Every Time

I started my Rhinebeck sweater the other day. I’ve only got 60 days to go, which isn’t a lot of time to knit a sweater. Two months seems like it should be plenty of time, but since a large portion of my days are taken up with Gainful Employment and they won’t let me knit and work at the same time (I’ve tried), that means I only get an hour, maybe two, per day. But that’s only part of the problem. The other part is that I chose an intarsia sweater.

It’s not a complicated pattern, but I don’t do intarsia that often and when I do, I inevitably mess it up. (Maybe that’s why I don’t do it much.) I know what the problem is – my tension is always off when I start changing colors. I can see that there’s a problem, and what do I do about it? I keep going. Because DenialJenn! has taken over.

I look at the knitting after a few rows of starting the intarsia pattern and say something like, “That bit right there isn’t tight enough, there’s a hole. And this part is so tight that it’s starting to pucker.”DenialJenn! says, “That can all be evened out when you weave the ends in and block it. It will be fine.”

After a few more rows I spread it out to look at it again and say, “Well, my tension is evening out, but I think that just makes this part look worse. Look, it’s actually so puckered here that it’s raised a bit and the stitches aren’t straight.”
DenialJenn! says, “It’s fine. It’s down at the bottom of the design. Nobody ever looks at the bottom third of a sweater. No one will ever notice. Plus – Blocking! Keep going!”

This usually goes on for a few more rows until I can finally get DenialJenn! to shut up long enough for me to be able to rip back to the beginning of the design section and start over.

Oh, DenialJenn! puts up a fight while I’m frogging and getting it all untangled, but we both knew from the start that this was how it would have to happen. And, we both know that we’ll be happier when it’s re-done properly.

Well, I’ll be happier. DenialJenn! will be sitting over in the corner, muttering about blocking.

Camping

I try to go camping 2 or 3 times every summer. Sometimes we throw things in like hiking or rafting, but sometimes we go just to hang out and do nothing. (Unless I go with my mother, who, wherever we are for some reason always wants to go find a Walmart. I don't really understand it, but I go along with it. Sometimes you just have to choose to find your loved one's weird little quirks amusing and not try to hard to figure them out.)

This past weekend was the Second Annual Knit and Fiber Camp at Kettle Pond, in Vermont. It's a pretty long drive from Long Island just for a weekend, about 5 1/2 - 6 hours, depending on whether I stop to eat, but it's totally worth the trip.


This year it took more like 11 hours, but that was because the tred on one of my tires disintegrated on I91. Scared the crap out of me because I had no idea what was wrong with the car, just that it was shaking really hard and making a loud banging noise while I was going 70mph. (It sounded like the entire undercarriage was about to fall out.) I put on the emergency lights, got the car pulled onto the shoulder, started to cry and then called my mother. (As one will in an emergency.) Once I got Mom all worked up and upset, and she got me calmed down, I called AAA and once we figured out where exactly I was they sent me a tow truck.

The guys at the garage I ended up in were terrific. The first thing that the mechanic said to me was, "You don't drive that car a whole lot, do you?" When I asked him how he could tell, he said there were two things that made it pretty obvious. One was that the car is eleven years old an only has 85,000 miles on it, and the other is that the tread on the tires was actually fine. The rubber degraded before it had a chance to wear out. (I didn't mention that I don't remember the last time I got new tires. They may well be the ones that were on when I bought the car.) He recommended replacing all four and at that point it seemed like a pretty good idea. Except that when he checked, it turned out that they didn't have the size tires I needed in stock. So he made a few phone calls to find a set and sent someone over to pick them up (which they didn't charge me for) and got me back on the road in a few hours. I got there at about 5:30 instead of 1:30, but I got there.

It was a fantastic weekend. The weather was gorgeous. It was cool enough for long pants and sleeves during the day and at night it got pretty cold - low 40's maybe. I spent the whole weekend nice and bundled up, which just made the heat and humidity feel worse when I got back home. It's amazing how fast you forget what 90 degrees feels like.

