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I've been doing a lot of pattern-writing lately, because it doesn't feel quite right to me to be knitting from another person's pattern. It doesn't quite feel like my own work. Beyond this though, it's just so exciting to me to create my own patterns, solve the problems I encounter, and end up with something unique.

That being said, sometimes I run across a pattern that I just sort of fall in love with, and last week I decided to knit one of them.

CRAZY KIWI!!!!!!!!

I found this pattern a few months ago on Ravelry and saved it in my favorites. After finishing the Gravitational Lensing Mittens, I decided to take a break and knit something quick and, more importantly, cute!

Knitting the kiwi-bird was really fun! It was simple, though I did do some learning about short rows for the neck, and on size six needles it went quite quickly. In two days a tweedy kiwi had popped right out of my hands! Obviously, I named him Tweedwi.

In truth, two days was just too fast for me. I decided to knit a friend for Tweedwi. I used some old wool from my Ireland sweater as well as some of the last of the first wool yarn I ever bought years ago. I rounded off the beak and feet with the birthday cotton I got at my birthday party last fall. I wanted to stripe him every-other round with cream Donegal tweed and the light brown first-wool-yarn. But the cream yarn was a very small ball - I probably wouldn't have had enough to knit a whole kiwi.

So I made things more difficult for myself and charted out a color-transition into the dark brown Donegal tweed to round him out. I must confess, Tweedwi's Friend is a little bit cuter than Tweedwi himself...

They're both very sweet. : )

love, Jimmy

Blocking Day

So ever since I've started knitting for serious, I've been hearing talk about this blocking thing. Patterns say, "Block the sleeves to the same size before assembling," or this witty knitting-tips book I saw somewhere says, "Don't believe what they say - it won't come out in the blocking," or the Stitch n' Bitchers say, "I'm sure this shawl will open up after it's blocked."

Yeah, whatever. If I want my sleeves the same size, then I'll knit them that way, and if I want my shawl more open, if I ever made a shawl, well I would sure as hell just use some bigger needles.


The theory of blocking has to do with fiber-memory. Natural fibers like wool or cotton, when they get wet, learn the shape they are placed into and remember it when they dry. The idea of blocking is, then, to wet your knitting down, to shape, stretch, and scrunch it perfectly, and then to let it dry.

"Oh please," I have often silently scoffed, "- that will never work!" Knitted fabric is like a liquid - it drapes over whatever form you place it on, but it doesn't inherently have a shape itself. Fiber-memory can't actually be that strong.

Even if it was, the implication is also that blocking is temporary: what if I spent ages perfectly blocking my sweater, and the next day my sweater got rained on, I'd have to block it all over again or it would dry and remember the shape of rain.



Now a couple of months ago, I completed knitting my Ireland sweater, which was my final project on the Ireland study-abroad program this summer. I'd been working on this sweater since August, and finishing it was a huge accomplishment for me. Trouble was, when I put it on, the shoulders puffed up like the 60's, and I just looked like a goofis!

I didn't want to admit that my sweater made me look like a goofis, so I compensated by conspicuously never wearing it, and I told people that all the joy had come in the knitting process - wearing it was not important. Not a complete lie, but yeah kinda.

I grudgingly took my sweater to the Stitch n' Bitch at Panera a week or two after I'd finished knitting it, terrified that they would make me try it on for them. I would self-consciously put on the sweater, looking at my toes, and the ladies would avert their eyes too, not wanted to say the truth, that the shoulders were horribly awkward. Anyway, they didn't make me try it on, but I explained the problem to them anyway. And the ladies said, "Oh I bet that will come out in the blocking!"

WHAT?! No.

But I wondered of course, what if they're right? Maybe I should actually try blocking it and just see what happens?

Anyway, I put off actually blocking the thing for about two months. I'd told my mom that I was going to do it though, and she kept asking me whether I'd done it yet. When she asked I would vaguely say I would do it soon, not really wanting to.

What made me finally bite the bullet was my spinning. One of the most essential steps in spinning is to wash the yarn once you have spun and plied it. Otherwise, the yarn will unravel. But by washing and drying (that is, blocking) the spun yarn, the yarn learns to the remember the twist and does not unravel. This had worked for me. Maybe blocking would too.


So Sunday morning I awoke, and it was blocking day!

