11.29.2006

Meta Meme

How very so to make and spread a meme so as to obtain data and insights into how a meme spreads. This is exactly what one UC Irvine English grad student is trying to do for his presentation at a panel of this year’s MLA conference (ah, if only my data gathering were as easy as pleading for public sympathies!). So, in the spirit of supporting (fellow) graduate students everywhere sloughing towards graduation and giving a little exposure to the world of our knitting blogger community, do join in on spreading this little meme. Here’s all you have to do:

1. Mention and post a link to his meme on your blog.
2. Ask other to do the same. (Remember, struggling grad students in desperate situations…sob, sob…)
3. Ping Technocrati

Of manly sophistication

Now that turkey day has come and gone, it’s that time of the year again -- the time when those gift-giving days on the far horizon suddenly loom disturbingly close. For the non-knitting portion of the population, this means the manifestation of a voice in the back of the head screaming “Shop! Shop! Why are you still standing there? Shop!” For those of us inclined to play around with sticks and threads for most of the year, that voice brings along a sly little friend, who incessantly reminds us just how wonderful, how much better in demonstrating our love, how the very spirit of holiday giving, handmade gifts would be. This year, I've succumbed to that guilt-inducing little voice. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t enjoy gift knitting, but that the many unknowns in devoting the time to make a present (will they like the yarn, the color, the stitch pattern…will they wear it at all?) is quite crazy-making. To wit, my Thanksgiving vacation time was almost entirely devoted to pondering this.

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How to turn 375 yards of Brooks Farms Riata into a manly yet sophisticated scarf, of comfortable width and sufficient length, that my uncle (who is thankfully very excited over the prospect of my knitting him a scarf) will like and wear. All without running out of yarn, of course. I started off quite optimistic, even though I have no idea what a man of sixty-plus years would consider to be manly sophistication (choosing the yarn color was enough to tax all my knowledge there). Riata is, after all, a beautiful, lustrous yarn. Surely it will look perfect in any stitch pattern. Surely. And besides, if anyone would know, surely my mother would have a good idea of what her brother would like. Surely. So, together with Mom, a few Barbara walker stitchionaries, some Vogue books, and a vintage text from Mom’s knitting days, we started to search for the perfect stitch pattern. All the lace patterns (really, anything with holes) were sadly dismissed out of hand for not being sufficiently “manly.” Ribs were good. Knit-purl texture patterns even better. Oh, and what about the cables? There seemed to be plenty of contenders but the more I swatched, the more frustrating it became. Initial swatching ruled out cables because of the limitations in yardage. More swatching nixed knit purl texture patterns because of the way the three ply yarn, with one ply containing silk and thus shinier than the others, reflected the light and made the texture disappear. Even more swatching settled the contention by Mom that an alternating rib pattern would work out beautifully --- the yarn is simply too loosely plied to show the difference and the end result looked boring and messy. Most irritatingly, nothing I tried showed off the subtle color and texture variation within the yarn. If anything, the yarn was screaming to be a loose, lacy pattern. This observation then touched off an extended debate with Mom on what exactly constituted a “manly” scarf. Between this and the failed swatching, I was ready by Sunday to knit two bobbles and an I-cord to a rectangle and call it manly and done. Fortunately, one last perusal of my pile of stitch patterns saved the day. I wanted something simple, interesting, and not too loose looking on larger needles…why didn’t I think of the plaited basket stitch sooner?

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So, is this manly sophistication?

11.22.2006

Family and food and other festivities...

Happy Thanksgiving!

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(And, given the poor weather all over the country, hope you all stay safe and dry.)

11.18.2006

Diamonds, diamonds, everywhere...

And

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not

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a one

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close to completion.


Sigh.

11.14.2006

S•P•I•N

Spin (n) -- the angular momentum intrinsic to a body, as associated with the motion of that body around its own center of mass*.

Merely add some fiber to that intrinsic motion and suddenly, you can create absolute joy. Witness here:

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My first skein of handspun! Yes, it's unevenly plied and alternately overspun and underspun but I love, love, love it -- all 41 purplish-pink heathered yards of it.
It's amazing how much finally figuring out how to properly draft will do for spinning speed and quality. While it used to take ages for me to spin a few handfuls of fibers into ugly, thick-and-thin yarn, being able to draft better allowed me to go through the rest of my two ounces of Coopworth in virtually no time at all with much better results. To make the final yarn in the skein, I plied my first spindle-full of singles with my second spindle-full (of which there are still a number of yards left). Since the singles from the first spindle-full were much more uneven and thick overall than that of the second, the resulting two-ply ranges from a light DK weight to a fingerling weight in terms of thickness.

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In case you care for more details...
Fiber: Indigo-Cochineal natural dyed Coopworth by Stefania
Weight: <2 ounces
Yardage: approx. 41 yds

And so begins yet another happy obsession.

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*Oh what would we do without Wikipedia?

11.12.2006

A random musing for the day

Are three heads...

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better than one?

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11.09.2006

Happy purple fingers

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makes for happy purple yarn.

