Purl-Handled Revolver

Norwegian Sweater Fighting

2008-10-06T09:10:00.000+02:00

I have to apologise for the series of planned posts that didn't materialise, owing to a combination of illness, indexing and the fact that the combination of illness and indexing isn't allowing me the time or mental energy to actually knit. Sigh.

As a peace-offering: Norwegian Sweater Fighting. Othar's Twitter is an entertaining little bagatelle purporting to chronicle the exploits of Othar, a Spark and gentleman adventurer from the Girl Genius web comic (pseudo-Victorian Mad Science!). The last couple of entries charmed me utterly by randomly inventing Norwegian Sweater Fighting, which handily defeats the odd white lady resurrected in the lab, who "knows not the way of the målet and is helpless against a true Genser Hersker". I'm seeing this latter as a particularly convoluted sort of wrestling hold, with the opponent tied in complicated and decorative knots.

bad knitter, no biscuit

2008-08-16T11:38:00.000+02:00

Gosh, yes, she says offhandedly, tracing embarrassed circles with her toe, I have this knit blog thing, don't I? Oh dear.

The lack of knit-blogging has had a lot to do with the lack of actual knitting, since I finished the banana-fibre scarf in an excess of zeal (and Farscape), and then rested panting on my laurels for a while. Then the really bad 'flu hit and the glandular fever hit back. Then work got seriously crazy for about three weeks, leaving me too denuded of energy to actually lift the needles. Then the edited book came back from the proof-reader and I spent three weeks quarrelling with Oxford commas and the "which/that" controversy. Then there was an unfortunate, doomed and temporary love affair with mohair (not the kid mohair) which ended up in emotional tangles and broken hearts all round, or at the very least broken threads, and about which I really don't want to talk. Then I went away for a long weekend to a game farm, and started knitting again:

Things I Have Learned:

Mohair is a bugger.
Cotton, on the other hand, is possibly my one true love, at least for the moment. (That's a cotton washcloth, this one).
Game farms are exceptionally beautiful spots to knit in, even in the freezing cold dawn on the balcony.
Banana fibre scarves are adequately warm for game viewing, and rather snazzy.
Now that I'm back into knitting mode, the latest infection is a perfectly unholy and random desire to knit lace. Probably with the kid mohair, which I confidently expect won't snarl like the other fuzzy stuff I've been wrestling.
Knitting is highly contagious. Inadequate quarantine has resulted in my mother, possibly frustrated beyond belief by witnessing my fumbling efforts, rediscovering knitting after a fifteen-year hiatus. (Robynn, your fell influence is spreading. You may now gloat ;>).Apart from a mad outbreak of woolly hats for the game farm trip (mine's purple), she has spent the last few days knitting clothes for the felt teddy bear she made for my niece. I am utterly charmed.

Da Niece (now aged nearly 3, and moving into the Experimental Linguistics phase) informs us that his name is Bottop Bear.

knitting pome

2008-04-23T09:30:00.000+02:00

Knitting poetry by Moira Linehan. Eve cable-stitches the serpent's back. You seasoned knitters are quite probably familiar with this, but it rather charmed me.

The banana fibre scarf is twice as long as my arm, and has only not made any progress in the last week because I've run out of X-Files. New seasons arrive in July, until which time I shall have to retreat into Buffy. I discovered, with some annoyance, that the two balls of wool are slightly different colours, so I've alternated them in huge chunks, probably not an optimal solution but I didn't want to rip it back and be more artistic as this yarn breaks very easily. The second colour is also slightly differently textured, not as smooth. Is this normal with hand-dyed stuff?

I will photograph it all soon. I will! I will!

banananananananana!

2008-04-09T08:14:00.000+02:00

There's movement on the knitting front! I have overcome vast inertia (and a sudden retreat into manic reading instead of knitting) in order to (a) reduce to neat balls of wool the swiss cheese scarf by determined frogging while watching X-Files, and (b) play with banana fibre.

