You are currently browsing the monthly archive for September 2007.
Hey dudes,
Ready for some more bad art and overwrought writing in the name of Storytellers? (Check out Purlescence for more details) Well, here you go! A submission for September’s prompt, “What would Persephone knit?”
Also, Elli and I went on a lovely field trip to a sheep shearing today at Schacht Fleece Farms. I haven’t gotten the photos off my camera yet, but she has some pictures on her blog. You should go look at them! Sheep are cute.
In the Underworld
She’s old now. I guess it happens to everyone, but somehow I always feel so alone when I think about it. It feels like you are the only one this could ever happen to, the only one this has ever happened to; unbearable, the confusion in her voice when she answers the phone, the bewildered yearning in her eyes when I walk away from her, even for a moment. I know everyone gets old eventually, and I know, from my job, that many people begin to lose their sense the way she has, but even so, it hurts.
I suppose that in a way, we are unique. Well, what a thing to say; everyone’s unique. But my mother affects other people’s lives far more than the average elderly woman.
“Mom? Mom, it’s me. I’m coming home tomorrow, OK?” She mumbles some things, whispers to me faintly. “OK, Mom. I love you. I’ll see you soon. Tomorrow.” And I hang up, and sigh.
My husband comes up behind me, kisses my neck. “Do you have to go already?”
I look out the window at the snow, the black branches, the weak winter light on the slushy street. “I have to. It’s been four months already.”
We have a calendar on the wall, and I always mark the day with a big red X, as a reminder. He glances over at it, and sighs, puts his arms around me. “I never think the day’s coming until it’s here.” I wrap my arms over his, lean my head against his shoulder, and we rock like that for a while, in silence, enjoying each other’s company.
Finally he sighs, kisses me, then throws on his heavy black coat and the cashmere scarf I made him, and heads out to run some errands. We’ll go out for a nice dinner tonight—he’s made reservations somewhere special, but he won’t tell me where—he wants it to be a surprise.
Brave little brown birds flit and swoop across the snow-covered front lawn, then settle on the chunk of suet we’ve set out on the balcony, arguing and scolding in their shrill bright voices. The dog groans a little and thumps his tail, looking out at them wistfully. My husband tells me the dog loves chasing birds and squirrels in the summer.
I know I have to go, but it’s hard; it’s so comforting just sitting here in the half-light of winter, wrapped in a blanket, working on my projects. I pick up the hooded pullover I’ve been working on. I guess I won’t get to use it much this year. It’s lovely and cozy, an inky, smoky black that makes me think of my husband’s overcoat, but I’ve knitted some little surprises into it: the edges of the hood and the cuffs are worked in a luscious, deep red yarn, seed stitch, with garnet-colored glass beads gleaming here and there; and the folded hem facing and the linings of the slanted pockets are lined in the same deep, surprising red.
It makes me think of pomegranates, and even now, after so many years, I flush a little when I think back on that evening before the fire, the way his hand shook a little as my lips brushed his fingers, the way the seeds gleamed in the flickering light, the way that tart red juice tasted when the seed burst suddenly between my teeth. I’m going to miss him. I always do.
“Mom? Mom, I’m here,” I say quietly, and she starts—she’d been half-dozing, looking up at the ceiling, but now she focuses on me. A great smile breaks out across her face, and I feel the air in the room brighten. I smile too, come over and hug her. She feels thin now. I can feel her tiny frame of bones when I circle her body in my arms. I can feel her happiness radiating off of her, pouring out into the world, a deep and gradual warmth. I’ve missed her. No matter how much I miss my husband, or how sad I feel when seeing how weak and fragile my mother’s become, the visit always feels worth it, just for this moment.
I sit down in the chair beside her bed, and we talk for a while about her nurses, and the foods she likes, and what she’s been watching on TV. I gather she’s mostly been watching the Weather Channel, so there’s not much to talk about. Chocolate pudding is currently her favorite, and she’s not so keen on the beef stroganoff they’ve been serving her.
