The Opposite of Knitting

I've been pretty sedentary for the past 6 years. Part of it is my hobbies--running with knitting needles is a good way to lose an eye or rupture a lung, and piano isn't exactly a marching band instrument. The other (larger) part is my body. I did gymnastics until I was 16. I wasn't particularly good at it, mind you, but I did it 14.5 hours a week, 51 weeks a year for a decade. When I hit high school, my knees began the process of dying. I don't know if you've ever had a body part degenerate on you, but it's basically awful. You go to physical therapy and they can arrest your descent, but unless you stop doing the thing that makes you hurt, you're never going to get well. When the thing that makes you hurt is putting any force on a bent knee, it makes that sport you dedicated your life to nigh on impossible.

The day I realized I was taking tylenol just so I could sleep through the night was the day I went to my coaches and quit. After that, I sat still for a long time. My body has, for the most part, forgotten just how badly I was hurting day in and day out (when it remembers, I have the most vivid waking dreams about injuring myself any number of ways back at the gym. It's pretty grim). This is one of the reasons I want to scream at the Marines for their "Pain is weakness leaving the body" slogan. Pain is not weakness leaving the body, it's your body telling you that if you don't stop that right now, you're going to irreparably damage something.

Since then, things have gotten better. Stairs are still a lesson in torture, but that's not too big of a deal unless I have an appointment in a skyscraper. Time heals all wounds, as they say.

Well, after a winter of being stuck in my apartment, unemployed, and generally bored, my body decided for the first time since I packed up my leotard that it wanted to work out. Now, I've worked out occasionally between point A and point B, but that was because it was "a good thing to do" or "healthy." Those are conscious mental decisions. My body wants to do push-ups. Badly.

So I wrote out a regimen based on my old conditioning routines. Other than bar exercises, gymnastics has awesome workouts you can do anywhere as long as you bring yourself. 5lb weights are helpful, but by no means necessary. The real trick was factoring in 6 years of not doing squat when calculating set numbers. My body still thinks it can do 3 sets of 30 clapping, diamond push-ups.

My piece of paper says we will do 3 sets of 5 regular push-ups. I may have been overestimating my abilities.

But I did my work-out yesterday for the first time in years. It felt great. It was exhausting. I really enjoyed it.

This morning I couldn't walk when I tried to get out of bed. I still almost fall whenever I try to stand up after relaxing the backs of my legs. I feel like a newborn calf.

Oh well. We'll work it off tomorrow. It'll be a good way to greet the day.

Meristem and learning to write patterns

A few months back, I wanted to make something nondescript. I walked over to my stash, dug for a bit, and came out with a ball of Mirasol "Hacho" I had picked up years ago on sale. I had nabbed 2 hanks because I loved the colors and because it was about 75% off, which is a steal and I am a sucker for such things. At the time, I had no idea how I would use it. I had tried a couple different patterns, but been unsatisfied because the dye-job on Hacho makes stitch definition difficult to see, the short runs make using it in fair isles confusing in the foreground and the background, and it knits up a little squat due to the fiber content and the way it's spun. (The recommended needle size is a 6, even though the yarn is no thicker than my other fingering weight.)

So, I had the Hacho in my hot little hand and I thought, "well, hand warmers don't need to drape... and I bet some simple directional stitches would show off the colors without being boring as drywall to knit." (it is, apparently, very boring to knit drywall.)  I cruised around ravelry per the usual, but I was wholly unsatisfied with anything I saw. The more I thought about it, though, the more I knew what I wanted. I wanted twisted rib, a thumb gusset, and a gentle arch with new ribbing blooming out of it invisibly. I got out my notebook and drew it. I grabbed my needles, ball-parked the number of stitches I would need to cast on (who's a lazy bum? this girl), and went to town.

Turns out decreasing in twisted rib is more complex than you would initially be led to believe.  You have to reorient every stitch that ends up "on top" a quarter turn clockwise before you do anything else (except maybe getting the stitch before it out of the way). It worked, though. The bind-off, on the other hand... that took three tries and three different bind-offs. Standard BO was ugly. EZ's sewn BO was an abomination (shiver). I settled on a tubular BO. Honestly, I should have started there; I knew better.

