Knit Sisters

I’ve been plugging away on Blue Bamboo.  She now looks like this:

 

I realize that this is virtually the same picture I offered on Wednesday.  Not much to be done about that; I have 21 inches to knit before starting the armhole shaping.  I’m 1/3 of the way there.  I’m starting to have my habitual and predictable fear that I will run out of yarn halfway through the second sleeve.  That’s why I knit–the suspense.

 

I started listening to The Echo by Minette Walters last night while knitting.  She is one of my favorite mystery writers–her books offer a little more psychological drama than your garden-variety mystery.  Check out The Scold’s Bridle if you have a chance.  Come to think of it, I need to reread that one myself.

A couple of Friday-after-a-long-week photos for you all.

Hugo, apparently seeing one of the cats doing something highly suspicious in the corner.  (Actually, when aren’t the cats doing something highly suspicious?)

 

And Rob, looking both goofy and handsome.  (It takes a truly gifted man to do that, I’ll tell you.)  That’s another one of his artworks hanging on the wall above the refrigerator.

Have a lovely and productive knitting/fiber weekend.

A big hello to Westside PC, The Green Caipirinha, SuperMouth Beatty, and Blackberry Villa from me, The Red Mojito! May we knit long and prosper under our various new aliases, all thanks to The Blue Cosmo!

Westside PC, aka Diane, noted that my mother has refused to tell us any of her funny names. I suspect it’s because my mother actually is a superhero. So if she reveals her superhero name, well, her cover will be blown.

I’m basing this suspicion on my observations of her in the 70s and early 80s when she was raising two daughters, teaching 8th-grade English full time, running a household, seeing that we all got something to eat three times a day, and keeping up with contemporary literature and current events.

If that’s not super-heroic, I don’t know what is. Superman and Batman are both shaking their heads in wonderment still.

The Red Mojito started work on Tuesday at Woolcott and Company and is pleased to report that it was absolutely delightful. By definition, working at the shop means that I am surrounded by yarn and knitters. The Red Mojito in Wonderland.

This coming Sunday afternoon, I will be at the Woolcott booth at the Boston Knit Out, so come on over and see me now, y’hear?

A lot more than usual has gotten done on Icarus because—are you ready for this?—if it’s a slow day at the shop and there’s nothing else pressing, we are encouraged to knit during work hours.

I must have done something good in a previous life.

Remember that last skein of Alchemy Haiku?

Now it looks like this:

You cannot hold back the inexorable tide of progress! Especially with a swift and a ball-winder handy there at the store!

Icarus is now large enough to form a valley wherein the remaining yarn may dwell:

And, even more importantly, I am now ready to go on to the second chart!

You cannot imagine how eagerly I have awaited this day. Or, if you’ve been reading the blog lately, maybe you can…

Meanwhile, Alex is taking his big “General Examination” next Tuesday, so things are tense Chez Wax Wings ‘R Us. Under the circumstances, a certain amount of stress is perfectly justified.

Because basically, if you do a doctoral degree in any branch of history, one of the requirements will be that you pass an oral examination administered by a panel of four to five professors who sit in a room with you for two to three hours and grill you on approximately 250 books that you were supposed to have read in the previous five months.

This is the exam he has to take next week.

Under the terms of the Geneva Convention, this is actually classified as “unlawful torture,” but they slide it through on the grounds that it is “traditional.”

It’s traditional torture.

No one thinks it is actually educational, but—like Marine boot camp—it shows that you’ve got guts, by God. That you are the kind of soldier student who can go into a room with four or five dazzlingly learned (and occasionally sadistic) people and come out in more or less one piece two or three hours later.

You have to go in there—and here I can’t do any better than to quote a friend of my parents who was given to rather crude turns of phrase—and “show them that you’ve got more *ss than they’ve got teeth.”

(As an aside, don’t you secretly love that quote? Even though it…how shall we say? Lacks refinement?)

It’s just the tiniest bit daunting. In precisely the same way that the fifth ring of hell is just the tiniest bit daunting.

So let’s all wish Alex well. And hope that our household can get through the next few days gracefully, calmly, and with no futher skunkings. There’s not too much more, frankly, that the traffic can bear.

I got all my hair cut off this week.  This was kind of a big deal, since my hair was pretty long.  My hairdresser, Linda, measured and said she cut off about 15 inches. 

Here I am, posing with my new haircut and new cardigan, Nicola.  My head feels light and free!!

 

It was actually cool enough to wear Nicola today, which made me happy, even though I had to go to the doctor this morning because I’m just not kicking this cold.  It’s settled in my sinuses, and I’m now juiced up on antibiotics and Allegra.  Then I spent the afternoon in bed.

I did work on Blue Bamboo last night, and made some good progress, although I had to rip out both fronts after I realized that I had made a mistake on the edge stitches.  I had just been feeling pretty pleased with myself for my rapid progress; then I found my mistake.  Sheesh.  Pride goeth before a fall.

