Not a creature is stirring.

It's mid-afternoon here, I put the Goober down for a nap, turned around, and the husbeast was in OUR bed, napping. I'm the only one awake here (other than Sekhmet). It's a bloody strange state of affairs; usually I'm the one semi-conscious on the couch.

The weather has begun leveling off (only a twenty degree temp difference last night, instead of forty or fifty), and my migraines are getting milder. I knew it would happen as soon as I went to the doctor -- isn't that always the way??

Earlier today, I started messing around with the South Park avatar maker thingie. I'm probably the last person on the internet to discover it, but there's the link for you on the off chance you're further behind on pop culture than I am.

I made an avatar of me, with the idea of putting it on the blog.

The husbeast walked in as I was saving it, began laughing uncontrollably, and said "Oh my gosh, that is YOU." He particularly liked the camo pants, but told me the outfit wouldn't be spot-on until I figured out how to put orange flip-flops on. Not sure that's possible. But you get an idea of my fashion sense.

So I made one of the Goober. You know, to save time when she starts her own blog next month.


The husbeast and Goober were, by this time, hanging over my shoulder, giggling and pointing, so I made one of the husbeast, for good measure.


So there you go. Our lovely, geeked out, slob family, in all it's South Park glory.

We're really too easily amused around here.

Now I've gotta go fix the Vogue Knitting photos while everyone's leaving me alone, so I can maybe review the holiday issue before the new spring and summer one comes out.

Yet again with the steel knitting needles.

Remember the discussion about how, possibly, the spread of knitting was limited by the lack of steel knitting needles? Um. Yeah.

Today, Alwen (bless her) went a little crazy and sat down to figure out what it takes to knit at twenty stitches to the inch. (That's eighty stitches to ten centimeters, for youse guys living in Metric Land.) That is the gauge used to knit some of the earliest known knitting in Europe. What it takes, it turns out, is needles .85 mm in diameter. That's almost HALF the diameter of triple-zero knitting needles.

I can't possibly see how you could knit on anything that thin, other than steel. I'm not even sure aluminum would hold up; I'm betting not (and aluminum is a moot point when we're talking about 1275, because it's a modern metal. Titanium or platinum would work, haha, but they weren't available in 1275 either.)

Anyone with ANY thoughts on alternative materials for knitting needles that small, let me know. Please. I really, really really want to hear it. I'm going to be contacting my uncle the metallurgist about this, soon. He's not an archeo-metallurgist, but he IS married to a knitter, so I'm hoping what with one thing and another, he can answer my questions. I'm sure, at the least, he's got better metallurgy books in his office to look stuff up in, than I do. (In fact, now that I think of it, I'll ask if he's got books in layman's terms to suggest.)

I'm also speculating on the sudden appearance of larger gauge knitting on the scene in the 1400s-1500s. Maybe people got tired of waiting for steel needles and started knitting on wood. The Monmouth caps of England were knit at about two stitches per inch, a gauge very easily attained on needles made from nearly anything - wood, ivory, bone, shell, you name it. This was also the era when knitted clothing showed up, possibly done on knitting frames. It looks VERY likely that people found alternatives to expensive steel needles with typical ingenuity.

More food for thought. Feel free to aruge with me.

Maybe Sekhmet needs the drugs.

Earlier today I was feeling no pain, and the cat was on my lap, so I started rubbing her head, chanting "kitty kitty kitty".

Then she bit me.

Then I flung her across the room, chanting "fucker fucker fucker".

Then I began laughing uncontrollably.

The husbeast gave me That Look.


Woohoo! No migraine!! Wheeeeeee!

Oh, goodie. More drugs.

(If you're uninterested in migrane news, scroll down. There's knitting stuff and a Goober photo at the bottom.)

I saw my doctor yesterday about the migraines. Ironically, it was a particularly bad day (due in part to the weather) and I looked quite pitiful, huddled inside two sweaters, wearing my super-dark sunglasses. (Those are the sunglasses I had made, custom, that the optometrist said might be safe to wear when welding.) Apparently it's been a very bad year for everyone, in terms of weather-related health problems, and he didn't argue a bit, just asked questions about why I didn't like my old medication and suggested a new one. I said okay to the new one. (I may tell him what to do in terms of chronic pain, but he knows more than me about just about everything else.)

So over I go to the pharmacy, land of my nightmares. I hate those fuckers. Have I mentioned lately I hate those fuckers?

