I've recently finished knitting a cardigan, which is extremely pretty. Cardigans have, historically, been a problem for topographical reasons. They often gap open in a terribly unflattering way, which is vexing and lowering to the spirit. In designing my own personal cardigan, I resolved that none of that nonsense would be allowed to go down.

I did a few things to avoid gappage:

1. Included two inches of ease in the final product, to minimize pulling.
   
2. Used horizontal rather than vertical buttonholes.
   
3. Used shaping at all the topographical high-points in my landscape.
   
4. Placed a button at the widest point of my bust, the place most likely to gap.
   
5. Reinforced the button-bands by sewing on grosgrain-ribbon facings.

It is of this last item that I want to talk about today, mainly because that's the thing that I took pictures of. If you'd like to learn how to add ribbon facings to cardigan button-bands, sweater necklines, wavy hems or any other garment element that could use some stiffening-up, ( click through here. )

It's actually crocheting. EVEN WORSE.

I distinctly remember some serious bitching about this afghan appearing on the blog, but as it looks like I didn't tag it as "knitting," it is nowhere to be found. Ah, well. We shall persevere.

So, I don't really like to crochet. I mean, it's okay, but it's not my thing. And I don't really like most acrylic yarns, because they catch on my raggedy chewed nails and they squeak and aren't very giving, so the tactile experience is therefore unpleasant. Finally, I absolutely hate doing counted cross-stitch, because I am crap at keeping track of the color and position of a dot in two dimensions and hobbies should be fun, not hair-pullingly-frustrating.

( Behold, therefore, my nemesis. )

But mine is the last word, for I have finished it and can now gift it to my MIL for Christmas, thus getting it out of my sight. Hah!

Knitting is a hobby. It is a time-consuming leisure activity enjoyed by a minority of individuals and temporarily experiencing a popular vogue. In the First World, one could easily conceive of knitting as a luxury.

Now, I like knitting. Most of my free spending money probably goes into yarn, needles, storage, paraphenalia, pattern books and magazine subscriptions. A goodly portion of my free time is likewise devoted to pulling loops of string through other loops of string using two sticks, in the eventual hope of creating a garment that is twice as hard to maintain as anything purchased from a store and half as flattering.

Despite this devotion, I recognize that what I'm doing is a hobby. I do not particularly believe that we need a National Knitting Day. I've never even considered smuggling circular needles onto an airplane in my underwire. I don't call non-knitters "muggles," nor do I consider public knitting "freaking the mundanes." I don't believe that theaters ought to offer special, well-lighted seating for knitters, and in fact I think people who knit during movies in theaters are wasting their money in both directions. I don't believe that I have the right to knit whenever and wherever I want, and I don't think it's funny when people joke about stabbing non-knitters with their DPNs for asking irritating questions.

And I most especially, definitely, totally and utterly do not understand paying $53 for 81 yards of yarn. In case you were wondering, that's enough yarn to make you a very soft skinny cashmere headband. Obviously, you buy the yarn your budget lets you afford, but really.

The problem exemplified by $53 skeins of cashmere yarn is that there seems to be a school of thought among knitters that one should not consider the price of yarn when planning a project. Guided by the 0.1% of knitters who are able to do their knitting professionally, we're urged to find the "perfect" yarn for our projects, to "collect" yarn and fill whole rooms with wool. Our artistic muse should move us, without regard for budget, storage or what on earth we're going to do with the thing when we take it home. There's even an acronym, SABLE: Stash Aquisition Beyond Life Expectancy. Now, this may not seem like a big deal (though it gives me a chill), but when you consider that sock yarns (very popular aquisitions) run to $20 a skein, and then you imagine people who have whole closets of just sock yarn... well, it can get a little crazy. We're talking the potential for tens of thousands of dollars of yarn, buying-a-whole-car-with-it amounts of yarn, sitting around in closets. People write about hiding their stash from their spouses and exchange tips for putting yarn in suitcases, under the bed or even (encased in plastic bags, natch) behind the plastic moulding on the side of the bathtub. And the standard response to a person's report that their husband or wife is unhappy with the size of their stash? "Divorce 'em, keep the yarn!"

