EvilJulie.com

I’ve come down with my first cold of the season, which means that my mind is kind of floating around and coherent writing (and thoughts) are at a premium. This means one thing for you. Craft post, because the pictures will help keep me on track. View full article »

Ah ha! I was adding photos to Flicker and found another FO from the year, and this one was so detailed and so special that I feel much better about my otherwise poor knitting showing for the year. (The pictures are not the greatest, so bear with me.

I got the idea to make Amelia a shawl for her high school graduation when I went to Stitches South in 2009. There was some orange Malabrigo sock yarn that just seemed to be begging to be made into something for her (her favorite color is orange), not too bright, and mixed in with some more earthy colors (it was the “Archangel” colorway, but your mileage may vary – some people tell me their skeins are more purple, I guess because of the dyeing technique). At any rate, I snapped up two skeins, and then promptly forgot about them until winter break last year. At that point, I thought, “If I don’t get this started, it will never be done by her graduation because I’ll have classes in the spring.” So I cast on for the Feathered Wings Shawl (sorry, Ravelry link!) on January 4, 2010, because I wanted to give her something that she could wrap herself up in when she was feeling homesick, kind of like a college kid security blanket. And I liked the symbolism of making wings for someone “leaving the nest.” And I was making pretty good progress on it until that snowboarding thing happened, sidelining my knitting for a good while.

But, I do have enough discipline that when Amelia’s graduation was looming, I jumped right back into it. Alas, I only had 880 yards of sock yarn (the pattern calls for 880 yards of laceweight, which is not the same), so I had to leave off some of the last repeat. I finished knitting it on June 8, and I believe she graduated on June 9, which didn’t give me enough time to block it. So, I wrapped it up and gave it to her unblocked so she knew what she was getting, and could see the whole before/after process with lace (below is what it looked like at that point, which was still very nice, but not finished).

Amelia left the next day for a last two week trip with her glee club, and I blocked it. Of course, while blocking it, I found out that somehow I had missed a stitch, or the little bastard has squirmed off the needle, or something. And that is when I figured nail polish was the best policy. I knotted it back into the pattern, more or less, and then put a couple of drops of clear nail polish on the knot to hold it in place. As the Persian rug makers say, “Only Allah is perfect.” And yes, I told Amelia about this when she got back and I gave it to her, blocked. She loved it anyway. Now, did we get any good pictures of it on her? No. So you are left with this horrible shot of it blocking to get an idea of how it turned out (but hey, I just realized Charlie is in this picture, so that’s a little bonus, he’s cute).

And here’s one so you can get a better sense of the feather detailing:

Sorry, it was dark by the time I did this, I slept on the couch that night.

Details:

Pattern: Feathered Wings Shawl by Asami Kawa

Yarn: Malabrigo Sock in Archanangel

Needles: US Size 6, 48″ circular Knitpicks Options

Would I make this again? Absolutely. I might even make it for Sage when she graduates in three years. I really did like working with the sock yarn on this, it made it very cuddly to knit, and I think it suits the sensibilities of a college student a little better – more sturdy, not as fancy as laceweight would have been. I would also totally make this for myself in some of the twenty pounds of laceweight I have in this house. Maybe over winter break.

I took up snowboarding two winters ago, if you can count “took snowboarding lessons once and liked it, then inherited Sage’s outgrown snowboard” as “took up.” Last winter, I again went out for a day of lessons, and after two of them, I was actually getting to the point where I was making it work, and I was madly excited about it. I was also in a lot of pain, because the process of getting to that point involved so. much. falling. down. I fell on my knees, I fell on my butt, and at one point I tried to catch myself and ended up hyper extending my right thumb, but I kept going, dammit, because I was getting it!

I would now like to blame Shaun White and the Winter Olympics for my stupidity. Damn you, with your making it look effortless and fun! (I am shaking my fist at them right now.)

Yeah, so the thumb hyper extension was bad enough that I spent a lot of time writing with my hand wrapped in an ace bandage, and my knitting (it was also the Knitting Olympics, after all) was completely de-railed. So the purple socks I started on February 13 for Rick’s mom’s birthday were stopped almost at inception because snowboard day was February 14.

