Run before you can walk

Okay, so I can't knit with four needles, but I can knit with ten, that's right, ten, needles. Count em!

I started another sweater and because I am now a Knitter and no longer a Beginner I decided to make up a pattern a leeeetle more challenging than the last one I wrote. Cue hysterical laughter. It has lace, it has decreases in the lace, it has PLEATS! I did a swatch with one pleat and it worked just fine, so I figured it would look pretty with four pleats... Of course I didn't consider how *&@$!%^& complicated that was going to be until I had done 20 cm of decreasing lace panels. Tra la la...

But look!!! It worked!!!

Of course while I was patting myself on the back for mastering pleats I noticed the row right near the beginning where I purled instead of yo p2tog right across the lace panels which pulls everything skew wiff and means it all bunches up and doesn't drape beautifully.

Yours, off to bang my head against the wall, Rachel

When do you stop being a beginner?

Having done all that cabling, and more importantly, having it work, I don't feel like such a beginner knitter any more.
I learnt to knit many many many moons ago - probably a good twenty-plus years - but I never finished anything more complex than a hat or a scarf until a couple of years ago. I started knitting after a long gap when I was pregnant with Katie but I developed carpal tunnel and had to stop. When Jess was born I hauled out my unfinished knitting and discovered that I had all the pieces of a cardigan - I just hadn't sewn it up. I have no idea why - carpal tunnel shouldn't stop you doing an hours' seaming but there you go - blame it on baby brain! (Women who have had children will understand!)
Since then I have finished heaps of things - seven or eight sweaters, a pair of baby trousers for Jess, countless hats - most of them from my own patterns (with very mixed results! Although I am still so proud of the trousers...). But I still felt like a beginner. This is very similar to motherhood...
I remember when I first started taking Katie to playgroup, when she was about 22 months old, I felt like a total fraud: all the other women were mothers, and I was just pretending. Even though at least half (oh, all right, three quarters) of them were younger than me I still felt like they were grown-ups and I was just this idiot who accidentally had a baby and had no idea what she was doing. Of course, just about everyone secretly felt like that (except for a couple of really, really irritating people who were probably prefects at school and always know everything and ... well you know the ones!). Sometime after Jess was born I stopped feeling like such a novice and fraud - still incompetent and with very little idea what I was doing, but at some point, without really noticing, I had become a Mum.
And now, I think, maybe I've become a Knitter.

So, having read, and been inspired by, David Demchuck's wonderful column on why beginners shouldn't limit themselves to garter stitch scarves, I decided to try to conquer the Everest of beginner knitters... The Sock. My mother kindly came around with a set of double point needles (because I couldn't find any of mine - I really should do just a little more housework and a little less knitting) and I hauled out the gorgeous expensive pure wool that she bought me a year ago and sat down with the wonderful visual instructions from Terri Lea Royea.

Well people, all I can say is that knitting with four needles is against the laws of physics and nature. It just can't be done. I don't care that thousands of people claim to do it regularly - they're all liars. Or else I am incredibly stupid. And I got an A+ for that shoddy essay (very odd I must say, standards at university seem to have slipped) so I can't be that dumb...

So I put aside the dpns (for 'put aside' read 'threw violently at the wall') and went back to things I know - hats!

Yup, it's been a week of hats here. I made a hat to match the purple jumper, after which Katie demanded a hat to match the cabled jumper, and then Jess had to have one just because. And because I'm bored by beanies, I've been working on variations of a hat I call Hex.

I was going to insert some photos there but they're on the camera, which is out of batteries again. I finally bought some new rechargeable batteries, but it seems they don't come charged. Who knew?

So here are two little photos, and when I get the batteries charged I'll slap some more up, along with the pattern!

Rorschach Knitting

The finished garter stitch tunic...



I don't know why we have developed this tipping-the-head-to-one-side-for-photographs thing...




Then Jess had to have a turn (as always) - Yo! Get down you crazy white baby!




