Side to Side Garter Stitch Gloves

I've always been a solitary knitter, mostly because I'm just not really much of a joiner. My LYS has several lovely knitting groups that meet weekly, and I just learned of another Saturday group that functions more like a guild, teaching skills and working on specific projects. So, I"ve got all this opportunity coming at me for group activities...

Knitting with others -why that should be hard and uncomfortable for me is unfathomable. Knitting is not a "dirty" activity, or one that involves compromising positions, dubious characters, or the likelihood of public intoxication and humiliation. And yet, it still gives me s feeling similar to that I get before I've entered a yoga studio or exercise class - anxious, fearful of making mistakes. Probably really more fearful of not belonging, and not being liked. And the worst part of all - worrying that people won't like me, but will yet be too polite and too civilized to not simply tell me to leave and never return. I don't want to be tolerated - I'd rather be banished!

(Side note - I'm actually not very likely to be banished, anyway. I'm kind, courteous, helpful when I can be, sympathetic to nearly any and all plights, non-judgmental, except of myself. And I don't smell or have bad breath. At least that I know of - oh, no. What if I do smell, AND have bad breath, and everyone around me is simply too polite to let me know? Am I merely tolerated by those I love? It's an endless loop, I tell you, this sort of not measuring up...or at least being afraid of not measuring up...)

Back to knitting, and back to my fear of knitting with others. I thought I'd confront my fear head on, at least by taking a baby step. I took a knitting class with other people at my LYS last week. It was nice.

For 5 hours we worked on a really neat and simple pair of custom measured Side to Side Garter Stitch Gloves designed by Joan Goldstein, who also was our delightful teacher. The gloves were knit in Mountain Colors Hand Painted Yarns - (PO Box 156, Corvallis, MT 59828 )
Bearfoot, a 60% Superwash Wool, 25% Mohair, 15% Nylon, (350 yds/skein, Gauge 6-7 st/inc single, needle size 1-2, or 4-5 st/inc double strand, needle size 4-6. Approx 100g/skein, srp $22.00) in the Glacier Teal colorway. This yarn is very soft and knits up like a dream!

The gloves themselves are knit flat and the fingers (and all other seams) are grafted together as you turn and come to them. I'm a slow knitter, and I almost completed the palm of one glove - picture to come soon. In this state, the piece looks more like a relative of an octopus than a piece of apparel, but as the pinky finger is finished and then turned, then the side of the glove and top of the finger knit and grafted, it really does start to resemble a glove. I've set this aside for now to work on my daughter's sweater, and will pick it up again as soon as that is finished. Joan indicated that it took most people a few days to make both gloves, and I think that I'll have the pair complete with a week or so of evening knitting.

All in all, I learned more about my fear of knitting in public that I did about knitting techniques, as the gloves require only basic short row shaping and a pretty neat provisional cast on. And what I learned is that if I want to be able to count knitters among my friends, I need to spend time with knitters.

Perhaps I'll gather my courage and attend Wednesday's free-knit group. I'll make sure I've bathed, brushed and have my Altoids with me when I do.

A Shout Out of Thanks to Amy!

So, my sweet cyber-friend Amy really deserves an enormous Thank You for her invaluable help with getting this blog up, explaining to me all the little details regarding buttons, banners and such.

I have never met Amy, but I've "known" her for a few years now. When she isn't beading, crocheting, running her beautiful children to soccer, dance, church youth groups, and everywhere else, she works at my favorite cosmetics company, http://www.aromaleigh.com. I don't know how she managed to find the time to offer me such detailed help, but she did, and just about instantly, too. Amy's got a lovely blog at http://catsinmycraftbasket.blogspot.com. Pay her a visit, and you'll see from her posts what sort of lovely spirit she embodies.

Actually, that sort of speedy, instant service is what Amy offers all the customers at Aromaleigh. And the rest of Aromaleigh - founder and cyber-friend Kristen Bell and her partner Steven Morello, her assistant Olivia, and the other elves and angels there all do that, all the time.

In my profile I mention a love of color. Certainly color in fiber, fabric, on my walls, in nature, in the art I choose for my home - see Wassily Kandinsky's Improvisation 23 there on the left.

