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There we are! Members of the Tuesday Lunch Knitting group, out to lunch. A little celebration because we are a great bunch of knitters. Unfortunately a couple people had to leave before the picture was taken, but they are there in spirit. It was fun. Next time let's go to a place that doesn't have such alluring desserts--I can't believe how much I ate!
Ride enthusiasm when it comes. For no particular reason, I am loving these socks. I finished the first one yesterday and cast on for the second, which gives me hope that there will soon be a pair. They are truly knee socks, on me *all* the way to the knee. I am using Regia sock wool and #1 1/2 needles and I ran out of the first ball of yarn right about the ball of the foot. Since I only have two balls in this color, I finished the toes with alpaca of the same weight, which is so close in shade that it won't matter, especially when my toes are inside shoes. Besides, I think perhaps having a little alpaca around the toes is a nice treat, don't you?
I can't see myself wearing knee socks in public, but you never know. If I'm not going to wear them and boast, what is so great about this sock pattern?
--the lace. I admit it, put in some lace stitches and my interest is automatically aroused.
--the way the decreases are worked into the panels. Not so tricky, to be sure, but still.
--the rhythm of the pattern. Yes, I believe in such things.
--a sort of whimsy I can't quite explain, like vintage style with a sly wink.
Now once more into the working world, the second sock will no doubt take longer. But I'm going to finish it before the fascination fades.
ps. The fruitcakes turned out well. I had to try one small slice just to see if they were edible.
A couple of weeks ago a friend brought the latest Interweave Knits to Tuesday knitting and I browsed through it. I am attempting to curb my appetite for printed goods, but I saw the Flower Hat and Lace Knee Highs and those socks would not leave my mind. Finally I broke down and bought the magazine and Thursday morning inbetween baking bread and pies I started one of the socks. There it is, already quite long, and I must say I am enjoying it immensely. Maybe you know the guilty twinge... the little voice that whispers "are you really starting something else? When you have seventeen projects on needles already?" But it's a holiday! I reply. I've been wanting to knit socks and these sure are fun.
I ventured out of work this afternoon to pick up a prescription and after that errand was completed, I thought I might step into a bookstore as well. When I got into the store, I could hardly move for all the toddlers underfoot. Beware of large parents with umbrellas who move suddenly in pursuit of their offspring. Ok, it was a children's bookstore, so what can I expect? I wandered over to Crate & Barrel thinking I'd check out some kitchen wares in a leisurely way, maybe find a nice pie pan for tomorrow. I don't truly need another pie pan. But you know...
Nothing leisurely about it. More vocal children, about knee height; lots of baby carriers, lots of people, long lines at every register. Is this the unofficial prelude to the official biggest shopping day of the year? Grocery stores, yes; wouldn't go near one today. But bookstores? Oh well.
For me, this Friday is Buy Nothing Day. A day on which I celebrate not having to purchase anything at all, and give thanks for having everything I need and more. From now until the beginning of the year, I shop as infrequently as possible and spend as little as possible. I like to eat well on certain special days, but I don't need more *stuff* and neither does anyone I know. I'd rather be creating something than spending money.
This is not to imply that I'm a grinch. I don't walk around with a sour face grumbling at the consumer merriment. I just choose not to partake. What I do like to do is bake. Tomorrow I'm making bread rolls from my Granmother's recipe and two pies to bring to the family that invited me for Thanksgiving. (I'm a little nervous about the cherry pie, since I make it so rarely...) Later this weekend I intend to revive a personal tradition that has been lost for several years: making fruitcakes.
Wait! Before you say "eeeeeeeewwww, fruitcake! yuck!" let me describe my kind of fruitcake:
no yucky candied fake fruit, meaning
no unrealistic neon colors
no preservatives.
not dry
not too sweet.
instead,
a blend of real dried fruit (organic when possible: raisins figs dates apricots cranberries prunes)
lots of hazelnuts and walnuts
molasses and honey
moist and dark
infused with good rum.
I procured the rum last night and I'm sure there'll be some left to make my mother's rum ball cookie recipe, a fondly remembered childhood treat. With the fruitcake endeavor, a studio full of projects, and books overflowing the shelves, I project a satisfying long weekend. And I'm grateful.
My first attempt at replicating a khipu. I've been working with these artifacts for a couple of years now, and the more I analyze their data the more I am convinced that to truly understand them, I have to replicate some. This tiny example is done with commercial cotton yarn; I haven't yet gotten to the point of spinning my own fine cotton singles, though I may someday. Right now I'm curious about several things:
--what is the most efficient way to make a short cord? By looking at the ends of complete cords, we can tell that they were not cut off of some long piece, but rather each cord was created separately from a bundle of looped singles. The singles were twisted tightly then allowed to ply back on themselves. Not so hard if the cord is arm length or shorter, but what's the easiest was to make a cord of say a couple meters?