They ended up with my seester for her birthday. As I look back on it now, it doesn't seem such a big deal--they were just hand warmers--but really, that was the first time that I have ever made the "thing I see in my brain." It's certainly not the first thing I've ever designed that's ended up in my family's possession. My little brother has odd requests and is the proud owner of his own Pi scarf (to the 314th digit, like a boss) and Totoro guitar strap (that was certainly a learning experience... hoo buddy). And then there's the boobkini... Even the cropped cardi from hell, for all those shed tears, was a lesson in editing rather than writing. well, let's just  say these hold a special little place in my heart reserved for those monumental firsts. Most of the accomplishments in there are things like "first time I did a back tuck" and "first time someone sang an arrangement I wrote."

As cool as my "totally original" patterns are (and they are. I won't hear otherwise), they're just strips. So, I'm pretty proud of my little "Meristems". As I look at the photos, I need to move some things around--that top is too long and the cuff too short--but I really love the movement on the hand. I think it's awfully purdy. Since it only took 1 ball, I guess I'll use the second one to make a pair for myself.

I'll post a pattern once I finish my edit. (Send me a shout out if you want to test-knit them.)

Grafting Cables and other forms of torture

I finished the cable border on Yggdrasil. It took longer than I thought it would. Because I hadn't knit on it in a while, I was deceived by the distance between where I knitted to when I put the blanket down and where I needed to be. I thought "that's maybe ten minutes worth of grinding" but it was really closer to 3 hours. But that section is done now and unless I get a hankering to do the largest size, that's the last large cable border I'll have to knit.

Now, when the cable border is finished, you graft the beginning and the ending together so that it appears continuous. In my mind this was an easy task. I like grafting well enough. It's pretty straight forward once you realize what you're doing (which, for the record, is mimicking stitches by controlling the entrance, connection, and exit from each loop of yarn. The traditional knit-purl-purl-knit format mimics stockinette because it keeps the working yarn on the "wrong side" of both pieces, which are held with the wrong sides touching. Ergo, you enter a the first stitch on the right side, drop it off the needle, and then thread the yarn through as if to purl, connecting the stitches through the back and coming up through the center of the second stitch. Then you enter through the first stitch on needle 2 purlwise, thereby bringing the yarn to the wrong side of that section, and leave knitwise.)

That turned out wordier than I had initially thought it was going to be. All that is to say that when you're grafting together, say, ribbing or cables you need to be careful about how you enter the first stitch, connect it to the second stitch, and finally exit that second stitch.

Now here's where it bites you in the butt. When you do a provisional cast on with the intention of  grafting later, you cast on the number of stitches you will be working (no huge surprise there. Need 20, cast on 20.) When you expose the live stitches, though, you now have the number of stitches you cast on minus one. Why? Well, you're working with the undersides now, and if you think of it like a big strip of rick rack (which shouldn't be too hard if you've ever frogged your work.) you know that the zig-zag has peaks and valleys, and since you started with a tail, the line starts and ends with a peak.

So now you're grafting 20 stitches to 19 stitches. So you say to yourself, "no big deal, we'll just fudge it a little and it'll all work out." and if it were stockinette, it would. But it's not. It's cables, and the stitch pattern in Yggdrasil puts that first cable on row 1. Accuracy matters if the basket weave is going to look right. But it never will. No matter what you do, it'll always be just a liiiiittle off center and a liiiiittle strained . There are only 3 loops in the bottom of each of those cables (5 loops associated with the cables, but only 3 are directly related. Remember the rick rack.)

And so I finally gave up after the 3rd try today. It's grafted and it's ugly and I'm sad. Would you notice it from far away? No. How do I know? Well, I only figured it out after my first failed attempt and I've been looking at peoples projects for years. Now that I look at them again, they all have that wonky join.

So... my advice is don't do the provisional cast on. Do something without a lot of bulk, maybe a backward loop, but certainly not long-tail or tubular, and whip stitch the bugger together later. 20 stitches to 20 stitches. Matched up perfectly.

