Cerebral Hemorrhage

Topeka, 1994-2008

My best friend for 14 years. I miss you. I hope there are lots of pouncy treats where you are.

An Odd Number of Mittens

I seem to have a problem:

Depending on how you look at it, I either have too many mittens, or not enough mittens. I've been treating mitten patterns a bit like one might treat a crossword puzzle. You wouldn't solve the same crossword puzzle twice, would you? Well, it depends.

I am admitting that the snail mitten turned out a little on the small side. Not sure I want to knit 3 of them, so I gave myself permission to move on.  Mitten #2, Anemoi by Eunny Jang, also a bit small. We won't discuss why I am apparently doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Also, I'm not sure how I feel about the lack of contrast and the color dominance on this one. I think maybe red should have been the main color? Or something.

And then there was number 3.

This one is juuuust right. I am already working on the second chart on it's mate, and I hope to finish by this time next week. Now this is a puzzle worth solving twice. Of course, it helps that I solved it right the first time.

Pattern: Tiffany from Knitty
Yarn: I took a chance here by using Noro Cash Iroha as the main color and pairing it with the slightly lighter weight, more fair-isle appropriate Peruvian Highland Wool from Elann. The Noro is a little rigid for fair isle knitting because of its silk content and because it is a 1-ply yarn. So even though my stranding has greatly improved since my first pair of mittens, there is still just a touch of puckering, even after blocking. Not enough that I care, though. The Cash Iroha is a vibrant grass green (#100 I believe), the secondary color is Peruvian Highland Wool in Dusky Purple, The blue details are Deep Blue Sea, and the wrist band consists of Aubergine, Chocolate Truffle and same Dusky Purple in the main pattern.

Again, without the thumb:

Love.

Snails!

This has been the longest day of my life. Did somebody forget to tell me when today ended and tomorrow began? Because I think it must be tomorrow by now.  Friends, I have spent the entire day entering numbers into a spreadsheet. I do not recommend it. I think I have been cursed and someone turned me into one of these guys:

Except they're much cuter than I'm feeling right about now. The stranded mitten knitting obsession continues. Except after today, knitting charts may remind me too much of Excel spreadsheets. Also I may have gone cross-eyed.

Pattern: Norwegian Snail Mittens from The Knitter's Book of Yarn by wonderful Clara Parkes of KR. Pattern by Adrian of helloyarn.com who recently designed those fabulous Fiddlehead Mittens of which I desperately tried to buy a kit at the scheduled time but failed miserably, so instead I wait not very patiently for the pattern to be released separately. (Wow, that was a mouthful. Forgive me. Data Entry Brain.)

Yarn: A complete hodgepodge of fingering weight yarns--the greeny blue is Fearless Fibers sock yarn in Juniper leftover from my Nutkin socks, the gray is Rowan 4-ply Soft and the wine-color is Shibui Sock in mulberry.

Neither Bird Nor Buffalo

Instead of giving up blogging, I'm going to try my hand at speed blogging.

This week, I learned that blocking does, in fact, work miracles:

Before and after blocking.

Ahh, that's much better. Here's both blocked, front and back:

To recap, these are Bird in Hand Mittens by Kate Gilbert, knit in Paton's Classic Merino in what has become my favorite color combination. Green has long been my favorite color, purple has been my second favorite color for a less long time, but long nonetheless. And look at that, they look good together too, at least I think so, my Punky Brewster sensibilities notwithstanding.

The only thing about these mittens is I'm not so sure about the actual bird in hand (or "in thumb," as it were). My embroidery skills are clearly lacking, and I believe what we have here is a two-legged buffalo wearing a saddle.

Ah, well, I never did claim to be a multi-crafter. Nonetheless, I am feeling almost maternal toward these mittens. If there was any major knitting mountain left for me to climb, it was stranded colorwork. I'm not completely comfortable with it yet, but I'm definitely ready to do more of it now.

