DesigKnit

A new job, a new city, a new apartment. New knitting groups, new friends, new projects. All good things. All exciting. Things have been the same for a long time, put on hold in pursuit of an education. But now they are stretching and growing, moving out of stasis and into motion. Slipping, sliding, rumbling, tectonic motion. A million things are calling for attention, tired of waiting their turn.

It’s so easy to grasp, to clutch, to hold on to the familiar.

My yoga teacher used to call this riding your edge, and it’s exactly the place you want to be, this place where things happen. It’s the place between comfort and panic – you’re still in control, but only just.

It’s easy to stand in a safe position, rooted to the floor, grounded and stable. Mountain pose is a place of rest, and it is where you begin. Being at your center is comfortable, but in order to grow you must move out of that place of comfort. You ride your edge out into the unfamiliar, into the unbalanced. You have to move out of your center before you can learn to come back to it.

When you move to your edge, you falter. You know you have found it when you begin to lose your balance, when feel that you are just about to tip over. Arms flail, legs refuse to stand firm. Things are wobbly and uncertain. Muscles tighten, grasping and reaching, trying desperately to hold on.

As your body tips and trembles, your eyes settle on something small, something insignificant. An island of quiet in the midst of the storm. A moment of curiosity or laughter grants you a second’s pause. A deep breath. Your eyes settle, and they stay. Things become still. You have found your drishdi.

In that moment, you let go of finding balance – and allow it to find you.

I’m not doing any official Christmas knitting this year, but look what I finished this morning:

It might not be official holiday knitting, but it’s officially done! All ready to fly to Germany in a couple of weeks.

Happy holidays!

I’ve hardly knit at home in the past week. A little over the weekend, and a few rows at night, but mostly I’ve been getting home really late, eating dinner, and heading to bed.

It’s times like this that make me really glad that I have a 20 minute period every morning and afternoon where I am guaranteed to be held captive, with nothing that I can really be doing. Add to that a few days where the commute was 2.5 hours because of snow (each way), and you have a recipe for an almost-finished scarf. Which refuses to photograph nicely, by the way.

I’m into the third skein, and probably only have a few inches left to go. I like this version so much better.  Now I just have to hope that it blocks as well as the sample did.

On Monday night, the being out late thing was actually all about knitting. I hitched a ride from work and went and joined the Madison Knitter’s Guild, which was fun. The group was pretty big, especially since Franklin Habit was there to talk about historical knitting and why one might just be tempted to work through vintage patterns. He really had me at “new stitch patterns.”

This could be trouble.

I picked up a few books from the library, which I’ll probably talk more about later, when I’ve finished flipping through them the first million or so times.

I also met my knitting guide to Madison, in the form of a guild member named Becky who has offered to go on a shop hop together. She’s also introducing me to the Sow’s Ear tomorrow night for their late night knitting. Yay for knitting guides!

When we put our things in storage this summer, we thought about the fact that we might be moving them out of storage in the snow. We were pushing our luck trying for a December 1st move in the upper midwest.

We got lucky: there wasn’t any snow, and it wasn’t even very cold. Perfect conditions for a move, actually.

Last weekend we got a dusting of snow, which then built up to about 4 inches over a couple of days. Everything was pretty and white, and it seemed like a good way to ease into the winter.

And then last night, the rest of it came.

Say hello to winter!

It took three of us 2 and a half hours to clear the driveway this morning, even with a snowblower. I haven’t heard official numbers, but there is a lot of snow out there.

Our neighbors’ trees aren’t so happy, either.

I was expecting to go to work this morning, but they just canceled bus service for the rest of the day because the roads are bad, and the university has been closed since last night. So, it looks like I have an unexpected snow day! I have some reading and a presentation to put together for work, but then I’m going to do the only thing that one should do under the circumstances: knit warm things.

The unpacking is mostly finished, and I’m beginning the process of figuring out where everything is, and where it now belongs. In that spirit, how about a project update?

