My Sock Summit

Viewing all the sock yarns that were submitted on Ravelry's "Dye for Glory" page (alas, since taken down, but here are the winners) sent me into some kind of psychedelic haze markedly similar to that induced by the ingestion of hallucinogenic drugs. I left my greedy perusal of the 201 yarns on that site with a sense of exhaustion, itchy fingers, exhilaration, addiction, and a need to knit socks.

Now, of course, I have sock yarns. A lot of them. In fact, I issued to myself a temporary sock-yarn-buying moratorium (along with the theoretical moratorium on acquiring spinning fiber that I keep threatening to make a reality by suspending my fiber club memberships. Thank heaven I'm too much of a procrastinator to act on that one).

But there I was a week or so later, in the yarn shop in Kirkby-Lonsdale, which seemed to me to have come up in the world considerably since I was last there. This was because 1. they had Peruvian yarns in addition to their Brigantia (they're my sole source for the latter) and 2. the nice lady behind the counter, who was knitting a sock, was on Ravelry. Now, how can you resist a fellow sock-knitter on Ravelry?

Ergo: my sock summit.



Not that I've started actually knitting a sock with it, you understand. We're still at the petting stage while I forge away on Belinda and on the several pounds of raw Swaledale fleece my stepfather bought me as a surprise present. (Gotta love those surprise presents.)

Surface Tension (Backlog)

[I post rarely enough that you'd think I wouldn't forget to post something I've already written, but here this is: written two weeks ago, saved, and abandoned. So I'm posting it now. Waste not, want not.]

Here's my current debate: whether or not to knit the wrap that is such an integral part of Surface.

The wrap was one of the things that drew me to the pattern in the first place. And I've already cast on for the darn thing. But here are my reservations:

- I'm not sure I will have enough yarn.

- I'm not sure whether, once completed, it is actually going to look all that great. I have pored over the pictures in the vain hope of figuring out what it is like actually to move in a sweater with an extra wrap buttoned around your shoulders. Does it scoot up when you move your arms? Can you wear a coat over it? Does it strain the buttons out of alignment (which it appears to do in one of the pictures), or ruck up the collar?

(I should note that at this juncture I am not 100% sure the sweater is going to look all that great either. It's lying on the floor drying as I write. It's certainly the best finishing job I've ever done, and I'm inordinately proud of it, if you didn't figure that out from my last rather conceited post on the topic, but I remain uncertain as to whether it cuts across my body at its least flattering point. Even my husband has come to share my anxious anticipation, or at least he is nice enough to say that he does.)

- I am concerned that this sweater, densely knit, is already going to be one of the warmest garments in my possession. Every time I try it on it seems almost suffocating (of course, it is the month of July, which doesn't help). I realize that in winter I may sing a different tune, but the idea of adding an extra layer of insulation seems tantamount to gilding the lily.

- The wrap represents a huge amount of knitting, and it seems a shame to go through all that for a garment that, if completed and found wanting, will not be very useful for anything else.

All this sounds like talking myself out of it. The issue is critical at the moment because I'm packing for a month away and I have to figure out what knitting to take. Queries to Ravelry on the shawl topic have been inconclusive.

Edited to add: I didn't bring the yarn with me. And I haven't regretted it. The callus on the back of my right ring finger caused by forcing the needle through all those p4togs may, however, be with me always.

Thy Hand, Belinda

I planned to finish Surface before I left for a week in New Mexico. And I was close: only three rows to go on the final button band and sewing on the collar. But I wasn't going to schlep a heavy sweater on the plane. So instead, I brought along my first Kidsilk Haze and the pattern for Belinda from the second Mason-Dixon Knitting book. (This was, of course, the same ball of Kidsilk Haze that took a scenic tour of the hotels of China without ever emerging from its plastic bag.)

I started it on the plane to Dallas and knitted and knitted and knitted, and at the end of several hours of flying I had a total of about ten pattern repeats and thought it might be the most boring knitting I'd ever done and it was going to take me well into 2010 to finish the thing.

What I didn't realize, however, was that Belinda turns out to be the perfect social knitting. Its very mindlessness is an asset when you are sitting around the dining room table, or visiting your aunt, or engaged in some long and important discussion with your brother. It is, in short, the ideal pattern to bring along on a family visit: it keeps you grounded while requiring no mental focus at all. And it keeps growing.