I promised a picture of a finished sock, and guess what, you can have two! So generous of me, really.

Anna's Socks from Through the Loops. Forgive me the black Winter Silks sticking out. They're prettier to look at than my hairy winter legs, and it was 9 degrees when I left the house this morning!

Catching Up, Before I Fall Behind Again

Do you ever get the feeling that your blog is one more friend that you aren't doing a very good job of keeping in touch with? I'm a lousy, er, keeper-in-toucher. Lousy, lousy, lousy. Luckily most of my friends are, too, so they're all perfectly happy to hear from me once or twice a year. I think maybe you guys might stop reading if I pulled that trick here, huh?

I have been doing a lot of knitting, though not a lot of finishing. Work life has many exciting things going on, a big happy development that's encroaching somewhat on my ability to goof off while at work. Damn boss. (Um, for those that don't know, that would be me.) And I just don't get enough time off from work that I want to spend it in front of a computer, so I prefer not to blog from home. So I have a feeling blogging might suffer a bit for the next several months.

But here's what I've been up to in the knitting department:

This is the Double Knot Cable Scarf by Dawn Brocco. A freakishly expensive pattern download, but freakishly clever, too, so I have forgiven it. I screwed up a number of cable twists, for which I have forgiven myself. This is a very long and skinny scarf, knit in Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Chunky to match the Gretel beret I made in December. Oh, and I did modify the pattern at the ends, completely fudging it the whole way in order to get the rounded points on the ends. The original pattern begins and ends with a straight edge just below the first cable twist.

Also:

I've actually finished this sock (one sock, not two), but I don't seem to have taken a picture of that. This is a marvelous little pattern by Kristen Kapur. What this picture doesn't show is the nice side ribbing details, how the pattern tapers off at a point mid-foot, and, well basically this picture pretty much just sucks and is clearly an attempt on my part not to show off my hairy winter legs.  I'll get you guys a better photo later. In the meantime, it looks like this, but green. The yarn is wonderful, a semi-solid in a pretty shade of celery green by Shibui.   

And finally:

Bird in Hand by Kate Gilbert, which I doubt needs a link. Yet another attempt at stranded knitting.  Blocking does work miracles, right? Right??? (The yarn is Paton's Classic Merino, purchased with a gift card from Michaels. Thanks, Elizabeth!)

Cheating the Memes

I don't have much to show in the knitting department right now. I was waiting for a replacement needle for the Koolhaas hat until last night, and in the meantime I cast on for a scarf to match my Gretel hat. I'm about 80% done, but I love the scarf too much to show it to you before it's put on its makeup, and I have about 10-12" more to knit before it gets the blocking it deserves. So I have nothing to show you. I was going to skip the blogging until then, but then I saw some interesting memes being tossed around.

The first meme is from Sallyjo. “Show a section of your book shelf, and talk about it.”

The observant among you may notice that I have a section of a bookshelf right in my blog's banner. I am lazy, and it also so happens to contain some of my favorite books. So there.

This is A - G of my poetry section at home. Yes, it is alphabetized. Don't be fooled. I am not really this organized. I ran out of space a long time ago and now there are books pretty much piled on every available surface. Notice they're also crammed sideways on top. I read a lot of poetry, have taken a lot of classes in both writing and reading poetry, and I used to write quite a bit of it too. Now, lacking time to do much of any of those things, I seem to mostly just own a lot of it. Anyway, the first part of the alphabet includes three of my favorite poets. My absolute all-time favorite is John Berryman, second favorite is John Ashbery, and depending on my mood, I would probably put Robert Creeley somewhere in my top 10 just for this poem alone:

I Know a Man

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, --John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look out where yr going.

Maybe you have to hear it read out loud by my former poetry professor. The man can read the hell out of a poem. Someone needs to give him an audiobook contract or something.

