The Doily Maven

Alas, no pictures

2005-04-20T06:01:00.000-07:00

I think my digital camera's broken. It began beeping at me as soon as I opened the cover, and I know that it can't be low on batteries, because I put in new batteries four photos ago. And since a knitting blog isn't much without pictures, I don't have much incentive to post. (Not that my six remaining tests aren't a disincentive to Internet-surfing in themselves!)

So I will be on a mini-blogging break until camera problems are resolved and tests are over - in other words, for a little over a week.

I also have some serious race training to do. I haven't mentioned it much here because it doesn't seem particularly applicable to a knitting blog, but I'm a fledgling competitive cyclist, and I've got two big races coming up in May. For those of you who may be familiar with amateur road cycling, they're NRC (National Racing Calendar) races, and even though I'm only a women's cat 4, I still don't want to embarrass myself, especially on a 2.5-mile uphill time trial with a 10% grade. If this is Greek to you knitters, I apologize, but if you're interested in hearing how the Lance Armstrong wannabes of the mid-South spend their time, I'll post more cycling tidbits occasionally.

A lovely spring week to you all, and thanks for all your words of encouragement during this trying time in my scholastic career!

Taking time to breathe

2005-04-10T17:48:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everyone who sent good vibes for the Behavioral test. Behavioral Science is not a particularly hard subject, but when one sort of forgets that it is a valid class until the test comes along, it can be a bit taxing. This coming week is my last week of lecture, and then the following two weeks are chock-full of tests. I suppose I should be glad that this phase of my education is ending, but I'm going to miss having the freedom to decide what to do with most of my time, even if that decision is to study or not to study.

Meanwhile, in crafty matters, I have finished one Retro Rib Sock.

It seems like everyone has their personal most-hated knitting task. For some it's seams, for others buttonbands. For me, it's weaving in ends. And these particular two skeins of Jaeger Matchmaker Merino 4-ply are full of breaks in the yarn - weak spots where at least three of the four plys are snapped. This sock has sixteen extra ends to weave in, and Sock #2 has six so far. This disaster unfortunately coincides with the arrival of warm (anti-wool) weather, so it will take a feat of will to accomplish the finishing. Fortunately, the disaster coincides with the beginning of good cold/frozen drink weather, so the finishing might not take much more than a good pina colada.

I'll try to keep posting and reading blogs intermittently in the next few weeks, but it'll be hectic! I am taking a break tonight, though, to watch "Grey's Anatomy." I've never watched medical shows; I thought that "Dr. Quinn" was ridiculous (doctors in frontier days never really cured anyone unless it was sheer luck), and I'd spent enough time in the emergency room to know that "E.R." is absurd. But "Grey's Anatomy," while terribly inaccurate, is alluring in a train-wreck sort of way.

Overwhelmed

2005-04-05T04:32:00.000-07:00

We will return to regularly scheduled knitting after the Behavioral Science test on Friday. In the meantime, I'll be working on learning 50 lectures' worth of material in three days.

An obligatory progress shot

2005-03-28T12:39:00.000-08:00

Here's a progress shot of the Floral Felted Bag. I would have a progress shot of the Retro Rib Socks I started last weekend, but my digital camera is out of batteries. I wrote two more paragraphs and deleted them because they sounded dry and depressing, so I'll just stick with the picture. I'm going for a bike ride!

Minty green goodness

2005-03-24T19:39:00.000-08:00

Ah, a finished object - an impetus to post in the middle of a very busy week...

Project details: Sweater body based on an OOP Phildar pattern, with sleeves of my own design. In Lana Grossa Point at 4.5 sts/in and 9 rows/in. on US 8 needles.

Lana Grossa Point is a lovely elastic-y yarn that feels wonderful to knit. My only complaint about it was that it had way too many knots, and that the resulting ends like to work their way out of the sweater. Otherwise, I'm pleased with the project - I love the color, and the sleeve cap worked out well.

While this project has been blocking, I've had plenty of classes in which to knit other things. Thus, Smooch (from Rowan's All Seasons Cotton Collection).

As you can see, the front is almost done. And I've already finished the back, so I don't know what I'm going to knit in class tomorrow, and it's already bedtime, so I have to figure something out QUICKLY...

