Road Trip

Last week my mother asked me if I wanted to go to the Covered Bridge Festival in Parke County, Indiana, for a long weekend. We used to do this every year with a group of women, including some of her high school girlfriends and their daughters. In recent years, what with mom's health concerns and my travel schedule, we haven't been able to manage it.

Anyway, it sounded like a fine idea to me, so away we went for a long sunny weekend of shopping, eating, chattering --

-- and driving. We put 600 miles on the car, about 200 of which was at night. But the daylight drive time was sufficient for me to finish the HPYC socks pictured above. My feelings about this yarn haven't changed. Great dye job, lousy base. The finished socks feel a bit flimsy.



























Luckily, I brought another ball of sock yarn just in case I finished the HPYC socks. This is Alpaca Sox on size 1 needles. This yarn is lovely to knit, soft and springy and responsive to the touch. It's fuzzing a little already from the alpaca content. We'll see how they wear over the long run. Using size 1s instead of my ubiquitous 1.5s ought to minimize any pilling.

The editor in me is compelled to say this....
As you're listening to the news these days, regardless of your political slant, try to keep one thing in mind. The difference between "voter fraud" and "voter registration fraud" is much like the difference between "lightning" and "lightning bug." Get upset if you want to, but know what it is you're getting upset about.

(apologies to Mark Twain for that one)

A Friend Sent Me This Lovely Poem

All Over The World

women are knitting
in Ireland they are knitting thick
cream cables each with their special stitch
so when their man is dragged out of the sea
with his face bloated purple
they will know him

in New York they are knitting on subways
with bright orange yarn stitch after
stitch and folding up their needles
tucking them into the plastic bag inside
a flowering tote
in time to the train wheels as
the subway stops and they get off

in England they are knitting in airports
not only the English the Indians
the Pakistani the Americans they are
all sitting in Heathrow Airport knitting
long indecipherable scarves for persons
unknown

in Italy they are knitting black sweaters
for the saints with the methodical care
they perform upon their rosaries

women in Wales are knitting the dawn into
peat bog afghans girls in Ghana are
knitting tribal chieftains into unimagined
legends women in Chile are knitting
blood into the stockpile of tourniquets
waiting for the next round young women
in Istanbul are knitting far into the future
which is a replica of the past and it keeps
shrinking the closer they move into tomorrow

women in Iran are knitting insignias of the
oil companies to be sewn into the
covers of the coffins women in Ethiopia
are knitting green and white and red ribbons
to be worn around the heart of those who
will not recognize the outcome

women in Russia are knitting peaceful parables
that will win the Nobel Prize
with long Slavonic colours of melancholy
and heart despair

women in Kansas are knitting according to the
latest catalogue in yellow and white
they are knitting strands of wheat into their
needles and they will
fill their kitchens with the abundance
that smiles because Kansas has not been bloody
since the time of the fierce old man John Brown

women in Amsterdam are knitting blue and white
porcelain doilies that are brittle and break
quickly unless purchased by tourists
their daughters are knitting with the
precision of an etching deep brown
quilts to cover themselves and their
lovers against the piercing sky

women in Paris are knitting bright Picasso
sweaters that they will never wear because
even now they do not know what makes them
choose those colours

women in the swamps and rivers of Indochina
are knitting the reeds and nettles into the
steel of machine gun bullets that will
explode with warmth into the bodies of
the men that are cold with the ignorance
of trespassing and longing for comfort

girls in vacant towns
inbetween cities inbetween rivers on
maps are knitting their hopes in
small stitches echoing into each other
like muffled mirrors the needles
click smoothly in the language all
of the same word over and over
that no one can read the
same word over and over

Christina Starobin.

Pink Things, and Why I Love Australia (Even Though I've Never Been There)

Here's the back of the pink wool vest. Seven inches into the armholes. 4.5 to go. Also, that ball in the upper right corner is only ball four. I have thirteen. Which means this vest might end up with sleeves.

Blah blah blah, enough of that. Look what the mailman brought!

























Yes, I have Tim Tams. No, I won't share them. Mine! All mine! (And a clever viewer might note the package is already open.)

Tim Tams, for the uninitiated among you, are like the Oreo of Australia. Two chocolate wafer cookies, sandwiched with chocolate cream, and the whole lot drenched in milk chocolate. Dude. These cookies make me happy. Big happy.