In any other circumstance, this kind of ridiculous consumptive hoarding would be considered grounds for psychiatric treatment, but in the knitting community, it is applauded. Look how spunky we are! We embrace our total obsession totally and allow it to dominate our lives! This is healthy and cheeky, not weird or creepy! People compete for stash size, and knitting "from the stash" instead of buying fresh is considered an impressive achievement in self-control.

Maybe all hobbies have a subculture like this, and maybe knitting's is just one of the more vocal. But even a well-behaved, non-SABLE knitter can burn through money like nobody's business. Take famous knitblogger and author Wendy Johnson. Wendy is renowned for her knitting speed and consistency; nothing but illness or spinning keeps her from putting in knitting time each day. Wendy is able to design and knit a pair of socks in approximately four days from start to finish. That's 91 pairs of socks a year (of course, she does knit other things, but let's assume this is a good representation of her rate). At one skein of sock yarn per pair, and $20 per skein, that adds up to nearly $2,000 a year of sock yarn consumed. Now, obviously not many knitters are that persistently productive. And I don't mean to pick on Wendy, whose blog I read with great enjoyment. Knitting is a large part of her life, she's published knitting books and patterns; in many ways, she is a professional knitter. And even if that weren't the case, a person is allowed to spend money on their hobbies.

My point is that knitting is an expensive hobby by default, and can easily grow even more expensive due to the hyper-consumerist culture in which it is situated, which glorifies the aquisition of yarn to the point where "stash expansion" (otherwise known as SEX)can be more important than actually knitting.

So what does this have to do with me? Well, I can't exactly afford to buy new yarn every few months; I am budgetarily constrained to virtue. Even if I could, sitting down and doing the math like this has made vicerally clear that, unlike kayaking or board games, knitting is a consuming hobby. I buy stuff, use it up and then my end products sit around taking up space. I've been uncomfortable with that for a while (who needs 10 hats?), and as my skill and speed have increased, my discomfort has grown. I'm good enough at knitting now that I can knit a sweater in two weeks (Wedgewood, pictures forthcoming). Sweaters use a lot of yarn, and I live in a hot climate. Are my knitting habits really making the best use of my money, not to mention planetary resources? As far as I can see, I'm going to be knitting for a long time, and I'd like to reduce the financial and environmental impact of my hobby.

To that end, I've made a few decisions.
From June 2008 to June 2009, I will:

1. Knit only my own designs. This will make my knitting progress much slower, since I'll have to create the designs first, decreasing my yarn consumption and cash expenditure over time.
   
2. Write up and sell or give away the patterns I write, for the good of my household finances and because I think it's fun.
   
3. Research and pursue local sources for yarn, instead of working with stuff shipped from Peru.
   
4. Research and pursue environmentally friendly fibers.
   
5. Buy only yarns that are sport-weight or lighter, because it takes longer to finish an object knit in thin yarns (less yarn used, less money spent-- the two-week sweater was in heavier yarn).
   
6. Buy yarn only with a specific project in mind.
   
7. Give away or frog finished objects that I won't use.
   
8. Buy no new knitting books; used bookstore knitting books are acceptable.
   
9. Whenever possible, knit from stash.

Please note that I'm pretty sure, with the exception of the environmental impact elements and the book clause, these criteria fit Wendy Johnson's knitting habits pretty darn well. When you knit a lot, this sort of strategy is just practical. What I'm hoping to gain here is not so much the glow of extraordinary virtue as a greater tendency to mindfulness in my knitting consumption. We'll see how it goes.

Other ideas for reducing the monetary and environmental impact of my knitting while keeping the fun always welcome.

Knitpicks Bare Superwash Merino Yarn is 75% merino wool, 25% nylon, 462 yards/100 grams for $5.99.

Knitpicks Bare Sock Yarn Dye Blank is 75% merino wool, 25% nylon, 462 yards/100 grams for $11.99.

The only difference? The Sock Yarn Dye Blank has been held double and machine-knitted into a rectangle, so that people can dye it, unwind it, and knit two idential stripey or otherwise patterned socks with it.

