Analog

The best things in my life are non-digital.  My knitting needles, my spinning wheel and my fountain pen use no screens, no electricity or bandwidth. 

For literally years, I've been stalking Craigslist in search of a bicycle.  What could be simpler, or more lovely than just riding a bicycle? Wind in my hair, air in my tires, and not a care in the world.  Not just any bicycle would do, of course; it had to fulfill an unreasonably long list of criteria, some of which are:

Not too expensive (harder than you'd think, even on Craigslist)
Not too sporty (if I have to wear a bicycle/clown outfit, forget it)
Not too beat up (my pride outweighs my mechanical skills)
No derailleurs (the source of much frustration when I rode as a kid)
Room for Knitting (obviously)
And it had to have some degree of charm; a je ne sais quoi that I would only know when I saw it.  A Goldilocksian fantasy.  No wonder I looked for years.

I did loads of research about what bicycles can (and can't) do nowadays.  And living in Portland, the self-christened Bicycle City of the USA, there is no shortage of places to see and talk about bikes.  I narrowed it down to about four different options that I thought would be good, and searched the used bike listings compulsively regularly.  I was pretty sure that I would end up rebuilding an old English 3-speed, which both excited and nauseated me.  It would be fun to learn about, but time-consuming and cumulatively expensive.  And of course, there's always the chance that you'll need a part that hasn't been made in 50 years, so a relentless pursuit of weird little pieces looked inevitable.

And then one day last winter I found her:

She was unceremoniously sold to me after her owner fell off her, after less than a year of ownership.  A practically new, modern bike with an eight-speed internal hub and nice, modern brakes.  She wasn't as pretty at the time as she is here.  Her fall had left her covered in mud and scratches.  Although there wasn't any real damage, her prior owner had assumed the scratches were deep and permanent.  She was mine for less than half the price of a new bike.

Back at home, I carefully buffed out all her scratches, lovingly waxed her frame and lubed her chain.  I named her Nilla, for her ice-cream color.  For Christmas I got her the beautiful basket she's sporting.  Lindsay and I found the Dutch stretchy-bands for her rear rack at a boutique bike store one rainy afternoon, which we followed with a real Portland-style food cart lunch. 

I've been practicing with her a little all winter, as the weather would permit (not much).  I'm a little bit wobbly, not having had a bike since about age 12, but it's nothing too scary, so far.  I live in a great neighborhood for riding, so I can stick close to home until my skills and endurance improve.  Today after lunch I decided to take Nilla to the park.  First I packed the necessities:

Once there, I found a comfy spot and noticed that the Oregon Grape (bonus points if you know it's the State Flower of Oregon) are in bloom:

And I worked on a sock:

A plain Vanilla sock, as a mater of fact, which makes it just about perfect for today.

My next goal for Nilla is to procure a lock, so I can take her places where I might actually leave her side. 

Yarn shop, perhaps?

You hereby have my permission to do something Analog today.  Leave the phone somewhere, unplug the laptop, and take yourself outside.  Crack a book, drink some tea with lemon, and knit for a while.  It's good for you.  And if you are lucky enough to have a bicycle in your life, dust her off and go for a spin.

It's Good to be Needled

Last weekend I managed to drag myself away from the spinning wheel (Not. Easy. There may have been self-bribery of an undisclosable nature).  It's time to start the new book!

The working title of this project is The Creative Kids Photo Guide to Knitting.  Part of a series my publisher is starting, this book is all about adults and kids knitting together.  I'm really excited about it because it's about how kids and adults can spend time connecting and learning together, rather than just another "how to knit" book.

Of course, my handicap is that I already know how to knit.  I have to be really careful that I don't assume too much, or dumb anything down, either.  So I've decided to force allow my family to help me. 

