theknittyvritti

origami

 

This weekend, our cousins picked up their daughter and a friend from camp, and spent the weekend with us. Having the girls in the house was so evocative. I went to camp for years, and while I sometimes remember the astonishing cruelty of young girls, and the challenges of getting along in a group, this weekend I remembered the sweet pleasures of camp. The songs, the secrets, the freedom and exhilaration of being in a group of my peers.

I learned to make a paper crane in camp.  I have never quite gotten over my amazement at turning an ordinary square of paper into a beautiful bird.

 

Truth be told, I have been known to make tiny birds, one after another, while working. (One of the problems with a job where they call you "doctor" is that very few people seem comfortable asking "what the hell are you doing?", so in a story for another day, I have quite a few bad habits that I engage in while sitting in my chair. Not, alas, knitting, which I have deemed too self-indulgent).

Paper Crane by Kirsten Johnstone, must have been inspired by origami. You knit a shape like this:

 

and turn it into the body of a cardigan, as evidenced in the photo below.

Johnstone made hers in a Habu linen lace, which is lovely, and perfect for summer. But I had my own agenda. I wanted to make a sweater out of Malabrigo lace.

I had a few skeins of this yarn in the colorway "polar morn", and I like the idea of a really lightweight cardi for early fall. I've seen a lot of Whisper cardis made in Mal, but I don't really like the shape of the sweater (described by one Raveller as "boob enhancing"), so I haven't wanted to get on the Whisper train. I decided to see if Paper Crane would be well suited for wool. It turns out to be very well suited for this yarn, producing a lightweight garment that still hangs well, and is surprisingly warm. All that was needed in the way of mods was to lengthen it a bit (personal preference), and to reduce the number of rows for the armhole decreases to adjust for the slightly different gauge of the yarn

 

My answer is "yes". I like this sweater so much that I just couldn't wait to show it off. Please ignore the not-so-classy safety pin standing in for the beautiful button I will get just as soon as I can get to the store. I think this one has the potential to be just as much of an instant Malabrigo lace classic as Featherweight is. What do you think?

contraband

 

All week long, I anticipated a blog post entitled "I am knitting a cloud". I was visited by song lyrics, like "Get off of my cloud", and especially "Heaven is a place where nothing really happens", the latter because aside from a few torturous calculations to adapt the Paper Crane pattern to Malabrigo lace, nothing much does happen on this project, other than rows and rows of stockinette. Soothing, but not much drama.

Until Saturday. We got tickets to the Bob Dylan and Friends concert at Bethel Woods, the outdoor music venue on the site of the Woodstock music festival. My sister-in-law (age 62) is having a second adolescence....she has been kinda following Dylan around this year, and this was an opportunity for the whole family to share in her obsession. And, I thought, a great venue for knitting. Family, friends, music, knitting, the great outdoors, sign me up.

Little did I guess that my project is not a cloud. No, it is contraband.

 

I am accustomed to that moment of suspense at the airport when I don't know whether my needles will make it onto the plane. I realized a long time ago that the long plastic tube of my circular needles might make a fine garotte. But airline security has been unphased, maybe because I don't seem like the strangling sort of person.

Not so the nice young man who looked through my bag, or maybe Dylan's "people". It's apparently the performer's perogative to ban anything they want from the concert. So cameras and "sewing materials" as he said, are on Dylan's list. Even weirder was the conversation I had with the somewhat aggressive (yes, she was matching me in emotional intensity) woman who confirmed the ban. She actually offered to hold my needles, and when I was ready to leave, she said, I could call her on my cell phone and she'd get them back to me. Yeah, that sounds helpful. Me and her trying to connect at the end of an outdoor gathering of ten thousand people. I passed on her generousity and trudged back to the car to deposit my knitting.

As you can imagine this put a damper on the day. Not only did I have to relinguish my project, but my cell phone camera didn't work, so I couldn't have my little revenge. After all, trying to ban cameras is ridiculous, as the crowd were taking pictures and movies all night with their cell phones, not to mention an occasional large camera that had been smuggled in somehow.

And we're not even gonna talk about the plastic beer bottles flying (really) and the contact high from the drugs that were smuggled in in (unsearched) pockets.

Last summer, Operations Man and his sister saw Dylan in Prospect Park. Here is a quick look at the man himself, taken with OM's phone last summer. I guess it's legal, after all, they said "no cameras" not "no pictures". Or maybe me and Bob are both outlaws......he just gets to make more rules than I do.

 

Perplexed, I asked Dr. Knittyvritti what the big deal with the needles might be. She suggested that some performers are so narcissistic that they can't stand the idea that someone would be multi-tasking at their concerts.