I Am Handcrafted, Hear Me Roar

Dearest Stitches,

We need to talk about you messing with my head. You all, I'm sure, as you sit there on the needles, gab endlessly about ways to make your life more amusing.

I can understand it must be boring to wait a couple of hundred stitches down and then a couple of hundred back to find out whether you're going to be knitted, purled ssk'd, dbl dec'd, k2tog'd or sl1 k2tog psso'd. (Well, except you two groups of three stitches at either end. You never change. I admire your stoicism and herewith exempt you from the rest of this diatribe.)

I empathize with boredom. Really. I do.

But for the love of lace, when I've got a section with a 103 stitches, with a marker after stitch 51, then I expect 52 stitches on the other side. I'm a simple knitter. I don't think that's asking for much.

I see no humor in you pretending, then, to have 51 stitches on the other side as well. Or 48, 47, 53 or 49. And the time you made the leap down to 32 was really, really not funny at all. You knew it was a row with a lot of yos. You knew how easy it is to muck those up, and you took advantage of my apprehensions.

But the worst of it? You didn't even bother to try and hide your sniggering. Not even after I discovered all of you were there after all. Sauciness is one thing, but that, my dear stitches, was the equivalent of a battle cry.

And I have never been one to back down from a battle.

So. I went back and redid myself, complete with Chris-given nickname. I'm no longer Heidi: Handcrafted Electronic Individual Designed for Infiltration.

I have become*



Heidihun: Handcrafted Electronic Individual Designed for Infiltration, HARM & ULTIMATE NULLIFICATION.

Ponder those last words, dearest stitches. Think what they could do to your happy dreams of becoming a beautiful shawl. I know how you long to be beautifully blocked, lovingly worn, and jealously admired. But if this rebellion continues, all those dreams will be for naught.

Can you imagine it? Stop and listen. Yes. There it is. The soft sound of frogs, ripping harmfully back to where you lie trembling on the needles.

Think of becoming, once again, one long, hugely boring piece of string, wound back into a ball. No pretty patterns. No beautiful shape. No admiration of your subtle colors.

Just...ultimate nullification.

There there, dear stitches. No sniffling. We don't want you felting together, now do we? Have you all taken a deep breath? Are we all on the same page? Can we count sensibly now?

Good. We'll begin R15 of the current chart, then. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Your knitter

*Source : http://cyborg.namedecoder.com/ (both text & picture are the property of cyborg.namedecoder.com)

The Blogversary

The wee little blog celebrated its one year birthday this month, and I have shown that by…

Um. Well. I haven’t shown it in any way, actually.

This has been an oddly not-much-knitting-or-crocheting month for me. There have been job worries; although my acceptance of an 11-month contract instead of a 12 was presented as “completely voluntary” it doesn’t take a genius to know which way the wind blows, especially when you're standing in gale force economic winds. So, I accepted and have until June to figure out how to make up the money I’ll be losing. There have been Things who saw fit to share the sickness love, taking their turns one week after another will new variations on each illness, instead of getting all done in one go (marathon few days of no sleep for mom is actually preferable to drawing it out over six weeks, let me tell you). And there have been things to think about and get through.

You know how it is. Sometimes life demands so much attention that you can arse up even single chains and stockinette stitch when you attempt them. When that happens to me, I find that it's best if I simply set the crochet hook or needles down.

It’s kind of lonely doing that. Most times, when things are off-kilter, there's nothing like shaping a granny square or knitting down a row to bring me back to myself. When I hit that land of thinking without thinking, working with my hands grounds me. This month, though, my focus has been too scattered. I've looked down at the yarn in my hands and realized I was making froggable moments, again and again and again. And wasn't even irritating when I did it. That's when I decided to just set things aside.

But, me being an incurable optimist (read totally naive idiot), I can't help but bounce back before I should; really, I know it's fashionable to languish more in these moments, but I'm sort of hopeless at it. I'll still have some worries and sadness with me, but it will be of the quiet sort that moves gently along with me and still lets me enjoy what I can.

We had a huge storm and beautiful amounts of snow. I'm getting out and meeting new people. I still have a job next year, unlike so many people who have been laid off. I was cast in two one-act plays and both are parts which will challenge me to try new things. Thing Four came and snuggled with me last Saturday morning, almost falling asleep against me, the way he did when he was a baby.

All these things have nothing to do with money or other worries, and all are great gifts. They are bringing things back into focus for me. They are making my hands feel like it's time to pick things up again.

As the month draws to a close, then, we here at Neglected Blogs are making a change. It’s going to be big. It’s going to be shocking.

Yes, it’s the uber how-late-can-you-get-the-feckin’-Christmas-&-Hanukkah-stuff-done extravaganza.

The snow zombies are about to return.

Stay tuned.

Gak

It's a Bill the Cat, hairball kind of day.

I should have known it was coming. When one has to go to bed with an extra blanket (most likely crocheted by one's aunt or grandmother) and use one's wee heating pad as a sort of bed heater, and furthermore must wear two layers of clothing and wigwam socks (which are, short of creating oneself a thrummed pair of socks that would make one look as if one had been attacked by a swarm of deranged bees, the preferred warmwear for the discerning feet), one should suspect that the following day will be…fraught. Fraught with what, you ask? Read on.

