I would knit this if I weren't pregnant

I recently discovered a semi-new zine called Metapostmodernknitting. It's run by a group of friends who are librarians at some fashion library in LA, and many their patterns are inspired by/ knock-offs of designer pieces. I like this one a lot.

Knitting something for myself in my current state is stupid, right? Then again, if I started it now, at the rate I knit it would probably be finished by the time I get some semblance of my old body back.

On the pleasures and perils of being a joiner

I'm not much of a joiner, but I have to say that I'm glad I decided to become a part of the Anthropologie Knits group on Ravelry. For the record, I actually have fundamental problems with Anthropologie - there was a critical shopper column in a long-ago New York Times that pretty much summed it up perfectly: Anthropologie sells you the history you wish that you had - Grandma's attic, if Grandma were an elderly hipster incarnation of Martha Stewart (okay, the Critical Shopper didn't put it quite like that, but you get the idea). To this I would add that the price point of Anthropologie suggests that their other major mission is selling hedge fund managers the soul they wish they had. Still, there is no denying I like Anthropologie's bohemian-esque style, though I refuse, for reasons both practical and ideological, to pay hundreds of dollars for it. The solution? The Anthropologie Knits group harnesses the taste and browsing efforts of many people who feel the way I do about Anthropologie's price point, and the result is great tips on patterns that look like Anthropologie sweaters. In preparation for fall, the group has been posting possible patterns for a knit-along, and I'm feeling quite torn. I've wanted to do Rambling Rose (but in one color - like this one on Ravelry) for a long, long time, but someone in the Anthropologie Knits group suggested Oblique by Veronik Avery. I don't think the pictures on Knitty do the sweater justice - this version on Ravelry, however, is inspiring. Basically, I think I like Oblique a bit more, but I know that I am not a huge fan of actually knitting lace (wearing it, sure) and the Oblique pattern doesn't have charts, which means that the lace will be even more challenging/self-loathing-breakdown-inducing.

As Indians say, "What to do?"

Ecce Alpaca (or, if you prefer, yarn porn)

Increasing levels of appreciation for my new alpaca sweater prompted this happy purchase:















Blue Sky Baby Alpaca is my favorite yarn, period.















Being a relatively unprolific knitter has its advantages - I can more or less justify buying obscenely expensive yarn because I go through it so slowly (witness the aforementioned 3-year-old green alpaca sweater).
















It's brilliantly soft and smells like baby alpaca - musty and living, though without all the actual barnyard animal funkiness. Blue Sky baby alpacas must maintain excellent personal hygiene.

Sweater Rescue

Approximately three years after I started knitting it, I have a new fall sweater:






















Prior to its release last week the sweater had been living under our bed, wrapped in plastic, all knit except for the top part of one sleeve. I started this project back when I still thought it was a good idea to design my own sweaters using the free demo of Knitware. Somewhere in there I sort of lost faith in my design vision (fitted stockinette raglan with picot edging = boring) and then there were many friends' babies and the wedding shawls and the alpaca was forgotten.

















Because 100% alpaca ain't cheap, I had originally gone digging under the bed with the intention of cannibalizing it to make Camden (sans sleeves), but then I thought it was an awful lot of knitting to just rip out, and so I decided to finish the sleeve, sew it up, and see what I thought. And I think it's pretty nice. Nice enough to keep after all that freaking seaming, anyway.

















Stats:
yarn: Misti Alpaca Worsted, color 7300
needle: # 5
pattern: made using Knitware
yardage: exactly enough:






















In other words, after knitting the remaining portion of the sleeve and seaming, I had this much left:

















Rock star finish.

For a change, a post that does not warrant the "gender" subject tag

For now, let's just have a posting about innocuous, pretty baby knits, shall we? I've finally put the finishing touches on the Koko Kimono from Minnies for Cousin Liz's little girl. The pattern was a snooze to knit in mostly a good way and I am mostly pleased with the results, though it is true that I am much more fond of knitting with variegated yarn than I am of the resulting rainbow knits. It looks a bit more pastel in the photo than it does in real life.

















Not much for a baby girl not to like.


