Other good things from Australia:
-- Violet Crumbles. Imagine a crunchy honey pillow coated in chocolate. (Imagine, because I won't share these either. Heh.)
-- Chocolate koala bears filled with caramel. Like a chocolate Santa, only Australian style. (These didn't make it into the picture because my dad made off with them. The candy koala rescue posse will be meeting in the front hall in five minutes. Bring weapons.)
-- Wool. Of course! I didn't put it in the picture because I was wearing it and forgot to take it off, but Bron knit me a lovely buttoned scarf. That girl can knit.

Best thing of all from Australia:
-- that book!!! Hot diggity day-umm! I was going to read submissions all weekend, but screw that! I want to read Bron's book! It's not available in the US yet, and I feel downright special for being able to get an advance look at this book from "a thrilling new Australian voice." :D

So, if any of you are looking for me, I'll be the sugared-up reader clutching candy wrappers and turning pages as fast as I can read them. Oh, yeah, baby, that's what I call the makings of a great weekend!

Happy September 29!

I MADE IT!

I went two solid months without casting a new thing on. Not socks. Not slippers. Not hats or scarves or mittens or sweaters or vests.
Not.
One.
Thing.

*snoopy dance*

And of course, I celebrated by casting on two things.












This is some pink worsted-to-bulky wool which has been marinating in my stash for, um, well, let's see.
*gets out calculator*
*performs complex math*

Yeah. Forfreakinever. That's how long. 13 skeins, 87 yards each, taking up a lot of space. All I ever wanted to do with this was a simple stockinette vest. No frills. Just knitting.

So I cast it on, and with a gauge of 4 stitches to the inch on size 10s, it whips up quick. That's about 2.5" of the back, knit this morning while I loafed for as long as it took to watch last night's Mad Men episode on demand. (Roger's an ass. I hate Jane. Pete is mean.)

This project will live on my desk for a while. Here's my theory on this one. I've been keeping plain socks on my desk, and socks in my purse as my travel knitting. With only one sock OTN now (woo hoo!), I'll carry that in my purse and leave some other plain, simple knitting on my desk to work while I dictate revision letters and read slush. And I need to clear out drawer space currently occupied by this pink wool. Hence, a new desk knitting project is born.

But you know what I've really been longing to cast on....
---drumroll----

The Kyoto!












Oh, baby, how gorgeous is that. Look at that sheen, that halo. I think I'm in luuuuuurve. This yarn feels like a dream.

I cast on the sleeve, ignoring the directions -- well, not ignoring them precisely. More like, I looked at them, said, "Nope. Not doing it that way," and cast on something different. So I did pay enough attention to the directions to decide to throw them out. That's not exactly ignoring, is it?

Right. Semantics. Now that I've knit three inches of the cuff, I reckon I'd better go figure out what I'm doing here. I don't want to get caught in my usual cycle, which as we know goes like this:

1. Scorn the pattern with much harrumphing.
2. Knit blithely without doing any math or planning.
3. Realize what a disaster I'm making.
4. Keep knitting anyway.
5. Realize the disaster is failing to magically self-correct.
6. Frog it.
7. Do just enough bad math to have to repeat these steps indefinitely.

But not with this yarn. This yarn has a high mohair content. I'd forgotten what that meant until I started knitting with it this afternoon. So now that I've remembered, three inches into my knitting-on-the-fly highwire act, I'm going to pause and redraw the pattern and calculate my increases, and all that good stuff, and then I'm going to double and triple and quadruple check my numbers, because DANG it I DO NOT WANT TO RIP THIS BACK. EVER.

(Bonus points to anyone who remembers those pink needles.)
(No, I haven't found my addis yet.)

FO: Sockotta Socks

Take a close look at those toes. There's just the thinnest slice of green there, where I kitchenered the toes closed. It's a perfect match on the stripes, in fact, and even the jogs in the striping come in exactly the same spots all up and down the socks.

And yes, the length of the legs and feet is identical, to the eighth-inch.

That's the best thing I can say about the Sockotta. Crissy, if you're out there, I bet you would also appreciate the striping in this yarn. You share my obsession with matching feet.

I have another skein of Sockotta in Christmas red. I've decided that eventually, when I get around to it, I'll double the yarn and knit dish cloths as Christmas grab bag gifts. This yarn would be great for scrubbing pots. It's got that stringy, kitchen-cotton feel to it.

So that's another FO in the 2008 column before my self-imposed ban on new projects ends. I'm debating my weekend knitting. Fulmar's sleeves have an error a few rows back -- and, remarkably, I managed to duplicate the error in both sleeves. So I may tink that. Or I may try to finish the last pair of socks currently OTN -- the Hand Painted Yarn Co socks. I'm on the second sock, but not far into it, so finishing is probably not within reach.

