Tangled web

Um. What do you get when you decide to knit lace for the first time and you can't find the center of a 636 yd ball and you just start pulling?

Yeah. Mess.

Fear of Blogging

You wouldn't know it from the number and frequency of my posts, but I think about blogging all the time. Before I launched this baby blog, I thought about writing all the time. Letters to the editor, magazine articles, curriculum guides, non-fiction, fiction...it spins in my head like clothes in the washer all day long. Now I think about snippets of bloggage...phrases I like, thoughts I think, reactions to daily events, reviews of books I've read, responses to others' blogs.

Why then, the inaction? The inability to put fingers to keyboard and press PUBLISH?

Some of it is discipline and opportunity. I am a notorious procrastinator, having gotten away with it all my life while earning good grades and good reviews and good evaluations in my jobs. I'm the person rushing around the house 30 minutes before the in-laws arrive, cursing my lack of cleanliness. I'm the girl waiting outside the computer lab fifteen minutes before that big paper is due because her printer ran out of ink. So I put off the posts until someone else is on the computer, and then I use that as an excuse to get grouchy.

Some of it, though, is plain old perfectionism. It's no secret that perfectionism is a self-defeating and self-sabotaging behavior. I fear failure, so I don't take up something I can't be perfect at. I exercise for weeks and when I start to get close to my goal, I eat like crap because having that margin of non-achievement of goal allows me to rationalize poor choices.

I realized, too, that I was afraid no one would be interested in what I'd have to say, particularly about knitting. I'm late to this blog game, and I kept thinking, well, anything I'd have to say has been said before. No one wants to hear about my socks and what kind of heel stitch I used. No one cares what I think about the book March and whether I think it should have won the Pulitzer or not. (Not.)

This hypothetical audience is paralyzing me.

But what the hell? Who am I writing this for, anyway? Who is my audience? The blogs I read I read because I like what they have to say and HOW they say it. The care they take with their photos, the humor they use, the bravery to lay up selected details of their lives for the scrutiny of others.

So I'm resolving to post each day until May 11 as part of my trifecta of birthday goals:

1. Exercise/be active every day
2. Post to peertrainer.com every day
3. Post to knitsmith-wordpurl every day

I think I just need to get over myself and write.

Not Much Progress

Though the weather remains rainy for the most part, we did have a day of sun over the weekend for yard work, and I saved these lovely tulips from the deer. They don't eat the tulips on the side of the house, just the ones in the back. Go figure.

As for the sock progress...well, I could basically post the same picture as last time. In true tortoise fashion, I am just inching--not even inching, just millimetering--my way down the legs. Man socks on size 1 needles--what was I thinking? I must really love the guy. I'm really looking forward to the excitement and danger of the heel flap. (Did I really just write that?)

Meanwhile, the siren call of other projects haunts me. I'm contenting myself with some sketches for now...

More to come...

Little Chevron Rib

And so I start another pair of two-at-a-time socks.

These ones are for M, who chose the 10-stitch, 4-row Little Chevron Rib pattern from More Sensational Knitted Socks (love that book almost as much as the original!).

At first I really didn't like the way the knit/purl pattern interacted with the dark parts of the self-striping yarn (Trekking XXL color ). Now that I'm a few inches in, though, I like the way the purl bumps pull up lighter and darker colors into the stripes, and the texture is fantastic. I'm using size 1s (gulp!) and my gauge is 8.5 stitches per inch, so the fabric is really taut and interesting. I'd love to see what this stitch pattern looks like with heftier yarn.

Speaking of size 1s, this is also a showdown of the needles: I'm trying to decide whether to take back the Addi Turbos I bought a couple of weeks ago...impulse purchase when my KnitPicks circulars hadn't arrived yet, and $25 can buy more yarn. So I'm using one KP and one AT circular to see if I can discern any difference or preference. So far I've definitely noticed the weight differential--the Addis are much lighter, as Grumperina posted about a while ago--and I have to have a tip transition whenever I switch, but I don't know if I feel strongly about one over the other, nor do I think I'm appreciably faster with one over the other. I do feel strongly that $5 is more reasonable for a needle than $12.50; on the other hand, I love all my larger Addis and DO notice a speed difference with them. Anyhoo--

Back to the socks: I was able to read much of Helen of Troy by Margaret George while knitting on these this week. I'm not a huge historical fiction buff, but this one was good.