To put this in perspective-- knitters are happily paying $6 more than they need to for the privilege of avoiding having to knit 231 yards of yarn (about a hat's worth) on size 6 needles. The horror.

And here I thought knitters actually liked knitting.

Following the instructions from Strobist, Mike and I built a lightbox to take photos of stuff! It is very high tech, as you can see:


And then we tried it out on my latest knitting project, a cardigan! Here you have the yarn, Main Line, worsted weight. The color is called "Wedgewood" and is discontinued.


The swatch, in all its glory:


( The cardigan, so far: )

Additional work is clearly needed.

Three projects, nine photos, a lot of shop talk.

Predictably Irrational

First, a baby blanket to celebrate the birth of a new book! This was a commission from a friend to give as a gift to the author of Predictably Irrational, a new social psychology book that just came out this spring. The colors are designed to match the colors of the book’s U.S. cover and the colors of the mock 'birth announcement' the author sent out when the book was published.

( Predictably Irrational Baby Blanket )

Hemlock Ring Blanket

Everybody and their uncle has knit the Hemlock Ring Blanket already, but who am I to argue with everybody? It's a fun, quick project. I knit my Hemlock Ring on size 8 and 9 needles with aran weight rather than bulky weight yarn, and it was still quick and easy to do. This blanket will go to tanac if she still wants it.

( Hemlock Ring Blanket )

Atlantis

The story of Atlantis was for a time very sad, but it has a happy ending.

I began knitting Atlantis in the summer of 2005. It was my first lace project, a self-designed wrap alternating a leafy pattern with feather-and-fan sections, using Knitpicks Shimmer (alpaca and silk) in the grape hyacinth colorway. It was very hot in Minnesota (believe it or not) and there was no air conditioning. My roommate went to bed early, so I had to turn off the lamps while it was still too hot to sleep. I knit doggedly on too-blunt size 8 needles in the heat and humidity and the dark, by the light of the House episodes I had downloaded onto my computer to distract myself from missing Mike (then my fiance), who had a job in Nebraska. It sucked.

( Atlantis- The Saga Continues )

Tonight I finished a big project! While it's drying, I thought I'd post some in-progress pictures and teasers, because I'm like that. Mainly about the dyeing process.

( Mystery Project Dyeing! )

Tonight I bind off on the Pi Shawl O'Doom!!!

It has been a harrowing journey of beads, little needles and ever-increasing stitch counts, ending with the challenge of finding a sufficiently stretchy bind off for faggot-lace.

Well, I say "ending," but the greatest challenges remain:

1) Constructing the custom color to dye the shawl (currently white with green beads, tres ugly). I want a kind of bluish grey weathered wood color.

2) Blocking a large circle. Imma gonna need more pins.

And then, if it all turns out alright, I might write up the pattern and make it available. We'll see.

Pictures of the bound-off "yarn barf" that is unblocked lace will appear tonight, if only for my sake.

The sun is shining.

The apartment is (relatively) clean.

There are hardboiled eggs in the fridge.

I've just finished two big professional projects, one of which is something I've been working on for nearly a year (and one of which was a weekend whim, but so what?). I've also tied off a few knitting projects (see one pictured below).

One of my good friends from college is arriving for a visit in a few hours.

I'm going to my first sci-fi convention (Stellarcon) tomorrow.

Life is very good.

It was on clearance, and the name of the color was Wedgewood, and I need more cardigans anyway, so I now have enough of Knitpicks' Main Line (75% cotton, 25% merino wool) for a sweater.

And now I'm having the weirdest dilemma. I can't decide whether to design the cardigan myself (for fame! for glory! for challenge and skill!) or to use a pattern because I AM a grad student and my brain is supposed to be doing other things and the entire idea of dealing with set-in sleeves on my own makes me tremble and not in the good way.

It's not so much that the dilemma is weird as that I've been on the horns of it for something like a month now, unable to decide one way or another, and I'm not normally indecisive. It's annoying.