The only issue I have with Belinda, in fact, is my association with the name. It immediately summons to mind Dido's final aria from Purcell's opera "Dido and Aeneas," an aria which she sings either right before or right after she has taken the step to kill herself (the opera is elliptical on this point, but I like to think she has just been bitten by the asp): she reaches for her lady-in-waiting/confidant and sings, "Thy hand, Belinda! Darkness shades me. On thy bosom let me rest. More I would, but death invades me. Death is now a welcome guest." Then begins the aria, beautiful, simple, stately, and running like an incessant soundtrack through my head every time I pick up this particular piece of knitting. As much as I love the aria, it's starting to drive me a little crazy.

Here, for reference, is Dame Janet Baker as Dido in an ancient black-and-white clip. I can only hope that sharing this particular tune will help me move on to some other internal musical accompaniment. Certainly it can't hurt: Dame Janet, at any rate, is pretty fantastic.

Applying that College Degree

There's a tipping point in making a sweater when the pieces that have been slowly accumulating for so long suddenly come together and become a garment. For me this is a time of obsessive fascination. I've been used to the idea of the thing, the color of the yarn, the easy familiarity of carrying it around in various stages of completion, and suddenly, here it is as something I may or may not wear. How does it look? Will it actually fit? Will I actually dare to wear it to the office, or is this going to be another winter-Sunday-in-the-country garment, pilling happily in my closet, unseen by all but my husband?

The intoxication of this process is only intensified by my concentration on finishing skills. Finishing is not something I am naturally good at. I am a big-ideas, creative-insight type person who tends not to be so great at the detail work, though it's true that once I've finished a piece of writing I can spend a considerable amount of time going back and tweaking prepositions and commas. But things like measuring, sewing, carpentry, hanging pictures -- things that require precision -- have never been my forte. So to achieve some degree of ability at putting together a sweater that looks halfway decent is a source of quiet but not inconsiderable pride.

It reminds me of a college course I took in Homer's Odyssey which required, as its final project, a research paper analyzing the philology of 90 lines of the original Greek. As someone who has always learned languages solely for the purpose of reading literature in them, and tends to gloss over the specificities of arcane verb conjugations or moods, I was more than a little terrified by this paper, but I wanted to write my senior thesis on the Odyssey so I pretty much had to take the course. I spent hours in the classics library surrounded by incomprehensible tomes (the joke "it's all Greek to me" very quickly gets tired in that context), but the upshot was an A paper that remains one of my proudest achievements in my four years of college, because it was so utterly out of character.

So it is with me and finishing. On Friday I executed my tidiest button band yet, and I had the same feeling of incredulous pride that I had then. This may be only the second time that that classics degree has had such direct bearing on my current daily life. (The first was an assignment to write about the Greek Islands based on my putative expertise in all things Greek. I didn't complain.)

Yesterday, however, took some of the wind out of my sails. As I was on the fourth or fifth row of the wrap/capelet that goes with the sweater, my Knitpicks Harmony Option needles BROKE. I tried and failed to pick up the lost stitches (the wraps in the blister part refused to look right in the picked-up part) and had to start over again. That's 242 stitches, in blister stitch, a couple of days' work, and I'm ashamed to admit what a bad mood it put me in, especially after I had re-started and made a mistake in the second row that will require tinking back to fix. If I'm going to neglect my work for my knitting, at least let me have something to show for it.

Myrtle

Meet Myrtle. This is my latest installment of the Spunky Eclectic fiber club. I'm usually several months behind. Wish she'd held still for the picture-taking (ha).

This is my jetlag yarn since I started spinning it the day I got back from China in a valiant effort to keep awake. It worked. The colors seemed appropriate for jetlag, too: a core of smokey gray BFL, with stained-glass greens and maroons and blues blossoming out of it, muted and rich and dreamy. This just how I felt: full of all the colors and memories of the trip, and moving through a fog.

Spun into 3-ply sock yarn (310-plus yards, 16-18 wpi), it all turned a kind of heathery gray. Though there'll be at least one red stripe. I'm thinking socks for a man. The question is: which man?

I am at a crossroads with my fiber club. Until now, I have justified it as a monthly expenditure that isn't exorbitant and makes me happy whether or not I can keep up. But I may have reached the proverbial tipping point. The other night I went into my box of fiber and felt like I was drowning: too many plans, too many ideas, too many small hanks of variegated yarn. I may have more fiber at this point than is fun to keep around. I'm torn because I so enjoy getting the monthly shipments, and then following on Ravelry what everyone else does with them. But I will never have enough time to catch up. Until the recession claims my job - and then I'll have to sell all the fiber so we can eat.