But finally, this weekend when I was procrastinating, I finished them, making them my sole FO for 2010 so far. That statement there is pathetic and almost reduced me to tears yesterday when I realized it was true.

And here they are. The light was crap in the apartment, so they’re somewhere between the two in color – purple with a really intense violet blue. These are the Yarn Harlot’s Plain Vanilla Socks in Socks That Rock Lightweight, “The Incredible Shrinking Violet” colorway, which was a Club color a while back, 2.25 mm needles.

And now that I have finally, finally completed them, Rick’s ma has decided she is moving into a nursing home. In Florida. Where she will never ever need wool socks. I would keep them, but I know she likes the socks I knit for her, so instead I will laugh at the irony. Or cry. I haven’t decided yet.

As Christmas approaches, so does the deadline for completion of my Christmas knitting. God help me. I got three more presents done in the last week, and all three went out in the mail this morning, thank you Jeebus. My brother’s and my mom’s were pretty easy, although I injured myself on my mom’s several times (no details yet, because Mom reads the blog. And Mom, chill, this was an easy present. I haven’t really done your big knitted gift yet because you said do everyone else’s first. So I am.). My sister-in-law’s though…I thought I was going to die.

I decided to make my sister-in-law a nice pair of felted clogs. Everyone raves about this project, it’s on big needles, guaranteed to go fast. And it did. I enjoyed knitting them greatly. It was the felting part that I have a strenuous objection to. The directions say to put the clogs in the washing machine. Problem: I don’t have a washing machine. So I figure, “Oh, it’s okay, I can hand felt them. Stick them in a bucket of hot water with some towels for friction, use a potato masher to agitate them, it’s all good.” Famous last words.

I filled a bucket with hot water, stuck it in my bathtub. I put in some Soak knit wash, a couple of hand towels, and the clogs. I mashed it with the potato masher. For ten minutes. I took the clogs out. No noticeable felting happening. I tried a different technique, using my hands as the agitator. Ten more minutes of leaning over the bucket, I looked at the clogs again. Some felting. Okay, we were getting places. I switched up between the potato masher and my hands, because goddamn that is tiring. Ten more minutes. Some more felting, but nothing substantial. I put the iPod on the sound dock to break up the tedium. I agitated some more. And at this point, let me tell you that I have glass doors on my shower, which means the side of my bathtub has tracks for the doors on them. I was sitting on a towel to cushion those tracks, but after half an hour, I was starting to feel a little bruised on my posterior from them.

I stood up, thanking god and goddess for my small feet, and started doing my impression of the grape-stomping episode of I Love Lucy, one foot in the bucket swishing everything around, the other foot in the tub. Ten more minutes, and I was getting bored as well as tired of felting. Looked at the clogs. They’re a little more felted, but not shrinking down to a size 8 any time soon. See, that’s the thing about felting: felting is basically shrinking down your knitted object, in this case on purpose (as opposed to that time you accidentally stuck a sweater through the washer and dryer and ended up with a sweater fit for Barbie). So you need to start out with a gigantic knitted object for it to felt down to the right size. After forty minutes of felting, these things still would have fit Big Foot.

I went and got a beer. I felted for a half hour more, with various checks on the progress of the felting. Damn thing was going sloooow. Finally, after an hour and twenty minutes of alternately hunching over the bucket like an Irish washerwoman or doing the grape stomp, it seemed done. And by “seemed done,” I mean “was close enough to a size 8 that I didn’t care anymore because I was fucking crippled and sis-in-law could just wear some really thick socks with them and make them work. I put a ton of plastic bags in them to shape them, stuck them on the radiator to dry, and swallowed a fistful of Advil.

By the light of day the next morning, I could see they were a bit big, but as I hobbled around the house, I tried them on with socks and figured what the fuck, close enough for government work. I sewed on suede slipper bottoms to make them a little less slippy, then stuck a little note in them that said this was my first attempt at hand-felting, please excuse the unevenness, but I hoped she would like them anyway. I did not say that this would also be my last attempt at hand-felting. Because screw it, I don’t care if I have to beg, borrow, or steal, the next time I do felting it will be with the aid of a washing machine. I still hurt, and ain’t no one on earth special enough that their present gets to cause me pain for two days.