This print hangs against my lemon-yellow walls and brings My Pilot and me much joy. The colors are definite but slightly muted, and there are amazing reds and sky blues that make my heart sing. And similarly, Aromaleigh's colors make my heart sing - every last one of the 286 eye shadows. That's right - 286 different eyeshadows. Different colors, textures, finishes and shimmer levels. The only sad thing is that I have only two eyes. Take a look at just a small sampling of the offerings in Kristen's newest color collection, Aromaleigh's Rocks! line - http://store.yahoo.com/aromaleighinc/rockssoniceyes.html Isn't that AWESOME, especially going into spring and summer? And best of all, they dont irritate even my extremely sensitive eyes.

Cool, huh, when a company is super kind, courteous and efficient AND they've got the biggest, best, and now brightest color selection anywhere. It's just heaven, I tell you, for a girly-girl color junkie like me.

My Pilot

Another picture, this time a non-knitted object. Actually, my husband (My Pilot) and our airplane. It's a 1976 Grumman Cheetah, and very nice. Good visibility, nice stability, and as good gas mileage - or better! as our Subaru gets. It cruises at 145 mph and can carry four people. We can fly to Spokane in a little over an hour - it takes about 5 hours to drive there. In the background is the 1954 Piper Tripacer, which has found a new home down in Idaho.

It's a lovely little bird, very comfortable. My Pilot has even installed Sirius satellite radio so we can listen to music, news or the Martha Stewart network while aloft. He's very handy that way!

An actual finished knitted object

OK, so if this blog is about knitting, then there ought to be a knitting-related picture now and then, right?

Well, here it is. My green ruffled scarf. I had acquired about 7 balls of Trendsetter Dune in this lovely seaweedy green colorway, now discontinued, and didn't know what to make. A vest, but I couldn't find a pattern I wanted in such a bold fabric. After much hmmming and hawing I settled on the Ruffles scarf from Scarf Style. It's shown in a pink cottony yarn, on smaller needles. I improvised and kept knitting through about 4 and a half or 5 balls of it. I really liked the fishtail effect at the ends, and added a bit of i-cord and some pom poms. I get so many compliments on this thing, and it is warm and soft and snuggly. And long. Long enough to wrap three times around, or long enough to double and loop through itself. I am happy.

What the Heck Has Knitting to Do With the Tango, Anyway?

Well, so much, really. In the way that everything is really closely related to everything else. Sort of a "six degrees of separation" thing.

Tango is a dance of improvisation. A dance that has humble beginnings among the poor, downtrodden and marginalized. It borrows from many cultures - South American Indian, Western European, Caribbean. The music likewise is an amalgam of instruments and cultural influences. However, even in the midst of so much improvisation, spontaneity and vibrancy, there are specific rules. The direction of movement about the floor, the types of pacing crucial to a tango being not merely a tango, but ...A TANGO. Tango was a dance for the men, primarily. And it is said to have been danced primarily in the brothels of Argentina, perhaps as a cover for the real business there, perhaps as a diversion whilst one awaited his turn...

At any rate, the Tango has a long and varied history, and as a dance it has enjoyed several peaks - firstly, when it was legitimized by being danced by a crowd that included those with money and social status (as opposed to just prostitutes, gangsters and dock workers), again as it spread to Europe in the early part of the 20th century, again in the 50s, and most recently with the birth of several exhibition Tango musicals to tour the world.

Knitting has so many parallels: humble beginnings; an endeavor for men rather than women; multicultural influences in pattern, color, technique and structure, many of which were improvised rather than taught; and times in history when it enjoyed relatively increased popularity, acceptance, elevation from being a necessity to being a leisure pursuit.

Even the act of knitting runs parallel to dancing Tango, for me. A pair of (perhaps deadly) needles, the sensuous aspects of the fiber, the dance between the needles - the lead - and the fiber - the follow. Or perhaps the dance between the hands as the lead and the fiber or the needles as the follow. The need for both structure and spontaneity to create a beautiful fabric that makes the heart, the hand, and the eyes rejoice. The devastation that the knitter feels when fiber or tools betray. The pain sometimes inflicted on the knitter by the act of knitting. And, perhaps most importantly, the passion most knitters feel for their craft, which is also a love, and a luxurious, leisure-time pursuit that yet yields an object of useful value. Knitting seduces wholly.

Dancing a Tango can last a mere three minutes, or a lifetime. Knitting can possess the spirit of either commitment or dalliance, depending upon the scope of the project and the investment of money, time and soul the knitter chooses to make. In the best marriages, the spirit of both commitment and dalliance are present. Tango holds that possibility for us. As does knitting.

