look at that! I'm knitting a sweater!!

this photo has the most accurate color - green pea soup

the lacy front panels

Yeah. I’ll be doing this a lot more. And if you haven’t tried knitting with it yet, Rowan Felted Tweed is AMAZING. I’m just sayin.

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happy! joy!

SUCH a wonderful, happy day for me! I finished the final little details of my old job, tied up every last loose end, left nothing undone, left on a very high note.

I finished grafting the shawl together, and it LOOKS GREAT! I was so worried that the graft would be obvious and weird, but you know the kitchener stitch is really amazing. It really looks seamless. Now I just have to weave in a couple of ends, then soak it for a bit and do the blocking.

Isn’t it great when the things that hang over you are finished? You know that glorious feeling of liberation and accomplishment and exuberance?

Yeah. I’ve got those going. After I finish the blocking, I think I’ll do the next swatch for Peasy, so I can work on it on the flight later this week. To my daughter’s wedding. Two girls happily married, that’s another great relief, you know?

blocking

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Anyway. I proudly introduce you to the Minkeys …. pink monkeys, get it? (the word minkeys makes me giggle because I hear it as Inspector Clouseau — Chief Inspector Clouseau — would say it.)

the top/left sock hasn't been blocked yet - the other one has

oh, you minkeys

i love socks.......

The yarn is the incredibly soft Felici, from KnitPicks. The first pair of socks I knit with this yarn still looks great, after a couple years’ washing. They get a lofty halo, but they’re very hard-wearing. And they don’t need any special care at all, double good for busy people.

These socks are for the bride-to-be, my daughter Marnie. When my older daughter Katie got married, she gave Marnie a t-shirt that said “I’m a worm farmin’ power liftin’ bad ass” and that really says it all. Since Marnie has this photo in her Facebook photo album (and therefore it’s public) I don’t think she’d mind my posting it here.

Marnie and Tom, getting married in a few weeks - taken at Katie's wedding rehearsal

It’s such fun finishing something, if only because I feel a little less guilty about casting on a new project.

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beautiful, beautiful marilyn

From the NYTimes:  “There is a sublime silliness to Halsman’s images that can make you laugh or at least smile regardless of how often you see them. They may offer incontrovertible proof of Schiller’s claim that ‘all art is dedicated to joy.’ Evidently the simple act of getting off the ground requires giving in to something like joy. You have to let go.  One of the purest examples of this joy is an image of Halsman himself, holding hands with a smiling Marilyn Monroe several feet off the ground. Facing his partner, he seems ecstatic, as if he cannot believe his luck.”   Credit: The Estate of Philippe Halsman/Laurence Miller Gallery

Second: this line from Nabokov, which has haunted me since I read it yesterday.  “The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.”

And third, one minkey down, one to go:

one minkey down, one to go!

And a bonus thing that made me smile and feel all sorts of things, courtesy of an email from Marnie:

“have you seen marina abramovic’s endurance performance “the artist is present,” where she sits in chair for the entire length of her retrospective. there is a chair opposite her, and visitors sit and look at her and she looks back. the flickr group is so compelling: about 1/4 of the people are in tears.”

Here’s to an interesting Wednesday.

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So imagine my surprise to listen to a great little TED Talk, by Alain de Botton, in which he defined the word snob in a way I’d never heard: a snob is someone who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. At first, I kind of jumped back a little and did some sassy back talk to Senor de Botton: IS NOT! That’s too simple, and anyway, that’s the definition of stereotype, so there. Ha. You’re wrong and I’m right.

