Enchanting Juno

Baby mine.

We are all about love this week, here at Enchanting Juno. 

It must be the rising sap of spring, because usually I am not so much with the eyeglasses of the rosy fingered dawn.  I'm suspicious and prone to a (some say) comical dourness about the motives of my fellow man.  But not right now.

In this particular case, the object of my affections is the cable.

How is it that I did not do this before?  Last night I finished the second repeat of the sleeve pattern on the Redhead, and the only reason I didn't keep going was that I needed to go to work today and the Daily Show was over.  In fact the previous night's repeat of the Daily Show was also over, which meant that it was time to sleep.

They fly out of my hands, so satisfying and beautiful.  I want to make more.   If I had two sets of hands...well, I'd look pretty funny, but I'd be knitting two cabled projects.  I have to go to the hospital for pre-admission blood work today, and I am GLAD, because I'll be able to cable in the waiting room.

And in response to the comments yesterday - yes it would be delightful if one could send out for cute boys at 2 am.  I feel strongly the Internet would have fulfilled its ultimate destiny if it could make that happen, in a non-escort service, non-icky kind of way.

The specific cute boys to whom I referred came from from a dating website called www.okcupid.com, which looks like a refuge of the strange, but ultimately has been far more successful that the more conventional eharmony in providing me with prospective dates.  Perhaps I am odd. 

But recently the suggested matches have been running to the too young, awfully weird and terribly perverted.  I was getting a little bored with the whole thing.  But now they've instituted this new matching algorithm - based on your relative hotness as voted on by site users, I swear to god - and suddenly the matches are popping up all interesting like, with something to say and thoughts to provoke.

It springtime and the air is full of possibility.  My favorite time of year.

Plus, maybe I'll get some.

In other news, I've been looking at the Sally Melville books and have suddenly been overcome with the desire to knit the Not-Your-Mother's Suit dress and jacket.  Can someone please talk me out of the freaking miles of stockinette that this will involve?

It may be too late, mind you.  I bought a couple balls of something promising on Elann and I swatched last night.

Anyone mad enough to have done this already?

So in love.

I have such a crush on the Internet today.

First of all it has provided me with this outlet for my compulsive outpourings about things my local friends are not all that interested in.  They'll listen, because they are good people and they love me, but they cannot enter into the spirit of these things except in a purely theoretical way.   My local knitting friends are a promising group, but we do not know each other well, nor for long, and I have finally learned my lesson about forcing these things.  Evolution and instinct are a good thing when it comes to any relationship. 

But Internet - you provide me with people who understand about the need to possess a book I have never read, and kind souls who offer to share theirs with me as long as I do not drool upon it, and mysterious packages from kind strangers and 24 hour yarn shopping, and places that can provide cute shoes for my large feet and a way to spy on the life of someone I have not spoken to since 1990, but who popped full blown into my head yesterday and needed investigating, and new forms of self-expression and from it self knowledge and even Amazon.com which, yea, is a wonder, despite its corporate evil.

And today, today, Internet, you have told me that that your algorithms say that I am hot, and thus you have matched me with others whom your algorithms say are hot.

And so you bring me, for the first time in many months, cute boys who are my height and age appropriate and use polysyllabic words and are, quite possibly, interesting, instead of the usual selection of horny 22-year-olds about whom I can only say, at best, a regretful "tag & release" and at worst, "get away, little boy, and wash that mouth out with soap."

Internet, I am grateful.

Aran Knitting.

Talk about unfullfilled desire.

I am obsessed with cabling now.  I want to cable everything.....sweaters, my cat, the living room rug. 

Through some recent irresponsible shopping I am now the owner of a few Starmore books - Stillwater, In The Hebrides, Fisherman's Sweaters, Tudor Roses, Collector's Item, Celtic Collection.  They are wonderful - I guess it is the geek in me, but In the Hebrides has all this amazing history of the Islands to go along with the patterns and it just makes the whole thing richer and more satisfying.  They are all like that - tightly bound to the geography and history of the topic the collection is built around.   There is a colorwork cardigan in one that I want to make.  For myself.  (I am, you understand, allergic to Fair Isle, after the enforced preppiness of my education and childhood).  This is a Big Deal.  A breakthrough, even. 

