Wedding band

micahcable5
Originally uploaded by Wordpurler

So...the lovely and talented and also full of self control Toni has requested I post the cable chart for my wedding band celtic cable. (Seriously--check out her amazingness as she stashbusts and doesn't-buy-stuff her way across southern Idaho. Being an Idaho native myself...well, ok, I was BORN there at least...I am proud of my sistah.)

Right now the cable chart is a Word file, so I need to do a little PDF magic and will post it ASAP.

The project has taken on added urgency, since I am developing a new and alarmingly emotional attachment to my husband. (Wait, you say. Isn't one supposed to feel that way for one's spouse? Allow me to explain.)

M and I have been together for 13 years, since I was but a lass of 19 and he a much maturer older dude of...20. We'd both ended somewhat disastrous relationships and in the course of being really good friends discovered that we were actually madly in love with each other, a fact everyone but us seemed to realize much earlier. We married just 17 months later, the summer before my senior year of college, and celebrated our tenth anniversary last summer.

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, he's been having some health problems of late. Nothing urgent, nothing dangerous, just something that feels really chronic, ominously hanging on the horizon of our lives like a shadow across the sun. It's affected his energy, his patience, his spirits, and of course mine as well; the normal stress of the school year plus added responsibilities at home plus general worry equals me on the edge. Normally even-keeled, on a daily basis I am finding myself choking back tears, short-tempered with my students and my children, ducking into hallways to surreptitiously wipe my eyes, sobbing in the car. Today I burst into tears during my pre-observation meeting with my supervisor, the nicest man in the whole world. He thought I was worried about him watching me teach, which is the lowest of the worries on my ladder o' anxiety right now.

Anyway, I think I get the whole prayer shawl thing now. I've worked my way down the yoke of M's sweater and have divided for the body and sleeves. (The photo above is actually of one of the cable swatches I worked during the planning stages, not the sweater itself.) Since the body is vanilla stockinette, it's been great movie and blog-reading knitting, but I find myself just sitting and meditating--on him, on life, on what I hope and what I fear, on what I can do to be a better wife/mother/teacher/person, on how I will survive this, which is, we hope, just that shadow soon to blow away with the next wind, not the night coming early.

Sentence Fluency!

micahcable2
Originally uploaded by Wordpurler

OK. Big duh.

I realized that one of the big reasons I haven't been posting...or was getting frustrated when I DID post...is that when I type in the Blogger post window on my vintage 1998 iMac (with its little weenie processor) I get this weird bounce-back echo effect and it takes FOREVAH for my letters to appear on the screen after being typed. (Sorry, bad sentence.) And so I would often get about 1/4 of the way into a post and then just think: screw it. You can imagine the angst this has caused. I just looked back at my post manager and found that I was leaving over 33% of my posts as drafts, never finishing them.

Although Dr. Freud might make all sorts of speculations about my inability to finish off (ahem)...and other knitters might categorize me as a startitis sort of person, I really was just plain frustrated by my technology's inability to meet my needs. I literally could not post what I wanted to--the words in my head did not translate quickly or easily to the electronic page, and not just in the normal composition/editing sort of cycle. (This must be what people with learning disabilities feel like all the time. Should probably note this feeling for future reference with students.)

Then, today, I'm sitting shuffling through Ravelry and spinning through my favorite blogs and all of "the sudden" (as my students would say) I have a little mini-epiphany. Text Edit is my friend.

I can WRITE in TextEdit, then CUT, then PASTE into blogger.

Why oh why did I not realize this before? How dense am I?

Anyway, here I am, typing with fluency and a little behind-the-scenes magic and, voila! I'm a blog-o-matic. A blog-machine. A whizblogger.

I've been doing a bunch of knitting lately (insomnia having its silver lining) and here are a few of the projects in the hopper:

1. I finished charting the cable from our wedding rings, and have started a top-down raglan for my husband. {ravelry link} Dear readers, if any, do you think I should post the cable chart? I'm really proud of figuring it out on my own, with a little inspiration from Alice Starmore and The Girl From Auntie.

2. I finished the body of my Stefanie japel top-down raglan {ravelry link} and am on the arms.
It is a bit big, I fear. I'm going to finish the arms and neckband, and I reserve the right to rip back part of the bottom ribbing after I block it. Right now there's a weird sort of blousing effect between the stockinette and the ribbing, and I hope that will calm down after I block it. I had a lot of trouble getting gauge on this one--the pattern calls for size 9s and I had to go up to 10.5, but now I'm worried that my gauge ended up relaxing as I worked more on it. It's supposed to be just about my bust size and it feels really big. (No, I haven't measured it. Yes, I'm in denial.) May end up being a gift or a sweatshirt-type sweater instead, which is disappointing, because I love this pattern.

3. I've made bunches of hats lately. Been on a hat tear. Soon I will assemble them in one location and have a hat fair.

So that's the knitting of note.

a listless list

It's that time of the school year. it's been slow, and it's weeks still until spring break, and we're in the middle of testing and there are still 3 yearbook deadlines and everyone's sort of already thinking about next year, because of registration, but we can't REALLY think about next year and it's kind of hard to have your feet in two years at the same time so we just, if we're me, feel listless, marooned, and hide-under-the-covers-y.

But good things have been happening with knitting.