I was in line to ask them what the bloody hell was taking so long, when my name came up on the 'perscription ready' list. When I got to the window, I was greeted with a sheaf of papers to sign - turns out my new migraine medication is a controlled substance, just like the narcotics and tranquilizers I've been trying to quit taking for the last month.

Sigh. At least I only take these when I've got a migraine, and once the weather settles down, that means almost never.

It's called "Midrin" for those who are curious. It's a 'combination drug', meaning it's some unholy witches' brew of stuff, not one single chemical. There's an anti-inflammatory, a vasoconstrictor (which is what I was on before that messed me up, but this is mild enough it doesn't bother me), some kind of sedative related to chloral hydrate (isn't that a hoot? Knock out drops. Fun), and God knows what else. one or two other things.

Long story short, they make me slur my speech, but I slept last night for the first time in three weeks, and am awake enough this morning to be writing a blog post at nine AM, instead of laying in the recliner with the cat on me, barely coherent. When I took it yesterday, I got really goofy, but I've yet to decide if that's the drug, or just being free of pain -- I've seen it in chronic pain situations before. My CP doctor told me about it, too. Basically, if you've been in pain for a while, being suddenly free of pain can make you so giddy it's like you're drunk. And it can happen with drugs that have NO drunkeness effect. I've had it before with anti-inflammatories. So we'll see. But there are far worse things than being goofy. I kinda like being goofy.

-... -

Anyway. Now that I'm feeling better, I'm working on the Vogue Knitting holiday review. I swear. Unfortunately, last I checked the VK web site is down and there are no photos available. I took some of my own, using my camera to take photos of the magazine. But they kind of suck. So unless the web site goes up in the next day or so, you're stuck with more photos of a lesser quality, for the review.

I had the husbeast look through the magazine in the hopes of another description like 'fistful of monkey's assholes', but no luck. Mostly he just kept saying "what is that doing in a winter magazine?" which was the same thing I was asking.

There is one pattern that made me think "Oh my god, another Dalek", but you'll just have to wait and see. (Unless you have the magazine, then feel free to guess which one I'm talking about. I bet you know.)

-... -

Last night, we were watching "How it's Made" on Discover. It's a show that does factory tours. The husbeast and I are engineering geeks, so we love the show, and it's something safe to watch when the Goober's running around (as opposed to, say, murder vision, which is strictly a nap time sort of thing).

I don't know if it's the environment or simply DNA, but the Goober appears to be turning into an engineering geek before our very eyes. It was a segment on how they make ball-bearings, and she was fascinated.

(Note the pig slippers.)

I went to high school with a girl who was about five feet tall, looked like a pixie, and had a tiny little-girl voice. She told everyone that she wanted to be a mechanical engineer. Last I heard, she was working for NASA. I always think of her when the Goober starts on the engineering stuff.

Now I'm gonna go knit. Because I feel like it. Whee!

ShoesDay!

I wasn't planning on doing another shoe post, but we had a Shoe Event this morning, so here you go.

About a year ago, my sister-in-law found a sale on children's animal slippers and bought two pairs, one for her son and one for the Goober. She gave them to both kids last Christmas, figuring that they'd fit eventually. It's finally cooled down enough here to NEED slippers, and when I noticed the Goober's feet were cold this morning I went and dug out the slippers and put them on her feet.

They fit.

She's had them on for about half an hour, and is still walking about saying "Look! Pig shoes! Oink oink onink!"

You know...

Knitting actually goes quite fast when you actually SIT DOWN AND KNIT.

Yesterday, I woke up without a headache for the first time in three weeks, and started knitting. See the line where the pattern shifts? That's where I started knitting. In 24 hours I've knit about two inches of fabric. This whole deal where there's no deadline and you just knit when you feel like it is... fun. Imagine.

I swear I'm never knitting on a deadline again. (You can all bookmark this entry to e-mail it back to me next Christmas.)

Sekhmet, you fucker.

CAKE!!

We were at a combination birthday and going-away party for a friend of ours last night. When we all started singing "Happy Birthday", the Goober shouted "CAKE!" at the top of her voice. No dummy, my kid. Got her priorities straight. Between us, we ate three pieces. She's right as rain this morning. I'm nauseated from all the fat and sugar.