I take out the other project I’d been working on. I finished the knitting on the plane, and just a bit of finishing remains. It’s a peplos, nice and traditional. I thought Mom would like it. I knit laceweight on large needles for a gauzy fabric with a lot of drape without a lot of bulk, and instead of fastening the shoulders with fibulae, I’m sewing on buttons and crocheting little button loops on the other side, with the apoptygma, the decorative overfold, draped in separate front and back pieces without a lot of ease. It’s cropped, too, just waist-length instead of a full-length garment. I couldn’t stand to knit a full-length version.
I finish crocheting the button loops and hold it up to see. “What’s that?” my mother asks. “Put it on. I want to see it.”
Checking the hall to make sure no nurses are coming, I strip to my camisole and slip on the peplos. There’s not much ease in the body of the garment, and I can see in the mirror on the wall that I’ve judged the fit properly—I look like a proper Greek maiden, without having to swim in pounds of heavy draped cloth. My mother looks at me for a long time, and her gaze seems to clear up. That old, sharp, probing gaze is back again, for a moment, and then she slips into her memories and I feel like it was a mistake to show this to her. Maybe a mistake to come at all.
“You were dressed just like that on the day you went out into the meadows,” she says dreamily. “Remember how you were playing in the grass, among the flowers? The poppies. Those red poppies.”
“Mom,” I say warningly, but of course, she doesn’t listen.
“Those nymphs didn’t do a thing to stop him. Remember how the earth split, remember how that horrible man came up from the earth in his carriage? The black horses. All those black horses trampling the flowers.” She’s getting agitated, starting to chant. One of the nurses peeks in through the door, alarmed at this loud, steady incantation of Greek syllables, and I wave her away, whispering, “It’s fine, don’t worry.”
“Mom, it wasn’t like that. Don’t you remember? He brought me flowers. I went out with him.”
“The black horses trampled those red poppies. Red poppies everywhere, like blood. I couldn’t find you. I couldn’t find you. I made those girls into monsters because they didn’t stop you. How could they have left you? You were innocent. My innocent girl, playing in the grass, in your little girl’s peplos.”
“Mom, please don’t.” I kneel beside the bed and put my hand on her shoulder, trying to stop her, but she just looks at me and continues.
“That horrible man. He took your innocence. That rapist. I turned those girls into Sirens, into monsters. They were monsters, just standing there when the black carriage came out of the earth. Winter. Winter. Cold. There’s nothing here without you.”
“Don’t, Mom. I went with him. I chose him. He’s my husband. He’s not a rapist. Don’t say such horrible things!” But it’s useless. She starts to cry and wail a little, and I’m afraid she’s going to start beating her breast and tearing at her hair, old-style, and then she calms down and falls asleep.
I sit in the chair beside the bed and cry a little, quietly. I want to call my husband, but I don’t want to tell him the things she’s said yet again, the ideas I can’t seem to get out of her head, no matter how many times I try. Outside, the sun is shining merrily down, and I can feel the snow starting to melt, and the crocuses stirring themselves, getting ready to press their impatient green shoots up through the earth and the melting snow.
The nurse comes in with Mom’s meds in a paper cup, and a tray bearing both the hated stroganoff and the beloved chocolate pudding. Mom wakes up at the sound and starts to tuck into the food with a surprising appetite.
She eats half the stroganoff, takes her pills, and stops just short of licking the pudding cup clean. “Aren’t you hungry?” she asks, and I take the rest of the stroganoff to make her happy. She seems better now, much more lucid.
“Where’s your husband? You should have brought him,” she says. “I like that man. You made a good match.”
“Yes, Mom,” I say quietly. He doesn’t like to come anymore, not since that first year he tried coming back home with me, with disastrous results. These days, sometimes I think it would be nice to have them see each other again, but her moods are so unpredictable, I don’t think it’s a good idea.