1. I saw an Alice Starmore St Brigid (ravelry link) in the wild last week, on a mom wandering the cafeteria during spring Parent's Night. I practically accosted her. It was an old school St Brigid, straight from the pages of Aran Knitting, and we both laughed with commiseration about how freaking expensive that book is and how we take it out from the library and hoard it as long as we can until we have to give it back. In fact, she said, "So YOU'RE the one who has it checked out!" which struck me as hilarious, because when it's not in and I want it, I always imagine some other Starmore freak, reading and rereading the pages, trying to get up the gumption to knit one of those gorgeous labors of love.
2. I have finished a couple of key projects, started another, and am generally happy with the state of my knitting.
   
3. I am wearing a hand-knit item nearly every day to school...scarf, socks, vest, hat, shrug...and this makes me inordinately happy
4. We figured out what was plugging up our hard drive -- iTunes was, unbeknownst to us, saving new downloads onto the hard drive instead of our PERIPHERAL hard drive where it's supposed to -- and now I will be able to upload and share photos! So, as soon as I have a spare couple of hours (ha!) I will be sharing picks of recent FOs and all manner of fun things!
   

Make My Day

Clumsy Knitter says I make her day.

In making her day, she has made mine! And here I thought no one was reading...and I wouldn't blame them, given the sporadic and photo-free nature of this site lately.

Amazing how knowing someone is out there strengthens resolve to write...

Thank you my dear! I'm going to have to think a while on who to pass this honor on to...and yes, as an English teacher, I am allowed to end a sentence with apreposition.

where did January go?

I blinked and my maternity leave was over. I blinked and it was Thanksgiving. I blinked and my baby boy was turning five. I blinked and it's Valentine's Day.

Clearly my blinking is causing some sort of warp in the space-time continuum. If I end up on the battle bridge of the Enterprise D I'll make sure to ask Jean-Luc to play poker.

I have been a busy knitting bee, though. One pair of clogs for M, still drying after being felted on Monday night. (Our laundry room is really cold. I should probably bring them upstairs before they a) mildew or b) freeze or c) both. Ew.) A baby hat for our friends' new sweetie, Miss Josephine. A pair of fingerless mitts, adapted from the ill-fated socks I started the day M and I spent in the hospital.

(He is fine, by the way. He had pericarditis, an infection in the lining around his heart, which sounds scary, and can be dangerous, but in his case just required a few days of rest and a few weeks of taking it easy. He seems to be on the mend, now.)

I realized after 3 inches of slipstitch ribbing on the size 1 needles that the Magic Stripes really should have been knitted with at least size 2s. The ribbing was much too stiff to make a comfortable sock. So I checked around ravelry for a pattern for fingerless mitts and kept going, switching to the size 2s for the hand and finger ribbing. We'll see how they turn out--I fear I put the thumb too high, suitable only for the freakishly huge-handed. We'll see.

Next up: I am working on the design for a top-down raglan for M in Cascade 220 with a celtic cable. I am attempting to chart the cable myself based on the design of our wedding rings. (Thank goodness our library has Aran Knitting.) He wants a very simple design, so it's going to be brown with blue accents at neck, cuffs, and hem, and the cable is going to run down one arm only. Minimalistic.

And we found out we're getting a hefty tax refund, probably due to my not working last year, and last weekend we went computer shopping...dare we enter the 21st century?

a barrier? or a blessing?

Lene wrote this in her January 6th post:

"And sometimes, just sometimes, the knitting might be a barrier between the world and me, and then the question is: do I dare to enter the world without my knitting?"

I've been thinking about my own motivations for knitting.

I've always been sort of an introvert. Socially normal, but happiest alone or with one, maybe two special friends. My family is pretty quiet, not boisterous at all, and as a child and adolescent I was always happiest in my room with a book, or sewing on my little Singer featherweight in the basement, or out for a bike ride, alone with my own thoughts. For a few years I basically refused to participate in family stuff like horseback rides or watching movies. I just wanted to be alone.

Books provided a protective barrier in social situations, too. Even in the middle of my big extended family or on a rollicking school bus, I could retreat and be quiet, peaceful, in my own head.

I like knitting for the way it keeps my hands busy, but I've realized rather uncomfortably that even though I still FEEL engaged, knitting affects the investment others perceive from me. My reactions are delayed...I miss touchdowns and plot points and the expressions on faces or in hands when my eyes are buried in what's on my needles.

I need the decompression time that knitting provides, because my job is socially and physically exhausting. But I need the reconnection time with loved ones, too.

I spent Monday in the hospital with my husband. he'd been having chest pains for a few days and they had him in for testing and observation. When it became clear on Monday morning that the symptoms had worsened and I'd be spending the day in one of those infamous hospital hurry-up-and-wait situations, I grabbed a ball of sock yarn and needles on the way out the door. I used the knitting to calm my anxiety...but in doing so, did I shut him out?

In which I drop the in whiches

Each year when I teach my students to write research papers, I talk about plagiarism. There are several types of plagiarism of course--out-and-out stealing...cherry-picking ideas, sentences, or paragraphs...incorrectly citing someone else's ideas, or the most difficult to identify and deal with, unintentional incorporation of something you've read into your own work. Tenth graders, of course, have a hard time finessing a research paper. They often unintentionally plagiarize simply because they are inexperienced writers and they simply don't understand how to paraphrase well --once they read something, they can't think of how else to state it!

Imagine my embarrassment when I was reading Knitty the other week and realized that I have been unintentionally plagiarizing the "in which" beginnings to the articles.

Clearly, this wasn't Amy Singer's idea either, as anyone who's read Winnie the Pooh or 19th century British literature knows. But still. In good conscience, I must desist.

On the knitting front: I finished my Stefanie Japel vest from Fitted Knits (woohoo) and wore it today to school. Ended up dancing a traditional Zimbabwean dance in front of the student body in it, so it stands up well to flopsweat. Go Cascade 220!