Furthermore, I don't spend all my free time spinning. I also knit. I have developed a knitting callus: a bump on the back of my right-hand ring finger. I hold the yarn in such a way that my two last fingers curl under and the ring finger presses against the needle, and the p4tog of Surface requires enough pressure to create an actual sore spot. The unsightliness worries me less than the idea that this might lead to some horrible form of arthritis when I'm 65.

My professional blog gets more hits in a bad week than this blog has gotten in its entire existence. This gives me a deceptive sense of freedom about posting here, which I have to keep reminding myself not to trust. But it also makes this blog a poor platform for the kinds of things I'd like to vent about in my private life. Like Wimbledon. Did it bother anybody else in the US that you couldn't see some of the important matches live, because NBC took over broadcasting at noon (Eastern Daylight Time) from ESPN and went back and re-broadcast the earlier matches from the morning before airing the final one of the day (by then, also on tape)? In the age of the Internet, does it really make sense to punt on live coverage? Or do I, in my tennis fan-dom, represent such a small part of the population that it's insignificant? Obviously, it says something that I only get around to posting about this days after the final match is over.

Chinese Yarns

China was amazing.



Of course, the one thing I brought too much of was: yarn. Somehow when I thought of those 14-hour flights and all the internal flights I thought I'd spend my whole time knitting. I didn't stop to think that I might be sleeping. Or reading. Or working.

I did finish both sleeves of Surface. I even ended up liking the blister stitch. (You're right, rubbishknitter: like bubble wrap. Now I keep poking my fingers into it, happily.) But three whole skeins of yarn traveled back and forth to Asia untouched.

My great regret, besides not buying the Shantung silk, was not being able to check out the yarn booth at the fabric market in Shanghai. Actually, I regret not buying the Shantung silk a lot more. I'll have to go back for that.

Late Lace

The pace of my blog posts here reflects the pace of my finishing in the last months. A colleague at work had a baby and I thought I'd whip up a quick little baby gift. After all, that Mason-Dixon baby kimono doesn't take any time at all, right? Alas, I have had even less time than "no time at all" in the last couple of months. By the time I finished it the baby had almost outgrown it. (Her father tactfully described it as "snug," but was touched by the gesture.) Worse still, I did a truly crappy finishing job. An heirloom it ain't, handspun or no. But here 'tis.



This is made from the leftovers of the BFL I spun up for my mom's birthday shawl last year... well, the spinning happened two years ago. How time flies.

And the post I linked above (but hey, I'll link to it again for good measure) also documents a cliffhanger: the time I ran out of handspun yarn when my Melon Shawl (from Victorian Lace Today) was nearly completed.

Fortunately I can report a happy ending.





A little blurry, but hey, it's done.


It's a sign of my current state of overextension that I finished this on vacation in March, but didn't block it til May. What kind of obsessed-knitter behavior is that?

Gratuitous vacation shot to distract me from my woeful lack of knitters' OCD:


This is Tulum, Mexico, before swine flu, but not before drug-related violence that kept the tourist crowds to manageable proportions. Please note that this is a last-minute vacation booked on Travelocity. On a Wednesday night, my husband found an amazing deal for flight plus four nights in a really nice hotel in Coba, and we flew on Friday morning. And it was one of our best vacations ever. Muy bien.

In other travel news, I'm leaving in a week for China (there's a temptation here to insert lots of exclamation points and smiley faces to indicate the monumentality of this news in blog terms, but I am resisting). And on this blog, as nowhere else, I can discuss the all-important question about this trip: what knitting do I take for a 14-hour flight? (Plus sundry other three-hour flights once we get to Asia.) I'm thinking I'll be able to finish my Surface: I just have the sleeves and the collar to go, and then the wrap. Even that monstrous wrap might be doable in 28 hours of flying, though the dreaded blister stich (which requires a string of p4tog every six rows) has put off better knitters than I, and I'm not sure my fingertips would survive several consecutive hours of it.

(A side note: I worry a bit about this sweater. It looks like it could either look really cool when it's done, or really weird and homemade and never, ever get worn.)

But I can't only take Surface - there has to be some variety. I'm wavering between the Belinda wrap, which seems like nice thoughtless travel knitting, and the Leyburn Socks. (I'm so used to Ravelry that it's frustrating to try to find non-Rav images on the web for blog purposes. All you Rav readers know where to find better information.) My urge is to compromise and take both, but I'm not sure how much yarn I'll have room for in my luggage. And the sad reality is that this is a work trip and I'll probably spend most of my time on the computer, and get much less knitting done than I hope.