Best Quote I Heard All Day
The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous.—Shana Alexander

So if that’s the case, and I believe it is, let’s get over being nervous about finishing, OK?
Because if ever there is a part of knitting that demands excellence, it’s right there. In the end game.

I gave commenter Lynne’s suggestion about a 4-part series on finishing some thought. OK, I’ll do it. But it’ll cost ya a dollah-three-eighty. Heh.

Now, get inspired. Here’s a picture for those who need visual aids. Sewing up one of the Campanula's side seams.

We'll get to the seaming in another entry. Just remember this: I couldn't sew shit to begin with and it took me torturous sewing classes in junior high school, sewing clothes for me and my kids, and learning machine knitting before I understood the importance of finishing, in all aspects of needlework.

Part I—The Beginning of the End
[The End by the Doors playing in the background is a prerequisite for reading this. Or perhaps People Are Strange. Your choice.]

Getting into finishing a sweater is perhaps akin to steeling yourself for a long stint in the dentist’s chair à la Marathon Man. At least, it seems to be that way for many knitters. As it was for me, at one time. Until I got fucking Finishing Religion. Because finishing is a a religious experience.

Before you begin to think about finishing, you need to get yourself into a positive state of mind about it. Which means not “terriblizing” it.

Here are my 10 Rules for a Healthy Finishing ‘Tude, which include many absolutes:

1. Always look at finishing as part of the process as a whole.
   
2. Never consider starting another project until you’ve finished the garment that’s lying in pieces in your knitting basket/bag. (This is arguably the hardest thing to do.)


3. Think about all the time you’ve put into knitting those pieces. Then think about rushing through the finishing, doing a shitty job, and how those pieces will end up looking like a church bazaar reject.


4. Always do your finishing work when your brain is its sharpest. And your eyes.


5. Never drink coffee, tea, cola, beer, or Jello shots when finishing. This I tell you from sad experience.


6. Lock up your cat(s). Cats like dangly bits, such as ends of yarn. And sitting on blocked pieces as they are drying. Dogs seem to have more control.


7. Lock up your kid(s) under 12. Or in lieu of that, if you are concerned about your local Child Welfare Board, palm them off on their Dad, doting grandmother, neighbor, daycare, whatever. The kids have got to go.


8. Ponder the beauty of sewing things together so that they look impeccable. Translate that splendiferous feeling into your soul, if you still have one at this point.


9. Make sure you have all your tools together before you start. Then use your measuring tape as a Rosary, because you’ll be praying to Our Lady of the Perpetual Piece.
   
10. Keep this in mind: How would Jesus finish this?

You’ve got three major components to finishing: blocking, picking up and knitting edgings, and sewing seams. Now, obviously, a lot of people like to knit in the round because it decreases the finishing tasks. I’m certainly one of them. However, whether you knit flat or in the round, you’re going to have to do something to polish up your knitting. And there’s going to come a time when you see a design you love that’s loaded with finishing.

Finishing actually starts the minute you determine what garment you’re going to make. If you are working from someone else’s design, you can only hope that the designer has incorporated certain elements that will be critical to successful finishing. Read the instructions carefully and look for the following:

• If not worked in the round, are selvedge stitches included? If not, add ‘em to the pattern. Immediately.



• How are the decreases for the armholes and neckline handled? Are they decreased right on the edge? Make sure you don’t do that. Move decs in one stitch, at least. You’ll need a selvedge here too, for sleeve set-in and neckline pickup, if you have to do those.



• What other potential finishing pitfalls are there? Zippers, ties, snaps, buttons? Will you bind off the shoulders or leave the stitches live for grafting? You don’t need to do any special preparation ahead of time for those, but be aware that they will demand certain decisions at the end. Like changing the way the buttonhole is constructed, that sort of thing. And if the fabric you’re knitting will have a lot of drape, you may or may not want to seam the shoulders to give it some structure. Ditto for phony seams. If you’re going to use them, you’ve got to decide NOW.

