G. Knerd

While I was on my honeymoon several months ago, I decided to start knitting a pair of socks.  I had grand plans for the pattern, but in the interim took a bit of a break and then realized that I couldn’t remember what that plan was.   I also started feeling a bit of animosity toward the pattern, but since I am delusional and I am not a quitter, I kept going.

Anytime someone would see me knitting those socks, they’d ask who they were for, “Like, a kid or something?”  And I’d laugh, and say they were for me, and demonstrate that they were actually quite stretchy.

Unfortunately, they’re not stretchy enough.  They barely (and only with a lot of swearing and some lost skin) fit over my heels.  Once they’re on, they fit like a dream, of course, but if it takes me five minutes to put on my socks in the morning I’m not going to be a happy camper.

Of course, I blame the yarn.  This was the last set of Deborah Norville yarn I had in the stash, and I haven’t had a single positive experience with that stuff.  With any other yarn, 72 stitches would have been enough to fit around my heel (I’ve got some socks with 68 stitches in them and they fit just fine), but with this yarn…no.  It’s just not working out.

I don’t think I’m the only one that feels that way either – Monkey Kitty did the usual thing and came to investigate the knitting as soon as it hit the floor…

…and not 10 seconds later, he was walking away again – apparently, this yarn isn’t even good enough to chew on.

So now, I just have to find someone who has smaller heels than I do, that I don’t really like too much, but who I like enough to give them hand knit socks.  Thoughts?

Every now and then, I put down a knitting project only to come back to it weeks or months later and realize that I have no idea what my past self was thinking when I was knitting on it earlier.  Generally, it’s obvious that I had a plan and that I had every reason to believe that it would go well, but when I come back to it I have absolutely zero recollection of what’s going on anymore.

It’s at times like that where I wish I could go back in time and just ask myself, “What were you thinking?”  Mind you, in these circumstances it’s not in the smack-myself-in-the-face, what-were-you-thinking way, but a calm, interested hrm-didn’t-quite-follow-you-there, could-you-explain kind of way.

For example, I started a pair of socks while The Blanket Thief and I were in Europe.  I wanted something relatively simple, but not so simple that I was bored, so I decided to make up a two-cable traveling pattern that’s inspired by a couple kids playing tag.  The idea was that one cable would chase the other back and forth across the socks, bouncing off of the “walls” and going through a round of tagbacks whenever they crossed.

Recently, I dragged these out of the basket and started working on them again, only to pause and realize that the back cable crossings (above), didn’t match the front cable crossings (below).  Namely, while on the backs I’d apparently decided to stop moving one (but only one) of the cables, on the front I’d kept at the full pattern as established.

I spent a good amount of time trying to figure that one out.  The back was going to turn into the heel, so was I planning to have the one cable travel to the other side of the sock and mirror the placement of the first, stopped cable?  Had I intended the first cable to double back and meet the other one, to kind of check on why it hadn’t started?  Was it even possible that this had just been an accident, and I somehow hadn’t managed to pick up on it for four rows?

Eventually, I decided that, barring time travel, I was never going to figure out what the plan had been, and without a plan it was just silly to continue with a deviated pattern.  With that decision, it was time to engage the Knitting Surgery.  I picked back the four rows of the affected stitches, making a neat-but-really-confusing section.

Then I knit it all back up in the original pattern to match the front.  I’ve got a new plan for how it’s all going to go now, and I’m sure it’s much better than my original plan.

At this point, though, I really hope I never do run into my past self to ask her what the original plan was.  I don’t want to find out that I’m wrong, and really her plan was much better than mine if I could have just remembered it.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve had counting problems in the past.  I’d like to say that usually I can make it to at least twenty without an issue, but experience would say otherwise.  For the Wedding Blanket II, though, I’m not sure if what I’m experiencing is a counting problem or negligence.

Remember when I started this thing, and I mentioned that putting the yarn together to knit from was like knitting from a kit?

So…each kit made four squares.  And I’ve gone through four kits.

However, I only have fifteen squares on the pile.

I really do not know how this happened.  I’ve got a few theories, though:

1. Gnomes and/or stash weasels
2. I didn’t finish one of the kits for some reason
3. I did knit a sixteenth square, but put it somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be

Now, if theory 1 or 2 is correct, I should cast on another square and just get it finished.  On the other hand, if theory 3 turns out to be right then I’ll end up with seventeen squares (because you just know I’ll find the missing square as soon as I finish the replacement), and since seventeen is a prime number that would make a pretty odd-shaped blanket.

For now, I’m somewhat ignoring the issue by doing everything else that needs to be done, like sewing up a small seam in the middle of each square and weaving in the ends in the center.  I’m not going to tell you how many ends that will end up being, but if you want a bit of a hint…

…it’s a lot.

Also, I really do have to figure out what I’m going to do about the border at some point.  Let me know if you have any suggestions…

In my last post, I mentioned that I was just about to start blocking the border for Wedding Blanket the First.  This was a somewhat momentous occasion, as it’s been months since I finished knitting said border, and at no time did I actually measure the in-progress or finished border against the blanket it was intended for.