Anyone else fighting massive allergy attacks right now? I can't hear or breathe. Thank you, Mother Nature. Allergy medicine seems to improve things only in that it knocks me out so that I'm no longer conscious of how miserable I am. I'm having a hard time focusing, and this may turn out to be a knitting weekend if only by default because any other activity feels beyond my reach.

Farewell, Summer of Sleeves

I blinked, and the summer was over.

This was going to be the summer of sleeves, the summer in which I dedicated myself to knitting six sleeves on three sweaters-in-progress. I declared it so around the end of May, and then promptly set about knitting two brioche berets, two pairs of mittens, some socks, a vest -- just about everything EXCEPT sleeves.

Is it any wonder that my driving determination lately has been to recapture my focus? I've been living a butterfly's life, flitting from task to task with no plan and little comprehension of my own personal butterfly effect. This is highly atypical behavior for me. And I can't say I like it.

But the truth is, I hadn't even realized how bad it had gotten until we were at the editing retreat in August, and one of my friends made a gentle joke at my expense about unfinished manuscripts lingering on my desk. Dammit, she was right. My lack of purpose and plan has led to lingering, unfinished business in every corner of my life.

These things don't happen all of a sudden, of course. It's not like one day you're driven to succeed and the next, you're coasting. Instead, I found myself jiggling my schedule to make room for things like tv -- and that should have been a big warning sign in and of itself. I bet I haven't averaged five hours of tv a week over the course of my life. So why would I suddenly need to stop everything to watch American Idol, of all ridiculous things? And why would I skip a trip to the gym in order to do so?

I know why I did that. There were reasons. We all go through times when the urge to play ostrich swamps other concerns.

But since returning from Goat Rock, I've been taking stock and pulling my head out of the sand. Just as the change from focused to unfocused didn't happen in an instant, the return to focus is also taking some time. I started by reprioritizing my workload. I took inventory, set up a schedule, made goals. I created ways to hold myself accountable.

And I knit some damn sleeves.

Anyway.

So what's next? Right now, I'm working on finishing the Sockotta ribbed socks and the Fulmar sleeves. On Monday, I get to cast on something new, and that "something" will be a sweater from that purple Kyoto.

By that time, I expect I'll have finished the Sockotta socks -- or they'll be very close. That will leave me with one pair of socks OTN, and that's where I'll keep that number. I'll keep one plain sock on my desk, as always, to knit when I'm dictating or reading. My other knitting time will go toward finishing things in progress and toward Banff.

Banff is an easy sweater which won't take a lot of thought. Knitting the Veronik Avery halter vest this summer reminded me how much I enjoy making simple fabrics with just a bit of design interest in the shaping. So I'll have Banff, and Catherine Parr will be wearable before the end of the year, and Fulmar will continue to be the project I knit when I have time for something a bit more challenging.

I'll finish Catherine Parr, the Fulmar sleeves, and the new Kyoto sweater before the end of the fall. And that means we've moved from the summer of sleeves into the fall of finishing.

Oh, Snap!

Someone out there is shaking her fist at this picture right now. Heh. We're not racing or anything, but I know she wants to finish her Catherine Parr sleeves, too. So we'll call this photo extra motivation.

I'm really glad to have these sleeves done. Cascade 220 is a dependable, reliable yarn, but it isn't all that glamourous. Now that the sleeves are done, I'm going to knit something softer for a while to break up all that Peruvian crunch. The skin on my fingers needs a rest. I'm starting to develop a callous on my index finger from the yarn, and no amount of lotion seems to help with the dryness.

Still churning along in my no-new-projects groove. I left for San Francisco on July 29, and that's also the last day I cast on something new, a pair of plain socks perfect for the airplane. The embargo is in effect until September 29, two months later.

And I feel like this is a worthwhile experiment. I'm making progress on outstanding projects despite not having a lot of knitting time. I think I'm down to 6 projects OTN, which is as low as it's been in quite a while. And of those projects, I have two pairs of socks, both of which are on the second sock now, and neither of which is all that exciting. Catherine Parr, which now just needs a yoke and some reknitting on the hem. Fulmar, a forever project, and the cabled cardigan which has been in almost perpetual time-out. And the felted bag, which is rough felting wool, irritating to the touch, which I almost have to bribe myself to work on.

In other words, I'm not feeling that any of the current projects are at the top of the queue, yearning for my attention, for various reasons. But I will chug onward until the 29th, because these are all projects I'd like to finish.

And then on the 29th? I have something planned for that gorgeous Kyoto. 'Nuff said.