Feral Knitter

Knitting, Books, and Islands

Last week I had a chance to spend some time in the San Juan Islands, in the NW corner of Washington state. I have a deep love for this group of islands, so I was grateful for the belated-birthday present that let me stay in Friday Harbor for a few days. Those are the Olympic Mountains in the background. We had one lovely day and several gray ones:

Selbu Stocking

I used three motifs from Selbuvotter by Terri Shea and four colors of Dalegarn Tiur to create this rather large stocking. When I began knitting in 1997, I made stockings for John and Shadow. A few years later, Gingko picked out yarn for her special holiday stocking. But somehow I'd never made one for myself until now. (I had won the red and white yarn in a raffle at the Seattle Knitter's Guild along with a copy of Folk Knitting in Estonia; I added the dark and light olive greens.)

I'm rather proud of the braiding detail--you can just see it on either side of the red band near the toe and at the base of the cuff. I have always been irritated by traditional braiding techniques--tangles and irregular tension were the inevitable results--so I got around these problems by casting off and then picking up in the bump behind the two sides of the cast off row. In the past I have frequently used the "pick up in the far side of the cast off row" to create a raised line that looks like embroidery; this time, I decided to try forcing the cast-off row to turn outward. I'm pleased with the result, which adds that 3-D touch that I find so charming.

Armenian Knitting

This "slim volume" from Meg Swansen and Joyce Williams arrived last week! This technique, which involves regular trapping of the carried color throughout the garment, has enormous potential for people who love stranded knitting. The book has some 11 patterns that show the range of design possibilities--the garments do not come in a wide range of sizes; for the most part, I see the charts and construction notes as stepping off points for adventurous knitters. Joyce's Olive Branch in particular calls to me. Meg notes that gauge in Armenian knitting differs from gauge in standard stranded knitting, so three "swatch" hat patterns are offered. 80 pages; hardback. Available from Schoolhouse Press.

Ravelry

Well, I succumbed. I have already found many uses for this amazing "database" of knitters and their obsessions. You can find me as (what else) Feralknitter.

Side Note

I have just finished an excellent book by Michael Perry called Truck: A Love Story. The blurb on the back of the book caught my attention: "Hilarious and heartfelt, Truck: A Love Story is the tale of a man struggling to grow his own garden, fix his old pickup, and resurrect a love life permanently impaired by Neil Diamond." When I realized that the book was set in rural Wisconsin, a place that I love, well, I've purchased new books with less provocation. Perry is a very good writer, funny and thought provoking. Plus I have lusted after an old pick up for a long long time...

...know when to fold 'em

Now, you know good and well that this knitter will go to any lengths to save a knitting project (see last post--the patient is doing well and will soon leave the hospital with a new button band).

But sometimes, sometimes the problems are too deep, too intractable, symptomatic of a fundamental disconnect between pattern, knitter, and yarn.

You know how it goes: Although the knitter knows what to do, she wavers. She sets the project aside, hoping against hope that something, anything, will change and make the project viable. The knitter consults with others, seeking out professionals and psychics. The answer is always the same, serving only to confirm the knitter's worst suspicions.

It's time to face facts: The Birddancing Shawl is no more. It was not the pattern--Near Solstice (a.k.a. the Birddancing Shawl) by Bridget Rorem is more than marvelous. It was not that I didn't desire to complete this--I should think that the hours I spent on this would show my devotion. No, it was the yarn. Cashwool by Lane Borgosesia is a lovely yarn, delicate and soft. But not the right yarn for this project. I had my suspicions--they nagged at me louder and louder everytime I picked up my knitting until I could hardly stand the voices and stopped picking up the project at all. When Marilyn Van Keppel, an extraordinary lace knitter, came to Seattle for the Nordic Knitting Conference, I took advantage of her experience to check out my thinking (when it comes to knitting, my ability to live in denial is quite amazing). And she agreed: the knitted fabric was not firm enough to show the pattern very well. 

But I am not a quitter! I have a lovely ball of white Zephyr silk/wool that is just the ticket and I will cast on again in November.

You can't keep a good knitter down for long.

Nerves of Steel and a Steady Hand

I've been consumed by work for the last few weeks, so I'm always a bit surprised when I've delivered the laster proofs (7 pounds of them!) to the FedEx guy and I take a look around at the shambles of my life.

But I'm ready, now, to face what needs to be done.

Time for a major operation on the Celtic Knot Cardigan. If you get squeemish during Nip/Tuck, you might want to look away. Because this is not simple cosmetic procedure, here--we are talking lung/heart transplant emergency surgery.

And yes, the tough-love intervention involved scissors.

So, to start with: what was the problem?

The Celtic Knot Cardigan is a bottom-up yoke sweater knit in the round following Elizabeth Zimmermann's percentage system as revised by Meg Swansen in The Opinionated Knitter. I've made several of these before, and the shaping has worked well for me. So I was quite unprepared for the ugliness that the mirror exposed when I tried the sweater on after steeking. It was quite lumpy at the shoulders, and it quite simply did not fit.

