... my Ravelry queue is spiraling out of control towards unrealistically ambitious levels. Also, I want to knit everything designed by Cecily Glowik Macdonald and Gudrun Johnson. That is all.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Thursday, June 16, 2011
lost: knitting mojo
Whenever I don't knit for awhile, it always takes me awhile to regain my knitting mojo, for lack of a better, less dorky term, and my first attempts to pick up the needles again always feel clunky and awkward. Case in point: my tri-country Ishbel, to which I clearly did not pay enough attention during my intermittent attempts to pick it up while traveling through Vietnam and India (though partially this is because I crashed my motorbike directly onto my wrist and was a bit out of commission for a few weeks - though it's OK now!) After two days of dutifully working away at it here in Scotland, I finally had to come to terms with the fact that after three repeats of the charts, it looked nothing like the gorgeous Ishbels populating Ravelry. Not even a tiny bit. I've never been much of a lacy shawl knitter, so it's probably not surprising that I wasn't doing my best while trying to read a faded, crumpled pattern in a Mysore hotel room while deciding if I could justify ordering room service curry while watching reruns of last year's So You Think You Can Dance (I could, it turned out).
I'm too embarrassed to post photos of my terrible Ishbel, but - as much as I'd love to have a lovely knitted shawl I could say I worked on in three countries - I know that it's too far gone and that I'm going to have to just give in and frog the whole thing. My fear of frogging and all the wasted time it represents is one of the reasons I'm probably so willing to accept imperfection in my knitting projects, and though I'm typically fairly laid back about not being perfect, I do think that this time around, for myself, striving to get it right is the only way I'll ever be able to manage lace - otherwise I'll just end up with a closetful of horribly mangled shawls that even I'm embarrassed to wear in public. So a little perfectionism is a good thing, right?
In the meantime, depressed by my total loss of knitting mojo, I cracked open the only other project I had waiting for me in the UK. Months ago, when we were packing up and moving out of our house in Japan, I sent enough yarn for one Snowbird sweater to my boyfriend's Aberdeenshire home. I'm knitting it in Berroco Ultra Alpaca Light, which at the moment feels a bit scratchy, but which has a nice texture, particularly on the reverse stockinette in which most of the sweater is knit. Besides that, though, it just feels nice to be back in my knitting comfort zone, using nice familiar size six needles and being able to knit and watch TV again. Yay, sweater knitting!
Monday, June 13, 2011
yet more wayfaring (a little bit of knitting)
The last month or so has been lots more living out of a backpack - great fun, but not always conducive to knitting. While I wasn't getting much knitting done, I was riding a moped over roads of various quality in Northern Vietnam:
And then visiting India for the first time! After dreaming of visiting for most of my life, I stumbled across some cheap Air Asia tickets and decided to go for it despite the time constraints, because who knows when I'll be in Asia again. I only had a few days, but I saw a little bit of Kerala...
... and also Mysore in Karnataka, where I became obsessed with all the insanely gorgeous colors:
I wish I'd had more time in India, but I had to hurry to Scotland in time for a friend's wedding:
Throughout all of this, I did have an increasingly crinkled WIP in my backpack - a very slow-going Ishbel shawl, knit in madtosh prairie in Oxblood, which looks far more luminous in this photo than it does in real life.
To be fair, living in a crumpled up Citimart shopping bag for six weeks is probably not the ideal condition for any yarn. I finally made it to the lace section in India, and since then it has started to move a lot faster. It was hard to work up enthusiasm for knitting in Asia's 40 degree early summer weather, but Scotland - with it's cold, rainy June - is much better knitting weather, so here's hoping I can finish it before I head back to the States (and to all the yarn I sent home from Japan months ago).
Monday, April 11, 2011
more wayfaring, less knitting
Eek. I had not intended to go nearly two months without a post - since the last time I posted, we saw lots of early blooming cherry blossoms, entertained out of town guests, finished our contracts, said goodbye to all our friends and students, and packed up and moved out of Japan two weeks ago. Though we felt the earthquake on March 11 - and many of the aftershocks - we were very far removed from the all the hard hit areas, with no more than the occasional rolling blackout to contend with, and so were just glued to the news with everyone else.
From Japan, we flew back to Vietnam, where first we stopped here to relax a bit:
... before heading back to our old onetime home Hanoi:
Hanoi hasn't changed much since we left two years ago, and it feels awesome to be here - I am as happy to be back in Vietnam as I am sad to be out of Japan. It also feels awesome to *finally* have free time again - all of March was so disgustingly busy, I didn't even have time to think about knitting. Unfortunately, because there's so much traveling ahead, I have a very limited amount of yarn with me to last until I get to Iain's house in Scotland in early June (where I managed to tuck a ridiculous amount of yarn into a box of books he was already sending back): just two skeins of madtosh prairie and a ball of malabrigo silky merino, to be specific. I started with much, much more, but my backpacker pack couldn't handle it, and so I had to reluctantly mail most of the stuff I wanted to work on back to my mother's house. It feels a bit ridiculous to have little stockpiles of yarn waiting all over the world, but in the meantime I was finally able to shake off the awesome food - lazy beaches - motorbikes everywhere! stupor that has been our two weeks back in VN and wind half a ball of prairie to get started on an Ishbel shawl. So hopefully there'll be more knitting soon...
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Thursday, February 10, 2011
happy knit day!
It's "Knit Day" in Japan, thanks to a mash up of English and Japanese, using ni (2) and to (10) to sound (sorta) like "knit" (or, neato?). Though the day went largely un-commemorated in Numazu, I was extremely happy to see this: only the awesomest thing in the whole wide world ever. Guerrilla knitting! Octopi on trains! I love Japan!
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Snow White
... is finished! Yay for the first sweater of 2011! Knitting endless rounds of 2x2 ribbing may not have been the most exciting thing, but things got much more interesting once I got to the raglan decreases - I've never seen a sweater knit quite like this, with either sides of the shoulder worked separately and then joined via kitchener stitch, but I love the shrug-like quality of the neck and the general flattering-ness of the pattern! The 2x2 decreases in the front give a nice illusion of curves I don't actually have. Yay.
As an added bonus, it covers the small tattoo at the base of my neck, which means I can wear it to work in tattoo-phobic Japan!
Other thoughts on:
The Pattern: Snow White by Ysolda Teague. This pattern has a unique construction that made the last few hours of knitting quite interesting. As many other people on Ravelry observed, just follow the instructions and everything will make sense. I didn't make any modifications other than making the sleeves shorter by exactly one round (they are quite long), and I also rather lazily bound off the neck stitches in a regular bind-off, to no apparent disadvantage. Though I can be a bit of a sloppy knitter, I think the directions are thorough and the pattern is forgiving enough that it looks quite finished. The only thing I wasn't able to totally pull off successfully was the tubular cast on, which - while stretchy - felt rather tight, and pulls the flared sleeves inwards a bit, though not overly noticeably. I'm guessing I must have done something wrong? In any case, you barely notice when it's on, it's just a bit tight when you pull it over your head.
The Yarn: Noro Cash Iroha in dark teal, 8.5 skeins. This single-ply yarn is so soft and almost pearlescent; I fell in love with the color over a year ago when I saw an unwound skein of it hanging from the wall in a Berkeley yarn shop, so I'm happy I finally made something with it. I haven't blocked this yet, so I can't say anything yet about the performance over time (though if the Thisbe hat I made for my sister is any indication, it'll just soften up more?). My only complaint is that virtually every ball had a knot in it, which means I had to weave in twice as many ends :-(
Raveled here.
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