Hope I Die Before I Get Old

Best Quote I Heard All Day

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity--Tom Stoppard

I'm starting my countdown to 60. Less than three months to go. Gack. Well, that's the age I'll be according to my birth certificate. Given that my mammy is going to be 87 in August and still knits lace, I have no reason to angst about it.

Teaching the Old Bitch New Tricks

For a long time, I felt that using the Magic Loop technique to replace my dps was a waste of time. I tried it a couple of years ago and hated it.

Now, designing a pair of socks that I've named Naughty Nudge Nudge, I found that the lace pattern I'm using for the body is a royal pain in the ass if done on dps. It's a 6-stitch repeat but decreases land on the needle junctions on the instep. Shifting stitches from one needle to another sucks. Feh. I ended up putting it on the instep only. That made me quite unhappy.

So I decided to give ML another try. And still hated it. However, the two circs technique was something I could live with. I tried it out on a pair of plain vanilla socks. The two socks are shown below--I was too lazy to go downstairs and get my Canon, so bite me. I used my cellphone camera.

Needless to say, I'm ripping out NNN and starting over.

My point--Never say "never" when it comes to shit. I'm not ditching dps but using the two circs will allow me to use my lace pattern throughout the sock, rather than simply on the instep. I actually like this method.

Sillybus

I'm working up some workshops for Sheila at Stix-n-Stitches. Finishing, Lace 101, Knitting Clinic, Spindling for Beginners, to start. Sheila figures she'll open the shop on Sundays so I can teach. I love this place. It's more than just a local yarn shop. Sheila, Patty, Monica, and the other women who work there are my kind of wimmens. I've been loitering there every Saturday afternoon. Does the soul good. I enjoy helping the beginners--despite what you may think, I love novice knitters. They're like blank pages open to ideas.

Obligatory Knitting Shit

Other than the NNN socks, I've started recharting Jerry's sweater and blocked out the Crayon Madness set. Haven't gotten to spinning yet this week. However, I did buy some lovely Harrisville Shetland for an upcoming lace shawl. Yes, a bit heavier than usual but honestly, I wear my heavier shawls more often than my laceweights.

I don't see submitting anything to the mainstream magazines. For one, I don't want an editor dictating what yarn and colors I use. And second, I would rather sell my patterns online. If an editor would let me do what I do, then I might rethink it.

Knitting News

I was thrilled to see that Schoolhouse Press is publishing Ron Schweitzer's patterns. For those of you who are not familiar with Ron's wonderful Fair Isle designs, take a look at his Flowers of Life. I've never made one of his designs but they are all truly lovely.

Eight Years and Counting

Yesterday was the 8th anniversary of Jimmy's death. I don't generally dwell on it but I don't forget it, either. It was arguably the worst day of my life but there has been much joy since then. It also means that this blog is approaching its 8th anniversary. Jeez. Back then, there were very few knitting blogs. When I started, there were maybe 100 of them, some of which are long gone.

I wonder how much longer blogs will exist. With the birth of FaceBook, Ravelry, and other social networks, blogs may become obsolete. I know I update my FB status every day, pretty much. I doubt that blogs will go away entirely but instant gratification is truly the bane of our time. To some degree, I enjoy the immediacy. And to another degree, I recall the time before faxes when you had to wait for what you wanted or needed. The instant gratification syndrome has infected our world. As my former boss Pat Conway always said, "If you want it in the worst way, that's probably how you'll get it."

A rare but handy philosophy, indeed.

P.S. Haloscan, the service I have used for comments, is going out of business. They've cut a deal with a service called Echo so I've transferred over to Echo. A few people have told me that they've had problems loading my page recently--the page loads but then aborts. If you've had that problem, drop me a line so I can figure out how many readers have been affected. Danke.

Best Quote I Heard All Day
He has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.--Jonathan Swift

Where the fuck is spring? They say it's here.

The hermetically sealed phials are in some box in the basement, I guess.


A Brief Respite
Took a couple of hours Tuesday to run down to Montclair and have lunch with Mumsy. And visit Stix-n-Stitches. This has become my local yarn shop, even though it is a 34-mile drive each way.

S-n-S is one fabulous yarn shop, for you North Jerseyans and anyone else in the area. They have the best selection of sock yarn I've ever seen in one place, lots of wonderful yarn, a big book section, and they are some of the nicest knitting shop people I've ever met. One of them dragged every single Lavold book out for Ma, rather than her trying to do it herself. Between this place and Twist, I can't bitch.

Although I do wish that I lived next door to Halcyon or Harrisville.

Facing Forward
The Lavold front is almost done.



Now, I'm going to complain about Lavold's directions, which are singularly peculiar and often misleading, to put it mildly. This being my third Lavold, I've come to find that you simply cannot trust the charts nor the directions. I've found mistakes in each of the charts. No schematics in any of her books. She does a particular type of raised increase, which is explained in her first book but not in any of the later books.

So if you buy one of these softcover books and you don't understand how the increase is done (and it must be done her way), you're shit out of luck.

Out of Print
Get your eBay seller's page ready because the Harmony Guides are now out of print. I got that from Stix-n-Stitches, so I scooped up the copies I was missing.

Do I hear a starting bid of $100 a piece?


Charts and Stitch Patterns and Barbara Walker, Oh My!
I like the Harmony books, despite the fact that the earlier ones are not charted. Well, neither are the BW Treasuries but so what? I generally chart them myself. And frankly, the Treasuries' stitch patterns are now so overused that it's gotten to the point where if I see them on a garment in a mag, I often keep going. Twenty-five years of looking at all those patterns, you know?

These days, I use my old Mon Tricot Knitting Encyclopedia 1500 Stitches, Beautiful Knitting Patterns, and an old Burda stitch pattern book from the early '80s.

Michelene commented upon the commercial potential of having the BW Treasury patterns charted. That's an interesting proposition but one that would be an enormous undertaking. I doubt you'll see it, although I think they would sell. Jeez, with all the bad knitting books out there, it would be great to see classics like these revamped.

When Spinsterina made the comment that she was going to convince Eunny to switch to the Japanese charting system, I was amused. The Craft Yarn Council of America will waste a ton of money pushing their Yarn Standards, but no one seems interested in standardizing chart symbols.

I learned charting using the Japanese system in the early '80s because I was a machine knitter at the time. I would not necessarily choose Barbara Walker's system over that one but the knitting industry should pick one and stick to it.

Stitch 'n' Pitch
For fellow baseball fans, TNNA is promoting this. I always take my knitting to ballgames but due to security issues, it's not that easy to drag a large knitting bag into Yankee Stadium. Sock knitting is about all I'll take.

Seems to me that if anyone can turn knitting into an "event" these days, they will. Enough, already.

I'm rather pleased that I didn't see the Yankees on the Stitch 'n' Pitch schedule. Only the Mets. But then the Mets are a warm and fuzzy team, whereas the Yanks are not. They're just rare and handy. Eleven days to Opening Day against the Devil Rays.