What that picture was about

2005-03-17T03:11:00.000-08:00

The post with the picture of the mint green sweater was supposed to be about designing a sleeve cap, as I had to work out the numbers for the sleeve of the Lana Grossa Point sweater. However, Blogger was inaccessible all day yesterday, and it's 5 AM now (I'm an insomniac), so there will be no writing about sleeve caps - for one thing, the anticipation's over, because the sleeve cap fit into the armhole perfectly. Thank goodness for elastic yarn.

2005-03-15T20:25:00.000-08:00

will it fit?

Spring break!

2005-03-14T12:32:00.000-08:00

Project Details: Cinnamon, designed by Kim Hargreaves, from The Summer Tweed Collection. Yarn: Plymouth Turino Silk Print, color 122, knitted at 4.5 sts/in.

Here's a grainy mirror shot of Cinnamon. I ran out of yarn and had to make the collar four rows shorter than called for, but I am still very pleased with the fit. The sweater is thrown over my favorite t-shirt for photo purposes, but I just might wear it that way. The color makes the cardigan quite versatile - I can imagine wearing it much like a jean jacket.

I am now officially on spring break. I'll still be posting, though (probably more than usual!) because I am not going anywhere. I will still be studying, but I don't have classes to attend. Hooray for Spring Break!

Frantically finishing (and a lament for a bleeding sweater)

2005-03-09T20:07:00.000-08:00

The Husband Socks are finished.

The bulge near the ankle area is due to a hemp anklet hidden under the sock - not due to a defect in my knitting, which is perfect, as we all know. I promise that there are two socks. The dog was about to eat the other one, so we had to hide it. I would not inflict the horrors of Second Sock Syndrome on my spouse.

These are actually the second pair of Husband Socks I have made. My husband is neither a sweater nor a scarf guy, so I make him socks. Man-socks are usually pretty boring, but this Trekking XXL was actually a pleasure to knit. The skein was HUGE - I probably only used about 2/3 of the yarn. I used a basic 64-stitch pattern with my favorite Crystal Palace size 1.5's. (I'm a Crystal Palace DPN partisan because I've snapped two sets of Brittanys, a set of 2's and a set of 1's).

I also finished the band and wove in the ends of Cinnamon. The sweater is currently wet-blocking on my sewing table. The Turino Silk gave off a pungent chemical odor when wet, and I really hope that it starts to subside as the sweater dries.

The drying rack appeared in the mail after I had a conversation with my mother-in-law about how I dream about a Maytag Neptune dryer - you know, the one with the drying cabinet on top. The sweater rack is definitely better than using a towel on top of the table, but I'm still going to get a Neptune dryer someday (after all the student loans are paid off).

I discovered this evening that the mesh on one of the racks has a blue outline on it that is suspiciously like the Audrey sweater I made out of Rowan Calmer in color "Pool" last summer. Audrey also has seams and edges that are distinctly bluer than the middle. If anyone has any suggestions on what I can do to stop the bleeding, please let me know - I really love this sweater!

Books

2005-03-06T17:48:00.000-08:00

A week without an update... by way of excuse, I've been sick - too sick to knit, in fact. Too sick to knit does not mean too sick to read, though, and I've been doing a bit of that - which makes me happy that the latest thing in Knitblog Land is a meme about books. Kristen tagged me, and though I'm not usually a fan of memes, I really love seeing what everyone's reading!

Last book read: Ladies Coupe, by Anita Nair. If you loved Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, you might enjoy reading Ladies Coupe, a novel about women's lives in Southern India. Nair uses her excellent narrative sense to tell about five very different women and how they cope with their places in society.

Where it came from: An independent bookstore.

Books read per year: Goodness. About one per week during school, many more during vacation times.

Favorite genre: It's not strictly a genre, but I love 19th century British novels. My favorite class in college was called "Money, Class, and Marriage in the British Novel."

Five favorite books: Let's just call this "Five Books I Like." I'm not picking favorites - I don't want to hurt my other books' feelings. The following are some of my "comfort books" - those that I go back to year after year.

The Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West. This lovely work is only about 100 pages long, but those 100 pages are filled with emotion. Jenny, a single woman living in England, tells the story of the events that unfold after her beloved cousin, suffering from shell-shock, returns from World War I. He has regressed to his young manhood and appears to have no knowledge of his recent past. His family and friends must decide whether to indulge his illness or to force him to face the present. The novella was one of the first to explore the effect of war on the women left at home.