John Berryman is most well-known for his long poem/collection of poems called The Dream Songs. It is possibly the most perfect thing I know on this earth. A little bit nursery rhyme, a little bit surreal, disturbing, bittersweet. I'm torn between showing him to you at his most charming or his most disturbing. I'll go by the theory that people will come for the charm, and stay for the disturbing. So, charming:

Dream Song 14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

John Ashbery is probably way too famous at this point to need much of an introduction. Hell, even MTV has had a piece of him.  What I love about John Ashbery is, well, everything. I have honestly never read a poem of his that I didn't  connect to in some way. Which I suppose is a little odd, really, given his somewhat obtuse style. This Slate article about him is wonderful (I find him almost as fascinating to read about as I do to read his work) and this particular nugget may be the most insightful thing ever said about him:

Ashbery becomes a kind of radio transistor through which many different voices, genres, and curious archaeological remains of language filter, so that the poems are like the sound you would hear if you spun through the FM/AM dial without stopping to tune into any one program for long. Sometimes (as you can imagine) this is infuriating. But in the best of Ashbery, the excess verbiage helps make the moments of lyric focus all the more propulsive and startling, like coming across a lost tune as you spin the dial..

One of my favorites is here.

I'm a couple of days early for the second meme, but since I'm already cheating....it's time for the Blogger's Annual Silent Poetry Reading, or it will be on February 2. And, um, well, I read you a whole bunch of poems today, didn't I? Never could follow directions very well...

Cracking Up

I'm a klutz. The sort of klutz where most accidents don't really phase me because they happen with such frequency and regularity that it would be like noticing every time I burped or cleared my throat. If I have a bruise or a scratch or two (and I always do) I won't be able to tell you how I got it, because the event would be so incidental that I wouldn't have bothered to take notice. A bump here, a trip there, a spill, a drop, a broken dish...all matter for the course. But there are some days when I wake up and I wonder who slipped me what in my sleep because only someone drunk or high could possibly be such an uncontrollable mess. It's as if someone suddenly booby-trapped my whole life. My own invisible obstacle course which I'm failing miserably.

In case you're not following me, this morning was one of those mornings.

8:03 AM:  Boil water, fill tea pot, make oatmeal with raisins and brown sugar.
8:04 AM:  Open new bottle of milk. Splash milk all over my shirt in process of removing little plastic thingy.
8:05 AM:  Spill a good amount of tea out of teapot onto counter.
8:06 AM:  Clean up tea, move breakfast to living room.
8:07 AM: Eat oatmeal.
8:12 AM: Pick up teapot to pour brewed tea into mug. Pour a glug of tea onto my thigh instead of into mug.
8:12:20 AM: Go to set down teapot, miss table by about an inch, drop teapot on floor. Somehow the teapot doesn't break. Nonetheless...
8:13 AM: Clean up big mess while alternating between cursing and giggling uncontrollably.
8:14 AM:  Decide that I won't go for a brisk walk before work as planned, both for the sake of my own  safety and for that of any moving vehicle I might step in front of. Decide to knit a few rows instead.

Um, yeah. Bad idea.

That used to be a size 4 Knit Picks Harmony interchangeable needle. It was being housed by this:

The ubiquitous Koolhaas hat pattern, for my husband. When I last worked on the hat, I put rubber point protectors on the needle tips so that he could try it on. In trying to free one of the needles of the alleged "protector," I snapped the needle in two. I don't think Super Glue will save me this time. Which is probably a good thing, considering where that got me the last time.

Anyway, hat details, anyone? As I said before, the pattern is Koolhaas by Jared Flood from the 2007 Interweave Holiday Gift issue, which I believe is sold out, but the pattern can be purchased individually from the Knitting Daily pattern store.