The variegated wool made a rorschach blot on the front on the sweater which is kind of fun. So far we've had Rangitoto erupting, a malaysian kite, and a nuclear sub seen from the rear. The nuclear sub was the children's father, who I've been looking sideways at ever since - a nuclear sub? Where did that come from and should we be very worried?

A malaysian kite and Rangitoto (imagine the eruption) - what do you see?

Another day another collar

It's a happy day!

The collar doesn't look as bad as I thought and Katie is thrilled to bits with the whole sweater which is the important thing. I did cast off about forty rows too soon - which means that there aren't enough short rows to make a nice shape at the front, but there aren't so many rows that the sweater eats her head.




Having sorted that I went back to the purple garter stitch one. Here's what knitting with kids is like: Both of these sweaters used 4mm needles and luckily I have two pairs. At some point however, one of the kids swiped one needle and it hasn't been seen since. I think it's probably in their room somewhere but looking for a needle in there is like looking for, well, a needle in a haystack. There could be another child living in that tip and I wouldn't know! [I consider my role in life is to make other mothers feel good about their standards of housework - everyone I know can comfortably look at their houses and say, 'Well, at least it's not as bad as Rachel's!'] So I had the pink sweater on one needle, the purple sweater on one needle, and a third needle, which I guarded jealously, which I alternated between the two. But of course when you're doing short rows, you never reach the end of a row, so I had to finish the pink collar before I could go back to the purple one! (Which might partly explain casting off so soon!)
Anyway, the purple one, with its cowl neck, is now finished but the camera has run out of batteries. C'est la vie. I have enough of each yarn to make matching hats so that's the next project.

Now I have to go and eat chicken biryani - my lovely Bangladeshi friend Asma came over yesterday with a HUGE pot and we'll be living off it for a week.

If you're gonna do it, do it right

Well it turns out I can't do the wrap thing... The collar looks very odd.

The sweater, on the other hand, I think is pretty cool...

This is the sweater by itself

This is Katie trying on the sweater (note the beautifully cut hair - not bad considering I used blunt paper scissors and couldn't find a comb)

Then of course Jess had to have a turn.

That was all before I attached the odd collar. Now I have to wait and see how it actually looks on, before I decide whether or not to rip it out and start again. (No, Rachel, you absolutely cannot wake a sleeping child just to try on a sweater. Dammit)

How tragic is this... I scored maximum points on MSN Games 80s' Music Trivia. You wanna talk Wham! - I'm obviously your girl!

Elvis

So I've finished the second sleeve for the cable jersey, and I'm working on the collar. I don't know about this collar... First off, I've never done anything with short rows before and I'm not sure that a) I'm doing this wrap thing right and b) I'm going to able to do the knit wrap thing when I get to that point. And then... it's just so BIG! The gauge (which I may or may not be knitting in) for the pattern is 26 rows to 10 cm. And the collar is going to be about 67 rows. So it'll be over 25 cm. Now even folded in half - that's a HUGE collar for a small child! She's going to look like Elvis in his icky Las Vegas years... I may have to just cast off 30 rows early and see what happens.

I should have stuck to knitting my own patterns, amateurish as they are. At least then my poor daughter wouldn't have to choose between orangutan arms or Elvis!

I DO love my children I DO love my children

It's been one of those days...

Katie and I have been battling about her hair for the last year and a half; she adamantly refusing to have it cut, me threatening to hack it all off every time I have to comb it. It now reaches just about to her waist which is ridiculous on a four year old. So today she decides that it would be nicer shorter and starts cutting it herself... Part of me is shouting 'Yippee! Get rid of it ALL!', part of me is shrieking 'Aaaah - step away from the scissors now!' and the rest of me is rolling on the floor laughing because she looks so funny :-) I am not cruel enough to provide a photo.

As for the smallest one...


She decided to do a spot of redecorating in the kitchen with a permanent marker.

I'm opening the gin...