Immediately after this picture was taken I was reprimanded by a park employee for having draped the sweater on a bush. Because what would happen if everyone decided that they could go draping their baby knits all over the shrubbery of New York City parks whenever they felt like it? Defoliation! Deforestation! Global Warming! Apocalypse!

In other news, I am rather proud of this photo:


















It's the lily pond in the Conservatory Garden, and I love it even though Claude Monet more or less ruined water lilies for all eternity.

You maaaade me feel shiny and neeew

There has been some knitting of late, much of it accomplished yesterday during a three hour, ten mile journey (yes, south Delhi traffic is that bad, and is made worse this time of year owing to the arrival of massive packs of Ganges-water-bearing Kanwaria pilgrims).
















I was in an air conditioned chariot of luxury because I thought it would be the best way to get to a potential field site in the extreme south of Delhi; as it turned out, the chariot may not have been the best choice because it had to sit in traffic and could not perform illegal u-turns; a rickshaw could have merrily broken many traffic laws and gotten us out of some of the worst backups.

The journey also dragged on forever owing to a series of wrong turns that were partly due to circumstances and partly due to the fact that the driver was an amazingly passive aggressive creature who had obviously recently crawled out of a dark, life-hating level of hell. But I digress. Look at the lovely colors of the Dream in Color Superwash, photographed in the brilliant, blindingly hot subcontinental sun:
















This is none other than EZ's famed BSJ, which I have named in knitter code so that the non-knitter for whom it is intended will not suspect anything. I held off starting it until I could confirm that a stateside friend could get me another skein - a bit of post-trip Ravelry sleuthing indicated that one skein of the Dream in Color wasn't enough. So far so good, and the pattern notes linked on the Ravelry page are helpful, though everyone who has knit this classic knows that it is nothing so much a cross between knitting and origami, and so impossible to intuit, even for an accomplished sweater-knitter like myself - it's just a big blob of knitting until the very end, and then, fold fold fold, and suddenly, out of nowhere: sweater!
















Pain; excitement; mystery - it's like losing my sweater virginity all over again.

Putting off grading final papers takes many forms

Extreme disillusionment with the drop stitch lace tank (and subsequent frogging of the same) greatly contributed to getting the Koko Kimono from Minnies done prior to my impending India trip. Cute, no?














The burning question - and possibly the only active thought I've given this gratifyingly simple and drama-free pattern - is what to do with the i-cord closures.


The pattern calls for garter stitch i-cord, but having knit one, while I understand that it's supposed to match the garter stitch border of the kimono,






















when compared to a straight-up stockinette stitch i-cord, to me the garter stitch i-cord resembles nothing so much as a evil worm-like parasite not unlike those that will almost certainly take up residence in my intestines this summer. Less rainbow-colored, perhaps, but still...lumpy. Ugly and therefore malevolent. You know.
















So I'm torn: ugly thing that makes better design sense, or pretty thing that breaks garter stitch continuity of border? Because of course if I make the wrong decision, no self-respecting 6-month-old girl is going to wear the thing.

one of the many reasons I do not tell my students about this blog

I decided to knit the drop stitch lace tank in the round; this entailed minor modification of the cast-on stitch count since I wouldn't need the stitches alloted for the seaming of edges. No problem.

















Seventy-six minus four is seventy two. Seventy-two divided by eight is nine. Seventy two plus seventy two is one hundred and fifty four. No. Wait.
















One hundred and forty four. One of the nice things about knitting is the ease with which one can return a project to its primal, original form. It's very Upanisadic, come to think of it.

Also, I am not dumb. They have a new name for dumb now. It's called dyscalculia, and while it is not recognized by blogger's spell check, it is recognized as a learning disability by the federal government, and therefore it is something for which public schools must provide remedial instruction. Anything that gets tax money has to be real, or is possibly rendered real by the infusion of tax dollars.

OM.

Hopefully in the end this won't look like someone barfed purple yarn all over my chest

I'm not one for spring/summer adult knits, but currently the only things on the needles are the wedding stoles and Cousin Liz's baby's gift. The wedding stoles require the kind of concentration and optimism of which I am only possessed for a narrow window of not more than two hours in the morning (and I generally like to use that time for Actual Work); Cousin Liz's baby's gift, on the other hand, is so fun and easy that it almost doesn't feel like knitting, and anyway, god forbid we have too much fun and/or ease.

