Better Judgment

Remember snow? Sigh. What a strange thing to have a thunderstorm in January.

I have been so inspired by all the amazing people in my life (both cyber, physical, and fictional) this season. I am determined to no longer accomodate for fear of rejection, but instead to follow Max's lead and do things because I want to, not just because something or someone is pressuring me to, not least the many voices in my head.

SO!

To begin I have made some major changes: Instead of ergonomic chairs and conference calls, I am working three -four days a week at a yarn shop I love (Go Woolcott!). Sometimes the day brings amazing people I would never otherwise have met, sometimes challenging customers who desperately need someone to whom they can tell their story. Sometimes the UPS gods smile and we get Possum yarn, sometimes we get less-exciting -but-absolutely-needed needles. And with the other precious precious time, I am clearing brush in the jungle of my mind.

I often feel spoiled rotten by this opportunity to take some space. It is so very easy to feel bad.

If nothing else, knitting has taught me to be patient with my own shortcomings. Somehow I can be open to making mistakes with yarn in a way that is unavailable to me in daily life. My intention this year is to be open to being wrong, and having better judgment about what is actually important.

In that spirit, two situations in which I did what I wanted in the face of other advice, one knitting - one other:

1. I knit these thumbies at the incredibly tight gauge of 9.5 stitches per inch. Sean warned me. Danielle, too. They came out so stiff, they could stop bullets, and unfortunately, I couldn't get them over my hands. Sigh. But the fabric came out pretty cool, right?

2. I recently entirely ignored someone I had known well a few years ago. She is one of those people who is always in need of attention. She stood right behind me in a line. And I was exhausted and didn't want to be her friend again, so despite the persistent screaming of the voice in my head telling me how mean I was, I tucked my chin under and walked right out of the store.

Either of these situations could be defined as a mistake. I think the trick for me is to stop worrying so much about mistakes. But I haven't quite figured out a way not to feel bad. Any thoughts?

2008: The Year of Keeping it Simple

Recently I read a self-help book (well, skimmed—I never really “read” self-help books, I just skim, mentally editing and extracting the gold, which can typically be stated in a single pithy paragraph, and which I ought to think about sharing with the world, really. Wouldn’t you like that? All the world’s most truly helpful self-help, trimmed of all the stupid, transparently fictional examples, hoary parables, and assorted filler? Anyhow.) on “Goal-free Living”, and despite that, and the fact that I haven’t made resolutions for years, I have done a little planning for 2008, my Year of Keeping it Simple. I have set these goals:

1. To walk daily for one hour
2. To take yoga twice a week
3. To eat sweets a maximum of three times a week
4. To establish and follow a sustainable housework routine that is shared equitably amongst family members
5. To declutter the whole house from top to bottom, big to small
6. To have two weeks worth of healthy menus for each season
7. To recode all my organization’s websites to modern web standards
8. To finish all the insurance beneficiary paperwork I’ve been sitting on a long time
9. To be truly helpful to my son with his schoolwork, and not a taskmistress
and
10. To knit from stash, unless I run out (unlikely!), or unless I go to Rhinebeck or Taos. (I’m following Stacie’s Rules.)

And I’ve been doing pretty good! Somewhere I turned a corner. I’ve been getting up and meditating every morning—well, that's been true a long time—but then I decide what the day’s three most important things are, and that's all I commit to. Keeping it simple. I’m going to yoga because I want to, not because I should. Same with the healthy menus. The housework and schoolwork routines have been absolutely transformed, just by changing a couple little tiny things (ask me sometime).

Have you all been looking at the Purl Bee? I adore the way they style the knitting photos with a fabric background. Of course, they have plenty to choose from. But so do I! Big ol stash of thrifted vintage fabrics, right here! The one above I found at the Wellfleet thrift this Christmas. Lovely stuff. And Joelle’s Favorite, as you can see, should soon be done.

If only I had finished it yesterday, it would have been seasonally appropriate. I’m sure New England is headed back to the deep freeze any moment, though.

BSJ!

While I've picked up a new lace project (Muir), I always enjoy having something mindless on the needles:While I originally had some glittens planned for this wool, I opted instead to cast on for a Baby Surprise Jacket. I've wanted to make one of these for ages - they just look like so much fun! And this yarn is a lot of fun, as well. This is about 264 yards of Superwash Corriedale, in the colorway "Party Dress" from the Spunky Eclectic Fiber Club (December). It is navajo-plied in order to maintain the color transitions, and the final product is similar in feel to, say, Cascade 220. I'm quite pleased with it. And I think it will look AMAZING as a BSJ.

