Christmas!

How did it get to be Christmas again? Where does the time go?
 
Once again I've been caught unprepared for the Holiday season. I'm not really a procrastinator (no, I'm serious) it's just that I always think I have more time than I actually do. So I make a mental schedule of the things that I need to do and then accomplish them at that pace except for that pace would put Christmas in...about...April. I need to work less and have more time at home, I think that would solve a lot of my problems, but unfortunately that solution creates problems of it's own, like no money. Bummer.

At least I've been a relatively productive knitter. Small easy projects are the ticket.The mittens I made are excellent warm weather mittens and my fake-isle tam is soooo soft and warm. I love it. I also made my little man a warm hat, which of course he refuses to wear. Except for the time when I took this picture.

Merry Christmas!

Lessons Learned

I think I should keep a log of the main things I learn on each project, then I'll get better, right?

I think I put too much faith in my ability to remember things, meaning, I do things and then think that I'll remember that I did them and why, but then I don't. So I then end up repeating the same silly mistakes over and over again. Writing things down is the solution.

So here are the things I learned on the last couple of projects (you haven't seen them yet but pictures will follow soon):

Mittens - Hmmm...the pattern was really well written and they turned out beautifully. I guess the only thing I would do differently would be to make the palm slightly shorter. I added another pattern repeat because it would have been too short without it but a full repeat made the mitten too long. I'm nitpicking. These mittens were very fun and fast and satisfying. Maybe the real lesson I learned is that making small projects with large yarn is GREAT!
-Pattern: Bella's Mittens from Subliminalrabbit.com

Hat - I have not mastered tension. Stranded colorwork is my nemesis it's either too tight or too loose. I think I need to do a better job of monitoring it while I work. Like, check it on the next row. Yep. Plus practice. I think maybe I just need to do more colorwork period.
-Pattern: Three Tams from Knitty.com

I will now not make the above mistakes again. Suuuure.

New Magazines!

I just got two new knitting magazines in the mail! Yay!

I love getting magazines. They're like literary cookies, small, sugary, and not all that good for you. Knitting magazines are slightly different because they provide patterns, fiber and technique knowledge that you wouldn't easily be able to figure out on your own. But sometimes they're junky too.

I love the two magazines I got for different reasons. One is super artistic and usually contains at least one or two patterns I actually am interested in knitting. The other is not super artistic but has a ton of really good technique and fiber information. The problem is both have annoying features as well. And just because I'm kind of an angry woman I'm going to tell you about them.

The problem with the artistic magazine is that they are often so concerned about being artistic that the pictures don't actually show the knitting. I'm a person who really has to look at the picture to see what I'm trying to do. It's like the cover on the puzzle box, you need to see what the end result is supposed to be. They also have pattern problems, like mistakes, poorly written directions (hence the need for the good pictures), and unclear abbreviations. I also hate it when I have to flip through the magazine to find a special technique that's called for, or, (again with the pictures) to find the larger picture of the item I'm making.

I can't tell you about the problems with the patterns in the non-artistic magazine because I haven't made any of the items in it. That's the problem. The patterns are for ugly things that I don't want to make. They're getting better though, there was one sweater in this issue that I thought was cute, maybe there's hope.

An Unfortunate Situation

Here's my story: Last spring, during that time when the sun is warm but there's still snow on the ground, I decided to go running. Not knowing how warm I would get, I started the run with my mittens. About a mile and a half in I got hot and took them off. Then at mile 2 and a half I checked my pockets and one of them was gone! Tragedy! I tried to backtrack a little to see if I could see it but I couldn't and I gave up, hoping some homeless person would find it and have one warm hand. My next thought was about how I would have to make some more, but generally having a Scarlett O'Hara approach to life I put it out of my head and finished my run.

Since then I have made no mittens and now it is snowing. This is unfortunate indeed.

By the time I actually make some mittens the snow will probably be melting again, and I will have gone the whole winter with cold hands.

