Knit Sisters

I saw the best knitters of my generation destroyed by
triangular lace shawls, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the interminable rows until dawn,
looking for an angry stitch,
angelheaded crafters burning for the ancient heavenly
sighting of the marker that comes two stitches before the end of the row,
who hollow-eyed and slightly drunk
and somehow always in the middle of a row sat
up knitting in the supernatural darkness of
crappy graduate student digs with an obstreperous cat and a loyal dog,
contemplating burying the shawl under the shed in the backyard…

…Icarus, in my dreams you walk dripping from a Eucalan bath
on the highway across America to the door of my cottage in the Western night.
And when I open the door, you are miraculously finished and blocked
and I can go back to working on Rogue.

(With sincerest and most heartfelt apologies to Allen Ginsberg.)

Have a great weekend everyone! Me, I’ll be knitting Icarus. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

Thanks, Ellen, for your lovely and moving post yesterday. 

And now we all know (in case you hadn’t figured it out for yourself) who the real writer in the family is.  Remember when Ellen wrote about how she would be embarrassed when everyone compared her design for the competition to mine?  Well, I have much the same feeling when thinking about my writing in comparison to hers.  Oh, I’m competent enough, but that girl can really WRITE!  (Please don’t think I’m whining or feeling sorry for myself–I’m proud as punch of my sister’s writing and extremely happy that she’s willing to share blog space with me on a daily basis.  It’s just a fact, is all.)

OK, now on to other things…  I came home from work today all ready to get moving on today’s post.  First thing, to take some pictures.  Hey, wait a second, where’s the digital camera!?  Rob’s taken it to work, that’s where it is.  Well, crap.  So here’s the plan:  I’ll write the post, put it up on the blog, and put the pictures in later when the camera’s back. 

I now have two skeins of the lime green tufted superwash plied with the rayon ribbon.  Dude, it’s way, way cool.  (Rob says it’s “weird.”  What does he know, anyway?)

It’s also really fun to spin this stuff.  (Well, after the endless miles of spinning the wool in the first place.)  I have no idea of what I’m going to make with it after it’s all done, but no matter.  (Perhaps I’ll give it away as a contest prize.)  My initial idea of making sock cuffs with the tufted yarn and the attached sock feet with a matching smooth yarn has gone out the window.  I just like it this way too much.  I want it all to look like this.  And by golly, I’m in charge of my spinning!

I worked on another little project this week.  Remember the stash?  Well, Rob moved a cabinet out of the garage last weekend and into my studio space.  I cleaned it out, moved it into the corner, and filled it with goodies.

 

Looking at my cabinet full of lovely fiber and yarn gives me a warm, glowing feeling inside.  However, the truly scary thing is that this operation didn’t seem to make much of a dent in the other parts of the stash. 

 

I’m sure that there’s a life lesson about materialism and being content with what you have in this little story, but I’m just not feeling up to ferreting it out.  Instead, I’m concentrating on that warm, glowing feeling and the fact that I never, ever have to face the prospect of running out of yarn.

 

Icarus is such a good boy! He just doesn’t give me any trouble.

Hey, is that a sneaky way of saying that I’m boring? Because if you want trouble, I can give you trouble. Just say the word…

Sadly, things that go smoothly make very uninteresting stories.

So this is a story about a dog,

and a terrorist,

Oh, whoops. Mistakenly popped in a picture of our cat. Well, it is an error anyone could have made.

and a woman who lived by herself in a studio apartment in a high-rise in New York City. This is a story about how their paths crossed and what became of them.

I was living in New York City on September 11, 2001, but I found I could not write about this on Monday. In the midst of all the political grandstanding and television specials and the genuine grief of those who lost someone dear to them in those attacks, the task felt both overwhelming and somehow wrong, as if I would be co-opting the ongoing grief of people who suffered direct, personal losses.

I was very fortunate: I did not lose any close friends or family members. But I did lose the same thing every survivor in the city lost—a sense of security and that peculiarly American sense of invulnerability.

In the days following the attacks, my friend Cindy’s little girl, who was four at the time, kept saying to us, “Did the Empire State Building fall down too? Are all the buildings going to fall down?”

What could we tell her? When you have just seen something massive and terrible that you never dreamt could happen happen, you feel you are suddenly in a place where anything could happen. Literally anything.

What can you tell a child then?

It was like dropping through a rabbit hole into some other reality. The suddenly silent city whose silence was punctuated only the roar of the fighter jets cruising up and down the Hudson. The acrid black smoke blowing in a steady stream out to Brooklyn. The fire that kept burning and burning and burning.

