Up From the Heap and Down to the Frog Pond

Ever since I got back from vacation I have been on a knitting treadmill with the Jali Cardigan [ravelry link] pattern.  I am vastly enamored of the combination of lace and cabling, the concept of a layer showing through the lace, and the silk-bamboo yarn I found to make it with.  I'm not sure whether my obsession is a good thing or a bad thing, though, because just after I took this picture:

it was time to divide for armholes and I discovered the pattern had sneaked around and was off as much as 8 stitches in some areas.  Crap!  There is just no way to fake or finagle that big a miss.  So merrily I frogged away clear down to the middle of the first repeat.  FOR THE 6TH TIME.  Mind you, I didn't get so far the first 5 times, but still...

This has certainly taught me something about my approach to lace knitting, which is that I don't do well just reading off the chart.  I need to learn the rhythm and proportion of the pattern so that I can work without the chart much of the time, knowing what to expect and where stitches are likely to get lost or created.  Apparently, at least in this case, I am a very slow learner.  Add to my trouble the fact that I'm working with black, which hides problems in all but the best light.  This will certainly be in my favor with little glitches, but I've got to do better than my previous tries.  What keeps me going is the two (plain stockinette) sleeves already made, the forgiving strength of the yarn, and the fact that despite it all, dammit, I still am fascinated with the pattern.

But I took a little break to complete an item from the Heap of Malfunctioning Rubble and regain a little of my self-respect and sense of accomplishment.  Aided by the discovery of the tiny ball of yarn I needed to finish sewing up my Dancing Vines sweater made, I dimly recall, out of Elann's denim yarn in a currently-not-available light blue.

Also visible in the picture is the poisonous jolly fairy ring of fly agaric mushrooms that have sprung up around one of our birch trees, just one of the features of the mushroom farm our yard has become as a result of the rainy rainy summer.  I guess the rain is a good reason excuse to stay inside and try (again) to knit the Jali cardigan.

Ptropical Ptarmigan

I'm back from a wonderful time in Tahiti! I think I will blog up the trip and its pictures separately for family and friends, but meanwhile, here are a couple of knittish bits that only you will appreciate.

First thing:

Doesn't this underwater sponge thingy look a whole lot like a pile of unblocked lace knitting?  Well, I thought so, anyway.  Maybe I should have taken video of it, because it was soft and waved around in the water.








Second thing:

During the partial phases of the eclipse you can create an amazing pinhole camera effect that shows the crescent shape of the partially obscured sun by casting the shadow of anything with small holes on a white surface.  Now, let's see--what do I have with small holes??  A knitted lace shawl!!  Tougher to photograph than I thought for various technical reasons and spousal reasons (there is a limited amount of time that a willing spouse will stand on the crowded deck of a ship holding a lace shawl up in front of a wall).  But in the lower right part of the picture you can see that the smaller holes definitely show up as crescents!
The real deal was done by a guy with much prior experience who makes elaborate arrangements of holes drilled in thin sheets of wood in advance of the event:

See all those bazillions of tiny crescents? (Click on the photo to embiggen & truly appreciate.)  Maybe next time I will knit a specially themed lace pattern to do the same thing? Probably not.

But none of this is very colorful, is it?  And bright color in the bright sunshine is the hallmark of the tropics, n'est ce pas?  So here's a colorful Tahitian fiberwork for you, a tifaifai, the beautiful applique Tahitian quilt:

Shawl's Done!

She's done and blocked, and is as lovely as I had hoped.

It's soft and slithery, blocked out to a respectable 60" x 20",  and drapes wonderfully.  Just what I wanted.  What I learned: could have used a larger needle for a more enveloping shawl.  The pattern could open out even more and still be OK.

Handmaiden seasilk is such a wonderful yarn.  The color variation is so subtle it scarcely shows up in the photo.  And I had heard that it smelled of the sea, but had not myself found that it smelled of anything in particular either in the hank or warmed by my hands as it was knit.  But get it wet and WOW!  A beautiful, fresh ocean smell from the kelp fiber, unmistakable. The perfect accessory for a tropical cruise.

What This Town Needs Is A Vegan Bakery

A brief detour, today, from the knitting to another household craft.  Background: my grandson has food allergies that include eggs and milk.  This makes him, in effect, a meat-eating vegan.  This also makes the bakery a very dangerous place for him.  Enter my heroines, the authors of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar.  I've lately become so enamored of the cookies that I've wished somebody would start up a vegan bakery in Anchorage. (I can't do it myself. I just don't have time, energy, or desire for yet another career. Sorry.)

