knitting in the dark

While I was working in Boston at the beginning of June I had very little time to play around my old stomping grounds, but I did, of course, find time to stop into two (and a half) local yarn stores:

The first: Mary Jo Cole Needlework (don’t bother with the website). I actually went here to find a needlepoint gift for my mother because they have some great brick cover designs to make doorstops, but I discovered that they now carry yarn for knitting… sort of. It’s mostly novelty yarn meant for the scarf-knitters of the world. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a “yarn store.”

The second: Newbury Yarns (again, not a terribly impressive website). Cozy, clean, friendly… I went not looking for anything and came away with (wait for it…) sock yarn! At typical retail price, some Schaefer Anne in beautiful green, blue, and a touch of purple:

I’ve never knit with the Schaefer Anne before, but I hear good things and it has nylon content, so I’m sure it will be okay. And at half price (I think it was a mistake, but didn’t actually look at the receipt until home in Brooklyn - I only got charged for one ball), some deep red Fortissima Socka:

This is perfect yarn for a pair of socks for my father as he prefers solid or slightly tweedy yarns for his annual Christmas socks. I’m already working on the pair for this Christmas, but there’s always next year with him.

And the third and final yarn store: Windsor Button (yet again a nearly useless website). This store was so much fun for me! This is a good old fashioned craft store, which we don’t really have in NYC. We have yarn stores, fabric stores, ribbon stores, button stores, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseam, but no all-around craft stores with felt squares and googly eyes and yarn and zippers and cross-stitch canvas. They had all the basics plus a lot of nicer yarns… somehow I managed to escape without buying anything because I didn’t see anything that was an absolute deal or that I couldn’t find elsewhere.

(warning: end of knitting content!)

I also spent some time admiring the view out my hotel window in the evening during my dinner break:

And took my usual wake-up shot:

And because I’m a lighting designer (read: dork) and constantly taking pictures of light for “research,” I give you a shot of the afternoon sun coming through the window and hitting the wall because the color is just so intense:

Contests at Skeins Her Way and Lotus Knits! have inspired me to write about how I learned to knit. My maternal grandmother and both of her daughters (my mother and my aunt - she calls herself Ant Kate [sic]) are knitters. My mother knit me and my little brother some of the cutest sweaters and vests when we were little. There are pictures at my parents’ house in Seattle, but I live in Brooklyn and the concept of scanning is foreign to my mother. The pair of sweaters I remember best were navy and had my and my brother’s initials across the chest in signal flags - they were so cool, but we couldn’t tell them apart, so my mother smartly put one stripe at the wrist on one sweater and two stripes on the other. I think I may have been about five at the time. Around that same time I wanted my mother teach me how to knit… I was in kindergarten and I remember taking my newly acquired needles and yarn with me to my friends’ houses after school and their parents thinking I had the oddest hobby for such a little kid. I think I completed about 6″ square of garter stitch in a chunky light blue wool on like US 8’s before I forgot about the whole wanting-to-knit thing.

When I was about nine I went through another knitting phase; my mother was knitting socks for my father with some sort of stranded colorwork - I think it was little fish. I wanted to work on what she was doing and not on my own project, so she let me sit on her lap and work on those socks and on a cream sweater with big magenta roses (don’t judge - we’re talking mid-1980’s here!) that she was knitting for herself. She’s only recently admitted that she had to rip back all the parts that she had let me knit to redo them…

The next time I picked needles up was in December of 2001. I was visiting my Ant Kate’s house during my Christmas vacation and I was about to study abroad in London and only knew one other person going. She found me some needles and some beautiful and vibrant red wool and reminded me how to cast on, to knit, and to purl. I wanted to make a scarf (like every beginning knitter) so I decided upon moss stitch to combat the curling edge problem and to keep it interesting. I found that knitting was just like riding a bike… I remembered things about tension my mother had taught me at five. I’m glad I picked something that would take a lot of time (I throw yarn with my right hand - moss stitch is terribly time consuming that way), because I was addicted to it - I would stay up late at night knitting and watching German MTV. I remember making mistakes and having no one there to tell me how to fix it… I didn’t realize that I could have just found any yarn store and they would help me figure it out! I had to figure out how to fix dropped stitches while keeping the stitch pattern right and how to put stitches back on the needle after ripping and how to bind off all without an experienced guide.

And when I finished the scarf, which was really much too wide for my tastes (I still have it somewhere, but I think it’s in Seattle), I decided I could do anything and wanted to try a sweater. I went to Liberty of London to check out my options. Options at Liberty include: Rowan. And that’s it. But I didn’t find myself wanting for any other options - Rowan yarn is incredibly beautiful and I find the patterns easy to follow. I found in A Season’s Tale a sweater whose shape appealed to me and decided I would knit in the recommended yarn but would add stripes for interest. I think I actually did a gauge swatch that first time (but I certainly didn’t wash it) before I cast on and knit up the four pieces of the sweater. I found directions for mattress stitch on the internet while on the computer at the library, seamed it up, and wore it proudly. I still wear that sweater even though the fit leaves something to be desired. Oh, and blocking? Yeah, that’s something I’ve just started doing recently - FIVE years later!