Lindsay, at 15, is almost not a kid anymore, but she learned to knit recently enough that I can count on her to remember what it was like better than I do.  Campbell, at 12, doesn't knit currently, having rejected it at around age 6.  I haven't forced it on him (for reasons I no longer remember), so I'm hoping his ambivelance can be overcome by blackmail my great teaching skill.  And Phillip, my youngest, (45), has never knit a stitch in his life.  The very suggestion of my teaching him to knit causes a vein in his forehead to throb menacingly.  But he's bravely volunteered to help me by trying to learn how.  He understands his value to the project as a brand-new knitter, and we both agree that if I can teach him, then other kids could learn from me, as well.

I decided one of the projects for the book should be to make your own knitting needles.  Campbell and I visited no less than five retail establishments to round up everything we would need.  We got:

Hardwood dowels, in sizes equivalent to US 3, 8 and 10 needles
A multi-hole manual pencil sharpener (more rare than you would think)
A rainbow of permanent markers
Sandpapers and spray lacquer
All sorts of wierd things we thought would be fun to stick on the ends of the needles:

Phillip's are the purple and red skulls hiding in the back.  Campbell rocked the black and red dice.  Lindsay made the squid fishing lure ones.  And mine are the beaded numbers.  You'll notice that we stained each set two different colors.  This is to aid remembering which needle is doing what when we move on to actual knitting.  So far, so good.  Nobody got hurt, and only one kid managed to get their needles glued together with lacquer. 

Yeah, it was Phillip.  Good thing he's cute.

Spinning, Out of Control

One drawback of having written two books in one year is that I put myself on a Spinning Diet.

Spinning, for me, is the place where no rules apply.  It's the opposite of knitting:  There are no deadlines, EVER, no writing down or trying to reproduce anything, no undoing of mistakes is allowed, and no time limits are imposed.  I embrace my mediocrity and "long-term beginner" status completely.  The yarn the wheel (or spindle) gives me is the yarn I love, and that's all there is to it.  I'm the Unintentional Spinner.  So I decided that as long as I was on a knitting deadline, there was not going to be any time for spinning in the way I like to do it:  Down the rabbit hole for hours and days; spin, ply, skein, wash, dry, pet, pet, pet.  Takes a lot of time.  And before I knew it, more than a year went by without my touching the wheel.

Which simply will not do.  What a colossal wrong to have done myself! Spinning Diet, indeed.  Spinning feeds knitting, which everybody knows.  Communing with fleece as it becomes yarn is spiritual knitting nourishment at its finest.  I have starved my inner spinner nearly to death with some ill-conceived notion of time management.

This weekend, I binged.  I made 643 yards if 3-ply Cormo yarn.  And by "weekend" I mean a good part of Saturday, lots of Sunday, most of Monday and all of Tuesday.  Spinning Out of Control.  I have no memory of eating or sleeping or cooking or doing laundry for four days.  I can tell those things have been happening, because nobody else around here has noticed a failure to function in me.  But 643 yards of 3-ply Cormo do not result from some passing whim to spin for a bit.  They come from hardcore obsessive megafocus on spinning.

I don't know whether to be proud of myself for making so much dreamy string, or ashamed for being so self-indulgent.

Either way, it's time to get back on track, because I have to start a new book.

And the 3 of these bags of beautiful gorgeous pin-drafted fiber that I still have to spin are pretty much torturing me.  They call to me from the corner by the wheel with the voices of Sirens.  No matter where I go in the house, I can hear the song: 

"Spin more, spin more spin more, it is not day! 
It is the Nightingale and not the Lark;
Whose song beguiles you Leave the Wheel and work.
The laundry and the dishes don't love you;
As we do, who are made of fluffy wool!"

Every binge must reach its inevitable end.  The only question is what sort of end will it be?  A purposeful, self-controlled roll to a stop, or a squealing, twisted collision with reality?  If I don't stop spinning today, I could find myself in an intervention!  My family could tell me all the ways my compulsion to make string has injured them.  They might say they love me and that's why I have to go to a Special Place of Healing.

Or else they will continue not to notice I'm wearing the same clothes from days ago, and there is fiber sticking out of my hair.  As long as they get picked up from practice and the groceries keep hitting their plates, at least. 

As ever, it's gonna be up to me to decide to control myself.  Or not.