It probably doesn't help that there is Someone from my Past from the Hebrides, such that the mere mention of the Western Isles kind of turns me on.   

Ahem.  If that's not Too Much Information.

I also have the Big Sky Knitting Handbook of Aran Sweater Design which is amazingly cool.  And a few other things.  Because my knitting library is starting to rival my library of books on costume history.  Which is....extensive.  Clearly I've been working towards a vocation around textiles for years, in a kind of oblique and off-hand way.

But I feel incomplete.

I must have a copy of Aran Knitting.

But I cannot.  REPEAT.  cannot. bring myself to pay 200-300 dollars for it, which is what it seems to be going for out on the worldwideinterwebnet.

They don't even have it in my local library system. Which has apparently not purchased a knitting book since 1982. 

Sob.

I can be patient.  I can wait.  And hunt.  And it looks like I'll be doing so.  But it isn't, y'know, ideal.

Such woes.  I should be struck by lightening for sure.  Give me something to complain about.

We learn.

A big shout out to Stephanie Pearl McPhee, without whom I would not yet be aware that my roof was leaking.

Seriously.

If this hadn't come in the mail today, I would not have been lying on my bed to hear the steady drip-drip-drip, or been still and quiet (except for the giggling) long enough to realize that it was coming from the wall, not outside the window.   During daylight hours, which allowed me to investigate.  I would have been at the gym, or cooking dinner, or watching tv, or going on the much needed Diet Coke run this house is crying out for. 

See?

Yes, I have no trim on my wall right now.  Wanna make something of it? If you recall, this was a bookcase until November, and I ain't gotten around to going to the Home Depot yet, OK?  And a good thing too, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to see the little puddle seeping down from the attic.

I will happily take credit for my own speed and dexterity with the ladder - I was up on that roof in about 3 minutes flat, a far cry from the timid new homeowner of 3 1/2 years ago.  No clogged gutters....means a real leak, not standing water seeping....into the attic....ah ha!  Ridgepole! Bastard.    I put basins under all the drips, marked the wet spots and the next fine Saturday I'll be up there with the tar and paper.  Better that than a new roof.

So thanks Harlot, and I mean that most sincerely.

Other learning stuff, and the original topic of this post:

I started The Redhead, the beautiful auburn Mariah, with a sleeve.  I suppose if I were clever I'd have done the boring bits first, but I wanted to learn how to cable properly - it is one thing to make a single cable, or horseshoe, or whatever up the center of things, instantly memorable and quite simple, and quite another to start to integrate woven cables, and single cables and ribs and things.  Since the sleeve is only the width of a sleeve, I thought it a good place to start. 

If I got freaked out I could just call it a swatch.  And if it was successful, I didn't have to start over on the real thing.

It was giving me fits.  I could process one part, or another, but none together.  Eventually I made an excel file that laid out the increases and cable twists, so I would have a place from which to orient myself.

And it went a little better.  The Knit Goddess explained why the cables have purls in them and I started to see it a bit, realized I was depending too heavily on the chart key and forced myself to not look - to at least try the pattern first.  And slowly, I started to kind of get it.  Last knit-night I did 10 rows with having to stop and rest my head.  And at the end I looked at it and said, "Hey, this doesn't look like shit anymore." 

But I was still saving it to work on only at knit class, when I had support to hand.  The rest of the time it just lurked in the bottom of my bag and mocked me.

Last night I was hanging out with my friend non-knitting H and I realized I needed another ball to divide for the neck on Nameless (back done but for the shoulder shaping).  Which I did not have with me.  So I pulled out the Redhead.

And in a house with 2 other adults in the middle of unpacking from a move, with three children, two of whom are little and noisy, while watching Terminator 3 and carrying on mockery of said film, I knit upon the Sleeve and it was Good.  In fact, I finished the first full pattern repeat.

I did have to pull out two rows when I got home because I repeated two pattern rows unnecessarily - the Post It, she moved.  But the important thing is that I am pretty much off the chart key - meaning I can look at the pattern and sort of see which way it needs to go - and I looked at it and Knew I had made a mistake.  And fixed it, nae bother. 

This is, and I realize I condemn myself to total geek hood by saying so, almost as good as an A from a tough professor.  I learned something.  I have integrated the knowledge.  I can apply it.

Cool.

