At the End of the Tunnel....

Hey all:

So my friend Ginger left this comment on my last post:

Puttermeister!
Puttermeister!
Where are you?!
Puttermeister.
[me, downstairs and outside of your blogging room, yelling up.]


So nice of you to have noticed! I haven't been knitting or writing very much at all this last month or so due to a nasty case of carpal tunnel. Given that we're also smack-dab in the midst of Grading Season, I'm trying--trying--to do as little typing as I can so as to save the burning sensation in my hand and wrist for writing paper comments and student letters of recommendation. I'm not gone, though--and it's nice to know I'm not forgotten. I'm actually going a little crazy with this whole no knitting thing, especially with Christmas and lots of travel on the horizon. Hopefully, I'll be back on the needles again soon. In the meantime--

Wolf Hall was pretty good. I loves me some Tudors. Nice to see Cromwell humanized, and that sanctimonious Thomas Moore get his. (Nobody who wears a hairshirt and loves self-flagellation can be as nice as Jeremy Northam made him out to be.) Plus, there were a good number of small jokes about Thomas-confusion. You know--because everybody was called Thomas something.

FO: Quincy

You may remember a little show called Quincy, M.E., starring Jack Klugman. Thanks to the intimate relationship my babysitter, affectionately known as Teevee, and I developed over my childhood years, I also developed a relationship with Jack. Whether he was Quincy or Oscar Madison from The Odd Couple, his was a face I saw quite frequently as a child.

This has nothing to do with that.

This nifty little had is from the new Made in Brooklyn booklet. At first, I thought the book and hat were just kind of interesting. But like Klugman, this hat kind of grew on me, and when I saw a friend's version, I figured, why the heck not. So here's mine (specs on Ravelry):

While this hat knit up pretty easily--it's just a band of garter stitch with a nifty i-cord edging that is simple to make but incredibly clever in design--it's a real, er, evil hat to graft together. And I say this having done the sidewinder socks, after which I claimed no grafting could ever intimidate me again.

Ah, the arrogance.

So, to the grafting. Montse Stanley has a really nice section on specific grafting tutorials: stockinette, purl, garter, and even ribbing. (Her book has become one of my favorites since embarking on the TKGA Masters program. Best one-row buttonhole by far.) She also recommends you practice grafting by pinning your work out and sewing from the pins rather than from the off the needles.

I, emphatically, do not.

It turned out to be a lot of work for a poor result. Here's my translation:
1. find your pins and a hat-sized Amazon book box. Enjoy your cleverness at finding the perfect item to pin onto.
2. lay out the garter stitch band and then put one twist in it. Feel super smug: you're onto something here.
3. put pins through 12,000 loops. Begin to notice that the pins encourage the loops to close, making them smaller and smaller and smaller....
4. drop and pick up stitches as you try to balance the contraption on your knees while watching old Buffy episodes.
5. Scream, then abandon.
6. Suck it up and just sew off the needles using Stanley's drawings, but not her contraption ideas, as a general guide.

Thankfully, I found some help with the i-cord grafting help here, but as it's only for an attached i-cord, the tutorial helped with one edge, but I had to just wing the far edge, which goes in the opposite direction. Did I mention I'm dyslexic? Due to my inability to simply reverse things, I winged it about seven or eight times. Not a fun flight, as the marital unit can attest. By the time I was grafting that part, he took to hiding in his shop, despite all the Sunday football that was on. Sometimes, knitting can be scary for everyone involved, even idle spectators.

Still, this was a cool pattern to work on, screaming and scared spouse included. Will I wear it in public? Dunno. It's a bit lopsided due to that fold, and I feel a bit Robin Hood in it. But I'm pretty happy with it nonetheless, as a kind of stamina and thought experiment.

The Hornby List: September

Books Bought

1. The Year of the Flood: A Novel by Margaret Atwood
2. The Essential Prose: Alternate Edition by Dorothy & Maas, Willard Van Ghent
3. English Passengers: A Novel by Matthew Kneale
4. Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences by Kitty Burns Florey

Books Read

1. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
2. Death on the Nile (Hercule Poirot) by Agatha Christie
3. Death of a Discipline (The Wellek Library Lectures) by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
4. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
5. Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences by Kitty Burns Florey
6. The Year of the Flood: A Novel by Margaret Atwood
7. A smattering of Romantic Poetry
   
8. Some Neruda poetry
   

Um. Hi. This is a little late, but you'll have to cut me some slack, because I threw a total wrench in my schedule by 1) going back to work, which is a real time-suck, and 2) taking time out to go see MARGARET ATWOOD in SF, for Crake's sake.

