Lateral Movement

This is what happens when you don't listen to that inner voice when it tells you that the tie-front sweater you're making is almost certainly going to be too small for you, and that the line of yarn-overs running down the back are going to start ridiculously high on your shoulders. This is what happens when you say, "no way is it going to look like the one in the picture", but you forge ahead anyway. You get to take the whole thing out up to the arms, up past the back pattern, and start over. This was one of my temporarily cursed sweaters, the batch that could not be worked until Ingenue was finished.

The lumpiness is due to the kinked yarn. It'll even out in the wash. I know this, because I had to redo the arm as well, and it flattened out beautifully after a good soak.

Did I finish Ingenue? Yes, I sure did, and a couple of days before the deadline, too. More details on that coming soon.

half a fortnight til freedom

One week left of winter.

I don't have an easy time of it in the winter months. I have a hard time driving after dusk, so I'm reliant on other people to get me from one place to another pretty much from the time I get home from work until the next morning. I have both starbursts and a marked loss of contrast and depth of field in the dark, so every streetlight is like the bloom of a firework, and every change in tone on the sidewalk looks like either an enormous drop-off or a huge bump. I can't drive, can't even really walk down the street without frequently stepping over imagined obstacles or tripping over real ones. In essence, I spend several months of the year trapped in my house after dark. It's a side effect of the LASIK surgery I had a decade ago, and one that I knew I was at a high risk of experiencing. Don't get me wrong, here. I wouldn't trade my all-around good vision for the ability to see better after dark. It's just that after a few months of racing the sun to make it home every weeknight, I start to get more than a little discouraged by it. I get tired of being trapped.

Then there are all of the unhappy things going on around me this year. Daisy and Falstaff are splitting up, we're down to less than a handful of people in my department at work, famine and pestilence are sweeping the land, and I have a bitch of a cold. I've been coughing nonstop for almost two weeks. I'm getting through it now, as I get through it every year, by hunkering down and waiting for the end of March, for the vernal equinox, which I consider to be the start of my new year.

One more week.

What does that have to do with Ol' Blue here?


When we last saw Ol' Blue, I was going to knit the second sleeve and be done with it. I did that, and then I didn't like how the sleeves and the lower hem looked. They were too long, and they looked flimsy when compared to the upper part of the sweater. I decided to turn both sleeves and the hem up and stitch them into place, putting the patterned sections on the inside of the work. Worked great for the sleeves, making them weighty and just the right length.

It wasn't such a good match for the hem, but I thought I'd give it a chance anyway. I wore it with the hem sewn up for most of a day. Toward the end of the afternoon, after a day of tugging the bulky lower edge of the sweater down approximately two hundred times, I decided that the best thing to do would be to snip the sewn thread and let the patterned section down again. I grabbed my desk scissors and snipped the running thread. When it didn't pull the hem free as easily as I'd expected, I found another piece of the thread and snipped that as well. Then, I pulled. Hard.


It's exactly what you're thinking. I hadn't snipped the running hem thread. I'd cut three stitches on the body of the sweater, then pulled an additional three stitches free, and then pulled the working thread so tight that I'd ruched the entire front of the sweater.

At work, with no knitting or sewing supplies handy, I was forced to use paper clips as makeshift stitch holders. I walked around for the rest of the day with office supplies dangling at my waist.

Later that night, when I took pictures of what I'd done, I noticed that there was some weird pooling at the bottom of the sweater. "Good thing I cut the hem!" I thought. "Now I have a good reason to rip back to the point above the pooling and start over."


I did just that, finishing the sweater for the second time a few days later. The hem's shorter, and it's only one layer thick. Why is there still no finished object post about it? Oh, funny story.

My second attempt looks as bad as the first, maybe worse. It's too narrow, and too insubstantial for the heavier, roomy top. It looks, in a word, stupid. I've been working on this sweater for too long, almost five months now, to let the finished product look stupid. I threw it into a bag and refused to look at it for a few weeks.

Since then, I've started several projects that have stalled, failed, or been lovingly chewed up by my dog. Something's gone wrong, crazily wrong, with every other knitting I've touched since stopping work on that one sweater. My gauge changes by an entire stitch per inch between swatch and project, with the swatch being looser, and this disparity does not become apparent until after the finished sweater is washed and blocked, then discovered to be too small to be wearable by even the slenderest of my friends. Winston figures out how to open a locked chest to get to Big Stripey. My entire collection of size 8 needles disappears. It's as though Ol' Blue is cursing my knitting. I am the Ancient Mariner and it is my albatross.

I'm making it my mission to finish it during the winter. This winter. I will break its cursed hold on my knitting. One more week.