Once you have a basic game plan as to how you will be finishing—and of course, you’ve been notating your instructions, right?—you can start knitting, incorporating any finishing adjustments.

I am presuming that you have swatched. Swatching, besides for gauge, can be used to work out stitch patterns and potential finishing concerns. For example, if you want to see how an edging will work when picked up on a bound-off edge or along a side, do it on the swatch. You can resolve a lot of potential issues by working them out ahead of time.

Written like the tech writer I am, no? Except the readers of my manuals don’t get the benefit of humor. Although sometimes, I’m tempted to write something like:

1. Enter your sort parameters.


2. Separate each entry with a comma. Example: Albino Midgets, Address, Zip Code
   
   
3. Click OK.
   
   

Knitting right off the needles seldom looks good enough for public viewing. So it has to be blocked. Read Blocking for Blockheads in the sidebar. That’ll do ya until Part II.

More Entries, Less Dead Air
Seeing as how I’m on vacation this week, I’ll be working on a couple of bloggish projects. One will be this series. The other, my bloggiversary spectacular.

I was very impressed with the quality of the responses to this week’s Open Mic topic. It’s good to get serious once in a while and truly think things over. So if you have a topic you’d like to see, give me a shout. My e-mail address is in my profile but for those too lazy to click, it’s knitz@optonline.net. If you submit a topic, please put TOPIC in your subject so that I can filter it into a folder.

I’m posting this today because tomorrow is our annual family barbecue extravaganza. So being lazy this morning, drinking coffee and writing this, I need to get off my can and get to the supermarket with Corinne. Two weeks of intensive manual writing now means I can float in the pool.

I’ll leave you with one picture. I’m not one for gratuitous kute kitty pictures but I swear, Buster is such a bizarre animal, this one’s worth putting up.

This is Buster’s house. An empty shrink-wrap that once contained water bottles. He truly believes he is invisible in his Fortress of Solitude. All the better to attack Buddy or Boo (Cleo doesn’t come downstairs, so he gets her where she lives, on my bed).

So don’t be buying those expensive kitty kondos. Shrink-wrap works just as well. And it’s not at all rare and handy.

Best Quote I Heard All Day
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals ... except the weasel.--Homer Simpson

Well, there are times when I'd like to weasel out of folding laundry, changing the cat litter, shaving my legs and pits, cleaning the toilet, and picking up hairballs.

I never weasel out of finishing work. After all, why knit all those pieces and leave 'em lying around? Besides, I find finishing to be a completely different activity and just as enjoyable as knitting the whole thing.

Call me masochistic. But at one time, I did finishing professionally for all of those who couldn't be bothered. Bought my babies clothes, toys, and other good stuff. So to me, finishing is the finer moment of knitting, in many ways.

Here's the Campanula, with front/neck band done and one sleeve set in. I'm not rushing it. That's death to finishing.

The true test of good finishing is this: The garment should look as neat on the wrong side as it does on the right side. That goes for most needlework, actually.

My answer to last week's topic: I would embroider. I spent a lot of years doing embroidery at the same time I honed my knitting skills. I love doing it and haven't done any in a long time. So maybe that's why I like finishing.

Open Mic Thursday
OK, once again I'm cheating and in fact writing this Tuesday night. Tomorrow, I'm mucho busy so I gotta grab the time when I can.

Joe is running a Blog Contest to benefit Year Up, a Philadelphia educational charity that supports inner-city kids. Blogs are powerful fundraising tools.

So this week's topic is:

There's been a lot of talk about readers donating money to bloggers who are asking for financial help. How do you feel about it?

I know that I never have and never will ask for a cent from my readers, not for broadband, not for anything personal, other than a charity, as Joe has done. However, each blogger has their own story, I suppose. Let's not turn this into a flame-o-rama, but discuss it intelligently. Like adults. Be forewarned, I won't tolerate any namecalling. I believe it's a topic that bears some consideration.

Fibrefest 2007
Ya know how hard it is for me to type "fibre"? Anyway, in keeping with my flogging the public domain for my friends, here's an event to consider.

