Knit Sisters

Today was the last day of summer school–woo hoo!!  Now, I really shouldn’t complain, since I just worked the mornings from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., and plenty of other people were stuck at school every day until 4:00.  But it does seem a tad gratuitous to put in 5 more weeks when you’ve just finished up a whole school year.

In any case, now I have seven weeks of sweet freedom before school starts in the fall.  And you know, don’t you, how I’ll be spending the bulk of that time?  Why, that’s right:  pursuing fiberish fun.  I have many, many things I’d like to accomplish–no doubt more than I’ll ever finish.  But, you must aim high, no?

I’ve been working on the simple summer sweater and have completed the body.  I got started on the first sleeve the other night.

Whenever I can I knit sleeves from the top down, picking up stitches around the armhole.  I follow the directions in Knitting From the Top (Barbara G. Walker) for knitting set-in sleeves from the top.  (By the way, Knitting From the Top is a wonderful book which I recommend that everyone have in their knitting library.)  So that’s what I’m in the process of doing here:

 

The end is in sight for this sweater, although I still don’t know what kind of edging I’m going to put around the neckline.  I may turn to Knitting on the Edge (Nicky Epstein) for inspiration there.  It needs to be something delicate looking, yet sturdy enough not to flop over.

In spinning news, I am working on a couple of handpainted rovings, which have related although not identical colors.  

(They are actually more related than these pictures show.)

I will be plying these together–in fact, I already have some plied, and it is lovely, although I am not including a picture today so as not to induce fatal wool lust in my sister.  I’ll post a photo when it’s all done.  Both rovings are 8 oz., so I will have a very usable total of 1 pound of yarn when finished.

And now, off to enjoy my freedom!

Before I tell you about Miss A. and our knitting lesson, I would like to take a moment to enlist your aid in persuading my sister to GIVE ME THAT YARN she is spinning. You know, just a word or two in the comments about how you think I could give the yarn a good home and raise it properly to be the best yarn it can be… That would be great.

Because that is really some beautiful handspun.

Meanwhile, my friend Emily and I have had success in finding my wedding gown! I shall be ever grateful to her for helping me sort through the bewildering options. Although I don’t want to destroy the surprise element by showing you the whole dress, here’s a little peek at what the fabric looks like near the hem of the gown:

Emily and the lovely saleswoman, who had an unexpected gravitas and exuded life-wisdom, both endorsed this dress, which has a sweet, vintage quality. The second choice, upon reflection, was just a bit too much in the “hootchie-mama” category: plunging neckline, body-hugging silhouette, va-va-voom trumpet skirt.

The lovely saleswoman said sagely, “It will be your wedding. You will be standing with your husband, greeting people, seeing his family and your family.” Then noting my unimpressive stature, she added quite gravely, “They will be standing over you. You do not want them to see your bosoms.”

An apt point, I thought.

So once the dress was chosen, we could turn back to other things. Like knitting. Emily’s elder daughter, A., had extracted a promise from me when she was three that I would teach her to knit when she was six. To my surprise, she had never forgotten this, which is remarkable given that she’s had to keep it in mind for literally half her life. But such is the power and the allure of knitting!

A. is a very intelligent child, and she has a sensitive and loving soul. She has a poet’s depth of feeling. And she does karate. But she is also a bit of a perfectionist. Her mother was a tiny bit worried that A. might become frustrated in the process of learning to knit and have a slight meltdown. Since people much older and much more experienced than A. have had slight meltdowns over knitting (I mean, just once or twice…nothing major, of course…not the kind of thing that involves screaming and crying and swearing and throwing the knitting in the general direction of the bookshelf where it lands on your copy of the Clinton biography…not that kind of thing), I assured Emily that it would be no problem even if it did happen.

But instead, A. was focused, professional, and completely cool (her full initials are A.C.; just coincidence?). Here we are encountering a slight problem:

Recovering:

And continuing on our merry way:

What was fascinating and wonderful was how much A. improved her knitting skills overnight. Literally. When we came back to it the next day, she had integrated a lot of the hand movements that were awkward for her at first and had gone ahead by proverbial leaps and bounds. It was a delightful thing to witness. I predict a full and productive career for A. as a knitter.