But on to the cookies!  The recipes are so good I probably will make my way through them all eventually.  Right now we're deep into the chocolate ones because the Grandboy adores chocolate, and he adores it so much that he picks chocolate chip cookies apart and only eats the chips.  You can imagine how long that takes and how messy it is, right?  Better to make them chocolate all the way through.

But pass the cookies, please, let's have a taste! 

These are Oreo knockoffs.  Cookie nerds would remind you that Oreos are already vegan, but when you make your own at home--WOWEEE!  And you can play around with the filling and make your own variations. I've tried cherry, mint, and peanut butter so far and all work out great.  Making your own also gives you an insight into what fat bombs these guys are.  An incredible amount of shortening and margarine involved here.  All the better for the Grandboy, however, whose doctor has advised calorie-dense foods.

And here are the cute chocolate pretzels and the Mexican snickerdoodles.

The pretzels are sweet; the "salt" is pearl sugar, although any big-grain sugar would do.  The snickerdoodles are cinnamon chocolate.  For adults you could include the little pinch of cayenne--for the kiddo it seemed better to leave it out.  I don't think preschoolers expect their cookies to bite back!

Ooops. I almost forgot. This is a knitting blog, isn't it?  Let's look at some knitting, then:

Up close and personal with the seasilk shawl.  I've got quite a bit more done, see?

Now it's a race against time because I have a serious chance of getting it done for my trip on the 3rd of July.  Done and blocked, that is.  And by the look of it, it's going to have to be, as they say, severely blocked if it's going to be as wide a shawl as its pattern.  That's it.  I've got to get off this computer and KNIT!

Swimming in the Seasilk

Note to Winter Sunset Cardigan: It's not my fault that the weather turned warm and the thought of a giant lapful of wool is so much less inviting than a hanky of lightweight slippery seasilk in cool marine colors.  You'll just have to wait in your basket for a while.

Here's what I've got so far:

That's a lifeline a couple of repeats down, and the waviness is a demonstration of why it's such a good idea even though it's a hassle to put it in.  No prizes for guessing why it's there or how many times I ripped and redid the first couple of repeats before I caved in to necessity.  If you think it's a hassle to pause and thread the lifeline in, you haven't had to rip 10 rows back and try to pick up live lace stitches.  Part of all this trouble is that the center lace pattern is deceptively complex.  I still haven't been able to memorize it like I have the edges, and have accepted the fact that I probably will have to carry around a little 5"x3" lace chart for the duration.  The great thing about knitting a stole shape is that once you get established, you just repeat and repeat until you run out of yarn. No shaping, no change. And the center being as tricky as it is, one has to be on one's toes all the time, so it's not likely to get boring any time soon despite the repetition.  The hawkeyes among you will discern that there is a mistake in the middle (below the lifeline), but I have judged it too minor to be noticed when the shawl is worn.  As my Scottish friend Molly used to say, "A blind man'd be glad t' see't."

A Light Bout of Startitis

I've been ruminating on what to do for a posh tropical wrap for the upcoming trip to Tahiti. A seacell/silk shawl or stole seemed right, and white was the first choice, but it was next to impossible to find white seasilk.  When I got some from a place that supplies it for dyeing I found out why.  It's natural color is a kind of yellowy brown-tan.  It's the color of white things that have aged from too much sun exposure (paper, cloth).  It might be an ironic match for yours truly by the end of the voyage, but I don't think we'll go there.  I quickly understood why it is mainly available in beautiful handpainted colors.  (I should get myself hand-painted?  I think it's called tattooing, and it's a specialty of the South Seas, but I don't think I'll go there, either!!)

Then I had a thing for fancy sea island cotton, which only comes in white, but the yarn was extremely thin and would have to be doubled, which would double the expense, and I just wasn't in love with it somehow.

 The skeins of seasilk actually look creamier in the photo than in real life.  Think dirty cream.  The cotton is laid on top of the seasilk for size contrast.  It seems more of a thick thread than a yarn.

And then I was evaluating the micro area of my closet devoted to dress up clothing suitable for the tropics and realized that aqua would be a cool color that would go with everything.  Eureka!  A new quest began and ended with a kit that contains a pattern and this:

Handmaiden seasilk in Blue Lagoon.  I just had to wind the balls and cast on.  I love how the pattern is lace, but with cables on the borders.  And I think the stole shape will be more versatile (a mega-scarf?) than the traditional triangle-y traditional shawl shape.  I don't even care if I don't get the thing done before we go in July.  What with the small amount of yarn and its light, slippery feel, it would make a good take-along project for the trip.

