January One

Georgie woke up singing this song this morning. We’ve been on a Foreigner kick lately. We had been talking about them for awhile – did we have their greatest hits? Why didn’t we have their greatest hits? And then one day last week or so I got in the car and noticed that the little snowflake was on next to the temperature gauge and all of a sudden “Cold As Ice” came on the radio! I thought what a funny coincidence! We were just talking about Foreigner and now it’s cold and here’s the song! DUH. Silly me! Georgie had bought the CD and set up the radio so when I turned the car on it would fill with those beginning piano chords. He’s so goofy!

Today didn’t start out so good. I was feeling physcially better, but kind of anxious. Can I confess something? December was beyond awful. I spent every day terrified about Georgie’s illness and anxiety doesn’t even begin to slice it. But, and this is a really big but, it was also something of a relief to have something REAL to be anxious about. And it wasn’t about me. A lot of the time I spend in my head making up stuff to be freaked out about and feel out of control about and when there is something tangible to ACTUALLY FREAK OUT about with GOOD REASON, well, in all honesty, that’s kind of a relief for me. Does that make sense? Because I’d rather panic every day for the rest of my life than have Georgie be sick. I hope I’m making sense.

Anyway. I was feeling kind of bad this morning. Anxiety bad. And still a little physcially bad but mostly anxiety bad so I finished up some work then I decided to run again. Tomorrow is supposed to be BRUTALLY cold around here (maybe not as cold at Zeneedle Land, but still, high of 16, windchills in the negative numbers – that’s pretty freaking cold) so I thought if I want to run again this week I better do it today. So I did. And I felt SO much better after. I came in the house and wrote my run down on the calendar and realized that I have run three days a week since the first week of January. Four weeks down! YAY!

I also got a great email from a very happy client. Also YAY!

And early this morning I split up the fronts and back on CPH:

Still loving the project – mainly because I’m loving the Beaverslide! (Worsted Weight, Huckleberry Heather.) I’m thinking I might still knit the fronts and back at the same time. I’ll have to keep track of some things a bit more, but it might be nice to turn those cables all at the same time. We’ll see. We’re going away week after next (Palo Alto peeps! I’m coming out there!) and G keeps saying it’s going to be cold and I’d love to have the sweater done by then, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I can be fast, but not that fast. Maybe I’ll finish it out there. I haven’t tackled the math yet, but I think I’ve got a handle on what needs to be done. Thanks for all the offers of help. And for all the cheering up. I really appreciate it. This day is definitely looking better.

Rissie Zeenberg, my maternal grandmother, taught me to knit one fine rainy afternoon. I’m going to guess it was the fall of 2002, although I’m not a hundred percent sure. She gave me some pink plastic needles and some Day-Glo Orange Red Heart and set me on my way. My grandmother is definitely more of a seamstress than a knitter, although she’s knit lots of great stuff, and she’s always amazed at what I can do with two needles, some yarn and one very quick lesson. I guess it was the right place at the right time because I’m not the only grandchild to ask her to teach them how to knit, but I’m definitely the only one that’s really stuck with it (read: become obsessed.) What she says, though, is that I remind her of my other grandmother, my paternal grandmother, Harriet Davis. My nana stopped knitting after suffering an aneurysm and a massive stroke when I was nine. She was the real knitter in the family, as my grandmom likes to say, churning out Arans of every size for the whole family. I remember those sweaters very well – but I have no idea what happened to them. The really sad part is that I have no memory of my nana knitting. As I said, she had the stroke when I was nine, and while she recovered enough to live on her own for another ten years, she was never the same afterward. She had to relearn to walk and talk and her left side was always very weak. Sometimes, though, when I knit night after night, I like to think that I’m like her, this grandmother I barely knew – I’ve got her knitting gene. And that makes me so very happy.