Her younger sister, while still too young to knit, is a dab hand at imitating an airplane:

And a good time was had by all.

The drawback to using the beloved five-pitch English combs is that you are left with quite a bit of waste fiber.  Now, being the frugal soul that I am, I had to purchase a smaller set of combs so as not to completely waste said waste fiber.

So, when I combed that handpainted roving, I ended up with little bundles of fluff.  I combed that fluff with my double-row handheld Louet combs, along with some short pieces of mohair, and spun up the resulting sliver into a fine singles.  The colors became even more muted with the additional combing and with the addition of the white mohair.  It was a very pretty little bobbin of yarn, but it was indeed quite little.

 

I let this little beauty sit for a little bit, while I thought about what to do with it.  I knew I wanted to ply it with something, but what? 

A couple of weeks ago, in a moment of weakness, I purchased this largish bag of raw kid mohair from a woman in the local spinning guild.

 

What can I say?  The price was right, and she’s a local breeder of angora goats.  This is fiber from a bona fide Missouri goat.  That makes such a purchase almost noble, no?  (Supporting the local economy and all.)  But this stuff takes some serious fiber preparation.  First off, there’s the washing–we won’t go there in this post.  Suffice it to say that it is no joke.  After that, there’s the combing.

 

 

Then you have to pull the sliver from the combs.

 

You end up with something quite, quite lovely in and of itself, but it still isn’t even spun into anything yet.

 

Then you spin.

Then you have to ply the mohair strand with the mohair/wool strand.  (Because, as you probably guessed, that is what I decided to do with that little bobbin of singles.)  Wind it off on your trusty kniddy-knoddy, and you end up with one (!) skein of mohair/wool 2-ply yarn.  (Pictured on Monday, remember?)

And, because I do this for fun,  I’m going to do it all again with the leftovers I get when I put this roving through the five-pitch combs.

Then I’ll have two different, yet coordinating, skeins of yarns.  Yup, that’s the plan.

It’s been a quiet week here Chez Knit Sister because Alex, designer of this website, soon to by husband-of-mine, and general all around great guy (shown here looking for all the world like junior faculty at Princeton),

is out in Berkeley for a few days doing, you know, Berkeley things: drinking only shade-grown coffee, practicing Bikram yoga, and haranguing passersby with unasked for and unwanted tirades about attachment parenting. Okay, he’s not. I lied. He would in fact never do such things. That’s why I love him. He’s actually working on a website for a Berkeley professor.

But either way, Shelley and I are making the best of things, mainly by air conditioning the bedroom down to the temperature of a meat locker and enjoying all the things a dog and a girl can enjoy in a super-chilled room: crossword puzzles, books, beef bones, DVDs, squeaky toys, and of course knitting. Progress on Rogue:

Finished those socks:

I knit a lot of socks, as you may have noticed, and this has a direct relationship to the fact that I live in the greater Boston area, home of a functional public transportation system of which I am an enthusiastic and frequent user. I spend a lot of time riding the T and the bus. A lot. And this is time that is well-spent knitting socks. I’m not the first, and I’m sure I won’t be the last, to note that socks make a good portable project. I always knit mine on two circular needles, thanks to the remarkable Cat Bordhi, so I’m never in danger of losing my DPNs on the bus. It also provides a ready-to-hand topic for conversation with other riders and a chance to recruit others to the knitting life.

But most importantly, knitting on the T keeps me occupied, which keeps me from reading public service ads about health issues. Boston is full of public health schools that are eager to spread the word to the people of Our Fair City about disease prevention, screening, and good health habits. All great. Except that some of us, while certainly not what you’d call hypochondriacs, heaven knows!, are susceptible to worst-case-scenario thinking when it comes to health. This is kind of a problem because, when you think about it, the body only has a limited number of ways of expressing its outrage. That means that most symptoms you experience can legitimately be either (a) a sign that you should eat smaller meals and maybe exercise more or (b) the first indication that by this time next year you will be dead.

