Knitting
May 8, 2008
The Joy of Making Holes in Your Knitting
I wrote the other day that socks are not my choice for knitting. No, what I really like to knit is stuff with holes in it--in other words, lace. Here's the last project I finished before I started the socks:
That view shows it draped over a chair so you can see what it might look like when worn; here's a view that shows it spread out on a bed, so you can see how big it is:
I loved making this shawl--just LOVED it. I liked the lace, which is a basic leaf pattern I learned quite easily. I could have managed the body of the shawl on my own, but I knit it as part of a class so that I could learn to do the Vandyke border. That was tricky enough that I'm glad I had someone walk me through it, but once I understood it, it wasn't hard.
And I'm really pleased with and proud of how well it turned out. I think it's flat-out gorgeous.
I also discovered that I like shawls as garments. I have not worn shawls much before, but actually they're a great garment for someplace like Arizona: just enough coverage that your skin isn't cold, but not so heavy that you get overheated. And they're pretty. I wish I had realized sooner that I love shawls, but I intend to make up for lost time.
Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (5)
May 6, 2008
Now I Can Say I've Done It
A million years ago, I mentioned that I wanted to learn to knit socks, just so I understood how to turn the heel. Well guess what: I spent three Mondays evenings getting instructions on sock knitting, and last week I finished my first sock and started my second. The completed sock looks like this:
The second currently looks like this:
I do like the yarn I got, though I had a hell of a time finding something I liked well enough to knit with. It's more subtle in its self-striping than some yarns, and it would have been fun to work with something more dramatic, but unfortunately the taste of the owners of my nearest yarn store doesn't match my own: they favor pale and bright colors while I like dark colors.
But I have to say, sock knitting is not going to be my thing. I like double-pointed needles, but the ones you need for socks are TINY. And just working a rib stitch for seven inches is BORING. Yes, turning the heel is fun, and amazing: socks are truly a marvelous feat (get it?!) of engineering. But I just can't see doing all that work for something that will get worn out fairly easily--at least, not on a regular basis.
I was thinking about the wearing-out business at one class. I'm notorious for wearing things until they are in tatters, then finding some use for them when they're no longer wearable. Old socks, for instance, are good for polishing shoes. But I can't see using what's left of this sock after it gets a hole in the toe for polishing shoes.
So I asked the teacher what she did when a hole appeared somewhere in a sock she knitted--how she darned them, what she did with the sock after darning was no longer an option. "I don't know," she replied. "I've never had a sock get a hole in it. I don't wear any single pair often enough for them to get holes--I've knitted well over 70 pair."
The thought of knitting 70 pairs of socks in my life was enough to make me ram a double-pointed sock needle into my eye. If I manage half a dozen, I'll be impressed. People tell me I might change my mind, that knitting socks is addicting. Maybe... but I just have too many other kinds of knitting I prefer. I imagine my knitting addiction will run in another direction.
One friend told me she likes to take a sock project with her when she travels--it's a small project on small needles, and you can do it on planes and so forth. That makes sense--I can see myself doing that. And I also intend to wear the socks I've knitted, to the point where they do get holes. Which means I'll also have to figure out something to do with the yarn salvaged from old socks. If this pair ever gets a hole in it, I'll unravel what's still good and make something else.
Posted by Holly at 10:05 AM | Comments (3)
January 28, 2008
Why I Don't Blog That Much about Knitting
I don’t blog much about either relationships while I’m in them or knitting. There are a couple of reasons for this reticence about relationships, one being respect for the privacy of whoever I’m with, another being that blogging about a relationship is a form of commitment that I’m not always ready to make. I don’t blog about knitting so much because, well, for one thing, I’m not the most hard core knitter out there. For instance, I have yet to knit a sock, a fact which raises the eyebrows of more serious knitters, who assure me that is a life-changing experience. I have heard enough people tell me this that I’m pretty damn curious to see if my life will be changed this way. I even tried to take a class on sock-knitting last fall, but it was full.
But another reason I don’t blog much about either knitting or being in love is that they’re among the few things that, if I have the choice between doing them or writing about them, I’ll almost always do the thing itself. That’s not true of shoveling the driveway or being homesick. It’s not even true of making cookies--lately I’ve been hankering for my favorite chocolate chocolate chip cookies but it just seems like too much bother to make them. It’s certainly not true of having sex--some sex I’ve had was way better than anything I could write about it but some wasn’t. It’s not even true of reading Jane Austen or watching Buffy.
Lately I’ve been knitting a fair amount, and maybe that’s one reason I’m more willing to blog about it now--perhaps I’ve reached a certain saturation point. I guess I’ve also found a project I’d rather write about than work on: this lace shawl.
It’s just the most annoying pattern. It’s so intricate that I have to stay very intent on each stitch, but the stitches aren’t so interesting--just lots of increases and decreases--that I really enjoy what I’m doing. And if I drop a stitch or forget a decrease or something, it’s a real pain in the ass, which is why there are those strands of yarn in there: they’re called life lines, because if you end up having to rip out stitches on something this complicated, you’ll have to rip out clear to the beginning unless something keeps stitches secure at an earlier point in the work. I was supposed to have it done by Christmas 2007; I think I’ll be lucky to have it done by Christmas 2008.