I'd studied the theory closely with the help of this and this youtube video, and without further ado, I filled up the bathtub. I thought my dad might yell at me for wasting water, but he didn't. I soaked my Ireland sweater, the argyle sweater-vest I knitted several years ago, my newly completed gravitational lensing mittens, my new handspun hat, and the wool sweater I'd gotten on Black Friday that I hadn't really wanted to wear since Leo accidentally threw it in the trash.

While the knitting stewed, I got out some towels, and I fetched Momo's pin cushion.

One by one, I removed the things from the slowly-draining tub. As instructed, I wrapped them in towels and stepped on them to press out the water. Then I lay them out on Laura's bed, shaped them, and pinned them down.


I blew the fan for around 24 hours, and when I got home from work today, things were basically dry. I tried on my sweater. It was... INCREDIBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Everything was true, and though the shoulders aren't perfect, they sit about a hundred times better on me. Even if the sweater is still a bit itchy, I will definitely be able to wear it now. My knitting days are transformed.

love, Jimmy


PS - my two mittens? after I blocked them, they are like totally the same size.

Zero t(w)o Mittens!

So it's been more than two weeks since I posted here! Let's change that.

The first weekend in February, I spent Saturday night at Carleton for the Mid-Winter Ball. Of course I was really excited for all of the dancing and seeing of friends, but in one way I was equally excited to head home:

Friday night I'd stayed up until 3AM finishing up spinning, plying, winding, and washing my red 2-ply yarn!

This was the second batch of yarn that I'd spun, and this batch was substantially more difficult. More difficult because I tried to spin the yarn as thinly and evenly as possible! This means I was letting fewer wool fibers into the yarn with each drafting pull. Because they have less friction in between them when there are fewer of them, thin yarn also requires more twist than thick yarn to stay solid.

Spinning thin meant that the yarn was weaker and far likelier to break from the weight of the spindle! If I spun a section too thin or with not enough twist, my spindle would crash to the floor and I would nervously inspect the hook - if it snaps off, I'll be in trouble!

Incorporating fewer fibers into the yarn at a time also meant that I moved through my fiber supply much more slowly than when I was spinning the thick butterscotch slubs! So spinning all of the red wool took me a little over a month. By the time I was done, I was really sick of it!

Once I finally finished spinning the red wool, I had a spindle-full that needed to be plied. Plying is where you twist the yarn together with itself in the opposite direction of how you twisted it during spinning. Plying strengthens, thickens, and balances, the yarn. With the butterscotch yarn I spun at the start of January, plying was a relatively fast process, because the yarn was thick and thus relatively short (86 yards after plying). But when I set out to ply what ended up being 426 yards of red 2-ply, I didn't realize how long it was going to take.

It took hours!!! This is what I was doing until 3 in the morning the night before going to Carleton!

Thankfully, once I'd plied it, the rest went pretty fast: I wound it out onto a chair back, measured it, washed it, and set it to dry.

This is a very round-about way of saying that, when I went to Carleton last weekend, I was really excited to come back home because I knew that by that time my yarn would have had time to dry, and I could try knitting with it!



I'd decided that I wanted to use this new yarn to knit a pair of mittens. I wanted to do a fun pattern, and I was really interested in trying entrelac, which is a neat pattern of individually-knitted rectangles in a basket-weave type pattern. So I spent a couple of days teaching myself entrelac and trying out some variations, but I ended up not being happy with it. Maybe I could have gotten it if I'd stuck longer at it.. But I decided to try something else!

Once I had a pattern, I cast on my ball of red 2-ply! How exciting!!! I was using size-2 needles.

It soon became clear, however, that size-2 was too large! So I decided to use the size-0 needles Momo gave me for Christmas. Size-0 needles are two millimeters in diameter, so not much bigger than toothpicks, and I'm really terrified of snapping them!

So for the past couple of days I've been knitting these mittens with my size-0 needles. It goes super slow because the needles are so small and the yarn is so thin, but I'm really loving it and I'm really happy with the results so far! Wish me luck!

love, Jimmy

Spun out

Happy new year, everyone! I'll start off with that.

Last night, I was at Noel's house with Justin and Meridel, and we rosed, budded, and thorned a reflection of 2009.

Last year included so many brilliant, beautiful, and happy things, and also a lot of horrible things. But then I suppose the point of rose-bud-thorn is that, like Meridel said last night, the thorns end up sometimes changing their mind and turning roses for the next year. They are places to look for buds in.

