knitting

There, dammit, I'm a knitter again.

['Project closeup: "wisp" variant']

Blame our visit to Catherine and Jeff in Illinois recently; I knew I had gorgeous yarn stashed away, and I knew I needed to just dive back in and get started, but it took seeing her lace knitting left casually out on the table that made me say "*@($*(&! I know how to do that."

Bit the bullet, set up a ravelry.com account.  (I'm amyqmc there.)

Came home, dug out the stuff, picked a project I knew I was capable of doing — and just did it. Felt much better, too.

While 'Remixed' is still a big stinking pile of do-over, the good news is that it's significantly more done now. I've been sitting on the couch listening to Jeff's television choices and ripping out stitches a column at a time, alternating between

• cursing my massive set of mistakes
• reassuring myself that I've learned something, won't make these mistakes again, and am setting things right

An evening's worth of work is clearing out the quilting stitches on a strip the width of the quilt and anywhere between 5" and 7" wide, followed by taking it over to the sewing machine and re-quilting the newly-cleaned strip with a better pattern and white thread instead of grey.

No, there aren't any photos. I'm not showing you mistakes THIS horrid!

From this discover.com article, courtesy of Noah:

[David] Henderson’s method of constructing a hyperbolic plane involved taping together thin, circular strips of paper … Twenty years later, Taimina remembers, Henderson was still using the same tattered model. When she was assigned to teach his class on hyperbolic geometry at Cornell, where she had an appointment as a visiting professor, she was forced to confront it.

Stick by your words, domesticat.

Despite what Matthew will tell you, I’m generally a nice and polite person, especially in public. I let my hair down on this site more than I often do in face-to-face conversations, and every now and then I have to learn to live with the little lump in my throat that comes with speaking my mind.

You never know when you're going to fall in love. Well, I wouldn't so much call it 'love' as I would 'deep and abiding lust.'

Adrienne Vittadini. Cristina. Color #4.

Any knitter who tells you that there is no such thing as 'crack' yarn is a lying sumbitch who is desperately trying to cover up his/her addiction. In this world, there are workaday yarns, yarns you use to construct beautiful but unfussy garments; garments that don't attract a moment's notice. Then there are yarns that, once spotted in a store, never leave your mind, quickly ascending ranks to the level of obsession.

This is a shawl salvaged from a pattern gone desperately, desperately wrong. We’re talking "throw the unfinished project across the room and screech out loud" wrong. I’d started working this yarn in an Irish net stitch, which looks like a large series of interconnected X’s with open areas in between.

Except I was working with yarn that was completely and utterly wrong for that stitch pattern, and I kept losing stitches without realizing it. By the time I’d worked up about nine inches’ worth of shawl, I folded my work over and realized in horror that my knitting was getting smaller with every row.

I knew that I needed a shawl by birthdaybash weekend, and that I was running out of time. I resorted to one of the quickest and easiest openwork patterns known to knitters: k2tog, yarn over, repeat. Luckily, desperation made me knit fast.