“I’m proud of you,” she says, and looks at me for a while. “When are you going to give me some grandchildren? I want a granddaughter.”
My hand shakes a little. I push the stroganoff around on the plate. “I don’t know, Mom.”
“I’m old, you know. I won’t last forever.”
I imagine myself lying in that bed, staring up at the blue and red circles and jagged lines of weather systems swirling around on the digitized map. I imagine the loneliness of lying in that bed, alone, for four months a year, and I know it’s selfish of me, so selfish. I can’t imagine giving up those four months a year, though, those peaceful months, lying in bed, with the blanket of snow stretching out around the house, muffling the sounds. I feel warm, there, and safe.
“I—Mom, I know. But—I’m just—I’m just not ready yet.” I’m not ready to be a mother. I know what it means for me, for us. I’ve held on for so long, even though I know I shouldn’t. But I know what it means.
She can’t go until I have a baby. She can’t leave me until I let her. The world won’t let her; spring must come every year, and summer, and autumn, and that won’t happen if she’s not here. Until I’m a mother, and can take her place, she has to stay. I look over at her roommate’s ventilator. We’ve learned to build so much machinery around ourselves to keep our lives intact.
Sometimes I think of what it would be like to share our lives with a little child, to hold the baby’s tiny hands in mine, kiss her tiny toes. But then I think of what it will be like, that great betrayal when she reaches her teens, that moment when she turns away from me, like I turned from my mother, and climbs into the black carriage, into a world of mysteries, of winter darkness, of all the secrets we keep from our parents.
And I think of what it will be like, once my daughter is born, to see my mother fade at last, slipping away from me the way her mind and self have been slipping away for centuries now. “Oh, Mom,” I whisper, and stroke her thinning hair, thinking of how once, it was thick and wheat-golden, how she used to stride through the September fields barefoot, with her hair unbound, smiling, holding my hand. “Oh, Mom, I’m not ready yet.”
Persephone’s Pomegranate Hoodie
To evoke pomegranate seeds, the hood edges and cuffs of this hooded pullover are worked in seed stitch, in a deep red yarn, with garnet beads scattered randomly throughout. The dark red color continues in hidden places: the linings of the diagonally slanted pockets, and the folded hem facing at the bottom edge. The rest of the hoodie is worked in shadowy black.
Suggested yarns: Knitpicks Andean Treasure, Knitpicks Palette (double-stranded), Berroco Ultra Alpaca, Berroco Ultra Alpaca Light.
Persephone’s Peplos
The peplos was one of the basic types of classical Greek women’s clothing: the fabric was folded over at the shoulders and pinned there with pins called fibulae to form a decorative overfold, the apoptygma. This knitted version of the peplos is fastened at the shoulders with buttons; it features little ease in the body, and the apotygma is draped as separate front and back pieces, for a more modern fit. The laceweight yarn knit on large needles provides great drape and reduces the bulk resulting from the multiple layers of knitting.
Suggested yarns: Knitpicks Alpaca Cloud, Habu bamboo, Jaggerspun Zephyr, or other laceweight yarns.
Edited to add: damn it, why does WordPress keep eating my paragraph breaks?
A comment I posted in response to this review in the Daily Telegraph about Jane Brocket (yarnstorm)’s new book, The Gentle Art of Domesticity:
Ridiculous. If you feel insecure about your own choices in life, don’t pin the blame on Jane Brocket/Nigella Lawson/Martha Stewart. “Impossible standards”? Blame yourself for wanting to live up to them, or, if you’re getting flack from your husband, blame him. Don’t complain about how someone else is spoiling everything for you just because they take pleasure in something you don’t. I think Jane Brocket’s blog (http://yarnstorm.blogs.com/knitblog/) is a real pleasure, and I’m looking forward to reading her book once I can find it in the States. It’s a real shame you were able to see only your own bitterness and discontent in its pages.