I'm going to go over one of the cables (the ugliest one) again with some duplicate stitching to clean it up when all is said and done. That should help.

Sigh.

Yggdrasil and Charting Lace

My current monster project (because I inevitably have at least on of these on my needles, regardless of how many smaller projects are/need to be worked on) is Yggdrasil. I've mentioned it in passing a couple of times but I hadn't taken pictures of it until today. This is mostly because enough of the cable border needed to be knit so that the body was "liberated" and I could lay it flat. I can't wait for it to be finished. It's so endearingly lovely... all heathered and cabled.

Of course, it would be finished much more quickly if I worked on it. At all.

Between knitting breasts and writing patterns for knit breasts, it's hard to find the motivation to actually grind through the last 4 repeats of the cable chart, work the corner and kitchener that bugger together. Also, it probably doesn't help that I mis-crossed my last cable row and I'm being a stubborn idiot about fixing it. But in theory, it's about halfway done, which is good because I underbought in yarn from a store 5 hours from my home like a genius, and the likelihood of ever re-encountering this dyelot is somewhere next to the likelihood of re-encountering a dinosaur while being struck by lightning. I think I can make it, though.

It really is a clever little pattern. (Word to the wise, print the chart and mark both sides of rows to keep your bearings. That ^^ is not a symmetrical tree and the chart, she is wide and written in tiny font)

I think there may actually be too many repeats in the edging. It wants to curl up into a gentle ruffle. Maybe in the heavy cotton the pattern calls for the cables lay flat simply due to their weight, but my loft wool doesn't want to. I need to be careful on the pick up round (I'm writing this down here so that there's proof that I told myself this in advance, even though I will probably do so haphazardly, like an idiot.)

I have distant plans to cast on another Niebling project--frosted fern. I recharted it in excel from the written directions courtesy of the wayback machine. I have a personal rule never to work complex lace from written directions. It stems from a run in with a frostflower border in Vogue Knitting on one of my first sweaters. Frostflowers are evil. They are knitted lace--pattern on every row, as opposed to lace knitting where the pattern is on every other row. I had no idea what I had gotten myself into, and after days of struggling with the stupid narrow columns that divided a row of knitting over 5 rows of directions, I invented charting.

By myself. I had never read a chart before. I had never even seen one. It didn't matter. The pattern seemed linear, the stitch count didn't change. I made up my own symbols and went to town.

So, upon encountering 120 rows of uncharted text, I opened excel, got out my graph paper, and set out to make an easily understandable chart.

It needs a few more edits--I don't write in Mr. Niebling's style. I prefer my leaves segregated into their own sections and my stems mostly unbroken, and to achieve this, I'm willing to work with large "no stitch here"sections. But those need to be added later, since you can't really know the widest point of something until you've past it. It's about half-way done. I was content simply getting it transcribed.

The Boobkini

Links in this post are probably not safe for work. Nothing terrifying, just... stuff your boss probably doesn't want to see.

My knitting has taken an... odd turn as of late. A few months back, I applied to a posting on CraigsList asking for "knitresses" to make objects "roughly the size of hats." I am a naturally curious creature, and so I spent a good month mulling over what sort of projects were roughly the size of hats but still not hats. The only thing I could come up with was a bowling ball cozy. (If I had a bowling ball, I would make one just so I could say I had a bowling ball cozy.)

After a few weeks of silence, the woman in charge got in contact with me and told me we would be knitting fake breasts for a lactation instructor. Oh. Hats. Gottcha. I offered to help with anything she needed--editing, yarn selection, all that good stuff. A few weeks later, I got an e-mail saying that they were looking to combine 2 patterns into one, and she would get it to me eventually.

That leads us to this past weekend. Friday I received an e-mail with the two patterns that needed to be combine: a relatively standard breast pattern that was probably designed for women who've had mastectomies, and something called "Booby trap." Also she needed it by Monday (... ... ...). And so I set to work trying to make what I have affectionately dubbed the "boobkini." First the breast needed to change so that it would look full but not actually be too thick. Then I needed to make straps. Then I needed to figure out how to connect the two.

