How do you compare to RYC's staff?

At our annual staff Christmas party, the following trivia quiz was administered. (I would argue that there's nothing "trivial" about something as important as knitting, but then again, law school trains you to quibble....) Here's a challenge for our loyal readers: Submit your answers by midnight, August 2nd via email to carol@rosiesyarncellar.com. Whoever gets the most right (or if you're really good, the most right soonest), wins a copy of Selvedge magazine, an extremely cool British fiber arts magazine that we've started carrying at Rosie's.

By the way, our staff did not have access to Google when they answered these questions, so you're on the honor system not to look up all the answers. Winner to be chosen by RYC staff; all decisions final.

1. What year was Rowan founded?
2. The earliest surviving knitted fabric was found in _____ [name of country] and was ________ [type of garment].
3. How many colors of Kid Silk Haze does RYC currently carry? (not including new fall 05 colors)?
4. Which of the following is NOT the name of a sock yarn: (a) Sassy Stripes; (b) Safari; (c) Magic Stripes; (d) Fiesta?
5. Name two children's books that are knitting- or yarn-related.
6. Who founded the Bohus Strickning movement?
7. Name the yardage (in yards) of the following:
(a) Encore Worsted; (b) Koigu; (c) Manos Solids; (d) Anne; (e) Zara.
8. How many shelves constructed by Brent are on the long wall of the West Wing?
9. Which of the following are actual yarns? Frizzati; Spazzini; Crazy Curls;
Tartaloni; No Smoking; Cumulus; Orichetti; Mimosa; Gimlet; No Parking.
10. Translate:
Laine Garn Seide Lin Fil

Remember, no cheating! The challenge is seeing what you know off the top of your head. (And unlike you, the Rosie's staff were, erm, handicapped by their consumption of delicious foofy drinks courtesy of the Continental...)

Good luck!

For the canine you love

Wouldn't your doggy friend love a pair of paw protectors? Crochet them yourself, courtesy of the Arizona Republic. (If you've ever spent a summer in Phoenix, as I have, you'll realize this isn't quite as crazy as it sounds. When it's 120 degrees, walking on pavement hurts!)

SALE SALE SALE SALE SALE

Yes, it's that time of year again: new yarn is coming in, there's no room, we're all realizing how cluttered the place has gotten over the summer, it's the end of the season and we have lots of odds and ends lying about--plus, there's stuff here that I'm just plain tired of looking at. So . . .

Would you all please come and get some of this yarn out of here?

We'll meet you halfway: lots of yarns on sale for 25%, 30%, 35% off; some even more. Not all of them summer yarns, either; there's wool that's discontinued, or we're overstocked, or we're getting new dye lots in soon anyhow.

And bags: All Elizabeth Austen bags and cases are on sale.

As for you not-so-local types: it'll take us a few days to get the online yarns marked down, but we're working on it. If you've got your eye on something specific and can't stand the suspense, e-mail me (lisa@rosiesyarncellar.com) and ask.

Peacock Feather Shawl, almost complete

The knitting is done:



Some serious blocking remains. For this, I will have to repair to my mother's house in the suburbs, where there's a queen-size bed that's not in constant use, and no cat.



Unblocked, it's about 33" from center back neck to bottom point, and about 68" across the top.



I put a tiny bead in each of the bind-off loops at the bottom, because I like the way they look, and this yarn's light enough that I can pretend the shawl "needs" them to drape properly. You probably won't be able to see them until after blocking.

Actually, this yarn is also soft enough that I was seriously worried about it breaking during the bind-off process, from the stress of sliding the beads down the strand again and again.



You don't really need all these pictures. I just can't stop looking at it. It actually looks better here than in person: something about the way the flash flattens the surface seems to clarify the pattern.

You know what the greatest thing is about finishing a lace shawl? Now I'm allowed to start swatching for the next one.

Knitting Circle, 7/27

How nice to have a knitting circle where no one succumbs to heatstroke!

Here's Ed working on the second of a pair of socks made out of handspun (though not spun by Ed). It's not quite visible in this picture, but the leg of this sock was knit flat, when Ed found himself short one 2.25 mm dpn in Chicago. (Can it possibly be true that there's no yarn shop inside the Loop?) The foot now continues in the round; the leg will be seamed later. Note that the shift from in-the-round to back-and-forth doesn't seem to have affected the color pooling.



Kelly's making the classic Yankee Knitter pattern for the English Rib pullover. I love how different a really traditional design can look in a really contemporary yarn.



Rhonda's recycling some Elaine in the ever-popular color known as Toni Morrison: it was mostly knit into a sweater, she wasn't satisfied with the results, she's ripping it as she goes. This demonstrates two great things about the yarn: (1) If it wasn't knit too tightly, if it hasn't been in the fabric too long, if the yarn itself is highly textured--you can re-knit it right away, without having to re-skein and block it. (2) Despite its being a very loosely-spun merino yarn, Elaine rips and re-knits successfully, without undue fraying or fuzzing or shredding.



I tried to get pictures of Sherry's beautiful teal raglan with the cabled rib and cable on the sleeve, but the flash apparently didn't go off. We'll try again next week.

As for me? Well, I don't know if any of you have seen this knitting challenge, but I'm thinking maybe I should enter: I didn't knit underwater, I haven't taken my knitting skydiving, but I knit lace--the Peacock Shawl, no less--during Knitting Circle. Which, as any of you will know who've ever tried to knit any kind of pattern at all during Knitting Circle, may very well qualify as Extreme Knitting. But I was obsessed, as I've said, and I guess it's true that Heaven looks out for fools, because nothing went wrong. Pictures later of the now finished--but unblocked--shawl.

And if anyone ever wants to hear a good story about how someone met their mate, ask Lisa J. to tell you how her mother and stepfather met.

Knitting in Bosnia

I haven't been posting as much in recent weeks -- we took the crew on vacation, and we are halfway through potty-training the twins (Nick is, Grace isn't, in case you were that interested; or is this all way more than you needed to know?). Here's a little tidbit I came across involving a group of Bosnian women who formed a kind of knitting collective to better their lives economically. The post-war Bosnia has a staggering 40+% unemployment rate, and these women form small groups to knit and crochet items which are sold under the name Bosnian Handicrafts. What's especially heartwarming is that each group must include Muslim, Croat and Serb women, bridging some of the ethnic divisions that resulted in war.

How to Judge a Book, part 2

Ever looked through a new issue of Vogue Knitting and then wanted to throw it across the room?

(Raise your hand if you've done it in the last 3 months. Extra credit if you've done it for at least three issues out of the last 4. But I digress.)

Infuriating. You expect better. What to do?

In a capitalist economy, you're supposed to vote with your wallet: don't buy the magazine you don't like; buy the magazine you do like; and eventually market forces should reward the "good" magazine, thus encouraging it.

Yeah, right. What if there's no "good" magazine available? What if the percentage of patterns you like in a magazine is low, but you like those few a lot; or if it's low but still higher than the others and you want to knit something? You buy the magazine, and the people in charge don't know that you held your nose while you did it.

The people in charge: when a magazine is full of designs I dislike, I blame the editors. Anyone who's ever submitted a design to any of the major mags can tell you that they're all being inundated with submissions, and are selecting a small fraction of those for publication. If there are no cardigans in an issue, you can rest assured that it's not because there are no cardigan designs available right now. Editors choose these ridiculous garments that we see every quarter, the ones that make us all say, "KOIGU PANTS? WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?"

Putting aside for the moment the possibility that exactly the designs that make me cringe are exactly the ones making someone else buy the magazine, there's still the chance that some people buy magazines just for inspiration. ("I'd never make that, but the idea of intarsia flowers on top of a cable has potential . . .") The editor's job isn't simple; she has to walk a line between too "out there" and too traditional ("Another crewneck cardigan with a cable up each side? How many does anyone need?").

(She also has other problems: did you know that most designs are chosen based on a rough sketch of the garment plus a swatch [often not in the actual yarn] of the stitch pattern? The editor has to trust that her vision of the final garment matches the designer's, and that the designer can execute that idea, and do it to fit a fair number of people. Under considerable time pressure. I sometimes think it's a miracle any of these things are workable at all.)

But it's still ultimately the editor's decision about what gets into print and what doesn't, and she has a finite amount of space in each issue, so I blame her when there's nothing I would ever knit or wear in the whole magazine, because I also know that each thing she included meant excluding another design that was quite likely just as good. Or, to my taste, better.

In our next installment: have you noticed who I'm not blaming for bad designs in mags or books?

WOMN

I finished a shawl made of the mohair from Brooks Farm that I got at Maryland:



(That's under three months since the Festival: unusually fast turnaround for me.) I'm happy with it, but it's making me reconsider my plans for the other color I got: this is a little less than 3 sts per inch, and I don't know that the yarn wants to be knit much denser than that--it's just too fuzzy--but the patterns I'd been looking at are about 4 sts per inch.

Meanwhile, I've been working on the Peacock Feathers Shawl from Fiddlesticks:



Here's mine so far:




(I have reason to believe it will look better when it's blocked. Here's my reason:


I swatched.)

The yarn is OPY (Other People's Yarn): Cherry Tree Hill's "Possum Lace." It's 40% merino, 40% possum, and 20% silk. (As you'll know soon if you don't already, I'm a sucker for silk blends.) I'd always been pretty skeeved out by possum fiber, because it comes from dead animals--in Australia or somewhere, they're a plague on the landscape, so people kill them, and someone had the bright idea to shear the corpses. Ew. I mean, the animals are such a problem that groups like Greenpeace are o.k. with killing them, but still.

But at Stitches last year, this stuff just ambushed me. And in "Java," which is not anything like my usual colorscheme. Courtney called it my "roadkill" yarn.

I love it. Well, I'm not actually in love with the color right now--maybe because it looked different in the hank, maybe just because the light where I'm usually working with it isn't flattering. I don't hate it; it just leaves me cold. But I couldn't be having more fun with the project as a whole.

(In fact, I didn't know it was possible for me, personally, to get this much pleasure from a knitting project separate from the color; color is that important to me.)

The fun is in the feel of the yarn, which is absolutely luscious, and in the pattern. All Fiddlesticks patterns are very well written--comprehensive, detailed, accurate--but the design is also beautifully worked out. There's a lot of symmetry in the pattern, and it's got great rhythm in my hands (the little chant you do to remember the repeat: "right, over, two, over, double, over, two, over, left; three, over-left, over-left, three, right-over, right-over, three;" repeat . . .).

On Saturday, I crossed over onto the last chart, the one for the edging, and I can't put it down. 233 rows down, 17 rows to go (plus the bind-off).

P. S. I drafted this in the morning. In the afternoon, I wound up the third skein of yarn (which I'll need for, like, the last 6 rows), and learned another thing about why this project has been making me so happy: it didn't have any anxieties about whether I had enough yarn, whether I was fudging dye lots, etc. I learned this because the last skein, while still the same dye lot as the others, is visibly different. There's a pale green, almost a mint color, that comes up once in awhile but appears nowhere in the other two skeins. I'll have to blend the two by working two-row stripes until the old skein runs out (or until the project ends, which may be sooner). I'm sure it's going to be fine, but now I'm all stressed out about how much it will show, having the little floats from carrying the two yarns up the side edge, etc.

Don't Judge a Book By . . .

Would y'all please stop buying knitting books you haven't read?

I mean, this isn't Barnes and Noble, where they'd really prefer you not read the latest Patricia Cornwell before deciding to invest.

Some people read book reviews, but most people walk into a bookstore and buy a book because it "looks good": nice cover design, interesting flyleaf copy, encouraging blurbs on the back. Maybe a quick glance at one random page to "taste" the prose.

You buy the book, you go home (or to the beach), you read the book. You like it or you don't, but if you don't, you still understand that that's part of the deal: you've bought a pig in a poke, as it were, and you won't know whether it was "worth it" until afterward.

Now, about knitting books. Totally different story. You know what's inside, because you've looked inside. There are patterns in there, for making the things in the pictures. Very few of us will read the knitting book the same way we'd read the novel. The value of the book is not in the reading experience.

Where, then, is it?

Please ask yourself, as you consider buying a knitting book, not "Is this a good book?" but rather "What is this book good for?"

Consider the possibilities:

One might buy a book in order to learn a technique. All beginners' how-to books fall into this category.

Some books are for inspiration. How many Kaffe Fassett books did you buy before you acknowledged that you weren't really going to knit that many of the things in them? That doesn't mean you regret buying them. They're beautiful, they inspire you, they expand your (my) sense of what knitting can be.

Everyone needs a couple reference books. You won't need all the information in the Big Book of Knitting, and you won't try all the stitches in the Barbara Walker Treasuries, but they're still good to have.

I want to make that sweater. By far the largest category, at least right now, is the pattern book: it's full of specific projects the way a cookbook is full of recipes. This is the category where I have an issue.

The beauty part of the knitting pattern book is that, with some close inspection, you can totally tell whether it's going to be what you want. You can read the sizing information and see whether the garments will fit you. You can read the gauge information and see if most of the projects are on teeny-tiny needles. You can read through the instructions themselves, and see whether most of them make sense or whether the whole thing looks like Sanskrit.

Yes, there are some things you can't tell for sure: will that shape be flattering on you? Is the book full of typos, so that the numbers in some of the patterns don't add up right? Are many of the yarns discontinued? (Like that matters.)

But, allowing for the cookbook factor (no one ever really expects what they cook to look like the picture in the book, do they?), there's almost no reason to buy a knitting book and be disappointed with it. And if you are disappointed with it, there's almost no one to blame but yourself.

Tomorrow: Who to blame when you're disappointed with a book before you buy it.

Good News for Everyone!

We're air conditioned!

And more Koigu arrived!

And because someone thought Magda's shawl could look even better than it did before, here's a picture of it blocking on Dorlynn's floor!

Chocolate Dreams for Knitters

Has anyone else seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory yet?

Maybe those of you who don't have children under 10 weren't in line on opening day.

I loved the original Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory; it was the first movie I saw in a theatre. I thought this one was pretty good. But I almost couldn't hear the dialogue, because I was so distracted by . . .



. . . all the knitted and crocheted stuff. That's Charlie (above), in the fairisle pullover he wears throughout his visit to the chocolate factory. The colors are a little harsh, the gauge is a little coarse--I have to assume this has something to do with making the design read on film. But that's just the beginning:

Here's the (usually) radiant Helena Bonham-Carter as Charlie's overworked, exhausted mother:



Didn't Rowan have a Chunky Tweed in that color? (The fingerless gloves, I assume, are store-bought.)

And then there's Augustus Gloop and his mother:



Haven't I seen the red one in a book somewhere? (I checked Folk Vests, but it's not in there.) It's a puzzling choice: Augustus is German; even if the vest has to be red, why not some more traditional traveling-stitch pattern?

The scenes inside Charlie's home are virtually overwhelming. The four grandparents are all in the bed, so in the same shot we can see Charlie's pullover,


Grandma Josephine's crocheted shawl,


Grandpa George's scarf, Grandma Georgina's shawl and hat, and (what you can't see here) a knitted blanket.

These photos are right off the official website. I wish I could get a better shot of Grandpa George's scarf. It's the same pattern as the blanket; both appear to be knit in garter-stitch triangles assembled into quilt-type blocks. Or possibly knit in intarsia. I don't envy the knitter, either way, but I sure would like a closer look.

This isn't all: when Charlie and the other kids first approach the factory gates, Grandpa Joe is wearing a knit scarf that I'd swear is Kureyon in color 149 (you know, all greys and toffee-browns); the first time we see Violet, she's wearing a (pretty dreadful) granny-square vest.

Anybody got any connections to the costumer for this job? The publicity interviews seem to focus on Johnny Depp's costumes. (Who cares about that?) Any insights, anyone?

Hot Times in the Cellar

So Teva Durham (of Loop-d-Loop fame) came down from NYC on Sunday to teach a seminar on Designing with Short Rows.

She's sure thought about doing a lot of things with short rows. She had a bag full of ideas with her, and more kept tumbling out of her head all morning.



We were agog.



We were also very warm. (Heads up: the new air conditioner is being installed on Friday.)



Everybody tried different stuff. I love workshops where you get to follow up the ideas that interest you, instead of everyone having to do the same stitch at the same time.



Nicole looks pretty happy with her results (preliminary as they are).

Things broke up a little early, I think not just because of the heat but because people felt like their brains were going to explode. Sometimes two hours' worth of new ideas is all you can take.

Hey, all y'all who were at the workshop: show us what you do from those swatches! Everyone who wasn't: watch this space for follow-up!

Stop Me Before I Felt Again

I give you the Caribe bag, as close to complete as it's ever going to be:



I cut the handles shorter, moved a couple of the holes they pass through (snip! snip! no worries--it's felt!), used the leftover i-cord to make a button loop, stitched down some curlicues of leftover accent colors, and layered two buttons. Redeemed? I don't know. But short of actually sewing on bells, that's as far as I can go. This was supposed to be one of the December in July projects, but it doesn't seem likely that anyone's going to want to duplicate it. If I'm wrong, backchannel me, and we can discuss materials for a kit.

Meanwhile, undaunted by my most recent failure, I got curious about what some Diarufuran I'd been crocheting would look like when it was felted. The answer? It looks good.



I don't know that it can properly be called a felting success, however, since (a) I wasn't planning to felt it when I made it, and (b) I don't know what it is now.

While I was at it, I thought I'd test out some of the Chester Farms pencil roving we got awhile back. You're supposed to be able to knit with it if you double it, or better yet, knit it double and loose and then felt it. No pre-washing pictures, I'm afraid, but here are the washed swatches:



Above, single-stranded on US #8; below, double-stranded, on US #13. Grace and Dorlynn assure me that both of these swatches are in fact felted; to me, they look incomplete, because you can still see the stitches. On the other hand, the stuff knits really nicely--more info soon.

And some catch-up from Knitting Circle last week, while I was away: Magda has finished her Pi Shawl.



Here she is draping it artfully around Cathy:



Wow!

The Kippah Project: Outcome

If I were a real blogger, I'd have pictures to go with this, but I don't.

I couldn't get more yarn on the way to Pittsburgh. (Euroflax sport-weight doesn't seem to be a very widely available yarn. Hmmmm . . . think maybe we should carry it?) But the supply I had held out through the end of the tenth kippah, which was at 4:55 p.m. Saturday--thus almost 24 hours to spare! Well, if you don't count weaving in the ends or blocking the last one.

The ends were an issue of their own; I'd brought along a chibi, but the basic chibi needle (also known as a "Jumbo Bent-Point Darning Needle," the bright gold one) was too big to go through the tight stitches. Ditto the crochet hook with which I'd made them. Hey, lucky me: an excuse to visit a yarn shop in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh Knit and Bead also carries only the standard chibi set. (For any of you out there who've tried to buy a smaller tapestry needle at Rosie's, only to be told that Jumbo Bent-Point Darning Needles are the only ones we carry, my apologies. That will be changing.) So I bought another, smaller crochet hook.

Which also proved too big for the job. So by now it's Sunday morning, and one family member or another asks me on an hourly basis, "So, are the kippot finished yet?" (They're all maybe a little better on deadlines than I am.) And I keep answering, "Oh, yeah, it's all fine." I go out early looking for a CVS or a Rite Aid, because they still have little sewing kits sometimes, and I need something with a selection of needles. I find, like, 3 CVSs in the four blocks around the hotel--and none of them open at all on Sundays. Finally, one turns up that opens at 10, and it has those little packets with two dozen different needles. Including a perfectly fine crewel needle that I'm sure has never been the reason anyone has bought that product ever before in the entire history of its production.

I wove in the ends. Yeah, I wound up hitting the last kippah with a hairdryer for a few minutes, just so it would be totally dry by the time someone put it on. Nooooo problem.

When the rabbi arrived for the signing of the ketubah (that's the marriage contract; the bride, groom, rabbi, and a couple witnesses sign it before the actual wedding ceremony), I realized we'd been miscounting all along: my grandmother used to make a kippah for the rabbi and the cantor as well. Not that it's so important that everyone under the chuppah (wedding canopy) should have matching kippot, just that it's a nice gesture to give the rabbi a kippah, as long as the other participants are all getting new ones.

Sigh. Now that it's all pretty much over (I still owe Suzanne and Jill theirs, for future use), I can say that this has been an interesting project in several ways: I don't think I've ever completed a project that was so unpleasant to do. I mean, not everything I knit is a pleasure at every moment, but if a project is being a real misery, it's usually a sign that something's wrong with it, and I either make an adjustment or cancel the project. (Or sometimes abandon it to the back of the closet, like everyone else.)

This one was frustrating (because I felt like the product wasn't very good), slow, high-pressure, and physically painful--and I had to finish it, and I did. I don't have anything meaningful to say about that right now. Maybe in a little while, when I get some photos of the kippot to post, and write up the instructions for how I actually made them.

For now, it's back to work on the Peacock Shawl, and boy, does that feel good.

Comic Relief Dept.

Have you discovered You Knit What yet? Warning: high snide factor, but oh so funny. Unless one of your garments is up there.

The Sound of One Hand Stranding

The kippah project has yielded one technical development: this is my first experience with two-color work in crochet. In theory, this sort of thing is easier in crochet than in knitting, because the “floats” of the unused color are trapped automatically under every stitch. Thus there’s no concern about length of float, and getting correct tension is (supposed to be) easier.

I like stranding two colors in knitting, so I was eager to reach the pattern section of the first kippah. (Also because it would represent the end of the anxiety-provoking center section, in which you’re never sure you’ve increased properly until after blocking.)

Almost immediately, however, I discovered that I was going to hate the crochet version, because when I knit fairisle, I carry one color in each hand, so I don’t have to drop a strand and pick up a strand every time I change color. Even working to pick up the new color in the proper orientation (to prevent excessive twisting), the crochet was going to be excruciating.

Somewhere in the second or third round, though (you know, like 5 hours into the process), I noticed that it was getting a little better. A little after that, I noticed why: I wasn’t dropping the second strand. Like this:



The more I think about how I’m doing this, the more impressed I am that I’m doing it at all: I must really hate dropping and picking up strands. But here’s what’s going on, as I understand it:

--Instead of holding the fabric between my thumb and my non-index fingers, I’m grasping the fabric between those fingers and my palm.

--The yarn over the forefinger is tensioned pretty much as usual, which for me is between the non-index fingers and the back of the fabric.

--The yarn over the thumb is tensioned between the front of the fabric and my palm.

The tension is still a pretty sticky wicket. Unlike stranded knitting, there seems to be little or no advantage to patterns that use the colors equally (two light stitches, two dark, etc., as opposed to one light, 5 dark). The thumb strand has a tendency to go slack, even when it’s the one used more often.

Now, as for working the stitches:

--Stitches worked with the forefinger strand are almost normal:



Reach through the fabric, draw a loop through; reach over the top edge of the fabric and the float strand, grab yarn and draw a loop through.

--The first half of a stitch worked with the thumb strand:



Reach through the fabric, bring the hook up and forward over the dormant forefinger strand. Continue to move the hook forward until it’s in front of the active thumb strand as well, then duck it down a little bit so that it catches the active strand. Move the hook back; the strand is now running up the back of the hook then over the top and forward—it’s not caught in the “hook” part at all.

Now twist the hook enough to catch the yarn as you come back through the fabric.

--The second half of a stitch with the thumb strand:



Oh, look, we’ve got another helpful volunteer! For those of you who haven’t been into the shop around lunchtime lately, here’s a little more of Truffle:



And now back to the matter at hand:



Hook comes forward over the thumb strand (and also therefore incidentally over the dormant strand), strand comes up the back of the hook and down over the top into the notch, pull loop through.





There you have it. And in case you’re keeping track, as of 7 a.m. today, 8.2 kippot are complete, with 1.8 to go. Fortunately, I’ve got the whole ride to Pittsburgh in the car tomorrow. Unfortunately, I’m pretty clearly going to run out of yarn midway through kippah #10.

Fortunately, I anticipated this last week and ordered another skein.

Unfortunately, an online vendor who shall remain anonymous botched my order.

Fortunately, I still have hours and hours today to find out which other retailers of Euroflax have the right color and weight in stock—and are near the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Any part of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

And it’s not like I had anything else to do with my time today.

Follow-Up Visuals

Here are three of the kippot I've completed so far.



I promise I'll work in the ends before anyone walks down the aisle.

In honor of July 4th....

If you happen to be in Massachusetts for the holiday weekend, you can stop by MASS MoCA, a center for performing and visual arts in North Adams (wherever that is). There you can gaze in wonderment upon Dave Cole's work "The Knitting Machine," in which two full-sized John Deere excavators, with ersatz knitting needles attached, commence to knit a giant American flag. You can read more about it, and see a picture, here.

Happy Independence Day!