My house is a mess, a jumble of mismatched thrift-store and Ikea furniture, because I don’t choose to spend my energy on that part of my domestic life. But I do find a great deal of pleasure in cooking lovely, elaborate meals every now and then, and hand-knitting clothing for myself and my loved ones, and I grew my own vegetables when I had a garden. “Why should we when we can buy it?” Sure, I could buy cheap machine-knit sweaters at Wal-Mart for a fraction of the time and cost it would take to make them by hand, but it’s a wonderful, relaxing feeling to feel the yarn passing through my fingers, and as fulfilling as anything I’ve known to look at my beautiful finished pieces and know that I made them from scratch. I don’t see any of this as a chore, and, in fact, it’s a worse mindset in my opinion to think that the key to feeling better about yourself is to go out and buy stuff. (And just where do you think those hand-knitted bed socks come from?) The enjoyment, for me, comes more from the process of creation than from just owning another cardigan.
If you don’t enjoy doing any of this, fine. Don’t. Go enjoy doing whatever it is you like doing better. Just don’t imply that Jane Brocket is a self-absorbed, terrible person unthinkingly ruining everything for the rest of us, and don’t imply that anyone who does enjoy the “domestic arts” is doing so in a frantic attempt to live up to someone else’s impossibly high standards, or because they’re backwards, deluded slaves stuck in a pre-feminist era.
Are you just jealous that she has the means to stay at home with her kids?
Should she go back to doing an office job she doesn’t like and doesn’t need just because it’s considered more “worthwhile” than working in the home?
Should she stop doing the domestic things she enjoys, or stop sharing them with the world, because it’s making you feel bad about yourself?
I have to admit I do have a certain degree of insecurity about this myself–I’d feel deeply ambivalent, at this point in my life, about quitting work and becoming a housewife, I think mainly because the societal pressures in the circles I run in hold up fulfillment of intellectual/career-oriented potential above domestic duty, and I’ve internalized these expectations. But I have dreams of a life where I can spend my days spinning and knitting, growing organic vegetables, gathering fresh eggs from my backyard chicken coop, cooking fresh and lovely locally grown meals, sewing my own quilts and clothing. Oh well–I’m not going to blame this disconnect on the Domestic Goddesses.
I like this site. It has iguanas.
Also learned at knit night that you can machine wash stainless steel, and that chemgrrl has a climbing wall IN HER HOUSE.
I’m about 1/4 done with Selbuvotter mitten #1. It looks lovely. I think using an appropriate yarn for colorwork makes a huge difference. (There are pics of some pretty, but less successful mittens in my Flickr)
I keep thinking of new things to write! Oh well, it’s my blog and I can post five million posts in one day if I want to, Twitter-style.
This morning after class, I was walking back to where I’d locked up my bike, and eating a bagel (toasted garlic with jalapeno cream cheese) and as I was walking through the Sample Gates, with my face all smeared in cream cheese in a very undignified way, I noticed someone looking at me. I didn’t recognize her, so I kept walking, but to my surprise, she said, “Sunrise Circle!”
I stopped short. “Oh–yes!” I was wearing my navy blue tweed Sunrise Circle jacket.
The following conversation ensued:
“Jo Sharp?”
“No, Kate Gilbert.”
“No, I meant the yarn. It looks like Jo Sharp’s Silkroad Aran Tweed.”
“Oh no, it’s Rowan Yorkshire Tweed DK.”
“Well, it looks beautiful.”
I introduced myself. She introduced herself. (I hadn’t seen that site till I Googled just now for an appropriate link but OH CHINCHILLAS CUUUUTE!!)
And it turns out we were supposed to meet tonight anyway!
I’d seen her on Ravelry recently, and invited her to our knitting group, and our next meeting is planned for tonight at 7 PM.
Isn’t that funny? The knitting world is so small.
