Living Small

When Data Makes You Cry...

...it's time for some knitting!  If only I could just pull my knitting out right here at my desk and work out some of this frustration.  Even though I haven't blogged much about knitting lately, I have still been doing quite a bit of it.  Two weekends ago when David was out of town, I finished two project: these convertible gloves/mittens and this scarf (the photo isn't mine, but you get the idea -- mine looks very similar, only in a vareigated green Malabrigo).  I am currently almost done with a pair of socks made from two different leftover sock yarns.  But the real highlight of my recent knitting life was seeing The Yarn Harlot at the library with my friends Elizabeth and Nora.  I had tried to see the Harlot before and failed (she was delayed by several hours and I couldn't stick around), so this time I was determined to see her.  In fact, I was so determined that I arrived at the library an hour and a half early, only to find that I wasn't early enough.  The room was full and I was sent to the overflow room, which also quickly filled up.  It turns out that people had been arriving for the event since 11:30 am when the library opened.  This might not have been so surprising if the Harlot had been scheduled to speak in the early afternoon, but she wasn't coming on until 7pm!  I guess there are some truly hard-core knitters here in Ann Arbor.  But even though we didn't actually "see" her, except on the video screen, the Harlot was hilarious and it was an evening well spent.  And I got to work on my socks...

Over the weekend I also managed to combine knitting with running.  Now I didn't actually knit WHILE running (though this may be possible -- at physical therapy last week I did see a woman knitting while warming up on the Nu-Step), I just used my row counter to count laps on the indoor track.  I had gone to the North Campus gym, where the track is even smaller than the Central Campus gym (1/10 of a mile as opposed to 1/8 of a mile).  I don't think I had ever yet had a run where I was absolutely certain about how many laps I had done.  There was always at least one time where I would wonder -- "was that seventeen or eighteen?" -- and then spend the rest of the run wondering how far I had actually gone.  Last week I found myself running laps outside behind a couple of boys.  I had so completely lost count that I ended up asking them how many they had done, and then trying to figure out how far I was behind them.  But with the row counter, I could just give it a twist at the end of every lap and it kept track for me.  It did slow me down a bit the first time, but I think I'm getting used to it.  The downside of knowing exactly how far I have gone, though, is that I now know exactly how slow my pace is!

And, if you are wondering about my data issues, I think I have found a work around.  Now home to knit!

The Evidence

I have blogged about knitting recently, but it has been a long time since I have posted any knitting photos, partly because I haven't taken many photos of my recent knitting adventures, but mainly because I have been too lazy to hook the camera up to my computer and download the pictures I am taking!  Fortunately, my grandfather is a professional photographer, so when I was in New Jersey last weekend, a few of my items did get photographed, and I received them in my email this morning.  Here is my newest sweater, Mr. Greenjeans from Knitty, which was my sweater for NaKniSweMo:

It is kind of an odd photo because it was taken from below, but it shows my mom and me in my grandparents' living room.  For the sweater, I used about ten skeins of Telemark from Knit Picks on a size four needle.  At $2 a skein, it means that I spent less knitting the sweater than I would have spent buying a cardigan, which is a rarity in the world of knitting!.  Unfortunately, you can't really see the sleeves in the picture, but they are just like the rest of the sweater: olive to the elbow, a stripe of rust, and then the cable pattern in that dark mustard color.  It is a super-warm sweater and was fun to knit, which is important because it took me three tries to get the size right!  Since I started it about halfway through November, I didn't actually finish it until December, but it came with me on my late fall travels to Chicago and Los Angeles, so it has those places knitted into it as well.

Shrink to Fit

When David and I were in Los Angeles over Thanksgiving, my mom took us to her favorite local yarn store, where David picked out some sock yarn so I could make him a new pair.  He had complained that the previous pair I made for him were too big, so I went down by about eight stitches on this pair and they fit him perfectly.  The tag on the yarn said superwash -- I would never buy non-washable sock yarn because socks just need to be washed -- yet I had my doubts because the sock seemed to be felting as I knit it.  After one wearing, he threw them in the laundry, as anyone would after wearing a pair of socks, and was alarmed to find that they came out quite a bit smaller.  I was disappointed, but not terribly surprised, when he told me about it, but pleased to find that they now fit me perfectly!  I guess I have a new pair of socks and I'll have to make another one for him.  The question now, though, is whether they will continue to shrink with subsequent washings or whether wool only shrinks once.  Perhaps I'd better be careful...