So without knitting, here’s how it might go: I toddle down to Ye Olde Tea Party Square, head over to Felipé’s, consume a Super Burrito with cheese, black beans, guacamole, salsa, extra hot sauce, and a couple of jalapenos and wash it down with a 352 oz. Diet Coke. Then I hop on the T. I ride a couple of stops, communing with the mellifluous sound of metal-on-metal as the train rounds the curves, and then…I notice the public health ad above the head of the rider directly across from me: “Are you experiencing bloating? Lower abdominal pain? A feeling of fullness? Vague gastrointestinal complaints like nausea, gas, or indigestion? Do not ignore these symptoms. They can be signs of ovarian cancer, the deadliest of all gynecological cancers…”

My heart skips a beat. I am experiencing bloating, gas, and indigestion right now! I feel full. I feel vaguely nauseated. Could it be? Am I truly not long for this world? It says right there that I should not ignore these symptoms. I better get off this train right now and go to the doctor! Or maybe I need to think about “putting my affairs in order.” Oh Lord! Why? Why me?

Just as I am getting hold of myself and preparing to be brave and noble in the face of certain death, I remember. The Super Burrito. The 352 oz. Diet Coke.

As they say in medicine, when you hear hoofbeats in the hall, don’t go looking for a zebra.

Now I could try to work on myself and try to become less crazy and less apt to be convinced I am dying every time I read one of these public health placards and more Zen-like and all the rest of it.

Or I could just keep knitting socks:

P.S. Sarah, I would be happy to take that new skein of mohair/wool blend off your hands. It will be a burden, of course, but one I will gladly shoulder. It ain’t heavy, it’s my sister’s handspun…

While walking Hugo this Saturday morning, I saw what I at first took to be a horse trailer parked downtown.  Of course, Hugo, with his super-sensitive nose, knew better at once–these were no horses, these were alpacas!  I immediately scouted out these alpaca people, (who were sitting on some benches around the courthouse) and asked somewhat lamely, “Are some of you the alpaca people?”  Of course, they were very nice about it and didn’t even poke fun at me for my dumb question.  Turns out, there were not one but three groups of alpaca people:  two groups who own alpaca farms in Kansas, and one group who owns a fiber shop and fiber mill in Kansas.  They were all there for the county fair shindig going on around the square on Saturday.  They had live animals, fiber, yarn, and other fiber-related goodies.

Well!  What could I do but invite myself to come sit and spin with them that afternoon?  So, at about 1:00 p.m. I trundled myself up to the square and horned in on Kay and Sally, two sisters (!!) who run a fiber shop in Phillipsburg, KS.  I took the Joy with me:

 

Kay was spinning up some alpaca on her Kromski Mazurka wheel, so I happily sat down beside her and set up shop, so to speak.  Her sister, Sally, was warping a small Kromski table loom in preparation for weaving a scarf.  They graciously let me join them and even more graciously treated me as though I were an old friend.  We all sat and chatted for about an hour, and then, off to the west, some very threatening storm clouds started to blow in.  Kay and I moved in under their tent.  It started to rain.  It started to blow.  Then it started to thunder, lightning, and pour.

Soon, Kay, Sally, and I were involved in Operation “Save the Alpaca Fiber.”  We frantically threw books in their truck, tossed skeins of yarn into bins, and bundled up beautiful woven and knitted alpaca goods, all the while trying to hold onto the tent, which was threatening to blow away in the wind.  Eventually, the tent did blow away, right into the nearest store front.

Well, we did get everything packed up into their truck, more or less safely, although not before we were all absolutely soaking wet.  Actually, I think we all gave up on the idea of staying dry pretty early on.  (At least I know I did.)  The phrase “soaking wet,” doesn’t really convey how wet we were.  Sopping, sloshy, drenched, down-to-the-underwear wet comes closer.

I invited Kay and Sally to come back to my house to dry off a bit before heading home.  (It was the least I could do after having invited myself to their party…)  They towelled off as best they could and I gave them a couple of old t-shirts.  Here they are, standing in my kitchen, still smiling after everything.

 

(That’s Kay on the left and Sally on the right.)

You know what the worst part of the whole day was?  I didn’t even get a chance to purchase any of their lovely alpaca roving before the storm blew in.  Sorry, ladies!  But, at the risk of sounding sappy, I now have two new fiber friends.  Thanks for the adventure, Kay and Sally!

In other weekend news, I finished this skein of mohair/wool:

More mohair news on Wednesday.

