ElbowGrease

Check out Library Journal's article and "core collection" bibliography on knitting...

...in the August 2007 issue. Great to see this good advice for library collection development!

Knitting in a Digital Age
By Jan Zlendich -- Library Journal, 8/15/2007
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6466638.html

Eight years...

I made my annual pilgrimage to Friendship today. Offered up the roses...as always, one dried from the final bouquet Skip sent me from the hospital and one fresh...The dried one to remind me of his love, the fresh one to remind him of mine. I only have two dried roses left, for years 9 and 10...when they are used up I will have to rely on memory...perhaps I will start putting two fresh ones on the water then...

Can he be 8 years gone? Can it be 15 since I fell in love with the man dressed "all in green"? The hole in my heart still gapes...and part of me is always missing...like nerve tissue that never regenerates...like a limb that no longer feels phantom.

Today when I tossed the old and then the new roses onto the water, Siri swam out to fetch them. She grabbed the fresh rose in a soft mouth and dropped it gently when I told her to leave it.

Then Buddha walked over to see what she had been interested in...he sniffed and left it undisturbed.

Soon both roses drifted together...as though kissing in the shallow water.

Monsoon season

They're done and I love 'em...my first pair of socks in the 2007 Blue Moon Fiber Arts "Rockin' Sock Club"...

Pattern: 2007 Rockin' Sock Club "Inside Out"
Yarn: BMFA Socks That Rock, Medium Wt.
Color: Monsoon
Needles:
Crystal Palace 2.25mm -- short row garter stitch heel and toe
Crystal Palace 2.0mm -- ribbed foot
Crystal Palace 2.75mm -- cabled leg up to last 1"
Crystal Palace 3.0mm -- cabled leg last 1"

Used lots of seldom-employed or new techniques (for me) for these socks -- toe-up construction, short-row garter toe and heel, tighter-tensioned ribbing around the entire foot, cabled inside-out ribbing for leg. I'm pleased with the fit though, as for all my socks knit serially on double point needles, each sock is slightly different from the other. My habit seems to be always to create a better, more snug-fitting second sock from the lessons learned in knitting the first. Not quite ready to do all my socks simultaneously on two circulars, though I am planning to try this technique shortly. Am especially glad that my Monsoon socks striped rather than pooled, as I am not fond of most pooling color effects on socks...especially on patterned socks. Don't think I mind so much on plain crew type socks. Love the medium weight STR yarn*, though they are just a little more difficult to get into shoes when they're new. Am looking forward to trying the light weight yarn soon.

April's kit should arrive sometime within the next couple of weeks. Am looking forward to working with the newly named "Take a Walk on the Wild Tide" colorway, which judging from its cousins looks to be colors found in a tidal pond (pinks, dark and light greens, dark and light blues, dark and light browns?).

Meanwhile, I'm casting on a lace sock out of red STR medium weight called "Lover's Leap" as a thank you gift for a good friend. The pattern is from a Catherine Wingate/Jackie Erickson-Schweitzer booklet called The Sock Calendar; it's called "Modern Romance" and it's an undulating lace top down design. Planning to use 3.0mm and 2.75mm needles according to my usual plan of making the cuff with a size larger needle. Will post pictures as progress is made.

*A little anecdote about the ruggedness and cushioning properties of STR medium weight: When I was preparing to travel with Suzi i over Christmas she encouraged me to pack really lightly for our 13 days (11 in Spain and 2 in Paris), so I decided I should forego packing my handknit socks and threw in a few pairs of thin, black nylon 'trouser socks' instead, thinking they would be less bulky. In the end, I couldn't resist throwing in my favorite handknits, a Fair Isle pair made from STR medium weight. By the second day of trudging over cobblestones and climbing steep-stepped, narrow medieval streets through Andalucia, I had a nasty blister just under the big toe of my right foot. From that day forward, the only socks that would properly cushion my achy feet was the STR pair...and I wore them for 8 days without washing them and never got another blister! Put them through the washing machine and hung them to dry when I got and they're good as new...

Sittin' around on a snow day with the no-yarn-yet blues...

OK, Mother Nature, we're sorry...you can call off the dogs.

El Nino must be Mother Nature's bad seed...

Trudged up to the Owls Head Post Office to see if my Socks That Rock 'Rockin' Sock Club' shipment had arrived so I could brag with the privileged on the STR blog...but no such luck...So I'll watch the afternoon talk shows with my lower lip stuck out..."You could ride to town on that lip," my Dad used to say...

Baby Surprise!