That's on US6s, by the way. Straight Single-Point needles! Why? They were the closest and easiest to get to. :)

Trying to Git Things Done

Back to the wheel I go:

This here is my December selection from the HelloYarn Fiber Club. It's 2 oz. of Soy silk/Wool blend, and man-oh-man was it awesome to spin. It wanted to be laceweight, so I let that happen. I decided to keep it as a single-ply, which yielded me about 600 yards. It is ohsofine, and lovely yo touch, and divine to look at. I had been concerned about it not balancing as a single, but the set seemed to resolve any issues in that arena. Lovely!

As for the knitting. WELL. I started up Muir - and by start, I'm talkin' 3 rows - and I'm looking for something mindless. It being January (the month I don't really knit), it's tough getting my knitting mojo back, but I really really want/need to. So for now, I'm re-evaluating some of the UFOs that are clogging up my life, and making DECISIONS.
• The Ugliest Sweater in the World? I'll be frogging that. It appears that it won't have a decent ease to it, so away it goes.
• Fair Isle vest? Still want to do it, though I am re-evaluating where I placed the increases on the original go-round, so I may rip back a bit. Not sure yet....
• Blue Assymetrical Zippy Cardi? Definitely going to complete this - I just need to relocate the pattern :)
• I've got a Kidsilk Haze lace scarf on those awesome kid needles - also need to get the pattern for that one.

Things seem to be fairly under control, no? Until I actually come up with a dedicated plan, a plan involving completing these above items, and knitting things that I am going to WANT to knit in their entirety, I think I'll stick to spinning for a bit. After all, I need to get through a RAW fiber stash, as well.

Happy New Year and All that Jazz

Not quite the year in review, but an end-of-year wrap-up, and some thoughts on this coming year. My final finished (sort of - they are both halves of pairs....) objects for 2007 are the awesome Snail Mittens from The Book of Yarn, and the first of the Marie Antoinette socks, part of a slow-going KAL with Miss Max.
The Marie Antoinette pattern - well, it's just lovely! the pick-up loopy-bits along the back of the foot and the back of the heel are funfunfun to work, the yarn is wonderful, the color is great. I stupidly misread a portion of the pattern and didn't notice until some 60 rows later, so I've almost knit 2 socks already what with the tearing out and the re-knitting. I finished this lovely with about 5 hours to spare of 2007. While Max is completing Joelle's Favorite Yoke Sweater, I knit up sock number The First. I'll put the other one aside until Max is ready to take a shot at it, and there begin the knit-along portion of this project. Anyone else care to join us?
And because I am so good at procrastinating the proper Christmas projects that I had planned, I started up on these mitts a few days before Christmas. I managed to complete this one (these lovelies will be a gift for Miss Amy) using Baby Ull and US1s - they were a blast! And went so quickly.
Here I am modelling one of them - the only completed one thus far. These puppies are double-thick throughout - the other side looks like a fish belly of red and grey stripes. They are super duper warm and comfy.

But for the New Year! As mentioned in a previous post, Miss Max and I had been toying with the idea of a year of Knitting From the Stash. And here we are in a new year........

With minimal discussion, the following decisions were made concerning this venture:
∙ knit exclusively from our stash for 2008
∙ all bets are off for Rhinebeck (stash re-acquisition) and/or Taos.
∙ should some yarn *need* to be purchased for the completion of a project, the yarn purchased cannot exceed the yarn in the stash, i.e. I cannot purchase 9 balls of yarn to accompany the 1 ball that I already have in order to make a sweater.
∙ gift yarn is fine, as well as gift certificates.
∙ if all stash is eliminated, new stash can then be acquired. (HA!)

I'll also mention that I plan on remaining in my 2 fiber-of-the-month clubs, so I will be slowly creating more stash through the course of the year. When I get my act together - hopefully this week! - I'll have all of this stash business sorted out in my Ravelry, so as to be able to really track this to-do.