The best thing was the complete lack of structure. We ate when we were hungry, wandered off for a walk if we felt like it, and otherwise sat and talked and knit and spun. There was yarn for sale/swap on one table, and food on the other and a group of friends to share it all with. What more do you really need?

I'm already counting down to next year.

Dear Blog,

Okay, I knew it had been a while, but I didn’t realize exactly how long. I know I’ve said it before, but I’m a very bad blogger. Please forgive me.

It’s not you, it’s me. I can’t say why I’ve treated you so badly, but I’ve neglected you terribly and you don’t deserve it. I could give the excuse that I’ve been busy – but really, if there’s that much going on then I should have plenty to blog about, shouldn’t I?

Well, from now on, things are going to change. At least until I get distracted by something else again, but for the moment you have my undivided – well, partial attention.

After all – I have thoughts. Occasionally I have more than one thought in a day. There’s all sorts of stuff going on in my head and there’s nothing but a short attention span keeping me from telling you about it.

Where was I?

Oh, right. I’ll be back soon – I’m thinking.

Love, Jenn

In which I prove myself to be capable of Learning

I've been knitting socks for a couple of years now, and I've been closing the toes wrong for every bit of that time. I can think of several people right off the top of my head who will be appalled when they learn this. Even worse, I see most of those people every week and I know perfectly well that if I had asked, they would gladly have shown me how to do it correctly.

I just never seemed to get the hang of Kitchener Stitch. I tried to do it. I consulted reference books. I watched tutorials on YouTube. I followed the directions on various blogs and websites. As long as I was following along with the pictures I would do okay (sometimes) but as soon as I tried to do it on my own I would mess it up, get frustrated and then give up and do whatever thing got the toes closed up no matter how bad it looked. (Or, alternatively, I would just knit down to the toe decrease then stop and leave them in a bag somewhere with the toes just sort of gaping accusingly at me whenever I happened to come across them.)

I knew that I was doing it wrong but I had decided to not care and just go ahead and live with weird toes. (Again, I know a whole bunch of people who would have happily helped me if I had asked. Apparently I like banging my head up against the wall.)

Okay, so I recently decided that if I'm going to go to the expense of buying nice yarn and go to the effort of using it to execute a beautiful pattern that I should really be paying more attention to my technique. In the past I would ignore a mis-crossed cable or an off-center decrease or even a yarn-over that didn't quite line up with the row beneath it. And a lot of the time, projects got frogged or never finished. If I did finish something, it frequently ended up in a drawer because I wasn't happy with it.

Since I've been spending time around people who are better knitters than I am, they've made me want to be better. Now I'm much more likely to rip back or drop down to fix a problem as soon as I notice it. I've also been paying more attention to my finishing techniques - doing things "correctly" instead of "quickly" and I'm a lot happier with the results and ultimately, with the finished product. So, apparently it's working and I am, in fact, becoming a better knitter.

Which brings us back to the Kitchener Stitch. Observe:

One correctly grafted toe. Done without visual aids or tutorials.

I'm quite proud of myself. Yet at the same time, vaguely disappointed in myself that I didn't just ask for help in the first place (I know - it's a character flaw. I'm working on it) so that I could have been doing it right all along. I've got it now, though. And I'll be going after all those open-toed socks now.

An Exercise in Futility

Just another episode of the freakshow that is my daily commute.

It's my own fault. If I would just remember to put my ipod back into my bag when I get to the office in the morning instead of dropping it on my desk and then covering it with files, I wouldn't get involved with these things.

Two women sat facing me on the train coming home. They were sort of loud, but one of them was hauling a suitcase, which of course she left sitting in the aisle for people to trip over as they got on and off the train, so I figured they were just excited to see each other.

Suitcase Lady asked her friend what stop they were getting off at and her friend answered, Baldwin. Well, I have an uncontrollable urge to be helpful and am apparently Quite Stupid and have not learned yet that if I actually talk to People On The Train I usually wind up annoyed, so I spoke up and told them that this particular train does not stop at Baldwin.