Middlemarch, by George Eliot. Yes, it's sprawling - but I dare you to tell me about a part that is truly uninteresting and worthy of being cut. This book just gets richer with each rereading.

A Room with a View, by E.M. Forster. The book's worth reading even if you've seen the Merchant-Ivory movie adaptation.

The Choiring of the Trees, by Donald Harington. Harington has been called the best unknown novelist in America. Choiring is his most serious work; his other novels are much more comedic. It's based on the true story of a man sent to death row for a crime he didn't commit and the woman who works to save him, but it's not a crime novel - it's about the Arkansas Ozarks and their people, prison at the turn of the 20th century, justice, art, trees, and love. I've heard it compared to Cold Mountain by people who have read both... and they preferred Choiring.

Christy, by Catherine Marshall. This is the only book on my list that one wouldn't encounter in a literature class at some educational level. I'm an equal-opportunity reader, and I give popular fiction its proper place on my bookshelf. I read both Christy and Julie about once a year. It's just so darned inspirational, and the scene where Christy comes back to consciousness to Dr. MacNeill calling her name gives me chills.

And who am I to tag? Well, I've gotten in on this one late, and I'm not sure who's done it and who hasn't - I'm still not caught up on my blog reading. Please do it if you love to read and haven't been tagged!

Button, button, who's got the button?

2005-02-28T19:26:00.000-08:00

Not me, obviously... button-purchasing has been delayed by bike-racing activities and also by my complete lack of motivation to finish an angora/merino sweater that I won't be able to wear until next winter.

I realized Saturday night that I was facing the prospect of about six hours in the car Sunday without a good car-type knitting project. So I had to start something else. I usually try to keep my project list under three, but I just can't do intarsia or a Fair Isle chart in the car, and the Husband Socks are too close to being finished to be car-worthy. So I started a ribbed sweater from the Lana Grossa Point I scored at the big yarn sale. I'm adapting it from a schematic from an old Phildar mag.

There. My noble goal of posting more frequently has been satisfied, but I don't have any true picture-worthy progress. Once things slow down a bit with school/going fast on two wheels, more knitting will happen. I must confess that I'm actually looking forward to spending a few hours a day in the month of May with a BRS on the table and a knitting project in my hands, studying for boards. I'll be able to make some nice fancy socks to spruce up otherwise conformist scrubs.

A new project

2005-02-23T19:00:00.000-08:00

This is the beginning of the Floral Felted Bag. The tangled mess above the piece is what always happens to my yarn ends when I knit intarsia. It looks chaotic, but it seems to work out okay. The book preventing the edge from curling is Robbins' Pathologic Basis of Disease, which is actually one of the more interesting medical texts - no kidding.

What? I promised a finished Cranberry before starting the felted bag? Well, I just haven't been able to go buy buttons for Cranberry yet. The sweater's done, though, if one ignores the twenty or so ends I have yet to weave in.

February FO

2005-02-21T18:03:00.001-08:00

I was not especially productive in crafty endeavours this weekend because I was spending time cycling. However, an unfortunate interaction between my bicycle, several other bicycles, and a bloody squirrel prevented me from getting out and training today, so I was able to spend some time at the sewing machine.

Pardon the rest of the outfit. Blame the squirrel for my lack of desire to change out of my Underoos t-shirt.

This is the second time I've made this skirt (Simplicity 5914, view B, in 100% polyester herringbone purchased at Hancock Fabrics). Making garments multiple times is the best way to sew cheaply because patterns are rather expensive, but I think two times is enough - I'm ready to try something new. For months I've been wanting a blazer like those pink velvet ones at Banana Republic, and Simplicity just came out with a pattern that suits the vision in my head. Since it's not velvet weather now, I'll probably use linen. I'll look for some suitable fabric after I fix my husband's sadly torn cycling jacket.

Cranberry is all sewn up and awaiting a belt and buttons, and if I can find the right buttons locally, there will be another finished object on this blog by the end of the week.

Finally, another gratuitous dog photo:

Delaying gratification

2005-02-16T19:50:00.000-08:00

I have no progress pictures to show that do not involve curled-up pieces of stockinette-stitch sweaters. You are welcome to use your imagination to visualize another front and part of a sleeve to Cinnamon. Cranberry has one button band, but there is no picture because moving the sweater from its current location would expose it to the angora-eating dog.

