be a little intense at times. Look, it really isn't you, it's me, I admit that freely. And I know I may have led you on with my initial enthusiasm. In retrospect, that really wasn't fair of me. So can we step it back just a little bit? No, I'm not knitting anything else now, and I'm not looking to find another pattern. Really. I just need a little space, a little time, ok?

Dear Lyle, Meg and Famous Steve.....

I can't reply to you directly because of the blogger silliness about not giving me real email addresses to respond to. Thanks, however, for your complementary feedback. I really appreciate it. And I hope you all (and I mean everyone out there, not just Lyle, Meg and Famous Steve) are having as wonderful a holiday and I am.


Irtfa'a progress report: I am finished the body of the shawl and I am ready to begin the edging. I might actually have this done by New Years, and I am really excited about that. To address Steve's comment on how I knit lace, I do lock myself in a room and concentrate on nothing but the pattern until I know it well enough to take it outside the room. And if that never happens, I stay in the room.


I am fortunate enough, you see, to have a knitting room. Actually it is a necessity, because I have 9 cats in the house who all are very interested in whatever I am doing, and want more than anything else to "help". Now, from cats, "helping" means that they all help me understand that I am not paying enough attention to the cats. Who, they will also tell you, are underfed, unloved, attention starved angels who never claw furniture, poop outside the box or chew on yarn. Alrightee.


So I have this knitting room, which my husband does not begrudge me, as he has an entire basement for his toys (and I do mean toys), and I spend lots of time in there when I am knitting. I have music, a place to put my diet coke, I can bring the phone in there, and many hours are spent knitting away while my husband builds his models of WWI biplanes. But it gets kind of lonely in there after a while, separated from all the kitties and the husband, and lately I have really felt kind of sequestered and lonely. While I really want to spend every moment working on the shawl, I started to hate the prospect of spending all that time locked away, alone.


Say hello.


Slightly blurry picture complements of lightning fast hamster. These are Roborovski hamsters (or Robo hamsters), there are five of them and they are all males (because I really don't need more hamsters). They are a naturally dwarf breed from Mongolia, and oh my Bob are they cute. It's like having my own personal Cute Overload right there in the knitting room. They only get 5cm long at full maturity. 5CM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I can't hold them, I can almost pet them, they're not real bitey (although the scary giant finger from above did get nipped, but that was my fault for being scary and giant on day 1) And they live in a habitrail knockoff in my knitting room. I can't tell them apart, and they move so fast I never know who I'm looking at, or else I'm laughing so hard at them I can't see. I have named them collectively "the Horde".

I have the bestest husband in the world. I'll bet no one else got a Mongol Horde for Christmas.

My Soul Swims In It

Getting there........

Pay It Forward

The coolest thing has hit bloglandia, and it's called Pay It Forward. I found it through Ada's blog and it goes like this:

I will send a handmade gift to the first three people who leave a comment on this blog requesting to join the Pay It Forward exchange. The only thing you have to do in return is pay it forward by making the same promise on your blog.

Sounds like fun, don't you think?

Now, for a photo free Irtfa'a update. I am currently on row eleventyjillion of the small feather pattern section, and it is going amazingly fast considering I am approaching 400 stitches per row. I really am still excited about working on this, but I have a problem. I only get to knit in a weekend warrior sort of way, and I have gone slightly past my limit. Yes, that is spelled ouch. I have learned that my particular knitting nemesis is the number 4 needle for some odd reason, and as a preemptive measure I have taken to wearing a Thermacare neck patch on each wrist, which helps a lot but does not imbue knitting superpowers. Especially when I start ignoring the obvious signals (like geting shocky feelings in the wrist) just because I want to finish one more repeat. I only have 4 more repeats to go before the next section and the day is young, dammit!

So I am off the shawl for the rest of the day, which is a little crazymaking, but I'll get over it. Later this evening we are going with HappyGoth and her husband to have dinner and see a medieval Christmas play, and I'm going to crawl around up in the bell tower at St. Lukes. It is really going to be hard to not start screaming "Sanctuary!" but I think I'll be able to control myself. My husband, on the other hand, I can't control, and I fully expect him to take advantage of the opportunity to have a Quasimodo moment.

The Last Photos From a Dying Camera

I managed to coax a few more pictures out of the old camera. I hope Christmas gets here soon, I need the new camera I am not supposed to know about really bad. Anyway, here's the progress on Irtfa'a:

This is the picture I got with a flash. I am past the shoulder drop section and into the small feather section. I really could not be happier, well, that's not true. If my camera would take a decent picture of it I would be much happier, but I'm happy as a clam with everything else about this project. The yarn, BMFA Laci, is soft and squishy and really altogether wonderful. I am definitely going to knit with it again. The colorway, Corvid, is as purpley-green-y-black as I could wish for, and the variegation is exactly what I would want for this project. The pattern, thankfully, is very well written and it is just complicated enough to be engaging without being so demanding as to require me to have to completely cloister myself to keep up. It's the best kind of lace that makes you feel smart knitting it. All in all, I find myself just as enchanted here in the middle as I was in the beginning, and that, my friends, is saying something.