Seeing Atwood is, for me, a really big deal. I should clarify that, while Margaret Atwood likely neither knows nor cares, she and I have a history. Perhaps I should say, her books have formed an important part of my reading life since I was a teenager. In fact, I discovered Atwood, Robertson Davies, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the same year, when I was sixteen, and all of them have been my mental traveling companions in the decades since. Atwood has, in particular, been a crossover read for me: I read her books for deep personal enjoyment, and I have written about them academically quite a bit, too. My senior thesis was on linguistic tension in her novels; I gave a paper for the Margaret Atwood society at the MLA (and at Berkeley, and in Finland, and...and....and....), her novels were a part of my PhD dissertation, and I teach her work--fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and essays--pretty regularly in my classes. So clearly, her writings really speak to my psyche.

But I don't like a lot of it--and I think that's pretty cool, that I don't feel compelled to like or love it all. It's enough to think about it. I mean, her books from the 70s, with their divorces and non-communicative couples, don't have a lot to say to me, and, with regard to her more recent work, I found neither The Blind Assassin nor Oryx and Crake in need of more than one go (though I reread O&C while waiting for Year of the Flood, as a refresher). So when I found out about a year ago that her forthcoming book, The Year of the Flood, was a "meanwhile" novel, which takes place during the same time frame as Oryx and Crake, I was not exactly tingling with anticipation. But I read her work, no matter what, because I like the way her mind works, and I love the way her critical/poet's eye can unpack an image or chain of associations to reveal the many tensions it contains. (Perhaps my favorite of her most recent work is actually Payback, which does this kind of thing in spades.)

So about The Year of the Flood. It was...uneven. I don't mind post-apocalyptic; I don't mind speculative fiction (in fact, I love it); instead, I really think my issues surrounding this novel have to do with craft. The book felt incredibly uneven to me, and I didn't really have a sense of why I should care about the characters until about half way through. Perhaps most annoying was that I found a lot of the futuristic conceits less insightful than silly. The names for things in this book were particularly distracting: AnooYoo ("A New You") was particularly ridiculous, I thought, as it was cutesy, made the eye stumble, reminded me of Yoohoo chocolate milk, and was nothing any marketing company worth its salt would allow onto a label. That kind of thing just made me grind my teeth after a while.

In fact, writing this up, I just really find that there's not a lot to reflect on with regard to that novel: the characters, finally, were just too thinly developed. When I closed the book, I thought, so what? I keep wondering what, other than the overall, repeat message that corporations are out of control, science isn't necessarily in our control, and the world could easily go to hell in a handbasket (all of which I already knew from O&C) was the point.

Seeing Atwood herself do a reading again, however, was great. I last saw her in 1993 (I think--when Robber Bride came out), and it was like revisiting my youth to see her again. At the same time, this reading was also very different. She was gentler, more amused (or bemused), and less caustic than usual during the Q&A with the audience. It was also a little sad: she's 70, and seeing her age is a bit like seeing my parents age. I don't know Atwood as a person, but I know how her stories, ideas, and images have filled my years, and however I feel about her last book, I don't like to consider that I might not always have another Atwood book to look forward to.

So not to put too fine a point on it, I'm ambivalent: I didn't really like this one, but I want more; I really liked seeing her in person, hearing her sing, witnessing her amazing wit, but seeing her made me, already, nostalgic.

But given we're talking about Atwood, that tension seems appropriate.

Insights From A New Designer: Never Not Knitting Visits Sundays In Stitches

There are many, many reasons why I adore my local knitting group, Sundays In Stitches. I have a feeling everyone loves their own LKG, but the Sundays gals are really special, and not in a peanut bus kind of way. We are, to be sure, an ecclectic group with a wide variety of ages, backgrounds, and interests, but in addition to our mutual love of the fiber arts, we are united in our never-ending curiosity. This is a group of folks who can never stop thinking, wondering, exploring, or explaining. Love 'em to death.