Rosie’s Yarn Cellar, one of my favorite Philly knitting shops, has decided on a new book policy for the store (via Go Knit In Your Hat.) They’ve decided that they’ve had it with books insulting their grandmothers. You know the ones – they claim a million hip trendy knits – the “not your grandmother’s knitting” knits. On the store’s blog, they talk about beginning knitting books that dumb everything down, with lots of big needles and lots of scarves. And how, at their store, they challenge their beginning knitters with fair isle and dpns. I’ve knit exactly ONE scarf in my life, and I hated just about every minute of it. I’ve knit three hats – okay four – if you count the fun fur extravaganza. I don’t wear hats and I don’t wear scarves and I pretty much knit for myself so that’s that. My first real project, after a million and half swatches, was a 5’x6′ four color slip stitch blanket that I knit with acrylic. It was also my foray into circular needles (for knitting flat.) We use it all the time. The only lesson I had had was my grandmother teaching me to knit and purl. That’s it. Whenever people email me with questions – they can’t do this, it’s too hard – what’s too hard? Everything is either knitting or purling with some variety thrown in! That’s it! And the best part about knitting is if you try it and it doesn’t work, you can rip and try again. And again and again and again. Eventually you’ll figure it out.

Anyway, back to the books and grandmothers. For the most part I agree with Rosie’s policy. Part of the problem is that I don’t think there’s enough variety out there in knitting books. It all sort of seems the same to me. That’s what I thought was so fantastic about Mason Dixon Knitting – if you were something of a beginner – there were plenty of projects to knit and feel comfortable with. If you were a more advanced knitter, it was the perfect jumping off point for boundless creativity. (Visions of log cabins are ALWAYS dancing in my head….) And the best part of the book was WHATEVER your skill level, it NEVER SPOKE DOWN to you! Never assumed you couldn’t knit anything you put your mind to. Maybe that’s the problem with all these “not your grandmother’s knitting” books. It’s not that their’ knitting scarves on big needles, it’s that they’re actually assuming that my grandmother’s knitting was too complicated and intricate and time-consuming for my whirlwind fantastic super fast super terrific life. Why would I want to slow things down, with small(er) needles and charts and new skills? We are, after all, an instant gratification society. I also think that books like these – Knit it fast! Knit it fun! – and their publishers buy into the whole “knitting as trend” philosophy rather than the knitting as art or knitting as craft (or knitting is FOREVER) attitude. Popular or not popular, I have no plans to stop knitting anytime soon. Just some thoughts. Talk amongst yourselves.

Speaking of knitting, things are finally going well with my Central Park Hoodie. I’m a couple rows away from my fourth cable turn and all is well. I’m loving the yarn. The pattern is easy. I’m doing the back and fronts all in one piece up the armholes, and once I figured out how to read a chart, it was smooth sailing. I basically have taken out one stitch at each back end and one stitch at each front end (where the fronts meet the back) so that the ribbing all matched out. These are the stitches that would’ve been used for seaming – and since I won’t have any seams in the body – I won’t need them. I’m planning on doing the sleeves at the same time as well.

The yarn, as you know, is Beaverslide‘s 90% Merino/10% Kid Mohair in the Huckleberry Heather color. I’m really enjoying knitting with it – even with the 10% Mohair. I don’t notice it all and the yarn is soft enough and it’s about as hairy as the Cascade 220 Heather I used for Ariann. So no problems. I will mention that every now and again I come across a knot in one of the plys of this two-ply yarn. It’s not that big of a deal – I just snip the knot out and spit splice it all back together. No biggie. It might bother some people though, so I thought I should mention. Other than that, I’m enjoying the yarn so much I bought enough for two more sweaters! Excellent value too. Each skein holds at least 200 yds.

I’m having fun with the cables – it seems like a long time since I’ve done cables. And, yes, I use a cable needle. I LIKE my cable needle. I can see if you were doing a really complicated piece where you had to cable every five seconds you might want to master cabling without the needle, and maybe I will someday coughAmKamincough, but for now I like my needle. I also came up with a handy dandy method of keeping track of my rows. I don’t like all those row counter thingamabobs and I like my stitch markers very plain, so every row that I turn the cable I loop a long piece of thread through the first stitch and that’s how I keep count. Want to see?

I like it nice and long because that way it doe
sn’t fall out. Not brain science in the least, but it works for me and since you all seem to like the tips and things…. Thanks for all the nice comments about my brief tutorial yesterday. You’re very kind, but don’t expect to see that kind of stuff around here very often. I’ll leave the lessons to the experts. I’m just fuddling along like everyone else!

One last thing – I’m THRILLED to tell you all that G-ROCKS and January One are now for sale over at Blue Moon. Their website’s working just fine and you can all go buy buy buy! THANK YOU!