Not that I allowed reality to intrude. No, sir--I maintain a strong belief that blocking will solve a multitude of sins (in the recovery community, this is known as "denial"). But as I was grafting the underarm stitches, I got to thinking: I'm grafting the 15 underarm stitches. Hmm, 15 stitches. The underarms usually have about 8%-10% of the body stitches. This is a large sweater in Shetland jumperweight wool at around 7 stitches per inch. I'm pretty sure there are more than 150 stitches in the body. Hmm. Hmmmm. Hmmmmdddaaaaaaaaaaaammmmmm! There are 299 stitches around on this sweater. 10% would be in the 29 stitch region. Aughhghhh. I had set aside 10% TOTAL--5% under each arm rather than 10% at each point.

Here's how one little error multiplies itself through the yoke decreases:

So, here's how I approached the fix. First, I  located the row of stitches that united the sleeves and body.I then marked on the back where the underarm stitches should have been (I had 15 stitches, centered, therefore I had 7 stitches to either side of the center point when I should have had 13, so I counted out 6 more stitches from the existing underarm stitches). Here are the original 15 stitches--I removed the grafting stitches and am about to locate the appropriate place to mark on the back:

I snipped a stitch near the existing underarm and began pulling out that row in both directions--up to the marked stitch on the back and across the front to the cut steek. This is actually kind of fun, when you get over the fact that you are ripping up your very own knitting. When the ravelled yarn got cumbersome, I snipped it and started again. No need to try to save the yarn--that would be straying into martyr territory.

Note that the sleeves are once again separate from the body. I then treated the sweater the same way I would if I had been assembling it for the first time. I set aside the underarm stitches  on green yarn (27, this time, because I CAN learn from experience! Plus, I've checked the math many, many times....):

Then I began grafting together (or Kitchenering, if you prefer that term) the sleeve stitches to the yoke stitches until all the sleeve stitches were gone--and then I merrily grafted the body stitches to the yoke stitches--In other words, I re-created the row of stitches that originally connected the body and the sleeves. I did the grafting in two steps: first, the Frankenstein step, in which I use a blunt-tipped grafting needle to make big, sloppy stitches, only grafting about 30 stitches or so.

The second step is to go back over this mess with a double-pointed needle, working outward from the center of the graft, artistically tugging the yarn to make each stitch as like the ones above and below it that eagle-eyed, critical knitters can't see where the graft is.

When this was done, I had some extra yoke stitches:

I will now cut off the excess fabric and get on with the button band.

Whew, I need a massage. I can't kid you, my shoulders did get rather tense through this entire process! But it didn't take all that long, expecially when I think about how long it took to knit the yoke....

Getting the Swede On

I took some time off work to attend the Nordic Knitting Conference last weekend (at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle) and needless to say I had a great time! Knitters from around the country arrived, keen to learn from the teachers who had flown in from Scandinavia--Elsbeth Lavold, Vivian Hoxbro, Annemor Sundbo--and those based in the US with a particular expertise--Terri Shea, Susanna Hansson, Marilyn van Keppel, Carol Rhoades.

I took a class on Bohus Knitting, taught by Susanna. This was a MINDBLOWER, for sure! Bohus Stickning was known for the use of color--unlike Fair Isle knitting, the Bohus style was unrelated to any folk tradition (I refer you to the Bohuslan Museum website for an interesting summary of the history of this cooperative; also, Poems of Color by Wendy Keele is an excellent book, although the patterns were re-written for the heavier gauge the publishers thought Americans would prefer). The designers incorporated texture stitches into the colorwork, and the designs could call for 3 or 4 colors per row.

Not all sweaters were in the yoke style--it just happens that I didn't take photos of the other designs. The sweater construction was highly influenced by couture design--Susanna had us "excavate" the vintage garments to learn what we could about their construction.

I was wrong more often than I was right in my guesses, which means I learned a lot! We knit a wristwarmer from yarns dyed by Solveig Gustafsson to replicate the original designs--the yarn, a mix of wool and angora, was lovely to work with.

Kits for sweaters, hats, and scarves are available--their quality is quite simply amazing.

Susanna and I have had discussions about the difference between Bohus Stickning designs and Fair Isle. I was fascinated by a sample cuff she had: taking the class design, which incorporated most signature Bohus techniques, another cuff was knit without the texture--that is, Fair Isle style. This cuff was, to be blunt, uninteresting and, well, ugly. This is not an indictment of Fair Isle design, however--it's just that each mode of knitting requires different design considerations to come to life.

Hello...lo...lo...lo...lo.....loooooooo

That's me, trying to make contact from this bottomless pit of work that I've fallen into.

(Doesn't look so out of control in this photo....)

I haven't been able to carve out any time for knitting the past couple of weeks--although I WILL be taking Susanna Hansson's Bohus knitting class at the Nordic Knitting Conference this weekend!