Good conversation is never lacking at SIS.

Lately, we've had some ongoing conversations in which we wondered quite a bit what new knitwear designers go through in order to become professionals: how does one go about designed a garment and writing up a pattern? How do they do all that sizing and tech editing? How does publishing in a magazine compare to publishing on Ravelry?

For those of us who merely knit up the patterns, the process, the concepts, and the business end of things are quite a mystery. So rather than continuing to theorize, we invited a local budding knitwear designer, Alana (Nevernotknitting) to visit our group and give us the insider's point of view.

Talking shop.

Alana has several very successful patterns on Ravelry, including my particular favorite, the Playful Stripes cardigan (I love the colors she combined in the yoke and kind of want one sized for a grown-ass woman). She has a popular blog, creates a regular podcast (available on her blog and on iTunes), and is unfailingly generous in her support of other knitters. So we were thrilled when she visited our Sundays group to share her experiences and insights. I think the revelation for me was how little time an independent professional knitwear designer actually gets to devote to the designing part of the business.

Alana "in stitches."

Alana was fabulous: she brought the sample garments from her patterns, talked about the vagaries of trying to establish a business (of which there are many!) and balance those demands with those of family, brought a sample sketch to show us how she works from swatch to pattern, shared the secrets of schematics and tech editing, and she even brought in a project yet to be released.

We had, to be sure, tons of questions, but Alana, patient to the end, answered every one.

Alana and fellow podcaster, Knitsaholic (Melissa).

Many of us consider diving into the murky waters of design. Who hasn't had an idea and thought, "What does it take to make this happen?" Whether or not we actually do take the plunge, because of Alana's generosity, we now have a clearer idea of what lies beneath. Thanks, Alana!!

Why, yes. I am flammable.

Almost exactly a year ago, I went to a Habu workshop and trunk show in Santa Barbara at Loop & Leaf. That in itself was quite an adventure given that I had vertigo, took the train by myself, and walked around downtown Santa Barbara in order to find the little side-street on which the shop is located. I include this extraneous information to help convey the degree to which I am obsessed with Habu's fibers, Setsuko Torii's designs, and Habuliciousness in general. In case you've never had vertigo, it's like being really, really, really drunk--but with the ability to fear and to reason still intact. So it really was an act of will to get my lunging, swaying, lurching self down the coast.

Chinese Style Paper-Linen Pullover (Kit #89)
Tech specs on Ravelry

I went having pored over Torii's book and illustrations and completed one of the Kusha Kusha scarves; I fully intended to purchase some more steel to make a cardigan. Maybe it was the sort-of-drunk state of mind I was in--but once I was looking over and trying on the various samples at the trunk show, I became obsessed with the paper fabrics and the completed articles' strange rustling whispers. I'm not kidding: this shirt talks, softly, whenever I move. Clearly, it was calling to me. Everything about it seemed wrong for me--short sleeves, a high neck, and a very boxy fit are all intended for figures more birdlike than mine. (I know this because Susannah and Trinny, Timm Gunn, and other TV fashion experts have told me so.)

Closeup of the fabric before blocking.

But how could I resist the sense experience of knitting up this utterly unique fabric? I know, right? So I didn't.

Left: single piece, before blocking. Right: after blocking.

The workshop on reading Japanese pattern schematics was life changing--rather than presenting the information in a kind of HTML code system, as most European and American patterns do, the Japanese provide a basic graphic representation that includes cast on, increase, and decrease information, and, when called for, a charted stitch pattern, but for the Habu patterns at least, there are no specifics as to what kind of increases, decreases, cast on, button hole, or other elements to use; they leave that up to the individual knitter.

While the sense-experience of knitting up the paper wasn't nearly as enjoyable as the noises it makes after it's completed, the husband knocked together a nifty little cone-holder for me which sped up, neatened, and improved the experience overall.


As for the finished shirt, I wore it to work one day last week. And when three different people, all of whom know I'm a knitter, found out the shirt is made of paper-linen yarn, all of them exclaimed, "so you're flammable!" One even included "whoosh!" sound effects, in case I failed to grasp the full extent of my vulnerability to open flame.

I'll have to remember to stay away from smokers, I guess.