Damn it! Lara turned out huge. Yes, I did wash and block my swatch. Hmph.
I knew the sweater would have 8″ of ease (I don’t quite know what I was thinking with that, either) but as it turns out, the sleeves and body gained quite a bit of length during the blocking process. So now the sweater is kind of a big gray sack.
The drape has improved, so I’m trying to think of it as a large, cozy, kimono-type garment rather than the more fitted type of cardigan shown in the book. I do think I’ll have to fix the collar, though; it still looks bumpy.
I’ve been a sweater powerhouse lately! I finished the Tilted Duster in two weeks, Lara in two weeks, and I just cast on for Anna Bell/Amelia Raitte/My Fashionable Life’s Jess, which I hope to finish in two weeks as well. It’s become a routine, with all the reading I’ve been doing: cast on at knit night, knit for two weeks, finish by the next one. I might run out of steam soon, though. I guess I should have plenty of one-skein leftovers by that point, perfect for Christmas gift knitting.
Lara
Lara origamied up into a passable cardigan (phew!) She looked like poo when I tried her on pre-blocking. Lots of wrinkly excess cloth in the armpit area, and she made me look decidedly pudgy. I’m hoping blocking will help the fabric drape better. It might also help to not wear a second sweater underneath.
I clipped Lara together with binder clips to keep her in place while seaming, and it worked pretty well, except at the collar, where I had to kind of squish the last little bit in. I’ll see tomorrow if blocking helped that part lie flat, or if I should rip out and re-seam.
Pictures soon, hopefully.
Jess II: The Re-Jessening
…is what I’ve decided to christen my jacket project. I knit Jess in this same yarn (Queensland Uruguay DK, double-stranded, $25 a bag at Littleknits) on these same needles (Boye Needlemaster size 11) for my stepmom this spring. Hers was a sage green color, mine will be a rich burgundy. I loved working with the yarn and I loved everything about the pattern. So despite my general aversion to making the same pattern twice, I decided to go ahead and make the exact same jacket in a different color, and it’s rather liberating–I know the number of skeins I’ll use (I bought one extra just in case), the proper needle size, the mistakes in the pattern, the things to tweak this time around (fewer buttons, longer sleeves, different bindoff for the collar). I knitted on the cast-on stitches and this left nice big loops for picking up and knitting in the hem.
Instead of repeating my thoughts on the pattern, here are the notes I posted on the Craftster knitalong about the original Jess:
“Well, I finished Jess last week, but forgot to take a picture before sending her off to my stepmom! 
I used 11.5 skeins of Peru Luxury DK/Queensland Uruguay DK, a wonderful, shiny, bouncy merino/alpaca/silk blend in sage green, double-stranded, and I sewed on wooden buttons instead of doing the crocheted button covers.
My stepmom says it’s too narrow around the chest, but it seemed to fit me fine when I tried it on first, and I think I’m about the same size as her–she probably just likes more ease in her sweaters. The basketweave fabric with the Peru Luxury DK is surprisingly heavy and stretchy and REALLY warm. The sleeves require much more knitting than you would think to get to the proper length–I think they have a tendency to ride up because of the basketweave. I lengthened them to wrist-length instead of having 3/4 length sleeves.
I realized after knitting this that although it’s a jacket, I think it’s a good idea to use something like merino as she suggests, because the basketweave makes the jacket really cling to your arms and I think it could easily get very itchy and uncomfortable if you used a less-than-luscious yarn.
