Roineval

After today, no blogging here until August 7 (or thereabouts; depends on when we get in). In the meantime, We'll have a Sweater From the Past.

Once I'd learned to knit like everybody else (see previous installment, July 17th), and had therefore opened up my knitting horizons, I decided to try intarsia. Now, one can certainly knit intarsia using "Reverse Left-Finger Knitting," but I hadn't ever learned how to do it, anyway, being stuck in my ways, uninventive and cowardly.

So for my first intarsia design I did this:



It's "Roineval," from Alice Starmore's Celtic Collection, 1992. My dear friend Ann in London bought the yarns for me and sent them over to the States. The design's now pretty near impossible to do as it was conceived, since so many of the various yarns in it have been discontinued. Very, very occasionally you see the collection of yarns it requires come up for sale on eBay. If you were so minded, you could make collecting its various yarns a life's project, finding them one by one, on eBay, at estate sales, at little yarn shops that hadn't got rid of all their discontinued Rowan yarns, or through trading yarns with online buddies. It would take you years.

Little did I know, when I made it, that Roineval would become the Holy Grail of Starmore aficionados. I chose it partly because I loved the design, and partly because it was one of the few Starmore designs I could actually wear -- I was at the time quite large, though I would get larger (and then smaller, but that's another story). The design is given in one size only, to fit a medium sized man, and it fit me fine back then. Still does, though it's big on me now. I like it on weekends with jeans.

I learned a LOT from knitting this design -- color use, for one; I learned that the jewel-like tones stood out because they were put next to dull ones. I learned how to knit intarsia, obviously -- that's useful.

Also I learned that I probably don't want to knit again a piece with such different yarns put together -- not if I want hard wearing out of it. The sweater is weak at the joins in between the worsted and the mohair -- the shift in weight is too great. And the chenille is weak in and of itself, not to mention the fact that it "worms" out to the front continually, and the sweater therefore requires frequent grooming.

But I do love it -- it's so extravagant.

Here's a close-up of the spirals:



Yep. I love it. It was worth the trouble it first took -- you can't knit it without following the pattern every row; it's not the sort of project you can do without thinking -- and the trouble it takes now.

Currently, I'm done with the knitting on "Oriental Flower" -- I'll post pictures after it gets blocked and buttoned up. For my vacation knitting, I'm taking a Totally Mindless cotton sweatshirt that I am knitting only because it's done in Fox Fibre, and I want to see what it looks like when it washes up. That's the cotton that has color bred into the cotton boll -- the color is supposed to get deeper as time goes on and you wash it. I'm looking forward to that, but the sweater itself is boring, and it's been hanging around as my office knitting, and I think I'll just finish it up. Knitting with cotton. Yecch.

And since I don't think that project will last the week, I'm taking socks, too. I seem to have acquired five different socks projects -- don't know how that happened. Elves, probably. So I'll take the Fortissima that Julie bought me last Mother's Day (or was it birthday, Julie? I can't remember now, and they happen at about the same time). Julie will be practicing her knitting, too, at the beach; she's been learning, and doesn't want to forget, so, sensible woman that she is, she also will take advantage of the air conditioning, artificial extender of the Knitting Season.

And, so, on to South Carolina, the home of Sam's people and Excellent Food. See you later.

Mary Magdalene

Today's the feast day of St. Mary Magdalene, apostola apostolorum. We're having tortellini soup with mint tonight, and there's NO connection! I don't actually manage thematic dinners every night, alas.

Of course, there's Mary Magdalene, and then there's Mary Magdalene. She was adored in the middle ages -- the cult's sort of fallen off now, though there are people working on it -- as an icon of the possibility of true remorse, and the promise of redemption. But she'd been conflated out of two or three separate women in the gospels, so it wasn't really her. Or, rather, pieces of it were her. In one of my own all time favorite medieval plays, the Digby Mary Magdalene, she's not only her medieval self in all its glory (she gets to raise people from the dead, for instance), she finally becomes, not just an amalgamation of various gospel women and some accumulated legend, but the Virgin Mary herself -- "hail, Mary, full of grace," she's addressed, and then, in case it's not clear, she's referred to as an "almighty maiden," and "tabernacle of the blessed Trinity."