I am rather tired of stockinette, but with 22 hours of lecture over four days this week (every weekday but Monday, which was test day), I haven't had the opportunity to knit anything else. What I really want to start is this:

It's Peruvian Highland Wool from Elann for the Floral Tapestry Bag from the Fall 2003 Interweave Knits. I love working from graphed designs and watching the picture grow. But I'm not going to start on the bag until I finish Cranberry and the blue herringbone skirt. I'm not even going to add Rapunzel to the list. Like my needlepoint pillow (which I haven't even shown here because it's growing so slowly - ahem, leisurely), she's a long-term (read: more than three months) project.

Spring!

2005-02-14T14:50:00.000-08:00

The fickle Mid-South Weather Gods decided to give us a beautiful Valentine's Day - it's 73 degrees F outside right now. On this day last year, it was snowing. I have not been able to bring myself to pick up any woolly projects today - instead, I've been riding my bike and dreaming about things to knit for spring.

I also spent almost an hour sewing, ripping, and re-sewing this:

Zippers are one of those irksome things I seldom get exactly right. The first time I made this skirt pattern (in the same herringbone material, but in brown), I got the zipper right without having to rip it at all. This time, I neglected to zigzag over the raw edges before pressing down the seam allowances at the zipper edge, and the material ravelled like crazy, leaving me very little of my original 1/2" to work with - thus the sewing line that's a little too close to the zipper teeth. There's a gap at the bottom. (I'm pointing this out because I'm laboring under the delusion that no one will notice it but me.) I can't rip it again because I simply don't have any more seam allowance to spare. Perhaps I will wear the skirt with a very long sweater.

And for those of you in colder climes, here's a cheery spring picture.

Me and my llama

2005-02-12T18:18:00.000-08:00

It's Pharm Test Weekend, so the only knitting going is stockinette-with-minimal-detail that can be accomplished while staring at a syllabus. I've made a lot of progress on Cinnamon, but I haven't even been able to finish seaming Cranberry. I'm envisioning a stack of sweater pieces taking over my spring break.

This is the front armhole/neck detail of Cinnamon. It's just a simple cardigan, but the admirable Kim Hargreaves adds a detail that I wouldn't have thought of - double decreases. They don't show up especially well on the variegated yarn I'm using, but I still appreciate them.

I do most of my yarn-buying over the Internet, but I couldn't resist purchasing a couple of things yesterday - at my LYS's first-ever storewide sale. Everything was at least 25% off. I came away with two projects' worth of yarn.

On the right is Lana Grossa Point, a cotton/elastane blend. I've got six balls - enough for either a half-sleeved or short-sleeved sweater, depending on the pattern.

The lovely hank on the left is Goddess Yarns Phoebe. It's 100% baby alpaca. I've been lusting after this yarn for weeks, but it's definitely a luxury fiber (retail is $10 for 73 yards), and even on sale, I was only able to get enough for a small project. I'm thinking of doing an abbreviated Flower Basket Shawl from the Fall 2003 IK. This yarn combines two of my favorite things: alpaca (they're so cute) and pink (the color's called Mountain Azalea, which helps me recall my previous life as a botany enthusiast).

Someday, after I'm a real doctor, I want some alpacas. I've had an affection for long-necked furry things since I was a small child watching Sesame Street. Remember the early-'80s segment entitled "Me and My Llama," where a child takes his llama to the dentist? The only portion of the lyrics that I can remember goes something like "me and my llama, going to the dentist today." The cheery music made the llama's giant incisors seem less fierce.

Note: I just found out that I'd neglected to change the default Blogger setting that only registered users can leave comments, and I've fixed that - now you do not have to be one of the Blogger minions to say hi.

Dog of Destruction

2005-02-09T19:48:00.000-08:00

I forgot to post stats on the last pair of socks - the yarn's Regia Mini-Ringel in color 5340. I used 60 stitches around on US size 1.5s.

The latest batch of lecture knitting is progressing rapidly - perhaps because there's a little voice in the back of my head saying "Knit up what you have as fast as you can so that you can feel better about going to the Big Yarn Sale this weekend." More on the prospect of the Big Yarn Sale later.