Of course, it doesn't help that I'm trapped knitting the self-designed beaded hell of a Pi Shawl's rows after the final increase section. (530 or so stitches per row. Bleah!) The beads keep me from being brainless about it, too. But the pattern is so beautiful I can hardly bring myself to care, except when I become convinced that the beads were a horrible mistake and I should take a plyers and crush them all off the yarn. It's distressingly similar to working on my master's proposal-- I alternate between dizzying egotistical euphoria and disgust, all the time with the knowledge that there's no way to evaluate whether my ideas are any good until the project is done and I can see the whole thing in one piece.

I think the most fun thing, for me as a very small-time knitting pattern designer, is getting to see other people knit up my patterns in really, really, really nice yarns. I get a definite kick out of seeing my stuff, which I worked using cheap merino, made out of somebody else's really amazing alpaca, or silk blend, or hand-painted this-or-that.

Which is not to say I don't have really nice yarn... I'm just somewhat afraid to knit with it. And yes, we are aware that this is silly.

The parts of putting knitting patterns available online that suck are: hearing people bitch about them, seeing people mess up in knitting them, and worrying about ruining somebody's fun and relaxing hobby by having accidentally written some instruction wrong. The Spiral Hat appears to be specially vulnerable to screw-uppery (mine and others'), and it seems nobody on earth can get my gauge for From Russia With Love. I'm definitely gonna try to recruit a test knitter for the next pattern I put out.

Crafting update: Still cross-stitching. HATE.

Thus endeth the Random Knitting Post.

To be updated whenever I feel like it.

Mainly for my own reference, Christmas lists, other shopping sprees, and for lusting over the rest of the year. Despite common knowledge and psychological research on materialism, I find it somewhat comforting to have a list of gorgeous, quirky, deliciously wonderful things to desire.


( Read on for BPAL, Villainess, Sock Dreams, jewelry, yarn, clothing and other things. )

( In general, my preferences: )

Of unreinforced steeks. For you non-knitters out there, unreinforced steeks means I cut the knitting without putting in any sewing or lines of crochet to stabilize the cut edge. The whole thing could unravel at any moment.

The plan today is to get some work done on my presentation for Tuesday (ack) and then move on to the main event, finishing what I have been calling my Norwegian sweater. Yes, I have FINALLY finished the second sleeve, and now it is time to turn it into what it is meant to be: a cardigan. I need to:

• Tack down three folded edges.
  
• Sew the shoulder seams shut.
  
• CUT THE KNITTING down the middle. (also known as steeks)
  
• Sew the button bands and the collar band.
  
• CUT THE KNITTING at the sides to make armholes. (more steeks)
  
• Attach the sleeves.
  
• Have a stiff celebratory drink.
  
• Avoid the knitting until I sober up.
  
• Sew down the button bands and sleeve facings.
  
• Weave-in ends and finish the ends of the button bands, etc.
  
• Steam all the seams and bands and all.
  
• See if it fits.

Whee!

I have three knitting patterns currently available for free on the internet! If you knit, you may be interested by this.

( They are: )

For interest, From Russia With Love was the design turned down by Knitty.

Below, pictures of the Swallowtail Shawl as promised, as well as Three More Hats. Because I have a serious hat problem. By the way, if you are on Ravelry, I'm 'dragonpaws' there too, and you can find pictures of all my projects with a lot more knitterly details and info.

( Swallowtail! So pretty! )
( Spiral Hat )
( Alfabeto Beret )
( Curmugeonly Hat )

It took me two and a half hours to get from my office to my apartment today. Two and a half hours to cover a distance of three miles. But it was so fun!

Well, part of it was fun. I got to use my adorable clear half-bubble umbrella, because it was pouring buckets. That was fun. And I got to have a small Starbucks hot chocolate. That was fun. But then...

I missed my bus! So I walked in the rain, and this was somewhat fun as well.

