Peripatetic

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.

Last night, I wrote a substantial part of the next (and, I hope, last) installment of my Replacements saga. I was going to make it a page rather than a post (it’s a somewhat trivial difference in the WordPress world, but pages don’t necessarily get featured as the newest entry on the main blog page, which I thought would be a nice way to tuck the saga away for anyone who wants to read it without boring anyone else with it), and when I tried to save it, I got an error message. ARRRGGGHH. I couldn’t face rewriting it tonight, so it will have to wait till I’m in the mood again.

Then, just now, I started and finished a long, quite trivial post about my weekend thus far that was noteworthy only in that it actually discussed knitting—not just knitting in the abstract but my knitting, with links to some scrummy yarn that I just ordered (in the blue color shown, though the photo doesn’t do justice to all the variegations in the yarn) so that I can make this sweater, which will be my first full sweater. (I’ve made a shrug—basically just sleeves and a back—but not yet a whole sweater.) I also went on and on about my acquisitiveness lately, and none of it would have been very interesting to anyone else, probably, but I had fun writing it. And when I went to publish it…yup, error message again.

Sort of a metaphor for my weekend, which as usual has been a story of good intentions and poor execution. I haven’t been completely useless: I did—finally, after over a year of good intentions—start to work on decluttering our spare bedroom. There’s still a long way to go, but there’s something so encouraging about just taking those first steps that I think I can actually envision finishing it now. And on Saturday night, Bill and I did something we rarely get around to doing: went to the movies. We saw “Good Night, and Good Luck,” which was beautifully done, from the cinematography to the performances, and further affirmed my growing conviction that George Clooney really ought to run for president. I also got a fair amount of knitting done. I’m working on two projects simultaneously: a blanket (the first of two) for Siamese Rescue’s shelter blanket program, and a hood/cowl type of thing for the allegedly impending winter weather. (It’s 60 degrees or so here today, so who knows if I’ll actually need the thing, but it’s my first project on circular needles, and I’m enjoyng the process enough that I don’t really care about the finished product.) I’m making the blanket from a pattern that I created myself, something I never dreamed I’d be able to do. I still haven’t done it, of course—I won’t feel proud of it until I’ve actually finished it and made it work. But it’s been fun to try.

To counteract my recent bout of acquisitiveness—I’ve been bidding on eBay for two new objects of obsession: millefiori Venetian glass beads, and a very specific style of Levis that are the most flattering jeans I’ve ever owned—I also put a bunch of CDs and knitting books up for sale on Amazon, and arranged my first ever knit swap, trading a knitting book that I don’t expect to use for a pair of Addi Turbos in an unusual size. So I’m feeling slightly guilty about my spending sprees, but at least I’m clearing some stuff out to compensate. I don’t know where this millefiori obsession came from (”Cash in the Attic,” probably), but I think I’ve satisfied the urge for now, having bought a pair of inexpensive and gorgeous millefiori earrings on my new favorite site, Etsy.com, and a really cheap, beautiful pendant on eBay. The jeans obsession comes from the fact that, just as Trinny and Susannah promised, I put on this particular style and immediately gained two inches in height and lost 15 pounds. I figure once you find anything that suits you that well, you have no choice but to stock up on them. Er, right?

Things I haven’t done this weekend:
1. Gone to the gym every day as planned. I have sort of an excuse there, though: my personal trainer had me try something new at our second-to-last session on Friday, and I haven’t been able to walk properly since, much less exercise. I’m going to try to do some stretching and Pilates-style toning this evening, and maybe walk on the treadmill if I’m feeling ambitious, just to get the kinks out of my muscles, but a serious workout will have to wait until tomorrow or Tuesday.
2. Done any work work. There’s some preparatory reading I need to do before tomorrow morning, so that’s how I’ll be spending my evening tonight.
3. Go to the brand new Ace Hardware over by the grocery store and pick up some wallpaper remover and something to score the wallpaper with. Our house is coated in dated, ghastly wallpaper, and I’m hoping I’ll be able to get rid of it with the nasty chemical liquid remover rather than resorting to the heat gun. Heat guns scare me.
4. Burn CDs for Mark and Ken.
5. Block the above-mentioned shrug and sew up the sleeves so that I can actually wear it.
6. Color my hair…but I think I can get another week out of it before I start getting the skunk-roots effect.

