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.

the color purple

I didn't think I still loved the color purple as much as I apparently do until I got most of the way through NaKniSweMoDo. I've made more purple sweaters than sweaters of any other color.

Just like words, colors have associations for us, based on personal memory. My first design choice was the decision to paint the walls of my room purple as a pre-teen. My mother, who detests purple, probably hated it, but she kept that to herself. Unlike my first mother-in-law, who shared her opinion that purple was the color of death (really?) with me on a shopping expedition that was supposed to be a bonding experience. Well, when she took me to the polyester clothing store, I simply announced that I only wore natural fabrics. Needless to say, it was an uneasy relationship at best. I can't say I didn't try (occasionally). Like the time I visited and found when I arrived that she had locked herself in her bedroom after my then husband and his father had teased her about making tomato aspic, which she had then unceremoniously dumped down the drain. Who do you think ended up in her room consoling her( and this after her most interesting pronouncement, that psychologists make lousy parents)? Fortunately, the aspic was gone, so I wasn't really tested.......I have to say, I might have laughed too. Not yet understanding the urge to cook odd foods for the people you love, and not yet aware of Julia Child and maybe, just maybe, fighting back.

Where was I? Oh, yes, purple. Seems like I have strong feelings about purple....or in-laws, or something.....Well, sweater nine is going to be purple, and so is sweater ten. And sweater eleven is a purply-brown. I'm mother-in-law-less this time around (although I do have some really loveable in-laws), and I'm still a natural fabric girl. And my mother still doesn't like purple, and since I'm not a teenager anymore, I'll probably get an honest opinion about the sweaters.

Speaking of natural fabric, the cone is cashmere from Colourmart. I'm really looking forward to knitting it up; it's my first and only Colourmart purchase. And check out the fabric below. It's the back of sweater nine, made of Rowan Cotton Glace. I'm loving this pure cotton yarn, and the cool stitch pattern of this sweater. Purple natural fabric? I guess I've died and gone to heaven.

waiting

There's a lot of room for a lot of plants in this garden. Every year we buy some, but after eight years, we are not even close to being done. I accept the fact that we are not willing to break the bank buying huge, mature specimens, so that we can have the easy gratification of seeing them in their full glory immediately after we've planted them. Which means that I have been waiting. 

The lilacs were one of the first plants we bought. When we bought them, they were in bloom. New to gardening, I didn't understand how plants are forced into bloom before they're shipped to the nursery, and I assumed that we would enjoy beautiful flowers the following years as well. We got one flower the following year. Once I realized that the lilacs were in the wrong place, I resigned myself to waiting a year, maybe two, before they would bloom after the stress of re-planting. That was four years ago. Each year, I eagerly await the first signs of life on the lilac bushes, and each year, I am disappointed, no, slightly crushed, to see that there are no flowers.

I had no reason to hope, but this year, it looks like I am wrong to be so cautious about my desire. Waiting is like that. While you are waiting, you must manage desire. You can distract yourself, try harder to do better without necessarily knowing what you are doing wrong, or abandon all hope. I've done them all, but in the end, waiting is just waiting. Life requires that we get good at it, and gardening teaches it.

 

That is, unless you are the Yarn Eater, who spends most of the day waiting for dinner, often like this, and is naturally good at it.

severe initiation

I have forgotten much of my undergraduate social psychology, but a few bodies of research have stayed with me. One of them found that the harder it is to get into a club, the more you will value your membership.  Essentially, the experimenters in these studies varied the onerousness of the things one had to do to become a member of a group---think fraternity hazing. They found that the more severe the initiation ritual, the more value a person would ascribe to the group.

This has to explain the strange phenonemon that is a yarn love group. Let me say before I start that I have nothing against indie yarn dying (actually, I'm in favor of anything creative, and any job that is off the grid, so to speak). For the most part I like the yarn I've bought indie. But man, I don't get the yarn trading scene.

I noticed talk about this yarn on the Rav boards a few months ago, and decided to get some. I found a color I liked, and ordered a skein. It came, it was pretty. So far, so good. Then I decided that I wanted to get another skein to make a large shawl. Given that each color is sold for only a month, no more was available from the dyer. I found someone selling several skeins of my color on the Rav board, and contacted her. At first, the yarns were promised to someone else. Then I got lucky. The deal fell through. Two skeins were available to me, and a little concerned about dye lot matching, I decided to buy them both from this other Raveler, in case they did not match my dye lot, figuring I could always sell mine.

