theknittyvritti

It's important to call things as they are. Much as we hate to acknowledge this, sometimes what we have is a near miss.

The near-misses that I think are the most important are the near-misses in love. I mean those "I wish this could work, but I know it won't" situations that are so tempting. To avoid loneliness, you might want to make do. Skipping over the fact that a wrong match is likely to be lonely. In the years that I call "eight years in the desert" (between husbands), I had a few of those. Between me and my near-miss counterparts, we managed to do the right thing and call the relationships what they were. In spite of all the pressures to do otherwise...the lure of companionship, the friends, even shrink, who not-so-secretly thought I was just too picky.

Operations Man and I are both relieved. Actually, Operations Man may be even more relieved that since I plan to frog the sweater, the photo shoot was belessedly short.

As I will be when I frog my almost perfect Akoya. The pattern is lovely, well-written and clever. The yarn is beautiful. I am holding up quite well for my years. But together, we just miss.

I can do better by this yarn. Its soft, drapy splendor deserves its perfect match, and I have already begun to search. Kind of like internet dating....

(I'm still counting this as IntSweMoDo #3......the rules don't say that you have to marry them).

blush

 

Self-consciousness is the bane of human existence.

Our capacity to blush is evidence of this. An unfortunate few are cursed with an uncontrollable blush reflex, such that any time they do or say, or even think, anything even slightly embarassing, they turn bright red, registering their discomfort visibly on the world.

 I'm not cursed with this affliction. But I am still prone to excessive self-awareness and self-castigation. I've spent days re-playing moments that I wish had never happened. Internally, invisibly, uncomfortably. If I were a blusher, I might be a much brighter shade of pink most of the time.

I wish I were more like those people who find their own questionable behavior less worthy of attention. Accept that life is full of awkward moments and worse, and make them just not so interesting. I do get better, and someday I may just live fully in the moment, accepting whatever less than gracious acts I commit. Because they will continue to happen, whether I approve of myself or not.

You may be wondering why this topic is coming up at all. Well, I'm not going to share all of the reasons. But I am sharing, above, the yarn I unapologetically bought, breaking my six month ban on new yarns. It was supposed to last until Rhinebeck, but I have been longing to make Akoya since it was published. And in all my lots of sweater yarn, I didn't have anything for it. So I treated myself to this Blue Sky alpaca silk.

Colorway: Blush.

slow knitting

 

Blogging doesn't lend itself to the projects I'm currently working on. There's no way to churn them out and throw them up on the internet. They are each large, complicated items knit on small, small needles. Working on them is making me think about all the things in life that just take time, that can't be rushed.  And how fast we all want everything to move, especially today.

Funny I should be thinking about this, since I'm also writing (for work) about a psychotherapy in which the beginning evidences of arriving at the end results, while they are here, took much longer than even I expected them to. It has been almost excruciatingly moving to witness as the combination of hope and willingness to take tiny steps has resulted in the beginnings of a certainty that the desired ends will be achieved. At times, watching this effort has almost brought me to tears. So much so that if the goal was never reached, the effort would stand as something beautiful and meaningful anyways.

I feel similarly about these projects. They are each in their own way so exquisite, the work is so pleasurable, that if they were never finished, I'm not sure I would mind. How long I wonder, would you be willing to stop by and visit them? Would I be able to convey the satisfaction I find in them? Are you willing to find out? Or do you need an end product, a finished object, to feel like something is happening?

lifelines

We've had an idyllic week here, marred only by intense heat and the absence of rain. Operations Man is very lawn-proud, and he has spent quite a bit of time in this chair surveying his dying lawn, getting up only to move the sprinkler around or toss a ball to the dog. The lawn has suffered quite a bit, but even more significant,our friends who farm here have been frantically doing whatever they could to keep crops alive in a blistering and completely dry heat wave. It has not been easy. Today, thankfully, is one of those rainy July days and we have moved inside and are watching the lifeline for the crops fall from the sky.

 

Muir has gotten a lifeline as well. I'm on the last half of the last repeat, and while I'm pretty sure that I have enough yarn to finish it and the borders. I've given myself a lifeline just in case. I rarely use them, foolihly enough, but this time, I am so ready to move on to something else that I would do damage to myself if I had to tink this shawl for sixteen rows. It's a perfectly good pattern, but I have things I'm eager to begin, or finish.