The Buddha, as my sweet little undergraduates have just learned, taught the middle way, and also so far as I know he didn't forbid spring/summer adult knits, so yesterday I spent a good amount of time on Ravelry trying to find something interesting to knit, requiring concentration while also being unlikely to reduce me to tears. A close runner-up was Ruth Homrighaus's Tokyo (Ruth is also the talent behind Sheldon), but the winner as of yesterday was Stephanie Japel's Drop Stitch Lace Tank.
















A visit to my most local yarn store - Yarntopia - turned up the pattern book and some nice purple Princess Classic Elite.
















Last night I swatched and I learned two things: (1) drop stitch lace is really fun! and (2) this pattern walks a fine, fine line between being interesting in a good way and looking like a big pile of yarn barf. For now, on the strength of how fun it is to do drop stitch lace, I'm going to proceed according to plan, and hope that the plan comes together. dah da daaa, da daa dum...

Knitting and Criticism: Presenting Samantha

Finished in a frenzy of end-weaving and last-minute spot blocking (spritz with water, stick in pins as needed and set the blow drier on cool...), Samantha by Kate Gilbert is finally, finally, FINALLY finished.
















While by and large I am pleased with the finished product, this was far from a joy to knit for several reasons. The main issue was problems with neck shaping: after much fiddling and some cursing, I took the mess over to a local yarn store where the staff confirmed that I wasn't crazy but the neck shaping was. I set the project aside for a while in part because I was mad at it and in part because I had other pressing knitting deadlines, but eventually I picked it up and took it to Portugal, where I would have made more progress on it had the *&^%$ security personnel at the Lisbon airport not confiscated my needles just before the 8 hour flight home. Hate. hate.

Back home, I waited and waited for Kate to write me back with pattern corrections, and eventually, fearing that winter break (read: vital knitting time) would pass before I heard from her, I wrote to a fellow Samantha knitter who had noted on her Ravelry account that Kate had sent her the corrected pattern. Said knitter responded quickly and heroically, sending me the corrected pattern (and I did send her my pdf of the old, incorrect pattern as proof that I had bought the original pattern so, knitting copyright police, there's no reason to think that there was anything unethical about this heroic intervention). For the record, Kate did eventually respond to my email, but much later than was useful. Kate is a very talented and popular designer and so, despite the name of this blog, I hesitate to say anything too critical; still, I do think that if a designer has a website and they know that they've been selling a pattern with critical errors, it would be appropriate to post errata on the website, particularly if the designer has difficulty responding to email in timely manner.
















Besides the annoyances of the neck shaping errors, it seems that the corrected pattern (at least the one sent to me by the heroic helpful Samantha knitter) also has an error in collar instructions: basically, picking up an odd number of stitches (as the pattern suggests for all sizes) will not work; the easiest fix is just to add one stitch to the suggested number of stitches (e.g., for the size I knit, the pattern suggested picking up 71 stitches for the collar, so I picked up 72).

The final annoying thing may be more of a function of the yarn that I chose (Zara 100% merino) rather than the pattern itself, but the picot edges simply wouldn't lie flat no matter how much I blocked them. This is minor and actually not nearly as annoying as finishing the picot edge itself (it made me want to gouge out my eyes with knitting needles), but still. I'd say that knitting this yarn a bit more loosely than I did might have made the problem less pronounced (I had to knit it a bit tightly to get gauge). On the bright side, I chose Zara because I knew that it has great stitch definition, and sure enough, the smocking and eyelet really did come out nicely.

















The buttons were a singular triumph - I'm normally horribly indecisive, but I always immediately know whether or not buttons are right for a project. If only I could somehow transfer this vital clarity to other areas of my life. In this case, even with the assistance of a disconcertingly handsome and helpful salesman at M and J Trimmings, I failed to locate anything that I liked, but then another knitter who was looking for cute kid buttons for a another cute little knit dress (and one that was blissfully devoid of picot edging) came over to me to ask about a box of buttons I had disregarded, and I happened to see a box of buttons that she had disregarded, and the rest, as they say, is history.























Thank god.