cobwebs

Oops. Over a month since I blogged here - got an attack of Life, or at least enough worry about it to stop the fine, careless yarn rapture. I hasten to add, though, that I have been knitting, and that it's been the kind of boring work on the same project where, if I had updated, all I'd have said would have been "Finished Farscape Season 2, Swiss Cheese scarf update: now 72cm." Please assume such posts to have been made, leading to the point where I can say that the scarf is now 92cm long by my cute sheep measure, I'm on my third ball of wool, and the stitches are a lot more even than they were when I started. Soon I shall progress from taking out the cotton washcloth yarn Robynn made me buy, looking at the pattern and having a small, feeble Purl moment, to actually trying to knit it.

In other news, I have a new job from January, one with an actual salary, so will be able to buy more yarn. (You can see how the finer essentials of this knitting lark have vouchsafed themselves to me). In the last two weeks I have fondled yarn in three separate shops, although remaining strong in not actually acquiring any owing to the uncertainty about money.

However, I did succumb and buy myself a knitting bag. It's beautiful, and has probably accounted for about 20cm of scarf in sheer inspiration.



Note the nonchalant way the scarf is draped out of the bag. Practically Rubenesque.

Oh, and happy seasonal wossnames to all, hope you got lots of good knitting done.

oh, dear

I had a ... transcendent experience yesterday. Wandering around a trendy Woodstock yuppie bead shop, I unexpectedly found that they stocked yarn.

Now, I've given in more or less good-naturedly to this knitting infection. I've accepted that the tangled and fiddly gods of knitting have some sort of bizarre use for me. I have knitted, ripped, sworn, counted and tied myself to the sofa in their service. Slowly, I am acquiring something that might, if you squint at it in poor light, look like a preliminary and embryonic form of skill. But generally I have preserved a certain detachment from this knitting madness, an amused distance wherein I participate, but do not submerge. My first yarn-buying experience was restrained, even dignified.

Then, yesterday, I saw yarn. The shop colour-codes their beads, so you walk into whole sections that glow orange, or blue, or red, and there's green yarn with the malachite, and yellow with the amber. And it's beautiful yarn - mohair, mohair/wool, cotton, pure wool, mohair with strange bobbly bits. Great big chunky skeins of it. Jewel colours. Soft.

Everything went a bit black, and it wasn't just charcoal mohair and haematite. I came to clutching multiple skeins, drooling and babbling. Jo, with whom I was shopping, should have been restraining me, only she's also a colour fetishist and was also under the spell and kept on pointing out new and beautiful stuff.

I don't know how much I have. I don't know what weight it is. I have no idea what it's suitable for. But it's mine.



The purple is hand-dyed pure wool: the blue, strangely enough, is banana fibre. It has an amazing texture and a sort of slubby drift to the colour that I really like.

Can someone tell me if the weird mohair with the sort of loopy, bobbly bits stuck to it is particularly difficult to knit? I covet it, but it scared me. I feel I am not worthy.

whee! Stuff!

So, Robynn is the Knitting Divvil, an enabler par excellence. She sent me a lovely knitting starter kit, including needles, a woolly sheep tape measure and the Yarn Harlot's Knitting Rules. She is not only evangelical in her zeal, she's absurdly generous.



I have made a bizarre discovery. Lantern Moon rosewood needles have been personally blessed by the snarled and sensuous gods of knitting. They are charmed. Having ripped back the swiss cheese scarf for the umpty-millyunth time, I started again on the rosewood 6.5mm beauties. Using them, I make a fraction of the mistakes I usually do, and when I do drop stitches or accidentally loop the wool to double a stitch, I can fix it. Also, they make a quiet, soothing click, and feel light and agile in my hands. As you can see from the photo, the swiss cheese scarf took several giant leaps forward while I watched the last few episodes of Buffy Season 4 last night. It's almost beginning to resemble the swiss cheese scarf. (Although in fairness this might also be because I've completely coincidentally made it in almost the same colour as the pattern. I find this strangely reassuring).

I'm not sure that even birchwood dpns are going to persuade me to knit socks, though.

holes in the fabric of space-time

I have to report progress!