Knitters, Knitters Everywhere

Yesterday was the first session of my intermediate SAS workshop (a follow-up to last month's workshop), which is held in an alcove in one of the study rooms in the graduate school building.   The class went until noon and David and I were planning to meet at the health center at 1pm to get our flu shots.  In between, I planned to hang out in the study room and knit (because I don't study anymore!).  As I walked through the door from the alcove into the main study room, I noticed a group of women setting themselves up at a table.  They all had yarn!  I asked if they were knitting, and if I could join them, and they welcomed me and introduced themselves.  It is just amazing how many people knit now.  Everywhere I go, there are knitters and yarn stores.  Even at the middle-of-nowhere bar where I've been knitting through televised football games with David and my in-laws, all the bartenders either knit or know someone who knits.  Soon we will take over the world!  In the meantime, I'll have to scout out some new yarn stores in my upcoming travels to Chicago and Los Angeles.

Knitting on the Radio

As I posted yesterday, David and I spent the evening volunteering at the Michigan Radio membership drive, answering telephones.  We have done this together twice a year since 2002, and David started long before that.  It is actually a lot of fun because we get to sit  around a table with about six to eight other Michigan Radio listeners, answering phone calls from (usually) really nice people and chatting with each other in between calls.  Yesterday I also brought my current knitting project to work on in between calls.  Knitting in public often draws a lot of comments and last night was no exception.  I learned later that they were even talking about my knitting on the air!  The telephone room has video and audio links to the studio, so we can see and hear the people on the air, and they can see and hear us.  Last night, in one of the many pleas for support, the hosts asked people to call because one of the volunteers was knitting and they wanted to get me back to work answering the phone!  Then they came into the volunteer room and teased me about it.  But apparently this appeal worked -- we did get many, many phone calls after that, especially during the last half hour when there were only five volunteers left and it seemed like we were just taking one call after another.  Thank you to everyone who pledged!

Waiting for Fall

The last exciting thing I did this past weekend was to finish the sweater I was working on, the Somewhat Cowl by Wendy Bernard at Knit and Tonic.  Now if only it would get cold enough for me to wear it!  Today's post will be a story in photos, less about the sweater and more about the challenge of photographing oneself in a new sweater:

Still Knitting

Even though I still write about knitting fairly frequently, it has been a while since I have actually shown you any of my knitting!  Instead of uploading my knitting photos to the photo album on this blog, I have been posting them at Flickr and on Ravelry.  If you are a knitter, you know about Ravelry.  If not, Ravelry is probably the most awesome knitting website ever.  It is a user-created database of knitting patterns, yarns, and projects.  For each project I make, I create a notebook entry that lists which pattern, yarn, and needles I used, and then I can include my own notes, blog posts, and photos.  This notebook entry links to the pattern and yarn, so that I can click on the name of the pattern and see who else has knitted it, what problems they encountered and modifications they made, and what theirs looked like.  Or, if I have just gotten some new yarn and don't know what to do with it, I can post it to my stash and see what others have done with it.  Furthermore, Ravelry links directly to Flickr, so once I have uploaded photos there, I can quickly post them to my Ravelry notebook.

I didn't intend this post to become an ad for Ravelry, but there it is.  In any case, the above photo is a pair of socks I knitted for my dad's birthday.  I finished them a couple of weeks ago, but didn't want to ruin the surprise by posting about them before he received them.  They are the toe-up Campfire Socks by Cider Moon, knit in Felici by Knit Picks.  I liked working with this yarn quite a bit -- it is soft and also stretchy, everything a sock yarn should be!  I worked on these socks everywhere: in the car, at David's family reunion, on my father in law's boat.  While I was working on them, David asked whether knitting made all experiences the same for me -- whether being at his family reunion was any different than being on his dad's boat, given that I was knitting in both places.  I replied that knitting at his family reunion, or knitting in a bar or cafe, was totally different from knitting on a boat or knitting in front of the television, and that the socks I was making would have all these different places and memories embedded within them.  For example, I can't wear my monkey socks without remembering knitting on them during stats class!