I spent New Year's with my sister and her friends Erica and Jenny. There was talk early in the evening (that is, Carrie Paulette, around 9:30 PM) of going to a masquerade ball. This didn't end up panning out, but Erica did have the supplies to make polymer-clay masks! That was an unexpected and unfamiliar project for me. The mask I made ended up being a little too brittle to be practical, but then it was the first time I'd used polymer clay in years, and never had I tried to make something wearable out of it before.



I finished spinning my first ball of yarn! On December 27th, I worked hard to finish first the spinning and then the plying of the whole batch of roving. Plying means spinning two already-spun yarns together to make a thicker, stronger yarn. You ply the yarns with an opposite twist to the twist with which you spin the two component yarns, so the two twist directions neutralize each other and give you a yarn that doesn't crazily curl!

Once I'd plied my yarn, I needed to wind it on the back of a chair, measure it, and tie the skein. Then, I washed the skein in just a tiny bit of detergent and water, which set the twist of the yarn so that it wouldn't unravel when I released the tension on it.

Then, Momo, Dad, and I left to Kansas while my yarn dried. I returned on December 31 at 5AM and wound this ball. Yay!!! I'm pleased and super excited to try knitting with it! Right now, I'm thinking about doing a hat with it.

In other knitting news, the other day Laura modeled the leg-warmers I'd knitting for her so that I could awkwardly take pictures of her wearing them. I inserted these into the pattern I'd written, and then I posted it.

Once I'd uploaded the pattern, I submitted it officially to Ravelry, and so now the pattern shows up on my Ravelry profile as one of my "featured designs." This is really exciting for me! I'd really like to continue writing patterns and hopefully doing something that somebody will enjoy.



During 2008, my big project was Picture of the Day. I took pictures each day of anything significant, and at the end of each day I chose one picture to represent the day. I had artistic pictures, goofy pictures, and pictures of things significant that had happened. Anyway, I put these all together in a folder and labled it the Pictures of the Days. In 2009 I didn't do this anymore and took correspondingly less pictures. But since January 1st, 2008 my camera is basically perpetually in my pocket.

I missed Picture of the Day last year. So this year, I'm starting it up again. Here's my Picture of the Day for January 1st, 2010:


It's Noel doing the dance from Bride and Prejudice. YAY!!!!

love, Jimmy

Balls.

If I haven't posted anything on this blog for like eight days, it's been because I've just been too busy, not because I haven't been productive enough! I've been knitting and knitting, wrapping presents, and making calendars, being musical, and listening to books on tape. I've been up until some ungodly hours, and it's been really great!

So first off, merry Christmas! I hope all of you had a wonderful day of celebrating or not celebrating, or just existing.

Second off, projects! Here are some highlights:

Laura's leg-warmers ended up coming out pretty great. The last couple of days I've been typing up the pattern so I can post in on Ravelry. It's more complex than what I usually knit, so it's been a challenge to write everything down and make sure it's correct. I kept Laura waiting for these until the last present on Christmas, and it was really exciting to give them to her. : )

I finished Laura's leg-warmers around 11:30 PM on December 23. Around 11:30 AM on December 24, I started working on Momo's ear-flap hat. Because I had less than a day, I decided I should probably not use size 2 needles and fingering-weight yarn. So I dug out some dark green and some really pretty multicolored sparkly yarn I don't know where it came from! Anyway, I'm really happy with how this turned out!


During this time, I engaged in some serious literary adventures via the CD player. I listened to the books-on-tape for Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy, Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan, and a really bizarre CD called The Best of Shel Silverstein.

I'd been kind of hankering to read this Beowulf translation since I'd come across it in the BU bookstore a couple of weeks ago. I'd picked it up because of course Seamus Heaney is amazing, and I'd read about thirty pages, which made me eager to continue. Listening to the audiobook was, of course, very different. I think in some ways it made the story easier to follow for me. Beowulf uses several large-scale digressions, which were easy for me to be confused by. But if I just zoned for a couple of minutes, we got back to the main story and I didn't totally lose the thread. I'm hopefully going to listen to this again before returning it to the library and focus more on the significance of the digressions.

At first, it was hard for me to really feel too chuffed about Beowulf. Beowulf is one of those macho, brilliant fighter-heros who keeps going for glory and riches and carnage. I guess that's not quite my cup of tea. But I've been working to think about Beowulf as he fits into his culture as a whole, and of course he's a good person. Of course it's good to kill monsters that are attacking innocent civilians, to help out neighboring kingdoms, and to be a good and just king. But it's also a factor for me that his motives for killing the monsters seemed as much about self-pride and glory as they did about protecting "the people" who are mentioned just a few times and are usually portrayed as helpless, pagan, and without meaningful occupation. It just felt so painstakingly aristocratic.