(My other all time favorite piece of medieval drama is the N-Town Passion, wherein Jesus is fed, by angels, the Host, in order that he be comforted in the garden of Gethsemane, thereby making absolute hash of the doctrine of transubstantiation. A priceless moment in theater history.)

Ah. Well, that's not who she is any more, but she's still the apostle to the apostles, and just as helpful as she ever was, even if now we know that she wasn't the repentant sinner who wiped Christ's feet with her hair and perfumed ointment, making all images of her which focus on her hair or her jar of ointment, such as this , outdated (sorry, Rossetti). Also, this (sorry, Sandys). And this (sorry some more, Sandys again). And this (sorry, Hunt).

Ok, well ANY Pre-Raphaelite depiction of the poor woman, on account of all that hair, which makes her indistinguishable from all other Pre-Raphaelite women.

Dust Mites

Having finally finished wrassling the Mosaic and Mirror scarf, I present it here:



I think it will work nicely with a black velvet sheath.

It's been one of those emotionally draining weeks for our little family, but we're muddling through nicely. As far as that goes. We all require more cuddling than usual, however.

It's a bit difficult, if you're not yet seven, to be told that you can no longer sleep with your stuffed animals OR your beloved cat. Luckily, that was the Allergy Nurse of Doom, who consulted with us first -- the doctor was much less scary. I think they set this up on purpose, so that the families think, "oh, thank God! We only have to encase the mattress, throw out the rugs, buy entirely new bedding, wash all the stuffed animals every week, wipe down the cats, and actually do some housecleaning!" Whereas, if you told them that stuff first, they'd be way more perturbed.

Kitty and Bear survived their first trip through the washing machine and dryer safely, and look fine, to the delight of all of us. Both of them had little tags that said "surface washable," but I looked at them carefully and took a chance. Also did major work on the bedding, and indeed the child was breathing better the next morning. And Kitty, especially, looks pretty spiffy -- her little paws are white again, which they hadn't been for three years. (No, I didn't put the real cat through the washing machine. Stop that.)

Today, Sam is going to take up the carpet in the child's room -- so the child and I (the allergy sufferers -- Sam's got entirely better behaved genes, in all respects) can't be anywhere near there, or we'll be Very Sorry, as the dust mite poop is going to be floating around for a while, and Sam's immune, but we're not. He's entirely on his own. We're not even going to go upstairs and provide emotional support.

So Sam's been allowed to pick out one of his favorite foods for dinner, and what did he choose? Lemon Orzo and Chicken. A manly dish, I'm sure you'll agree.

Want a picture of the dreadful dust mite? Here's one.

Good news? The child's not allergic to wool (the fiber of our people).

Thackeray

"The wicked are wicked, no doubt, and they go astray and they fall, and they come by their deserts; but who can tell the mischief which the very virtuous do?"

That's Thackeray for you, and it's his birthday today -- he was born in Calcutta in 1811. I couldn't find anything that sounded good at the moment in my Victorian Cookbook -- though it's got nice things in it, they all just sounded too stodgy today. So, obeying a colonialist impulse, we're having curried shrimp.

And we'll read a bit out of Vanity Fair -- I should take it out again; I used to reread it every 10 years or so, but I haven't looked at it in a while. Back when the BBC was going through its "let's film every Victorian novel ever written" stage, they showed a TV version that was pretty entertaining -- the baby watched the first part of it with me, and was SCANDALIZED by Becky Sharp, as indeed we all should be -- in his case, though, it was because she actually threw a book out the window of a moving carriage. A BOOK, I tell you. How evil is that! All her sexual shenanigans and greediness made him no never mind. She threw a book out of a window. That's all he needed to know.

Surely that's one of the ways you can recognize a future serial killer, right? Torments playmates, tortures animals, throws books out of windows?

As for the knitting content today: Go here for Thackeray's rendition of yarn-winding and its relationship to spider-like behavior, and here for Thackeray's illustration of how some sort of needlework -- he doesn't seem to care much exactly of what sort it is -- can be used in later stages of courtship.

Yes, I think I'll go reread Thackeray. Clear-eyed but charitable view of the foibles of the humans, and a nice solid sense of humor.

Summer Knitting

It's not really that hot, but as the summer goes along, the residual heat sorta accumulates. Makes it harder to sit around and knit at night.

Nevertheless, I document progress:



One sleeve down, one to go. Since the border's done, as well, once the second sleeve's done I can move on quickly, quickly to the blocking, sewing on of buttons and, maybe, clapping the borders if they need it.