The sock is for my husband, who is comfortable in his masculinity and can successfully wear yellow and orange. The background is the beginning of Cinnamon. I still haven't decided if I really like the way the Turino Silk Print is turning out, but I'm going to stick with it for a while. One of my favorite sweaters is a hoodie out of Manos del Uruguay in a colorway that I thought was pooling in an awful fashion, but once I got all the pieces together, it really looked nice.

Rapunzel is progressing more slowly. I haven't done anything since I finished the left front on Sunday. The reason is that Rapunzel is tucked into her bag in the living room, which is the Devil Doggie's domain.

It's not just the flash. Her eyes really look that way in the light. She's teething, and she is fascinated by Lurex Shimmer. In order to knit tonight while studying, I have closeted myself in the back bedroom that serves as my office. I only emerged to get new batteries for the digital camera. My studying efforts, however, have been punctuated with shouts of "No!" coming from my husband and aimed at the doggie, so I think I'll just stay back here for a little while until things calm down.

A cure for still hands

2005-02-07T18:43:00.001-08:00

I knitted during the Super Bowl yesterday. I even helped teach a new knitter during the Super Bowl. I am a football fan, but here in my Small Southern State, no one really cares about the NFL. We are crazy about following our land-grant university's sports teams. The Super Bowl is just a convenient excuse for a party.

The chocolate socks are finished. I usually try to avoid self-striping yarn with short repeats because the stripes aren't even enough, but the Regia Mini-Ringel's pattern of brown stripes between each color makes the unevenness less apparent.

The promised yarn from Mom was also delivered this morning. I'm still feeling a bit purposeless as far as knitting goes, but at least now I have something to keep my hands moving - new sock yarn (earmarked for husband) and some lovely Plymouth Turino Silk (earmarked for "something I can wear to clinic").

It's always a challenge for me to pick out a pattern for a variegated yarn. I tried a checkerboard pattern on the top of the swatch, but the color pattern is too busy to work well in reverse stockinette. I'm sure it'd look good in seed stitch, but seed stitch hurts my hands, and since this is supposed to be a fast, easy knit, I'll stick to stockinette. I had an idea in my head that would work well with this yarn, but I just don't have the time to work it out now, so I think that the silk will become Cinnamon. I have yet to make a Kim Hargreaves pattern that doesn't look fantastic, so rather than spending my time scribbling a pattern, ripping it out, and scribbling some more, I'm going to trust her design sense and try to hold off on designing until after the next pharmacology test.

Knitting withdrawal

2005-02-05T20:29:00.000-08:00

I've been stalling on writing a post because of lack of pictures, but there has been too little knitting progress around here lately to take pictures. The pieces of Cranberry are finished, but I'm waiting to sew them together until I have an hour I can use to seam them. The candy socks are finished except for grafting the toes.

The truth is that I haven't touched a pair of knitting needles in over 24 hours. I'm out of "mindless" knitting projects. My hamper has three projects' worth of yarn in it, and all of those projects involve pages of charts. I am sufficiently talented to knit and read or knit and listen to lecture simultaneously, but I cannot do these things and follow a chart. I have been attempting to study without a knitting project in my lap, and my efforts have been fruitless.

In times of crisis, we turn to family and friends for support. I talked to my mother. She is mailing me yarn. Soon, I will be able to function normally again. The yarn should be here on Tuesday.

Just in time for Valentine's Day... candy socks

2005-02-02T13:05:00.000-08:00

Today I wished that the temperature would get below freezing. Then the rain currently falling would turn to ice. Of course, this would inconvenience hundreds of thousands of people in this vicinity. Power lines would fall, cars would skid, and those who did not make it to the grocery store on time would be out of milk and bread. It's a tradition here to go to the grocery store when snow or ice is forecast and buy milk, bread, and kitty litter - the latter for putting on your front steps so that you can walk outside without slipping. People buy massive amounts of these things. They buy much more milk than they ever do when snow is not forecast. Lactose-intolerant people buy milk and Atkins dieters buy bread. I wished to inconvenience all these people because I did not want to go to school today, and because I don't have the guts to just skip class. I am a narcissist.

