Thankful

You knew it would happen:  I succombed to the call of the Faery Ring.  It starts out with this narrow band that you knit for 17 repeats, which comes out to 51 inches long, but only 26 stitches wide.  Totally portable, which is an excellent excuse for taking it (and only it) when I packed my knitting for the trip to my brother's house.  Thanksgiving was in Seattle this year, which as wonderful on many levels: particularly the part where I didn't have to cook the dinner.  Instead, I made shortbread and gingerbread men for the kids to decorate.  Which was good, because on Wednesday morning, our refrigerator died.

Know what happens when 24 popsicles from last summer melt all over a bag of thawed chicken parts?  I hope you never have to learn.

While we waited for the repairman, we jettisoned the entire contents of the fridge and freezer.  This was pretty surreal for my children, who have been taught that wasting food is something we try to avoid.  We made it into a game:  Un-Thanksgiving.  Instead of cooking and eating, we were throwing away everything in the place.  As we pitched things, we named what we were thankful for.  Me: frozen lima beans - I'll never miss 'em; thankful for that.  Campbell:  Corn Dogs - I'll sure be glad when we get some new ones.  Lindsay:  Popsicles - Good thing it's not summer, when we really need them.

Then the scrubbing:  It's unbelieveable the smell that comes out of a freezer when you warm it up...
And I'm wondering the whole time if there is any point to this - will I end up with the tidiest fridge in the whole landfill?  And worse:  Will we be buying a new major appliance instead of paying the mortgage and/or exchanging gifts this December?  I tried to gently prepare the kids for the worst, just in case I were to go fetal when the repair man delivered the news and could no longer explain things well.  "Won't this be a funny Christmas if we get a new refrigerator instead of toys!" 

Disbelieving Silence.  A dog barked in the distance. 

Then Campbell began to process the information:  "Wouldn't Santa still come?"  "Yes, of course Santa would still come.  We just wouldn't be giving each other presents this year because a new fridge would use up all our Christmas money."  Lindsay: "Well, at least there would be a place to keep the ice cream."  Kid has her priorities worked completely out.

The repairman came, ahead of schedule, changed a part on the back of the refrigerator, (which he even had brought with him), and left with a check for $300 from me.  It was all over in less than 15 minutes, including pulling the fridge out from the wall to expose the unimaginable dreck that lives under it.  Good thing I killed myself scrubbing the inside of the damn thing:  He never even opened the doors.

I'm thankful for a bunch of things this year.  Not least of which is the fact that I didn't have to deal with the unplanned purchase of a major appliance.  I'm also happy I wasn't hosting Thanksgiving dinner - throwing out what we had was bad enough - I can't imagine losing a whole family feast.  I'm also proud of the way my children took the news when we discussed curtailing our holiday consumerism.  I'm thankful that after the dust settled from that exciting adventure, all we had to do was get in the car and go away.  I'm thankful that the loving arms of my family were waiting to hold us all when we arrived.  I'm even thankful that I have a really clean refrigerator now. 

To celebrate (as if I needed any excuse at all), I put aside my "work" knitting, and took only the Faery Ring with me to Seattle.  I declared a knitting vacation, and immersed myself completely in it for the whole weekend.  Stay tuned, because this thing is gonna ROCK, and I can't wait for you to knit yours.  Start asking Santa now for 8 skeins of Blackwater Abbey worsted in your favorite color!

Tug O' War

And here we join the cream-colored organic cotton peasant blouse in progress, still looking suspiciously like an aubergine wool peasant blouse.   The trouble with raglan shaping is that sure, you can try it on as you go, but who wants to move 800 stitches onto waste yarn to do so?  Okay, yes, I am aware that if you have 800 stitches, there are bigger problems at hand than moving them to waste yarn.  So that's why I finally did just that.  You'll notice the telltale safety pins marking the spots where the raglan shaping should really have ended.  At first I thought it was actually passable, but on closer inspection (shortly after I lost feeling in both my arms) I noticed that the sleeve bind-off was tourniquet-like, rather than perky.  Then I decided that the fullness over the bust was matronly, rather than mysterious.  And after that the sleeve length started to look more dumpy than dainty.  There was too much wrong and only one thing to do.  After a suitable period spent alternating feelings of denial, rage and disgust, I frogged the sucker.  Yanked back about 4 vertical inches, which was probably 10 horizontal inches of raglan fullness.  Stupid thing looked like an umbrella without ribs.  And a really big neck hole where the top should have been.  But it's okay; I can totally do this.  Really.  Now it looks like this:

Yeah.  I know.  Not appreciably different than it did before a whole day's worth of stolen moments knitting.  But I have faith that it is, in fact, different now.  For one thing, the sleeves are way less long, and way less miserably bound off.  In fact, I might even be enjoying this little process if it weren't for the fact that I would WAY rather be working on something else.  Notably the Faery Ring.
 
It is still only a pile of skeins on my living room table to the naked eye, but it's a fully-fleshed-out dream pattern in the wilds of my imagination.  It's yelling at me from across the room:  "Hey!  You with the stupid peasant blouse!  Put that thing down and come over here and feeeeeeel meeeeee......."  It's hypnotic.  I could just stand up and stretch.  It would be good for me.  I've been sitting here slaving away for like, seconds on end.  I'll just stand up, and stretch my legs, and if I happen to wander over there to where the Blackwater Abbey yarn is, well what's the harm?  And if I accidentally tripped and fell and one of those skeins inadvertently fell onto the swift, well, I would be duty-bound to wind it nicely into a ball, now wouldn't I?