My Brain Doesn't Work

I realized tonight that my energy and brain power can only do so much. My limits are reached by simple daily life: driving and working, chasing a brilliant and very handsome ball of energy who is nearly two years old, and making sure I have clean underwear. I simply have very little head room for anything else, and unfortunately that anything else extends to my knitting. I have lately attempted to learn new skills and work on adventurous projects, and while this philosophy has been very fruitful in the past, at the moment it falls flat. Like, I don't even want to look at those projects, much less work on them.

The only projects I'm interested in doing right now are small ones that require absolutely no thought. Sigh...

I like them, small thoughtless projects. They're very relaxing to me at the moment.

I started a lovely little hat for my boy. Very simple and cute. He has an adorable hat that his grandma made for him, which he wears all of the time, like even in the bath all of the time, but it's going to get very cold and he needs choices. That's the beauty of being able to knit. Choices.

Easy fun

My new scarfywrappythingy. It's not blocked yet but it still looks ok for pictures. I am definitely planning on blocking it especially since I have new lace blocking wires to do it with.

Oh dear...

...It's been sooo long since I posted. I was doing so well for a little while and now my poor blog is languishing in the vast unattended portion of cyberspace. Sad.

I've been knitting. Just not writing.

Here's where I'm at with my knitting projects:
For my Meringue Yoke Cardigan I finally found beautiful metal buttons at Yarnover in, get this, the Ingebretsen's booth. I always thought Ingebretsen's was a bakery but I am wrong they are wonderful Scandinavian button suppliers and my cardigan now has viking dragon buttons. Excellent!

The twisted yoke cardigan is done except for the plackets, which I am afraid to start. Because every time I pick up stitches to knit the plackets I pick up either too few or too many, or pick them up unevenly, and the sweater puckers and stretches in weird ways. I'll get there eventually.

In the meantime though I knit a beautiful shawl/scarf/wrap thingy that was easy and fun.

I am also in love with garter stitch and need to find some new projects.

Oh, and I'm still procrastinating on my Master Knitter program. It's such an undertaking, who am I really to be attempting to get certified as a master knitter. I kind of suck. Well, not really, but I definitely lack some skills. I guess the idea is that it will help you get to be a master knitter, but I'm not so sure. I just want everything to be perfect the first time. That's not unreasonable is it?

Over the Hump!

In every project, it seems, there is a point where I just cannot proceed right away. The pattern changes, the sleeves have to get attached, etcetera, etcetera, and somehow I need to grow some courage to continue. Well I grew my courage on my cardigan and started the cable pattern. I, of course, already messed up the second row of the cable chart and had to take it out, but it has been started and the roadblock is gone.

 Sometimes, I think, life is like knitting in this way. We need a little rest time to grow some courage to make changes. It's hard to find the energy to change when we are keeping up the hectic pace that so many of us are accustomed to. It's difficult to even know what we want our change to be when there is hardly time to think about the mundane everyday questions and certainly not the grand how-do-you-want-your-life-to-be kinds of questions.

 People ask me what I want and, unless it's in reference to lunch or dinner (bbq sandwiches, pizza) my answer is invariably "I don't know." I kind of know what I don't want but I'm not entirely sure of what I want. And what if what I want turns out to be crap and I don't really want it? I guess these are eternal questions. Maybe you solve them before you die and that's when you know your time is up. Luckily I think I've got a long time before I get anywhere so the world is stuck with me for a while.

Absent but coming back

I've been absent lately from my creative endeavors but I'm on my way back.

First I was in a slump, uninspired and unmotivated then I caught some very infectious daycare germs and was flattened by illness, then I couldn't find my knitting tools and was forced to do nothing.

But now those problems seemed to have resolved themselves. I found my tools, row counter being the most important and easiest to lose, so I can continue on the yoke of my cardigan (btw the sleeves are very much the same size), plus the needles and yarn I was missing to work on a new little toy I'm making for...me probably. The toy has got me working and thinking again about fun things to make and I'm recovering nicely from my illness.

I've still got some problems: a lingering cough, some extra snot in my nose, no buttons for my other cardigan, behind on my master knitter swatches, not much time to knit (or write, or think, or shower). Despite those though, I think I'm on the mend; coming back from my late-winter blahs and starting to feel like the world is turning right side up again. As Martha S. says, it's a good thing.

