Archive for the Knitting Category
Posted by: meham in Knitting
I hate it when I can’t see the post I’ve just made. Especially when I’ve got something technical on it.
The last post is supposed to have a satellite image of my grandmother’s house on it. There is, at the moment a big blank space. I can’t even re-load the post to edit it. Another huge blank space. Yes, I like WordPress. No, I don’t like the technical difficulties. I did manage to fix the lace photo so that one is not so huge. yay. I am learning to take things a little bit at a time, not changing four pieces at once and messing up everything.
OK. Back to work. Have the scarf half done, exactly. I’ve decided that I will be using two balls of yarn since the length of one seems to be plenty for half way. I’ve also started his scarf. It’s one of the “two trees” patterns from Barbara Walker. I used the other one a while ago and I especially like the symbolism. His is in Lamb’s Pride, navy of course. I’m taking the official pictures, the one I’m giving as the placeholder for the actual gift, tomorrow. Went shopping for decent going to wedding stuff today. Ended up with a T-shirt.
Don’t ask.
Ok. Early to work tomorrow. Write 100Words tonight. Listen to the end of The Amber Spyglass somewhere in between. Maybe the blog fairies will come tonight.
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I got an email today, from Brenda Dayne of Cast On. She wants to use an audio essay I sent her.
The essay was inspired by her Summer Camp series, and wasn’t about summer camp. It was about my grandmother and my approach to housekeeping.
I think of this present as being from both of them. Mostly from my grandmother, though. I never got birthday presents from her, my mother’s mother, Mae. I got birthday cards with crisp five dollar bills in them from my father’s mother, Bertha. All I’ve ever had of Mae, or Roachie as I was tole she’d been called, was her only daughter and through her, part of my life. And the knitting.
Bertha didn’t knit, wasn’t a maker. She was a missionary wife and mother. I knew her as someone who managed on her own, in her own house, on an artificial leg. Yes, she fell from time to time and I was there sometimes to help her up. Mostly, though, she did everything herself. I spent part of the year that my grandfather, Sam, died, living with her. She’d wash my hair in the kitchen sink, first covering the burners on the stove before having me lie down under the tap water.
She gave me my first taste of cake batter. And my love for big, bright, open kitchens as well a longing for a real chest freezer. And rolling down lawns and sunbathing.
(this should have been a Google map of Bertha’s house, now my stepMom’s)
Mae only left me poetry. It was a slim volume of her poems that she had published. I have a photocopy of it. I didn’t take the one my mother had and when my grandfather called and asked if there was anything of my mother’s I wanted, I didn’t think to ask for the book. Or the knitting things. Or her science fiction collection. Or the chairs I sat in while I figured out how to knit, that first sweater.
Today, though, I feel I got that birthday present Roachie never sent me.
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Finally figured out how to add a button or badge to the sidebar when the image in on my local server and not the originators. Had to have me a Ravelry button. Now if I can just figure out how to add the Huna button and get things to show when I’m done. Oh, well.
Oh, and I found out that I have to actively administer comments. Didn’t even know I had any! And now I have to go an apologize to my sole commenter for neglecting her.
Gave myself some boundaries for the wedding present. So many inches of the scarf each day and a day to finish by. This is such a new process for me. It allows me to take the time I’d be using to get more frustrated and apply it to being more productive. I swatched some yarn I had in the house to get a feeling for what happens when I use needles larger than recommended for knitting lace. I also don’t know what the yarn weight designations mean in relation to knitting lace. I get tired of the really fine lace weight knitting. I want to have something more substantial that I can use to get experience with the stitches and how they interact.
And yet, I want to have finished pieces and fun. I like the sock yarns that are out there. I like some of the hand paints that are out there. It would be nice to play in those while working on my skills. The more time I spend with a single project, the more questions I have about knitting in general and the construction of lace in particular.
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Posted by: meham in Knitting
This is how I see the scarf. This is where I find my reprieve from perfection, from the shoulda, woulda, coulda’s.
I’m not saying that I shouldn’t be precise in my knitting. I am definitely over my head in this piece. I don’t have the time to do it differently. So, I am allowing myself to perform this way, with flow and courage rather than precision.