Though it hasn’t gotten much blog time, the Kauni sweater is moving along nicely. Here’s where it was just before we left Germany:

The armholes are joined, and I’m working my way down the body. This was my only plane knitting, so it’s a bit further along now than it was in this photo. I haven’t touched it since we landed, but I’m looking forward to getting back to it soon. It’s so nice that it’s back to only 400 stitches a round! (It was at almost 700 before the split, and those rounds were taking a really long time…)

In the week before we left, I re-knit the red scarf with a garter edge, and I turned the pattern sideways. I had hoped that this would help it to lay flat, as all of the curling had been at the long edges in the first version. Unfortunately, the sideways scarf did the same thing:

I also tried using a bigger needle, as Ellen suggested in the comments. The first scarf was knit on a 5; I moved up as far as a 9 and was still getting curling. In this case, I don’t think it was the stitch pattern; it was the weight of the yarn pulling it into its cinnamon-stick shape.

I pulled the whole thing out and gave away the yarn instead of packing it. It will make a beautiful bag or something, knit up in a design that doesn’t want a lot of stretch and that can bear a little weight. It just wasn’t the right yarn for my purposes.

I had a little bit of SouthWest Trading Company bamboo in red waiting for me in my US stash, so I put the scarf aside until we came back here. Unfortunately, I didn’t have as much as I remembered, and the yarn is old enough that it doesn’t quite match the current colorway. Given the microfiber experience, I was also a little worried that the weight of a 100% bamboo yarn would cause the same problems with curl. Instead, I found some beautiful Frog Tree fingering weight alpaca (color 23) at my new LYS. This yarn is light and airy, much warmer than the microfiber, and has a beautiful halo. I wasn’t sure how I’d like the pattern in a fuzzy yarn, since the clear stitch definition was my favorite thing about the microfiber version. And then I started knitting.

I cast on Thursday night, after realizing that I hadn’t knit in almost a week. I haven’t had much time for it since then, but it’s flying off the needles, especially considering that I frogged back a good 12 inches when I discovered that I’d made errors setting up the stitch pattern.

I can’t believe how much better it is. It doesn’t have the same crisp stitch definition, but the alpaca yarn has a beautiful softness, and I love the way it catches the light. I tried for about an hour to get a good photo earlier, but I couldn’t really get the new camera to capture it. I forsee some trial and error photoshoots in my future, as I learn the buttons and settings for this new camera.

We also visited another of Madison’s yarn shops, looking for yarn for a second scarf. We didn’t find the perfect color, but I love the one that we did find:

That’s a silk-merino blend by Cascade called Venezia (color 160 – Ginger). I don’t think I’ve ever seen Venezia before, but it’s a beautiful yarn. The shine and the feel are perfect, even though there wasn’t much available in the exact burnt-orange color that I was hoping for. I’m a little worried that I won’t have enough yarn (it’s only 160 yards), but I have a tendency to over-buy for projects, so I’m hoping that I’m overestimating what I’ll need. There was plenty in the store, so I can go back for more if necessary.

My only complaint with the yarn is that there were three or four damaged areas in the skein that I didn’t find until winding it into a ball. Cascade is usually better quality than that, so I’m hoping that it’s just a fluke, because I think I’m very likely to knit with this again.

I’m not really sure yet what stitch pattern to use for this scarf. It should be a little bit more muted to match this other friends’ personality, fairly open (to help with yardage, mostly), and something that really shows off the shine and drape of the yarn. Nothing has popped out of the Walker books yet, but we have another date this evening.

The waving lace pattern is also coming along well. I have one more chart section that needs to be test knit (for the last time, I hope!), a few stitch counts to calculate/verify, and then it’s all layout, proofing, and editing.

And, last but not least, the geometric lace project is also coming along well. I couldn’t get a good picture of the swatch tonight, so I’ll have to show it to you later. One transition is completely mapped out, and it’s waiting until I have some quiet time to focus on the other.

So there’s the knitting status. I was thinking of writing a “State of the Stash” post, but that will have to wait for another day, when I’m up to a project of that magnitude. For now, I’m just glad to be able to find time to knit.