on vacation, and a small game

Bet you already guessed that. Sorry for the unexplained absence; last week was a bit, er... busy. And then we left for vacation.

I'm writing from Salome HQ to let you know that:

a) I'm still alive;
b) I'm sorry for just disappearing;
c) Out of the four knitting projects I brought on vacation, three are socks; and
d) San Francisco still rocks. And Menlo Park is the new Jersey City.

We are hanging out with the Salome crew this weekend and will be in Yosemite next week, and then it will be back to the standard fare of blogging, knitting, whining, etc. I also promise actual knitting content, including a really belated Free Pattern Friday that I had intended to post during Socktober, but somehow the month just slipped away (I know it's not over yet, but I won't be able to post it from the road).

So here's the game (bugheart and les are sadly ineligible for this game): If you're the first person to correctly guess why last week was so crazy, and why October got away from me so quickly, you will win a lovely ball of sock yarn. Leave your guesses in the comments... I have no idea when I'll have internet access again to verify the guesses, but rest assured the sock yarn will be shipped promptly to the winner.

See you in a week!

all workey no knitty

First off: today is blog action day. I already posted an action topic on our blog at work, so rather than write another one, I'm just going to suggest that you pop over to the Pesticide Action Network and sign a letter to the US EPA asking them to withdraw their stupid, stupid decision to bring a very nasty new toxic pesticide onto the market in the US - one that is sure to harm thousands of farmworkers. Sign the letter, and send it to a friend!

= = =

Okay, on to my self-absorbed little blog post:

There is so very little knitting happening here at the pea headquarters lately. My fingers are itching for it, but they are busily occupied with a computer keyboard at all hours of the day and night.

Don't feel too sorry for me; I am working ahead so that we can go on vacation. Two weeks on the west coast! We are going to have some fun with friends in San Francisco, and then go see beautiful Yosemite. I can hardly wait! I've never been there before, but I understand that in Yosemite they have two kinds of skunks - striped and spotted - not to mention all kinds of weasels, martens, and other interesting animals. I'm sure to come back with some lesser-known critters on my to-knit list.

And two weeks of vacation means two weeks of uninhibited knitting: on the plane, in the car, in line at museums, and just plain old leisurely sitting around knitting on places like park benches. It's going to be fabulous. Maybe I'll even finish something for a change!

But in the mean time, it's nose to the grindstone for me. The most knitting I've managed in the last two weeks has been a couple of rows on a random sock. My dreams of posting a sock pattern during Socktoberfest seem to be slowly fading... if I can get away with posting photos of a lonely single sock with the pattern, it may just come to that. How sad. Of course, some of y'all only knit orphan socks (*cough*GraylaGran*cough*), so this would be the perfect pattern for you.

So, I have to fess up to my laziness and stupidity. Last week I did a post for Sew Green in which I wrote about felting without the washing machine, in a technique that uses the dryer. It was an attempt to save a lot of water, and it worked. But I asked whether anyone had methods for felting that also avoided electricity... well, if you're a Knitty reader you know that I didn't bother to do a lick of homework before writing that post (other than trying to figure out how much water my washing machine uses per cycle. Answer: about 50 gallons. Ouch). Christine Olea wrote a great article for the latest Knitty on felting in a bucket with a plunger. Oops. Only half a dozen people pointed it out to me... This is an important lesson. If I'm too busy and distracted to knit, I certainly shouldn't be trying to write about knitting. Duly noted.

Now it's back to work!

i hope we never see it

I don't like poetry. Well, that's what I've always said. HWWLLB always told me, it's just because you haven't found a poet you like. He is a great lover (and memorizer) of poetry. I've always admired people who can remember a poem they like, let alone recite it from memory.

There are some poems I like, some funny and famous poems by people like William Carlos Williams and e.e. cummings. But maybe I have finally found a poet I like. After reading a bunch of his poems, I am about to go out and buy a book (or two) of collected poetry by Wendell Berry. Here's one I read last night, which he wrote upon inspiration from his daughter, who once said to him: "I hope there's an animal somewhere that nobody has ever seen. And I hope nobody ever sees it."