Meanwhile, the neck and front edges are on the Winter Sunset.  Ends are being woven in; facings tacked down, and then, I think, the ends of the sleeves will need to be whacked off and the cuffs re-knitted to make a more reasonable length.  Great thing about having cut your sweater up the middle from stem to stern--you're much less shy about taking the scissors to it again!

Book Review: Sweater Quest by Adrienne Martini

It's no surprise that this book appealed to me.  It's about a woman who decides to challenge herself by knitting a major fair isle sweater.  At this point non-knitters are already starting to doze off while knitters' ears perk up.  It's definitely a book for The Craft and not the muggles; it's about knitting, the knitting world, and issues important thereto.  That's OK--there are millions of us worldwide and the internet (dare I say?) knits us into a community however far we are flung.

 The danger in the subtitle comes from Martini's choice to make an Alice Starmore sweater, Mary Tudor, the cover girl on the book Tudor Roses.  Starmore is famous both for being a design genius, especially with fair isle colorwork, and for being very adamant about control of her work and name, to the extent of lawsuits against yarn manufacturers and web sites.  Anyone can probably do what they want in private with any published pattern, but does publishing this book invite the wrath of the designer?

The chapters follow Martini through the process of acquiring the book containing the pattern, the difficulty of finding the right yarns, the misery of multiple failures at merely counting cast on stitches correctly, the emerging beauty of the pattern's color changes, the satisfying rhythm of the later pattern repeats.  Along the way, she makes entertaining and relevant digressions into the histories of Shetland and Fair Isle knitting, Mary Tudor and her clan, Starmore's clashes with yarn makers and web discussion leaders, eBay sellers and yarn shops.  She travels to Nashville and New York to interview Ann Shayne and Kay Gardiner of Mason-Dixon Knitting, to Toronto to see Amy Singer of knitty.com and  Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, the Yarn Harlot.

  The main question she toted along through the book like a big rock in her knitting bag was, "Does making a small change in a Starmore design (say, substituting a yarn for which the original no longer exists) still make it an Alice Starmore sweater?"  Ordinarily this is not something that preoccupies your average knitter, but Starmore has gone to extreme lengths to protect her "brand" and ownership of her creative property, and many of the pattern books are out of print. [an aside: This book may have increased the scarcity.  At this writing Tudor Roses is not available for any price on eBay or Alibris.] The original yarns have not been available for years.

The wisest answer was given by the good ol' Harlot:

I saw an Alice Starmore online, one of her cable ones, knit out of--just hold on to something to steady yourself--Red Heart acrylic yarn in the Fiesta colorway.  It was rainbow variegated.  It was blinding.  I bet when Alice Starmore saw that, it was so far from her vision that she was like, "please do not call this an Alice Starmore.  That is clearly your interpretation."  But she wrote the pattern.  They are all her cables.  And that person could say that they had not departed at all...

Sometimes I have bad, dirty feelings if I use, like, a pattern distributed by Berroco and not Berroco yarn...I probably only feel that way because I've seen a couple of my patterns knit in ways that I had never imagined and thought, "This is not my vision."

At that point I remember what my mother used to say to me, which is that one of the central tenets of a happy person is that when they give something away, they cease to care what happens to it.  I struggle with that.

Publishing is not giving away, and certainly no one should profit by stealing another person's idea or creation.  But publishing is turning your creation loose in the world and people will make of it what they will according to their own ideas and capabilities.  No matter how tight your grasp, you cannot maintain total control.  Hanne Falkenberg, the Danish knit designer has always kept control of her work by selling it only in kit form.  Alice and Jade Starmore now do the same by selling kits for many of the old designs plus some new ones on their web site Virtual Yarns.  (and I am developing a serious lust for Oregon, Beadwork, and Dunadd.)

This is a rather specialized book, and probably your knitting group rather than your book group would want to read it.  But to me it was as addictive as a detective story--I carried it around with me everywhere on the off chance I would have a few minutes to read a little bit more.  Adrienne Martini got up inside my head, added some great information furniture, rearranged some of what was already there, and stirred some cobwebs.  I now may refer to my Winter Sunset cardigan as my Winter Sunset inspired cardigan.

And you may take this blog, print it out and decoupage it to your toilet seat.  Feel Free.  But if I see you're selling Ptarmigan Ptoilets on Etsy you will hear from my lawyer.