I'm told, by the search engine firm, that the phrase y'all search for on this site, by a large margin, is "toilet paper Jesus." The second most frequent phrase is "Alexandrian Quartet." This means something, but I don't know what it is.

After much tedious hassle and pots of tea, I have my work page up again -- it fell off the server a few years ago, because I was supposed to do something I never did -- I think it involved sending caravans of expensive foodstuffs and jeweled caskets over to the office that was, at that time, running the enterprise. But now our pages are Under New Management, a new management that may just turn out to be competent. A girl can hope.

The Earlier Crew was so amazingly incompetent that they were useful on account of offering many opportunities to practice long-suffering cheerful charity. Over the course of my acquaintance with them, they lost my web page updates, forgot they'd scheduled video machines for me (in every semester that I worked with them), told me machines were working that weren't, played the wrong video tapes when they finally found machines that worked, lost my web page updates again, and then refused to allow me to upload my own web page updates because, as they put it, "the Web Master was the only one who could do it." I think the Web Master lived behind a curtain, manipulating levers. When I remarked to them that the whole enterprise seemed remarkably incompetent, they told me that I didn't know what I was talking about, and things were actually going very well.

I'm told that when the university took the job of running the computer show away from them, they predicted disaster, since no one could do the job as well as they.

Ok. Well. This should be interesting.

Finally, a quick run around some blogs: Jerry has the first sleeve done on his gansey. He will not, alas, be entering it into the competition at the county fair. He could save it for the next year, but then it couldn't get used, could it? Unless his fair has a special category in the Hand Knits section for "Sweaters that Have Withstood a Year of Sheep Raising Really Well."

And Ryan's Discount Victorian Gazing Ball has gone the way of all flesh, also alas. We have a couple of the non-discount variety, and were slightly cheered by the quick demise of the plastic substitute, till Ryan pointed out to us that hers is SO cheap that really, at $.99 each, she can have a whole summer of gazing balls for the price of one of ours.

So if our expensive glass ones break, I'm heading down to the plastic ball bin over at the WallMart.

Don't Touch This

Here's a lovely vintage knit outfit, brought to you by Spinnerin, in 1964:



Isn't that gorgeous?

I want this outfit. Nice top, very cool giant plastic beads, great sandals, killer skirt to die for. Just the thing to wear, apparently, when hailing boats off some Mediterranean coast. I could end up on a Mediterranean coast at some point; best be prepared. Must have this. Must make.

Just for the hell of it, how troublesome do you think it would be to knit the killer skirt?

Well, I'll tell you.

It's 7 stitches to the inch, on #3 needles (a circular 36" is what's called for). For the medium size (waist 29"), one casts on 210 stitches. Right after the waistband, one increases in EVERY STITCH, so as to produce "Dirndl Skirt fullness," ending up at 420 stitches. Over the course of the skirt (which is 27 inches long), one increases some more, after about every pattern band, until one ends up with 704 stitches.

Now, the problem, as far as I see it, is not that the pattern is difficult -- no, no, it's pretty easy and straightforward. Nor that it's tedious -- there are many little pieces of the day when one can get a bit of mindless knitting done, and very restful and calming it can be, too.

No. The problem is that this thing is, as far as I can tell, going to take YEARS to make. Years, I tell you, during which time babies are born and grow up and go to college, jobs are won and lost, and whatever darling Mediterranean coast this picture is taken at becomes some terrorist haven and we break off diplomatic relations.

What I really wonder is, did anybody other than the original knitter paid to make this design ever knit this skirt? Please write and tell me if you know of someone who did.

And how long did it take?

And did they ever wear the thing? Wasn't it completely out of fashion by the time they got it off the needles?

Though, come to think of it, if I'd started this thing in 1964, I could have finished it by now -- and it's been back in fashion at least three times that I can think of since Spinnerin first thought it up.

Setesdal

Sunday morning in summer -- laid back; time to blog. Today, we'll start the Sweaters From the Past project, but first, I must tell you -- so you don't miss it -- that Amber has been successful at indigo-dyeing, and if you go over to her site you can watch her video of yarn magically turning blue, which I highly recommend. It's got Sam all excited -- apparently you don't need horse urine, you can just go buy ammonia, a much easier alternative. Still smelly, though. Nevertheless, smelly or not, I foresee indigo in our future. Here's the deal, Sam -- grow the indigo, and we'll dye some yarn, and you can have a vest.