TO THE UNSEEABLE ANIMAL

Being, whose flesh dissolves
at our glance, knower
of the secret sums and measures,
you are always here,
dwelling in the oldest sycamores,
visiting the faithful springs
when they are dark and the foxes
have crept to their edges.
I have come upon pools
in streams, places overgrown
with the woods' shadow,
where I knew you had rested,
watching the little fish
hang still in the flow;
as I approached they seemed
particles of your clear mind
disappearing among the rocks.
I have waked deep in the woods
in the early morning, sure
that while I slept
your gaze passed over me.
That we do not know you
is your perfection
and our hope. The darkness
keeps us near you.

-Wendell Berry

I find this poem incredibly moving. The first time I read it, I was in awe of Berry's reverence and gratitude for mystery, and I cried at the wonder of it (sappy, I know). I love the deep quiet of it, and the idea of perfection in unknowing.

so what do i do with this stuff?

Yesterday on a rare visit to the LYS in my former hometown of Carrboro, I picked up the final ingredient for the Neuse River Waterdog.


lovely roving from three waters farm

Um... so what do I do with it?

The idea is this: the waterdog has these crazy external gills that flap out from its neck like little butterfly wings. I have already knitted and felted the body, but to get these weird free-form gills, I think I need to needle-felt them.

I picked up a great needle-felting tool at a craft swap this summer, but have yet to use the thing. At the other LYS, I was told I should use roving, which as you now know I finally got yesterday. The only solid advice I've received so far is not to hold the roving in my hand while jabbing it with needles. I think I can remember that. But now... I am stuck.

Do I wet it first and mush it into shape? Do I just lay it down and start poking at it with the needles? How do I make it go into the pretty lobed shape that I want for the gills?

I like these pretty lumps of brilliantly-dyed wool though. It's going to be hard to start bashing them into external gills - hopefully I'll have some left over to stare at and fondle afterwards.

defenses down

Yuck, yuck, yuck. I have a terrible cold. This is maybe the most beautiful weekend of the year so far and I'm spending it snotty, grouchy and tired. I even had to go to work on Saturday, yuck of all yuck, despite my unearthly level of mucous, for a Board meeting which was compulsory for me and could not be rescheduled. While I should have been hibernating in bed, I was reviewing financial statements and saying over and over, "Hello nice to see you I'm not shaking hands because I have a cold."

But after all, it's not so bad. HWWLLB made two kinds of soup last night, and today I get to lay on the couch or sit on a lawn chair all day if I want to, drink all the tea I want and read books or knit mudpuppies. I finished sock #1 of the pumpkin vine socks last night, and I can't wait to share the pattern with you. It was so much fun and they're going to look great with fall clothes.

When you get sick, do you look for explanations why? I caught it from so-and-so, or it's because I stayed out late without a sweater on and it rained and I drank too much, or because I forgot to take vitamins and went to visit so-and-so and their preschooler is a walking petri dish, etc etc? Anyway, my explanation is stress. Too much going on and running runnning running all the time... my defenses were down and I foolishly hugged someone with germs (I think it was my dad) and then whammo! Unearthly mucous and ill-timed Board meetings. Yuck. I hope I haven't spread it to too many other stressed-out unfortunates.

So, as for the post about Ravelry the other day... I feel kind of guilty for starting a Ravelry love-in when much of the knitting population is 4,756,894,327,852,201st in line (right behind J). Perhaps the Ravelry is just a bit too much like sorority rush... (not that I'd actually know, because I was MUCH TOO COOL to care about something like rush, who cares? I mean really? What's the point?) But I will say it's still super-exciting to use it as design lab, and to see all the other wannabe designers like me getting such valuable feedback from other knitters (or at least, from the other knitters who are in their sorority). One day we'll all be there together, in that great big knitters' database in the sky.

Well, I'm off to make my 4,756,894,327,852,201st cup of tea and use my 4,756,894,327,852,202nd tissue. Keep your defenses up!

P.S.
My man is a real man. Check out the quilt he just finished. This is the front:



And this is the back:



Real men quilt by hand.

a few words about ravelry...

Do you use Ravelry?

For a long time, I resisted Ravelry (despite Lomester's generous early invitation), because it kind of seemed like MySpace for knitters. And I don't do MySpace, or FaceBook, or any of those other social networking sites, because (as I like to tell HWWLLB), I already have enough friends. The real reason, actually, is becase I don't like to spend too much time in front of the computer, particularly in maintaining friend relationships, when I should be actually maintaining the friend relationships in real life by doing something meaningful like drinking tea with them.