Speaking of work, a BIG shout-out to Ryan's TMK, who talked me through a blood pressure-raising event involving lost files, imminent deadlines, and the potential for homicide or suicide. In addition to being a great work-out pal, TMK is incredibly generous with her time and expertise.

I found this wonderful book by one of my favorite authors on the subject of color use, Joen Wolfrem: Visual Coloring.

This is a book for quilters, but there's a lot here for knitters as well. Quilters work with larger blocks of color than Fair Isle knitters do, but the process of making color decisions is the same. Joen uses visual sources of inspiration to guide color choices (which is pretty much what I teach in my workshops). In addition to talking about the "how" of this process, she gave photographs to a number of quilters; the resulting gallery section shows a fascinating range of how people interpreted the photos in their work.

Speaking of books: Meg Swansen and Joyce Williams' new book, Armenian Knitting, will be shipping soon! I'll let Meg and Joyce describe the technique, but what an addition to the arsenal of skills a stranded knitter can employ.

Speaking of workshops, you guys crack me up! Your responses to the giant box of Spindrift colors I bought for the upcoming November workshop at Churchmouse Yarns & Teas was as impassioned as if I'd announced that Viggo Mortensen was my new boyfriend. That's what I love about knitters--priorities.

Speaking of workshops even more: I understand that the Churchmouse workshop is full and has a waiting list (hooray! this will be so fun--I'm especially jazzed about the follow-up session to trouble shoot and/or applaud the swatches). If you weren't able to sign up, I have some good news: I was talking with Suzanne Pedersen, the organizer of the annual Madrona Fiberarts Retreat in Tacoma, Washington, and I will be teaching there for sure this February. She will be putting more details on her website soon; she promises that the full class schedule will be posted by October 29th.

Good movie you may have missed: SlamNation. Here's the Netflix description: Director Paul Devlin's fast-paced documentary follows four bards as they head to the 1996 National Poetry Slam. The competition begins with the Grand Slam tournament at New York City's Nuyorican Poets Café, and then it's off to the nationals for champs Saul Williams, Beau Sia, Mums the Schemer and Jessica Care Moore. The quartet vies against 26 other teams from across the country in a dramatic contest awash with tension, enmity and controversy. [My note: there is some questionable material in the poetry, that's for sure, so if you have kids check the movie out before they see it. But it's a great look into a subculture I didn't know much about.]

Good deed for the day: Rachael is vying for a chance to have her romance novel read by the editors at a large publishing company. Here's the heartfelt letter she has sent out:

Hi there.

Please forgive the mass mailing -- I have a favor to ask.

I'm in a competition you may have already heard about. I wrote a book, a romance, full of yarn and alpacas and sheep and hot knitter-on-shepherd action (no, really). I entered it in Gather.com's First Romance Competition. I posted the first chapter, and it garnered enough votes to move on to the second round (in the top 25 of more than 300), so I'm thrilled to say that I'm a finalist, with people now voting on the second chapter. It's kind of an American Idol type of thing, if you can imagine, and this second round is still vote-driven, and the the most important thing to know is that if I end up in the top three, with the most votes, I move on to the last round where THE WHOLE NOVEL IS READ BY SIMON & SCHUSTER and their favorite is published. Oh, my god. I would like that. I would love that.

So I need your vote. I *really* need your vote. I'm in the top four right now, and the three people ahead of me have LOTS of friends. I need to be in the top three to move on, and you will make ALL the difference.

Here's what you do: Read chapter one, but don't vote on it. That one is nice and content and voted on as it is. Please ignore the typos. They hurt my soul, but they're there.

Then read chapter two and please DO vote. If you like the chapter at all, please give it a 10, as they only count 10s (they throw out all votes of 1-9). The chapters with the most 10-votes win.

Even though I know you want to, don't vote more than once, since they're watching for IP fraud. And you DO have to register with their site in order to vote, but they won't spam you, and they don't share or sell email addresses. They will send you a daily email which you can easily opt out of.

Oh, please, please? And will you forward this note on if you like the chapter? To all YOUR email contacts?

Thanks so much. Here you go:

Don't vote on chapter one:
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977094360
DO VOTE on chapter two:
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977126255

All my thanks. Really, ALL my thanks. It means so much. Whoo-hooo!
xo
Rachael

Do you like puppies? Rainbows? A gentle rain on a November evening? A vote for Rachael is a vote for all that we love in this world.

Oh, was that laying it on a little thick?

And in the Good Deeds department, don't forget that Cara is still collecting donations to Heifer International. Every $10 that you donate gets you a chance to win some fantabulous prizes. Plus Heifer has to be one of the very best charities out there. The link to the Spin Out registry is on her sidebar, and don't forget to send her an email telling her how much you donated. 

Gotta go, faithful readers. I am plotting dozens of wonderful new Fair Isles and willl soon astound you with my magical surgery on the Celtic Knot Cardigan (and I hope to astound you by finishing the Denim Raglan I started some time ago). LOTS to look forward to after I finish up this workload--should be done, for the most part, at the end of next week. Then I'll start showering regularly again.....