The First Seven Rows of My First Scarf, posed artistically on a handy third-year Shrek essay. Those look almost like rows, yes? and the big chunky gaps are the correct and relevant big chunky gaps for the Swiss Cheese Scarf. There are probably the buried corpses of ninja errors in there, but that's because my ninja-burial skills are still a bit rudimentary. At least, however, I'm zotting the little sods before they multiply, even if there is the odd limb sticking up out of the grave. And this refers completely and only to dropped stitches: I still have five stitches too many at the end of the last row, and no idea where they came from or how to make them wriggle back into the void. Darned space-time.

Knitting is still a highly private occupation because I suspect I look bloody ridiculous while knitting, particularly while binding off: the hunched posture, the deep frown of concentration, the pitifully unco-ordinated movements, the swearing... Binding off requires knitting in reverse. This is possibly unnecessarily cruel to a ham-fisted beginner, but I have to say I picked it up faster than I did purling. Purling is still my nemesis. And I absolutely cannot work out how to cast on in this pattern. Long-tailed cast-on, which I have down, clearly doesn't work when you're halfway through a row. Two-needle cast-on is giving me unaesthetic snarls. I shall persevere a bit, and then go and find an actual knitter who can lead me gently by the hand through the thickets of stitches.

redo from start

I've finally worked out what my problem is with this knitting binge. It's not that I don't know how to knit properly, it's that I don't know how to knit improperly. More accurately, before you're all yelling "Knit Naked!" slogans, I don't actually know how to deal with errors.

Basically, I don't get errors, I get highly-trained Ninja Errors. They sneak into my work, cat-footed and blending into the shadows, so that it's all fine when I check it, but three stitches later there are errors going back four rows and raising whole families of little baby errors with nauseating enthusiasm. (The Sex Life Of The Common Garter Stitch. Scary stuff).

I don't know what I do to get these errors. (Well, I've ironed out the extra-stitch ones, thanks to various kind suggestions from Teh Internets. Teh Internets taught me to knit. Fact.) But crossed stitches? weird bobbly bumps at the base of the stitch? sudden ginormous loops that span three stitches which I could have sworn were perfectly normal on the previous row? No clue. Ninja errors. Their ways are mysterious.

Not knowing how I got them, it's actually very difficult for me to do anything about them. The first few (dozen) times an error happened (note the careful passive tense), I ripped the whole thing back and started from scratch. (This is why I'm now very good at casting on). The last few times I've ripped carefully back to the error, picked up all the stitches, on at least one occasion taken them off the needle and carefully picked them up again right way round, and then sat staring blankly at the mistake, occasionally poking it feebly with a needle to see if it miraculously jumped into position. Then I ripped the whole thing back and started from scratch.

Any time now it's going to occur to me to take this poor multi-knitted tangle of yarn to someone who actually knows what they're doing, and humbly beg for enlightement. And, possibly, gin.

Several Things

1. Am in love with the weirdness of this scarf, Robynn's suggestion as an alternative to the plain/purl combination which is eluding me. It's particularly reassuring pattern because it allows me to knit four plain rows straight off. This I can do. OK, I can't yet do it without ending up with tangles and crossed stitches the instant my concentration slips (memo to self: do not knit and watch Farscape, compulsion to watch the attractive male is too strong), but it's considerably better than the horrifying things I do to purling. With any luck I'll have some rows to show you in a day or so.

2. Conversely, I can now do long-tail cast-on while reading the Yarn Harlot.

3. Reading the Yarn Harlot has inspired me with a mad desire to bake Canadian butter tarts. Have printed out five separate recipes.

4. Have marked all but one of the Honours dissertations. There is green ink on my knitting needles.

5. Is it normal, she asks nervously, for the knitted side to entwine itself around the needle like a barber's pole, or am I once again inventing new and exciting ways of warping space-time by holding the damned thing all wrong?

for want of a better word

This is what my knitting looks like:



This represents in potentia a simple broken-rib scarf, 41 stitches, a 3/1 plain/purl pattern, size 5.5 needles, and an Aran 50% wool in a pleasingly sludgy shade of green. I have now ripped it back to nothing six times. This object exists in a sort of stuttering relationship between notional and actual form, as I bring it continually forth only to send it back. Bearing in mind Pratchett's Pork Futures Warehouse, I am unsurprised that the weather has turned cold and rainy.