Lifelines. What a funny term for a knitting technique. It sounds so dramatic, as though shawl-death were a real possibility. When I think of lifelines, I think of real life and death matters. And the way that we are all lifelines for each other. This is true in an everyday way, and also when we are in crisis. We're built to feel each others' joys and pains, and to be moved to help when we see someone hurting. Empathy is one of nature's own lifelines, just like rain.

work in progress

 
This is a small area of garden that feels a bit more like a finished object than a work in progress. Although a few of the plants have to grow a bit more, and there is a tiny area that is still unplanted, I like what is happening here. Color, mass and bloom times are all working together in a way that most of my garden areas do not.

I'm tempted to say that this section is finished, but gardening, like life, is not so static.  Just as you think you've gotten things lined up, something comes and upsets the order of things. Although I long for symmetry, order and harmony, my garden, like my life, is a precarious balance between equanimity and upset. I don't alway know what will happen when I bring something into my garden or my life...whether it will be enhanced or disrupted. Sometimes the only way to know is to see. Luckily, these plants which I bought earlier this month have brought me pleasure. I hope that the rest of the summer's additions will be as felicitous.

 

I have high hopes for this sweater. It may not be hubris to say that it could be finished in three weeks. The yarn and pattern seem perfect for one another. The knitting is going so quickly that it is like watching time-lapse photography. If this one is anything like life, there must be a catch......

lace is not life

 

I've been slowly knitting away at the Mediterranean Lace shawl (rav link) from "A Gathering of Lace" over the last few months. It's my first cobweb weight shawl, and it's a big one, so it will be on the needles for a while, what may eventually come to feel like a lifetime. This one's not easy.

I've been ambitious with my lace projects. I started with a project that was designed for experienced lace knitters, and I have an indelible memory of the process of figuring it out. We were on vacation in South Africa, a place I'm unlikely to ever return to given the difficult travel it requires. Operations Man became so sick that he was confined to his bed for two full days. We were in a peculiar French provincial style hotel in the wine region, with an automatic shift car that I couldn't drive, and there was not much to do on my own. So I spent those days knitting and reknitting the shawl until I had learned the pattern and could execute it perfectly. The shawl is pretty much flawless. And the knitters among you will understand that I had quite a good time in that over-decorated, dimly lit hotel room.

This shawl has a few really complicated rows, and I haven't been able to master them. Earlier this week, I did them quickly, aware that I was making some mistakes, and decided to just blunder on ahead. And yesterday I faced the music. They needed to be re-done, so I spent about four hours ripping cobweb lace and carefully re-knitting the first row of the difficult section again. No one will know but me that I didn't get it right the first time around.

Lace is not life. I made another big mistake this week, one that I've done everything I can to rectify, but when you act like a moron, there's no way to erase what you've done. Ugh, I hate that. I so overreacted to something that I acted like an overgrown hyperarticulate child, and while I've analyzed my reaction (shrink style) and apologized for my behavior, the fact is, that there's no way to undo the fact that my mistake happened and left evidence of it's occurence in the memories of others. I suppose this is the time to confess that my ultimate fantasy in life is to be a Grace Kelley type blonde....cool, calm, always gracious, never dramatic or the least bit aggressive. And that alas, I am prone to fits of unmetabolized excitement over rather small events.

This has something to do with why I love lace, maybe especially this lace, which as it happens, is the color that is sometimes called Grace Kelly blue. Complex like life, takes damn-near a lifetime to do, but unlike life, all mistakes are fixable, as long as you take the time to go back and re-do them. The illusions of perfection and immortality....a human's dream. Easy to see why. In life, we don't  undo our mistakes. We recover as best we can from them. We, or sometimes others, carry them around for as long as they have to or choose to, and we have no choice but to keep moving forward. Hopefully to some less bone-headed moves, but inevitably to new mistakes as well, for as long as we're around to make them.

puppy love...a tale of free association

(No dogs in this story). Let's start with something pretty, adetail of my finished shawl. All of the elements were there. A beautiful pattern, the Peacock Feather Shawl by Dorothy Siemens. And a beautiful yarn, my Squoosh Fiberarts Cedar lace, delicately variegated in the colors of a peacock's tail. It should have been a match made in heaven.

