Danger Boy Dances in His Underwear

Testing out my new video camera. It's blurry. Or we're all drunk. Take your pick.

Taking It To the Mats

This picture makes my blocking look crooked, but it's really the picture that's wonky. I was standing on a chair with the camera held overhead, and the angle is funny. (Proving once again that I am a genius with a camera.)

I thought I would talk a little about the blocking process because I do things a little differently than some.

First, I soak the pieces for 30 minutes in cold water with a good blob (1 or 2 tablespoons) of hair conditioner dissolved into the water. Dissolve the conditioner in the water before you add the wool, or you'll get uneven distribution. The conditioner will soften the wool dramatically. It won't hide all the crunch in a rustic yarn, but it will mask the roughness and let the blocking go a little more easily. Cheap conditioner works just as well as the expensive stuff.

Next I insert blocking wires on the straight edges of the garment -- in this case, the side edges of the body piece -- and use those to stabilize the fabric as I pull and smooth and squoosh it into shape. The actual shaping can take a few minutes, but inserting the wires will shave a lot of time off the total. Pin the straight edges first, too, because those make good reference points for shaping the rest of the piece. (My mats have grid lines scored into them, so I can use those to make sure things are straight, too.

Not everyone uses conditioner and wires to block pieces like these. The other tools I use -- a straight-edge ruler and tape measure -- are pretty ordinary.

In this case, I wanted to block the sleeve to the body piece to make perfectly sure that the saddle was blocked to the proper measurements. So I'm doing one sleeve plus the front now and the other sleeve plus the back later.

There's still quite a lot of finishing work on this sweater before it will be wearable. Not just seaming, but knitting the braided bands at the collar, cuffs and hem. The bands are knitted on sideways. I'll post pictures of those as I do them, because it's kind of a cool technique that could come in handy if you ever need to lengthen something.

Special Note To An Interested Person

This is my desktop wallpaper. Don't have some stinky boy in the house to complain about it, neethur.

Scenes from a Train Window

Okay. So here's the story on this picture. I told Tricia I would help her catalog the yarn leftover from the closing of Nana's Knitting Shop. She promised to duly reward my with episodes of season 4 of the Tudors, featuring my boyfriend Henry who I adore. And who adores me. Or would if he ever knew me. (Humor me.) Wait -- let's all admire Henry for a moment so we can understand better the rest of the story.

























You see that? He could distract a saint, right? So we had ten episodes of the Tudors featuring my boyfriend Henry pictured above. And we had about 6 hefty bags full of yarn to catalog and photograph. Naturally, we decided to do a bag or two between episodes, which meant we were working really, really, really fast. I would dump out a bag, sort it quickly, and pass it to Tricia. She would make notes on the inventory records and snap the photo. Then I would scoop it up and stuff it back in a bag -- very quickly, because Henry doesn't like to wait for things like yarn indexing. He's impatient that way.

So we got through about half the total yarn and about half the total episodes, though sadly, many of the pictures are sort of insane. (Sort of? The one above looks like it was shot from a train window.)

But Trish, if you let me come back and watch the rest of the episodes, I do most faithfully promise to control my raging lust a bit better and let you take a proper photograph without rushing. Cross my heart. It won't be easy to keep a man like Henry waiting, but it will be a good exercise in discipline for all of us. ;)

Been a Long Time

It's been a long time since I put a big new project on the needles. For a year now, at least, it's been all little bits and dollops, scarves and socks, hats and baby mittens. And ripping out old, failed projects. And working on existing projects that seemed they would never, ever be completed.

So this feels like a real milestone, a real leap of faith that the corner has been turned and it's safe to tackle a big new project. le sigh

The project I've chosen is Mendocino, from Starmore's Pacific Coast Highway. It's a simple cardigan with some simple cable work on the bodice, but like most of Starmore's designs, it has that little something extra that makes me long to knit it. The way the cable is set into the shoulders, perhaps, or the beautiful collar, or just the cozy look of it.

As an added bonus, it ought to clear out about 20 balls of Sublime from the stash. Stash reduction is about to become my battle cry, not merely stash dieting -- details will follow.

In the meantime, happy knitting. (I know mine sure is.)

Miscellany

Nana's Knitting Shop's last week was a sad, bittersweet, angsty time, but I wouldn't have given up one moment spent at that back table. Not one. As sorrowful as the mood was, the chance to spend time there was something I'll always remember with pleasure. It was sort of lucky, actually, that I quit my job and destroyed my wrist (deQuervain's tendonitis, ew) during the final days. It meant there was little I could do beside hang out at that table and talk to people.

On that note, a few promised links regarding our far-ranging conversations of the past ten or so days.

RE: the Globe's recent production of Macbeth, which we gather was staged like a horror movie aimed at teenagers:
The Times of London
Telegraph
Official London Theatre


RE: You can't make this stuff up. It's too perfectly ironic.
Jesus being struck by lightning.


RE: Shetland-spun yarns
Jamieson's history, with emphasis on the difficulty of machine spinning Shetland wool
Shetland Wool Council's discussion of the breed

I'm hunting for the travelogue with the photos of the Jamieson's mill. It discussed the particular carding technique used with Shetland wools. If I can remember which blog that was, I will post the link later.

D. O. N. E.

Presenting Ishbel the Third. I think this might be the prettiest of the Ishbel trio, but we won't know for sure until next year when my friends and I gather in Los Angeles and show them off. Meantime, this white Ishbel will wing to Australia, and the Blue Skies Ishbel will journey to Kansas, with my love and friendship for the recipients.

I thought I would easily finish this Friday afternoon during open knitting at Nana's, but I stupidly miscounted my chart progression and suddenly realized I had a whole 'nother chart to knit. As lace knitters know, those last rows are always killers because they take a billionty times longer than you think they will. And I had 8 more than planned. Do the math, and this took eight billionty times longer to finish than I thought it would. And there went my fond and foolish plan to finish it Friday afternoon. Good thing I like knitting, eh.

So after the horrendous storm killed Chicago for a few hours, and after it was safe to drive home from Nana's (dodging tree branches and cursing broken traffic signals the whole way), I came back here, popped a Poirot video into the DVD player, and watched it almost twice through as I finished the shawl.

Which brings me to a question. Do any of you watch these Poirot movies? What do we think of them? This is my first exposure, and I'm ambivalent. It was fun -- the look of the series is beautiful, the acting was good, and it moved quickly enough on the first watching to slide right over all my objections at the leaps in logic. But on the second watching, I started analyzing the script -- a dangerous occupation -- and found myself calling out, "Objection!" to every bit of hearsay or other bad evidence. (Proving once again, you can take the litigator out of the courtroom, but you can never really take the courtroom out of the litigator. I haven't tried a case in 9 years, but I tried the crap out of that movie.)

That might be a personal problem. What do you all think? Thumbs up or down on Poirot?