Enchanting Juno

Proof of Sock

The internet is slow today - it is as hot and cross as I am, as everyone is.  I'm at work alone because I told everyone to leave when they hit their personal heat limit. They made it to 10, which I thought was good, really good in fact.

The chocolates that live on my desk are not quite melted but neither are they quite solid.  A delicious texture in fact, except that the environment that created this state is the one we all have to sit in and semi-solid people are less delicious. Which is to say the air conditioner done broke, and this is a building built in a technologically dependent age.   No airflow. 

And even so, it is a million degrees out.  Airflow would only make the poaching well ventilated and breezy.  My ear keeps waiting for the shimmering vibration of cicadas, which I associate with this temperature on some kind of visceral level.  It must not be a cicada season, though I swear they were all cicada summers when I was small.

The nice man is out sweating behind the building.  I brought him some ice water in a cup - which was weird, I'm so used to bottles but a cup is what I had.  It felt old fashioned, bringing the repairman some water in a cup.  I wish it had been a beer, but I don't keep beer at work.

Yesterday I went medieval on my kitchen - someone asked me how my house can be the mess I always talk about, with just me and the cat (who totally does her share of mess creating, little shedding beast).  The truth is I hate house work AND I never learned to do it well and efficiently.   There is an art to it, or a knack at least, and a discipline:  I am the daughter of a born-again slob who was the daughter of a dyed-in-the-fucking-wool psychotic neat freak (related items, I think) and I am not saying this is my mom's fault because am 39 and take care of my own business.  But I am sort of realizing that since I did not learn these habits at my mama's knee I have to teach them to myself and that the cat hair is not going to vacuum itself, no matter how much I wish it would.

Typically I do the bare minimum to keep it civilized.  But I think my minimum standard for civilization is changing and I'm tired of feeling like I have to clean up for company.  I like clean, it makes the house feel calm and good and me too.  So my choices seem to be get over myself, or dust more and I am aiming for both - if I could average out my mother and grandmother I might turn out have a fairly balanced approach, in this one area at least.  But to get there, there has to be a higher level of clean attained.  A new baseline.

Plus, I want to paint everything in my house and thatgoes way better when you start without a layer of weird, sticky baseboard dust.  Not that these were conscious decisions - I woke up yesterday and went down to make some breakfast and accidentally scrubbed the baseboards and vacuumed the screens and and washed the windows inside and out and stuff, for oh, like 10 hours.   I went behind the cookbooks, people.   With a vacuum and THEN a dust rag, and did all that odd chore stuff too, like polishing the silver fork wind chime, and taking down the brackets for the blinds I deep-sixed 4 years ago and removing the holder for the paper towels I don't use. 
The kitchen looks a million times better with the screens down and the glass clean - LIGHT!  VIEW!   It's kinda crazy nice.  Satisfying. 

I think the trick is, clean the shit out of one room, then the next day, clean it again (which only takes 10 seconds because it is already good) THEN clean the shit out of the next room.  Day 3 do rooms A and B, then clean the shit out of C.    And eventually you can keep the whole thing going on a hour a day (A thought both horrifying and appealing.  But I think the Internet can probably spare me a hour a day, right?).  Except I am going out of town Wednesday and when I get home?   Brace yourself for home improvement: I had one of those spasms I get sometimes and 1050 linear feet of new book shelf are on the way here. 

Tonight I corral yarn and hang up the laundry.  Maybe a bit of dusting.  We'll see what happens to 'a higher level of basic civilization' over the rest of the summer.  The whole thing would be simpler if I just shaved the cat though.  Well, simpler except for the plastic surgery to repair the damage.

Oh god, I blogged about housework, didn't I? 

It is the heat, forgive me.

 

I HAVE started the second one.  But it goes really slowly when you spend a weekend with a brush attachment in one hand and a dust rag in the other.

Oh PS.  I talked to my brother yesterday and every two seconds he had to go pry his two year old daughter off of something she wasn't supposed to be into or renegotiate the terms of some thing or another.  She's a twinkling, button-pushing, ferociously stubborn pack of trouble that one, and it makes me incredibly happy because a) she's a riot and b) so was he, the rat, 35 years ago and serious big sister was target no. 1.  Also hearing my brother repeat as his calming mantra "well behaved women seldom make history" was like, the best thing ever. 

(he's an awesome dad, just so you know.)

She's so fine, there's no telling where the money went.

At Christmas we went to the zoo.

