Sometimes it's okay to be quiet.

I've been feeling sort of thinly spread and introspective lately. Maybe it's the weather. The site, as the extension of my psyche it is, will probably be the same way for a little bit.



I made a hat for Jeremy. The pattern is from Alice Starmore's Aran Knitting, which I got from the library because I can't in good conscience spend 200$ on a book. Especially one less than 10 years old. I used some Araucania Nature Wool that was originally going to be part of a felted bag for J. Man, I love that yarn. It absolutely goes against the conventional wisdom that varigated yarn obscures cable patterns, but the Araucania seems to give cables a subtlety and depth that's fantastic.

My tassel/pompom attaching technique remains totally half-assed, though the worst of the mess is on the inside of the hat.

I've made this hat before, as my first foray into cables that weren't just ropes. I found it interesting to revisit the pattern, now that it seems so simple.

The original version was way, way too loose, even after I felted it slightly in the wash, so I reduced the number of repeats from 8 to 6. This was right on the edge of being too snug (I probably should have been conservative and gone with 7), but it'll keep the wind out better that way.

J tried it on, and thought the folded-up ribbing was too shallow. I've got a fair amount of the yarn left, so I'll add an inch or two before his old hat explodes into dust (it won't make it to Christmas, I don't think). I haven't decided yet if I'll take the lazy route and just pick up stitches from the cast on edge, or if I'll do the thing properly and actually unravel a row or two.
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Yes, I'll get back to that designing essay soon. I've just been doing too much stuff at work to focus properly, and slightly stalled on a cool design idea I had. So consider this a case study before I get back to the lecture.

The deal is this: I'm making a weird shape that I think can be gracefully done with short rows. At the same time, I'd like to have an allover pattern. It's a bit of a square peg/round hole deal. I COULD just make the peg round--work the item in just one color, keep the patterning out of the continuity-wrecking short rows, make the shaping with a more inelegant solution--but I don't like giving up on problems of spatial distribution due to a failure of imagination. There must be a way to get it right.

I have two ideas as to how I can approach this problem. First, I can make a rough paper mockup of my crazy shape in 3D, which I haven't done yet. That way I can figure out just how much shortrowing would be required, and see if a sort of pattern-coda would work for that subsection. (So far I've mixed knitting, music, and math terminology. I know. I'm so, so sorry.)

Secondly, if I figure out something doing the paper mockup that seems right technically but speaks rudely to my knitter's instinct, I might knit a very small version of the idea with a loose sloppy gauge, maybe even leaving off the patterning entirely, or just striping, so I can figure out how things separate or converge while I'm busy fudging. Undoing a goof hurts less than undoing The Real Thing, which is why I may do it like that.

Any other ideas?

Other things that have been true about me since before I was walking:

The ability to sleep for 10 hours without intervention.

Enjoyment of applesauce, bananas, and squash.

A love for laying down.

A dislike of burping.

The ability to listen raptly to interesting voices for a long time.

Bleurgh. I can deal with allergies and a headache and intestinal weirdness one at a time, but it's just too much to deal with at once, so I'm staying home, wrapped up in a cozy shawl, looking at pretty knitting pictures (I'm not really up to actual knitting right now, which is my personal benchmark of "Am I *unable* to go to work right now, or do I just not *want* to?")



The body of the Cornwall sweater is finished. J tried it on after I bound off the shoulder seams and it fits great, phew. I'm doing this crazy intarsia-in-the-round thing on the sleeves now because I didn't think ahead, but if you've been reading this site for any length of time you've probably figured out that I'm not afraid of new techniques and I don't mind winging it. So I've spent a lot of time looking at it dubiously, but I think it'll turn out all right.

I have a not-socially-acceptable confession to make.

I don't like bathing.

I mean, I do wash myself, of course, whenever I'm dirty or smelly or whatever. But the water's cold, or else it's too hot, and the second you get out you're cold and shivery, and it just makes me GRUMPY. It will always be one of those things that I have to do in order to live in an adult world.

So this morning, I was standing in front of my dresser in a towel, grumpy and wet, pulling out jeans and a shirt, and I happen to look at an old sheet of notebook paper on top of my dresser. It's from a note my mom gave to my grandma, the first night she ever spent away from me, and it has the level of intricate detail that seems to simultaneously make perfect sense to a new mother, and is incredibly funny to a mother of 5 and a grandmother of 3 (at that point, anyways). At the time, I was just starting on solid food but hadn't yet started walking, which means I was probably about 7 months old. Gramma saved the note, and gave it to me last May when I was home. Details of my pooping schedule were joke fodder for the rest of the night. I haven't been sure what to do with it, so it joined the pile of other stuff I don't know what to do with on top of my dresser.