And then I stopped by a used bookstore that just "happened" to be on my route home. I checked the crafting section for knitting books, as one does, and I found:

Arctic Lace ($12)
Knitting in the Old Way, expanded edition ($16 for hardcover!)
Orenburg Lace Shawls ($11)
Two Stephanie Pearl McPhee "knitting philosophy" books ($6 each)

I was so excited! I ended up just buying Knitting In the Old Way and one of the McPhee books, because I simply don't knit enough lace to justify the Orenburg Shawls book (plus, it's mostly history anyway) and the Arctic Lace is mostly an Ode To Qiviut (the world's warmest, softest, yummiest natural fiber, made from musk ox undercoat). But I'm SO THRILLED to have a copy of KitOW, becuase it's a wonderful reference book with all sorts of information about designing sweaters (sleeve types, neckline types) along with ethnic sweater motifs that's just perfect for what I've been wanting to do-- start designing my own sweaters! Plus, it's just a great book, it does a wonderful job of situating knitting historically, it's what people cite when they want to talk about the history of knitting, and it's just generally a volume I'm really happy to own. It's especially fun to have found it randomly second-hand in a used bookstore while I was hiding from the rain!

(I may have to go back and get the Orenburg lace book, though. I mean, if I ever DO decide to torture myself with 1 mm needles and cobweb-weight yarn to make a traditional Orenburg shawl, I'll be kicking myself to not have those motifs available to me. And it was a cool book.)

I plan to give the McPhee to my mom or to some other beginner, as it's got good support for "intermediate beginner" level knitters (qualities of different fibers, importance of swatching, etc). Though I'm already getting pissed off at it-- she talks about the pros and cons of straight vs. circular needles but never mentions that straight needles strain the wrists? She mentions casein needles "taste" bad, but not that they're so flexible when they've warmed in the hands that some arthritis group (I forget which one, it's been a while) recommends them to arthritic knitters? I mean, come ON.

And then I take several deep breaths and remind myself that arguing with the knitting book is a sign of insanity, and I put it down and show Mike my AMAZING NEW KNITTING REFERENCE BOOK YEY!!! (He's being very kind about the whole thing.)

And then, in the other used bookstore that I hid in when the rain was so bad that I was soaked to the WAIST while using my umbrella, I got a copy of Good Omens (yayness!) and Charlie All Night, one of the only Jennifer Cruisie books I haven't read! Somebody had actually sold them a whole stack: Welcome to Temptation (with a famous sex scene used by at least one person to teach how to write good sex), What the Lady Wants and Strange Bedpersons (my first Cruisie and one I absolutely love). Makes me wonder, in both the knitting books and in this case, who would do this? What were they thinking? Did the book owner suddenly die, or move? Especially with the knitting books, I imagine some relative is the one who sold them off. Any knitter, when forced to give away her books, would presumably give or sell them to knitting friends.

I should have bought Strange Bedpersons! I should have! Dang me!!!

Clearly tomorrow, if I'm not too incredibly tired from seeing the new Harry Potter movie tonight, I need to go back to the used bookstores.

And THEN, back to my walking home, I missed the bus AGAIN in the rain (was on the wrong side of the street), but then I caught it 20 minutes later, got home and had a hamburger. And yes, it did rain the whole time, in varying degrees, and it is still disgustingly humid.

But man... best two and a half hour trip home ever!

And yes. My route home passes TWO used bookstores. Directly. No faking or finagling or going a block over (though naturally, I would). You may envy me.

You know what's really mindblowing? Read a few hundred entries of fatshionista and then go to a regular "fashion" website.  I kept thinking shit somebody has to have vertically stretched those "skinny" photos!  They just look freakishly weird and unnatural to me, all of a sudden-- not unhealthy-skinny, necessarily, just heavily, heavily photoshopped.  The photographs make the models seem disproportionate- too tall, limbs too long, bodies too thin.

That was fun.  :)

In related news, I am very close to deciding that knit tops are the devil, as they seem to cling to my every bulge and tent over every curve in rather unflattering ways.  Unfortunate, since I am a knitter.

There I was. Randomly surfing the internet, care-free and happy, procrastinating doing any valuable work, as usual. When suddenly, it struck me:

I want to make a square Shetland-lace shawl. Like this one.

Why? Why has this desire suddenly lodged itself in my brain with the force of an obsession? Was I looking at shetland lace? No... Do I LIKE knitting lace? No... Do I wear shawls? No! Do I need more knitting projects?