This is near my mother, an excellent small zoo just the right size for people under five to enjoy a refreshing and adventurous day and not be quite tired enough to cry on the way back to the car.  We saw lots of excellent things like a rhinoceros, and giraffes eating Christmas trees.  There were monkeys.  And an anteater.  The giant tortoise was hiding and my nephew fed the ducks with shaky hands and nervous shrieking laughter. The coi, no dummies, tracked the path of children along the pond's edge waiting for the inevitable bounty.  Sometimes they even beat the ducks.

Just before the ducks, and after the parrots, we walked around a corner and saw these. 

Flamingos, subjects of a million pink plastic lawn tchotches, they've become some kind of shorthand for kitsch.  When I wanted to annoy my fastidious neighbor I considered a pink flamingo for the front step.  What was I thinking?

They are beautiful, so astonishingly beautiful with a thousand impossible shades of coral and pink and vermilion knees, the s-curve of their necks as they drank and the blackness of their beaks and the ripples of light in their feathers and the Seussian spindle legged feather puffs of them as they slept.

They sorta stuck with me, in this brilliant mind's eye picture, I haven't the words for it exactly, but this moment of breath lost, this moment of unexpected drenching beauty, this moment of expanded perception, these birds.  (Not for the first time I realized that human beings can be oddly reluctant to fully embrace the beauty of the world and the wickedness too.  We settle for the pink plastic lawn version too much.  What is up with that?)

Naturally, I could not resist the exact deep glowing Flamingo coloured-ness of this.  Because when you can express memory and perception in yarn, you so totally should.

Yes, that's the same yarn vendor Steph blogged last week.  Yes, I am a sheep.  Yes, you can bite me. (And yes, that is the vendor's picture.  1 million tries got me 1 million pictures of bright eye-searingly pink yarn.  Nothing like the real thing.)

469 yards, 70% superwash merino, 30% silk.  It is divine. The color is as brilliantly varied and yet harmonious as the inspirational feathers, and the silk is giving it the tiniest halo while I work with it.  I want more.  Given my history with socks (ugly, abortive, brief), probably not a fiscally prudent idea.  But the desire is there.

Yes, Lisa, I said sock. 

Really.  It is even a bit bigger now. 

A Loksin actually.  Baa. 

(In strict accuracy, I had long ago (January) decided that my next attempt at a sock would be a Loksin.  I swear it.

(I find them perfectly charming, particularly once I stopped spelling them Loskin).

This was after a recent sock attempt that went awry.  (I never told you. There was some gauge trouble.  It was very sad.  It is 'resting' now.) 

It was just the flamingo yarn that moved me to start (and who could blame me?) 

But one cannot deny the influence of strange outside forces upon one's behavior.  No matter how much one might like to claim complete autonomy in one's desires and actions.  (Ahem.)

So great yarn, great pattern, not-so great sock knitter.  It is going.  But nobody hold their breath or anything, I'd feel responsible if anything happened.

 

Snowball, meet Hell.

There are lines, people.  Lines we cannot cross. 

The house is hers to play in.  I have said not one word about the one million little claw marks on the floors and occationally the furniture, I wasn't mad when she smashed a vase I had full of peacock feathers (foolishness on my part, I admit), I clean up the dead mice with words of praise, she can sleep on any part of me that pleases her and she is perfectly welcome to place herself between me and any person who enters the house whom she feels is a threat to her comfort.  Which she completely does.  The more I like them - even if she clearly likes them herself - the more carefully she keeps an eye on them.  Times about 11 for anyone I might have a romantic interest in.  Transparent little beast.

These are the rules: 
The cat shall not put her little feet on food prep surfaces.
The cat shall not sit or stand on the keyboard (this one is a challenge).
The cat shall not molest or ingest the wool (this one too).   

And in this case, the crochet thingy is not for her.  It's for my friend J.  So there.  Anyway, its almost done - 3 sides of single crochet and you can see it.  If I can figure out how to photograph something so vast.

I will have about two-three balls left over - it was just getting too freaking huge.  So she might get a little mat in the same stitch pattern.   If she pays plays her cards right. 

I dunno though, I bought her a sheepskin last year.  Romeldale.  And she hardly goes near it any more. Ungrateful wretch.

Further adventures in finishing stuff.

So all this time I thought I was a slow knitter and never finished stuff and that turns out to be kind of bullshit.  Ah, well, not the first time I have believed something slightly uncomplimentary about myself that turns out to be maybe a tiny bit of a misconception. 

(I spent the holidays around my mom which means I must now laboriously relearn how to feel and also, not to believe only negative things. Project!)