The part of the note facing up, while I was standing there cold and grumpy, was about bath time:

"She's ALWAYS fussy and grumpy when you dress her after a bath."

It's good to know I haven't changed much in the past 25 years.

I made yarn!

I made yarn!

I can take this:

And turn it into this!


I'm fully aware that this is the spinning equivalent of the lumpybumpy garter stitch scarf with dropped stitches here and there.

But I don't care. I made YARN.
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Details if you care: The green started as a small 1$ ball of roving I bought on Saturday along with the rest of the spinning tools. Because I'm crazy, I needed something that small and cheap so I could give myself permission to turn it into garbage as I got the hang of the motion, figured out how thick or thin or consistently I could spin, etc. It's pretty ropey after plying, I think I underspun the singles, though it's reasonably balanced. As a 2-ply, it ranges from maybe Aran weight to foolishly bulky, and there's 3-4 yards of it that aren't just total junk. Just enough to be an accent stripe on a silly hat.

The big ball of roving (and that's a REALLY big ball, bigger than a basketball) is natural-colored Border Leicester, a mix of dark and light gray, which spins so differently from the ball of green that it took me a while to get the hang of it. Learning the concept of "pre-drafting" helped a lot.

I was originally thinking of using it in a knitting project, combined with some other uber-natural sheepy yarns I've been waiting to do something with, but it's a considerably different shade spun up. Much darker and less brown. A little test swatch (or whatever spinners call what knitters call a swatch) shows that this yarn will probably be about worsted weight, maybe a smidge lighter, and it's coming out much more evenly than the green. Since I won't be using it with the yarn I have, I'll have to come up with something else for it. Maybe a hat.

I am finding that the Border Leicester is spinning up fuzzier than I want. I think I need to pull the fibers out more carefully so that they're all lined up. So far I'm still focusing on getting the yarn weight and spin that I want, but I'll try to think about the fuzzy factor too.

Also, spinning is a lovely thing to do when it's too hot to knit, as it's been the past few days. I've been spinning until my fingers get tired, then unravelling a sweater I have other plans for. I don't think spinning will replace knitting, but I am enjoying it a lot and will probably start making and using more handspun now. In fact, I even have a project in mind....

J and I get even more loopy and stream-of-consciousness in our conversations than usual, first thing in the mornings. He walked into the kitchen as the people on the Today show were yammering on about some talk show.

"I wouldn't have a syndecated talk show," he said as he washed a couple of dishes, dried one, and set yogurt and granola out on the counter. "I'd have a *syncopated* talk show."

I laughed, and made up some talk-show guests and topics, roughly to the tune of The Pink Panther Theme:

"Here's OUR
first GUEST
she WROTE a COOK book AND it's A
best SELLLL-ER"

J paused, spoon in midair.

"Which of us is blogging this?"
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A bunch of design stuff has been coming up lately--people using my patterns, or emailing me about them (a bunch of the Fair-Isle Hat pattern's actually been reworked recently, because the more I'm exposed to new-knitter questions like in my knitting group, the more I realize what information needs to be put into a instruction-heavy pattern). Also I'm working out a couple of patterns at the moment that I'll probably submit to someone besides myself.

So I thought I'd talk a little bit about the process of designing something, because it seems like something that intmidates a lot of people.

And since I'm already talking about the design process, I may as well use an example of a pattern I've been loath to share, although I've been asked for it a bunch: Gir. I'm hoping that, by going through this little exercise, everyone wins--I'm not taken away by the copyright police, people that want to make Gir have a place to start, and people that want to do something else entirely maybe get the little kick in the pants that they need.

This will take a few days to get through, here's part one.

Don't touch the yarn yet--Getting Started:

A: The idea

There's something you want to make. Maybe it's just a part of something--you want a sweater, and you really like this cable you found in a stitch library. Or maybe you already have a global picture--a specific stuffed animal that's unusual enough that you can't find a pattern for it.

I saw someone online who was knitting a Gir doll. But I didn't want the mix of knit and fabric she was doing.

So I started watching Invader Zim and picking yarn colors.

For the yarn colors: I had some gray wool in the stash, and in a flurry of excitement I found a shade of blue Cascade 220 that worked perfectly--color 9455, if you're wondering.

As you can see, before I'd done anything, I'd already made a lot of decisions. I wanted a happy, blue-eyed doll. Gir, the cartoon character, is occasionally activated so he follows orders, or wears a dog costume so he doesn't attract Earthling attention. (Neither plan works very well). But these different incarnations just didn't have the same level of personality.

If you're planning a garment, it may seem that there are a million choices, but you've probably made several of them already. Yarn color/composition/brand/weight? Pullover or cardigan? Shaped or boxy? Colorwork? Maybe cables? Of course someone can change their mind as they figure out the details, but many avenues have already been removed painlessly. If you have an idea, you're already close!