Creative Slump

I'm in a creative slump right now. Totally uninspired. I have no writing ideas, no knitting ideas and am totally blank. This sucks. I don't even want to do fun stuff around the house like baking.

Maybe I just need more rest, or more time, or both...Blah. This will pass and I will get my mojo back. It just might take a while.

Buttons

The buttons are killing me! Well, not really but they are a problem.

I finished my Meringue Yoke Cardigan and now I need to put on the buttons. My problem is, what buttons? Buttons are an important choice. I want them to be noticeably gorgeous but not take away from the beauty of the sweater. I want them to stand out, but not too much. Plus they have to fit through the buttonholes.

I went to the store and bought some bone colored interesting rectangularish-ovalish ones that I thought would be pretty on it but two things happened and I decided not to use them. The first being that I lost one, which is not a total tragedy since the sweater doesn't have specific buttonholes (the placket is made of garter stitch with one row of yarn-overs, yes, it's a very wonderfully forgiving sweater to make) and I could probably make do with one less button. But, the second thing that happened was that I looked at the buttons laid out on the sweater and decided I didn't like them. They seemed too big for the sweater and the white did not accentuate the teal like I imagined it would, it simply looked clowny and kind of garish. Sad.

So, I'm back to square one. What buttons? At least I know white-bone colored ones are out, but that leaves me to decide between, wood, metal, horn, plastic, polymer clay (not likely) and the myriad of other materials that people make buttons from. Crap.

Sleeeeves

Here's what happens when you knit by the seat of your pants, don't take notes and make two items that need to be exactly alike at very different times from one another:

What's that you say? That my friend, is a giant ball of re-do, aka try-again, aka knit-it-over. Or you could just call it, I messed up so bad there's no fixing it.

This is a once and future sleeve. I made two sleeves for my beautiful Twisted Yoke Cardigan and when I got to the end of the second one I realized that it was about an inch and a half longer than the first one. Oooops! When I went back to diagnose my problem I found that I had put the decreases in at too short an interval on the first one. Both sleeves followed the pattern but one was knit a size smaller than the other one. Apparently I couldn't remember what size I was working on when I started the first sleeve, or I just simply thought I was making a different size than I really was. Why didn't I write anything down when I started the sweater?? It's because I think my memory is infallible, but unfortunately it is not. And I had proof in my two different sized sleeves.

At first I thought I could make up for it by knitting on to the end of the first one but then I realized that the sleeve would be oddly shaped no matter what I did and they would never match. Maybe it would look funny and maybe it wouldn't but I don't care to find out so I ripped. I ripped both of them. I have a little remorse about ripping the one that was probably right but I was so rattled by the discrepancy in length that I don't want to chance it. These will be exactly the same! At least the pattern for the sleeves is simple and doesn't take too long to knit. Stupid sleeves.

Hopefully (but I doubt it) I have learned my lesson and will take very detailed notes in future. At least write down what size I'm making. That's pretty simple right? I can do that.

Decrease Evenly

I've been working on the Meringue Yoke Cardigan from Interweave Knits and I finally reached the yoke decreases only to find that the pattern stated simply decrease x number of stitches evenly. Whahaaa?! That's annoying. I like the pattern tell me how to make the sweater. Like it's supposed to. Not, "here do some math." So I tried to divide the decreases by the number of stitches but that number is not accurate since each decrease takes two stiches and I want one at each edge. I found I would reach the end of the rows with either not enough decreases or too many to fit on the row. Very irksome.

I thought long and hard about this problem and decided to search the internet because it is all knowing, well sort of. Someone else must have encountered this same problem before and come up with a viable solution and it's likely that they posted it.

The first thing I came across was from the author of the pattern and involved doing long division by hand. To me it didn't look mathematically plausible and anything that involves arithmetic without a calculator is just silly, so I kept looking.