(Sorry for the crappy pictures-of-pictures, but my scanner refuses to communicate with my new computer!)

Brilliant! I love the idea of a photo scavenger hunt… this one is over at My Best Friend’s a Dork. I’m missing one photo: a knitter other than myself knitting in public. I didn’t go out of my way to look for someone (there weren’t any organized knitting events for Knitting in Public Day last Saturday in NYC), but I carried my camera everywhere for two weeks in case I saw someone. Here we go:

An ice cream truck. I live in Brooklyn, so they are everywhere all the time. This one is near Coney Island…

A sock, handknit or not. This is in the window of PINK in Copley Place, Boston…

A library card. These are my two NYC library cards - you need one for the regular branch libraries and one to enter the research libraries (I use it to watch the taping of theatre shows)…

A ball of green yarn. This yarn is destined to be socks for my father for Christmas, but it’s currently just torturing me…

A bicyclist. This is my father at Coney Island earlier today; I took the photo while riding my own bicycle…

A street sign. I never spent much time in the theatre district of Boston while I lived in Andover, but I just remounted RFK at the Stuart Street Playhouse…

A flower. These beautiful paper flowers were found in a window on either Newbury or Boylston…

A public work of art. Strange stone chairs just south of Boston Common…

Your reflection in an unexpected place. When I went out on the balcony of the hotel in Boston to photograph my ball of green yarn I found a beautiful reflection of the Hancock Building and the Prudential Building behind me…

Someone in a catalog pose. This man was highly suspicious of me and my camera…

A funny billboard or sign. Upon first glance I thought this said “EYES”…

I would ABSOLUTELY do this again - it was so much fun! Maybe I’ll organize one myself someday…

Even if all I’m reading is knitting books, at least I’ve started reading again. I went through a big reading funk and hadn’t finished a book in about six months. While out of town I finished three books I’ve been meaning to read since I received them for Christmas:

Reading Elizabeth Zimmermann always feels very empowering. KNITTING WITHOUT TEARS is not my favorite of her books, but it does have the seamless hybrid sweater (which I want to make for myself) and the Modular Tomten Jacket (which I want to make someday).

I also read her KNITTING WORKSHOP, which has an excellent tip for Long-tail Casting-on - you don’t need the slip knot at the beginning; you just lay the yarn over the top of the right hand needle! Why didn’t I think of that? It has the recipes for the Babies’ Surprise Jacket and the Rorschach Sweater, which I’ve only ever seen here, and it is lovely.

My mother also got me KNITTING FROM THE TOP, as she felt it was a classic accompaniment to the other two. My mother has never ever knit anything without a pattern - not even socks. I think reading these books one after another has definitely convinced me to do a sweater without a pattern, whether or not it follows any of the recipes… but I have a long WIP list to do before I even think of starting something new. I should prioritize those items and attack the list rather than starting new things for this round of Project Spectrum, even though red and black are some of my absolute favorite colors.

Sometimes I think I take knitting and all my other crafts for granted. It’s only when I see someone just starting to learn do I really appreciate the time it took my mother to teach me how to knit, needlepoint, cross-stitch, sew, and quilt (not to mention cook and bake). My mother first taught me to knit when I was about five or six years old; I think I stuck with it for about 9″ of a “scarf,” nevermind that we lived in Seattle and there was no need for scarves! I wish she had saved that little bit of blue scarf for me - or at least a picture of it!

Last summer I taught a friend how to knit and, while she enjoyed it for those first few moments, she gave up the moment someone wasn’t there to supervise. I don’t blame her - it takes a lot of time and effort to solve knitting problems on your own the first few times you encounter them. And you have to know that you really want to solve it and to get better at your craft. When she was packing up to move from NYC to Portland last month, she found the needles and yarn and the bit of knitting she had done and gave it all back to me in one piece. And before I ripped it out to rewind it onto the ball I took a photo for us to remember it by:

If I hadn’t been knitting for so long I would want to quit now because my current knitting challenge is pissing me off. I am designing a pair of socks for my father that is masculine enough that he’ll wear them, but not too boring for me to knit. In the past I’ve made him pairs that are stockinette and pairs that are ribbed, but golly do those get boring fast. He’s not cable-adverse like some people tend to be, so I thought I’d put together some stitch patterns myself and see how it goes:

I thought it was going swimmingly (I love the braided cable) until I measured the leg diameter… it’s so skinny it wouldn’t even fit my little tiny feet! So I ripped. And wow did it hurt to rip all that cabling. And I tried again…

I added 12 stiches to the needles and added some plain ribs in between cables and tried a looser braid and it will fit now, but that braided cable is SO UGLY and needs to be tighter as in the last iteration. I’m okay with the ribbing and the small cables and I will keep those features in the next installment. So I’m going to pull it all out again… but the Brown Sheep Wildfoote rips easily and is holding up nicely. Thank goodness I didn’t try this with a mohair blend or it would be a big sticky mess!

I have a couple other projects that are in need of “fixing” as well… and I’m hoping to work through their problems before I start new projects. I bought some yarn while I was in Boston for work last month and I just can’t wait to get started with it. Fortunately it’s all sock yarn and I only have one set of 2mm needles so I have to finish these socks and the Fiesta Mittens that I started in February first!