The friend having the party was the fearless leader of our trivia team. With him leaving, we're going to consolidate with another group of people who played trivia and worked with the hubby, and make one big team. (It was fun when both teams were playing in one place; we'd all boo each other and throw french fries.) So trivia goes on. Last week we won a $20 gift certificate for a pretty good restaurant. More and more 'real' restaurants are running this trivia tournament, as a way to fill the place up on a slow night. These days we've got about twenty places to choose from and can pick the kid-friendly venues. (Though the hub still plays without me and the Goober at the biker bar.)

Otherwise, I think I'm out the other side of the drug switchover. It only took a week longer than I planned; not bad. I switched from two pretty serious drugs - tranquilizers and narcotic painkillers - over to an anti-depressant and an arthritis drug related to anti-inflammatories. (Anti-depressants work on pain control. It's weird, and I didn't quite believe it before I tried it, but it's true.) Anyway, once the new drugs kicked in, I had to quit the old ones, and have basically been doing drug withdrawal for the last month. It's a lot like having the flu, with migraines.

So that's why things have been pretty dead around here; they've been dead in real life, too. I've spent two weeks laying on the couch. The good news is, now that I'm on the new drugs, I should spend a lot less time 'drugged up', and I shouldn't - hopefully - have to tinker with the medication again for a year or two. (Eventually my stomach will quit tolerating the anti-inflammatory. I'm dreading it already.)

It's officially cold here. At the Yarn Harlot's, it's officially winter when the heater goes on. At my house, it's official when the husbeast puts the hard top on the Jeep.

Brrrr.

The accidental sweater.

There were questions about this sweater when I posted a photo of it, so here are some details.

It is a seamless sweater in the EZ Percentage System style, the saddle-shoulder method discussed in Knitting Without Tears. It's the same decrease method used on the Steeked Jacket. I knit it on size ten and a half needles, with Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride Worsted.

Originally, I was just curious about how the decreasing method worked. I had two skeins of beige yarn sitting around, so I cast on 200 stitches (the number of stitches EZ uses for her example) and knit upward, doing nothing but the yoke, just to see how it worked. When it was done, I was looking at it, and realized if it had arms and a body, it would fit me. So I got another color of yarn (I figured matching the beige would be impossible, and it'd be dumb to try), picked up the stitches at the bottom of the yoke, and knit downward, making the sleeves and body.

At the end of it, totally without a plan, I wound up with a pretty nice sweater. It used less yarn than I expected - six or seven skeins, total. And it went quickly.

I need to knit a couple dozen more in different colors.

Happy Halloween

Shoesday, and some photos.

Fun still abounds at House O' Samurai. The weather is doing this crazy, mid-season deal where there's a forty degree difference between night and day, and the shifts are giving me migraines. So it's back to vegetation in front of the TV, and all the peanut butter and bananas you can eat. Goodie.

Someone asked about gauge on the Russian Prime. I'm knitting it at about five stitches to the inch, with size five/3.75mm needles.

The Goob has begun watching television like this:

That's an easy chair she's got her legs up against. I swear I had nothing to do with this; she settled in like that all on her own and watched TV that way for about half an hour. I got dizzy just looking at her.

She also unearthed a horn from the depths of the toy box, left over from her birthday party:

It's doing wonders for the migraine. (Pleae note the Cat Look Of Doom from behind her. After the photo was taken, the cat pounced.)

Sekhmet? Oh. She's gone totally fucking crazy. Over the husbeast's feet.

Whenever the husbeast goes barefoot, she goes wild. Lays on his feet, rolls on them, rubs her face over them. This time she decided to have a taste.

I don't know what she thought of the taste, but she didn't like the husbeast shouting "SEKHMET, YOU FUCKER!" at the top of his voice.


Oh, shoes?

I got my black suede clogs out of the closet tonight. Worn with heavy socks and long pants, they're good for all but heavy snow, and I usually wear them all the way through winter. No idea who made them; I bought them in Hawaii about five years ago.

Metallurgy, and knitting, and kitchen gear.

Oh my.

For the one or two of you still interested in the metallurgy topic, there's a good history of it, here. (Unfortunately it's a bit on the technical side, but you can get the gist.) Among other interesting links I've turned up, is that East Africa produced a lot of the early steel; knitting was invented in Egypt. Concidence? I'm starting to think not. Then, knitting spread out of Spain to Western Europe at about the same time that Spain started producing enough steel to export it.