However, it did not snow here. It snowed north of here, in Newton County, which is one of the few counties in the nation totally free of railroad tracks. (No kidding. Those familiar with Donald Harington's novels will remember the area. If you're a fan of Donald Harington, please leave me a comment so I know that I'm not the only one. If, like almost everyone in the rest of America, you have no idea who I'm talking about, don't worry about it.) So I went to school, and I made a little knitting progress. The knitting part of Cranberry is almost finished, and since I can't do seaming and finishing work in class, I worked on socks.

This is the first one. I'm currently working on the dreaded Second Sock. There are still needles in sock #1 because I save all grafting until the end of a pair. That way, I won't be tempted to just finish one sock and show up to school with mismatched socks. I'm sure there's a study out there showing that patients don't have confidence in physicians with mismatched socks.

The socks are in Regia Mini-Ringel. They're Chocolate Socks. The brown, of course, is the chocolate, the pink is strawberry cream, the red is raspberry cream, the blue is blueberry creme, and the tan is that chocolate nougat in the center of a Three Musketeers bar. Mmmm.

When I first began to knit socks, I used a heel flap, but I was troubled by ladders in the decrease section following the pick-up-stitches-around-the-heel-flap step. I tried several different tensioning tricks and resorted to simply darning up the ladders with a bit of extra yarn. Then I discovered Lucy Neatby's book, Cool Socks Warm Feet. In it, she describes the Garter Stitch Short-Row Heel - the perfect solution to my problem. When one knits a short-row heel, there's no picking up stitches and no gusset decreases - all increasing and decreasing is done by the short rows in the garter stitch section. Therefore, no ladders! I also find that short-row heels fit my narrow foot much better.

That's it for today. Go enjoy some chocolate.

Heated floors warm bare toes

2005-01-31T12:56:00.000-08:00

I have a finished object to show, but I am very dissatisfied with the pictures that I tried to take of it. I attempted to take some photos using the full-length mirror in my bedroom, but the sweater looks fuzzy and I look like I had a test at 8 AM (which I did). There will be a lovely model-esque shot of me in my long coat after I get over my hangup about asking my husband, "Can you take a picture of me wearing my new sweater so I can put it on the internet?" (I'm new to this. "Having pictures on the internet," in these parts, still means "probably doing something illegal.")

I can show a picture of the braid stitch edging. It's very pretty. Props to Maria Gonatti, the designer, for creating such an elegant cardigan. I was going to wear it to school today, but then I realized that a four-foot-long cardigan looks really silly under a hip-length short white coat. Someday, when I am a real doctor and get to wear a super-long white coat, I will be able to wear my classy black cardigan to clinic - if my dog doesn't eat it first. She's already ingested a few inches of leftover Vittoria.

I fudged the edging a bit. The pattern calls for picking up 600-some-odd stitches for the front bands, which I thought I did, but my edges didn't come out quite square. So I added a couple of rows of single crochet at the bottom of the front band, slip-stitching them onto the bottom bands. It worked quite nicely. It's still not exactly square - I don't think that's within the realm of possibility for an edge made in merino ribbon - but it doesn't look like the front band is noticeably shorter than the bottom band.

Since my attempts at self-photography turned out badly, I will show you the only other picture on the camera that is worth looking at. This is a bathroom in Spain. My husband returned from his trip late last night, and this bathroom was one of the few things he had time to tell me about. Since it was so exciting to him, I thought it merited a blog mention. It has heated floors. (Don't you wish your bathroom had heated floors?)

Getting more out of knitting

2005-01-28T19:15:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned, I’m a voracious blog reader, and a few weeks ago, I came across Domiknitrix. Jen is a skilled knitter, and she’s also a skilled designer. Her sweaters are beautiful and unique, and she creates them on her own terms. I came away from her page thinking “I wish I could do that.” Other fabulous designers like Annie and Marnie are also inspiring. What’s stopping me from knitting like that - from going out on a limb and experimenting with so many new things?

