Introducing My Husband

This is my husband. He's a very good husband, as husbands go. Even when other women want to pet and fondle him (and they do! Oh, do they! You should have seen the heavy petting at the Harlot's booksigning!) he remains Mine, All Mine. He's very nice to touch -- hence the hordes of women wanting to stroke him. He's an extrafine merino and you know what that means. Very soft, almost feels like cotton, but retains some of the elasticity and hand of wool.

When I knit the gauge swatch on this a few weeks ago, I was so amazed by the hand and feel that I took it to my SnB and went into paroxysms of ecstasy right there in the old coffee shop. Total yarngasm. I confessed a desire to have this yarn's babies, and now all my SnB buddies call the yarn my husband. They also keep acting like a buncha husband-craving hussies, but that's a whole other story.

I bought this yarn at The Fold, which is a very holy and mystical place, and also very dangerous. Do Not, under any circumstances, take credit cards with you to The Fold. The Fold has been sanctified to the worship of extremely gorgeous and elite natural fibers. When plastic crosses the threshold of a place like that, the plastic is cursed to its limits. Sometimes, in rare cases, this curse has been known to exceed the plastic limits.

Ask me how I know.

Don't mess with The Fold's supermojo is all I'm saying. Next time, I'm taking cash. Lots and lots of cash, because I'm only human after all. But still. Cash.

Anyway. Silver Creek Yarns sportweight merino, color Marine. The top picture probably comes closest to representing the true depth of color. That's the cardigan back of a fitted cardigan. The cables angle in at the waistline by decreasing the reverse stockinette field between each cable, then increasing again above the waistline. This picture shows the upper part of the waist with some of the above-the-waist increasing.

The hardest part of this project so far has been related to this waist shaping. There is a single purl stitch separating the columns of cables at the narrowed waist. That single purl stitch was distorting like crazy at first. I've never had ladders in anything before, but my first go on this almost looked like a cabled clapotis. Big honking holes.

I tried ptbl and other standard fixes, but nothing gave me the result I wanted. I ended up ripping back and re-knitting and paying very, very close attention to the way that single purl stitch seated itself on the needles so that it would not distort. It was slow and tedious, but it seemed to work. I'm not 100% satisfied, but it passes the prancing pony test.

Just to complete the picture, here's a shot of the below-the-waist shaping on those cables. It's a very simple cable with a 12-row repeat, cable crossings on row 3 and 7. I like the hourglass shape that the irregular crosses give to the cable and I think it complements the shaping of the actual cardigan. (I hope! Still lots of knitting left on this one.)

Holy Shirt!

I'm going to try to explain the shirt thing, but since my knitbuddy Knifty Red was the architect, she explains it better.

The short and highly suspect version of the facts-as-I-understand-them --

Guido, the guy from the "It's a Purl Man" podcasts, needed someone to design a logo. This was somehow connected to the Represent event in New York City and an appearance on the NBC Today show.

Kris designed something, and part of it was used, along with something else from a lady in Italy.

Kris has some contacts who were able to take her design and put it on t-shirts. The very first one went to the Harlot, and the rest went to our happy little SnB gang. See the Knifty Red blog for a picture of some of us with our shirts.

I love mine. It's soft and perfect for a nightshirt. Keeps me dreaming of cables all night long.

Thanks, Kris!


About the Pictures

My picture-posting woes continue, but I'm beginning to find ways around them. I've discovered that I can post up to three pictures without text in the time it takes to knit five rounds on the purple Bearfoot sock. If I add text to anything more than one picture, my pictures turn into those funky letter X boxes. I hate those things. Hate. Those things.

But at least it's no longer a pictureless blog. Progress, eh?

What She Got

What We Saw

What She Saw

Murphy's Law Strikes Again

The Knitterary Corollary to Murphy's Law: If there's a way to arse up a blog, it will be arsed most arsily.

If any of you can see actual pictures in the previous post instead of annoying little boxes with Xs in them, please, for the love of Addis, let me know.

Is it just me? Or does everyone have problems like this?

Mommy, What's a Harlot?

What she saw. Chicago knitters turned out in hordes for this event. Way to represent!

What we saw. The bohus is a thing of beauty. The woman wearing it ain't so bad, either.

This was my second time attending one of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's booksignings. The first, last summer, was a real turning point in my knitting life. But what led up to it was even bigger.

I'd been knitting quietly, in isolation, off and on for almost two decades, when one day about two years ago, I stopped in at the library to browse the pattern books. This was shortly after I began making that grand cosmic personality shift from "someone who knits" to "KNITTER" with a capital KNIT. And there on the bookshelf, wedged between a hat book and a ragged Mary Thomas, I saw the first Yarn Harlot book. Reading that book opened my eyes to the existence of the online global knitting community. (Not to mention that she helped me laugh at my own yarn obsession, which had lived in a pretty secret place until then. But that's a whole other story.)

So when I went to the signing last summer, it wasn't just about the book. It was to pay tribute to the woman who made me aware that there was an internet knitting presence. I knew about a local knitting group by then, but hadn't managed to attend any of their weekly meetings yet. I met two members of that group in the audience that night, and meeting them -- plus all the other knitters -- helped me get over my shyness about joining a knitting group.

I'm not a shy person. But for years and years and years, I didn't know any other knitters. Not really. I had met a few in the yarn shop in my former hometown, but it wasn't the kind of place where people mingled and bonded. It was more the kind of place where the clerks sniffed at my humble projects and scorned my student budget, and the patrons were afraid to touch anything. I wasn't all that sorry when it closed except that it left me nowhere to buy yarn except the big box stores. And we know what that means. We call those the Acrylic Years, and we try not to think about them much.

The funny thing is, I had witnessed the way the internet revolutionized the writers' community. And it just never occurred to me that it might have a similar effect on the knitting community. Maybe I'm just the slow knitter in more ways than one. But those early harsh experiences with the snobby knitting shop had pretty much closed me off to the possibility that other knitters might be worth finding.

Something else might have flung itself in my path and made me aware of all that I was needlessly missing. But it wasn't something else. It was that first Yarn Harlot book, and it changed the way I thought about knitting and the way I interacted with other knitters.

I went to the signing last summer to pay tribute to that book, and found a knitting community while I was there. I went last night because now that community has become such an integral part of my life that staying home would have been unthinkable.

All of which is just to say, Thank You, Stephanie.