Can you see where this is going?

It all started with a pile of border – when I was knitting it, it seemed like miles, but in retrospect it was really only several yards long.

The border got the customary dunking in water, was squeezed out, and then I laid it out in a rough rectangle on the floor.

This was when I started to get nervous.  This seemed…large.  In fact, this seemed like the size I had wanted the blanket to be, although I was pretty sure that the blanket was not, in fact, this large.

Laying out the blanket only confirmed my fears.  Somewhere, something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

The width is about right, but the length?  Not so much.  No amount of fudging is going to bring that back into alignment, either, unless I want to make the long-edge border ruffled.

So there’s going to be some knitting surgery in the near future.  I need to extract almost a foot from both long edges.

After that, the slog to attach said border will commence.

Just between you and me, I don’t think I’m going to get this done within a year of the wedding.  Maybe we should make the new deadline 18 months?

(I thought I’d posted this from my phone last Thursday, but it turns out that I apparently only saved it.  Damn technology.)

Reading the directions is important.  It’s a life skill that I’ve only had spotty success with, both in knitting and in life.  In knitting, it usually manifests in me going off pattern within the first few inches – and, of course, I usually claim it’s actually on purpose.

In life, this failure to read directions often manifests in a vague sense of where I’m supposed to be and when I’m supposed to get there, without any clear understanding of how I’m going to make that happen or what exactly I’ll do once I get there.

Today, for example, I was really excited to be able to attend Ignite Seattle for the first time.  (Even if you can’t make it to an in-person Ignite, you should totally check out the videos on the site – they cover all kinds of topics, are usually funny, and are always limited to 5 minutes.)  I looked up where I needed to be, I looked up the start time, and I kind of ignored everything else.

Because I knew where and when I needed to be, I rushed over from work to get to the theater at 7.  I didn’t have a plan for dinner, but I figured I could have bar food since the theater had a bar.

First lesson: there’s a difference between liquids and foods, and bars are only guaranteed to have the former.

Once I got into the theater, I found a seat and started wondering when the festivities would start.  And kept wondering, until eventually someone got on the mike and announced that we were going to work on mouse trap-powered cars until 8:30.

I thought for sure that must be a mistake.  Surely he meant 7:30, meaning I’d only have to wait 15 minutes.

Nope, dead serious.  One hour of car building, fifteen minutes of car racing, and then the main event would begin.

Second lesson: when you see random posts about an ice-breaking activity to build mouse trap-powered cars before the talks, don’t assume “ice-breaker” means “quick”.  Apparently, some people are quite passionate about their mouse trap-powered car racing and can’t be rushed in the building thereof.

Luckily, I’ve at least learned enough to always have my go-everywhere, emergency socks with me.

It’s validating to know I can at least plan for emergencies like this.  Now if only I had some food…

I was unpacking some stuff I hadn’t touched in a very long time, and I came across the ball bands for some Cascade 220.  I apparently wanted to remember something about the colors I used, because I made sure to write a note about the color on each one of them.

For those of you who can’t read it, this one says “Purple!”  Apparently just “purple” wasn’t enough – oh, no, I had to both capitalize it and make sure to give it an exclamation point.

On the other hand, my favorite was this one:

It took me a while to figure out what the second word here was – at first, I read this as “Pretty Ole!”, which didn’t sound right at all (I may not have the best handwriting either…).  Eventually, though, I was able to determine that this, in fact, said “Pretty Blue!” – notice that I carried through the capitalization and the exclamation pattern here too.

Now that I’ve found these, I wish I could remember what I was trying to remind myself about.  If only I’d, oh, I don’t know, written more on the inside of the band or something?  Maybe just another word like “Sweater!” or “Hat!” or “Blanket!” to give me some direction to go in.  But I guess that would make it too easy, right?

Remember a long time ago when I said I wanted to start writing knitting patterns?  And how I then managed to knit an entire pair of socks without writing down a single letter about how I’d done so?  You know, like almost exactly a year ago?

At least I’m not making the same mistakes again…

So, you see, a few weeks ago I decided that I would write up the Garden Party Socks pattern (as that’s how I’ve decided to name it).  I created a knitting font in order to make the charts, I played around with the formatting in Word way more than a sane person would have (including no small amount of swearing), and I wrote down the pattern as I created the first sock.  I figured I would be my first test knitter, so I (as far as it’s possible for me to do so) followed the pattern when making the second sock.

It seemed like no time at all that I had a pair of socks!  And a pattern to go with them!  Maybe this knitting designer thing would work out after all!

Except, it was when I was thinking about how awesome it would be to be a knitting designer that I realized something…the Chinese lanterns pattern that I’m basing this sock on was written for flat knitting, not knitting in the round.  That means that all the fussy bits are on the even rows, with the odd rows being simple “knit the knits and purl the purls” – but ultimately, that leads to imbalanced lantern tops in relation to lantern bottoms.

I immediately cast on a small section of knitting so I could compare the pattern as written vs the pattern as I think it should be – the two columns on the left are “as I think it should be” and the two on the right are “as written”.