Dance on.

Meditations on the nature of imperfection

I view my knitting as a movable meditation. It stretches my brain in new directions as I learn a new technique, or finally realize an understanding of something I've been doing by rote for a long time. In each stitch lies the potential for greatness, for tension and laxity in balance, in uniformity, if desired, or in the delightful thick-thin unevenness of a highly textured handspun yarn. All stitches can possess their own beauty, if they are in the place, shape, form I desire them to be. And any stitch can be unceremoniously ripped out. You cannot do that when sewing with fabric. You get one chance, and one chance only, really, to coax the fabric, thread, and machine engine into the right arrangement for your project at hand. That's far too much pressure for me.

I feel perhaps most like a "real knitter" when I am frogging row after row after row of stitches that don't quite measure up. As I slowly breathe and unravel and practice detachment, I remind myself that Buddhist monks make gorgeous, intricate sand paintings over the course of days, and then watch them blow away, grain by grain, scattering the prayers and intentions placed with each sphere of sand to the four winds. So every stitch I knit, unknit and knit again is a prayer, a meditation on love for the recipient of the final object. This keeps my brow from furrowing so deeply, as I am, above all, an imperfect knitter.

It is this realization of my current degree of imperfection in my chosen craft that actually brings me joy - it is so easy for me to gauge progress, measure how much deeper my understanding of the interplay of fiber, sticks and hands has become. Knitting also affords me safe exploration into attitudes of kindness toward self - why am I so critical? Why did it take so long for me to believe that I was worthy of embarking upon a "real" project, with "real" materials? And for what reson did I believe that I would first have to practice before doing, when all the while, it truly is the doing that contains the practice.

Knitting is a meditation in so very many ways for me, and as such, it is a deeply spiritual as well as intellectual, creative, artistic and industrious enterprise. My wish for all knitters is that each and every one may feel the satisfaction that comes with the peace of doing, undoing, and doing again.

Namaste.

My Daughter's Sweater

My daughter is grown now -turning 18 in a couple of weeks. And she's out on her own, doing a dental tech program in California. The Pilot and I have decided to rename her Tooth Pick, and My Pilot somehow thinks he'll not only get away with that, but also with calling her TP for short...I just don't think he'll be able to make this new moniker stick.

Anyway, it was my daughter who brought me back to knitting. I learned when I was small, but never learned any of the basics that make knitting really work - how to form an untwisted stitch, what the order of operations is, how to read a pattern. I mostly grabbed needles from my mother's basket and yarn from a stale smelling bag of acrylic that a sweet friend had brought over for us to play with. Then I poked and twisted and "invented" my own stitches and made some swatches. Then I put it all away for many years. Until, grown up, I bought my own needles and some slightly stale smelling acrylic and decided I would teach myself to knit. I found a Better Homes and Gardens Complete Guide to Needlework, which had a chapter (a whole chapter - imagine!) on knitting, and determined that I would need to make large swatches of every stitch pattern in the book before I could embark upon following a pattern for an actual garment. So swatch I did, in all manner of very lovely textured stitch patterns, which were rendered ever so much more textured by my habit of always knitting into the back loop. I made it through a few torturous 8x8 and 12x12 inch squares in my sticky, grabby faux wool, retired the whole mess to a free canvas tote bag acquired at some convention somewhere, and stuffed the bag into a box, where it stayed for several different moves about the country.

Fast forward to last summer, when my daughter left home to begin her very own life. She was fine, doing well, happy. I was lonely, empty, sad. I decided to knit her a sweater. I'm not sure how, or why, this seemed like the thing to do, other than knitting for another gives the knitter a perfect opportunity to meditate and pray and weave love into every single stitch, twisted or not.

I chose a Crystal Palace pattern- the Waikiki Halter, really more of a racerback mockneck tank with a great shoulder-baring front. I picked a beautiful blue variegated thick and thin yarn, swatched it, and started knitting. My still-twisted stitches caused the body front and back to bias a bit, but I did learn to decrease (crudely), make buttonholes (one nice, one crude as I didn't knit to the end of the row and follow the buttonhole instructions from the beginning, but rather tried to reverse the buttonhole directions and insert the second buttonhole in the same row as the first), and stitch the thing together. Using backstitch or whipstitch, as I had no one to ask the proper method of. I mentioned to my daughter that I was making her a sweater, and she in turn mentioned said sweater to my mother, who apparently sort of snorted and said, "Bridget's making a sweater? What kind? When does she think it will ever be done?" I suppose, given my aborted attempts at knitting, sewing, and all manner of needle arts at which my mathematically precise mother excels, her response was not unexpected, and not unkind so much as just honest.