Interesting. (Oh, yes it is. Quit rolling your eyes at me.)


The Russian Prime is a single round away from the arm pits:

Tonight I hope to put the armpit stitches on holders, establish the steeks, and all that rot. Then it's a simpler, faster pattern, all the way up to the shoulders. The sleeves are picked up in the same pattern and knit downward, continuing the pattern to the wrists. It's cool. You'll all want to knit one.


Tonight, cooking dinner, I used a new gadget, a Microplane grater.

This is the zester, but I used it tonight on parmesan cheese. It's sharper than a razor blade and made quick work of the cheese, producing a really fine, papery grate. Awesome. You cooks out there, check them out. They're worth the money and more beside.

Still more about knitting and technology.

Last night, after my last post on knitting needles and materials to make them out of , I went and dug up my copy of "A History of Hand Knitting" (Richard Rutt) and looked at what he had to say. He also says that early needles were made from bronze and steel. However, he emphasizes European knitting and pretty much ignores the implications of all those bits found in Egypt, so I take him with a large grain of salt.

On the other hand, Rutt's boffo at details of specific artefacts, giving charts and gauge and material, and like that. According to him, the oldest bit of knitting that's known and substantiated in Europe is a pillow that was found in a tomb in Spain. The tomb was closed up in 1275 CE. So, obviously, the pillows were made then, or earlier. He includes charts and stuff, but the interesting bit is the gauge: Eighty stitches to ten centimeters, or about TWENTY STITCHES PER BLOODY INCH. That is fucking SMALL. (The smallest I've ever knit was twelve stitches to the inch, on 0000 needles, with thread, and I thought THAT was insane.) Among other things, I always wonder who the poor slob knitting was, and hope they had good light. But I doubt they did; Ott lights had a few years left in R&D.

For our puroses, the big point of that gauge is, there's no way it couldl have been knit with anything other than steel needles. Nothing else available in 1275 had the tensile strength to do it. At least not that I know of, and I live with a guy who does industrial inspection and have had an ongoing interest in archometallurgy, myself, since at least 1990. So if anyone ELSE can come up with something that could have made knitting needles smaller than quad-zeros, in 1275 CE, let me know. I sincerely want to hear it. Because I can't think of anything. I can't think of one organic material that could have managed it.

Steel would have been expensive then, limiting knitting to either religious orders with lots of money, or rich people (with lots of money). Spain produced some of the best steel in the world back then, so it's probable that the needles were fairly easy for them to come by, but they still would have been expensive. And of course, there was no way for them to ramp up production enough to provide knitting needles for every peasant in Europe. I think we may have hit upon a legitimate reason why knitting did not spread faster than it did.

Rutt also describes the process of making needles in the 1500s: the local blacksmith would basically cut lengths of wire, straighten and temper them, and point the ends. So by then needles were easier to get, but the blacksmith still had to get the wire from somewhere, and extrusion methods weren't really fast and cheap until, as I mentioned before, the Victorian era.


On a related topic, I was brooding over other ways technology has influenced knitting, and hit on something else: Fair Isle knitting. They were certainly doing banded patterns of stranded color for hundreds of years, but Fair Isle knitting did not exist, as we know it, with all those colors, until after the 1860s. Know what happened in the 1860s? Synthetic dyes were invented.

You can't knit in two dozen colors, until you can MAKE the two dozen colors.

More food for thought. I'm on a roll. Going to page through Rutt again, and ask the Husbeast metallurgy questions. I may wind up calling the uncle who is a retired industrial chemist and engineer who specialized in, you guessed it, metallurgy. This is an odd enough topic, from his point of view, to really get his attention. He's more used to working on nuclear reactors.

What I really need is an archeo-metallurgist. Anybody know one?

A related issue, in knitting history.

While brooding over the history of knitting at the gym today (hey, I've gotta think of something to distract me from my knees), I came up with another reason why the spread of knitting might have been rather slow. One that has little or nothing to do with culture and trade routes, per se.

Mind you, I'm talking about the Middle Ages, here, around 1100 CE.

Metallurgy.

I wonder, if perhaps the spread of knitting was slowed by a lack of decent knitting needles. Sounds crazy at first, but think about it. Back then they were knitting at really fine gauges (seven stitches to the inch, or less, average) and needles out of wood, that small, kind of suck. Not to mention, even making needles out of wood, by hand, can be a tricky proposition. (Look into arrow making, if you don't believe me.) Not impossible, of course, not by any stretch, but certainly a pain in the keester. And of course, the harder the wood, the more useful the needle is, and the more difficult it is to make in the first place.

