Norwegian Sweater Fighting

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

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:

1. Mohair is a bugger.
   
2. Cotton, on the other hand, is possibly my one true love, at least for the moment. (That's a cotton washcloth, this one).
   
3. Game farms are exceptionally beautiful spots to knit in, even in the freezing cold dawn on the balcony.
   
4. Banana fibre scarves are adequately warm for game viewing, and rather snazzy.
   
5. 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.
   
6. 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

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!

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

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.

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!

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

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

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

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.