Latitude and Longitude: pattern release!

OK, folks, ready for some magic?

Abra…

Cadabra!

Presto…

Change-o!

OK, it ain’t David Copperfield, but it’s still pretty cool, right?

My latest pattern release, Latitude and Longitude (Rav link for purchase: buy now), is a set of three accessories, meant to be knit up in two complementary colors of Noro Kureyon, Silk Garden, or another self-striping yarn: the PDF includes instructions for a scarf, cowl, and hat. All three are fully reversible and, as you saw, have vertical stripes on one side and horizontal stripes on the other. You only use one color per row, and there’s no real fancy business going on, stitch-wise–the basic pattern is just knits, purls, and slipped stitches. There are a few fancier things happening in the hat to keep the decreases as balanced and invisible as possible, but follow the written directions or chart and you’ll be fine.

I probably shouldn’t gush too much about the awesomeness of my own work, but seriously, I love these. (Sadly, one hat and the scarf have gone missing already. I seem to always lose my absolute favorite knitwear. At least I still know where two rainbowy cowls and a hat are.)

I first came across the stitch pattern a couple of years ago, in Jane Neighbors’s out of print Reversible Two-Color Knitting, which I found in the Cleveland Public Library system (one of Cleveland’s only redeeming points, in my humble opinion). It took a while, but one day I realized its full potential as I was contemplating another Noro striped scarf–previously my favorite renditions were the vertically striped two-color brioche rib or the horizontally striped mistake rib scarf. I realized that with this pattern, at last, there was no need to choose between the two.

So I worked up the scarf, then put the pattern into the round for the cowl, and last but not least, figured out some nice-looking decreases for the hat–I think it looks pretty good from both sides:

The opposite directional striping shows up when you fold up the brim of the hat:

Or when you fold down the edge of the cowl:

Or when your scarf twists or folds, as scarves are prone to do:

The hat and cowl each take two skeins of Noro–the scarf, a more budget-busting four skeins. The cowl, like most cowls, is pretty much just a big tube, but it is a nice portable piece of knitwear to tote around in your purse (or murse, or pocket, as the case may be) in case your neck gets cold.

One of the hardest things about knitting these two-color Noro pieces is picking out colors that will work together.

Contrasting dark and light, warm and cool, dull and bright colors seems to work well. But there are always those surprising lengths of weird colors like neon yellow or muddy olive that aren’t visible from the outside of the skein, then show up with a vengeance when you’re halfway through. Liz and Other Liz, friends from my Wednesday night knitting group, were kind enough to test knit for me; Liz (or Other Liz?) had to frog a bunch of her hat because two nearly identical shades of green showed up in both skeins at the same time. I try to avoid these situations by keeping both the centerpull and outside end of each skein accessible, and switching them out as needed. But sometimes just cutting out a length of a nasty color is unavoidable.

A perfect example of careful color selection: the hat I lost was knit in an ivory colorway of Silk Garden contrasted with purple shades, which seemed to go together really well when I held up the skeins next to each other, but the contrast all washed out when it was knit up. It was attractive and subtle, but didn’t photograph well–so it was a good opportunity to choose the two most garish colors of Kureyon in my stash and knit up hat #2.

The two-sided stripes help camouflage everyone’s other least favorite thing about Noro (well, aside from twigs, breaking, uneven spin, and all the other things I see people complaining about on the Ravelry Yarn forum every few weeks like clockwork)–knots, with completely different colors tied together at the join.

So there you go. Latitude and Longitude. Please consider them for your future Noro striped accessory needs! More info, including a chart of possible yarn substitutions and links to tubular cast-on and bind-off tutorials, can be found on my main pattern page.

Meme (me, me!)

I’ve been tagged for two memes–I’ll do Kristen’s first, because I’ve been thinking about it for a bit.

Both these memes are meant to be about me. I find it much more difficult to write about myself than to write about external things like books or knitting… perhaps because I find it stressful to be the center of attention, or perhaps for the same reason I’ve found it hard to answer when people say “what’s X person like?” or “what was it like to live in X place?” For complex subjects I know well, I don’t construct a simple narrative about them the same way I do for simple subjects or people/places I know only in passing. I should practice coming up with “elevator speeches” if I think I’ll be asked about something, but honestly, I never think about it until the question drops and I’m left stymied and stammering and going into far more detail than the person asking really wanted.

Anyway, here’s the six-word memoir I decided to write.

Searching for happiness. Is happiness enough?