I’m also making a basic cardigan, nothing too fancy; the challenge in this project is that I’m designing it myself. I want to see if I understand sweater construction well enough that I can come up with gauge and a look and make something that fits me. Elements will be borrowed from patterns in books I own, but it won’t be based on any single pattern already in existence. This is due partly to the fact that I couldn’t find a single pattern that was what I wanted--if I had found one, I would simply make that pattern. And that’s one of the differences between knitting and sewing that I find hard to adapt to: in sewing, you just change patterns. You just alter things and substitute fabrics and it all usually turns out OK. That’s not true with knitting. It’s much more complicated.
Anyway, here’s a photo of the back of the sweater:
the bottom border is seed or moss stitch, one of my favorites. The body of the sweater is in a very easy stitch I just discovered. The book I found it in called it “the woven knit stitch,” but I can’t find any other references to that. Anyway, I think it looks cool, and it’s very easy. It’s worked with an odd number of stitches, and goes like this:
Row 1: knit 1, * yarn forward, slip one stitch, yarn back, knit 1; repeat from * to end.Row 2: purl.
Row 3: knit 2, * yarn forward, slip one stitch, yarn back, knit 1; repeat from * to last stitch, knit 1.
Row 4: purl.
It is, of course, almost stockinette, but this slight and very easy change to the stitch gives it a subtle increase in texture and visual appeal.
I like the way the purl side looks too:
I have one other major textile project going, but it’s really special and I think it deserves an entry all of its own.
Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (4)
December 18, 2007
The Lead-Up to Two Minutes In Heaven
Warning! This entry contains spoilers! If you A) haven’t seen seasons I or III of Veronica Mars and B) intend to watch them some day and C) are upset by spoilers (I’m not), then read at your own risk.
If you look at the calendar on my blog, it shows that I took a full week off from blogging, Sunday December 9 through Saturday December 15. I completely missed National Blog Posting Every Day Month or whatever November is called; I was traveling and away from home for over half the month, and much of the time I was gone I didn’t have reliable internet access, so there was just no way I could have done that gig.
I decided, however, that I’d compensate by posting every single day for a week or ten days in December, and I thought December 5 through 15 would be ideal as those days (even though that’s actually 11 days). But I got distracted on December 8, and what distracted me was a sweater I started last spring and really want to finish before 2008 rolls around, and Veronica Mars.
Several weeks ago I got this coupon from Borders offering me 40% of an dvd boxed set. It occurred to me that I had never gotten around to watching Season III of Veronica Mars, and while I’d heard it sucked, I wanted to see the magnitude of suckage for myself. So I bought the boxed set, took it home, forgot about it for a while, and then decided what the hell, I should watch it. (Especially since I had this sweater I wanted to finish up, and I like to knit while I watch tv and vice versa. It’s a good way to make tv time productive, and to keep me from getting bored with rows of stockinette stitch.)
And the season sucked. It really, really sucked. The over-arching story lines providing continuity from episode to episode sucked; the plots of individual episodes often sucked; the character development sucked. OK, there were plenty of great performances: from the first moments of the show I really enjoyed seeing both Kristen Bell and Enrico Colantoni on screen, and I especially liked them together. But great performances can’t compensate for a crappy script.
And OK, there was still plenty of witty, intelligent, sparkling dialogue, but if I wanted to watch something with lively banter but ludicrous, unbelievable plots driven awkwardly along by stupid contrivances and the most inane inexplicable choices on the parts of the main characters, I would have made it through more than four episodes of The Golden Girls--or wait, was it Gilmore Girls? I swear I can hardly tell those two shows apart: they both feature some excessively close (to the point of being kind of grossly claustrophobic) relationship between a mother and daughter living in some insular, retiring (retirement?) community; they both have characters who are obsessed with sex and money in very cliched, banal ways; and they both require you to suspend entirely not only your disbelief but your rational wits and any knowledge you might have about human beings actually behave--though one about the old ladies sharing an apartment isn’t quite so bad on that front as the one about the 30-something single mom in New England.
But I digress.
So, VM3 sucked, and one of the worst things about it was who Veronica was with when the season ended. It wasn’t just that she wasn’t with Logan, it’s that Piz, the replacement boyfriend, was SO BORING that he made Duncan (who was so boring that he was kicked off the show as a way to placate the show’s fans, because they quite rightly HATED Duncan) seem like Fourth of July fireworks. Someone in casting or production of that show has a thing for bland boys.... I was trying to figure out who Piz would be in the Buffyverse. He wouldn’t be Riley, because Riley is at least hot, and Marc Blucas could convincingly deliver a comedic line like, “You’re in the thrall of the dark lord!” from the “Buffy vs. Dracula” episode. (I have a beef with Riley haters. I think there’s a reason Marc Blucas is the only one from the show, aside from SMG, to garner many roles in feature films, and the reason has to do with the fact that he’s talented, tall, attractive and affable.) He certainly wouldn’t be Xander, the romantic underdog, because although Xander is discussed as this kind of hapless schlub, he’s really funny, pretty insightful, and quite attractive too. Piz wouldn’t even be disposable love interests Scott Hope or Parker Abrams. Instead, he’d be Graham, Riley’s emotionless and forgettable sidekick in the Initiative.