Ninja Training

Hello, readers! It's been a while, mostly because I rarely have time to update my blog, due to my taking on the work of all of my laid-off comrades. This makes me sad, both because I miss my friends and fear for my own job, and because I have so many stories to tell.

Like, for example, my story about how I've always wanted to be a bad-ass ninja. I've never mentioned it before? Curious, as it's been my motivation during every one of my periodic fitness crusades. Not that I think it'd ever happen, but if corporate terrorists decided to seize control of Bishop Ranch 15, Building A, I want to know that I'd be able to subdue at least a couple of them, rappel down the building and run to the police station down the street. And maybe win a knife fight all Steven Seagal-style, with the twisty-wrist hand-wavy thing he does. Never mind that we don't have knives in any of our kitchens anymore because departing employees have taken them home, so we have to serve birthday cakes and pies with plastic utensils. Never mind that Seagal looks, well, let's not mince words here, more than kinda sissy when he's pretending to be in a knife fight. And if you're wondering why terrorists would want to overtake a little loan servicing shop in San Ramon, or how I'd be able to fend them off with a spork, you're missing the point. Bad-ass ninja. That's the point.

To that end, Accountant Boy and I took a judo class about ten years ago. I wasn't very good at it, because I could never learn how to do the most basic fall properly. If you watch professional wrestling, you know the fall I'm talking about. It looks like you're falling flat on your back, but your arms take most of the energy out of the landing, slapping the ground just before the rest of your body. I couldn't ever get that right, even after a hundred tries. I smacked the back of my head on that mat enough times to finally just give up.

I started going to the gym not too long after that, and while I occasionally got to the point where I felt like a bad-ass, I gave up my dream of being a bad-ass ninja. Sure, I was strong enough, but as soon as someone tripped me or knocked me off balance, I'd be done for.


Lately, though, I've started to wonder if the ninja agility is maybe in there, waiting to come out. A few months ago, Winston swept my feet out from under me while he was sprinting through the house. I flew into the air, suspended completely horizontally above my foyer. Somehow, I managed to land almost flat, forearms forming a triangle that kept my face from the hardwood, my palms and the tops of my feet taking most of the force. I wish I'd been able to see what I did, because I'm certain that it looked awesome, like something a gymnast would do. Winston thought it was cool, at least. He congratulated me by licking the top of my head.

And, a few weeks ago, it happened again. Winston and Kaylee, Daisy's dog, were running around the cul-de-sac, and I made the mistake of calling Winston and then turning my back on him. He ran at full speed into the back of my knees and swept me up like the flap on a pet door. As I found myself up in the air over my neighbor's sidewalk, I thought to myself, "Huh. This is how people die. This is how I'm going to die. I'm going to crack my skull on Barb's sidewalk. Un-be-f$%king-lievable."

And then, as if by magic, I was on the ground, flat on my back, but not dead. I lifted my head up slightly to look through my feet at Daisy and our dogs, all now across the street in my yard.

"Dude! What are you doing on the ground?"

"I...Winston ran into my legs...and..."

"Did you hit your head? Oh my God, are you O.K.???"

By this time, I was walking across the street and dusting myself off. "Yeah, I guess...yeah. I'm O.K. My hands hurt, and I landed a little hard on my hip, but I didn't hit my head. I didn't hit my head."

"Are you sure you didn't hit your head? You seem a little off..."

"I didn't hit my head because I did a bad-ass Judo fall! I did it! I'm like a bad-ass ninja! My hands kinda hurt now, though..."

What's up with my knitting, you ask?

I got this far on Katje, and then Winston got into the yarn.


I did a little more work on Big Stripey, and then Winston got into the yarn.


I rolled these two skeins up into big balls and started to swatch them, and then Winston...you get the picture.


To be far to the poor guy, it is pretty hard to resist a big ball of string, especially when it's so close in texture to your favorite fleece toy. He's a young dog, with a lot of curiosity and boundless energy. If he eats my yarn and repeatedly tosses me into the air as though I were a particularly untalented matador, who's fault is that?


"Blunder? Are you reflecting on your flaws? Are you sorry for running down the Woman? Twice?"

"Yeah. I'm the saddest dog in the whole wide world."

"And for repeatedly trying to eat her handicrafts?"

"Yeah, so sad and sorry. I'm just gonna stare out the window and sigh for a while."

"And for urinating on the garage floor instead of in my cat box?"

"I'm really, really sorry for...hey, wait a second. I didn't do that last one!"

"J'accuse!"

By the way, Mascorro, if you're reading this, drop me a line! I've been wondering what you've been up to for the last few years.

get no satisfaction

What in God's name was I thinking? Wasn't I just talking about how I have a great big head?