Maybe this is not a big deal, and I should just accept that that's how this poet thought about things, and that's fine.. I mean yes, as a literary work, as something to study to learn about historical context and old English literature.. yeah but as a work of literature that's going to change my life and inspire me? I wish I could have related better to Beowulf and that he was a character I really admired. Maybe on a second listening. : )

The Best of Shel Silverstein was a pretty insane thing to listen to. It's got several poems read by Shel Silverstein but also a bunch of classic country songs by Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, etc. Then there are a bunch of songs by this band Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show and a couple by Shel Silverstein himself! I had no idea that Shel Silverstein did country music.. especially songs with titles like "I Got Stoned And I Missed It!" Anyway, it's really fun. You should listen to it.


For Christmas, I received a drop spindle!! I learned what a drop spindle was this summer in Ireland when Anna and I went to a stitch n' bitch. I didn't realize you could spin without a spinning wheel, and ever since I've been sort of itching to try it out. So Momo found a lady in Maplewood who sells spindles, and last night I got started!

Spinning is actually a fairly straightforward process. My mom gave me this great book called Spin It, and it walked me through this: You tease apart the fibers of raw wool, hook them with the spindle's hook, and twist. When it's been twisted enough, you tease out more fibers and twist those. When you get enough yarn, you wrap what you've spun onto the spindle's shaft, hook the yarn, and keep going, wrapping as you go.

So last night, I gave it a go. It didn't go marvelously. My yarn was super thick and super uneven. Here's the ball I made:
But around 2 AM last night I called it quits and got some good sleep. This morning I tried it again. I think the sleep helped me reprocess the process, because it felt a lot smoother, and my yarn became correspondingly smoother too! I'm still breaking the yarn sometimes, and it's still not quite even, but I'm definitely making progress and am having a really good time.

What I'm loving is, this process is unfamiliarly organic. With knitting I'm used to rigid counting, stitches in neat rows and columns, measurements, and pattern charts. Spinning is just so totally unlike this. There's no "hook 14 fibers and twist 30 times." It's just not measured, because how could you measure raw wool, except maybe my weight? So I'm just spinning, trying not to pull the fibers too thin and break it but also not leave them too thick and slub it.

I suppose this organicness makes sense, that maybe I shouldn't feel so surprised. Because this is really the stage where you're imposing some kind of order on the wool. You're dividing and twisting it and saying, "Stay here," so then you can knit it in patterns. It's sort of new to me to think about textiles as an imposition of order. I don't know how much I like thinking about it this way, but maybe it is.


Tonight, Momo and I made peanut butter balls. That's what the picture is of, at the beginning of this entry. They're covered in chocolate but full of peanut butter and rice crispies. My grandma used to make them at Christmas when we visited, and I ate them a ton. On Monday, Momo, Dad, and I are driving down to Kansas where I'm going to visit Carrie, and then go to visit my grandma. She's living in an assisted living facility now, and apparently she likes it there.

love, Jimmy

Moving up the human leg.

This morning, I woke up with a bit of a cold. I'm working hard to fight it off so it doesn't grow big by consuming lots of vitamin C! On the other hand, if there's a time to get sick, I think this is kind of it, because it would suck to have been sick in Boston or over Christmas.. but I don't really want to get sick, so there you are.

Anyway, today I finished knitting the socks I'm making for Tyler while listening to The Tempest book-on-tape, which was pretty super. I'm very pleased with these, so whenever I see him, I'll be able to give them to him.

In Maple Grove, then, is this lovely yarn store I just discovered called Amazing Threads! I trekked out there (after a quick stop at Michael's for some yarn I knew Amazing Threads wouldn't have, since it's all acrylic and "metallic polyester," but still wonderful) and got some excellent yarn for my next project: leg-warmers for ________ except she already knows they're for her, so I guess it isn't a secret.

Anyway, tonight I knitted a couple of gauge swatches, and right now I'm planning out what these leg-warmers are going to look like. I've never made leg-warmers before, so I'm going to do some exploring of patterns on Ravelry just to get my bearings..

It's my sister Laura's birthday today!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LAURA!!!!!

love, Jimmy