I would like to linger for a moment here over Sarah’s suggestion that we henceforth refer to her as, “Sarah, Woman of Transformation.” Not only is this incredibly apt, it certainly makes a whale of a lot more sense than, Alchemy, Yarns of Transformation. I hasten to add that I adore and covet Alchemy Yarns (of Transformation) and that I have warm feelings toward their delightful Charles Rennie Mackintosh design elements, yet…this whole “Yarns of Transformation” business is just…so…well…Sebastopol, CA.

In the name of great yarn and even greater dye jobs and colorways, however, we will forgive them.

Meanwhile, my sister, the Woman of Transformation, continues to transform piles of roving studded with “vegetable-matter” into lovely yarns like these. As “Sister of Woman of Transformation,” I am transforming her handspun into Rogue:

Cunning kangaroo pocket, wouldn’t you say? Sadly, with the incredible heat in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, we have experienced a work-slowdown on Rogue. Cotton/wool blend socks, however, continue to be knitted at previous rates of production, in accordance with the goals of the most recent Five Year Plan set out by the Supreme Knitting Soviet:

On the positive side, the heat and sun have produced limited successes in horticulture,

which is miraculous given that my gardening strategy rests on three pillars of strength: ignorance, absentmindedness, and Darwinian survival of the fittest. Here in Darwin’s garden, only the strong survive!

Other parts of the yard, meanwhile, are increasingly jungle-like. Here, an unidentified beast, captured by Wildlife Photographer Ellen, checks the underbrush for domestic felines and hidden bones.

To come full circle, our alchemical fiber friends out in Sebastopol actually have something to say about gardening on their website: “Without seed no fruit can be born, without soil no seed can grow.” These quasi-mystical, and yet somehow completely obvious, words of Isaac Holland’s remind us that it isn’t just ignorance, absentmindedness, and Darwinian tenets that make a garden grow. It’s also soil. And seeds.

A little Miracle-Gro doesn’t hurt either, I hear.

Well, I don’t know about this whole “knitting is the new yoga” thing.  I myself feel that knitting is the new tae kwon do.  No wait, I think I mean that tae kwon do is the new knitting.  No, that doesn’t make sense either.  Maybe I just mean that tae kwon do is my new knitting.  Oh, hell, just forget it.  (I do have to say, however, that I find more stress relief from punching and kicking and yelling than I ever did from the Downward Dog.  My Dog was plagued by the fact that I am a heavy sweater, even while doing yoga, and my sweaty palms would habitually start to slide away from me, making my Dog look more like a Downward Inchworm as I tried hard to hold onto the damn thing.)

On the knitting front, I am continuing to plug away on the Simple Summer Sweater:

I have gotten up to the point at which I switched to a straight 5×2 rib.  You can see the side waistline shaping up above, and here is a closeup:

You can see where I’m increasing back out to the bust measurement.  Now the question is whether or not to include short-row bust darts, and where to put them.  Big Girl Knits recommends starting the beginning of your bust darts at the level of your bra band.  I’ll have to think about that a bit.  My standard practice up until now has been to place the bust darts about 1 1/2 inches below the underarm bindoff. 

Ellen, I can’t believe you own some Alchemy yarn and you hadn’t told me!  And I thought we were close!  Have you been holding out on me about other things as well?

That stuff is seriously gorgeous.  (Actually, I just like to say it:  “Alchemy Yarns of Transformation.”  Not exactly sure what that means, but it sounds pretty cool.  Maybe I could adopt something similar as my own personal motto:  “Sarah Woman of Transformation.”  I realize that sounds a bit like I am a werewolf or shapeshifter, but no matter.)

To finish today, a somewhat gratuitous picture of Hugo hanging out in the armchair:

 What a sweetie.

We’ve been hearing for a year or so now that, “Knitting is the new yoga.” Like most of these kinds of catch-phrases, it doesn’t hold up well to scrutiny. (I also have issues with, “Forty is the new thirty!” Since I am nearing forty–but still vigorous!–I often get this from salespeople at stores like Sephora. If forty really were the new thirty, they wouldn’t be trying to sell me products like Philosophy’s When Hope is Not Enough. When I was actually thirty, hope was enough. But I digress.)