Fidelity in knitting is definitely not one of those qualities that any self examination would bring to mind. I am beyond fickle. I tend to fall out of infatuation with a project as soon as I hit a stride, and my brain starts searching for something to bring back the rush of giddiness that casting on or sometimes just buying new yarn or patterns can produce. This was a strange thing for me to encounter in myself when I first started knitting, as in most other areas of my life I am, well, predictable and set. When I was much younger I flitted from project to project, but in my adult life I have managed to achieve that certain level of inner, um, deadness? balance? that allowed me to engage in the same activities day after day, year after year without going absolutely postal. But knitting, or maybe it's the yarn, I don't know, lit a fire under my butt, and got me in touch with my inner 4 year old who is running around wearing an indian chief headdress and brandishing a new set of fingerpaints, an easybake oven, a spin art machine and maybe a cake decorator full of extremely blue icing.

Only I'm 46 now, so add a beer to that. Or maybe two.

And there you have it. So in the middle of the attention deficit festival of projects that is my knitting, I have found a project that incites total monogamy in me. Go figure. And now, because my camera is insisting that it's not dead yet, a close up for a fair representation of the color.

Hello lace.

Ikea - Få orden på livet ditt

A little something to entertain you while I'm busy.

You cannot know the power of the dark side.

Blue Moon Fiber Arts Laci colorway Corvid.

It will be this.

It just goes to show you that the old "never say never" adage is true. I am not a fan of the faroese shawl, never was. It was kind of klunky looking, and the patterns out there were nothing that grabbed me. There was an ok one now and then, but I wouldn't have called any of them beautiful. So I pretty much wrote them off, and stowed the whole thing in that part of my mind reserved for scrapbooking and webkinz and entrelac socks, the brain equivalent of file 13.

Then came Anne Hanson, whose incredible design not only turned me to mush, but had me chiming in with her daily mass of comments and blithering on endlessly about how much I loved, wanted and needed this shawl. And when Miss Vanity here throws that much pride out the window and starts with the hem kissing, it's all over.

The pattern came out yesterday. Faroese shawls have been granted a reprieve. I am no longer remotely concerned with becoming a knitter or a Knitter. I've gone from zero to Jedi and straight over to the Dark Side.

And they really do have cookies over here.

My Friend Failure

So Lotus Knits is having a really neat contest, where each Monday she posts a question and all you have to do is post your answer in her comments to enter. If you win, you really win, because she is a really talented yarn dyer, and the prize is a skein of her beatuiful work. Now, that's my kind of contest, because any contest that actually expects me to know something or *gasp* do anything isn't going to go well for me and, well, I like yarn.

This week, she asked a very intriguing question regarding how we approach our knitting, and asked us to explain a bit about ourselves and our processes. As I wrote my answer, it occured to me that I would really love exploring this idea further, so I decided to expand a bit on my entry.

I am very gonzo in my knitting. Of course, over the years I have seen the Dale patterns and some of the Starmore designs and complex lace as being beyond my abilities, but I have always known it is just a matter of time. From the start, unless I was obviously outclassed, I have always jumped in with both feet. Sometimes that has caused me to frog, but never has it caused me to regret trying.

I realized that the best gauge for how my knitting skills are progressing is to find that project that brings me to a failure point. It usually identifies the areas I have to work on. In the beginning, it was "Branching Out" and "Forbes Forest" that utterly destroyed me, now I fail at much more ambitious projects, like "Cromarty" and "Ingeborg".

Now, I know this sounds like a really negative way of approaching this, but really it is making lemonade from the lemons of knitting. And we all have them. Whether I am learning that I am not quite ready for lace patterning on every row or that a particular yarn substitution really wasn't suitable, or that I lack the Clapotis appreciation gene, I am learning.

Knitting does not come naturally to me. Along with a whole new set of physical skills are an entire panoply of concepts which have to be intellectually assimilated or else, while knitting might be achieved, it will not be understood. I don't want to be forever a slave to patterns as written - in all my work I greatly prefer to be a more active participant, putting a bit if myself into the project. By internalizing the techniques I become more flexible and can develop some refinement of skill and knowledge. But that doesn't mean what I try always works, whether I am slavishly adhering to a pattern for the purpose of learning a new skill or pushing the limits of my knowledge by kitbashing a pattern to get something different out of it.

Now, admittedly, I am still very much in the learning phase of my knitting life. I am more often adhering to the pattern, but I am more likely now to seek a pattern for my next project that will allow me to explore a different aspect of the craft than to repeat known techniques over and over. And glorious failure is often my companion. But what's the worst that can happen? I have to rip? It (generally) doesn't hurt the yarn. It doesn't waste time, because I have identified a problem, an opportunity for growth, even if I haven't yet identified the solution.