Anyway - I had this kind of backlog of knitting that I realize now all dates from the perfect storm of the wrist injury I had three years ago and the process of learning how to be a reasonably competent knitter/pattern choose/size estimator.   So for a long time it felt like I got nowhere.  But this weekend I picked up an old project and realized there are, like, six empty cubbies in the 9 cubby work-in-progress thing. (Oh, and one sweater in a bin somewhere.  And one pair of socks I began that I cannot yet speak of.) 

In fact, my cat has taken to sleeping in one of the empties.

I should probably dust.   

Anyway -here's another thing that I meant to show you when I cast on, but it was over so fast I didn't hardly have a chance.    Christmas gift for my niece - who of course burst into tears when asked to wear it, but her Mum liked it, which is almost more important.

Dream in Color Classy, Ruby River Colorway - Pink!  And Purple!  And Soft!  We Like!

Baby Soft Cardigan from The Knitters Book of Yarn (which is my favorite knitting book in a very long time and you should all take a look at it at the very least - great information, great patterns.)
5.5 mm  needles -  Harmony Options, which are, at this point, slightly edging Holz and Stein for favorite needles ever.  I love them both - but the points are so good, and if I broke one or lost it I wouldn't have to cry like someone stole my corsage AND my boyfriend, which is a plus.  I keep making people buy them. 

Touch the needles.  would you like to knit a row?  Yes, that is www.knitpicks.com ......there's a starter kit, you know.

If I had it to do over again I would pick up and knit down for the sleeves, rather than seam them on after, but that's it.  Easy as pie, almost as cute at the intended recipient.  Took WAY less than the 500 yarns of worsted recommended - like barely 300.  24 month size.  A few days of casually paced knitting and a great outcome for the effort.  Ravelry Link.

 

Not unlike the Bermuda Triangle.

I started writing this morning and it was the most awful self-referential claptrap.  Really.  I know self-referential and this was the bad kind.  Do not even reassure me.  So instead I will tell you about the most awesome knitting ever.

Really.

Perfect pattern, perfect yarn, holiday = a knitter vanishes.  Allow me to explain.

Just before Christmas I got to hang out with the fabulestest New York knitters Chez Too Much Wool - and you know what, I can't even pretend I'm not the luckiest girl in the tri-state area, I am.  The nice thing about it is that I bet you are too - tell me the knitting people in your life are not almost universally the best you know?  Anyway.

Visiting from the frozen Midwest was Ms. GreenDillyBeans, packing a pair of mitts she had finished the day before.  They were brilliant - 4ply yarn, perfect fit, gorgeous pattern.  I wanted to steal them.  I would show you, but the next day she lost them.  I almost cried, I tell you.  Cried.

But instead, I decided that the pattern was the perfect thing to do with the Sargasso cashmere blend I finished a little bit ago.  About to get on a plane for the holidays - interesting pattern?  Check.  Small project?  Check.  Handspun you adore more than life itself?  Check.  Sanity for the holidays?  CHECK baby.

I kept meaning to tell you about it, but Christmas ate me. 
I cast on and did a few rounds of ribbing then stuck the whole thing in my bag for the plane.  My self-control was heroic, I tell you.  HEROIC.

This is under the orange tree as sunrise come over the mountain, after a day of travel.
I used floss to hold the thumb stitches, as I was on a plane and my resources were limited.

Mitt the second, Christmas eve.  By which time I totally needed tequila.   If I could have found a blue agave to pose it with, I would have.  I find it interesting that my family - who know not of the blog - said nothing about the photos of knitting with plants.  I think they just think I am insane (Well, really, my brother knows of the blog, but he doesn't KNOW the blog, if you see the difference.)

Finished the pair on the plane home - and have barely taken them off since.  The right mitt - knit on the plane out - is distinctly larger than the left, knit over the holiday.  I can't imagine why, can you?  I have enough yarn left to make a third mitt and I am FIGHTING the desire to redo the loose one.  Even though I am the only one who can tell the difference.

I love them.

Admire the thumb shaping.

It is very hard to photograph one's own hands, by the way.  Tripod and timer were used.

Genius who Wrote the Pattern:  Mitaines a chevrons @ www.tinysushi.com (Ravelry link)

Genius who Discovered the Pattern:  Green Dilly Beans (replacement pair underway)

Genius who Blended the Fiber:  Abby's Yarns 25 cashmere/50 merino/25 silk blend

 

2.25 mm Inox DPNS, handspun fingering weight

Mods - 32 rows of ribbing, not 10, made thumb a few rows deeper.  Added another column of rib on the outside of the hand - was a mistake I liked and decided to repeat on purpose.