My failure to find anything to laugh about for weeks, a unique phenomenon in my life. Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead playing and re-playing on my stereo.

But this is a story about a dog. About how on September 12, 2001, I took a long walk in Central Park because it seemed to me that if I moved my legs, I could outrun the shocked, stunned feeling I’d had since I woke up. The futility of my exercise notwithstanding, the park was full of people walking dogs. They appeared to be the only people that day with any kind of grip on normality.

A dog must be walked, come hell or high water. Muhammad Atta or no Muhammad Atta.

As the early fall passed into the late fall, I thought more about getting a dog, turning the idea over more seriously in my mind than I had in the previous four years, a period during which I had idly considered dog ownership, but had skittered nervously away from the responsibility, preferring a life with light personal duties and few restrictions.

I also thought more about Muhammad Atta. The hatred I felt for Atta and his compatriots was rather frightening, even to me. It was ugly and poisonous, even if it was—at some level—justified.

Then right before Thanksgiving, I adopted Shelley.

She had been dumped somewhere in Queens and she still had a slight aura of wild animal about her when I brought her home. She wasn’t certain that human beings were entirely to be trusted or that the world was a safe place. She was, in this way, a very post-9/11 dog.

But after about two weeks of walks and coaxing and daily trips to the dog park, I was playing ball with her one day when, for the first time, she cracked a huge canine grin.

This is a typical expression, but I didn’t know that at the time.

She was a huge amount of work because she was young, she had no manners, and she was wildly energetic. I was living in a studio apartment on the 27th floor of a high-rise and since we had no outdoor space, she needed three basic walks plus one two-hour trip to the dog park every day.

After three weeks of dog ownership, I was both literally weeping with exhaustion and, paradoxically, completely in love with her.

In the past five years, Shelley and I have made two cross-country moves together. We’ve hiked in canyons in California and played in dog parks on two coasts. We’ve lived in five different houses. Everything in my life has changed since the autumn of 2001.

But Shelley has been with me through all those changes. She is the one constant.

I was taught in Sunday School to love my enemies, but I have to confess that I have fallen short of loving Muhammad Atta. But neither can I hate him with the kind of fury and conviction that I once felt. Because there is a way in which Muhammad Atta gave me this dog. He didn’t intend to do any good the day he flew that plane into the Twin Towers.

But indirectly he did.

Many terrible events have taken place since September 2001. But this is a story about a dog. And it is a story about how, at my house at least, the terrorists have not won.

Hey, thanks everyone for your wishes for a speedy recovery!  I believe it helped.  (Or perhaps it was all the time I spent lying in bed.)  In any case, I am, if not fully recovered, well on my way.  (Although, I also believe Lorinda was right and that gifts of roving would not only make me feel much better, but would also help my immune system fight off future attacks upon it.)

In answer to Deb’s question in the comments, yes indeed you may use a Barbara Walker stitch pattern!  No need to reinvent the wheel, as it were.

I have been working on spinning the lime green superwash.  I finally finished spinning all the combed wool and started plying it.  The attentive among you may remember that I wanted to insert tufts of the waste wool from the combs into the two-ply as I plied it.  I started doing that last night.  Wow.  That was seriously cool.  And addictive.  I finished up a bobbin in no time.

                                    Look at that!  Doesn’t it remind you of your fun and crazy aunt sitting beside all the rest of the staid and conventional relatives? 

 

The only problem I ran into was that it took me a relatively long time to insert the tufts, and so the two-ply got a bit over-plied.  I thought about plying it back onto itself as a cabled yarn, but I really wanted to maximize my yardage.  I came up with a few different solutions:  ply it with another single spun from a different roving or fiber, ply it with a commercial yarn, leave it as is and hope it would relax a bit when washed.  I finally remembered a light green rayon ribbon yarn that has been aging in the stash for a while.  Wouldn’t that look cool, to add a little bit of shine to the yarn?

Here’s the result:

 

Here’s a fairly cruddy closeup:

Unfortunately, the very thing that makes this ribbon yarn so beautiful makes it really hard to photograph.  It reflects the light amazingly.  I once made a scarf for a friend out of this yarn, which turned out looking gorgeous.  But, this yarn also has a tendency to pull easily, so the next time I saw her with the scarf it wasn’t quite as gorgeous-looking with all the little pulls poking out of it.  But, plying it with the tufted wool yarn should ameliorate that problem, right?

In any case, I think it looks really great.  (Nothing like blowing your own horn, huh?)  Harvey said, “That looks awesome!”  You don’t get higher praise than that from a ten-year-old.

Let’s all wish Sarah a quick and full recovery! I’ve heard that encouraging comments, along with frequent doses of echinacea, will have a sufferer back on her feet in no time.