But for some of us, knitting and yoga do seem to coexist in our lives: see, for instance, the wonderful Yarn Harlot post of a couple of days ago. She wrote so delightfully about her problem with competitiveness in yoga class. I, too, both knit and do yoga (see below my yoga mat in its little bag surrounded by supportive balls of yarn my sister spun for me),

But as a few of you must have realized from my comment on her post, my problems go much, much deeper than hers. I figured I’d just come completely clean.

Although I have gotten a lot of benefits in terms of stress relief, illusory tallness, and general mellowness from doing yoga, I’m still like someone unclear on the concept. I have been known to pass the time while “relaxing” in the Downward Facing Dog position by fantasizing about what Chinese takeout I am going to order when I quit standing on my head with my posterior in the air. Or, since all I can see in that pose is my own feet, by becoming obsessionally seized with the conviction that I have painted my toenails the wrong color and that my toes look like horrible little sausages.

Part of my problem was that I started doing yoga seriously while I was living in Berkeley (of course!). I’d be the first person to say that Berkeley, CA is a great place to live. If you are not me. It never really worked for me; what can I say? I lived there for three years and never felt at home, not for one minute of any given day. It kind of wore a girl down some.

And as far as not fitting in, yoga class in Berkeley was where the rubber really hit the road. I used to go to yoga about three times a week, which was all fine until the morning that our yoga instructor wanted us to do a two-person pose that involved running straps around the other person’s waist and in between his/her legs and pulling in ways that seemed potentially damaging to the person’s long-term, um, fruitfulness. Remarkably, everyone else just fell into line. When the yogi asked why I was standing aside, I said, “Sir, my cultural heritage does not prepare me to assume these positions in public.”

So I already had that black mark against my name when the fateful day arrived. Here we were in the Tree Pose when a man fell over–just fell right over!–and before I could stop myself, I yelled out, “Timber!”

No one laughed. Needless to say, I was no longer welcome in that yoga class.

So now, even though I no longer live in Berkeley, I do yoga only at home. This poses its own difficulties, most of them related to my dog.

She likes to check on me when I’m doing yoga, which occasionally even means going underneath me when I am doing Downward Facing Dog (how fitting, yes?) and plopping down on my sticky mat. I consider this part of “working at your own pace.” You know how on the DVDs the instructor is always pointing out the woman who will be doing the “modifications” (translation: the easy stuff for the total losers)? She’s always named Natasha or something exotic. Natasha will be doing the modifications; Ellen will be working around a hyperactive, 50-pound dog. But that’s also fine! We are all about acceptance. It’s all good!

Here’s a shot that combines knitting (note progress on pair of socks) and yoga (note over-the-top sticky mat with paisley pattern):

In other knitting news, although I’ve repeatedly sworn off all lace-weight mohair, I keep falling off the wagon. It starts with a couple of social skeins, and the next thing I know I’m waking up in a welter of Alchemy Haiku and Kidsilk Haze, with no memory whatsoever of how I came to have this yarn.

Perhaps I need an intervention.

So, I had this idea that I would make myself a simple little summer sweater, something I could wear with everything, you know?  I visited the stash (being the extremely good girl that I am) and came up with 11 balls of Reynolds “Tiara,” 70% viscose, 30% silk, worsted weight.  I swatched:

 

I not only swatched, I washed my swatch and laid it flat to dry.  I not only washed my swatch, I measured gauge both before and after washing.  (See what a good girl I am?)  Now (and here is where the plot thickens), the only problem with this lovely little swatch is that I forgot to write down the size needle I used.  No doubt I thought to myself, “Oh, I will remember.  No problem.”  (Actually, I usually make little knots in the yarn tail to tell what size needle I used, but I forgot to do that, too.)  So, I revisited the yarn label, and it says to use a #6 needle.  Knowing that I habitually go down a needle size (or two) since I tend to knit loosely, I deduced that I had used a #5 needle on this swatch.  I immediately made five little knots in the yarn tail.

OK, what I haven’t admitted yet is that all this happened several months ago, because, you see, I was going to get a jump on that summer knitting.   So, when I picked up this swatch a week or so ago, I saw five little knots in the yarn tail.  “Oh,” I said to myself, “I used a #5 needle for this yarn.”