Suitcase Lady's Friend looked at me and informed me that when she comes into the City she always takes the Babylon train to get home. I replied, yes, but this is an express train, after Jamaica it only stops at Babylon (which, for anyone who may not know, is really nowhere near Baldwin).

She said again that she always takes the Babylon train to get home, but she did it with this smug little smile and such an "I know better than you do even though you do appear to do this every single freaking day so why are you even talking to me?" look on her face that all I could really do was agree that this was, in fact a Babylon train and go right back to knitting Matthew's new sweater.

The conductor announced several times that the train would go express after Jamaica and even listed all the stations that the train would stop at (it was a short list - only three stations) but they didn't stop talking long enough to have heard anything.

I felt a little bit bad when I got off at Jamaica to change trains and left them sitting there, still talking, loudly. I sort of wonder how long it took them to finally get to Baldwin. I wonder if they're possibly sitting in the train station at Babylon right now. Then I think about the Smug Face and this woman's complete unwillingness to accept that someone might know something that she doesn't and I feel, well, not any less bad, but let's face it, sometimes you can only try to be so helpful before you have to let people learn things on their own.

Drive By Blogging

Yeah, I know. Another long gap between posts. Frankly, I suspect that I'm just not that interesting. Even to me.

I haven't really been finishing much lately - I knit all the time, I just never seem to finish anything. I really need to work on that. So, since nothing knitterly has happened (and just in case anyone actually stops by to read this) here are some gratuitous baby pictures of my favorite nephew...


He can't quite sit up by himself yet. My sister in law has him propped up in the corner of that chair, otherwise he topples over like a tiny little oak tree. He's wearing the Hooded Jacket from Debbie Bliss' Simply Baby. I'm really glad I made the 12-month size. Matthew is six months now and, while he's still got a little ways to go (the sleeves are rolled up and he's still got a little space in there) this looks like it's close enough to fitting him now that by the end of the winter I think he's going to have grown out of it.

Cold Feet

So they got a little behind at my doctor's office yesterday. I was fine. I had a sock-in-progress in my bag, so while I waited two-and-a-half hours past my appointment time so that the doctor could jab a ginormous needle into my knee (which is every bit as uncomfortable as it sounds) I sat and went round and round and round and got most of a foot done when a woman sat down across from me and watched what I was doing for a while.


When she realized that I was knitting a sock her first question was "Do you wear them?" An odd question to someone who knits socks, but I suppose not to a muggle. She just couldn't believe that someone knew how to or would bother to knit their own socks. Neither could the woman sitting across from me on the train this morning.

So, having amazed two complete strangers in as many days with something as ordinary as a sock, I started to think. Up until relatively recently in human history, if you wanted a sock, this was how you got it. In fact, there was a time not so long ago when a woman wouldn't be seen walking down the road without a piece of knitting in her hands for fear of being "stigmatized with idleness".

I, on the other hand, do this as a hobby. I don't particularly need to knit socks. It's a novelty for me to have hand knit socks. If I were to never knit another sock, I could just go to the store and get a whole package of them for just a few dollars. Actually, I could get a whole package for less money than it costs me to knit one pair. If these women didn't knit socks, then they didn't have any socks.

I've got it pretty damn easy, too. If I want to knit a pair of socks all I have to do is go shopping online or walk into a store and I have access to a huge variety of colors and patterns and yarn that makes stripes all on its own with no effort on my part at all. (I had a woman thoroughly confused on the train a few months back with a skein of self-striping yarn. She absolutely couldn't figure out how I was managing to change colors.) Until relatively recently if you wanted a sock you had to go out and find a sheep, then you had to shear it, then you had to clean the wool, wash the wool, spin the wool into yarn, dye the yarn and then you could get started on knitting your sock.

Now I like to knit and I like to spin, but really...... If this was what I had to go through for a pair of socks, I would probably freeze.