See what channeling Elizabeth Zimmermann can produce? Actually finished knitting this amazing piece of clothing architecture a while back and have been saving it for a very special baby. A worthy recipient is about to be born, so this week I assembled the shoulders with an i-cord 'seam' -- the only seam in the entire sweater! -- and sewed in my tag and attached buttons. Voila! Not sure if baby is boy or girl, but think this will work either way. The yarn is leftover stash from a cardigan I made 20+ years ago out of Reynolds Town and Country, a wonderful 85/15 wool/acrylic DK weight yarn in rich, heathery colors. Now I'm inspired to make an Adult Surprise for myself out of some worsted weight yarn I dyed last fall with homegrown Japanese Indigo...Stay tuned!

Trying out new stuff

Have spent a fair amount of time the past few days setting up Bloglines to read all my favorite knitting blogs and downloading Firefox add-ons to make life easier.  (Motivation for this was excitement over Socks That Rock '2007 Rockin' Sock Club' about to ship first installment of Blue Moon Fiber Arts awesome sock yarn...It's fun being a part of the knitting universe and joining with other Web-savvy knitters to share the excitement!)  One tool I discovered  is this cool 'Performancing" instant blog editing tool that lets me add a post anytime, anywhere.  So, this is a test!

powered by performancing firefox

Hep me, Ronda...Hep, hep me, Ronda....

I don't usually go in for lots of manipulation of my photographs -- it takes too much time and kind of messes with my purist attitudes about photographic composition -- but this image is, I think, a worthy exception. It was taken from cliff side at the gorge in Ronda, Spain, when I was traveling in Andalucia with my daughter over the Christmas holidays. Created this with recently downloaded the free open source photo management software 'Gimp' (http://www.gimp.org/) and I think it's interesting. What do you think?

Projects I hate...

Does everyone have projects they get stuck on? Things you are making or doing or writing or designing or whatever that never seem to progress?! For me it has been a pair of Jaywalker socks out of Austermann Step sock yarn in the Hunter colorway. These things will be positively stillborn by the time I'm finished with them. I bought the yarn about a year ago and held onto it for a while, kind of savoring the experience of knitting with this unique yarn...Finally cast on the socks in October '06, thinking it would be nice to feel yarn suffused with aloe and jojoba running through my fingers as the cold nights approached; they'd be done just in time for winter.

NOT! It's now mid-February ~~ winter is most definitely gripping us here in Northern New England! ~~ and these socks remain tenaciously undone. Granted, I've picked them up and put them down frequently over the months, completing any number of more or less complicated projects in the interim. But I always have lots of projects going and the Jaywalkers have a pretty straightforward pattern repeat that should have posed no special challenge. WRONG! I have knit, frogged, knit some more, tinked, knit some more, thrown fits, hidden the from myself, picked them back up, finished one, cast on the second, made you-can't-start-that-shawl-until-you-finish-the-Jaywalkers! deals with myself, and now, finishing the heel flap of sock #2, I see that I somehow dufus-ly knit only half as many heel flap rows as the pattern called for on sock #1! I thought it looked funny, but given the Jaywalker zigzag, I thought it would all stretch out in the wearing! WRONG AGAIN! So, when I finish sock #2 I will frog #1 back to the heel flap and fix that sucker! Why don't I just pitch them out my backdoor into the Mussel Ridge Channel as lobster food, you ask? I will not be de-feeted by these ridiculous pedal sheaths! This is either real stick-to-itive-ness or bull-headedness or just knitter's remorse on my part...Not sure what it says about my character...but I do know that these socks just better fit and wear perfectly, or else! Or else what, you ask...Or else...or else...um...or else I'll rip 'em out and fix em, I guess!

Ease of use

I remind myself how easy it is to post, and yet I still fall behind. Perhaps it is the struggle with condensation...However little actual exposure one gets here, it is still a public publishing medium...so one wants to write well, not to waste words, to " be impeccable with one's words." Hard to dash off a good sentence each day when bumping around one's life like a pinball set spinning...

Have the experience all the time of reading others' blogs and realizing I had had the same thoughts -- the aha! moments -- but never recorded them. Doesn't really matter, I suppose. I mean, it's our breath that infuses the ether with our eternal legacy, right?, not our words in the blogosphere. Still...it is a tendril and a rare opportunity to reveal who we are...Shame to miss out due to laziness...

'Course, there's the other problem...Caught up in this Web experience, one can spend all one's own blogging time reading or listening to others' words, thereby surrendering to the avalanche. So I procrasti-knit...And at least the product keeps me warm!

Snow Day

They called off everything in town today, including closing all city buildings, including the Library...so I had a whole day to veg. Knit on my Jaywalkers (will they ever be done?), the Swallowtail Shawl, and the beautiful Mama E's CyberFiber sock club blue variegated sport weight crew socks. All I had to eat in the house was fruit and bread! Snow was still falling at 7 pm tonight when I snapped this shot.