15 hours and a trip to Joann fabrics later, it was finished. It was a slog to get it done, mostly because every decision needed to be correct the first time if I were to finish in time. but it's done. finally. and now I just need to knit a ba-jillion more of them. So regular knitting is probably on a temporary hiatus in favor of monetary advancement, which is a little sad since I was really enjoying Les Mis.

Gingko and grad school

It's been an awkward time of life these past few weeks. I was accepted into my graduate program at EWU (weeeeee!) and funded for the next year, which meant that job searching was more or less a moot point, since no one is hiring someone for 6 months. So job hunting has been replaced with sketching serial cross-sections of chick embryos and learning basic programing. I'm excited to see what next year will hold, but I'm also rather nervous. I received an assistanship, which I wanted, but they haven't told me what I will be doing/teaching in order to merit their money, and I've been out of school for a year. I'm feeling rusty. I'm feeling inadequate. I'm feeling like I need to review my entire undergraduate curriculum in the next 6 months.

It's terrifying. Still, I can't wait to get back on the embryology horse and learn all sorts of new, fascinating things. Let's just leave it at "change is scary."

In other news, I started knitting Les Miserables, which has several things going for it. First, it is named after my favorite book by my favorite author. Second, it is felted laceweight, something I have always wanted to try. Third, it is charmingly distressed by little dropped stitch columns that fill me with girlish glee. The pattern is quite simple, and it's nice and mindless most of the time.

It was put aside for two days, though, to make way for Gingko, a shawl that I knit for our accountant. The blessed woman did our taxes pro bono this year and got us back enough money to calm my worried, worried heart and fix the car. She said, "pay me when you come back next year." I could have cried. Instead, I knit her a shawl.

Gingko is adorable. I went down a 2 needle sizes across the board so that it would be a little more sturdy. I added a repeat to each section (45 increase rows and a m1 in each half to get the necessary 92 stitches), and it looks lovely. I couldn't be happier. Well, maybe the leaves could look something like a gingko leaf (seriously... no relationship is shape.)

These are not gingko leaves.

This is a gingko leaf

But for what I wanted and the amount of time and effort it took to get there, I am more than pleased. It's in the mail. Marvelous.

Photo credit for the gingko leaf: http://www.bio.brandeis.edu/fieldbio/medicinal_plants/pages/Ginkgo.html

Back on the knitting horse

I've been unmotivated as of late to work anything to completion. I started Yggdrasil and I'm through the tree section and well into the first border. I plan on working it through the leaf border. It should take a few more years (or a couple weeks if I actually do solid work).

I've also almost finished transcribing a pattern for some delightful little mitts I made up rather on the fly (and by on the fly I mean after a few hours of careful jotting. You know. the fly). I'm a little proud of them because I had to basically invent 2 decreases and an increase to achieve the look I wanted. I'm sure someone somewhere at some other point in time has done something similar (vague), but I haven't encountered it yet, so I give myself bonus points for ingenuity and stuff. I'll post pictures when I remember to take them.  There's also a bunny rabbit making tutorial in the works, since I received a commission for a second one and I took loads of pictures this time.

So there's that.  In other news, I ran into a free Herbert Niebling pattern this week, Sternzopf or Star Lichen. So I started it last night and finished it this morning. It's only 44 rows and a crochet bind off, so a strong desire to knit lace was all it took to power through this bugger.  He's knit in the remnants of my totoro guitar strap, a delightful little number I made for my brother's birthday (he received it for Christmas. His birthday is not in December). I love Herbert Niebling. He challenges me in ways most designers simply don't. Most of this is because his notation is entirely different from standard US charting so I have to pay attention, but part of it is the 10 stitch cables in the middle of delicate lace and the 13 stitch increases to make the openwork I previously thought only lovely in crochet. I love that man a little bit.

The Star Lichen is truly darling. It's supposed to be knit in itty-bitty yarn on itty-bitty needles, but I knit mine on 4s and the yarn is technically fingering weight. My finished piece is about 2.5x a large as the original. It's darling. I can't wait for it to finish blocking so that I can decide what on earth to do with a 12 inch doily when I own no end tables :)