Too often I see other people learning to knit and they are fighting it for all they are worth. I have to wonder if they really want to be doing this, they seem so unhappy. Don't get me wrong, I curse my knitting regularly, but I do not approach it either defensively or offensively. I don't feel my knitting is a kill or be killed sort of thing. I look at every new project as a meeting of equals, and even though I am sometimes overly optimistic I am never unhappy, even if the project fails. It only fails for the moment. And, it is a shared experience between myself, the yarn and the pattern, so no one aspect is regularly to blame, which is very freeing.

Then there are those who, whether they mean to or not, infect others with their anxieties and dislikes. I don't need to tell you about steeking, do I? I have read so many accounts of steeking that read like they came from Stephen King's Handbook of Knitting Horrors that it was all I could do to remind myself that without the internet and with basic instructions I would probably succeed at cutting a steek with little to no fuss at all. Tie knots in your yarn when you could use the erudite fad join of the week? The knitting police will surely be busting my door down any minute now. Not that there isn't a time and a place for nearly every technique, even if it is only in the interest of studying the history or anthropology of knitting, but there is never a time or a place for snobbery for the sake of snobbery. Not in my world at least.

So there, that is my several cents worth. No knitting scares me. I don't have to like all of it. I may not be ready for all of it, but I suspect when I know it all, there will be little of knitting I am left to be interested in. As there is so much to learn (remarkably, for a craft that anyone can do) I seriously doubt I will ever get tired of knitting. And failure will be my fast friend for many happy years to come.

Uneasy Knitter

Anyone remember that Charlie Daniels song "Uneasy Rider"? I just did the knitting version of that. I went from Atlanta to Stone Mountain via Canada. Thankfully my trip does not involve the police. All the same, I feel rather foolish.

See, I am all revved up about learning knitting terms in other languages ever since Claudia created Stricken Sie Deutsch. Now I'm not going to pretend that I don't have to refer to the list of translations now and then, but I have anschlag down pat and I now know that I can make der zopf without a hilfsnadel. I am 4 rows from done on the MS3 and ready to cast on her swatch. I also have an estonian lace book and I remembered that there was a translation of the symbols online, so I looked that up and put a tiny button on my sidebar right under Claudias' button. Then I found info on Japanese knitting stuff and put that on the sidebar too.

So I'm tooling around the www, and I come across mention of a book all about knitting terms in different languages. It's title is, of all things, "Knitting Languages". And as usual, as soon as I find something I want or need, nobody carries it, or it is out of stock, out of print or discontinued. It's almost like a guarantee with me. So I poke around, and search around and I'm not finding squat until I come across a Canadian site (what is it about me and Canada?) that has it listed for sale. Well, faster than you can say zwei maschen rechts zusammen stricken, I have it paid for and on its way.

At this point, let me say that if I had simply googled (or blackled) the authors' name I probably would have immediately found her publishers' website, where anyone can buy the book with no problem right from the good old USA (actually less than 20 miles away from my house) without currency conversions and customs craziness. But I didn't.

I got the book today (customs obviously knows what uses books can be put to better than they know about the potential terrorist uses of yarn), and opened it and found out the hard way. I would like to blame it on vacation brain, or too much laughing gas at the dentist office or on my biorhythms or something, but no, I was just dumb. And believe me, I paid the price. Plus the shipping from Canada.

So kids, don't be like me. If you, too, want the convenience of knitting terms in 11 languages at your fingertips, just click the link above.

NoBloMoFo

I am not now nor will I be committing to the NaBloPoMo bloglines-clogging nonsense. I just happen to have news (i.e. stuff to show off).


I got my wheel! And I already suck at spinning! It's so cool! I haven't been this excited about being bad at something in a long time! This is a Babe's double treadle Production Wheel.

I figure I will practice treadling for another year or so and then give the spinning part another try. The yarn room also got a serious sound system upgrade.

Bose, baby. I don't even care what bodyparts still hurt, I have amazing sound. So I finally (four days into the vacation) felt up to knitting. And ruining roving. It was great! My husband did good.

I actually got my german language Anna out that has the pattern for Lyra and thanks to Claudia's "Stricken Sie Deutsch" project I was able to make pretty good sense of it. I am amazed at how much I learned. Hopefully my life will never depend on my being able to pronounce any of that correctly, though; I may have the German genes mixed in among the Irish and the French, but none of them went to my tongue which is somehow Japanese. Don't ask, I don't know. Of course, the proof will be in the knitting. If I only think I am reading this right, I will make a very unusual Lyra. Before that, though, I have WIPs that must be FO'd. I guess I'd better get back to knitting now.