I have lots of other beefs with social networking, but let's not go into all that here now, because I know, as someone will surely point out, that it has its very good points, spying on ex-boyfriends, meeting the love of your life, blah blah blah. This post is supposed to be about Ravelry... I'm getting there. Slowly.

So, I didn't do it. It kind of seemed like a popularity contest for knitters, who has the biggest stash, and which masochist could take on the most projects and so on. And I will say, there is a little of that, though who cares? Because for me, an occasional designer, it is a free laboratory! It's amazing!

One day recently, out of curiousity I guess, I decided to play around with Ravelry, which I had resisted for so long. I entered a project I had just finished making. If you haven't used Ravelry before, when you enter a project you select the name of the pattern. This was one of my own patterns, but when I typed in the name, it was already in the system. Yes.

Someone had knitted my pattern (it was one that had been on Free Pattern Friday) and entered the specs into the system. HOLY COW! I discovered that someone besides my three internet knitting friends is knitting my patterns! This was an astonishing discovery. I poked around some more and found that lots of people on Ravelry have knit my amateur patterns! Someone knit George the octopus! (it was Sarah). Lots of someones have knit the Mossy Jacket! And they leave notes, comments, feedback, suggestions, critique, encouragement... it's a designing dream come true!

Since then I have spent many hours fooling around there peeking at what my friends are knitting, looking for critiques and ideas, and especially getting incredibly valuable real-life feedback from knitters about my designs. It's so cool. It's so addictive. It's so crimping my meaningful time with non-internet-based friends.

I have made it my goal to be "friends" with everyone who has knit one of my patterns. On Ravelry, as on MySpace et al, you convey your deep internet-based respect and cameraderie to people by calling them your "friend" and allowing them to appear in your little digital directory. I have not met most of these courageous people personally, but they have entrusted many hours of their lives and the yarn of their loins to knitting my humble designs, and for that I pledge lifelong devotion (or at least for as long as I use Ravelry). So if I haven't friended you yet... friend me! I love you! Digitally! And I convey my cameraderie to you!

Isn't this a funny world? I'm starting to feel as if I ought to go convey some cameraderie to HWWLLB, since it's late and he's just got home from work and I'm busily pledging my love to knitters on the internet... digitally. Ahem.

in love with pretty things

The blistering days of summer finally seem to be over. Last Friday we got rain - finally, rain! It had been nearly a month since we'd even had so much as a glancing thunderstorm, and far longer since a real rain had soaked the ground.

On Friday a light drizzle began in the late afternoon. Everyone was dancing and jumping around the office. Rain! Rain! By the time I got home, our rain barrel had filled and was just beginning to overflow. Now the rain had turned to a soaking, and I got drenched running around finding ways to conserve every drop before they overflowed and ran into the storm drains. I stuck a giant bucket under the overflow valve and used our garden hose to drain more overflow out to the sad trees in our backyard.


this bucket ususally means "kegger!", but today it means "rain!"

When we woke up Saturday morning, it was beautiful outside. Ever since then, we've had the windows open, worn sweaters in the evening, and finally started the fall vegetable garden. Goodbye and good riddance to the 100-degree heat that plagued us all through the late summer. The drought is not over, not hardly, but the weather at least feels more normal. We can breathe again!

And with the relief comes a new appreciation of the beauty all around. One of the coolest things I've seen in the yard since the rain is the amazing other-worldly egg case of the green lynx spider who lives on a basil plant. It looks like something from another planet. Here she is holding it:



Another promise of new life and good things to come, even in a crazy world out of balance.

This lovely crisp weather has my fingers itching to knit, of course. Though there are sweaters and gifts and mudpuppies on the agenda, lacy socks kept dancing through my mind. I have been dreaming of single-color sock yarn - maybe hand-dyed? - in a fall color to knit twisting vining lace socks. And then at the LYS I found this:


the picture doesn't do the color justice - it was a rainy day

Which quickly morphed into this:



I found the lace pattern in Barbara Walker's First Treasury, and it is completely addictive. It's not the easiest pattern, since it's twelve rows long and doesn't exactly repeat, so you have to sit there reading the chart while you knit it. But I find it immensely gratifying, and just can't seem to put it down, even though other things beckon. You may see this again in October when the next Free Pattern Friday rolls around.

Socks! Sweaters! Wool! Rain! I could faint from happiness.