The banana fibre was hauled out as a direct result of Cape Town's current tendency to random load shedding, i.e. the lights go out without warning, usually right in the middle of an X-Files episode. This happened at about 8pm on Monday night, leaving me sitting in the dark kicking myself for not having dragged out the banana fibre and printed out a pattern a lot earlier, since knitting is a perfect activity for low light. I tried to read by candlelight for a bit, but the incipient headache made me give up and go to bed ridiculously early, with a pillow over my head to cut out the INCREDIBLE NOISE from the hospital generators across the road.

In a spirit of preparedness, and mental fist-shaking at the Electrical Powers That Be, I found the wool and pattern yesterday. I ended up going with the nicely simple broken rib Robynn suggested for My First Project, and it really seems to suit this yarn, which is heavy and slubby and uneven, and makes for a gorgeous texturedness. (The plain/purl alteration does, however, still cause me to occasionally bring forth extra ninja stitches from their pocket dimension when I'm not looking). The needles are huge, size 8, and wooden, since apparently my personal and wayward knitting gods have decreed that metal needles are for me an illegitimate rite which cause me to fall into sin, mostly cursing and dropped stitches. It's also a very thin scarf - I only cast on 24 stitches, and the width seems to be perfect. The problem with the Swiss Cheese was not the pattern, which I love, but the wool (half acrylic, can't stand acrylic) and the width, way too wide. I think I'll try for a skinny swiss cheese in the rather nice grey laceweight mohair friends madly acquired for me at a neighbourhood market.

I was, of course, poised in front of X-Files at 7.50pm last night with my knitting in hand and a torch next to the sofa, and, of course, there wasn't a power cut. On the other hand, I've achieved a good 10cm worth of scarf. Also, Mulder is stuck in Tunguska about to be infected horribly with Black Oil.

More importantly, tonight I have dinner with my sister, who's been away for a couple of weeks, and finally score the kid mohair courtesy of my papa. Photos will undoubtedly follow. *gloats*

oops

2008-03-12T07:40:00.000+02:00

oooh, I'm a bad knitblogger, I am. Weeks, nay, months pass without me so much as looking at this thing. In the current instance, this is actually because I'm so incredibly busy that I have no time to do more than think wistfully about knitting. Apart from the frantic wossnames that are the new job early in the term (students wibble to the left and right and me, occasionally they even volley and thunder), I am busy with the following:

1. A paper (on China Miéville and Neil Gaiman and alternate Londons). Actually, I finished it and sent it off on Monday, so that's one out of my hair.

2. The final, finicky updates to this thrice-dratted book. They're due mid-month, which gives me about a week to finish them. I'm pretty much there except for the last chapter, which is going to take more major work and a bunch of movie-watching. However, this means that the last month or so has entailed me arriving home after work, sitting down at the computer and editing like a fiend until I go to bed. Typing is not compatible with knitting.

3. A major SCA event, for which I am head cook, and at which is being performed a play I have been directing for the last month.

4. The annotation of another three chapters of a Masters thesis one of my students is about to submit.

5. Moving into my new office.

Most of these things come to a grand crescendo this weekend, after which I shall collapse, panting, a mere shell of my former self, and go and buy yarn. The thing that I possibly hate most about 9-5 work is that it precludes wandering around to all the cool yarn shops. I still haven't acquired the mohair boucle I have been promising myself for ever. Not this weekend, but possibly next.

However, yarn nirvana may be in sight. Years ago, when my family still lived in poor old Zimbabwe, my dad (who is an animal scientist by trade) was involved in a project doing commercial embryo transfer with pedigree angora goats. He ended up with a small herd of said goats (who are, I have to say, completely silly animals - their little brains are more sheep-like than goatlike, lacking most of the almost feline bloody-minded independence of your true goat. Yes, I like goats) and an interest in a related project in hand-dyed angora yarn. He phoned last night and intimated that he'd sent a small gift to assist my knitting endeavours, on account of how he just happens to have several hundred skeins of pure kid mohair yarn stashed away somewhere. In various colours. Well, well, well. I shall acquire said cadeau forthwith and share its joys with my fellow knitters.

