Best Quote I Heard All Day
The fundamentalists have taken the fun out of the mental--Ken Kesey

Will the road trip to FibreNorth be akin to the Merry Pranksters, without the drugs?

Here's to the memory of Ken, and Hunter S. as well. Two writers who, along with Mrs. Parker, taught me that writing needs an edge, if it's going to fly.

Blah, Blah, Blah
No edgy writing this week. Every so often, when I don't have time to write for public consumption, which was the case this week, Ted emails me and asks, "Are you OK?"

Yep. Never better. In fact, I will be going back to work next Monday, back to Slovenia World, which is rapidly turning into a much better place than when I left it last year. And I'll be working for my dear friend Susan, icing on the cake.

As for my little vacation and state of public incommunicado, I was finishing up the writing of my interview with Kristin Nicholas, which culminated in a one-day blitzkrieg trip up to Massachusetts this past Saturday to photograph her, the farmhouse, and some of her new designs from her upcoming book, Kristin Knits. The interview will appear in the Winter issue of IK. I'm pleased with it.

You know that after leaving Kristin to dash on home down I91, I had to stop at WEBS. It was 5 p.m. and I had a half hour. So I bought two skeins of the new Regia Kaffe Fassett sock yarn, Landscape Storm. (Never yarn-shop when you're on your cellphone talking business. It ruins the experience.)



Let me say this about that--I was somewhat underwhelmed by the yarn. WEBS seemed to have them all, both the Landscape and the Mirage types, and I picked through them. I think that what makes this yarn so much less worthy of Kaffe's talents is the gawd-awful striping, not the colors. Somehow, the big ole stripes on the Landscape don't seem to do his colorways justice. Check out the line here and see what you think. In fairness, you must see these yarns in person to get the true colors.

Rove-ing
Thank God he's gone. However, it's too late. The damage is done. More time with his family? How nice. How unbelievable.

Watch for a major stock market crash in October. I believe my dear Neal when he says that the time is here. Already, the subprime market is in huge trouble. However, as we all know, the Maroon-in-Chief wouldn't recognize a financial disaster from a natural one. Given the fine display of his leadership abilities during Katrina--you know, the same ones that made him such a success during his tenure with the Rangers--I would expect that on the day of the crash, he'll be clearing brush in Crawford. Or perhaps reading Camus.

Open Mic Thursday
I actually opened up one of my Knit List digests today, after a very long hiatus, and happened to see responses from a few people I recognized. When I do bother to skim the digests, I often just look at the subject. When I see something like "What to do with Fun Fur?", my first inclination is to write "Burn it." Ah, the toxicity of burning Fun Fur. What a concept. Better than asbestos, I would think. Far more damaging, probably.

Here's my topic for this week:

Did the advent of knitting blogs cause the intellectual disintegration of the major knitting lists?

Of course, even back in the halcyon days of the Knit List, there were mindless idiots posting stuff of little consequence, no question. But as a rule, the discussions then were smart, interesting, and often thought-provoking. The smaller, specialized lists still have some value, I believe. Some, but not much.

Campanula Redux
When I was up visiting Kristin this weekend, I told her that I'd had enough of lace for the time being. This is true. When I look back over the past year and a half, other than the Knit Picks Fair Isle vest (a present from Mammy), the Zizzer Zazzer hat, and the Guernsey socks, everything has been lace, starting with the Melanie shawl for Corinne's wedding.

And now, I'm on my last lace project for a while, Jenn's Campanula. I do like Rowan's Cotton Glace very much, though. It's become the cotton of choice for me. The colors are sublime.


Because I posted pictures of my Campanula, I won't be posting progress pictures of this one. The only difference between the two is that I'm shortening this for Jenn--she's 5'3" to my almost 5'7", so one less pattern repeat will be a perfect length for her. When it's done, then there will be a picture.

Cape May Antics
Carol invited me down to Cape May, the tip of NJ, where she and Tom and the kidz are spending a week. So Liz and I will travel down there today for a fun-filled day at the beach, something I haven't done in years. And it will be good to see my Sissyboo Deux--haven't seen her for a while.

No pictures of us in swimsuits. I swear.

The Book
I stopped writing my book some time ago, simply because I refused to put out something that was basically a reinvention of the knitting wheel. Shit, there are too many of those books out there. And although it was suggested by a person high up in the knitting publishing world that I write a book about myself and my life in the knitting world, I nixed that idea completely.

Isn't that what this blog is about, more or less?