Earlier this spring I purchased a simple little sweater–short sleeves, scoopnecked, and form-fitting.  I decided to make this new sweater as a virtual clone, shaping-wise, of this commercial sweater.  I did exactly as the knitting experts advise you to do:  I laid the sweater out on the bed and took careful measurements.  Bust, waist, lower edge, armhole depth, neckline depth, neckline width, shoulder width, length, the whole deal.  Armed with this knowledge and the careful gauge measurements I made of my washed and dried swatch, I confidently cast on (in the round) for the lower edge. 

Knit, knit, knit.  Some time later (about 2 inches later) I realized that this wasn’t looking exactly right, gauge-wise.  Perhaps it wasn’t a #5 needle that I used on that swatch.  Perhaps it was a #4.  “Well,” I thought, “that’s really not a problem; I’ll just switch to a #4 right now.  After all, my hips are bigger than my waist and I wanted some waistline shaping anyway.”

 Knit, knit, knit.  Some time later (about 2 inches later) I realized that the whole thing was looking a bit, well…large. 

 

Hmmm.  I checked gauge.  I checked my math.  I checked the dimensions of the commercial sweater–now it was measuring three whole inches smaller around the bust and waist.  How could this be?!  Well, here’s how it could be–the first time I measured it was right after I wore it and stretched it out.  The second time was after it had been washed and returned to its rightful dimensions.  Nobody told me about this!

Rip, rip, rip.  Simple little sweater.  Pah.

(Oh, by the way, this whole “involvement with the CIA” thing has been blown way out of proportion.  These days I just consult.)   

Thanks to Sarah for the post on the English five-pitch combs! Since I neither spin nor comb, I learned a great deal. Let’s be honest, y’all. That is a whole other level of craft and, even more to the, um…point, that is a whole other level of tools. Now that I’ve gotten a load of those combs, I’ve begun to suspect that my sister is living a double life: knitter, spinner, mother, and educator by day; Fiber Ninja and CIA Special Operative in Interrogations by night.

Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.

I bet Langley sends her all the really tough cases, the guys who won’t crack under any kind of pressure: “All right, Larry, if he won’t talk, I guess we’ll just have to call in…The Fiber Ninja. With her English five-pitch combs!” “Oh, God, no! No! What do you want to know? I’ll tell you anything! Anything!”

Half the time, she doesn’t even have to show them the combs. Just the idea of them is enough to strike terror in their hearts and loosen their tongues. Now that’s what we call good tradecraft! In the “intelligence” biz, that is. (You remember that book, Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten? What a lie. Everything I needed to know I learned from John Le Carré novels…)

Now, if I’ve learned anything from John Le Carré, it’s that my sister is going to deny all this. She’s going to claim she has nothing to do with the so-called “intelligence community.” You can humor her if you like, but we know the truth.

Meanwhile, although I made little-to-no progress on the Wedding Noodles over the weekend, I made the first sock of a pair (tastefully displayed with dog):

Shelley liked this sock more than I expected. Here’s what happened when I tried to retrieve it:

“I, Conquistador Shelley, claim this sock for Spain!”

I’ll get it back eventually. Though I may have to stoop to shameless and undignified bribery with Milk-Bones and Greenies.

Anyway, it really isn’t all that urgent because I have a broken little toe and can’t actually wear any enclosed shoes or socks. That situation recently got worse because, having followed the recommendations in Highly Technical, Advanced Medical Advice of Tomorrow…Today! (i.e., “tape your little toe to the one next to it”),

I found to my horror that after four weeks the skin on those toes was looking something close to gangrenous. For obvious reasons, I’d hate to lose my toes, so I cooked up a knitted solution that would bind the toes together, and yet let the skin breathe! The Koigu Toe-Stabilization Sleeve, in progress:

And in use:

I’m pleased to report that after only two days of wearing the Koigu Toe-Stabilization Sleeve, I have experienced significantly less swelling and dramatically less gangrene. The Koigu Toe-Stabilization Sleeve really works!*

*Results not typical. The Knit Sisters do not guarantee relief from broken toes or gangrene through toe sleeves or other knitted garments.