Finally, two questions.
1. Is it, in fact, normal to get halfway through a project and decide that you hate it and would never wear it anyway? I am disenchanted with the Swiss Cheese scarf. Apart from its tendency to quantum variation and the fact that I've reached the end of the wool I acquired and it's only half the length it should be, I made it too wide, in the wrong colour and wrong weight. I think I need to try it from scratch on smaller needles with lighter wool. Is this, perchance, a normal phase of knitter development, or do I just lack gumption?

2. Every now and then I open my stash drawer and fondle the dark blue banana fibre. What could I possibly make with it? I'm inclining to a thin scarfy sort of thing on really large needles - if so, what sort of stitches?

F.O.

2008-01-22T14:04:00.000+02:00

I did it! It's a dishcloth! My first ever finished project!

The camera is still doing horrible things to the colour, and viewers are asked not to look too closely at the snarly bits where the yarn separated out. Cotton seems to be evil that way. Also, what do I do with the dangling ends of yarn? My cats want to play with them.

I finished this while watching "Blink" again, still one of my favourite Doctor Who episodes ever, even though it scares me off the couch and occasionally out of the room even on the third watching. I have, however, discovered that looking steadfastly at one's knitting during creepy bits is a very good for defusing the wimpy terror, as well as being randomly good for my knitting.

Now I want to try dishcloths in different colour combinations. This is mostly to prevent me from having to go back to the swiss cheese scarf, which has suddenly reverted to its space/time warping ways, and is refusing to add up to the correct number of stitches. As usual, I blame quantum.

proof positive!

2008-01-09T11:08:00.000+02:00

Just for Robynn, the proof that I actually have managed to create something not entirely unlike the ballband dishcloth (while incidentally watching a whole lot of Season 3 of Doctor Who):

The colours actually look horrible, I'm not sure if it's my photography or the monitor: they should be a deep burgundy and a sort of grey with a faintly green tinge. In close-up (carefully chosen so you don't see the bits with too many errors):

The main problems I'm having with this pattern are the edge bits where I'm bringing in the different yarn colour (gets messy), and the occasional tendency to twist one of the fancy slipped bits. The main problem I'm having with the yarn is that its threads separate very easily, I've mislaid single strands all over the show and snarled them into the wrong places rather wholesalely. The next version will be better, she says with grim determination. But I'm generally very happy with the sort of brick-worky effect, and the rather pleasing texture contrasts.

I have also hopelessly fallen for the Panopticon's latest T-shirt design, which has a dragon-guarded yarn stash.

.

Want one!

bobblybobblybobbly

2008-01-04T15:23:00.000+02:00

A very strange thing has happened to my growing yarn fixation. In each of the three yarn shops I've gone into lately, I've found myself ending my judicious, dignified wander accidentally plastered up against the novelty yarn section, salivating. If it has bobbles, sparkles, feathers, bits, beads or gosh-darned bojangles, some eternally eight-year-old part of my subconscious seems to desire it passionately.

This is very weird. When indulging my first love, which is fabric, I'm a complete fibre snob: I like cotton, linen, silk, viscose. My habitual stance is to wander around fabric stores letting loose my fine homing instinct for colour (black, jewel tones); then, gaze fixed in the middle distance, I fixatedly fondle the fabric. If there's too high a concentration of synthetic, my mien assumes the disdainful expression of a snobby duchess who's just detected something a little off about the fish, and I drop the offending cloth contemptuously, in extreme cases wiping my hand on my skirt. (You can imagine that fabric store assistants love this). Anything above about 15% synthetic gets me. I hate it. I always feel as though I can't breathe when I'm wearing it.