I consider myself a fairly skilled knitter. I can execute complicated cables and lace patterns, colorwork (Fair Isle and intarsia), rewrite patterns for all gauges, and resize patterns to fit my body and style. I can translate patterns from French. I know these things well enough to teach others to do them. But I’m still mostly a pattern-follower, and while other people’s patterns help me create some great things, I can’t help but feel like I need a bit more. I was at our local SnB a couple of Sundays ago and everyone was admiring Rapunzel. Yes, she’s beautiful, but I didn’t really DO anything to create her other than scrupulously follow a pattern. (Okay, so it’s one of the Rowan patterns with a three-skein difficulty rating, and I am kind of proud of that.) I’m feeling an urge to actually create a garment – more than just creating a basic sweater (I’ve done that) but undertaking a real challenge. I’m not saying that what I’m doing now isn’t creative – even a simple garter stitch scarf can be an amazing creative effort – but a lot of creativity is how the creator feels about his or her creation and what he or she puts into it, and I’m just not there today with what I’m making.

Creativity has always been a bit of a stumbling block for me. Recently, a friend asked me to go to a pottery-painting studio with her. I told her, “No, I don’t really think I can do it – I’m not creative enough.” She scoffed at the idea and cited my knitting as an example of creativity. My knitting as it is satisfies part of my creative urge, but only part. The hardest part for me is coming up with an object that I truly want to create. In kindergarten, I dreaded the “draw any picture” assignment because I didn’t think I could come up with a good subject. Ditto for the “composition on any topic” assignment in later school years, and for the “pick a topic to research” in college. So what’s the secret to coming up with a great idea for a stimulating knitting project?

So here’s my question(s) for you. What goes into your creative process? What goes into making a satisfying creation? How do you go about expressing your personality in the things that you knit?

Deep thoughts on blogging and a gratuitous dog photo

2005-01-27T18:46:00.000-08:00

The only digital camera I usually have access to is still traveling through northern Spain, but I still feel like I should be keeping up with posting. I've finished both sleeves of Cranberry, but I'm running short of yarn. Since I can't actually afford any Chamonix, I'll have to make do with what I have. (Any luxury-type yarn I'm knitting with was probably plucked from my mother's stash. She's old enough to be established financially, and she has excellent taste. Hi Mom! I know you'll find this eventually!) I have eleven balls, and I've used three and a half on the sleeves. But I already used four on the back - which means some ripping and shortening shall happen tomorrow. I'm not too stressed about that, though. I'd rather rip it out than cut and graft it. After all, I do enjoy the process - it definitely won't hurt me to spend a few more hours knitting with cushy angora/merino yarn! (The process-oriented thoughts come courtesy of Margene, who is my knitblogging hero for today.)

After all, blogging isn't about a race for Finished Objects. I'm trying to figure out what knitblogging should be - a search for a blog mission statement. I've read knitting blogs for a couple of years, but I thought I never had time to start one. One of the principal reasons I'm starting now is to feel like part of the community I've been looking in on for so long. I'd also like to take a more structured, learning-oriented approach to my knitting, and writing about my work should help that aim. (Two of my favorite features in Blogland are Theresa's "What I Learned" posts with every finished object and Kim's technical explanations of a variety of knitting and crocheting techniques.)

Entering the virtual "blogosphere" is a bit like moving to a new city. The challenge for the new person is to find his or her own niche and fill it well. I'm still looking for mine - but I suppose I shouldn't expect to find it after a week!

I'm afraid it's impossible for me to post without leaving at least one photo. I have a puppy who is somewhat of a terrorist. She really likes Cascade Yarns' Key Largo (a luscious cotton-alpaca blend). She has successfully unwound two balls and turned them into tangled messes.

And a note for Anne-Caroline, Kristen, and anyone else who knows what a fungal ball is: Our class social vice-president decided that "Fungal Ball" was too gross to put on a T-shirt, so the party celebrating the end of Microbiology is now known as "Fungal Formal." I can't wait to see what kind of names people come up with for our satirical newsletter formerly known as "The Gubernaculum."

Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your numerous yarn tails

2005-01-26T19:58:00.000-08:00

My husband is on a business trip in Europe, and I insisted that he take the digital camera with him. As it is violently snowing in the portion of Spain he's visiting, I'm not expecting any nice shots of scenery and architecture, but I'm still without new photos until he returns. I am, however, an enthusiastic beginning blogger, and I made sure to take a few pictures before he left. I strive for excellence, even in blog posts being made past my bedtime.

In the absence of any actual knitting content today (the espresso Chamonix doesn't photograph well, anyway), here's a picture of what's in my knitting bag.