--The twist angle on existing artifacts is about 45 degrees. Really. Do you know how tightly you have to twist the singles bundle in order to get it to ply back to 45 deg? More than a lot. A humongous amount. I twisted those experimental cords until you could have opened a bottle of wine with them, but the finished cords still aren't steep enough.
--Some cords change color half-way down the string. Not by painting or dying, but through the cord formation process. How would you do that?
-- How much time does it take to make one of these things? I'm frequently asked that question by people who have just been introduced to khipu. The answer is-- I don't know. I don't think anyone knows. From this tiny experiment my guess is that they had some very efficient working methods, but I also believe that speed was less important than doing it correctly. Cords can get very complex and sloppiness is one thing you don't tend to see in these objects. Btw most khipu have around 30 - 40 dangly cords; some have hundreds.
In general I find that trying to replicate something gives me a new understanding of its construction, even if my replication is unsuccessful. Textiles often suffer from a host of assumptions, among which is the presumption that "it's cloth or string, it can't have taken too much intelligence to do". I am convinced that textiles are vessels of some of the most sophisticated thought to come out of human culture.
Humming along on the plum corduroy pieces I cut out last weekend, I got the skirt gores all sewn together and finished the darts on the pants. Nothing like making two garments at once out of the same cloth; a little efficiency does wonders for completion rates. I'm now at the point of inserting zippers, and I went looking for the matching zippers I knew I'd bought when I bought the fabric. Since I am so extremely well organized and on top of all household chores, this involved digging into the bag of fabric sitting in my laundry basket because I hadn't had a chance to wash it yet. Number of weeks it's been there? No comment. Anyhow, I did find a zipper in a lovely matching plum color.
One.
I need two, one for the skirt and one for the pants. Insert curses here. Why do I do this? I know I can always use extra zippers and hooks and eyes and thread and sewing machine needles and elastic, why would I buy only one zipper? And of course it is not one of my four staple colors, so I don't have another zipper in stash to match. And do you think I'm going to be able to get to the fabric store while it's open before the Season of Excruciating Shopping starts on Friday? Not a hope. Blast it. I agree that stash can be overdone, but there are certain things which are like beloved spices-- life is just *so* much easier if they are on hand and always available.
Perhaps I'll compromise with a black invisible zipper. Since it's invisible, it shouldn't matter much, right? And likely I'll be wearing a black shirt with one of these garments much of the time, so it could be a coordinating accent. Next time I will overestimate on the zippers. I promise myself.
And while we're speaking of sewing... Claudia was posting a while ago about whether or not to make the same sweater twice... to her and anyone else out there wondering if this is indeed a bad thing, my answer is a resounding no. I use and re-use the same sewing patterns for years. If it works, why change it? Not that I won't add a collar or ruffle or lengthen or shorten, but flattering shapes are good for the soul. If you love it, why should multiples be a problem? I think the pattern I've used most to date is a pants pattern I copied from a pair of store-bought pants. In my head I can count at least seven pairs in my wardrobe from that pattern, but I bet I'm missing some.
Besides, practice makes perfect. Just think how much faster the sixth one is to make than the first!
The cheery cherry lace sweater is progressing slowly.
I don't mind. It is now in that armhole-to-waist stage in which very little needs to be done while working back and forth: decrease here or there, but no neck shaping or fiddly bits. That makes it perfect for knitting under the table while listening to bad stories in writing class. Tangent: writing class bugs me. To put it mildly. It's an introductory fiction class and it drives me nuts. Long ago I did the minimum number of humanities courses I needed to get by, even though they were interesting, for precisely this reason-- people get hung up on one word or the placement of a comma or a choice of tense and spend half an hour dissecting one tiny item. Besides which, without implying that my writing is any good, I'd like to state that I am stunned at some of the stuff that is turned in. Not in a good way. For that matter, I have lately been helping my boss write a proposal, and I am flabbergasted at some of the stuff he comes up with. It's replete--if you don't mind my saying so-- with interruptions (e.g., dashes, parenthetical statements, and convoluted phrases) as well as using quite a few awkward constructions such as "in regards to", "in as much as", and "in adddition to" which have the effect of creating run-on sentences which, by the time you get to the end of aforesaid sentences, have lost the original thread of their meaning and become something else entirely (see above). Sheesh. Does academic writing have to be unintelligible? Sometimes I look at a paragraph and just shake my head.