Metal needles would be even harder to get. Iron and steel were both very expensive. Bronze and copper would be too soft to be useful (bronze, if pure, would work, but likely be expensive, too). And aluminum wouldn't be made in any useful, affordable way, until at least the 1880s (useless but interesting fact of the day: in the 1850s, aluminum was worth more than gold, because no one knew how to extract it from bauxite). Aluminum knitting needles didn't exist until after WW1, to my knowledge.

There are, of course, other things to make needles out of, bone and ivory and tortoise shell being the most common. And those are lovely, and certainly did exist. But again, the material isn't strong enough to make really small needles with.

I do know that lace knitting, at a very small gauge, did not exist in any real way until the Victorian era, because that was when wire-making technology made it possible for the masses to buy steel knitting needles cheaply (or make them out of bicycle spokes, or the ribs of umbrellas). Until then, only a few people could afford the needles to knit the really fine lace; I'm sure it existed, but it wasn't widespread until then.

So. More food for thought.

Knitting migrations, revisited.

Partly because my Vogue Knitting holiday issue seems to have disappeared (it may be time to clean the house), and partly because HistoricStitcher left me a comment about it (you can read it, here.)

In a nutshell, she makes a case for knitting being brought to Europe during the Crusades, by returning camp followers and the like, who'd gone to the Middle East.

I do think that the Crusades did trigger the movement of knitting, along both trade routes we've discussed before; across N Africa into Spain, and up through the Black Sea into Eastern Europe. There were probably a lot of refugees from the fighting, and they'd have moved along those trade routes to get away from it. Stands to reason.

It's likely there were also all kinds of single bits of knitting brought back by the Crusaders, shirts and socks and gloves and all, and spread out all over Europe. Archeology just hasn't found them. Most were probably worn to rags, and the rest lost in the coming thousand years.

But the thing is, knitting isn't just a trade good, it's a SKILL, something that has to be taught, and learned, to be truly passed along. And it's more the skill of knitting and it's movement, than plain old knitted socks, that I'm talking about. There were other things that the Crusaders brought back to Europe, that are well-documented - spices and citrus fruit leap to my mind, thanks to the food research I do - and both of those goods exploded onto the scene, historically speaking. Looking back, it's like one minute, no one in Europe had heard of them, and the next, every rich person from Ireland to Moscow was eating cinnamon-orange pudding. Blam. Sudden influx.

Knitting's movements weren't like that. There's no sudden appearance. It can be tracked across Europe (at least Western Europe) pretty easily, looking at paintings and fragments and linguistics. It took hundreds of years to spread all the way to Scandinavia, from Spain, which is kind of what you'd expect of a skill that has to be learned. (Iron working, which was only invented once, in China, and then spread west to India, the Middle East, and Europe, can be tracked much the same way, though it took longer to move, because it traveled further.)

So... Crusades and knitting. Yeah, I bet the Crusades did have an effect on knitting's movement. But I still don't think the skill was brought back by returning crusaders, at least not in numbers large enough to matter. Certainly it's possible, even probable, that single people returned with the knowledge, and may explain odd bits and pieces that have been found. But knitting as a trade? That took some time.

Opinions? Anyone?

...and some knitting.

After I posted last night, I realized I haven't posted a picture of the Russian Prime sweater in at least a week, so here you go:

It's actually a little further along than that, but you get the idea. It's hovering around the armpits of the body, mostly because I haven't knit on it in two days. I've got some fun drug-related crap going on, where I alternate between migraines and nausea. Plus the Husbeast is pulling double shifts.

The Goober is in toddler heaven because I'm under the weather; she's spent the last two days watching children's television and eating bananas and peanut butter sandwiches. I alternate between feeling bad, and wishing all the kids in the world could have problems like this. As you can see, she's mentally scarred by the whole thing:

The other day I hugged her against her will. Poor, poor Goober. Life's rough.

Topics revisited.

It's yet another fun day of sloth here at House O' Samurai. It's rained all day, the Goober's been in her pajamas, and we've both been snacking and have totally blown off regular meals. She's having a ball. Boy, is she going to hate a return to real life, tomorrow.