I do many things this way, falling away from the shoulda’s into the What Would Happen If’s. This way I find out, regardless of the consequences, what does happen if I don’t follow directions, if I don’t so what I should.
I erupted in tears last night, over this. And after the tears were done, and after a night’s sleep and some work on my Ravelry writing challenge, I thought about what my behavior says about me, to me. I don’t eschew precision. I just feel driven by something else, something more exploratory, more adventurous. The place for precision in my life is usually here, in words. In text. Sometimes that precision flows away from the written word and into the spoken. I find myself challenging others to shift their language to improve their thinking, their beliefs about their lives and themselves. A kind of “word magic”, I guess.
Electronics is also where I try to exercise the need for precision, where I try to find the boundary between good enough and failure. That my intent is to find that boundary shows me that even in that field, I do not feel bound by the shoulda’s.
I’m a designer. When life gives me lemons I try to see what else besides lemonade I can get. My knitting is giving me lemons. I tried to find some way to balance the lemon against thirst and just added more water and left out the sugar. As it turns out, this is supposed to help the body take up the water better. I’m hoping that my dilution of the bird’s eye with plain garter stitch will help the piece be received better than what I shoulda done.
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Posted by: meham in Knitting
It’s a wonder what a few tears of release, an open forum of open hearts, and a little blocking will do.
I really didn’t like how the wedding present was turning out. At least until I blocked it. Unblocked it looks as ungainly as its knitting. Blocked, it looks as though everything belongs there. There are points where points were not originally planned. The balance of solid garter stitch, together with my intermediate skills and fractured attention attempting the bird’s eye pattern, works. If you don’t know what the stitch pattern is supposed to look like, it looks like itself–a very openwork border for a sheer block of fabric.
  The unevenness of the edge isn’t as infuriating when it hangs. It looks almost leaf-like wit the points.
Maybe the transparency of the garter stitch lets the piece work. I’m working on needles about two sizes larger than recommended for the yarn. I’m using US 4 instead of US 2 or 3. This makes a sheer fabric and in such a dark color as the navy, I’m really liking it. Either way, I feel better. The piece, as a whole unit, will work. It’s being downgraded from a wrap/stole to a scarf, though. They will both be getting scarves and that suits me fine.
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I’m caught up in my preNaNo writing fever and procrastinating the current writing challenge on Ravelry. Yes, I’m getting rows on the “Wedding Project” done. I’m not very enthusiastic because I’m not having fun with the pattern.
Because it’s a true lace with patterning on every row, I’m having trouble seeing the stitches in the both the row below and the row I’m knitting. I just can’t see how they work together. I even tried knitting the pattern, as I’m currently working it, in a heavier yarn. The stitches get swallowed up even in a worsted, and knitting them in two colors still doesn’t help.
The pressure of intention, of having taken on this project as a gift with a definite finish-by date, isn’t helping either. Or is it?
Were it not for the finish-by date, I would have given up a while ago and moved on to something more manageable. A baby sweater or booties. Something in a heavier gauge with a variety of colors that showed more progress for the effort. Something that I would be certain to finish.
I will not stop until it is done. I will not allow my confusion as to which pattern row I’m on weigh me down and entice me away from the project. I will continue to see my progress as an emblem of my continued friendship despite distance. I will see the working of it as a blessing of a long marriage, a fruitful marriage, and a courageous marriage.
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That’s where the knitting is. Turns out I was knitting the pattern the wrong way round. My printer is mostly out of ink and the only part of the pattern that I can see easily is the chart. So, I’m knitting it, right? Well, even though the pattern looks the same, it’s not knitting right. It took me five tries to think that maybe there really is a difference between the beginning and the end.
I will eventually knit the pattern that way deliberately and see what happens. Meanwhile, I am going to try again.
Oh, and who knew! Evidently, according to my Scottish Mum, Bird’s Eye and Print of the Wave are traditional baby shawl patterns. And the prospect of knitting them acted as sufficient birth control! You don’t see that in the knitting books!
OK. Taking a break from Ravelry. And making dinner.
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 This is the Bird’s Eye pattern begun. And about to be frogged!