I cannot adequately express how bad I am at this. Long-tail cast-on I have mastered. I can do it, if I'm careful not to either twist the wool inappropriately, or to accidentally hoik all the new-born stitches callously off the end of the needle by an incautious movement. I end up with a tight, even row of something that looks suspiciously like stitches. Anyone who can give me pointers to a project involving indeterminate quantities of long-tail cast-on and no actual knitting will have my gratitude. Beyond cast-on it all goes a bit pear-shaped.

The last time I tried to actualise this scarf, I watched my first three rows like a hawk, and triumphantly had 41 stitches at the end of each row. Then I relaxed slightly, and by the end of the fourth row had mysteriously acquired four extra stitches from some alternate dimension where they lurk, waiting. I also had crossed stitches, interesting snarls, and a tendency to look over my shoulder at intervals in expectation of annoyed physicists wanting to talk about the nature of space-time.

Bizarrely enough I'm actually still enjoying this. I realise that knitting represents a constellation of skills and qualities I simply do not possess - patience, attention to detail, ability to maintain concentration over simple, tricky, repetitive movements. I am buggered if I'll be defeated by a snarl of yarn. I will be a better, higher, nobler person if I can master this, and master it I will. In my universe, sheer bloody-mindedness is a virtue.

This being said, I need to present to you my knitting in its natural habitat:



The pedestal is a pile of unmarked Honours dissertations whose existence I have been wantonly ignoring all week. The deadline for the marks was yesterday. My doom is upon me. If I get to knit this weekend, it will only be in small snatches in between writing enthused or withering comments in green pen, and suppressing my cursing. Thus, no pictures of rows. Will put up pictures of what we will humorously refer to as "rows" when I've had a chance to actually knit some. Which I will. Soon. Properly. Grrrrr.

the divvil made me do it

Or more accurately, Robynn. It's all her fault, (a) that I started knitting at all, she encouraged me, the pusher, and (b) that she pointed out what a good blog name "Purl-handled revolver" would make, and it turned out to be a google-whack. The daft, arcane and tangled gods of knitting are clearly making their will known.

This whole knitting binge started with a post on my other blog, thusly:

As a result of a random concatenation of circumstances, I just spent an hour reading through The Panopticon. It's a knitting blog. It's very well written and very funny, and features Dolores the cabaret sheep. It has also, in a response straight out of left field, and a horror hitherto unknown in my personal life, left me with a serious desire to overthrow the prejudice of a lifetime and take up actual knitting.

I feel an intervention is required here. I would be grateful if the relevant people would perform the following tasks:
(a) Non-knitting friends, please forcibly restrain me from this madness, pointing out its roots in psychological insecurity, life-avoidance and the frivolous desire for pretty clothes, and the unavoidable fact that, whatever I might fondly imagine, it's likely to teach me exactly the opposite of patience.
(b) Knitting friends, of whom I seem to have incredible stonkloads, please advise me as to the most user-friendly, low-grade projects likely to ease me gently into the long, hard process of converting some of my many thumbs to actual fingers while entangling myself in miles of yarn. The ultimate production of genuine articles of clothing would be a bonus.

God, I must be mad.

Since I received nothing but enthusiastic support, I am currently four rows into my first scarf for the fifth time. I should point out that I am thirty-mumble years old, and last knitted sometime in the dawn of time, when I was still in junior school. I hated it and was very bad at it. Even now, I regard knitting with a sort of paranoid fear: not only am I terrible at it, but I'm firmly convinced I'll actually unknit the fabric of space and time with some of these stitches.

This blog is for chronicling, in words and pictures, the slow and laboured progress of my acquisition of knitting skills. This alternative venue will prevent me being growled at or lynched by the readers of my other blog who think knitting is weird.

I should state now, for the record, up front, that even if I achieve respectable levels of skill at this game, I won't knit socks.