~One large amount of cold.

It's freakin' -20 F out there this morning and I'm writing this with a blanket wrapped around my shoulders rather than turn up the heat (heat costs, the blanket doesn't). When I walked my son, the Thing Four one, to school this morning, the snow that generally looks like dirty brown rock salt strew across the hardtop (from the street salt spread out) was frozen solid. The snowdrifts were so tightly packed that we could walk on top without breaking through. My hair, which was dry when I set out, was frozen due to me having the temerity to breath.

And on the way back from the school, the freakiest thing happened. A guy stopped the delivery van he was driving to let me cross the street. I've never seen any car so much as slow down around here. Kudos to the driver, and here's hoping he wasn't in the delirium stage of hypothermia (did I mention it's freakin' cold here?).

Not enough? Oh, there's more.

~One kid with the flu

(and I'm thanking my stars for Nintendo DS, trying to adjust to teenage coolness that will not permit a mother to fuss over him and praying that not all of the other three get it).

~One car that thinks it has the flu and had to be jumpstarted

(we won't talk about the interesting sparks I generated, okay?)

~One application

that asks for so much personal information (it's for the government) that I freaked and had to read a whole month's worth of the Yarn Harlot blog—September 2004, to be exact; I'm playing extreme catch up—just to calm myself down. These people want to know every address I've had for the past ten years. When I considered that a) I used to be married to someone who generally wasn't happy unless we were somewhere else every few years and b) I forget addresses and phone numbers if I don't use them for a long time (like a week), I realized that I would have to call the ex to get some of the addresses. It's enough to make me go back and read the October 2004 blogs as well.

And (since these blogs are supposed to be about knitting and/or crocheting, it had to be coming)

~One hat.

I've been very pleased by the hat. I found the basic pattern at Knitting-and.com (and if that doesn't show up as a link, save yourself a lot of hair pulling and just Google London Beanie) and tweaked it for the different yarn I was using. I added a few stitches and adjusted the number of rows I would need based on how many inches tall another hat I had knit that fit the kid was (I felt so mathematical).

I found the train pattern at Knitting Any Way and tweaked it as well by adding another car to match the number of stitches I'd figured the hat should be (the youngest son thinks trains are seriously cool at the moment). I'd cast on, and had fun doing alternate color ribbing (pattern tweaking again).

Things proceeded well at first. After the five color Christmas stocking, I felt I was ready for anything (the fact that I would be carrying five colors at the same time rather than two or three at a time should have warned me). But the knitting seemed to bear witness to my good feeling. The knitting was lying nice and flat. Like this:



What few bumps there were straightened out beautifully with a gentle tug. Hello blocking, you will be my hero. It was working, and I was finally shrugging off the title of the world's slowest knitter of lumpy objects.

Then I got to here:



Okay, so it was suddenly a tad lumpier. Not to worry. I pulled gently, confident I would see the knitting smooth like an abyssal plain.

Instead, I got nothing. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Well, that's a lie, actually. What I got was a bunch of yarn strands telling me in no uncertain terms that they were a bit uptight and if I was fool enough to think I could block them into relaxation then I was, well, a fool.

Still, I was undaunted. I finished the last bit of all red rounds and then jammed the thing on Thing Three's head this a.m., hoping it would stretch enough that it wouldn't really matter.

Did I mention that Thing Three has rather a large head? As in, bigger than his 13-year-old sister's head? You can already guess the results, can't you?



Aside from getting "the look" from a kid who still wears footie pajamas with moose all over them (namely due to the indignity of his mother trying to jam a too small hat that still had dpns in it onto his head before she would even let him have his breakfast), I was sure I could hear that damn hat sniggering at me. Sniggering.

(and if you are too, don't tell me.)

Now the hat looks like this:

But this is not bad, right? I mean, I can go back and add pale yellow for the window openings so they look more like windows; I'll like that better than the red, I'm sure. Floating one more color for a few more rows is really no big deal.

But….I now have this hideous scary feeling that the hat will be too tall and will fall over his eyes when he pulls it on. And I should mention that even the part that stretched over his head was still an extremely tight fit (why, I ask you why? This was a beanie for teenagers/adults, I added stitches to allow for the extra floats in back, and it was still very…snug. Either British teenagers' heads are incredibly small or my kid's head is freakishly large instead of rather large) and I'm wondering if it will really fit it the end or if I'll have to add more stitches, rechart the train and start back at square one? No, I shouldn't mention that. No worries; it'll be fine.

And, I tell myself as I straighten out skeins of yarn, it's interesting to learn that floated yarn tangles just as much when you frog out as when you're knitting and furthermore, if I have to frog out all the way, then I can use that cool technique I learned about in Meg Swansen's last newsletter to get rid of the purl bump when I increase (that random bit of blue did show up well in the red and if I have to do everything over at least I won't have to convince myself the blue purl bump makes the hat "unique").

And either, way, it has to be better than a 32-page application for a job, right?

That last sentence just killed off every positive thinking gene in my body.

All of them. I can hear taps playing softly in the background.

Think I'll go do the math for my simple, custom-fit, uber-basic ribbed sock in pretty self-patterning yarn now. Self-patterning yarn is good.