Anyway, there have been a couple subjects raised here in the last week or so that got a lot of comments, and I wanted to comment upon them further, so here you go.



THE STASHING ISSUE:

I can't tell from some of the comments left if people were generally agreeing with me, or if some of you thought I was trying to tell you how to spend your money. If it's the second case, please let me reassure you. Not only do I think it's rude to tell someone how to spend their money, I also think there are a lot of worse things to do with your spare cash than buy yarn. I'm firing up the dye pot again, now that the weather has cooled, and will be re-listing the sock yarn left over from last year as well. So please. Buy all the yarn you want. If you wanna insulate your house with it, knock yourself out.



THE GREAT LITERATURE ISSUE:

I said Shakespeare was a hack, and people went wild. Which, no offense, is kind of why I can't stand the guy. It's not so much that he truly sucks, it's that everyone holds him up as the be-all end-all of English lit, and really all he was, was a pop culture wonk, trying to make a buck. Amy Lane and I have discussed this in e-mail a little bit... she compared him to Stephen Spielburg, that he made a bunch of movies/plays and some money and was pretty much the pop culture king of his day. Personally I think Amy's giving The Bard too much credit. Spielburg has used his talent for some good social awareness (Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List), and The Bard's social awareness didn't go much further than sucking up to the royal family. I think of The Bard more as a historic version of Jerry Bruckheimer.

Studying Shakespeare in school, to me, is kind of like if they took a Brukheimer movie, let's say Pirates of the Caribbean, waited four hundred years, and because it was old, said it was profound. Then they make every kid in school watch it and discuss it, and people put on tuxedos and spend a week's pay to see it over and over in fancy theaters. That's what we do with Shakespeare. So, if you wanna read Shakespeare, and like the guy, knock yourselves out. But I don't think he was some fantastical example of Great Literature. He was just a guy, a product of his time, trying to make a buck. (And I don't think he's the one who actually wrote the plays, I think a peer of the realm did it anonymously, but that's a discussion for another day.)

What do I like, you may ask? Well, if we're talking about historic writings that I find profound, or at least throught-provoking, I go further back and hit what I consider the really good stuff. Beowulf, the Ulster Cycle (there is a good novelization of it called The Red Branch, by Morgan Llewellyn), the Arthurian Legends (and the related, older, Welsh stuff), the Icelandic Sagas (which Tolkien ripped off -er- adapted). Like that. All contain great commentary on the human condition, great stories, and fascinating characters. Plus they're as old or older than Shakespeare, and so I think legitimate if we're going for historic fiction. Plus there's always Canterbury Tales, but that's about sex and farting, though good for a laugh. Aristophanes was pretty funny, too, but seriously low class. I don't care if he was famous and ancient and wrote in Greek.

I guess profundity is in the eye of the beholder. Folklore fans, all those links above came from Sacred Texts, a wonderful database of all that is holy (or used to be holy) from all over the world. Enjoy.

It has begun raining, again, so I'm going to click "publish" before the cable goes out.

Shoes Day!

It's been a crappy couple days around here, with me and the Goober sick and the Husbeast doing a work project that involves him not being home most of tomorrow. Thankfully, we've got shoes to talk about.

This is more of my ongoing Sketchers addiction; these were purchased last year and I love them so much, I take good care of them and they look almost new. Here they are without socks, so you can kind of get an idea of them:


Here they are with feet in them. I'm wearing white socks, which should be pretty obvious.


Aaaaand here's a shot from the side, to sort of round things out. I took the photo myself, so it's goofy, but you get the idea.


Up next week: More Sketchers.

Tis the season.

What season, you ask? THE SEASON OF SWEATERS!! (Jumpers. Whatever. It's autumn in the northern hemisphere.)

The weather is finally cooling off enough to warrant unpacking the wool. Today, with delight, I pulled one on and took a lovely, toasty-warm nap while the Goober was taking hers. Wonderful. I was wearing this one:

It's a regular old pullover knit with Brown Sheep's Lamb's Pride worsted. This is one of those standards; every time I put it on, I think I should knit ten or twenty more of them in different colors.

I can also tell the weather's cooling off, because now Sekhmet wants to crawl inside my clothes at every opportunity. Here she is in my bath robe:

...yes, I look like I'm ten months pregnant with a cat.

And here she is, trying to climb into my pants leg. (Yeah, that'll work.)