My husband wants this to be a year-round hat, so I wanted to use a light, breathable yarn. I had some Rowan Calmer in the stash in his color of choice, but Calmer is a much lighter yarn than the pattern calls for. Dimly recalling that the once ubiquitous Knitty hat pattern, Shedir (pdf, page 3), calls for Calmer, which is a similarly fitting hat with lots and lots of cabling, I wandered over, checked out the cast-on number and suggested needle sizes, and as it turned out, the cast-on number for Shedir (128) is evenly divisible by 8, the length of the pattern repeat for Koolhaas. And thusly, Rachel narrowly escaped having to do higher math. Or at least, multiple lower math problems. Occasionally things do go right, even for klutzes.

Fits Like...Not a Sock, Anyway

Evidently my knitting lesson of the month is, "go with it."

Last week, we discussed not fighting the twist in the Nutkin sock pattern. This week, I tried to knit a variation on the pattern, getting rid of the bias by knitting every other repeat in the pattern as a mirror image of the chart. It works beautifully and I love the result.

Only one problem. Evidently the pairing of the decreases (replacing half of the ssks with k2togs) takes away some of the stretch in the pattern, and let me just add that it's not a very stretchy pattern to begin with. There was no way they were going to fit over my heel and my big honkin' instep.

So I asked my knitting what it wanted to do, and I went with it.

Ladies (and gentlemen? husband? Wow, am I being sexist? Insidious thing, the patriarchy.), I present you with the Nutkin Glove, Untwisted version:

Yarn: Colinette Jitterbug in a shade of red that is impossible to capture on film. Think long-stem roses and bing cherries.
Backdrop: Chicago in January. Brrr....Frosty.

See how long the wrist portion is? That's exactly how long it takes me to knit my way out of denial. I like the  way the mirrored patterns push up against each other. I relied loosely on Ann Budd's book, The Handy Book of Knitting Patterns for stitch counts for the fingers and thumb gusset (I had to wing it a little because I was halfway between two cast-on numbers in her charts). Other little details I added were letting the two center purl stitches run up to the base of the middle finger after I finished the last pattern repeat, and I also ran the single purl stitch on either side of the hand all the way up the sides of the index and pinky finger (not that you can tell from the picture). And in case anyone else is crazy adventurous enough to try to duplicate what I did, the last bit you will need to know is that I started the thumb gusset 4 stitches in on the palm side, which seems to have centered the pattern perfectly.

The above blog entry + the Nutkin sock pattern + the Ann Budd book = Nutkin Gloves, Untwisted. Any questions?

(No really, feel free to email me with questions if you want to try this. cerebralhem at gmail dot com I won't give out details from copyrighted material, but I will explain my variations in more detail if needed.)

I Can Do the Twist

The Nutkin socks are finished:

Yarn: Fearless Fibers Superwash Merino sock yarn in Spellbound
Mod: Heel flap instead of short row heel. Short rows don't fit my high instep very well.

I love them. Now, the astute among you may have noted that the pattern is all kinds of twisty up my leg, and that the pattern photos do not show a pattern that's all twisty. Not to be nitpicky, but the pattern photos were clearly either heavily blocked or in some way were forced to twist against the twist. If you have a pattern with all of the decreases facing the same direction every round, the resulting fabric is going to bias. That's just the way it is. You can either pretend that it's not true and fight the pattern, or you can call it a design element and go with it. I like the twist. I just don't understand the need to ignore the fundamental twistiness of a twisty fabric. Maggie Righetti writes in her book Knitting in Plain English about misleading pattern photos, and like her, I am not a big fan of them. So I deduct a point from this pattern for the photos--not for the twist--but for the photos that pretend the twist isn't there. If it weren't for that, it would be a perfect 10. So easy, so memorizable, so endlessly entertaining. A wonderfully constructed pattern down to the little details.