I don’t mind. It’s taken me this long to get it started and there is very nice progress. That I can see the little circles this time. I’ve been trying to really see the pattern, locked in all those little marks on the chart, and it’s taken me on quite a journey.
 First I tried writing it out. This helped a little bit. I at least got to see where the rhythms might be. I could see what the pattern was built from Then I knit just those stitches.
. This doesn’t tell much about the pattern. I knit the pattern with knit rows in between the pattern rows. I almost went with this idea, of adding knit rows between the pattern stitches and making a quite different object.
The pattern, this bird’s eye, as it is to be knit, scared me. When I get scared of something printed, I go on a search. I seem to take the long way round to find myself at the center of my search, but it works. There’s a benefit.
I found more Shetland patterns online. Knitting-and has a group of knitting patterns called “spider” and they have a structure similar to the bird’s eye. In my Knitting Shetland Patterns From Charts I found the pattern again. There’s a Lace Symposium online that told me that for all their apparent complexity, Shetland patterns are relatively simple. The simplicity of the pattern made it easy to memorize, and thus profitable to knit.
I could see that simplicity in the Spider stitch patterns. I saw that and more. I saw a quarternary, if that’s a real word, number system. If binary is base two. These patterns are base four, quarternary. 0=yarn over, k=1, k2t=2, sk2p=3. Spiders and number systems. Mmmm. Story fodder.
When she knits, she knits a particular rhythm. Pod notices it and comes to see that what her husband can’t express to the other musicians, was the idea of phrasing. She has that idea in her fingers. Maybe, she knits the same combination of stitches but with a different phrasing. Does this make a different pattern to her? It could be so. This could be what else Pod notices, another step he can take towards her acquaintance.
So, I will be frogging the rows, I’ve knitted already. My plan is to move the knitting along by only using the Bird’s Eye as the end of the wrap and not the whole thing. Not this time. I don’t have time for that. I’ve figured out where the center of the shawl pattern is and I will echo the shape of the point in the knitted part. The shawl is charted for points at both ends, for a diamond. A very useful arrangement.
Meanwhile, I’ve practiced the combinations of yarn-overs, the rhythms of the stitch combinations. Like practicing scales and other combinations in preparation for playing a more complex work.
I finally listened to the Purl Diving podcast. I had been feelng frustrated with this process. I’ve been designing, or trying to design a gift. The piece has to fit the person, the occasion, and my skill. There is more to the process, but that’s all I’m going to say about it for now. So, hearing the podcast telling about the process as I was experiencing it, and after the fact of my coming to the end of the preparation, hearing it after all that I felt comforted. Soothed. Well accompanied.
Whew! That’s enough for now. Ravelry calls!
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The header is up and it looks really good. Of course I had to start with a decent photo and that was mostly good fortune. Work has some nice surfaces to work from.
Not to deny my own input. If you look at the bottom of the knitting chart you will see a couple of words. Originally it said something like “Stop knitting when you get to …” Not what I want to remember. So, I changed it. I’m happy with the whole serendipity of the thing.
Next? Get Flickr up. The original of the banner photo is there plus photos of the MS3 in some of its progress.
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Posted by: meham in Knitting, lace knitting
There are a couple of pictures of swatch squares in the Knitting Lace Triangles book. Only there are no directions for knitting them.
So… I looked in my Mary Thomas’ Book of Knitting and found the directions for knitting square medallions. First, I found something to practice with. I didn’t want to use a true lace weight… yet. I found an acrylic sportweight that works up well enough for me to enjoy the practice of practice.
First, I knit a swatch in garter stitch just to get a feel for the combination of #6 bamboo needles and this Red Heart LusterSheen.
Then I knit the square. I used bamboo needles again and it took me a while to remember how to use 5 double-points. I like how it turned out. The step of knitting in the back of the stitch on the first round seems to close up the threatening hole.
OK. I’m tired of not seeing the blog the way I want to see it. I’m working, also on a shawl for a friend who is getting married in less than a month. I’m listening to Brenda Dayne’s Cast On podcast. This makes everything feel a little better. Looking at the swatches floating on velvety backgrounds in all their lopsided goodness, also makes me feel better. I’ve broken through the ennui.
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