I then came upon this lady's page! She uses real math! SCIENCE! EQUATIONS! They're great. I tried this formula and it worked. Simple, easy, calculator friendly. Maybe I should send it to the pattern author. :)

Others

So I've been looking for a compilation of inspiring and helpful websites to inspire and help me with my knitting. I'm not a patient woman and I cannot sort through myriads of crap (meaning chat threads, and layer up on layer of BLAH!) that exist in websites that may have this information. Thus, I have not been able to find the helpful and inspiring index I'm looking for.

Since I can't find it I must create it, and I plan to do that here. Look for links under Inspiration and Help.

Knit Crush

I'm not sure how, but I came across this lady (textisles.com) and she is amazing. She inspires awe in me because she is a wonderful designer, a beautiful writer, apparently a very good photographer, and she's recovering from a stroke so she's not even 100%


Plus she's Scottish, and, honestly, how can you not love a Scot?

I kind of want to be her (except for the stroke, of course) or at least have her artistic skill. Alas...maybe someday.

Motherhood Manifesto

I've been reading a lot of mom articles lately and in them I've noticed a theme; it seems that mothers are plagued by guilt, lots of guilt, with a good dose of self-hatred mixed in.

My question is why? What is going on with that? Women who are clearly intelligent, moral people with a multitude of abilities sit around and feel guilty about, it seems, pretty much everything. If they have a job they feel guilty for not staying home, if they stay home they feel guilty for not having a job and not using their education. We feel guilty for having a dirty house, but then we feel guilty for taking time to clean. We feel guilty for not breastfeeding; we feel guilty if we let our babies sleep with us, and we feel guilty if we put them in a crib. We feel guilty for not enjoying every second of parenthood (to that I say: poopy diapers? Really? Aren't we expecting a lot of ourselves?)We practically feel guilty for breathing.

Well, I decided I'm not doing it. I'm not feeling guilty. I'm not feeling inferior. I'm not playing that game. Here's why: I'm pretty sure I'm going to mess up my son somehow and give him a complex about something, but I don't know what. All I can do is hope I get the big things right and manage to raise a healthy, and moral person, who can make wise choices. If I worry about every little thing I won't enjoy his childhood and chances are I will make it miserable for him as well. Besides, most of the things we feel guilty about aren't really problems at all. All of the ladies I know who are mothers are damn good parents. They love their children and provide them with rich, wholesome environments to learn, love, and play, breastmilk or none. We're all doing the best we know how to do. No one sets out to screw up their child.

I think we, as women, need to go a little easier on ourselves and let go of the guilt.

Hmmm...

...It seems I have been absent from my blog for quite some time. Well...so it goes. It's not that I haven't been knitting, I have, I've just been busy, and tired, and in a bad mood because it's winter and dark. I hate the dark. I could handle the winter if it wasn't nighttime ALL the time. Winter in the sunlight is pretty; it's sparkly and nice smelling with crisp fresh air. All of the sparkles and freshness kind of makes me happy, but you can't see the sparkles at night. Stupid nighttime.

Winter tends to make me want to hide in my couch-cave and drink too much but at least it also makes me want to knit like crazy. Which I am doing now. I have three big projects and still seem to want more (but I'm containing myself and focusing on finishing).

The first project is the biggest project I have ever undertaken: my master knitter certification. Right now I'm working on knitting the swatches for level one. So far I have four swatches and one that I need to re-knit because I made an ugly mistake. The blocking on the first four is done and it was a nerve racking process, well all of it is really. I keep wondering which swatches I'll get back. I think I'm going to go forward with the assumption that I will get all of them back and then I won't stress about it too much. So that means I have 12 more swatches left plus the questions and report. I'm hoping to get through level one by the end of the year, well really earlier but the end of the year is more realistic.

I also have two sweaters I'm working on. That's right, two. Yes I think I might be a little crazy but it's working for me right now. The first sweater is this one (this is the bottom):



Hopefully in the end it will look like this (this is the top, pretty right?):


-from Interweave Knits

I'm also working on this one:


-from Interweave Knits

For these I'm motivated by the cold. It's cold and I want to be warm. Plus having two at the same time means I know I'll be warm at some point and I always have something to knit even when I run into a roadblock on one. (Which I did and is a story for another day)