However, readers have pestered and I did some pondering. And yes, there is a book up in this cramped cranium but perhaps not the book that everyone might expect. I'm working on the proposal now, so we'll see who bites. I'm not going to self-publish, as I originally intended to do. More trouble than it's worth.

An author doesn't make shit from books, you know. Nor do they from articles. This I know for a fact. So when and if the book proposal is accepted, I will have more to say about it. But not much.

Surprises are rare and handy, dontcha know?

Best Quote I Heard All Day
It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours.--Harry S. Truman

Well, you could have knocked my socks off when I got the phone call at 9:30 this morning.

"We're sorry but the Board has decided that due to financial considerations, we have to let you go. But you did a great job and this was a very hard decision to make."

Yeah, well. Big fucking deal. I know I did a great job, I don't need the Senior VP of Products to tell me that as he hands me my hat. And to be truthful, I'm not all that unhappy about getting the boot. I've got enough freelance work going right now (that they didn't know about) to keep me going for a bit, along with the severance and my untaken vacation time, which I never had the time to take. As far as I know, the rest of my team got canned too.

The only real problem is that I lose my health benefits as of midnight tonight. That sucks. Of course, if we had some kind of national health care here, it would not be an issue.

Tech writers are in huge demand. So I'm not particularly concerned. And I did need a vacation badly.

Felting
I picked up the IK special on felting/fulling, Felt. It's mostly reprints of projects published in IK and book excerpts, but if you're interested in really learning the different techniques, this is worth buying. I've done a couple of fulling projects and enjoyed them. It's something I'd like to take further than just bags and totes, however.



Felting/fulling is one of those techniques whose outcome can be really neat. Or really ugly. For example, that cover bag is not something I'd want to make, ever. But I'd consider doing fulled pillows rather than just knitted ones.

Felted fabric is much stabler than knitted fabric. For one thing, it's more receptive to surface design. Whereas I would only use certain embroidery stitches on knits, on felts I would feel comfortable adding something like satin stitch, for example. A fulled afghan? I might do that rather than just a knitted one, given that I could add quite a bit, embellishment-wise, that I would not otherwise consider.

I find afghan knitting a stone bore. But it might be interesting to design squares, say intarsia or Fair Isle, full them, and then see what you get, once sewn together. Or even apply fulling to a shawl knit in DK, for example.

Anyway, for what it's worth, Felt is a good reference if you want to give the technique a shot.

Arans and Things Irish
I was very saddened to read that Tommy Makem passed away last week at 74. For those of you who are into Irish folk music, Tommy was a remarkable singer and songwriter, long-time member of The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, and an all-around great guy. I met Tommy many years ago, after a concert at Carnegie Hall. And his song, Four Green Fields, is a classic.

Jimmy and I shared a love of Irish/Celtic music. My daughter Jenn plays the Celtic harp. And there's not one drop of Irish blood on either side. Go figure. (Yeah, being German means oompah music. Oh, and Beethoven and a few others.)

Watching Joe knit his Aran made me think it was time to get back to my knitting roots. My very first sweater was an Aran, my second-ever design was an Aran, too. However, for quite a few years, I've been concentrating on other projects, with nary an Aran on the list.

One of the books I've been coveting is Janet Szabo's Aran Sweater Design. And I finally bought it.This is an extraordinarily well-written technical guide. If you're looking for a pile of patterns, go elsewhere. If you want to be spoon-fed, don't buy it. If you truly want to learn how to design Arans, you must have it in your library.

I grant you, highly technical books such as this can often cause glazed eyes. But many of the things that I learned the hard way, such as planning your cable row repeats to the same numeric factor, arranging your design motifs carefully, making sure that your center motif ends gracefully at the neckline, and a bunch of other little nits that have to be picked--Janet addresses this all and more, step by step.

In degrees of design difficulty, I still maintain that lace is the most difficult if you are creating a fairly complex design. Arans surely come in second. In many ways, the pitfalls of Aran design are less obvious. Particularly if you choose to shape your garment, rather than opt for the easy way out and do a dropped shoulder.

I also bought Melissa Leapman's Cables Untangled. Not for the designs but for the stitch patterns, of which there are many. I'll be planning a new Aran design in the next few weeks because I'm saturated with lace and need to do something completely different.

Well, I guess I'll be blogging a bit more now. And knitting. The Magenta Diamonds shawl is almost done, except that dope here managed to go 3 rows past where she should have because? I was too poor to pay attention. And I started Jenn's Campanula as well. So at least I can feel a little less stress as I knit by that rare and handy pool in the backyard.