But he’s right. That’s exactly what a snob is, isn’t it. It’s a topic of conversation on Ravelry, here and there – people self-identify as ‘yarn snobs’ and if someone talks about having used acrylic yarn, the yarn snobs sometimes come out of their dark corners to say unkind things. So those who don’t want to use acrylic yarn have decided that people who do use acrylic yarn are … well, a whole bunch of things. It’s very interesting to think about the word snob in this way, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I listened to the podcast in line at Starbucks 2 hours ago. Here’s the talk – it’s very nice, and is more about success and failure than about snobbery, though snobbery does have its place in the mix:

Today has been a really shitty day, there’s no other way to say it. One of my authors has decided that I personally betrayed him because of the way we had to price his book, and he has spent an awful lot of energy and pixels writing me the same email a dozen ways, emphasizing the personal nature of the betrayal. To soothe myself a little, since I am working at home today, I cast on 15 stitches and knit a few rows of stockinette in this luscious madelinetosh pastoral, colorway terrarium. I have to say, it did make me feel better:

such pleasure

And I’m nearly finished with one sock, will knock out the toe tonight and cast on for the other one, so I can work on it in the subway tomorrow:

at the toe now, sock #1 will be finished tonight

I’ve decided to name this pair of socks “minkeys” – a play on pink monkeys, and also I hear it in my mind in the Inspector Clouseau voice and that just makes me giggle.

I hope you’re having a better day than I am!

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I can put in hours of knitting on the wedding shawl and have just a bit of growth to show for it, or I can put in the same amount of time and have more than half a sock, to wit:

monkey see

Granted, since this was the first sock pattern I ever knit, and since I’ve knit four other pairs using this pattern, I can do it in my sleep by now. But the thicker yarn just obviously makes things go faster, and zoom zoom zoom I’ve turned the heel and picked up the gusset stitches. Go, Lori, go!

Cute, right Marnie?

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I love thee for thy bright pinkness

p!i!n!k!

I love thee for the pleasure of dpns and clever-feeling fingers

I love thee for thy springy feeling

I love thee for the one who will wear these when I finish

Pretty Marnie, in her senior year at Smith

PLUS: We bought a new mattress! Yippee! Hallelujah! Boy did we need one, that’s all I’m saying about that.

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Don’t do it, Lori. Don’t start something new. Satisfy yourself with touching the yarn, looking at it. Keep it on the table next to you so you can …. NO! Put it away! Go put it in the stash bins so you’re not so sorely tempted all the time! Do it now! Just get up, step away from the laptop, and store the yarns out of sight!

But it’s so pretty, that pink, and I don’t even like pink. The caramel colors of that one skein of Noro, so seductive. And the madelinetosh pashmina, bali hai come to me.

NO – finish at least one thing first. You know you have a lot of work to do, finishing the wedding dress, and don’t forget the shawl – not even halfway done with that and time’s a-ticking. The baktus, the blanket, the cardigan. You’ve got your train knitting project, you don’t need another one. Focus Lori, focus.

But just a little bit, just a swatchNO! NO!

help me……

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purple and small, with Sunday Knits Eden

greenish and pretty big, with madelinetosh wren

big and in the works, with madelinetosh lace

Why does this pattern inspire me? First, it’s great fun to knit – and lots of people seem to agree, since Ravelry lists 6400 projects and it’s in 3268 queues. (At £3.00 GBP, Ysolda has done very well with this little project! Good for her!). The main reason this pattern inspires me so much is that it’s very cleverly written while still being a LOT of fun to knit. Scientific theories that explain a phenomenon with an economy of variables are called elegant, and that describes Ysolda’s patterns.  Ishbel hits all the marks, which is kind of great: it’s fun, it’s changeable (you can make the stockinette section larger or smaller, knit more or fewer repeats of each of the lace sections, etc), the end result is not just beautiful but also very practical, and it has clearly generated a very good amount of money for the designer while being inexpensive for knitters.

I’ve knit (or should I say, tried to knit) other patterns that were beautiful and ‘clever,’ but they were just fussy and kind of ridiculous in their cleverness. There’s no need to name names, because maybe I was just not a skilled enough knitter and others could easily manage the pattern, but there was one scarf that just made me so angry and you know? Who needs that in knitting! But Ysolda’s patterns are clever in the very best way, and I think Ishbel is a great example of her design philosophy. I would love to be able to do what she does; instead, I’ll just benefit from her talent. Me and thousands of other happy knitters.

Read the other posts on this topic:  knitcroblo2

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