Doesn't even matter if this first sleeve ends up far less beautiful than its future sister, I'll be as proud of it as my first woodworking project (1st grade), changing my first tire, or the A- from that evil genius of Shakespeare.

This is.....deeply satisfying.

Because really, there is nothing better than knowing that Your Powers are Growing.

Drink the kool-aid.

So, if nobody wants the Phil Laine that I have 12 millions yards of, is that a sign from the universe that I need to dye it with Koolaid to be closer to the shade I wanted?

Still life with woodpecker.

Isn't that the novel about life inside a pack of Camels?

I had a conversation with a friend of mine last night about quitting.  She was amused because she had planned to quit that weekend - in a kind of resigned and uncommitted way, because her family wants her to - and her therapist told her not to.  He thinks that instead of just stopping she should embrace it for a while, smoke good tobacco and really enjoy it and, I think, by embracing the habit and the ritual, come to some understanding of why she loves it so.  Her husband isn't pleased.

But it started me thinking about the history of my life with tobacco.

I started smoking really cold bloodedly – I wasn’t a goody-goody, but I looked like one superficially, because I was slow to embrace some of the behaviors of other girls my age and I was tired of being without sin. Tired of that vision of myself.  I looked around me, selected smoking, bought a pack, smoked them all on the train home from school one weekend, presented my parents with it as a fait accompli, and that was that.

Dolt. Idiot. Fool

And yet...it was a great moment of the self, of courage, of developing persona. I scorned to sneak, I declared myself...and my parents accepted it. 

When I was a senior in high school I smoked 3 packs of filtered Lucky Strikes a day on weekends – the only time we had unrestricted access to the Butt Room - and about 2 packs a day the rest of the week. And I was proud of it.  The great thing abut the Luckies was that, even filtered, they were so strong no one wanted to smoke them – very economical in an economy founded on borrowing, and teenage shorthand to prove my toughness and individuality.

When we went to the city we’d get Dunhill’s or Nat Sherman’s pastel cigarettes - gold banded, slender, exotic - and pretend we were sophisticated. We shopped for vintage cigarette holders at Antique Boutique. And re-imagined ourselves a hundred different ways.

You know, these are all really good memories.  Even the one of nursing my very own first hangover, seared with nausea in Washington Square Park.

I am so used to despising everything about smoking and myself for being so weak, I had forgotten that.. But I feel quite tender and affectionate towards my 17-year-old self, and the friends of those years, braving the world, inventing ourselves over and over again, trying on our ideas of sophistication, and quality and style. It is lovely, really.

I must remember that and not confuse it with the stupid mindless addiction it became. It is so easy to lump the whole thing together under the heading 'bad', but you lose the savor if you forget.

The smoking was how we defined ourselves away from adults, the butt room the one place that we gathered that was our own, revolting as it was. The place we retreated and reformed when under attack by the school administration.  The place where lies were told, knowledge shared, rules broken, and we began as students to choose who we were.  I wonder where today's students go for that?  What is the refuge of commonplace mystery? Are there any permitted sins?

Sins of my youth.

I've been restless this weekend, due to the quitting of the smoking.  Also the PMS.

It is the nasty habit and I do not wish to get the emphysemia or the cancer or the heart disease or the high blood pressure, so the something must be done.    It can be done, it was done before and will be done again, but boy howdy, the middle bit sucks.  I wish I could just skip over the next few weeks.

I am a prime example of the stupidity of the human race, by the way.  I quit 5 years ago - for four years - and in a fit of drunken foolishness a year ago bummed a smoke and found myself back on 20 a day in short order.  But I am in complete denial, so I don't smoke around most of my friends or in my house, just stink up my car and my back porch.  And my body, of course.

It has been 72 hours.  I'm already breaking out and my skin looks 10 years older than it is instead of 5 years younger, which is what I usually manage, as all the toxic things work their way out of my body.  In a day or so I'll start to cough.  A few days after that I should start to feel better on stairs and have more breath singing along to the radio.

Be warned, my lovlies.  You can never let your guard down.  You will always want a cigarette, even after years, and sometimes the taste will be metallic longing in your mouth and take up half your brain when you should be thinking about who you are talking to and what you are saying or doing and there is no amount of time that will pass that will make it OK for you to have just the one.