Ted Myatt, aka Knitterguy, has been organizing Fibrefest 2007, to be held September 28-30 in Wiarton, Ontario. You can get all the details here.

Gang, this is a weekend retreat that is very, very reasonably priced, and it looks to be a great time with some very interesting fiber peeps. Knitters, spinners, weavers, crocheters, whatever you do, this will be an ecumenical get-together and an opportunity for us Amurricans to traipse over the border and meet our Canadian friends.

That is, of course, if our dipshit State Department doesn't continue to fuck up the passport situation. I have visions of being stuck at the Canadian border coming back. Forever. I'll be keeping an eye on the situation but as of now, I plan to go.

Because if Ted's running it, it will definitely be a rare and handy event.

Ed. note: Yeah, I'm cheating again and publishing this in advance of Thursday. I need my beauty sleep.

Best Quote I Heard All Day

The Ninety-Ninety Rule of Project Schedules: The first ninety percent of the task takes ninety percent of the time, and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent--Arthur Bloch

This weekend was exceptionally gorgeous. Much time spent on the deck, in a bathing suit, working on the Campanula's final piece, the second sleeve.

Those two pieces hanging over the railing are dry. I just stuck them there for lack of a better place.

Besides, it made a close-up easier.

The Other Ninety Percent

So now I've finished all the pieces to the Campanula cardigan and now you can see why you must make the effort to block your work.

To the right is an unblocked sleeve, to the left, a blocked front. Don't need to say anything else. As I write this, the shoulder seams are done and I'm about halfway done picking up the front/neckband edging, 337 stitches. The sleeves always go in last, unless it's a raglan, because I don't need the extra weight as I work the band.

Knitting Daily

Don't know if any of you have tapped into this, but Interweave has just started a new bloglike creation, with access to free patterns, many of which were freebies for subscribers via their website or from older issues, I think. Sandi Wiseheart writes it, and although it's certainly a running ad for IK subs, it has a lot of good stuff. Nicely designed web site, too.

The Barbara Walker Chart Project

I've completed several of these transposed chart and now the question is, how am I going to archive them so they will be easily catalogued and downloaded? I have several options, one of which is to put links to them on their own blog, which I may do. The original files will be on my FTP area, which means that you will be able to download the original file. If I just put the chart right on the blog, the size would be too small.

My hosting service offers free MySQL, which is a database, for those who don't know. However, as these charts will be saved as .png files, I'm not yet sure whether I want to go the database route.

It amazes me that some people hate charts. For one thing, they allow magazines to publish much more complex designs than they could if the directions were written out. Plus, they decrease the margin of error enormously. If you look at a 40-row lace pattern written out against its charted version, it's not hard to understand why. And if you train your eye to read them, you'll find that they ultimately make your work much easier.

My own sainted mother fought against learning how to read charts for years. And finally, several years ago, she gave in. Now she hates working without them because she is very visually oriented. So if a woman who's going to be 84 in two months can use charts, what's your excuse?

Upcoming Events

One of the best things about a Sunday morning is often a phone call from Ted. We talk about once a month or so and although I'm not much for chatting on the phone, damn! Ted and I can talk for hours. Just to keep you in the loop, if you read Ted's blog, you'll know he's planning a knitters retreat the last weekend of September. I am going. I'll make the drive from NJ to Canada, absolutely. Because this will be worthwhile.

And then there's Rhinebeck, aka NYS Sheep & Wool Festival. This year, it's October 20-21. I'll be there too, along with a bunch of Wolvies. I can't imagine what I could possibly buy, having taken a keen look at my fiber stash this morning. I'm still feeding from stuff I bought at Rhinebeck two years ago.

However, it's a ways off until the autumn. So I'll continue my rare and handy swimming, and start on a shawl for daughter Jenn. "Because, Moooommmm, you made Corinne a shawl for her wedding last year, what about ME?" No, Jenn's not getting married. But ya gotta make your kids happy. So that's next.