Hope you feel better soon, Sarah!

Out here Chez Mad Dog, Icarus just keeps on keepin’ on:

Obstreperous dog included in photograph for purposes of scale.

I posed him with Shelley because I wanted to prove to you that he is a growing boy. Oh, and because over the weekend, the Knitting Muses whispered to me, “When your Icarus is as long as your mongrel dog, then my child, and only then!, may you bind him off and block him.”

I wanted to see how far I had to go, you see, and it looks like the answer is, “One mutt butt and a mutt head.”

Never say that knitting is not an exact science here Chez Mad Dog! Rigorous measurement protocols ‘r us.

Icarus at the piano: Darlings, I can’t tell you what a consolation music is to me…especially after the gross indignity of being draped over that reeking animal!

In addition to spending some quality time with Icarus, I caught up on my Rolling Stone reading:

Tangled up in pink?

A rewarding experience on the whole, I’d say. I learned once again why Bob Dylan is a genius (because he says so that’s why…), what the soldiers are listening to in Iraq (Tupac Shakur, may he rest in peace), what Pam Anderson and Kid Rock wore at their wedding (not much), and other issues of vital interest and importance.

Arguably the most remarkable article was about a guy named Daniel Pinchbeck, a leader and guru in the “psychedelic community.” You could read it yourself (it’s very well-written and masterfully reported), but I can save you the headache with this concise summary: Pinchbeck spends most of his time tripping on various hallucinogenic drugs and expounding upon his own incoherent, psuedo-philosophical system which includes apocalyptic predictions about the end of the world.

Dude. He is, like, so deep.

But that’s not what really interests me. No. No, no, no, no, no! What’s really interesting is how Pinchbeck reports that in one of his altered states, Quetzalcoatl appeared to him and delivered a message from God.

The message was roughly as follows: You, Pinchbeck, are a prophet and, furthermore, monogamy is an unnatural state for human beings, so in order to save the world, you are going to have to sleep around with various attractive women.

Huh. I’ll be doggoned.

Here’s my question: why is it that when Quetzalcoatl appears to a member of the “psychedelic community” with a message from God, the message is never one of the following?:

(a) You are not a prophet, you are an incorrigible slacker. Over time, God has noticed that you have made a habit of sloth, or, as He Himself would put it, “reaping not the fruits of human industry.” He demands that you improve your personal hygiene, get a job, show up to work on time every day, pay your taxes, go to your children’s school plays even though they have pacing problems, be loyal to your wife, keep your shoes shined, drink only in moderation, and quit smoking.

(b) You are a prophet, but God says that in order to prove your mettle, you have to give up drugs and join the Marines.

(c) God no longer engages in direct communication with so-called “prophets” from the “psychedelic community.” In the past, God found these communications were often unsatisfactory in the extreme and only left Him with a lot of extra work to do in the Retribution and Vengeance Department. In fact, there have been ongoing discussions between God and his top advisors about smiting today’s “prophets” and destroying all their goats and sheep. Recently, however, God has made His home phone number available to celibate, drug-free, vegetarian ultra-marathoners. The choice is yours.

Yeah, Quetzalcoatl never says any of those kinds of things to Mr. I.M. Tripping.

Curious, isn’t it? I mean, I’m just raising the question, is all. For further thought and such.

Funnily enough, my friend Tope and I were visited by Quetzalcoatl this weekend while we were knitting:

He told us that in order to save the world, we will have to spend more time knitting and eating chocolate.

It’s going to be a heavy burden to carry. But someone has to care enough about this crazy world of ours to do it.

I got sick this week.  This is as inevitable as the sun coming up–every year when we go back to school, I end up catching a cold in the first few weeks.  It’s because all the snot-nosed urchins darling children bring their germs with them back to school and grade-school children are not known for their stellar personal hygiene.

I’m not severely sick, mind you, but sick enough.  Not sick enough to stay home, but sick enough to feel pretty crappy while at work.  Sick enough to be absolutely beat when I got home from school yesterday afternoon.  I lay down for “a little rest” and ended up sleeping 2 1/2 hours. 

Then, Harvey and I had our tae kwon do testing this morning.  It lasted quite a bit longer than I had expected.  Then we went to Wal-Mart.  I realize that going to Wal-Mart at noon on a Saturday shows a sad lack of defensive planning, but what can I say?  I’m sick and my faculties are not at their highest level.  In any case, 3/4 of the way through our shopping expedition, I started to feel shaky and broke out in a sweat.  Probably a combination of being (you guessed it) sick, not having eaten, expending all my energy free sparring, and having to deal with Wal-Mart at noon on Saturday.  I came home, lay down for another “little rest” and slept 3 hours.  (Why yes, I would like some cheese with my whine.  Thanks for asking.)