Do you see a difference?  It’s hard to see if you’re not me, and doubly so when it’s in the picture above, but if you look at the bottom of the two lanterns you can kind of see that while the one on the far left is nicely curved the one on the right is a little jerky.

Or, at least, you can tell if you’re me.  The Blanket Thief swears that he cannot see a difference even when I put it two inches from his nose (note to self: he doesn’t really like having knitting two inches from his nose…).

However, it’s my first real pattern, and I want it to be perfect, so I’m fixing up the chart and knitting them again (in different, plain yarn, so you can actually see the pattern – sometimes I do make the same mistake twice).

I think they’re lovely as is, and it’s certainly possible that no one on the planet but me would notice, but I do notice, you know?  Plus, this is an excuse to have yet another pair of socks in my drawer…

The thing about making a sweater up from scratch, as I’m doing with the cARGHdigan project, is that there’s no one to blame but yourself when things go wrong.

For example, when (finally) started on the sleeves, I measured The Blanket Thief‘s wrists.  He wanted them pretty tight, so I added an inch, looked up the gauge I’d calculated earlier, figured out how many stitches to cast on, started knitting like a fiend.  When the cuff was done, I measured his biceps, the length of his arm, did a few more calculations, and kept knitting, increasing as I went.

The whole time, I kept looking at it thinking, “Something doesn’t look right.  It seems a little bit small, right?  It’s not quite right.”  And yet, I soldiered on, not one to let a little adversity sway me from completing a project.

On the other hand, I also didn’t want to let stubbornness force me to finish two entire sleeves before admitting that they weren’t coming out right – and something about having to increase on every other row certainly seemed very wrong.  After about 8 inches of knitting, I finally put it around The Blanket Thief’s arm and asked, “Sweetie, what do you think?”

He grimaced.  “It’s a little tight.”

Crap.  At least I can always trust him to be honest.

As for the sleeves?  I’m going to make them walk the plank, then I’m starting over.  At least I was only halfway up the forearms before I figured it out – that’s progress, right?

After writing my last post about my, er, somewhat gross experiment with spinning cat hair, I realized something.  I wasn’t trying to spin cat hair because I had something I wanted to make out of it, I wasn’t doing it because it brought me joy, I wasn’t even doing it because I thought it was a good idea.

No, my only reason for doing it was, in fact, to see if I could.

The “Because I Can” phenomenon can be a good thing.  It can lead to crazy-amazing feats of knitting, like a gas station cozy.  Or a car cozy.  Or any number of guerilla knitting projects.

Of course, to some people, all of those projects are crazy too.  It’s all in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

The real problem with the “Because I Can” urge is that it leads to doing things you really don’t need or want to do, just because you can.  I’ll knit a sweater out of my dog’s fur…because I can!  I’ll knit a sock with super-weird construction and uncomfortable seams on the bottom…because I can!  I’ll spin a fiber out of things I find in the street…because I can!

None of these things are necessarily wrong, mind you.  They’re just…well, they don’t align with my values, let’s put it that way.

So getting back to the original point – the motivation behind spinning cat hair wasn’t “Oh, I can get something nifty out of this”, it was solidly a “Let’s see if I can” (little sibling to the “Because I Can” impulse).  And, frankly, I just don’t have time for that kind of thing these days.  I don’t need to do “Because I Can” projects – I’ve got plenty of real projects with real outcomes to finish.

In short, the cat “fiber” is going in the trash, along with the little bit I’d already spun up.  Sanity has returned.

Bear Kitty’s response?  “Does this mean you’ll stop interrupting my naps to brush me?  ‘Cause that was pretty annoying.  Can I go back to sleep now?”

I don’t spend much time talking about Bear Kitty, but he’s really a very impressive cat.  For one thing, on one body he manages to fit enough fur to cover 6 normal cats – his coat is almost as thick as a sea otter’s (and nearly as waterproof).  This means he tends to shed…a lot.

In an attempt to combat this problem, I decided to try getting a FURminator.  This is one of the most amazing grooming tools I’ve ever seen – every time I brush Bear Kitty with it, I get a literal pile of fur.  Just one stroke of the brush (even after a full brushing just a couple days ago) gets an impressive amount of hair:

For a normal person, their reaction to a big pile of used cat hair would be “Ewww, gross.”

For a fiber-obsessed person, however, the reaction might be the same as mine, which was, “Hrm, that looks an awful lot like a free source of fiber….”

So, for the last couple months, I’ve been collecting the hair I brush off in a bag with the intention of spinning it into some kind of yarn.  What I’m going to do with the yarn once I have it is unclear at best, but I seem to think this is a good idea – I’ve started spinning it:

But then I look at the big pile o’ fur I’ve saved up, and I think that maybe – just maybe – this is all kind of gross and I really shouldn’t be doing this:

I might have to give this pursuit up – it only sounds sane if I don’t tell anyone about it.

Er…

….

…here, look at this cute picture of Bear Kitty instead of thinking about the dirty secret I’ve just revealed to you: