more knitting patterns online

Look, Weasley sweaters! I totally want to make these now. Except for the aforementioned problem - wool costs money. I guess it's time to start making sweaters out of wool unraveled from sweaters, but the problem with that, of course, is if you run out of wool, that's it. You're done. You can't go back to the store and buy more, and that sweater's just going to be missing one sleeve. So I'd have to plan really, really, really well. And only unravel giant-sized sweaters.

knitting for the trenches

I was poking around on google today trying to figure out how to do this one knitting thing, when I came across this - a 1917 New York Times article explaining what soldiers and sailors need in the way of knitted garments. It includes such useful advice as "If one does not know how to 'purl,' experts at Red Cross organizations and in the department stores, or experienced knitters anywhere, will be glad to explain the simple stitches." It sounds so useful, being asked to knit wool garments for the war effort.

cross-stitch scarf

Here's another knitting project:


A few weeks ago I was admiring a cool sample scarf in a stitch I'd never seen before at a store in the neighborhood. The woman who had knitted it wandered by and told me what book she'd gotten it out of. I considered buying the book, but it was $18 and I'd just been laid off, and, well, it seemed like a dumb way to use my savings. So imagine how clever I felt when I checked the local library catalogs and found out that D.C. and Montgomery County each had dozens of copies! This is the book, if you want to try it yourself. You knit it by crossing stitches over - you reach around the first stitch on the needle, knit the second stitch, knit the first stitch, then pull them both off. It makes more sense in the book.

I was really very pleased with myself for thinking of the library thing. I normally don't get library books, because I find they lead inexorably to fines. Now that I have lots of free time and can actually make it to libraries during their opening hours, I'm giving the library another try.

I gave this scarf to my older stage kid and made another one out of the same yarn for his stage little brother. So as not to incite inter-kid jealousy, we're supposed to sneak presents to the parents, not give them directly to the kids. I did that, being a good rule-follower, but it does kind of take away the fun part of the gift-giving, you know?

knitting

Yesterday I did NO KNITTING ALL DAY. I know. First time in weeks. Now I need a new project. Any ideas? I mean, yes, of course I have another hat that I'm working on, but I'm not happy with less than two or three projects at a time.

knit, then, wherever you may be

Like I said, yarn is expensive. A few weeks ago I found a sweater pattern that I wanted to make. Patterns are usually written for a particular yarn. You can substitute, of course, but it happens that the store up the street from me sells the yarn. I checked, and the yarn for this sweater would've cost $64. Uh, I could buy a better sweater for a lot less. Also, I just got laid off.

I asked my facebook friends how to get cheap yarn. One suggested a cheap brand but said, also, it feels cheap and it wears cheap. Then another said: buy thrift store sweaters and unravel them. I'd read about this online before but hadn't actually heard of anyone who'd tried it. So I read some tutorials and hit the thrift store.

Next thing I knew, I had 800-ish yards of baby blue cashmere and Swallowed My Flea had a new baby boy. I found a pattern online and knit for basically a week straight. I used circular needles so it didn't take up much space and carried my work in a little cloth bag so I could hide it in corners backstage during the Christmas show. I took it to the hospital (my dad was in the hospital - he's fine now) and knitted for hours. I knitted at restaurants. I knitted on the metro. And behold:

Totally cute cashmere baby blanket for less than $5 of materials. Aww yeah.

still obsessed

Don't worry - I may not have mentioned it lately, but be assured that I'm still knitting obsessively.

I made this wacky hat for She Gre:

The yarn comes from this awesome Japanese company. Noro makes really lovely hand-dyed yarn in all kinds of interesting color combinations, and there's a store nearby that carries a bunch of their stuff. She Gre says she gets many compliments.

This hat is for one of my former colleagues:

The gray is alpaca and the blue/yellow is another Noro yarn, doing its color-changing thing. Super annoying, though - so I started at the bottom of the hat, right, and the blue was a nice contrast with the gray alpaca. Then the blue started changing color and I realized it was going to change to gray. Which, uh, not so much with the contrast. I decided to cut it and jump to the next color, and I'm not as into the yellow. But anyway.

That hat took me two days and this scarf:

...took me a month. I think I just got bored with it (do one stitch, repeat for five straight feet of fabric). Anyway, it's done now and can make its way to its rightful owner.

ideas, ideas, ideas

I have about 10 million ideas for things to do next, from an Arctic cruise on an icebreaker to tracking down the source of this awesome yarn in Japan. I actually wasn't kidding in the last comment thread about writing a memoir with the subtitle "How I Lost My Job And Became A Better Person Through Knitting."

Somewhere early in that memoir, I would like to use Coloradan's line: "I'd be sadder if you guys didn't suck so much."

I'm in the market for suggestions on titles, better subtitles, and knitters I should talk to. I want someone in Norway to teach me how to make a proper sweater. I totally want to talk to someone who made socks and stuff for her family all her life and is perplexed by all these younguns who buy expensive yarn and think they discovered knitting. And of course I will need to talk to about 10 million hipster knitters. I should probably also get all these people to teach me to make things, too.

366 this year

The last few years I've managed to post exactly 365 items on my blog - one per day. (Some days with zero and some days with five, of course.) Today is the 314th day of 2008 and this is post 295...so I'm totally behind! I'm spending way too much time on facebook and obsessive knitting and stuff.

yarn porn

This knitting world, it's crazy. The other day I went to the fabric store to pick up a bunch of pink yarns (so I could make this hat for myself) and the check-out lady was all excited about how I got needles and a bunch of yarn for under $10. There was a sale, woo, and they also carry Lion Brand yarn, which isn't very expensive. And the checkout lady said, ooh, have you signed up for the Lion Brand mailing list? And I said, no. And she told me all about how they have a ton of free patterns and got the catalog out of her purse to show me. She may have used the phrase "yarn porn." Multiple times.

Yes, of *course* I went home and signed up. Lookie, there's even a Lion Brand blog. I'm excited about posts like this one - she tells you basically how to make a hat, so you can mess with the pattern and make it up as you go along.

knitting fiend

I made a hat for my dad. I was kinda saving it for Christmas, but I couldn't wait, and he did just have a birthday. Here he is modeling it in my apartment tonight:


Note that it has a tassel. He wears hats inside the house so I figured I could make something pretty ridiculous and he wouldn't mind. Then when I finished I decided it was so great I wanted one for myself. Mine's pink and stripey and only about 2.5 inches long so far.

This knitting thing...it's fun. I love making stuff, and it's fun making stuff that is actually useful and doesn't just take up space. I really like how I can sit in one place and wiggle some sticks around for a while and end up with a *thing* that is both nifty-looking (if far from perfect - I'm not selling these) and functional.

whew

This has been a big week, my friends. I stayed home sick three days. (And only worked a few hours on the other two days.) I finished knitting one project, started another, and went shopping for yarn three times. Or was it four? S.Ball, She Gre, Chatty, Ogram, and my parents came over at various times to keep me company.

Finally, yesterday I wrote a polite, reasonable 1250-word e-mail to the person who I think has primary responsibility for my misery of the last four months explaining exactly how I have been feeling and exactly what behavior and actions by that person have led to my feeling this way. So far, response to the e-mail (from that person and the next person up the management chain) has been good.

This is no fun, people, and I don't know where it's going to lead. But I feel super tough and awesome for actually standing up to the meanie. Rawr. And today I got my appetite back. I hadn't seen it in a while.

create

Yeah, I'm liking this digital TV over the air. I still have to go to someone else's house for Project Runway, but not only do I get Universal Sports, I also get Create. Twenty-four hours a day of commercial-free cooking, knitting, crocheting, quilting, painting...thanks, PBS! This is one of eight public TV channels I get now - WETA has four, MPT has three, and WHUT has one.

I realize that there are cable channels about food and whatnot, but I've never heard of a knitting channel. Anyway, if there was one, it would be 50% commercials and would include a reality show in which young women with underdeveloped social skills live in a house together and try to impress the judges with the improvement in their Fair Isle technique while drinking heavily and picking fights. I prefer the nice slow-talking southern ladies with limited changes in camera angle. Much easier to learn from.

new crafty obsession

Before I went out to Oregon, I decided I wanted Kay Ray to teach me how to knit. She was actually re-teaching me - my grandma taught me about 20 years ago, but I'd never learned how to cast on or actually made a project or anything, just kinda practiced with needles and yarn. So on the Friday I was there, on her lunch break, we went to this super-cute yarn store near her house and picked out yarn for me (she had needles I could borrow).

First I did a bit of practice knitting, which was semi-successful, on this random yarn Kay Ray had left over from something else:


Then, I started on my real project. Kay Ray cast on the first couple of stitches, I did the rest, and then I knitted and knitted and knitted and knitted. I knitted as we watched most of the Lord of the Rings movies (extended editions) on her apartment. I knitted in the car going to Crater Lake. I even knitted *at* Crater Lake, when I got cold waiting for Kay Ray to finish taking a picture:


And Sunday night, I finished the dang thing! It's a totally cute scarf! And I am so hooked! And ready to start something new!