Well, let's see, shall we:

The Norwegian Sweater, where I am stalled until I figure out a simpler way to do the bloody increases on the arms, because at the moment it is driving me mad.
The Entrelac Scarf, which is my TV knitting.
The Koigu KPPPM socks, which were my TV knitting but which will now become my commute knitting, as they are more portable.
The Log Cabin blanket, which is a 'using up scraps' sort of project and thus is perpetually in progress.
Learning to spin: I bought a hand-spindle and some dark green roving last weekend. (Spinning is okay, but so far it just doesn't have the intrinsic, self-contained fascination that knitting holds for me. Maybe I need cooler roving, or a specific project in mind, or something. I mainly wanted to try it so I could learn more about the structure of yarn, and to make awesomely weird bulky yarns to knit into cute hats, mittens, scarves and armwarmers for fun. Perhaps I need something sparkly to add in...)

Looking at things objectively, it appears that I really shouldn't start a new project. It's not like I don't like what I'm currently working on-- the Koigu socks are fun, the Entrelac Scarf is really fun (I love the yarn) and the log cabin blanket is a blast. I don't lack for amusement. I have a sufficient number of ongoing projects. (That's not counting two things on the frogging pile due to lack of interest, both of which are... wait for it... lace! Maybe there's a message here.) And yet...

I want to knit a square shawl! With a pretty central motif and borders and miles of edging! And invisible cast-ons and no cast-off edge! That's all warm and big and pretty and will sit in my lap like a big crumpled pile of crumpled stuff while I knit on it for hours! Wahhh!!!

Maybe next month, brain. Maybe. That and the next cardigan with cables that you want to make, and the knitted lace overdress that would be SO AWFUL for your body type, and the fair isle kneesocks, and the black cabled socks for dad, and... and...

Oh, and I still need to add elastic to the top of my gray tweed cabled kneesocks so they stay up, and put a lining in my knitted linen purse.

Man. I LIKE crafting, but holey moley. My starts and my ends need to match up more.

(The mood icon is "annoyed" tagged with lustful, because strangely enough lj doesn't have an icon for "exasperated at the fickleness of my crafting muse whilst simultaneously feeling its inexorable and seductive pull." Given the preponderance of crafters on lj, this seems like a significant oversight.)

Knitting socks is so incredibly addictive. In almost exactly two weeks I'll have knit an entire pair of socks (this'll be my third pair ever), and I'm already casting about (ha, ha, I said 'casting') for a pattern for the next pair. I hated doing socks the first time around- ribbing gave me very bad repetitive stress injury in my wrists. Now I just avoid doing socks that require purling- which means lace patterns! Woo! My current socks are Knitty's Broadripple in a very bright fuschia colorway (Iris Garden, to be exact, though it has peach bits the picture misses and the fuschia is more intense) of Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sport, for my mother's birthday (which is tomorrow!). I think next time I'm gonna try the figure-eight cast on and do 'em toe-up, since I don't know how much sock yarn I really have.

And yes, there will be pictures of the finished socks. I love them too much for it to be otherwise. Which reminds me... I need to find some cardboard and cut out 'foot shapes' so I can block the socks and flatten out the lace pattern.

Also, sadly, I think the cuff of the first sock is too tight- I'm going to have to pick out all the stitches around the top and re-do them using the sewn bind off. Which will be tedious like woah, but worth it.

Finally, it looks like I'm going to have a lot of the Lorna's left... it's such nice (and expensive) yarn I think I'll save it and, once I acquire some black sock yarn, I'll use the Lorna's Laces for accents on toe, heel, and top of cuff. It'll be deeply snazzy.

(okay, one last addition. Speaking of deeply snazzy, if someone were to, say, accidentally click on the internet and order two skeins of Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sport in Jungle Stripe and send them to me I would die of bliss. Those would be some utterly kicking socks. I might even have to learn entrelac just to take full advantage of the awesomeness of those colors.

ETA: Especially since it's On Sale at this website. Whimper. I need to stop surfing the net.)