So why did I wake up this morning thinking about Keith H?

As a psychoanalyst, I trained myself to follow chains of association in thinking or speaking. While we are listening to our patients, we ask ourselves, "why is s/he thinking/talking about this now?" Try this, it's actually fun. Seemingly unconnected thoughts are often linked to networks of other thoughts that carry the same emotional quality. So it occurred to me that there might be a direct connection between Keith H. and my plan to blog the finished shawl this morning.

A few moments of reflection revealed the connection. Keith H. is the boy that I loved from afar (well, from across the aisle in Mr. Fox's homeroom, and then whenever we had a class together for the next three years) throughout junior high school. Uh huh, I pined for Keith, who barely glanced at me, for the longest time. His indifference did not matter, pining being a compelling enough activity that it required no encouragement.

I pined for this shawl as well, and almost as long. I saw it a few years ago, and waited for what I thought was the perfect yarn to make it. When I received this lace,  I thought a match had been made in heaven.

I knit it anticipating the usual wonderful surprise I've experienced when lace is blocked. The thing about knitting lace is that you don't really know what you have until it's complete, so you learn not to evaluate the project too much as you are working on it. As I knit, things looked great. The motifs are fantastic, and the yarn seemed to be working. All the elements were there, I thought. Like me and Keith. Both smart, both tall, both kind of reserved and a little edgy.

Still, I had some inkling that things may not be as great as they might be. And I've been here before.

Keith and I did not hang with the same crowd, but one day he came to my friend's house after school and after a long wait, my dream came true. We kissed on the couch for a few hours (this was one of my group's after school activities in those years). I was cautiously happy. It didn't feel like romance per se, but maybe....

The next morning, Keith didn't speak to me in honor's English. I kind of knew the day before might not have been the start of something big, but it smarted just the same. To add insult to injury, when Keith and I made on contact on Facebook, he didn't even remember our tryst, although he did reveal himself to be such a colossal jerk that any residual pining (I confess, he had found a permanent spot in my dreaming life as the avatar of unfulfillment) came to a crashing halt. That at least, was a plus.

I esitate to compare this shawl and Keith H., since I don't have any complaint with the pattern. But things have just not worked out. My shawl is too small, the variegation of the yarn not really quite right.  I doubt we will be spending too much time on the couch together. I don't think I will spend much time pining in this case. While there were very few boys taller than me in sixth grade, making Keith more alluring than he might otherwise have been,there are an awful lot of great shawls to distract me from longing. 

 I almost forgot to mention the wonderful Dorothy Siemens, who was very helpful when my dog ate my pattern. Sorry, I did say no dogs in this story.....A few tips for making this most worthwhile shawl. First, use a slightly heavier yarn than I did, or larger needles. I used number two needles, and my shawl is about six inches smaller than recommended, even with frighteningly aggressive blocking. You absolutely want to be wrapped in feathers for this one, so make it huge. And second, I think it might work better in a non-variegated yarn, or one with very even color tones. This yarn though beautiful and perfect in patches, just doesn't work overall.

And as for teen crushes and their aftermaths? Well, for every Facebook story of rekindled romance, I just bet there are ten like mine....stories that end in you saying....now I get it....phew......

 

secrets

This is the time of year when the earth gives up it's secrets. Everything that has lain dormant all winter is starting to emerge. This is one of my favorite times of the year. Secrets revealed are a rare thing in my life.

I love secrets. I always have. When I was little, I wanted to be the girl who heard the secrets of the other girls. Now that I am grown, I have ended up in a job where the searching out and keeping of secrets is my life's work. It's become second nature to me to be a repository of things that people don't want known, or at least don't want known by many.

Keeping secrets for a living is a privilege, but it is not without it's attendant deprivations. That is why I am so happy to be able to report that I am just about to reveal a secret. Perhaps next week, if not, certainly the week after. I've been keeping it for months now, because I wanted to be able to not just tell it, but show it. And I am full of the excitement that comes of being on the verge of telling a secret--an excitement that can be used destructively, or for the sweet and harmless pleasure of the release of the telling.