Now, for our Feature Presentation:

I learned to knit, as a child, using the method taught to me by my mother, who learned it from her mother, who learned it from a woman from Germany. June Hiatt calls it "Reverse Left-Finger Knitting," which means, essentially, that one carries the yarn in the left hand, and the stitches are on the needle in reverse. It's quick as hell, but has some limitations -- purling is even easier than knitting, but the purl rows tend to be larger, which screws up the gauge, AND you can't knit garter stitch or seed stitch, or knit in the round, or the stitches twist. Nevertheless, that's the method I used for decades; I was adamantly faithful to it. It worked well for Aran knitting, which I loved, and that was fine with me.

The first time I went to visit cousins in Norway, though, it occurred to me that I was being an idiot. Why remain faithful to a method of knitting that wouldn't allow me to make the sweaters that all my cousins were knitting? Dumb. Just dumb.

So I bought a book of Norwegian designs -- it's Norsk Strikk: Fra Tradisjon til Mote -- and I picked out a design,and I asked my cousin Liv to translate some of the words for me, and I bought supplies in Mandal, and I went home and taught myself (from another book) how to knit like everybody else, and I never looked back.

I can still knit the way I was first taught, but I don't very often -- it's so quick for stockinette that it can be very useful, but frankly, since my gauge is easier to control with the more normal method, I like it better. And I'm nearly as quick now as I was before, so what's the point of going back.

My own Norwegian family is from Vest-Agder, but I chose the sweater design from nearby Setesdal -- I loved the black-and-white design, enlivened by embroidery bands and pewter clasps.

So, here's my first stranded color work sweater:



and a closeup of the neckline:



Not too shabby for a first attempt. And it's good to have options now. Once I made this, I figured that I could knit anything I wanted to, ever. Cool.

I think it's useful for knitters to try different methods. Next, I plan to learn how to knit backwards. I figure that'll come in handy on things like bobbles.

Tomorrow's Bastille Day, by the way -- peasanty French food is in order -- we're having some white-bean soup I found in the Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Cookbook, and some French bread.

The child has suggested that we read the section in A Little Princess wherein Sarah explains the Fall of the Bastille and Marie Antoinette's execution -- ok, good. Nummy. That should go well at dinner.

Hodge-Podge

A quick hodge-podge today; before I work on syllabi for the fall:

Jenna, the Girl From Auntie, has added a third installment to her Explanation of What's Up With Alice Starmore. Go here if you haven't read the first installment, here if you haven't read the second. More to follow, she promises.

Erin, over at Lose the Buddha, will be participating in the Danskin Women's Triathalon on Sunday, which I mention so that you can wish her well if you like.

I see that Rob, over at Cockeyed.com, has recently investigated free-car scams, and you can help too.

From the same source, just about the most cheering -- and comprehensive -- list of Awful Things That Can Happen To You ever written. (My current favorite: You find out you have Big Worms in your eyes.)

Finally, I think I speak for all of Pittsburgh, when I say, "Sorry about that sausage incident, Milwaukee."

Zen Shawl

Warning! Warning! Picture of crochet!

Finished up the Berrocco Zen shawl last night (the color is Raku):



You may be able to see the bit of sheen that the Zen fiber has -- it's a ribbon, half cotton and half nylon. This will be useful for the office, which is too cold in the summer, due to the combination of air conditioning and summer clothing.

I learned to crochet before I learned to knit (this was long long ago), but I don't usually enjoy it as much. This was a pleasant project, though -- quite and extremely mindless, making it a good talking-to-relatives-whilst-on-vacation project. I'm not fond of the texture of crochet for most garments, though I do like it for shawls such as this.

I like crochet best for items such as retro pineapple doilies made with variegated threads. But you can only use so many of those in a house at one time. Especially if you have already covered up all the flat surfaces in the house with untidy messes hinting at either creativity or -- well -- untidiness.

Hence, all my pineapple doilies are packed away.

Indigo

I really have been knitting, in between tossing spam and catalogs and setting up my marvelous new office computer (thanks, College of Arts!):



Because I couldn't work the sleeves while on vacation (could have bought yet another pair of size 1 double points; didn't want to), I worked the border instead -- the stitches have been picked up for one of the sleeves now.