And there are other reasons why it sucked, which I may develop into a paper someday, because they have to do with the ways teenagers do and don’t interact with adults, which is part of what I analyze in teen tv. But I won’t discuss that here. Instead, I’ll tell you that I kept watching it, a bit compulsively, wondering how it could possibly get worse, only to find out. Suffice it to say, that it sucked so bad, that I had to mitigate the nasty feeling of needing a shower it left me with, and the best way I could think of to do that was to watch Season 1 yet again.
And VM1 is still fabulous. That first season is so vastly superior to virtually all other television I’ve ever seen that I can forgive the crappy follow-ups. I especially like the Logan story--but then, who doesn’t?
Of course I HATED Logan Echolls the first few episodes--couldn’t understand why the show was subjecting me to this vile, vile character. At the end of the sixth episode, he walks into a closet full of belts and selects one, tests its strength. I thought, “Great! He’s going to hang himself! I will no longer have to watch this dreadful person fuck up everyone else’s life!” But turns out he was just choosing the belt his father would beat the crap out of him with, and that it was someone else in the Echolls family would who commit suicide.
But then you realize what a thorough asshole his dad his, and there’s the whole thing with his mother’s suicide, Logan’s conviction that she’s not really dead and his request that Veronica help him track her down because he needs to know she’s all right. By the time he realizes that his mother really did kill herself and collapses, heartbroken and sobbing, into Veronica’s arms, I wasn’t sure I liked this character, but I at least felt compassion for him and saw him as complex and human.
And then, there’s Episode 18, “Weapons of Class Destruction,” where Logan, all knight-in-puka-shells-ish, comes to rescue Veronica when the creepy camo-wearing, fertilizer-buying weirdo gets in her car and instructs her to drive to the Camelot Motel, all of which Logan overhears because she was on the phone with him when the guy got in the car. He punches the guy really hard in the face several times, and, upon discovering that the guy is an undercover FBI agent, still refuses to trust him, delivering the memorable line, "Dream on, Jump Street. I’m not leaving you alone with her.”
A few moments later, Veronica walks out of the motel room after talking to the FBI dude. Logan leans against the wall, asks “Are you OK?” She murmurs “Mm-hmm,” then kisses him quickly on the lips to say thanks before shaking her head and walking away--because after all, until a few weeks earlier, she LOATHED this guy so much she could barely stand to be near him.
And Logan grabs her arm, pulls her around to face him, and the two of them make out on the balcony of this seedy hotel while the music swells and the camera pulls away and circles around them in this sweeping romantic gesture. The very first time I saw it and half the times I’ve seen it since then, I stood up and clapped and shrieked in delight, because it was really sexy and completely unexpected and absolutely earned and ever so, ever so RIGHT. (Yes, the scene plays on all sorts of stereotypes and predictable fantasies. It's still a surprise, and it still works.)
Now, believe it or not, the point I want to make about this wonderful heterosexual kiss is related to what I wrote yesterday about a really moving gay sex scene. But once again I’ve already written a lot, and I don’t want this entry to be so long no one takes the time to read it in any detail. (I know what blog-readers sometimes do with really long entries, because I’m a blog reader myself and I occasionally do it too: we skim.) So you’ll have to check back again later for the continuation of this argument.
Posted by Holly at 10:37 AM | Comments (4)
October 24, 2006
Fetching
I'm proud to report that something I FINALLY did this past week was finish this pair of fetching fingerless gloves I began in August at Sunstone. That's right: I was one of those ladies who goes to some public place and pulls out her knitting, and just works it and fiddles with it even while other people go about their business of talking and being smart or entertaining or boring or whatever. Having something to work on while I listened really made the symposium more enjoyable, but I only noticed one other person who brought some project along: a 50-something guy who did needle point.
Even though it was my first time working with double-pointed needles (!), I easily finished one glove that weekend, and as for the other, well, it took me a while to find a chunk of time to sit down and start them. But they're done now and I adore them--I wore them today.
Here's a photo of my right hand encased in said glove:
and here's a photo of both gloves and the needles they were created on.
Posted by Holly at 2:54 PM | Comments (9)
September 9, 2006
My Glasses
There are so many things I would really like to blog about: I want to respond to Major Steel's entry about the music he loved in college and discuss this review I read on Salon of this book I really want to read, This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin. I have written nothing about Sunstone except an intro to the synposis I plan eventually to write. I reallly do intend to blog about knitting some day, though knitting is for me like being in love in that I find it so rewarding that I'd rather do it than write about it. Anyway, those are among the many topics I hope to find time to write about soon, but in the meantime you're getting a picture of my new glasses (which I am wearing this very moment, having picked them up yesterday--they are less cat-eye-ish than I remembered but at least the rhinestones are really truly there) perched on the book I'm currently reading in front of the basket where I store my knitting, which is currently a sweater I'm almost finished knitting.
Posted by Holly at 12:25 PM | Comments (4)