Recently in Knitting Category

I wrote the other day that socks are not my choice for knitting. No, what I really like to knit is stuff with holes in it--in other words, lace. Here's the last project I finished before I started the socks:

That view shows it draped over a chair so you can see what it might look like when worn; here's a view that shows it spread out on a bed, so you can see how big it is:

I loved making this shawl--just LOVED it. I liked the lace, which is a basic leaf pattern I learned quite easily. I could have managed the body of the shawl on my own, but I knit it as part of a class so that I could learn to do the Vandyke border. That was tricky enough that I'm glad I had someone walk me through it, but once I understood it, it wasn't hard.

And I'm really pleased with and proud of how well it turned out. I think it's flat-out gorgeous.

I also discovered that I like shawls as garments. I have not worn shawls much before, but actually they're a great garment for someplace like Arizona: just enough coverage that your skin isn't cold, but not so heavy that you get overheated. And they're pretty. I wish I had realized sooner that I love shawls, but I intend to make up for lost time.

A million years ago, I mentioned that I wanted to learn to knit socks, just so I understood how to turn the heel. Well guess what: I spent three Mondays evenings getting instructions on sock knitting, and last week I finished my first sock and started my second. The completed sock looks like this:

The second currently looks like this:

I do like the yarn I got, though I had a hell of a time finding something I liked well enough to knit with. It's more subtle in its self-striping than some yarns, and it would have been fun to work with something more dramatic, but unfortunately the taste of the owners of my nearest yarn store doesn't match my own: they favor pale and bright colors while I like dark colors.

I don’t blog much about either relationships while I’m in them or knitting. There are a couple of reasons for this reticence about relationships, one being respect for the privacy of whoever I’m with, another being that blogging about a relationship is a form of commitment that I’m not always ready to make. I don’t blog about knitting so much because, well, for one thing, I’m not the most hard core knitter out there. For instance, I have yet to knit a sock, a fact which raises the eyebrows of more serious knitters, who assure me that is a life-changing experience. I have heard enough people tell me this that I’m pretty damn curious to see if my life will be changed this way. I even tried to take a class on sock-knitting last fall, but it was full.

But another reason I don’t blog much about either knitting or being in love is that they’re among the few things that, if I have the choice between doing them or writing about them, I’ll almost always do the thing itself. That’s not true of shoveling the driveway or being homesick. It’s not even true of making cookies--lately I’ve been hankering for my favorite chocolate chocolate chip cookies but it just seems like too much bother to make them. It’s certainly not true of having sex--some sex I’ve had was way better than anything I could write about it but some wasn’t. It’s not even true of reading Jane Austen or watching Buffy.

Lately I’ve been knitting a fair amount, and maybe that’s one reason I’m more willing to blog about it now--perhaps I’ve reached a certain saturation point. I guess I’ve also found a project I’d rather write about than work on: this lace shawl.

Warning! This entry contains spoilers! If you A) haven’t seen seasons I or III of Veronica Mars and B) intend to watch them some day and C) are upset by spoilers (I’m not), then read at your own risk.

If you look at the calendar on my blog, it shows that I took a full week off from blogging, Sunday December 9 through Saturday December 15. I completely missed National Blog Posting Every Day Month or whatever November is called; I was traveling and away from home for over half the month, and much of the time I was gone I didn’t have reliable internet access, so there was just no way I could have done that gig.

I decided, however, that I’d compensate by posting every single day for a week or ten days in December, and I thought December 5 through 15 would be ideal as those days (even though that’s actually 11 days). But I got distracted on December 8, and what distracted me was a sweater I started last spring and really want to finish before 2008 rolls around, and Veronica Mars.

I'm proud to report that something I FINALLY did this past week was finish this pair of fetching fingerless gloves I began in August at Sunstone. That's right: I was one of those ladies who goes to some public place and pulls out her knitting, and just works it and fiddles with it even while other people go about their business of talking and being smart or entertaining or boring or whatever. Having something to work on while I listened really made the symposium more enjoyable, but I only noticed one other person who brought some project along: a 50-something guy who did needle point.

Even though it was my first time working with double-pointed needles (!), I easily finished one glove that weekend, and as for the other, well, it took me a while to find a chunk of time to sit down and start them. But they're done now and I adore them--I wore them today.

Here's a photo of my right hand encased in said glove:

and here's a photo of both gloves and the needles they were created on.

There are so many things I would really like to blog about: I want to respond to Major Steel's entry about the music he loved in college and discuss this review I read on Salon of this book I really want to read, This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin. I have written nothing about Sunstone except an intro to the synposis I plan eventually to write. I reallly do intend to blog about knitting some day, though knitting is for me like being in love in that I find it so rewarding that I'd rather do it than write about it. Anyway, those are among the many topics I hope to find time to write about soon, but in the meantime you're getting a picture of my new glasses (which I am wearing this very moment, having picked them up yesterday--they are less cat-eye-ish than I remembered but at least the rhinestones are really truly there) perched on the book I'm currently reading in front of the basket where I store my knitting, which is currently a sweater I'm almost finished knitting.