These are the evil thoughts that will keep me from finishing the stealth peasant blouse.  Get thee behind me Blackwater!  I must finish the reknitting of the aubergine sock wool so I can write the pattern, and get paid, and live to knit another day.  Even though the sock yarn is kinda splitty.  And I think it might be starting to pill.  Abbey yarn would never act like that.  And what's with these size two needles, anyway?  Whose dumb idea was seed stitch edging in sock yarn on size two's for crying out loud?  Stupid designer.  What I need is some relief.  A little break.  I'd still be knitting, you understand; it's not as if I'm not working after all.  Lovely sticky worsted on some nice grippy size eights, that's what's wanted here.  Just for a minute.  I'll just cast on for the swatch.  I have to swatch, don't I?  Never mind I've made like a hundred things with this exact yarn.  Never mind that I know just what to expect of it in my hands and on my needles, and that's why I wanted to use it in the first place.  A responsible knitter swatches things; that's how it's done.  In fact, it could be said that frittering away my knitting time on this ill-behaving prototype is impeding my valuable swatch-making time...

Enough already!  I shall ignore the siren song of the tricksy Irish wool.  This pretend-cream-colored-organic-cotton-aubergine-sock-wool albatross is about to be removed from my neck by the sheer force of will required to complete it.  Must...finish...peasant....blouse......

Confessions of a Backward Designer

You must believe me when I tell you that this is a cream-colored, organic cotton peasant blouse.  While your eyes (and your fingers if you were to touch it) will tell you that what we have here is aubergine superwash wool (Cascade Heritage, to be exact), what I am telling you is that it really is going to be something totally different one day.  The yarn from which this design will actually be made is so new that it isn't even for sale yet.  That yarn, right now, is somewhere between Peru, and Ohio, and Portland.  And it doesn't matter where that yarn is, because it's not coming to my house.  But I still have to figure out how to make a sweater out of it.  And then tell someone whom I have never met and will never see how to do the same, and without errors.

It's time for me to come out of my cedar-lined closet and confess:  I am a Backward Designer.  By that I don't mean Backward, as in, societally maladjusted (I am, but that's a different post), I mean Backward in that I have not yet learned one particularly vital skill.

I'm told by people whose job it is to know these things that the process goes like this:  Yarn Company, or Magazine, or Editor presents the project to the Designer.  The project can be the brainchild of someone who works for any of the above, or of the Designer, or whomever.  Somehow it is agreed upon that the Designer should make something, what the something will be, and what yarn will be used.  The Designer is off to the races.  She makes drawings, swatches and calculations.  She works out the pattern instructions, and then the magic formula is transferred to a saintly and talented human, referred to as Test Knitter.  This person is vastly underpaid to create the imagined garment in far too short a time, to fit a model no one has ever seen, with frequently not quite enough yarn.  Then the Test Knitter tells the Designer about all the errors she found in the pattern so they can be fixed, and the Tech Editors and their publishing pals take it from there.

This system has many benefits, I understand.  For one, the Designer is free to design far many more patterns than she could ever actually knit.  Her wrists, elbows and nerves are spared, in order to free her frail mind.  For another, without the burden of actual creation upon her, the logistics of how much yarn and where on the globe it might be found become largely irrelevant.  And of course, the Test Knitter's fresh eyes, perspective and tendons provide meaningful objectivity to the process.

It's a really swell system.  Too bad I suck at it. 

At least so far in my career, I have not mastered the skills needed to create a design more complex than a potholder without actually making it myself.  There.  I said it.  As of this moment in time, I have to knit every stinking thing I dream up, or its pattern will be way wrong in some very bad way.  Abominable math skills notwithstanding, my knitting just refuses to be born on paper.  It is totally inorganic and miserable for me to sit at a desk and grind numbers into graph paper.  That's the opposite of knitting, and everything I love about it, and I have serious doubts about my career lasting longer than my wrists if I don't find a way to make it work.

What I have to do is this:  Accept with glee the assignment, find a substitute yarn that I can both afford and procure in time to meet my deadline, and make a stealth sample myself.  That's right, I secretly knit samples on my own.  I have tried working on only making the key parts of the project: say, the armhole shaping and neckline.  Then when/if I have time, I go back and work the rest of the garment to figure out the rest.  I have more sweaters with weird seams and picked-up knitting than you can imagine.  For me to get it right, I just have to make the darned sweater, and write down what I did as I go.  Luckily, I am a really quick knitter, but I know I'm on borrowed time until this strategy backfires.

Can you imagine asking a Chef to create a new dish without giving him any ingredients other than a pencil?  That is the world I'm living in.  I don't know how other designers handle this problem, but I sure would like to. 

The good news is that even though the parties for whom I design do not allow me to share about what I am creating for them here, there are no such restrictions on showing you my stealth versions.  They are works in progress, after all, and may not bear any actual resemblance to the finished items.  So I hereby air my dirty laundry:  Here is the stealth peasant blouse, in progress.  

Because it's mine and I can do anything I want, it might eventually turn it into something totally different than the garment I'm contracted to make.  For example, the required element is a short sleeve, but nothing says my stealth version can't be a long-sleeve if I'm inclined... I will share progress on this until it starts to look like the thing I'm supposed to be doing, and then it will disappear in favor of some new project/whim.  Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.