I did in fact finish that first, imperfect sweater, and my generous of spirit daughter called to tell me that she really liked it, it fit, and she even wore it in public. She could have simply been being kind, or she could have been genuine. At any rate, she asked (asked!!) me to make her another one.

Which leads us to this current sweater - from Vogue Knitting Summer 2005, Sweater Number 11, the cropped wrap front hoodie with a two-sided frost flowers lace band along the front edge.

Naturally, the specified yarn has been discontinued. And also naturally, I never use the specified yarn anyway. I chose a beautiful, glacial blue shade of Nashua Creative Focus Alpaca and Merino single ply. The yarn is so soft and lofty and lightweight, I think it will make a lovely beachy-type sweater for my girl. I knit up the simple stockinette back in no time at all, and began the front, which is actually a single long, shaped strip of fabric that gets folded in the middle to make both the left and right sides of the front. The Two Sided Frost Flowers lace pattern is a 34-stitch, 32 row pattern, with no free rows of plain old knit or purl. I learned, after getting as far as row 19 and frogging back three times that I am not much of a lace knitter. I like the sort of patterns that are actually patterns, with regular repeats and that allow for relatively simple reading of the knitting on the needles to determine what to do next. Frost Flowers offers none of those delicious aspects. So I gave up on that pattern. Instead, I'll substitute the most basic lattice mesh pattern on the 5 1/2" band and call it good. This simple pattern has a vague Chinoiserie feel to it, reminding me of some bamboo work on Deco-era Asian inspired textiles and furniture designs. It is visually airy, as the original Frost Flowers pattern is, doesn't curl, and best of all, goes quickly and will require only 20 stitches or so to achieve the necessary width. Quite speedy, indeed!

The pattern itself is thus:
Row 1 YO, k2tog, rep to end
Row 2 & 4 Purl
Row 3, SKP, yo, rep to end

So problem solved, and her sweater is likely to be finished in time for her birthday.

Hurray for me, and my problem solving abilities!

Voracious and Indiscriminate Absorption = Inspiration

So, I've been combing our library catalog for knitting books and devouring them. Most of the are older - from the 80s and early 90s, so the styles, colors models and such are not particularly current feeling. BUT...
They are incredibly inspiring. I've loved Kaffee Fassett's work since I first got a copy of Creative Dressing by Kaori O'Connor when it first came out, perhaps the early 80s. In it was a stunning sweater done up in creams, pinks and dove taupes and such, in Fassett's Turkish Carnation pattern. I lusted after that sweater so much back then. And it was heightened by the fact that the model had red, curly hair (like me)...
Anyway, our state library system seems to have an abundance of Fassett books, and I've been combing them diligently. Hadn't found anything I wanted to make, particularly, because I'm not much of a fiddly knitter - preferring the sort of knitting that offers long stretches of meditative work punctuated by bouts of concentration. And then I found his section on circle patterns. They remind me so incredibly much of the Gustav Klimt paintings I adore (esp. The Kiss, where his robe is done in lovely shimmering golden, black and brown rectangles, and her's in gold, blue and red circles). The first circle print in his Glorious Knits book is done in a few different color combos, all beautiful. And 23 different colors!...and then there was the Persian Poppies...done in 23 colors, but only 2 balls of yarn. You divvy up your colors between background colors and poppy colors, then pull off random lengths of yarn and knot them together in graduating values but differing colors. Then you just knit like regular using the 2 balls - intarsia, I suppose. And the effect is stunning. Delicate gradations of color, a background composed not of a single tone, but of a whole spectrum of, say, greys, tauped, creams and beiges, perhaps punctuated with a delicate almond green or heathered lilac or duck's egg blue. Then the poppies, in muted, rich shades of persimmon, pink, rose, eggplant and mahogany tones, with little magenta centers...
Stunning, I tell you. Simply stunning.
And suddenly I am thinking of what colors I'd want, and what shape garment I'd like to overlay this breathtakingly beautiful pattern on. And I'm dizzy with possibility.
Anyone else pull out something past its moment and get drawn up short?