An amazing thing happened the other night. Unfortunately, it won’t sound amazing to anyone who isn’t a knitter, because it was a knitting thing. And it probably won’t sound terribly amazing to most knitters, either, because in the greater knitting scheme of things, it’s not any kind of big deal.
But it was a big deal to me, boy howdy. Over on the LiveJournal knitting community that I belong to, there are a lot of knitters who express their fear of various non-beginner tools and techniques, like cabling (which I did on my very first knitting project, not knowing any better, and which I love), or double-pointed needles (which I haven’t tried yet), or even circular needles (which I find no more difficult to use than the straight kind). I dunno, I guess I’m just not a fearful knitter. I’m afraid of fire, and rats, and electricity; I am not afraid of knitting, as a general rule. (Although I freely admit that steeking—a technique used most often for Fair Isle knitting that involves actually cutting your knitting with a scissors—intimidates the hell out of me, mainly because I can’t cut straight. But I digress.) I like trying new things when I knit. I could maybe stand to like new things a little less, in fact, and spend more time on actually finishing something more challenging than a scarf, but that’s another matter.
But there was a particular technique that I was ready to embrace and just simply could not get the hang of: the Möbius cast-on invented by Cat Bordhi. I wanted to learn it so that I could make one of the adorable felted cat beds in Cat’s Second Treasury of Magical Knitting, and after I got the book, I knew that I also had to make one of her amazing Möbius scarves. So I bought the book, and its predecessor, way back in March or so, ordered some lovely and affordable wool from KnitPicks and a long Addi Turbo circular needle for the cat bed pattern, and sat down to knit.
And I couldn’t figure out the cast on to save my life, despite the clear, illustrated instructions. Which was going to make it pretty hard to knit anything from the book, if I couldn’t even get past the cast on.
It should be noted here that Möbius knitting is not entirely intuitive for many people; no less a knitting celebrity than Stephanie Pearl-McPhee was awestruck by it, though of course she mastered it a lot faster than I did. A recent Web search found oodles of posts on various lists and blogs from people who had trouble with it, including plenty who couldn’t get past the cast on either.
Which is comforting, but I was still stumped. I put the book and needle aside for a little while, but it bugged me that I couldn’t figure it out. I’m still only an advanced-beginner-to-intermediate knitter, but so far, I’ve been able to figure out most new techniques after a try or three. But not this. A month or two later, I found a Yahoo Group devoted to Cat’s Magical Knitting, joined right up, and asked for advice and tips. I got quite a bit of help, including two long offlist posts from a very generous person who explained the cast on to me in painstaking detail. I read the posts carefully, many times, and thought I’d seen the light, but no luck. Then Cat Bordhi herself posted to the list, expressing her sympathy to me and offering an alternate explanation, a metaphorical one that she says is what she now uses when she does her workshops. The metaphor made sense to me, and I thought I’d finally cracked it, but…no.
Summer came, and even in the best of times, I don’t knit as much in the summer—and this past summer was unquestionably not the best of times. So Möbius knitting fell by the wayside again. Meanwhile, the lone knitted cat bed in the house—the Princess Snowball one from Stitch ‘n’ Bitch, which was fun to knit and is quite lovely and should not be slighted just because I’m intrigued by the Möbius one—became Jasper’s preferred place to sleep and got dusty and gray, which highlighted the desirability of making another cat bed so that the first one could go in the washing machine at some point. So when fall came around, I made another attempt at the cast on. I did some more searches and found still another alternate explanation—this one from the DIY Network, which (I learned belatedly, to my chagrin) had aired an episode featuring Cat Bordhi demonstrating the Möbius technique. (I even put a note in my work calendar to remind me to record the re-airing, in November, figuring that if all else failed, maybe I could master it then.) This third explanation had me thinking that I was doing it right for a whole hour or so, until I finally looked at the yarn on my needle and realized that there was no way it could be right. Argh.
Then on Wednesday night, while I was watching the ho-hum finale of a truly disappointing season of “Project Runway” (which had been my principal obsession earlier in the year, when the wonderful second season aired), I decided to look at Cat’s metaphor post again and try it out. And this time, something clicked. A single phrase in particular clicked, in fact, which seems ironic after the large number of words I’ve ingested on the topic. The phrase described the needle leaning on the yarn in one part of the cast on movement, and I suddenly understood what I’d been doing wrong on every other attempt, and lo and behold, I got the whole thing down. Hallelujah.
(It turns out that once you master it, it’s an extremely fast and easy cast on. Figures.)
Of course, my successful attempt was done using some scrap yarn that I had sitting around, and I don’t actually want to knit anything from that yarn, so I undid it before I could think to take a quick photo for posterity. So I have nothing to show for my efforts yet. But I will, I hope, soon.
My other cool discovery of the week is Shelfari. I don’t quite know why a social networking site based on books is of more value to me than all the other social networking sites out there (except for MySpace, which I love for the quick access to new music, not for the social networking, which I barely pay attention to), but it is. I’ve already learned about five or six books that I’d never heard of before, and I only joined a few days ago. Book clubs never appealed to me, because I don’t particularly enjoy analyzing books closely; it’s partly why I ended up not being an English major in college. But I do value recommendations from people with compatible tastes in books, and this appears to be a significantly more accurate and less intrusive way of getting them than, say, Amazon’s utterly useless recommendations.* It’s not a perfect system; I saw a big spike in the number of people who have some of the same books as I do when I added The Complete Calvin and Hobbes to my “shelf,” because it counts that as 11 books. But it seems pretty solid so far.
If this post has bored you to tears, just be grateful that I’m not posting about cat colons. Miss Maisy had hers removed—the whole thing, seriously—last week and is now in messy recovery mode, so I’m a little preoccupied with that topic at the moment.
*I could write volumes about Amazon’s pathetic recommender system, which is a bit of an obsession of mine. I have to concede that I do find some value, albeit just the tiniest bit, in Amazon’s recommendations for knitting books, because it means that I find out about forthcoming ones that I might not otherwise discover…though since I’m not really allowed to buy anything knitting-related until I use up some of the yarn in my stash, all the recommendations are really useful for is making my Amazon wishlist longer. And I still get recommendations for IA/user experience books, though that’s pretty useless since I tend to find out about those without Amazon’s help. But using Amazon recommendations for anything less easily categorized, like music (which I’m still convinced can be categorized, just not by the methods that Amazon uses) or fiction, yields comically terrible results, as I’m sure everyone knows by now. And even things that should be categorizable don’t work that well. For example, I recently bought a large, comprehensive book on bread-baking, something I’ve been wanting to try my hand at for a while now. So of course as soon as I put it in my shopping cart, I got recommendations for 10 more large, comprehensive books on bread-baking. Cookbooks do tend to breed more cookbooks, but I really don’t think I’m ever going to need that many books on bread…and certainly not two minutes after deciding to order just one. Needless to say, I unchecked “Use to make recommendations” for bread books as soon as I could, just as I do with nearly everything I buy from Amazon. And yet I can’t resist playing with the recommendations regularly, just so I can exclaim over their absurdity. It’s sort of like picking at a scab, I guess. 