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Or is it the other way around?
My singles are still uneven more often than not but I think I'm finally getting the hang of it. How to keep the fluff of the unspun roving from getting tangled in the developing thread, how to simultaneously "pull" (or draft, as my spinning teacher at Rhinebeck sternly corrected) the fiber while keeping the spin, how to coax the fibers free of the mass of roving without tugging so hard that the interrupted spin sends the spindle flying sideways...it's all slowly settling into my brain and body. As it was when I learned how to knit, my hands are finally adapting to this awkward business of simultaneously managing a tuft of fluff and a rapidly twirling wooden object. It's hard to beat that wonderful feeling when everything falls into place, when one's hands finally fit into positions that work and feel comfortable. It's like coming home. Even though the end product of my spinning leaves much to be desired, I'm loving the spinning process. There's something so very soothing and almost mesmerizing in the series of motions involved -- flicking the spindle into a whirl, drafting out a thin stream of fibers from the puff of roving, letting the twist climb into the fiber, reflicking the spindle into a whirl, and so on. I feel like I could almost do it for forever.
Happy purple fingers indeed.

11.07.2006

Psst...

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Don't forget to

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today!

Polls are open til 8pm.

11.05.2006

Fickle is the urge to craft

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Now that I have on-going knitting projects aplenty, including a few with deadlines, what did I feel compelled to do today but drop by the local bead shop. Makes perfect sense, no? Without fail, crafting not only brings out the worse of my packrat hoarding tendencies, but that hidden attention-deficit streak as well. A few weeks immersed in wool and suddenly the glitter of the jewelry dangling in the bead shop window is like a siren call. Not even the new issue of Interweave Knits could pull me back from taking a little side path off knitting (though Eunny Jang’s amazing Fair Isle Venezia pullover came close, until I thought about steeks and my already lengthy project list, that is). Good thing jewelry making, the amateur kind that I do anyway, is almost always just a night’s work of instant gratification.

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With the very non-instant gratification of gift lace scarf knitting ahead of me, a new bauble to wear certainly goes a long way towards tempering and focusing my urge to make, make, make.

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Yes, even with winter rapidly approaching, I appear to be still obsessed with autumnal colors.

11.01.2006

Rhinebeck! Much belated…

Nothing pulls one out of the blogosphere like a flurry of long-distance driving, future-relatives-visiting, and other vacation-related activities. I meant to blog along on my trip but almost before I knew it, I was on the plane heading back to the West Coast. Here, very, very much in the way of old news, is my Rhinebeck experience.
It was the quintessential autumnal day. Sunny and crisp.

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The drive up to Rhinebeck was like something out of a car commercial – all windy roads flanked by red and gold trees with the occasional flurry of leaves blowing across. I would have enjoyed the drive more had I not been fretting about not getting there early enough to catch a glimpse of the Socks that Rock yarn at The Fold stall (my main goal for the festival) before they sell out. I., being ever rational and having never encountered the rabid obsession inspired by STR among the knitterly masses, scoffed at my fears. After all, we were arriving only one hour after the festival opening. Hardly late. It was not possible, he stated as one confident that the sun shall always rise in the East and that the demand for yarn shall always be limited, for the yarn to sell out that fast.
Well, he quickly stopped poking fun at my concern when we walked into the exhibition building. I was worried that it would take me a while to find The Fold stall in the huge hall but I needn’t have. There was a line traversing the length of the building composed entirely of women (and the occasional man) clutching skeins of brightly colored Socks that Rock like stolen treasure. The stall itself too swarmed with bodies, even though the racks were all empty but for a few sad skeins. Of those skeins, I spotted one in a colorway that I had been coveting. At this point, I’m ashamed to report, I took a complete leave of my senses. Even though I knew that I could order any color and weight of STR just by contacting Blue Moon Fibers, even though the line to pay was at least fifty persons long, and even though I had yet to explore any of the other hundreds of vendors at the festival, I wanted to have that skein. Not even this sight, once I queued up to pay, could deter me.

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See that white tent the green arrow is pointing to? That’s The Fold tent, site of the yarn, the cash register, and the beginning of the line, as seen from my place at the tail end of the line (with even more people starting to queue up behind me). There’s nothing like scarcity to make everyone all a little crazy. Well over an hour later, I was in possession of one skein of medium weight STR and a rather grumpy fiancé. So, to make peace, we headed off for food and wooly animals. Fortunately, the animal tents were quite a bit less crazy than the wool-selling halls. And really, how can one feel ill-humored when looking at sweet faces like these…

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Or marveling at all the varieties of sheep?
These little guys (don’t they resemble miniature bison?) are Southdowns, one of the oldest breeds of sheep.

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Here is a Cotswold. This one placidly permitted some nose-scratching and close examination of his/her corkscrew wool.

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This poor dear made the most melancholy calls that rang through the entire hall. Apparently, his stall friends were just swapped out so he was lonely.

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By the afternoon (and after another long wait in line at the Brooks Farm stall that caused me to miss the blogger meet-up), I was starting to wish I could make like these woolies and take a nap.

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All in all though, I think I made out rather well in the yarn department:

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One hefty skein of Brooks Farm Riata (a wool, mohair, silk blend) to make a scarf for my uncle, one skein medium-weight STR in Rhode Island Red, and one skein of the glorious Briar Rose Sea Pearl (merino wool and tencel lace weight).
Yarn-wise, I was rather restrained, but all that wool and roving still managed to go to my head as I was unable to leave the festival without stopping by a spinning booth. After an hour of patient drop spindle instruction from the purveyors of the booth, I was the proud owner of some beautiful natural-dyed Coopworth roving and a Bird’s Eye maple Kundurt Wheels spindle.

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Now that I’m in possession of a spindle and roving, there must of course be the obligatory picture of my first yarn. So, here, to finish this rambling post, is my first yarn in all of its two-plied, uneven, seven-inch glory.

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