Used 1.9 ounces of the 3 ounces I had, or maybe a bit less than 200 yards.  The perfect project for small amounts of luxury handspun yarn.  Or luxury yarn in general.   Go.  Knit some now.   

3 Alarm

Posting is clearly going to be slowing down here - of course now that I've said that, no doubt I will be full of procrastinatory energy and you won't be able to get rid of me, but the days, they are like the sands through the hourglass, yes?  And Christmas is coming. 

I have a few things left to figure out, and a house to clean and a suitcase to pack and oh, the laundry...I don't know how people who are responsible for others manage it, I really don't.  But today I am optimistic, as I spent part of yesterday sorting out a guilt pile - you have guilt piles, right?  The unfiled, unpaid, the Damoclean sword in paper form, the encroaching tide of mystery data.  It starts out as 6 pieces of paper for next month and 6 months later is knocking the phone out of the cradle with the bulge of its retaining wall.

Yeah, I fixed it.  Paid them, filed them, threw their sorry asses in the shredder.  Back down to 6 pieces of paper for which I WILL WRITE CHECKS TODAY.  And I'm a little giddy from the high.

Also, I am on fire with the knitting, not that you could tell.  But the truth is that if tonight goes really well I could bring my finish count for the past few days up to three items.  Someday I must tell you about it. 
At knitting a few weeks ago someone pointed out that I had knit a lot this year.  I was in the throws of ripping 10 inches of ribbing out of the Dream In Color cardigan at the time and said something bitter and disparaging, but it turns out she was right.  This year I have finished 4 sweaters - 3 of which I actually wear - plus a myriad of mitts and scarves and things.  Which was my actual, if unspoken, goal in knitting this year: clothes. 

I'm so not a goal person.  How peculiar is it that I met one?  And the universe still intact and everything.

I think.

The very root of annoyance

I was going to say sadness, but let me not allow the melodrama to gain a foothold.  Very bad for the complexion.

Can you see? 

On the right, sleeve the first with its very proper six rows between decreases.

On the left, sleeve the second with its most improper three rows between decreases. 

And rather baggy around the bicep with it too.  I hate that.

The killer is that I looked at the first sleeve multiple times while working the second.  And I didn't notice until I'd worked 6 of 7 repeats.

So while I had hoped for a finished sweater, what I have is reknitting.  I had a very nice moment of prostration and flinging it on the floor last night, ripped and began again.  I think the emotional cycle of failure and success is one of the most useful things about creating anything. Keeps your heart limber.

Thank you all for the very kind words about my sky blue sweater - I AM pleased with it.  Sweaters are way simpler than I once thought - well, many of them anyway.  Once you pass the hurdle of accepting that ups and downs are inherent to the process of dressing yourself, as well as to creation, it's a piece of piss, really.

Onward.  I had an idea about a cable/kimono hybrid today....

Your groove I do deeply dig

When it comes to avoiding the accusing gaze of one's computer, things have gone too far.  Something about the one-two punch of SOAR and Rhinebeck knocked the blog right out of me.

(OK, YouTube is dangerous.  Any cultural memory available at any hour of the day or night, at your service. )

Ate too much last night - not just too much, but wrong food - American Chain Restaurant food, where even the chicken and steamed broccoli entree is somehow weighty indeed.  Haven't felt right all day - was about to stick a spoon in Mr. Ben And Mr. Jerry's Finest Creation (Strawberry Cheesecake Ice Cream, ohsweetbabyjeebusYES) when it occurred to me that I was compounding the problem and went and made a quick stir fry with a ton of edamame and roasted walnuts.
I feel better.

Let that be a lesson to me.  Again.

Rhinebeck was overwheming. I bought a ton of stuff (and yet I swear I saw only 1/3 of the vendors), I saw a lot of people I'm crazy about for not nearly long enough, not a one of them.  I have fragments of memory, rather than a sense of an experience.  Too soon after SOAR for comprehension.  But it was good.  Life continues, sweater continues.  Update pictures soon - want to get sleeve two underway first.  And maybe some spinning as well - need to get to work on the things I learned how to do at SOAR before I forget them all.

Missed your cheery little faces.

Gratuitous Sheep:
These two were making with the kissy face through the bars.  I mean, I don't want to be anthropomorphic, but I swear they were making out.  Jailhouse love, baby, Jailhouse love.

Karakul.  Look at the coats on them - I'm a sucker for the primitives.

Cotswold. 

This goat was, I swear to god, laughing at me while I tried to take the picture.  Goats are like that.