About the PMS, there is nothing to say. 

I'd feel a lot better if I could knit for more than 10 minutes at a time.  But I can't.
What I did instead was clean out the stash closet. 

Wanna buy some stuff?

      

Come on babies, help me make space for the Rowan Harris that is on the way.

And I am open to trades - if you've got something, make me an offer.

Photos link to the albums, which can also be found over in the sidebar.

You want some cheese with that....

The Knit Goddess has been talking for a little while about holding a series of all day seminars - little ones, only four people - on fit, sweater design, what to do with this yarn you love that you can't figure out.  The kind of classes every advanced beginner/intermediate knitter with ambitions would wet themselves for - the exact kind you so rarely see advertised.

Around the pools of anticipatory drool collecting on the floor in front of me, I've been encouraging her to go ahead because I'm dying to do these.  Well, not actually dying, but very, very pleased - very - at the idea.   

Enthusiastic, you might say. 

Practically jumping up and down, if you must know.

(Excuse - me I don't think it is polite to drool in front of people - OK, I'm back.)

Last night I got an email from her with the schedule and first crack at registration.

Design your own sweater 101

You will make a customized paper pattern fitting your body type and learn how to adjust it to the style of sweater you want. After that we will write the knitting instructions for it.

Prerequisite: be adventurous and know how to knit

My dream class really, the mysteries of fitting my body revealed, etc., etc.....and scheduled for the first Saturday after my wrist surgery.....when I will still be in a cast, still have stitches and, oh, yes, still be forbidden to hold a knitting needle. I'm going to assume that scissors or a pen fall into the same category of 'you may not use your wrist for anything for a week and then I'll decide' described to me by the nice doctor man.  I did mention that it is my right hand, the one I write, cut, wash, click, chop, slice and dice with?

How to alter a sweater pattern or copy a knitted sweater 102

What if my gauge isn’t the same as in the pattern? - What if I want to use a different yarn? - What if I want to copy a sweater that I bought or saw? - What if the shape of the sweater doesn’t fit me? - We will solve all these problems and more, as well as write and rewrite instructions to it.

Prerequisite: know how to knit and have a customized paper pattern fitting your body type

Which is the Saturday of Maryland Sheep and Wool (Hey, I can go Sunday and probably will) and also, requires the first class end product as a prerequisite which would a lot harder to work around since I can't take the first class.

What am I going to do with all this yarn!

You have bought beautiful yarns or have accumulated leftover yarns and you just don’t know what to do with them. You will learn what the possibilities are of your yarns and design a project with them.

Prerequisite: be adventurous and know how to knit

Thank dog! Finally! I could totally do this. Maybe not as cool as class number one but still interesting and useful and amazing and.....Oh, wait, June 11. I'm going to a wedding June 11.

I actually think I might cry when I think about this. It is childish and I know I will get over it and if they go well, I am sure that she will hold them again....but I still want to bawl like a baby deprived of a long anticipated treat.

Something in the line of self indulgent tantrum, if you must know.

So very busted.

It looks like I am out of the blog closet, at least a little bit.

Regular visitors may remember I said some uncensored things about my LYSs last week.  Yesterday I was there buying needles and the store owner looked me in the eye and asked me why I was talking behind her back.  Someone told her about the post - hey, local people, say hello.  I didn't even know you were there -and she figured out it was me.

I was completely dumsquizzled. 

I also give her a lot of credit.  I had it in the back of my mind to talk to her - I had chosen the time of day for my visit with the notion that I might find her there - but I hadn't fully committed to it, because the idea of standing there and just up and saying something was really alarming.    

So we talked about the specific experiences I'd had a problem with, and her thinking about store and its direction and the personal component of finding out that the criticism was out there in the world anonymously.....and in the end I offered to take the post down because it was never my intent to harm her business, just to vent after a particularly frustrating experience.  I think, tentatively, that the conversation ended positively.  I guess I'll find out when...if...I can go back.

Her underlying point was that she would have appreciated a direct approach and in retrospect it is blindingly obvious that I should have done that.  But I was genuinely conflicted about whether I could or should talk to her.   I feel bad about it because the one thing that I had not focused on is that I genuinely like this woman.  And as the owner of a small business, the last thing I would want is to find out someone had a bad opinion or a bad experience and didn't let me know..... I keep hoping someday I will wake up and always know how to do the right thing, or what the right thing is.  But I am pretty sure I should stop waiting for that to happen.

