Musings

I've been monitoring a board on cooking and knitting and I noticed that the moderator was looking for some help. I volunteered, since three things I love are knitting, cooking and eating.  We're looking for creative things to bring people onto the board.  More shared recipes.  More shared patterns.  That sort of thing.

The mod suggested food themed knit-alongs and I thought we could do something like dinner and a movie: you know, dinner and a hand knit potholder, dinner and a dish cloth, dinner and an apron.

I have one burning question: how do I keep the food from getting all over the cashmere? Oh, and can we call tomato stains dyeing with natural pigments?

This may go someplace: I never could get the berry stains out of my white jeans...would yarn treated with, say, a combination of raspberry juice and blueberry juice sell, or would I need to have it as part of a high fiber diet? cooked a la pasta?

Perhaps a more profitable line of thought would be food based amigurumi: knit eggplants, carrots, asparagus...

I'll stop now before I make a bigger fool of myself.

the things knitters carry in their knitting bags

Like most yarnies I know, on any given day I'm carrying at least one project.   Also like a number of my brethren and sisteren (see, Peter, Terry and Dan, I mentioned you) I have a number of bags of differing sizes. 

I like colorful bags.   Most of them are Vera Bradley bags I got used (some barely used) and a couple are by Laurel Burch.  Because every knitter needs a kit, I have a little make up case I move from project to project.  In that I have:
- at least 3 cable needles (in my case size 3 or 5 dpns
- at least 2 different sized crochet hooks
- a tape measure
- a pad and pen
- more stitch markers than I care to admit to
- a power bar
- blue scissors shaped like a cat (bryspun)  http://www.brysonknits.com/Bryson%20Dist/Scissor-Display-Cat.jpg
- a nautilus shaped needle sizer http://carolinahomespun.com/miva/graphics/00000001/DGneedlegaugeMetric.jpeg
- tons of chibi needles
- the occasional earring I took off because it hurt my ear
That's the basic list.  But sometimes I find the most unusual things in my knitting bag. This one greeted me the other day!    

Vera Wang.  Wearing Vera Bradley.  And I had no idea she was there until I reached in to get my cabled cape.  Doesn't she look smug?

A good day for a knitter

A little less than 2 years ago I saw a pattern on interweave knits. A stranded Cardigan knit back and forth. Now, lurking in color work, while doable, is boring so I decided, even though I wasn't using a pure animal fiber, that I'd knit it in the round, steek it, and take it fom there. I calculated the adjustments I needed to make and whipped up my steeled cloisonné Hackett. And forgot about it. I was not looking forward to today, so decided to wear some hand knit comfort. The morning started with an elegant co worker raving, she loved the colors and wondered where I had found it. Another person told her I'd made it. Throughout the day, people I barely knew stopped to admire it while the ones who knew me well kept checking the inside to see how I'd finished it. They all oohed and aaahed over the Czech glass button. You have to understand: the day was still difficult, but this made it bearable. It feels great to actually have you work admired. No one asked how much I'd spent on the yarn or suggested there were other ways to "waste my time".

String therapy

You often hear knitters claim that knitting is like yoga. Or less expensive than therapy. Or keeps them from killing people. I admit it is a stress reliever, rhythmic and soothing. My sister would argu I'm full of baloney; she's heard me cursing as I drop down 20 rows to reknit a cable or when a pattern instruction is less than helpful. Or when I find out there's errata available after having frogged and reknit a section more than once. She's probably right, but with the day I've had a little string therapy would be nice about now.

How I got here

There was a wonderful woman named Nellie Mann who lived with my Great Aunt Ilsa in Vermont. I was less than five years old when I first saw her making beautiful things with "string" (well, that's what it looked like to me) and a hook. She called it something that sounded like Crow Shay to my ears. She showed me how she did it, but at that age gnats have longer attention spans than I did so of course I forgot most of it. Our moving to Hawaii, far from my friend didn't help much, but I did remember what the "chain looked like and pestered my mother until she bought some string ( which she called yarn) in the garrish colors a child loves. And I chained happily away. We moved back to the mainland three years later, and I met Nellie Mann ( whose name, in my mind, had morphed into Nelli Knit) again. My attention span had improved, and with her help I started to crochet in earnest. Unfortunately, my skill was lacking so my flat crocheted pieces were wonvdfully three dimensionally warped. Over time I improved, increased my tool to yarn ratio from 1:1 to 2:1 and have been knitting and crocheting(and wet felting and weaving) ever since. But it was Nellie Knit who handed me my first hook and Hank of yarn: this is dedicated to her memory, with thanks and loving memories.