Growing up, whenever I blew out the candles on my birthday cake, or blew dandelion fluff clean away, I always closed my eyes and simply wished to be happy. I didn’t ask for particular things to happen or for particular items. I wished for a state of mind. Mostly, as an adult, I’ve been successful in that. But–the essence of my quarterlife crisis–

Is happiness enough?

I went to Quaker church last Sunday with Rahul. The church is non-hierarchical, so you sit in silence in the meeting of Friends, and when someone feels moved to speak by the Holy Spirit, they stand up and say their piece. Best church I’ve ever been to, though being more spiritual than religious, I don’t know that I really believe in the Holy Spirit or a personified God. Anyway, someone stood up at church and talked about a successful lawyer who had been moved to drop his career and move down to Nicaragua to live in a shack.

“What would the world be like,” the speaker said, “if all Christians felt like it was their Christian duty to be poor?”

Now, I don’t think that has to mean moving to Nicaragua and living in a shack. Studies have shown that money does buy happiness, up to a certain point, once your basic needs are met and you don’t feel afraid about where your next meal will come from. But what if we actively aspired to stop wanting at that point? Not passively, with the “camel through the eye of a needle” proverb in the back of the mind, or with alms or tithing as a sort of duty separate from ourselves, but actively, as a pillar of faith. What if we tried, like Buddhists (and not the kind of consumerist Buddhism that comes from buying prayer flags and wearing yoga pants) to let our desires fall away and ignore the I want mindset? If we stopped asking for more money, promotions, power, stopped buying stuff except when we needed it? What if we focused on love and simplicity and the things that please us?

What if we didn’t need more? Could it be enough to be happy?

I think we tend to give lip service to this idea, but in practice, without thinking about it, we value money, objects, status, and achievement more. We secretly look down on people who reach a certain point in their careers, not too high up the ladder, and then stop advancing, calling these “dead-end careers.” But is it always better to be at the top? You get more money and more status, but (depending on your particular position) you may trade off free time and your level of stress may skyrocket. There was some movie about this a few years back, where a very happy temp worker got hired full-time and his life went to hell.

I don’t mean to advocate selfishness, of course, or hedonism to the detriment of the greater good, and I’m all in favor of making enough money to take care of yourself both now and in the future. And it makes life so much easier to have lots of money, no question. But there’s a feeling in personal lives analogous to our ideas about the economy that more is better, growth is necessary, but what if it’s not only unnecessary but harmful? I read this interesting story in the Atlantic Monthly called Fear of fallowing: the specter of a no-growth world (abstract here) that goes into these ideas a bit, on an economic/societal scale rather than a strictly personal one–Collapse, by Jared Diamond, does as well, but then Diamond is a successful author and professor and doesn’t really need to worry about his place in the world.

So, without going too far into the details, and without addressing consumerism (I have a wee problem with loving and acquiring stuff, though I’ve gotten much better about it in recent years) my current crisis is that despite sometimes feeling like I’ve never been happier, I get this vague itchy feeling like I ought to be doing more, achieving more, or making more money. But what if I already have enough? What if I could, but I don’t want to, and what if that’s enough? (Maybe I should move to Bhutan, where they measure and deeply value their Gross National Happiness.)

I’m feeling this crisis particularly right now because, well, I just filed my taxes and am feeling extremely poor and angry and grudgingly, selfishly in favor of this idiotic economic stimulus plan, because it will mean another $600 in my pocket. But on the other hand, I don’t really need it, I just hate having to pay the government a big chunk of money, and I know I could be making more. I can pay my rent and my bills and sock away money every month for retirement. And I have lots of free time and mental balance right now. But I can’t help thinking, sort of longingly, of the days when I had a lot more money and a lot less free time and general happiness.

I mean, springtime is finally here in Bloomington, and just look at it! Magnolias, sunshine, rainbow scarves, forsythia… would I really rather be stuck in a cubicle or in meetings in an office park until 10 PM, making a bit more money? (Um… maybe? Check back in with me in a year…)

Observe:

A star magnolia outside the public library:

Pink trees on 3rd Street:

A reversible scarf pattern I’ve been working on, called “The Water is Wide”–it will have 3 variations, and I’m working on the 3rd right now. Here are variations 1 and 2.

The main version shows wave cables on one side and a quilted “gull stitch” ribbing on the other side. It’s knit in Malabrigo Silky Merino in Indiecita, 2 skeins. I have lots of nice pictures of this that I took this weekend around the IU campus. I’ll share more later, but here are some of the outtakes I don’t plan to use in the final pattern:
Too nipply:


Shows construction in the background:

And here are some photos of version 2, a version showing quilted rib on both sides, knit with 2 skeins of Noro Kureyon and 1 skein of Plymouth Boku, all striped together. I might use some of these photos for the final pattern–I’m pleased with how they came out, but then I have a real weakness for rainbow-striped scarves, so how could I have gone wrong?
In the star magnolia:

Floating in forsythia:

TP

Close up

Far off

(Version 3 will show wave cables on both sides, but I ran out of yarn and have to wait for more to come in the mail. I hope the dyelots are similar. I love it so far–it’s luscious–but it eats yarn like crazy.)