All of the above is a long explanation of why this post is late.  See, I’m sick.

I have, however, made some progress on the sherbet socks.  I finished the first one:

 

Here’s a detail of the toe.  I thought about using a different toe shaping, like a star toe or something, but when it came right down to it, I crapped out and used my standard short-row toe as per Priscilla Gibson-Roberts.  I’ve used this heel/toe shaping so much I can do it with one eye closed, and I just didn’t feel I had the energy to conquer a new toe shaping that might have involved math or something.  (Because, well, I’m sick.)

I started casting on for the second sock, but that’s not a very compelling picture. 

My next sock project will be for Rob, because he needs a new pair of socks for his new job, I think.  I know this flies directly in the face of “The Year of Knitting for Me,” but there it is.  A decision made in a moment of sickness weakness.  I collect sock yarn in sedate, male colors for him. (He will wear self-striping yarns, but only if they’re subdued.  By the way, this is a great way to build your stash–“But honey, that yarn is for socks for you!”)  Two candidates for the position of next socks:

 

Rob’s leaning toward the grey colorway.  I myself kind of like the sand colorway.

Alex, I’m sorry I missed your birthday!  I hope you had a good day and a good birthday week.  I do have a little something for you, which I’ll try to get in the mail this week.  Happy quarter century to you!

Suitably enough, I learned from Alison Bechdel’s wonderful, though harrowing, graphic novel/memoir Fun Home, shown here harmonizing beautifully with Sarah’s handspun:

that in the circus, the sort of acrobatics that involve one person lying on the floor and balancing another in the air are known as “Icarian games.”

Check it out! Page three. I’m knitting a shawl called Icarus and reading a book which mentions Icarian games on its very first full page.

Just coincidence? Or does everything happen for a reason?

Um. Yeah. Probably just coincidence.

But what a cool synergy! Bechdel returns to the Icarus myth throughout her memoir as a way of elucidating her relationship with her father, but she says nothing about Icarus’s shenanigans in Vegas. A missed opportunity, I’d say!

My Icarus now forms veritable pink dunes when you look at him from the side:

I left the room for a minute and discovered this intrepid Marine storming the ridges:

Forward troops! If we gain ground tonight, we can be over Heartbreak Hill and onto the fourth chart by morning!

I’m really savoring every minute I have with this Alchemy Haiku, both because I love it and because I’ve decided that there will be no more yarn buying for a while. So the yarn I have (which is admittedly not what you’d call a meager collection, except when compared to my sister’s stash…) must be enjoyed to the fullest.

Happily, on the very heels of this soul-destroying yarn-diet decision, my friend Tope generously gave me some Rowan 4-ply Botany she got from someone who was destashing:

Tope is no great fan of pink, and, as you may have noticed, I am. And yes, my friends, frugal is such an ugly word.

Tope’s gift of the wonderful and discontinued Botany really took the edge off. There are actually four skeins, but two are shy.

Thank you, Tope!

Let us speak no further of this yarn diet. It can only bring us sorrow.

Meanwhile, Alex is celebrating his birthday this week, consistent with our tradition of stretching every birthday celebration out for at least seven days. Sometimes, if you are clever, you can get ten days out of it, but that’s rare.

Last night, Nasser, who asked that I inform you that he also answers to “Omar Sharif,” came over for a birthday dinner:

My good man, how does it feel to be a quarter of a century old?

Shelley received a rubber chicken as part of the evening’s festivities:

Mmm. Chicken dinner. Chicken dinner…

And Nasser checked the internet for helpful advice for men turning twenty-five:

The only consistent message was that a man of this age will generally be happier, more fit, and more successful in all areas of his life if he chooses the companionship of a somewhat older woman.

Fortunately, Alex already knew this.

Happy Birthday, Alex! And many more!

In answer to a couple of questions:

Yes, I think any leaf-themed original design is fair game for the contest, even if it was designed at some other time. 

And Barbara asked about when I learned to spin and if it was hard.  The first part of that question is easier to answer than the second!  I taught myself to spin on a drop spindle in 2002, so I really have not been spinning that long.  I went to NY Sheep and Wool in the fall of 2001 and discovered that the yarns I coveted most were the handspun yarns that people had for sale.  Instead of buying these yarns, I bought myself a drop spindle, some roving, and a spindle spinning book.  I kind of put them aside until that winter, when I just decided that I was going to figure out how to spin, no matter how long it took!  I looked at my book, gathered a few little tips, and dove in.