If this makes a difference in your decision to buy or not buy her patterns, they are mostly very clearly written, but I’d say they’re not for beginners (based on looking over Flicca and knitting from Jess)–they’re very concise, and there are some things taken for granted, like that you will know what decreases to use in which situations (I used paired k2tog/ssk decreases worked a stitch in from the edge, and knit a one-stitch garter selvage on the edges to be seamed), or that you will know how to maintain the stitch pattern when increasing or decreasing. Clearly, since I’ve bought two of them already, I think they’re worth the money, but your mileage may vary 
Jess is a really nice pattern overall–it does go so quickly on the size 11 needles (the fronts are only 28 sts each in the smallest size!), the basketweave pattern is easy to memorize, and I love the details–the slipped-stitch edge, the buttonholes, the knitted-up hems. If you’re wondering, the collar is knit in seed stitch with a slipped-stitch edging, which wasn’t entirely clear to me from the pattern pictures. I would totally knit this jacket again.
I found a couple of possible errata in the pattern on the smallest size, but I could have just made mistakes myself, since I was usually doing something else while knitting.
- I think the instructions for the setup rows on the basketweave pattern for the back are incorrect–the structure of the pattern should be pretty obvious after you’ve swatched, so no big deal, but I believe the (WS) instructions should read P1, (K2, P2) to last stitch, P1.
- I think the shoulder shaping is reversed–when I started on WS or RS as instructed, I ended up with shoulders slanting upwards away from my neck instead of slanting downwards away from my neck. I had to rip and reknit a few times because I kept following along with the pattern and then realizing after binding off that I had done it backwards.”
Selbuvotter
I also cast on for a pair of Selbuvotter mittens, NHM #7. Terri Shea’s Selbuvotter book is phenomenal–the author reverse-engineered mitten patterns from samples found in various Nordic museums, and has reprinted them, in all their intricate, monochromatic glory.
The charts require all my concentration, which is why I needed to cast on for Jess–the mittens will decidedly not be my brainless pattern, but will be one step below.
I’m knitting them in Knitpicks Telemark in black and cream, on a US 1.5/2.5mm 24″ circ, magic-loop (I can knit only one at a time magic loop with this length needle, unfortunately). I don’t have appropriately sized DPNs (though I didn’t take a gauge swatch, so these may be wrong anyway) and two circs seemed way too fiddly this time around.
Stashing and Destashing
I’ll have to count using up yarn as “destashing.” I used up 11 or 12 skeins in the past two weeks on Lara. Yay!
Then I went and bought more stuff. Argh!
I tested some stitch markers for a woman on Ravelry a month or two back, and now she’s opened up her own store–Knitty K8’s Stitch Markers. I wanted to support her (and I got a discount) so I picked up a set of gray freshwater pearl stitch markers.
Jannette’s Rare Yarns was having a limited-time sale on Rowan Yorkshire Tweed Chunky at a price I couldn’t refuse: $50 for 10 100g skeins. She usually sells them for $70. MSRP for a bag is $159.50. This yarn is discontinued, and I loved working with the DK version so much, I decided I’d try the Chunky. I happened upon the sale when there were only 4 days left (3, now), and decided, after some deliberation, on Damp, which looks to be a slate gray flecked with blue and green. I was thinking of getting Coast, a mid-blue color flecked with brighter blue, but I think the gray will be more versatile. (What does the Chicago Manual of Style say about how to treat yarn color names? I went for italics this time.)
And my mom brought me 6 skeins of Patons SWS and 2 skeins of Patons Nuance when she came to visit last weekend–she wants a cardigan or a vest of some kind. My plan is to exchange the Nuance for more SWS so I’ll (probably) have enough for a garment.
In other news, I saw Stardust last night and I want to move to Stormhold. Or maybe Wall.
The Lara sweater has grown in a peculiar, puzzle-like way–right front cast on and knit for a ways, joined up with the stitches held on the back and knit along for a while, with many stitches bound off sharply and the right sleeve then knit with decreases where the left one had increases–thrilling, those rows getting shorter and shorter! But maddening, the huge and twisty pile of knitting in your lap, dangling from your needles. It’s more annoying than a top-down raglan because it’s not worked in the round, so it feels incredibly long and floppy, with sleeves or fronts or backs all dangling off to the sides like octopus legs. In fact, I think this passage from Alice in Wonderland perfectly describes my feelings about how it feels to work on this sweater:
“Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, ‘just like a star-fish,’ thought Alice. The poor little thing was snorting like a steam-engine when she caught it, and kept doubling itself up and straightening itself out again, so that altogether, for the first minute or two, it was as much as she could do to hold it.”