I know there have been a million pictures of Capitan Tightpants here, but what was amazing about this is - he did it ALL weekend.  I saw him a half dozen times, and always in this position.  He must have glutes of solid rock.  I am respectful.

And the horses are so beautiful.  Click for big and look at the size of the hoof here - like a dinner plate.

This one is tragically pissed off at my recent not here-ness ("am I not cuter than any sheep?  And yet cruelly, cruelly abandoned....").  I am summoned back to make a lap.

 

New Beginnings.

So the scarf, the turns-out-to-be-for-someone-else cashmere scarf?  Is nearly impossible to photograph.  I used to think reds were impossible, but blues are turning out to be just as challenging. 

Maybe it's the photographer? 
I suppose one of these days I could learn how to use all the higher functions on my fancy ass camera. 

Reasonable color approximation.  You can almost sorta see the bit of green in the blue.  This is fantastic yarn, by the way, almost worth selling a loved one to afford.  Or a kidney.  Grignasco Cashmere Soft, I believe color 543, 5 skeins.  Pattern here.  I might do this one again in a little skein of Alchemy Haiku I have around the place.  Very different effect in the lace weight, but a good one.

Finished object.  Most uncharacteristically steamed rather than pinned and wet blocked.  She can learn when not to push the limits of a material, she can.  Not much of a project really, but I like a little thing between big things, to occupy my hands while I make decisions.

The choice came down to this.  Or this.

It was a given that I'd be using the Dream in Color I bought at Lettuce Knit, as I haven't managed to put it away since I got back from Toronto.
 

I only had 7 skeins though - if you look at the red cardigan, you can see the line I drew in where that would have had to be shortened to allow for the available yardage.  Not what I wanted.  I guess I'll just have to buy another 8 skeins down the road for the first pattern - Cocoa Kiss?  Black Parade?  Chinatown Apple?  All of the above?   And I was in the mood for a little top down action, which is so efficient it kinda turns my crank.

You can see I put boobs on Ivanna - old bra stuffed with (what else) some roving of unknown provenance that I found around the house - a world of difference in fit estimates.

I started Friday night.  This is from Sunday night.  This yarn flies.  I don't know why - the merino?  The superwash?  I dunno.  But I'm into my second 250 yard skein and while I worked on this a lot, it is far from the only thing I did this weekend.

Hit a slow patch last night when I tried to add short rows on the fly.  After the third attempt, I mapped a plan and did the math, and will be back off and running tonight.

I almost hate to say this out loud, but....Rhinebeck?

 

Apparently my intellect is antique.

Not really a surprise.  My favorite professor in college told me once that I had a very 19th century turn of phrase.   I had a better vocabulary in those days, I think.

The unexpected, part 1.

On the right you can see a line of yarn overs - that would be the center of the shawl.
On the left are the remaining stitches to be bound off.
In the middle, my remaining yarn.

You see the problem.

Fortunately, before I began my preparations for ritual suicide (well, really, I just started swatching some Wool Bam Boo, rather than disemboweling myself with ebony straights.  Knitting has, if nothing else, taught me fatalism) I thought to email Judy at Smatterings, the artist who authored this yarn.  She believes she has a half skein or so about the place.  If true, I can even rip back and add the last two rows of the border.  Which would be bitchin'.. ..

...because this is much too pretty to leave on the needles indefinitely.

Unexpected thing the second was much pleasanter but even more of a surprise - I had, after all, rather begun to suspect that I wasn't going to make it all the way through the cast off some time before I actually ran out of yarn.

Last night I arrived home to unusually congested parking and a park ranger (we have those?) who gave me permission to park illegally.   Quite oddly, a person or persons unknown had erected a stage at the end of the street, upon which there were three guys playing some pretty decent summer music.  Kind of a Santana/blues/Ventures kind of thing.

Gotta click for big so you can appreciate one of Our Nation's Fathers supervising the proceedings.

There isn't much that's more enjoyable than outdoor music on a summer night.  I don't know who they were or why they were there, but the ranger told me they were playing in different neighborhoods each night, working their way through the city.  Which is one of those things that is just a gift to the universe - like buying a thousand copies of the best CD you ever heard and giving it to 1000 strangers.   Or the time I was leaving the grocery store and passed a guy coming in - a stranger - and I was done and he needed a cart and we just handed it off like we could read each other's minds and grinned at each other.

Miss Kitty was fascinated by it - once I was home cooking to the blues coming through the open window, every time I looked she was at the door or the window with her ears oriented to the music.

She's an odd little creature.