But hey, I cooked Thanksgiving dinner, I worked on the spare bedroom, and I did lots of knitting. That has to count for something, doesn’t it? (Doesn’t it? Please?!)

this is me:

http://www.overduemedia.com/archive.aspx?strip=20051026

(It’s true—despite my love for my job, not to mention its salary and benefits, there’s a little part of me that wishes I were a cataloger in a public library. But it’s a very little part.)

(Gah. I ignore the blog for a mere couple of weeks or so, and it gets swamped by nefarious comment spam. Bastards.)

I’d try to count how many CDs I’ve bought in the last two or three weeks, but I’m afraid to. I think it might be more than 15. After months of relative moderation, I’ve gone kind of nuts lately on music purchases. And I’m afraid it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Right now, I’m listening to one of the first purchases in the recent spate: Sleater-Kinney’s “The Woods” (not to be confused with Malcolm Middleton’s “In the Woods,” which I’m probably going to end up downloading from Chemikal Underground, because it’s only available on import here so far). I confess to admiring Sleater-Kinney more than really liking them; I find that I don’t even listen to “Call the Doctor,” my favorite record of theirs, all that often. That may wind up being the case with this record too, I don’t know, but at the moment, it’s exactly what I’m in the mood to hear. Even the eleven-minute song sounds good.

Just before this, I listened to “de nova,” the new record by The Redwalls. It too was superb. They’re deliberately and a little self-consciously retro, yeah, but when your retro-ness includes the best elements of the British Invasion, being retro isn’t a bad thing at all.

Next up: the Greencards, whose second (I think) album I just picked up. They’re new to me, but that’s probably just because I don’t have a reliable source of bluegrass-ish recommendations anymore; checking the archives of a twang-related list that I used to subscribe to, I see that I’m a little late to the party on this one. Haven’t listened to the record yet—it just arrived yesterday—but I loved the MP3s I heard.

And then there’s the first Malcolm Middleton record, Emiliana Torrini’s perfectly wonderful “Fisherman’s Woman,” the Wrights’ “Down This Road,” the new Karan Casey record, Dwight Yoakam’s new one, Richmond Fontaine’s superb “The Fitzgerald”…and that list doesn’t even include my likely top two records of the year—the forthcoming Son Volt record and Robbie Fulks’s “Georgia Hard.” It has emphatically not been a bad year for music.

Yeah, I’m already hypothesizing a best-of list. It is halfway through the year, after all. And the spot for “Best 2004 Record That I Didn’t Hear Until 2005″ is already nailed down: James Yorkston and the Athlete’s “Just Beyond the River.” I liked their first record, “Moving Up Country,” quite well, but the second one is in a whole different league. If James Yorkston had a really great voice, as opposed to just an okay one, it would be in serious contention for Best Record Ever. (Slight exaggeration, but only a slight one.)

From perusing the James Yorkston site, I learned about Anne Briggs, an obscure English trad-folk legend who apparently hated the sound of her recorded voice and so gave up recording, and eventually singing. I listened to all of the available clips, and I have to admit that I didn’t like her voice all that much either. But I was so distressed by the idea that there’s an obscure English trad-folkie out there whom I hadn’t heard of yet that I ended up buying two of her CDs. Music fandom is sometimes a very strange thing.

(But geez, Sandy Denny cited her as an influence. How could I not buy the CDs?)

Kathryn Williams—the Nick Drake-iest of all the singer-songwriters ever to be compared to Nick Drake (except for Alexi Murdoch, who’s almost too Nick Drake-y)—managed to sneak out a new CD without my realizing it, so it’s on order. And to my utter delight, John Doyle has a new CD coming out in two weeks, only four years after his debut. I’ll be ordering that one the day it comes out too.

I’ve also finally started knitting again, after a long hiatus. July is an odd time to start knitting again—holding fuzzy synthetic fibers is not the best thing I can think of to do on a warm summer evening—but I had to start again sometime, and this past weekend was as good as any. I’m finishing the cat bed that I started, um, last fall. The bottom piece is finished; I tried to get the cats to pay attention to it, but other than Liam chewing the loose end that I haven’t woven in yet, no dice. Maybe when it has its nice fuzzy cobalt blue sides assembled…

And yet, with all of this going on, I’m still considering buying a PlayStation2. Because evidently I don’t have enough ways to squander my leisure time.

…sort of. I love this. Makes me want to visit Tasmania.

Strathaven folk knit themselves a room :: ABC Tasmania

(Thanks to Erika for sending me the link.)