A week and a half left till Christmas, three knitted presents and one cross-stitch to go. I can do eet.

This year’s Ravelympics were a triumph for me: a 200% better showing than I had at the 2006 Winter Games. This year I medalled in not one, but two events:

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We all know I love the Olympics, as well as a chance to engage in lemming-like behavior with my fellow knitters. So I joined the Ravelympics. Similar to the Yarn Harlot’s Knitting Olympics for the winter Olympics in Torino two years ago, the Ravelympics features a million and two knitters (okay, really the count stands at 5,644 Ravelers) doing a billion projects (really, 16,192 projects, but who’s counting besides the Rav moderators?). Due to the sheer number of people we have over on Rav, these Olympic games are much better organized than the first, because everyone wants to pitch in and help. We’ve got events, we’ve got actual teams (based on geography, interest, etc.), and we’ve already got medalists, much like the actual Olympics (I knew I should have gone for hat dash, that shit would have been done already!).

So what am I doing? Well, in between tearing up at the Opening Ceremonies last night (I can’t help it…seeing all those smiling athletes, some of whom have never been out of their countries before and will probably not win medals, amongst the amazing pomp and circumstance? It gets me.) and writing in parentheses, I’m competing in two events, the Laceweight Longjump and the Sock Put. Given how badly I bombed out in the last Olympics (I was the Jamaican Bobsled team, in case you’ve forgotten), I kept my expectations a little more real this year. Knowing that I have Carpal Tunnel and a strong tendency to Plurk all day, I am doing Plain Vanilla Socks (no cables, no lace, just miles of stockinette) and a Montego Bay Scarf (laceweight yarn on size 8s flies). If I manage to get those done ahead of schedule, I’ll see if I can’t finally finish Samng’s Sweater, which has been languishing. My goals are totally doable. And my team? Team TARDIS, baby. Crafting through time and space, the Doctor is our leader, and we have the benefit of a time machine. If we screw up, we can go back and fix it, as long as we manage to avoid ourselves – don’t want to create a time paradox, now, do we?

Boston stories in the next post, promise. Really. But now, for something entirely different. We all know I am a joiner. I joined Plurk, I joined Twitter, I joined Facebook, Ravelry, MySpace, you name it, I’m on it. But for as much as I like the tech, I also love being connected to the “old ways” of doing things. I like to spin, knit, cross-stitch, etc. ad nauseum, knowing that these crafts have been practiced by generations of people before me. I like to see my part in the chain of humanity – I suppose that’s why I was a history major in undergrad. I would like to learn how to cook, how to really cook, instead of just the meat/veg/starch combinations I throw together. I like to make things grow. I’m really interested in becoming greener and helping the planet to recover for the next links in the chain. And I love sharing these interests with others (which is why I’m in a Stitch n Bitch, among other things). Yes, I am a 21st Century Laura Ingalls Wilder living in Brooklyn. I was just in need of a Walnut Grove (perhaps without that bitchy Nellie Olson, though).

You all know where this is headed. I joined something else. Miss Violet, from the Lime & Violet podcast, started a Farmgirl chapter on Plurk. Go ahead, read it, I’ll wait. Basically, a Farmgirl “A farmgirl believes in the strong arms of friendship, community and the just plain fun of being together. A farmgirl takes joy in the quiet satisfaction of making things with her own hands. She exudes kindness, grace, humility, gentleness, patience and generosity, and loves the simple pleasures in life. A farmgirl is loyal and caring, especially when it comes to her family, friends and community. She gives generously of her time and talents. Farmgirls love to get together to share their ideas. She can be with or without fields and stock. Farmgirl is a condition of the heart.” While I haven’t decided if I’m going to pay the $20 and join the Farmgirl sisterhood, I have joined the Plurkette Henhouse, which is a virtual Farmgirl chapter. We are a community of mostly fiber-minded people who met on Plurk, and since I spend much time each day conversing with these people online, it wasn’t much of a stretch to join them in something else.

I’m looking forward to seeing where this can lead me. And you know I like the idea of merit badges. It’s just a good match.