Here is a clue. I have been working busily on something to do with my Tempest that I can hardly wait to tell you about.

important scientific discovery

From the desk of Dr. Knittyvritti:

Exciting developments in the Knittyvritti case!  I can scarcely contain my excitement, since I think my findings may have important implications.....

Knittyvritti is an OCD knitter, that is, she suffers terribly from perfectionism in knitting. Her projects take inordinate amounts of time, since she seems almost completely unable to tolerate the distress of a mistake. No matter the cost of time and the invisibility of the error, she feels compelled to tink back and start over , when she finds an error. Why, just last week, she undid all of her progress on the gathered pullover, unable to comprehend that it really was fine as it was.

This week, though, KV came to her session with the Entangled Stitches glove she has been telling me about. The pattern (which I myself had been eying on Ravelry is eleven pages, and I don't know how many charts). Oy veh, I thought, she may go psychotic......

KV began her session by proudly announcing that she had found an error in the pattern, and in that prissy "aren't I good" voice of hers, reported that she had notified the author of her mistake. But then something very strange happened.

"Here, she said, "I want you to take a look at this. The way the border cables and center cables connect is really neat, but my stitches didn't really add up at row 81. This top row of cables isn't really knit properly according to the pattern. I must have miscounted somewhere, and I just kind of improvised this section".  Colleagues, I braced for the inevitable round of self-flagellation.

But she went on, "and look here---the whole left side lacks the knit purl border for the cable pattern section. I just forgot to put it in there!"

I held fast to the arms of my chair and braced for the usual display of anguish, and the possibility that the next two sessions would be spent discussing the absolute necessity of ripping the whole thing out and starting over. And that means twice, since, after all, this is a glove, and she does have two hands.

"But you know", she continued, "I can't help thinking that this glove is just beautiful anyway. I've never seen such an exquisitely complex pattern in my life, and I can't fault myself for not grasping the whole thing the first time around. I feel some affection for this glove just the way it is."

This has never happened! I'm reluctant to credit the years of work that KV and I have done together on her compulsivity. I think maybe it is the pattern.  Finally, she has found a pattern so perfect that it paradoxically challenges the notion that perfect is the only possibility, a pattern that has finally taught her that imperfection is part of life and to be enjoyed.

Of course, these breakthroughs are always fragile, and KV was unable to go the next step in this session--to agree to show you the whole glove. In order to trust that real change is taking place, she will have to show that she will not suffer shame if her knitting has flaws. But she has agreed to an extra session this week, because she knows that we must strike while the iron is hot. With any luck, she will be posting the glove very soon!

patti smith's mom and my dad

SNAP.

I imagine that was the sound, but since the knitting needle broke in the bag, and no one heard it, I'm not sure there was a sound.

Having finished the baby blanket (many tears were shed upon it's delivery ), I decided to resume work on the pin tuck tee. Packed it up for the weekend, new stoppers on the ends of the needles, and when I retrieved it, the tip of a needle was broken. Don't know yet if I have another number two circular needle anywhere. It's not the easiest needle to come by, and my most local LYS is closed on Monday. Not. Dealing. Yet.

What does this have to do with Patti Smith's mom and my dad? Who did not, by the way, go to different schools together, as my dad likes to say. Well, Patti was interviewed in the NY Times yesterday, and when asked about dealing with the numerous tragedies in her life, she said that her mother, who also had many tragedies, used to say that when she was down she would do laundry--that the laundry waving in the wind (mmm..problematic) looked like a new start. And when the very worst thing that ever happened to me happened, I called my father the next morning, and asked him what to do. He told me to make some toast and go to work . I listened to him, and in about five years, I felt a lot better. In the meantime, eating toast was a help.

Believe me, it's not so easy to sell this kind of advice (I do try in my day job). But in the end, there's nothing more profound.

Of course, I recognize that broken and possibly hard to replace needles are not a tragedy, but I still took a stroll to the back yard and found this:

 

And just moved on to something else.