A Work of Heart

I haven't posted about this project before, maybe because it's been absorbing so much of my time and thoughts. It's the first project I have branched out and "designed" on my own: the Easter dresses for my daughter and niece.

The fabric, above, was the catalyst. It's shirting fabric, handed down from my Great Aunt Iva. (That is to say, scavenged from her home after she passed away. She did not waste much, did my great-aunt. It lay in a drawer, perfectly pressed, with a paper pinned to it indicating yardage.) Iva was an amazing seamstress and weaver, needlepointed, baked, and knew how to knit and crochet, though family lore indicates she didn't ever enjoy knitting.

I wanted to make Easter dresses for my daughter and niece and fell in love with a picot-edged dress in Debbie Bliss's book Special Knits. I knew, however, that I didn't have enough yarn--only two balls of KnitPicks Ambrosia--for full dresses.

The solution: a knitted/sewn hybrid.

At first Aunt Iva's fabric seemed perfect because of how well the blue/purple yarn coordinated. But when the first ball of periwinkle-ish Ambrosia ran out halfway through the first armhole edging and I needed to do the armholes in green instead, I got cold feet. Did this color combo work?


I even purchased an alternate fabric, one with both blue and green, plus some other spring-y stripes:


I decided that my original choice worked better than the seersucker--there was just too much going on between the seed stitch, the picot bindoff, and the stripes--and the second fabric is now destined to become curtains in Baby E's room.

OK, so how to attach fabric, inherently un-stretchy, to knitting, inherently stretchy?

I thought about gathers. I thought about casings. I set the whole project aside for fear of the skirt. Finally, I decided to keep it simple, and, using a Butterick pattern as my starting point, cut out a simple skirt front and back. The top was 22" around, so, I made a small casing and threaded 22" of elastic into it. It gathered simply and naturally and I evened it up as much as I could by hand.


I then hand-stitched the bottom of the casing to the cast-on row of the top, being careful not to stitch through the elastic, catching the purl bumps, and leaving lots of slack so the skirt would still have some give to it. After that I did the same thing with the top of the casing:

I used the hemstitch on my machine to make a pretty blind hem:


And here's the final result:

The Universe is Telling Me Something

I recently read Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates.

I had never heard of this book until I was reading Blue Shoe, by Anne Lamott, and one of the characters mentioned it. I got a wild hare and requested RR through the library and read it in just a couple of days.

So, more than usual with me, the reading of this novel was the result of a completely random occurrence. No friend recommended it, I didn't read a review of it, nor did I have to read it for school.

So then I'm reading my latest Entertainment Weekly (Hermione's on the cover!!!!!! Harry Potter trivia!!!!!!) and I see that Revolutionary Road is being made into a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet (big news, because it's a Titanic reunion, o' course).

Isn't that strange that I would have read the book within weeks of the movie being announced? The book was written in 1961, so it's not like it's Oprah's latest choice or anything. Very odd.

As for the novel--I highly recommend it. It comes with cover blurbs from Tennessee Williams, Kurt Vonnegut, and William Styron hailing it as a masterpiece and a classic. It explores the post-WWII lives of the children of the 1920's, a generation I'd never though much about. Full of black humor, tragedy, and ennui, it's not for the faint-of-heart, but was thought-provoking and is still with me weeks after reading it.

Bumper Stumper: Attitude Problem

Driving home from Tacoma yesterday, we spotted this little beauty:

I DON'T HAVE AN ATTITUDE PROBLEM
YOU'RE JUST AN A**HOLE

To me, this represents all that's wrong with our society. Our focus on individualism to the expense of community, our focus on--ahem--assertiveness to the expense of courtesy, our general short-sightedness about the value of other people.

I've read three different blog posts in the past few weeks about commenters who range from insensitive to just plain rude (here, here, and here).

Part of this is the illusion created by blogs that because you've been reading about a person, you have reached a MUTUAL level of comfort and knowledge. But part of it is a genuine lack of courtesy in our society.

Being rude--or lacking the writing skills to write carefully when commenting, as I suspect is often the case--on blogs is just as bad as being rude in person, and using your car to call total stranger a**holes is, well--takes one to know one, eh?

Now, lest anyone think I lack a sense of humor about bumper stickers, the same car with the attitude problem also had a aqua ribnet proclaiming "Support Strippers."

Now THAT I found amusing.