The knitting helps me keep sane when all those poor tortured misused words are floating around in bad combinations.
Am I crazy to make a pair of pants out of this fabric? Without a scale it's hard to tell, because this might be a picture of only 2-3 inches. But it's not. Those swirly things are pretty big. I'm still undecided as to whether a garment from this cloth will be unwearably ugly, outré but chic, or hilariously goofy. I went ahead and cut out a pair of pants anyway.
Also a skirt and pants out of corduroy. Hey, at least it's not brown! Not that I don't like brown. I love brown. When other people wear it.
Yesterday I was reading a little bit about the introduction of knitting to Europe. The information I had on hand was very brief, and I am not strong on history, so I don’t have much context for what I read, but I found it fascinating…
For example, knitting most likely came to Europe via the Middle East and the spanish Moors. The earliest knitting pieces have moorish ornamentation. I wonder how native Spaniards felt when they saw moorish knitting? If they resented Moorish occupation, would they have viewed knitting with suspicion? Might wearing an obviously knitted garment have indicated that they favored the Moors?
By the time knitting got to England, the primary demand was for stockings. At the time (late 1500s – 1600s) there was concern for the poor, and efforts to keep them employed. Knitting proved to be a perfect occupation for the impoverished, because it was easily taught and could be done anywhere. It was perfectly suited to a peasant life, because knitting can be done even while herding sheep or cows. So knitting became a poor person’s occupation. Not, by the way, only a poor *woman’s* occupation. If you were a noble person in the 1600s, and wanted to take up knitting, in a culture that saw it as a craft for peasants, would you be making a statement beyond the simple fact that you were making something with pointed sticks?
Stocking frames came along quite early. (Early 1600s, I am bad with dates.) The first man to invent an automatic machine for making stockings couldn’t get the right patents and permissions in England although he was english born, so he took his ideas to France and set up manufacturing there. France then became a center of certain kinds of knitwork. And then, one might imagine, there was probably competition between France and England for providing stockings to the rest of Europe…. Just a guess.
When stocking frames were brought (back) to England, there was consternation, because naturally it was feared that stocking machines would take away jobs from poor handknitters. Over the course of time those with businesses that used stocking frames became quite wealthy, pillars of their community. The demand for handknit stockings never quite disappeared; some continued to believe that hand-knit hose were sturdier and lasted longer than machine knit footwear. Even so, one can trace the economic rise of the stocking industry against the steady decline of hand knitting as a viable income. So I wonder…. At that time, what would be the connotations you sent out if you appeared dressed in machine-made silk stockings? Would they be different than the connotations of wearing handknit? Would they be different than the connotations of wearing something clearly knit by you yourself or a member of your family? If your town was embroiled in a debate over whether to allow stocking frames or not, might your choice of dress indicate an opinion?
I don’t have answers, but you can probably guess where I’m going. Sorry folks, knitting is and ever has been political. You might not realize it, you might not want to accept it, you might believe that the Hand Arts are above any such mundane earthly entanglements, but alas, not so. World culture does not suddenly become suspended at the threshold of you local yarn store. Think about the statements you send with your knitting. Are you sending a message about the amount of time you can afford to spend in non-essential labor? Because let’s face it, knitting is a luxury in this culture, at this time. By your choice of yarn, are you making a statement about your favor for a particular designer or fiber? Is that fiber indigenous to your area, or are you relying on imported yarn? Are you swayed by yarns that promise they were grown organically, or that claim to be providing income to indigenous peoples, or that are recycled from other objects? Do you favor intricate constructions, and if so, what does that say about your patience and respect for manual and intellectual competence? Are you a quick knits person, wanting to make something easy and fashionable? Is it always possible to see where your desire stops and the desire to follow a crowd begins? When you wear a hand-knit sweater, do you advertise anything about your values? If it’s not off-the-rack perfect, what does that say about your priorities?
We don’t have to be scared that our knitting (or spinning or weaving or sewing) says something about us. We don’t have to be scared that it might be a clue to our values or political views. But we should realize it. We should be aware that we make a statement when we create with our hands, whether we like it or not. We may not choose to make this statement particularly meaningful; we may not choose to call attention to it. But those of us who do use yarn to create cultural and political statements are part of a strong and ancient world-wide history.
Finally, finally I made it to the underarms of the cherry fuschia sweater. When doing top-down I always forget that a lot more of the knitting than I think is in that top part. Anyway, casting on for the underarms lets me bask in the reality that I have, in fact, made progress. Just not very fast.