I waited with bated breath. When they arrived, the skeins looked lighter than my one skein, a little bit suspiciously light,  but it wasn't until I started knitting with them that I realized this:

Those white spots are just that. White spots where the yarn has no dye. I went back to the boards, and carefully asked about white spots. Understand, the board is visited mostly by grown women waxing rhapsodic about individual skeins of sock yarn, that is, exhibiting the effects of their own severe initiation. Some of these group members (I think of them as beanie baby yarn collectors owing to the fervor with which they buy and trade skeins of yarn) were just sure that those white spots were meant to be there, adding to the beauty of the yarn. Really????

Others were not so starry-eyed, able to admit that sometimes these yarns were shipped out flawed. They did report that the dyer was known to be very accommodating in dealing with problems like this. And I did get one great tip which I'd like to pass on. If this happens to you, you simply need to get yourself a prismacolor marker in the shade of the yarn, and well, just color in those damn spots:

As in the above "after" picture. It works. Annoying, but it does get rid of those white spots. So this project is knit (then tink--it is lace), knit some more, and color. Goofy, and not something I want to have to do again.  

Part of the severe initiation in the yarn-trading world is that you buy yarn sight unseen, always a bit of a risk. The potential problem with buying blind just multiplies when you buy second-hand. I don't really want to get into it with the seller. A regular on the boards, did she know that she had been shipped an inferior product but decide to just pass it along?  I'll never know. And I really don't have a case with the dyer, since I'm not her customer.

  The piece de resistance in terms of hazing is the update. If you're not buying a color of the month, or signing up to blindly purchase yarn in a themed color family (so not appealing for the non-trader), you can purchase at periodic "updates", in which a batch of yarns is posted to the internet for sale at a pre-announced time and then snatched up within moments.  First come Paypal shopping carts battling to capture enough skeins of one color to actually make something. People literally talk about yarns being thrown out of their shopping cart, and I can't help picture aisles of self-propelled carts with skeins of yarns flying overhead. Then comes the muted crowing and anguished moaning on the Rav board about what each person managed, or not, to snag in the ten-minute skirmish, followed by feverish negotiations for what was missed.

Not to mention that the yarn sold this way is as expensive or more than anything comparable. All of this "fun" does not come cheap.

Although I'm sure I'll be tempted by the odd skein on-line, for the most part, I try to buy my yarn in person (helps to live in a major city on this one). Touch it, smell it, look carefully at it, and then buy it. Pre-digital yarnies, that's the club I want to belong to. Even though there's nothing onerous about a few hours passed leisurely in a yarn shop. Just think of me as a statistical outlier, the one who messes up the study.

a case of acting out, part two

In an informal conference held in the car on the way to the knitting store this weekend, High Test and I decided that there really was no point in my knitting what appears to be a tablecloth (see previous post), since I probably would not wear it. There are advantages to having an outspoken sister, in spite of the pain of acknowledging that, at times, she is right.  I can actually make something a lot more reasonably sized and re-sell the third skein of the beautiful ruby port lace yarn. This little brain-melt was a perfect albeit relatively inconsequential example of the problem with the actions that you do when you are acting out: they tend to bring with them a world of tears. Hence the value in learning to sublimate, or at least to count to ten very slowly before making any decision that might seem a little rash.

The essential reasonableness of the decision to abandon the sampler shawl was brought home today when I received my shipment of another skein of lace yarn. Sundara, colorway "green olive tapenade". I bought this one for a specific project (hurray for foresight and planning!). I've wanted to make "Muir" since the first time I saw it here .

Actually, I'd love to have a several impressive piles of lace shawls. My first pile is just beginning....

 

...suggesting that it would be wise for me to choose projects of reasonable scope. So, I will spend some time today looking for, and maybe casting on for, a lace project of normal diminsions.

 

Said diversion made possible by the near completion of cable-licious two, which is a third of a sleeve and some sewing away from being done. Woo-hoo! 

And I just want to say that I do know how to spell "dimensions". Every time I try to correct the error above, Typepad throws a fit and shuts down my internet connection. Spooky.