Knitting at the Mall

Yesterday David went to a lecture about hostas at a nursery in Troy, which is about an hour's drive from our house.  Normally, I would have just sent him off on his way, but we had plans to meet our friend Ken at his house in Belleville at 4, and it seemed silly for David to drive all the way back from Ann Arbor to pick me up, and then head east again.  Furthermore, there is a huge mall in Troy, so I suggested to David that he could drop me off at the mall, go to his lecture, and then pick me up to go to Ken's.  It seemed like a good idea at the time, but then I remembered how much I really don't like shopping (not to mention the fact that I'm still pledged to Wardrobe Refashion through the end of the month, so I can't buy new clothes anyay), so I brought my knitting along with me in case I got bored. 

I managed to spend about an hour window shopping and trying on clothes before the boredom hit, at which point I found a bench near a window, sat down, and pulled out the sweater I'm working on.  I got a few smiles and several puzzled looks.  After all, why would someone knit when they could be shopping?  Or, who would go to the mall just to knit (though people do go there just to walk around, and that isn't considered odd)?  As I sat there, going around and around on the body of the sweater, I realized why knitting felt so out of place at the mall: malls are for consumption, and I was producing.  In fact, the beauty of the mall is that you can buy and buy and buy without having to think about where the clothing and housewares actually come from, or about the conditions under which they are produced.  Knitting turns the focus back to the animal that the fibers come from, the construction of the garment, and, of course, the labor that goes into turning yarn into sweater.  At the same time, however, knitters are still consumers -- we drool over yarn (without thinking too much about how it got to be yarn, spinners excepted from this generalization), snap up the newest types of needles, and buy books and subscribe to magazines in order to get all of the hottest patterns.  Too bad they don't have a yarn store at the mall...

Felted

Here you can see the before and after pictures of a knitted and felted bag I made for my youngest sister, for her tenth birthday next week.  I had a pattern for it, but was using the pattern more for the general directions rather than knitting to gauge and actually using the number of stitches called for in the pattern.  I had exactly two and a half skeins of Knit Picks Sierra and two balls of Fun Fur, and I had to make it work.  It was a very chunky yarn, so the bag was absolutely huge when I finished knitting it, but of course it got smaller in the felting.  The thing I always forget, though, is that knitted objects don't shrink uniformly when felted.  The bag shrank quite a bit lengthwise, but not so much widthwise, making it kind of an awkward shape now.  It probably won't work for my sister's school books, but it might be just right for carrying around one of her cats!

More Rain

We have more heavy rain today, which makes walking to work super-unpleasant.  I actually stopped for a while under a parking structure on my way in today to try to wait out the worst of it, and just watched the lightening and listened to the thunder.  Thunderstorms are still pretty new for me.  Growing up in Los Angeles, I could probably count on one hand the number of thunderstorms I saw from birth through age 22.  Then I moved to Ann Arbor, where thunderstorms are regular summer occurrences.  During my first summer here, I heard a "severe thunderstorm warning" when I was out driving and had no idea what that meant.  Should I pull over?  Go home?  Keep doing what I was doing anyway?  I also learned the hard way not to wear slip-on sandals in the rain because, when wet, they slip right off my feet.  And, of course, I always carry my umbrella, which probably serves to ward off rain about half the time.

In other news, I finished these socks, Jaywalker by Grumperina, last weekend.  As with the monkey socks I finished last month, I was super late to the Jaywalker party.  Every other knitter in blogland has at least ten pairs of these by now, and I can see why -- it is an easy but non-boring pattern.  Ravelry lists 1272 pairs of Jaywalker socks completed or in progress, with another 401 knitters planning to make them.  Although I haven't spent as much time on Ravelry as a lot of other knitters seem to, I love the fact that I can view photos and read comments about any pattern I might ever want to knit.  It is bizarre, however, to think about all these thousands of knitters going around wearing the same handknit socks and sweaters as each other!