Then the baby turns into a pig.
Insert “awkward pile of knitting” for baby, and hopefully I can soon also insert “elegant, urban, and sophisticated cardigan” for “pig.”
I haven’t really stretched everything out to verify that it will fold itself up in the right way–I really hope I followed the directions properly, because despite the interesting construction, this was really completely mindless stockinette and ribbing and I didn’t think about it much at all while I was knitting it. I worked on it constantly as I did my readings and caught up on videos for class, watched TV, and talked to my mom while she was visiting last weekend.
I finished the right sleeve decreases today and once I get home I’ll take the provisional CO off and work ribbing on both sleeves at the same time. Then comes blocking and seaming. I anticipate using up a total of 11 skeins of yarn on this, i.e. 1023 yards.
If I can finish this by Thursday (I think I can) I’ll be on a roll–cast on for one sweater at knit night, knit like crazy for two weeks, finish it by the next one. My next queued sweater, Jess, should be a snap to finish up in two weeks, although I may get sidetracked by mittens or slippers in the meantime.
I checked out Iris Schreier’s Lacy Little Knits
Green Apples has some good pictures from the book posted in her book review.
Maybe I’ll post it to Ravelry or knittyboard and see if anyone knows for sure.
Anyone else have an opinion on a periwinkle Flicca? (aka Dusk, Pantone 17-3812) I know you may be thinking “if I don’t have anything nice to say, I won’t say anything at all” but please rest assured that “holy moly, don’t do it!” is definitely an acceptable answer.
Debbie Bliss’s Lara proceeds apace. To my immense surprise, I suddenly found I was done with the back, instead of with the right front as I had somehow assumed. Thus I have gone far enough that I think the construction is as follows:
Knit sleeve up from left cuff.
Increase sharply for front and back.
Begin knitting only on back stitches, and knit all the way across back. Put the back stitches on hold.
Cast on stitches for a ribbed collar extension, then knit across these in rib, knit back across the left front in rib, and continue ribbing until the left front is done. Sew the collar extension to the back left neck.
I assume something symmetrical will somehow happen to the right front–knit collar extension, knit rib, attach to right front, knit sleeve. However, since I’m knitting like a Blind Follower on this project, there are bound to be further surprises.
Elizabeth Zimmermann would be ashamed, but there are Thinking Projects and there are Mindless Projects, and giant swathes of stockinette fall into the latter category for me and are quickly finished in comparison to the Thinking Projects, which tend to fall by the wayside because I can’t knit them while doing other things.
Three interesting search terms people used to find this blog recently:
1) “having a life while having a boyfriend”
2) “the good that won’t come out” (I like that phrase. I found out this is a Rilo Kiley song)
3) “forced to wear panties photo” (gross.)
So do you think that this coat, Flicca, in this yarn, Hyacinth Violet Lopi, would be nice? (I hear purple is the new black this season.) Or would it be too bright and loud and tacky? Will I be one of those people very obviously wearing a handknit? Give me your thoughts, Gentle Readers. This is the same yarn I made a purse out of for my sister, and I have a huge pile of it left. The color in the Fabric Place link is truer than the color in my photo–it’s kind of a saturated lavender/periwinkle. I think if it were heathered, I’d have no hesitation, but I just feel like it’s so unrelentingly, cheerfully purple. I’ve been mulling this over for ages! I actually have some blue-flecked white tweed I was thinking of using for this coat, but I like the texture of the Lopi better when knit to gauge–the tweed seems kind of thin and loose, the Lopi seems squishy and warm. There’s someone else knitting a purple Flicca, but hers is a much darker shade.