This NPR story inspired the meme, and here are the guidelines:

Here are the guidelines, should you choose to participate in this yourself:

• Write your own six word memoir.
• Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like.
• Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere.
• Tag five more blogs with links.

I hereby tag:

1. Goldtop, in revenge exchange for tagging me with the “seven things” meme
2. gleek
3. Emilee
4. Kate
5. Big Sister

(Apologies if you’ve been tagged before… I didn’t do a search to check. And no obligations here. It was definitely hard to figure out what to write in my 6-word bio, so totally I’ll understand if you don’t want to.)

And anyone else who wants to be tagged, please do participate and let me know!

Unicorn Pegasus Rainbow Scarf

Those two little skeins from the top of the picture I posted the other day

have transformed themselves into another addition to the menagerie of stripy scarves!

I finished the Earth and Ocean Bias Scarf you see on the left of the picture…

refined my bias knitting techniques a bit, and applied the same pattern to those two skeins of Noro. My intention was for it to be another Christmas present, but I may have to start tailoring my gift knitting a bit more to the actual needs of my recipients, as I don’t think my grandma will really want a rainbow striped scarf for Christmas.

Because it’s below freezing today, my boyfriend helped himself to the Earth and Ocean scarf for his morning ride to school, so I have no new pictures of that today.

I do, however, have some pictures of the new striped scarf:

As I was knitting it, the colors and pattern brought back lots of memories of the colors and objects of my 1980s girlhood:

the diagonal-striped friendship bracelets we used to make out of knotted embroidery floss, safety-pinned to the ripped knees of our stonewashed jeans;

Rainbow Brite and her flying, rainbow-maned horse Starlite;

the black Lycra leggings I had with hot pink stripes up the sides of the legs;

the colorful squares of the Candy Land board;

and the Lisa Frank Trapper Keepers depicting all types of happy fantasy creatures cavorting in clouds of hearts and rainbows in a magical neon wonderland. Lisa Frank always used those same motifs in that same palette, creating a familiar place out of time, like a Thomas Kinkade for the 9-year-old-girl set.

So with Lisa Frank in mind, I decided to name this scarf the Unicorn Pegasus Rainbow Scarf. The pattern, such as it is, can be found in the Free Patterns section. There’s nothing really special about it, it’s just striped garter stitch on the bias, but it makes a nice answer to the eternal question of what to do with two skeins of Noro.

Pattern: The Unicorn Pegasus Rainbow Scarf

Size: Unblocked: 7″ x 52″. Blocked: 5″ x 69″

Yarn used: Noro Kureyon, colors 134 and 153. I like Plymouth Boku better, in general–cheaper, softer, more evenly spun, no VM. The Noro, as many have noted, is full of little leafy pieces, thick, almost unspun sections, and thin, wiry-hard, almost laceweight-thin sections. It does soften and bloom nicely in a bath of Eucalan, so it feels rough afterwards, but not itchy.

Needles used: Size 10/6mm Addi Turbos

Started: 11/6/07

Finished: 11/6/07

Notes: I’m disappointed with my photography skills–none of the photos in natural light conveyed the real fluorescent colors of the Noro. Only the overexposed flash photo brought out the bright colors. I might have to wait for sunnier weather and try again.

So many striped striped scarves. And a deer.

Have I mentioned before how much I love striped scarves, especially manually striping self-striping yarns?

All scarves have 2-row stripes with the unused color carried up the side. From left to right:

WIP: Earth and Ocean bias stripe scarf. Misti Alpaca Chunky in Peacock Melange and Natural Brown, on size 10.5 needles, garter stitch on the bias.

FO: 1×1 rib striped scarf in Plymouth Boku.

FO: Forest Rib scarf. Plymouth Boku in mistake rib.

FO: Child’s Rainbow Scarf. Patons SWS in Natural Plum and Natural Navy in mistake rib, pattern from Last Minute Knitted Gifts.

More photos of these in my Flickr or on my Ravelry pages. Let me know if you want the colorways or other specs on these scarves.

Up above: Two skeins of Noro for yet another striped scarf.

Also, here’s my cute little fork deer. Isn’t he the best?

As you can see, I finally have my camera back, and I’ll have more projects to show you soon!