This is the back of Jean Moss's Rapunzel from Rowan 34. I'm doing mine in the as-written yarns - Rowan Kid Classic and Lurex Shimmer. (The Lurex doesn't show up very well, but it's copper.) And those tails hanging off the edge? They're the result of doing a four-row two-color moss stitch pattern. I can't think of any way to ablate them other than to simply weave them into the seams when I'm finished. With my propensity for delaying weaving-in-ends, that might take several days of the jacket just sitting on my recliner.

The fabric in Kid Classic is very soft and drapey - it will probably have a much more unstructured look than Bonne Marie's. I'm not expecting this project to go very fast, in part because though I know it will be a lovely jacket, I'm not sure where I'll be able to wear it. The shine factor makes it fairly dressy. If nothing else, I'll wear it at our official medical school formal. The formals have fun names like Cadaver Ball and Fungal Ball. (A fungal ball is a very nasty thing that you can get in your lung.)

The Black Hole

2005-01-25T19:12:00.000-08:00

This project has a long and troubled history. It's a long cardigan from Vogue Knitting Winter 2002/2003 in Adrienne Vittadini Vittoria. I began it as in-car knitting this past summer when en route to Canada to bicycle around the Gaspe Peninsula. I'd meant to start it long ago, but the thought of knitting three feet of straight stockinette stitch for each side and then picking up 600-something stitches for the front bands made me push it to the back of the project queue. I finally decided to finish the darned thing in December. I had the required amount of yarn (23 balls) but realized that I was going to be at least two balls short. I got lucky, though - the pattern designer happens to own one of two local yarn shops in my sleepy mid-sized city, and she was hoarding a few balls of Vittoria, two of which she graciously let me purchase. I finished the front band with about five yards of yarn to spare. Then I sewed the seams. I tried it on. As I should have expected, it was a Shapeless Blob desperately in need of blocking - but where does one block a 49" long, 1.2 kg coat?

For about ten days now, the cardigan (I refer to it in my head as "The Black Hole") has been sitting in a pile in my recliner, waiting for all of the ends from the 25 balls to be woven in. I finished that task tonight during "Scrubs." (Med students might just fall into two groups: "E.R." devotees and "Scrubs" addicts. I'm one of the latter.)

The whole mess is now wet and laid out on a couple of sweater-drying racks in the laundry closet on top of my washer and dryer (a valiant attempt to keep it away from my teething puppy). I hope the front bands don't keep rolling to the outside. And I hope that my five extra yards of yarn is enough to tack a little single-crochet edging onto the corner where the front band meets the bottom band so that it will look square. I think that, if all goes well, it will be dry by the end of the week.

Also guest-starring in the above photo is a Tumbling Blocks pillow I knit from the Rowan membership "free gift" kit a while ago. And yes, those are doilies. There's a complete chair set. When one owns a brown-and-white pinstriped velour recliner - one of the world's ugliest - one must plop an antimacassar on it to make it fancy.

In-class knitting for chilly days

2005-01-24T11:48:00.000-08:00

The back of Cranberry.

This is one of my current works-in-progress. It's Cranberry from JB10 in Jaeger Chamonix. The color in real life is a sort of purply-blue-brown - if I was naming it, I'd call it "espresso." Knowing Rowan/Jaeger's propensity for weird yarn names, though, its actual name is probably some vague appellation like "Charm" or "Dusk" or "Fog." I'm making the cardigan version of Cranberry. This yarn begged to be made into an oversized cozy jacket.

Cranberry is one of my "mindless" projects. The cable pattern's super-easy to memorize, so I can knit it in class. It's a little more stimulating than the socks that I was knitting during pharmacology. Pharmacologists are not known for being particularly enthusiastic about their subject, and keeping up with the ten-row cable pattern is about all that keeps me going through lecture - that, and the coffee from our huge stainless steel class coffeemaker.

Unfortunately, class is not the best time to measure what one is knitting. I got through about 14" of the back piece one day, brought it home, stretched it out, and measured it. It was about an inch too narrow. Fortunately, Jaeger's Chamonix is a cable-constructed yarn that's ready to knit right after it's frogged. I hope that this is the last blog picture of Cranberry-in-progress, and that the next photograph I post of it can be Cranberry finished.

So I'm finally starting a blog...

2005-01-23T13:22:00.000-08:00

I really should be studying for my pharmacology test right now. I'm just going to post this one little paragraph and see how it looks...