I hate picking up stitches for sleeves and necklines and what not more than anything else. All the knitters have a piece of the work they hate -- that's mine. Many of us hate the finishing, but I actually enjoy that -- but then, I was once a seamstress.

The borders to this cardigan are enjoyable for me, since they involve some seamstressing/tailoring techniques. Here's a close-up of the inside border, with the steek sewn down, and the hem turned up and sewn down. Keep in mind that it's not blocked yet -- and indeed, I will probably go beyond blocking and actually press, maybe even clap, the border. Only the border.



Clapping is a technique used to flatten the edges of a wool garment; this is the first sweater I've worked upon which I'm thinking about using the technique. I'd press the edge of the sweater with a steam iron (using, of course, a press cloth in between the iron and the sweater), and then slam some flat object on top of the whole thing -- for years I've been using a dreadful volume of awful Shakespeare criticism -- and then hold it down for a bit.

It's counter to all knitting wisdom, isn't it? But though my work on the border turning is neat, and I've reduced as much bulk as possible, the corners need help for a good finish. We're so careful of our knit fabric -- but that's all it is. It's fabric. I don't need the borders to stretch -- indeed, I'd rather they held their shape. So it won't hurt to give them a permanent fix.

Now, if I totally mess the whole thing up. I'll come online and 'fess up. Watch this space for further updates.

Amber, by the way, having finished her summer purse knit out of garbage bags, has been planting flax. I gather she means to achieve linen next year or so. She's been growing indigo, too, which causes great envy at our house -- Sam, South Carolinian that he is, thinks that growing indigo would be a very good idea. The only thing that keeps the indigo-dyeing project at bay around here is the absence (thank God) of abundant horse urine.

What Amber plans to use to facilitate the indigo-dyeing process I do not know. I won't be surprised, however, to discover that indigo-dyeing has moved on since the Colonial period, at which time the horse urine was a BIG part of the enterprise.

We're looking forward to finding out, cause all our information about indigo-dyeing comes from Charles Town Landing, where we go every year, in the sweltering heat of August, to look at the indigo fields, watch the foxes being fed lunch, clamber on what the child believes to be a pirate ship, and try to squelch Mama from pointing out all the inaccuracies in the historical reconstructions.

Really. You can't take me anywhere.

Things We Learned in Albuquerque

Here I am, back home again. I did have access to computers in Albuquerque, but both of them were V-e-r-y S-l-o-w and annoyed me. So I didn't use them.

Things I learned:

1) Do NOT go on vacation with a paper you've got to finish, even if you know the computer you're going to borrow has WordPad, and you've saved the paper in RichText, because you do not know but what the program might decide on a whim not to recognize RichText created on another computer, even though it will recognize RichText if you laboriously retype the whole damn thing.

2) Be very careful whilst packing knitting projects, if indeed you are also trying to make sure you have everything you need to finish a paper which absolutely MUST be off in the email, because you might very well forget the set of double-pointed needles you need to work the sleeves on your Oriental Flower cardigan, and then there you'll be, won't you, and you'll have to spend much more of your time reading trash than you normally would.

3) 6 and 7 are good ages at which to see Carlsbad Caverns, but if you are 5, you will have a little breakdown when, after arriving at the snackbar far below ground, you discover that your Dad and your Auntie Anne and Uncle Sam think it's a good idea to go and see a whole honkin' lot more cave features, which look to you pretty much like the other ones, which, as far as you are concerned, got boring after the first five minutes.

4) Also, if you are 5, you are not going to like driving from Albuquerque to Carlsbad one day and then back the next (our total: 14 hours), even if you do get to stop in Lincoln to see a hole in the wall where a bullet from Billy the Kid's gun once was, only somebody chiseled it out already.


Apparently, my nephew (the 5 year old member of the party) still loves me and wishes to see me again, though if you mention getting in the car and driving for a long time he's pretty adamant about refusing.

And I'm glad to report that we did not set Albuquerque on fire -- and nobody else did either, at least not while we were there, though Taos was watching flames get closer, and still is. Very dry. Very very hot.

Now, I'm back in the saddle -- spent most of my work time getting rid of spam. Spent most of last night throwing out catalogs.


Yes. Good to be home.