B: Drawing up an idea

I got a D in art in 6th grade, but I still like to draw.

For Gir, the purpose of drawing was to get the proportions right and decide on a facial expression. I did this while watching the cartoon and occasionally pausing. I shared my later goofy doodles on April 11th.



Since I'm more comfortable in science/math space than touchy-feely space, you'll notice a lot of numbers on that figure at the bottom--"x" and "2x" to signify the respective width of the body and head, and percentages and fractions which show how much of his height is taken up with each section. I regularly referred back to this doodle as I knit, to verify things were the right size.

Because I already had a very specific thing I wanted this project to look like, the planning process was quite easy. But with a garment, there are lots of options, and it can be more overwhelming because it's something you'll make someone wear out there in the world. If a particular set of options is large enough to sidetrack me, I draw out every option I'm thinking of, not in a detailed way, but the minimum I need to compare and contrast. Often it's clear even just after a quick doodle that one approach will involve a foolish amount of intarsia, an impossible-to-get-over-a-head neckband, whatever. Once the options are narrowed down, a more careful drawing can be made (not that "more careful" necessarily means "work of art". It only needs to be good enough for you to figure out what your original plan was). Be sure to write any non-drawable ideas down, like "work this section in the round", "I'd rather use wide ribbing", or "find a good filler stitch here".

Next time: Preliminary pattern-writing.

We saw the choral director of our church driving around with a pride flag shaped like a bear stuck to the bumper.

I love our church.

J and I tried capoeira yesterday. Today we're both stumbling around with sore quadruceps, but we'll definitely go there again when we've recovered.

It was a two hour meeting, and by the end of the first hour I was thinking I'd have to sit out the second half because I just couldn't move much more. Just as I was about to go sit down, the teacher stopped our drills and said "okay, now it's time to play some music." We spent a good portion of the second hour singing in Portugese. So yeah, a lot of fun.

Sometimes I troll my referrer logs* and find that lots of people have been finding the site by searching for poorly-spelled terms which indicate they were probably searching for pr0n.

I feel kind of bad for these people, because ending up looking at pictures of hats has to be the online equivalent of a cold shower. On the other hand, I have to read the nasty things they're looking for, which I don't like so much.

But sometimes good things happen. Like today, when I found this.

Someone's working on one of my patterns! And they like it! And there's a picture!

So that made me feel all grownup and pleased.

Speaking of patterns, I have a few other things coming down the pike. I haven't started yet, but I think they'll work out, and they're both interesting enough that I might try to publish them.

*Referrer logs: Every time someone clicks a link from somewhere else that goes to somewhere on this site, it goes into a thing called a "referral log". When it's the day before a long weekend and noone's around, or I see a blip in the number of hits the site is getting, or if I'm simply bored, I go through them to see who's linking to what.

Partway through a trip to a wedding dress shop with an engaged friend yesterday, I realized that the wedding industry no longer has the power to intimidate me.

I hold the people in charge of the wedding industry at roughly the same level of esteem I hold for people trying to profit from natural disasters--slow immersion in a pirhana tank seems too kind. In fact, the two moneymaking schemes have something in common, in that they both prey on your emotions by implying that if you REALLY cared, money would be no object, so you may as well throw thousands into a Golden Toilet of Love and Compassion.

It disgusts me, it really does, this idea that one's vows are somehow made more sacred by the presence of a string quartet, releasing a flock of doves, and steak and champagne at the reception. In the months before my wedding, I felt this disgust, but at the same time I was utterly intimidated by all this crap I'd never heard of. So I was pleased that I'd learned and retained enough to be able to ask the practical questions my friend was too busy to ask in the whirlwind of buttons, satin, and fancy underpants.
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The sweater I'm making for J is coming along nicely. That dark bit is a green stripe where the knit/purl chevrons are (here's an ultra-professional picture of what it will look like when done). I've finished that band now and have separated the front and back for the yoke, which is worked in fisherman's rib. There's an inch or so of back yoke finished.

I may change my mind before it's over, but I'm enjoying the fisherman's rib. Besides the brioche hat below, I haven't done any of the extra-squishy family of knitting stitches. I was surprised at how much larger the gauge is; looking at the yoke next to the tightly-worked stockinette portions, it almost looks like the yarn in the ribbing is doubled.

I'm also pleased that we've reached the point where the sweater actually looks like a sweater. I've only been working on this for a month, and because of the heat I haven't worked on it much even then. But it's felt like it's going so slowly because it's my first sweater in the round, and after the ribbing, there wasn't any landmarks of interest for a long time. At least now it's something besides a square mile of stockinette.