My family jokes that they always knew when I dropped the spindle on the floor, because I would let fly with a “Shit!”  And I guess that leads to the second part of the question:  is it hard?  Like many things that you do with your hands, spinning takes practice.  Somewhere I remember reading that when you are learning to spin, you should spin at least a little bit every day, to really cement the feel and the process into your muscle memory.  Like knitting, it’s a skill that you hold in your hands, and no amount of studying is going to make you proficient without the actual practice. 

Personally, I think you just have to be determined to learn and make up your mind not to give up.  I also believe that it’s a good idea to learn on a top-whorl drop spindle, so that you can really get the feel of drafting before you have to learn to manage a wheel.  It’s also a much, much smaller outlay of money–you can decide if it’s really something you want to pursue.  (A decent beginner spindle can be purchased for $10 or $12–I learned on a $10 Louet top-whorl.)

And speaking of spinning, my progress on the lime superwash:

                                                         I’m getting there, slowly but surely.

I’ve been working on the sherbet socks, too.

                                  Halfway on the first sock.

Hey, here’s a funny picture of my little (ha, ha) feet wearing my one half-sock on the spinning wheel treadles.

 

Hugo thinks this whole half-sock thing is highly suspicious.

                                     “Do I have to wait until you’re done with those before you take me for a walk, or what?”

(I’m still working on the secret project, as well.  Of this we will not speak…)

Back in August, when I was still on the road, New England was still a steaming inferno, and the world was just a little younger than it is today, my sister issued a design challenge.

She challenged all of you to design original knitwear of any shape, size, or description as long as it incorporated a leaf mofit, any leaf motif. All entries received by October 15th would be entered in a contest and the designers of the best three would receive a prize of my sister’s handspun.

At the same time, she beat me with a copy of Barbara Walker’s Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns until I agreed encouraged me to design a leafy something, despite the fact that I have never designed anything before in my life. And bitterly enough in the spirit of fairness and decency, my design would naturally not be included in the competition since I am a partner and stakeholder in KnitSisters Enterprises.

She even gave me handspun superwash wool

for inspiration.

Last night, I placed that lovely yarn on top of these helpful books

and left it there overnight. I had heard that sometimes if you get the right combination of books and yarn, a special alchemical reaction occurs and a great design idea is there just waiting for you in the morning.

So far, no luck. But that’s why I’m starting early, you see, while I still have time to monkey with the book-to-yarn ratio and run further experiments.

But seriously, I am certain that when my sister suggested that I “design a little something,” she was chuckling to herself at the thought of how she and everyone else in the contest would kick my butt from here to South Perth eager to see me expand my knitterly horizons and exercise my creativity so that I too could soar on wings of woolly inspiration.

In that spirit, I am panicking waiting in a peaceful zen-like manner to see what the design goddesses whisper in my ear.

Even if the worst happens and my design is shamefully subpar, I can erase my identity and live out the rest of my life under an assumed name in the remote, mountainous regions of Nepal chalk it up to experience and laugh along with the rest of you at my awkward freshman effort.

So far, the design goddesses have said only one thing: “Socks.”

I also thought I heard one of them say, “If you build it, he will come,” but that may have just been my imagination.

On a much nicer note, there is more of Icarus to love all the time:

He agreed to a close-up:

Actual color may vary and in fact be a heckuva lot more like what you see in the next picture, but what can you do?

And finally,

Icarus, bright and dark.

There isn’t much to say about the actual knitting process, except that the rows are getting longer (as the days get shorter…), but I’m not getting bored.

After all, in these trying times—what with skunks roaming the back yard and this design challenge hanging over my head—it is consoling to know that I can still knit my way out of a paper bag produce something beautiful. That is, thanks to the design genius of my fiber-arts superiors like Miriam, whose efforts—believe me—I only respect more with each passing day.

KnitSisters will be closed today in observance of the Labor Day holiday.

We’re plumb tuckered out from all that knitting, spinning, and skunk chasing.

But we’ll be back tomorrow with more fun and high jinks as Ellen attempts to design a small item of knitwear with a leaf motif in honor of the Fall 2006 KnitSisters Design Contest…and learns the true meaning of “total incompetence.”

Tune in Tuesday for this heartwarming (and heartbreaking) epic adventure in the fiber arts.

One woman. Ninety bazillion knitting books. Two beautiful skeins of her sister’s handspun. Minimal math skills. No vision.

The odds are long and the path is rocky. Can she succeed, or will this merely become an irresistible opportunity for her vastly more talented sister to mock her? We’ll find out when KnitSisters returns!

Until then, Happy Labor Day! Don’t lift a finger now, y’hear?