These socks mark many firsts for me:

• My first Fearless Fibers yarn. Mmmmm....sheepy. No really, it's the sheepiest smelling wool I've ever owned. Also, the colors are gorgeous.
• My first short-row toe. I've long wanted to do a short-row toe, and now I finally have. I may do all of my toes like this from now on.
• My first kitchener-free socks. Seriously--no grafting. The pattern has you do a three-needle bind-off after the short rows, creating that cute little ridge reminiscent of store-bought socks. Again, I may start doing all of my toes like this.
• My first use of reinforcement thread on the heels. I seem to wear holes in the heels of all of my all-merino handknit socks within 6 months. And since I follow the Yarn Harlot darning method of yelling "Darn!" as I throw them in the trash, this seems like a good idea to try to lengthen my sock life. (Actually, I can't get myself to throw them away, I just stop wearing them as soon as they're starting to hang on by threads with the idea that maybe I might darn them some day. But darning is like sewing, and I do not like the sewing.)
• My first pair of socks that really truly fits me perfectly. Maybe my second. I have a nasty habit of finishing the foot about 5 rows too early and then the heel flap stretches down under the heel a little. Maybe this extra strain explains the above phenomenon?

In fact, I love the pattern so much, that I plan to cast on tonight for another pair with this red Jitterbug:

It's a lot more of a deep red than it appears here, with even some violet undertones. Why is red so hard to capture on camera? And just for fun, I thought I'd try altering the pattern this time to get rid of the twist. I figure I'll do every other chart repeat as a mirror image, changing the ssks to k2togs in the process. Not that I don't like the twist, mind you, but if I'm going to knit the pattern twice in a row, I might as well mix it up a bit.

Finally, I couldn't resist. I have a lot of sock projects going, you know, so one bag just wasn't going to cut it. So I bought another bag from Lanea's Etsy shop.

Um, I also have a picture with the plaid side out, but Flickr is having a hissy fit right now. Use your 'magination. 

Recovery

Hey, thanks everybody for the positive response to my goofy little hat. I appreciate it. And whoa nelly, the sudden traffic on my blog! I went from one hit on the 20th, to 153 hits on the 21st. That's some crazy-assed shit, yo. (So do you think this is the first time ever that "whoa nelly" and "crazy-assed shit" have been used in the same paragraph? No one can say that I'm not an equal-opportunity slang-user here.)

So, I spent the last three days in hell back home for the holiday. Last year, I came back with a broken toe, this year with a nasty plague cold. So I suppose all told, I'm doing better this year than last, assuming the cold has a shorter recovery period than a broken toe. I don't want to test fate though, so we won't discuss my odds on that.

I will say that it took me longer to fly to Ohio than it takes to drive on a good day. I had a 4-hour flight delay there, and an hour and a half delay coming back. Total travel time to and from my destination, including time driving to and from airports and planned time to get through security, approximately 13 hours. Driving time according to Google Maps? 11 hours, 46 minutes.

What does it tell you about the state of air travel in this country that United, the nation's largest carrier, has its hubs in Denver and Chicago? So between fog and 80-mph wind gusts in Chicago on the 23rd and man-sized buckets of snow in Denver over the last 72 hours, has anyone managed to actually leave the ground in a United plane this week? I mean, I didn't even fly United, but I'm sure they must have caused my own flight delays. Half the people on my flight home were holding United tickets, anyway.

Also, I think purgatory is an airport. Have you ever noticed that they never actually tell you to begin with that it's going to be a 4 hour delay? They always delay in increments. According to my double-blind one-flight study, they delay flights in the exact increments so that no matter how long you wait, you still have two more hours to wait. Just long enough to feel like forever, but not long enough to make you give up and take the Greyhound bus.

But I knit a sock. I don't have pictures to show you at the moment, but it's a Nutkin. I'm also reading a fantastic mystery by Henning Mankell, the Swedish mystery writer. (Maybe I should delete update my sidebar at some point?) I suppose I couldn't have done any of that while driving, right? Bear with me, people, the bright side does not come naturally to me.

Am I even speaking English right now? It's hard to say, what with all of the cold medicine I'm taking (which isn't even working--oh, how I miss pseudophedrine). Um, yeah. No can thinky. I think I'll just click post now, and worry if any of this made any sense later. Uh, happy new year and such.