Here’s a detail:

Barbara asked in the comments about how much experience I had before I started designing my own garments.  Weellll…that’s really hard to answer.  I was always one of those little kids who loved making things, and would come up with elaborate plans for things I was going to make (like little dolls and their clothes).  Often I didn’t get them made, but still!  I learned to sew and knit at a fairly young age, and so had early experience following other people’s patterns.

When you’re young, you know, you don’t have as much fear, and so it wasn’t long before I was branching out and making up my own patterns both for knitwear and sewn clothing.  I remember making my mother an original sweater when I was a teenager.  I also remember checking out the first Kaffe Fassett book from the library over and over, and seizing on that sort of freeform approach to making sweaters.  I made one sweater in that style, and looking back I can see that I made tons of mistakes, but I did have a lot of fun doing it.  I still have that sweater somewhere.  (I also remember some fairly spectacular disasters, mostly relating to sewn clothing.)

I guess I’ve just always been one of those people who wanted to know how to do things from scratch.  (Well, things relating to textiles.)  I’m rarely able to knit someone’s else’s design without changing it in some way, and a lot of times I just can’t find the “right” pattern that I see in my head.  So I have to make it up!  And from making up patterns to fit just me, it’s been a fairly small leap to expanding the size range.

I hope this answers your question a bit, Barbara!

I have resisted the strong temptation to bury Icarus under the shed in the backyard and he is, in fact, thriving:

I’ve even been sweet-talking some of these hot straight needles in my free time. Ever notice how they are kept in a, ahem, honey pot? If you take my meaning, and I think you do…

He’s getting a little rambunctious, but then again, he is a big boy for his age.

The fact that there is still an entire skein of Alchemy Haiku to knit up—and it is very, very clear that Icarus will take nearly all of it—is simply not discussed Chez Wax Wings ‘R Us.

Alchemy Haiku haiku:
Yoo-hoo! Just when you
thought Icarus was ending…
here I am, baby!

Truly, there is only so much reality one can bear.

But I have good news! Oh yes, indeed I do.

This afternoon I begin working at Woolcott and Company, now under the management of Sean, who keeps up not only a store blog but also blogs for himself over here and runs a great store.

The excitement is almost unbearable. I guess standing outside the store for three days wearing that sandwich board that read, “Will work for yarn” actually paid off.

Woolcott is located in lovely Harvard Square, home of the famous Harvard Yard of Harvard University, that august institution to which parents shell out big, big cash-ola so that their kids can work hard and make a good start in life for themselves.

The flower of our youth, shown here buckling under the stringent demands of the Harvard workload.

In any event, when you are in the area, come over to Woolcott and see us!

Most importantly, however, I believe that this new job may mark the end of my yarn diet. Hallelujah!

Speaking of diets and going off of them, Sarah sent Alex these mouth-wateringly delicious cookies for his birthday:

Seemed like a good time to remind him that marriage means sharing all that you have with your beloved.

How does a person make cookies this good? To me, it remains a tantalizing mystery. Can I offer you a piece of advice? If my sister offers to make you some cookies, just say yes.

We are now moving inexorably into fall, and the final blooms of the summer won’t last long. This makes them even more beautiful.

As lovely as an autumn bride:

It really was a lovely day for a wedding. And doesn’t she look stunning?

At last, because I promised my friend Lorinda that I would (and because it really is entertaining), I took her “My Ten Names” quiz. The results were not uniformly successful because I have no middle name and thus am somewhat crippled when it comes to constructing funny names of this sort (Mom, hi. What were you thinking again?), I still have a couple of very good ones:

My Superhero Name, formed from my favorite color and my favorite drink:
The Red Mojito

My Futuristic Name, formed from my favorite perfume and my favorite shoes:
Lolita Lempicka Fluevog

Lorinda, being a good and decent person, did not include the classic “Porn Star Name” in her list, but since I am horribly corrupt, I can tell you that this one is formed by using the name of your first pet and the name of a street you lived on as a child.

Mine is “Wag Aspen.”

But I was blown out of the water by my friend Damon, whose Porn Star Name is “Winky Dor-Mar.”

Can anyone top that?

I sat down last night and sketched out Blue Bamboo.

 

On this one I’m thinking ahead and deciding on a size range from the start.  I thought about things like armhole depth, shoulder width, and length for the whole size range.  (And I wrote them down, too!  You would think this would be self-apparent, but unfortunately it is often not so.  I have fallen victim to the “I’m sure I’ll remember that” syndrome more often than I like to admit.)

Remember the charts?

 

This is where I ended up.  It’s still not quite what I want it to be; I want the leaves on the back motif to be a bit longer and more bamboo-like, which naturally requires some re-charting.  But this is enough to be going on with.

And then I sat on the couch late at night and cast on!

 

The embryonic Blue Bamboo back. 

I’m planning on side vents, so I’ll be working the back and fronts separately for a few inches before joining in the round.  You didn’t actually think I’d be knitting this in pieces, did you?  Never!

Onward.

P.S.  Ellen, I wore your silk shawl this morning when I walked the dog.  I felt simultaneously warm and glamorous!  Handknits can do that for a person.

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.