The thing about novelty yarn, of course, is that most of it represents the 1001 Really Interesting Things We Can Do With Unnatural Bits Of Thing. It's uniformly acryllicoid. The spangles and dangles and what have you are clearly Best Quality Plastic, and make no bones about it. And, weirdly enough, this doesn't seem to matter - while absolutely open to the more elevated seductions of mohair, wool and banana fibre, I am still possessed of an unholy desire to knit the unholy plastic novelty stuff. This also, of course, takes absolutely no notice of the fact that my knitting skills are currently barely up to perfectly straight and straightforward yarn; I shudder to think of the interesting space-time tangles I could generate with boucle. Also, it's not as if I'd ever wear any of it, or not at least without someone giving me a great deal of bribe money and a personality transplant.

I have thus far, with consummate self-control, prevented myself from actually acquiring any of this glittery froufrou, but I have a horrible feeling it's only a matter of time until I'm tying myself to the sofa, now with added sequins. When the hour is nigh, I shall have to do my damndest to channel the urge into actual mohair boucle in that beautiful greeny blue. In fact, I might have to go and acquire it tomorrow. Dammit.

In other news: more space-time warpage! Robynn, is this dratted dishcloth actually supposed to be giving me a stockinette stitch border and garter stitch bands of colour, or am I doing something weird to the row count while perving Doctor Who?

slippage, rapturous, for the use of

2008-01-01T10:35:00.000+02:00

It being a new year and all, I made the Symbolic Gesture of breaking out the two colours of cotton yarn and the beautiful rosewood 4.5mm needles, and having a go at the ballband dishcloth Robynn suggested. This was a bit weird, since the smaller needles and the texture of the cotton are a serious paradigm shift after quantities of aran-weight swiss cheese, but I didn't allow this to faze me. After all, I thought, there's still purling to come...

I have discovered that my space-time problem with purl is not, in fact, purl. I knitted a perfect row of purl first-off, no wibbles or continuum warps. It looks kinda cool. I am forced to conclude that the problem I have is in trying to alternate plain and purl. I suspect they're like matter and anti-matter, and therefore shouldn't exist in the same universe. Row. Whatever.

I spent most of the morning stuck at Row 3 in the pattern, which casually tells me "Join B". I had five different websites up with instructions for joining wool of a different colour. None of them made any sense (although this may be partially attributable to the fact that I had to wake up at 5.30 this morning to take my mother to the airport and consequently have no brain; also, the Evil Landlord's computer keeps randomly rebooting, kicking me off the wireless each time, usually in the middle of a complicated knitting video). I couldn't work out what I was actually trying to do here - tuck a new colour miraculously in so that I knit with alternately one and then the other, carrying the unused colour along with me concealed in a small alternate dimension? or starting a new row with a new colour and snipping the old one? or simply leaving the old one by the wayside like a discarded boot until I get bored with hopping? yours, confused. Also, the instruction "slip" sounded fraught with peril. Historically speaking, I break limbs when I slip, or at the very least dislocate something. Possibly the space-time continuum. Again.

Eventually, tired of squinting at the screen and muttering to myself, I damned well joined the second colour and simply obeyed the pattern, trusting to luck and the tangled gods of knitting and idiots. It helped that I finally found a site that explained slipping (it's so simple most don't bother). I am now six rows into the pattern, with no more incident than accidentally knitting the trailing end of the plaster on my left forefinger into a stitch, and having to be vigilant for the occasional picked-up stitch with all this yarn forwarding and backing. I am overcome with awe at the sneaky colour-play resulting from leaving all these slipped stiches hanging in this callous way and anchoring them with the forward/back bit. Knitting. It's cool.

cobwebs

2007-12-25T20:56:00.000+02:00

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

2007-11-18T10:19:00.000+02:00

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!

2007-11-17T10:36:00.000+02:00

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

2007-11-10T18:48:00.000+02:00

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

2007-11-07T17:17:00.000+02:00

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

2007-11-05T11:02:00.001+02:00

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

2007-11-03T10:54:00.000+02:00

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

2007-11-01T16:49:00.000+02:00

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.