I haven't mentioned it here, but everyone who knows me in my corporeal life knows that I can't wear hats with any amount of cling to them at all. A few years ago, I developed this weird sensitivity to anything pressing on my skull for even a few seconds. No elastic hats, no sunglasses perched jauntily atop my head, pulling my hair back. Hell, I can't even wear cloth headbands, even when they're loose enough that they're in danger of sliding off. I get these blinding, nauseating headaches, and by the time I realize that I've done it and yanked the offending object away from my head, it's too late. It only takes a few seconds.

And that's what happened when I tried to take pictures of this little hat. This stupid little hat that I knit up because I was tired of the bigger projects failing, and I just wanted something quick and cute and satisfying, and I wanted to be the kind of woman who could pull off a stylish, slouchy little hat.

Well, at least it was quick. I knit it up in under three hours. Now all I have to do is unravel it to the start of the ribbing and make it bigger. It won't be as cute as it is right now, but it'll be wearable, and that's more important. Probably.

...walk around in circles, walk around in...

So here's what happened. I put Ol' Blue away for a while, because I couldn't face undoing the sleeve and starting over.

I started knitting this great big striped pullover, but then I got worried that the color joins at the end weren't going to stay in place, and I became dispirited. That project got shoved into the knitting box up in the library. Oddly enough, I had a dream about it last night. I was looking at a page of magazine clippings, and there were pictures of me sitting on a boulder on a windy beach, wearing the sweater. It looked horrible on me. I kept thinking, "Where did they get those pictures? When did I finish that sweater? I have got to have something done to my hair. Is that what I look like? Oh, GOD!"

With Big Stripy temporarily shelved, I then dove into the stash and pulled out the big skeins of Interlacements. I swatched with two strands of what is supposed to be sport weight yarn, but which knits up quite a bit larger. Doubled, it produced a fabric so thick and dense that I think it would be able to repel a knife attack. I knit a few rows of it single-skein style on size 6 needles, the size I use for worsted wools, and got a pretty good look. When I showed the smaller swatch to Accountant Boy, he said, "Yeah, honey, that's what it's supposed to look like." Dammit. That means that I have to find a project for it, and it's not going to be a big, quick project because I'm going to be knitting at light worsted gauge. It's up in the box with Big Stripy.


"Maybe a top-down, something simple, then. I know! I'll make that hoodie I like so much, the one that has the big neckline. I'll use the lavendar yarn I got at Stitches a couple of years ago. It'll still be a Stitches 2007 project! I wonder if I have a swatch of that yarn." As it turns out, I did have a swatch and it is the right gauge.

Problem One - the yarn smells, I don't know, sheepy. Let's call it sheepy. The washed swatch is slightly better, and gives me hope that I can dilute the odor enough to wear it. It's not necessarily a bad smell, kind of like hot cardboard in your car on a summer day. It's definitely more ruggedly wooly in texture than I'd prefer in something that will be framing my face. It is a hoodie, after all. This leads us to the next problem.

Problem Two - my great big head. If you saw me, your first thought would not be "wow! That gal's got an enormous head! She's like that little chicken from the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons. No, not the chicken HAWK. The little chicken. The Widow Hen's little boy? You know what I'm talking about. With the glasses and the slide rule? Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about Larry. You always friggin' do this when I'm explaining something. You always gotta be friggin' Mr. Right all the time. Well how'd you like to be right about my fist in your face, Larry?" Maybe you don't have a belligerent, drunken personality rolling around in your head, poking his imaginary finger at your chest and calling you Larry. Maybe that's just me, and probably that's beside the point. The point is that my head doesn't look all that big until you measure it, because it's not symmetrical. My head happens to be longer front-to-back than most normal heads.

Why is this a problem? Well, because the pattern isn't written for the long-headed among us. If I knit according to the pattern, I'll have the increase seam that's supposed to run down the back of the hood starting right in the middle of the top of my head. Also, the hood will not stay on my head, which I would very much like it to do. I got several inches into the top, wrangling the needles with every row, before I realized that this was going to be a problem. That project hasn't even made it up to the box yet. In fact, there's no more room in the pretty project box.

Finally, with the greatest number of projects either on or near the needles in years, I came back around to Ol' Blue. I tried it on again. The big sleeve didn't bother me so much anymore. I liked it so much that I decided to continue it all the way to the wrist. I'm starting on the second sleeve tonight.


"Wonderful. How many more nights of being slapped in the face by your knitting will I have to endure, The Woman?"

I don't know, Buddy. Every time I give an estimate, I end up being wildy inaccurate. I'd prefer not to say. Hey, by the way, what do you think of the library? Cool, huh?

"I especially like the futon. You might tell the dog to stop urinating on it while you're away at work. Unsightly."

Pretty hard to him to do that from his crate in the other room, so I don't know what you're...ah, Buddy! Dammit, guy!