It is interesting me how the process of blogging has changed for me with the evolution of an audience.  In the beginning I was talking to myself, and I wince now over the over-mannered tone of some of the earliest posts.  I didn't know how to talk to the void.  But blogging is a form with an evolutionary voice, maybe much more than some other forms of writing, because it is, to a certain extent, an amateur's medium and an interactive one.  Knit blogging in particular is like this, as we seem to be seeking a community rather than only a voice.

And as readers appeared and conversation started going back and forth, I know my comfort zone of topics changed a bit.  And again with certain changes in my life.  And again when I met other knit bloggers for the first time.  And now again, when people in my daily life might be starting to know about Enchanting Juno. 

I didn't write the post to have it get back to her, I wrote it because it was my experience and I was frustrated and I wanted to get it off my mind.  It had never occurred to me that it wouldn't be my choice to reveal, because it had never occurred to me that anyone would put two and two together.  Or care.   

I am here to tell you, you may not be as anonymous as you think. 

I guess is you want to really be a mystery, you have to have a Rock Chick-like level of devotion to oblique misdirection, slight of hand - and, of course, actually be mysterious.  With her a hundred percent on Johnny Depp, particularly got up in Keith Richards drag, but otherwise, I just don't have the stamina for that kind of persona.

I am going to have to figure out where my lines are.   If I have a frustrating experience, this is a likely place for me to defang it by telling the story - whether it is on a date, or in a shop or out in the world in some other place.  And having this place to let off steam, to retell my own narrative, to understand my own life and experiences, is really important to me.   I don't know where the obligations of social usage collide with self censorship.

Last night was knitting group.  A very funny remark was made.  It is a story I would ordinarily tell you.  The woman who told it now knows about the blog - because, of course, I had to tell the Knit Goddess about the intense mortification of being confronted with my own actions, and there was general discussion. So, do I tell you?  Do I ask her permission? It isn't a question of saying something bad about someone - I think this woman is hilarious and cool and interesting and dirty minded in the best way.

And speaking of dirty minded:

Those super huge wood scarf needles - the Size 50 ones?  Aside from being incredibly awkward to use - like kitting with remote robot arms - could they be any more obscene?

I don't want anything to do with crafting with a tool that looks like it came from The Honeysuckle Shop. 

Talk about wood.

Blood Orange

I am obsessed with this yarn:

Jeanette's Rare Yarn Store

Rowan Harris DK in Sunset.  Somebody remind me that I don't like Shetland wool.  That it makes me itch.  Tell me that this isn't stunning.

(I've seen other pictures that have more of the blood orange red in them.  I hope that's the truth, but either way, who cares?  Both of them say....love me, buy me, knit me, wear me.)

These days yarn is all about color and texture and feel for me.  I look at some things I stashed a year ago and shake my head.   It isn't that there's anything wrong with them, but ..... they just don't match up with my idea of what a yarn should be.

Like the Bingo I'm using right now - it is a terrific yarn.  I'd recommend it to anyone for a good knitting experience.  I really like the sweater that is coming out of it.  It is one of the first things I've worked on that I am pretty sure I'll wear all the time - no matter how flattering or unflattering it is.  The mistake rib in this bi-color, multi-ply yarn is stunning. Stunning.  And yet.....

I won't ever buy it again.

It seems too....man-made....to me.  Is that stupid or what?  It isn't about rustic versus sophisticated, because I am equally delighted by the Tibetan wool and the Jaeger Merino DK.  I think it is because it is such a manufactured looking spin that the nature of the wool can't really make itself manifest. 

I was trying to explain this to Julia.  And she looked at me and said very firmly, "You're a spinner."

I said, "Oh no, I don't know how to spin."

She said, "Doesn't matter.  You're a spinner."

(This was several weeks ago so the text may not be completely accurate, but the tone is right)

All I can think is that, considering how crazy making I find the occasional loose edge stitch, uneven singles are going to make me bat shit insane.

But since I thought this instead of, oh, say, "No, I don't want to spin" or "She's crazy," I have a very forlorn feeling she might be right. 

I'm going to need a bigger house.