Occasionally, when I'm not around to lay on, she will lower herself to laying on the pile of wool blankies I've knit and assembled for her. That's all Australian merino she's laying on; the blue is felted, the brown on top is a loose garter stitch. (No, Bells, I did not use any of the wonderful yarn you sent me for the cat. I'm saving it for ME. Or maybe the Goober.)



I'm almost up to the arm pits on the Russian Prime. It's a good thing I'm not planning on giving it away, after all; I took it off the needles the other night and measured it. It's four inches smaller than it was supposed to be. It'll still fit me, but it wouldn't fit my mother-in-law.

With this sweater, I feel like I'm returning to my roots. My first color-stranded sweater I ever knit was the Chainmail Sweater from Knitter's Almanac, by Elizabeth Zimmerman. I did it in wool, and I was excited and pleased with the pattern, watching it develop as I knit. It's the same with the new one, designed by EZ's daughter, Meg Swansen. As I knit, I think "Oh yes, I remember this." and am pleased all over again with the idea of taking string and sticks and making a garment with nothing else but my own cleverness.

Knitting good.

Thrift, and knitting, and stashing.

In case you've been living under a rock (or are outside North America, in which case you're entitled to a lack of interest), the Rhinebeck fiber festival was this weekend. It's one of the country's largest festivals, full of vendors and farmers and knitters and spinners and weavers and other textile-related craftspersons. It seems like half the knitters whose blogs I read, headed there to max out their credit cards and wear fancy sweaters and network and pack their car with all the yarn they can carry.

Several OTHER people on the internet have come out against this orgy of delight. The excess of a house full of yarn bothers them. Crafting in general and knitting in particular is thrifty, the thinking seems to go, and so spending big piles of money on yarn goes against the grain.

I've been brooding over that for most of the weekend, the idea of craft as thrift, and you know what? I think it's mostly crap. I can run out to Wal-Mart and pick up a sweater for ten dollars. There is no way I could possibly knit something that cheaply, unless I were to buy said ten dollar sweater, unravel it, and reknit it. And of course that doesn't factor in the time investment. (There are people out there who do this - buy sweaters, unravel them, and use the yarn in new projects. That IS thrifty. More power to them. But they are a very small percentage of knitters.) Sewers, yeah, if they're clever, they can save money on clothes by either re-working old clothes or hitting major fabric sales. Knitters? Not unless they're using acrylic. Maybe not even then.

There are other crafts, embroidery and painting and scrapbooking and quilting, and on and on and on. Sure, most of them started off as ways to save money (quilting in particular), but in practice, in 2007, that doesn't often happen. Most quilters these days go out and buy new fabric, they don't make up something from their old clothes or worn blankets. Embroidery and painting both cost money, and always have. Scrapbooking? I won't even get started. But it's a money pit.

This does not mean that we don't occasionally save money. I do these knit doilies as gifts because I can produce an heirloom for $5. But it still doesn't factor in the time it takes to knit the thing, and I will never make anything remotely like money off them. The Blue Shimmer, last summer, was knit with pure merino wool yarn I got at one cent per yard. It still cost me about forty dollars. While you'll never find a ten dollar sweater like it, you WILL find a ten dollar sweater that you could wear instead.

We do what we do, because we love to create. It's not to save money. It hasn't been about saving money since World War Two, at the latest. I think active minds have a need to create, almost up there with breathing. It's what humans do. For those of us who use yarn as our medium, to make our thoughts take form, it's no different for us to buy yarn, than for a painter to load up on paints and canvas, or a sculptor to have piles of material laying about. It's a comfort, to have it near to hand, to look at and brood over, to decide what we want to make with it, change our minds, and decide again.

Mind you, I don't actually have THAT much yarn piled up in my house; three sweaters' worth sitting about. If you take away all the odd balls left over from twenty years of knitting projects, that's about all there is. Just a small emergency pile. You know, in case I get the urge to cast on for the Geometric Star at three in the morning. (You never know.)

There's also the flip side of the economic issue - we may not be saving money, but we're keeping an awful lot of small farmers and artesians in business. This new knitting boom, in the last ten years, has sparked the start of an amazing number of businesses. And it's the stashers who keep it going as much as the more active knitters do.

So, while I may secretly think that people with whole rooms of fiber are just a little nuts, I don't see anything ethically bad. It's like an artist with a lot of paint. Nothing wrong with it. Someone will knit it up eventually.

Even if it is your great-grandchildren.