Oh! I also plan on rewarding myself a wee bit for a job (jobs?) well done - a little bit of Stash for Cash. For every ball of yarn eliminated from stash, for every finished object, for every ounce of newly spun fiber, I'll throw some money at the knitting kitty. Stash can also be traded or sold - any funds acquired through selling of stash will also go towards future fiber-related ventures. Ultimately for more yarn. Or a new wheel ;)

In which I have something functional, as my friend Melissa the social worker says, to report

Hello friends! Perhaps you will recall how I vowed this year to take control of my knitting? Yes, I vowed to take control back from wishful thinking and stupid patterns and blindly following what my gut told me were gauge errors or failures of proofreading or the like. Perhaps you have been wondering, Hey, how is Max doing with that? Is her knitting getting any better, after all those bosom-swelling emotional vows?

Well, the answer is Yes. It's better. To wit: Above is my Joelle's Favorite Yoke Sweater from the almost-unbelievably good KnitKnit by Sabrina Gschwandtner. This was going to be my Joelle's Favorite Gone Pear-shaped, since I am pear-shaped and the pattern has no shaping at all, pear or otherwise, instead relying on ribbing round the middle. I thought I'd just make size XL on bottom, size S or M on top, and find a good spot to accomplish the decreases (after consulting with Dr. Stacie).

But after I got through the bottom ribbing and maybe a half-inch of sweater, suspicion began to gnaw like the worm at the apple. Another time, Pre-Vow, I would've sailed past it. But now I could not. So I put the stitches on some waste yarn, and friends, you really have to understand the depth and breadth of my conditioning to ignore problems to appreciate how momentous this is, I tried on the sweater.

That's when I realized that although it's true I am pear-shaped, the pear part doesn't really begin an inch below the waist. It's further down. Like an actual pear. Yes, my hips are wide, but my waist is not 48 inches. At least not at the moment. So I ripped out, cheerfully enough, and cast on for size S.

Among the good news is, reducing the sweater from 320 stitches to 252 should speed things up.

In other news, my son has been diagnosed with wheat, dairy, and egg white allergies. While this means evicting some (okay, lots of) food from the menu, it's also meant trying new things. I was inspired by this delicious-looking post from Alicia to make some polenta niblets to go with the homemade sausages and homemade tomato sauce (never used to make those from scratch). I always thought I didn't like polenta. But I was wrong. And look at the package! Is it not a little masterpiece of packaging design? 'Tis. I'm enjoying this experimentation.

2000 Yards of Lace, 2 Podiatric Garments, A Quilt.

Well, it's been awhile hasn't it?

I've been continuing in my plan to semi-ignore my holiday crafting tasks. Well, sort of.
I managed to finally get around to machine-quilting this quilt-top that I have had kicking around for some time now - next, to put on the binding.It's been easier to work on non-thinking projects. I present to you my variation of the "Azure" socks from the Winter Knitty, made with STR "Cluckers" colorway:
These are on US0, toe-up, blah blah blah. Going pretty quickly.

But I've really been wanting to get another lace project on the needles, so I spent a pre-snowy evening winding up a bunch of lace:That's A Touch of Twist Lace Alpaca in Lavendar, Malabrigo Laceweight in Verdes, and HelloYarn lace in Acid Green.

And while picking up that ball winder, Max also presented me with the Marie Antoinette Honey Bee kits we ordered! We're planning on working these up as a KAL, but Max said sure get to it. So I'm going to do one, and then wait on the second one until Miss Max is ready to go.
So far, I've got the lace cuff done and grafted, and I picked up along the edge.
My notes on this so far: the pattern is EXTENSIVE. It has everything written down and charted, which is great, but mildly confusing (there's just so much there! in so many different formats!). I ran into a very quick brief confusion on the edge lace chart - Row 3 features a BO2, K1, P3.......it turns out that the K1 is the stitch that you loop the second BO over, then go right to the P3. Easily amended. I'm loving the loop pick up thing on this. The yarn is a dream to work with and the color is amazing. It's fun so far, and has a fair amount going on to keep me interested. Well, until I get to a big lace project.

What else is in store for me? More quilting perhaps - I may try and get another quilt done in time for the holidays, but I'm not counting on it. We'll see.

Oh! And cataloging my stash for Ravelry! Max and I plan on Knit-From-The-Stash in 2008 - anyone want to join us? We'll be posting our rules (right, Max?) once we get them solidified.