16 April 2007

Judy Small's Montreal, December 1989 keeps running through my head

It was a cold December afternoon, the line stretched round the block
And some of them were weeping and some were still in shock
Seven thousand came that day to pay their last respects
To fourteen women slaughtered for no reason but their sex
And the cameras and the mikes were there to record the grief and fear
Of the ordinary people who worked and studied here
And a woman in her fifties in a gentle quiet tone
Summed up her sisters' outrage at the murder of their own

She said, I wonder why, as I try to make sense of this
Why is it always men who resort to the gun, the sword and the fist
Why does gunman sound so familiar while gunwoman doesn't quite ring true
What is it about men that makes them do the things they do

And the man behind her in the line, he started getting steamed
He said, It wasn't because he was a man, this guy was crazy, mad, obscene
Yes he was crazy, the woman replied, But women go crazy too
And I've never heard of a woman shooting fourteen men, have you
And all those other times came flooding back to me again
A hundred news reports of men killing family, strangers, friends
And yes I can remember one or two where a woman's hand held the gun
But exceptions only prove the rule and the questions still remain

And don't you wonder why, as you try to make sense of this
Why is it always men who resort to the gun, the sword and the fist
Why does gunman sound so familiar while gunwoman doesn't quite ring true
What is it about men that makes them do the things they do

And I know there are men of conscience who aren't like that at all
Who would never raise a hand in anger and who reject the macho role
And if you were to ask them about the violence that men do
I know they'd say they hate male violence too

And so we wonder why, as we try to make sense of this
Why is it always men who resort to the gun, the sword and the fist
Why does gunman sound so familiar while gunwoman doesn't quite ring true
What is it about men that makes them do the things they do

Sleeveless sweaters have their merits

Things sneak up on you when you're a parent; the kids change so quickly and all of a sudden you realise that they're into a whole new phase of development. Jess thinks she can talk now, and to be fair, she's come a long way. A few months ago she had a toy that Katie wanted, and Katie asked me if she could have it. 'You need to ask Jess if you can have a turn after her,' I said. So Katie turned to Jess and said 'Gaa gaa goo goo ba boo?'. Jess, unsurprisingly, looked at her blankly and wandered off. Katie turned to me, terribly aggrieved, and said, 'She didn't even answer me, and I even asked her in her own language!'. Lovely! But Jess now mostly speaks a variety of English, although you'd have to be a mother to understand. Not necessarily her mother sadly: my sister does a much better job of interpreting than me. The bitter and twisted part of me mutters that that's because she's emotionally and intellectually closer in age to Jess. This is not kind I know but you get that.
On the knitting front things proceed apace... I now have a sleeve for each jumper. My tension seems to have gone haywire on the garter stitch so I'm encouraging Katie to hang from the monkey bars as much as possible. If her arms don't stretch at least she'll build up the strength to wear the cable one: all that bulky cabling means she's going to have to walk around with her arms held straight out to the sides. Hey ho...

Books books books

Went to the library to look for books on the Muriwhenua treaty claim and came home with three knitting books, as you do. It's this terrible innumeracy I suffer from - I set out to find the 993s, get confused, and find myself surrounded by 746s. Damn that Dewey!
Having not finished either sweater yet, I am, of course, thinking about my next five projects. (This always happens: halfway up the back of a jersey I get this ok-I'm-so-over-this-one feeling and have to force myself not to begin yet another. Does everyone do this?) One of the books I found is so good that I may have to buy it... Hand Knitting: New Directions by Alison Ellen, who you can find here. Gorgeous gorgeous book with a fascinating potted history of knitting and fabulous clear instructions for all kinds of interesting techniques.
The second book I brought home because it had very clear instructions for doing a crocheted edge on a knitted garment, which is something I'm thinking about for one of my next things. Apart from that, all I can say about Clever Knits by Kristine Clever is that she should be very very very glad that YouKnitWhat.com is no longer adding new items. I joke about punishing my children with hand knits (although the purple, lime green and pink feather and fan jumper I made for Jess really was against the Geneva Convention) but this woman!!! Her poor children not only have to wear these sweaters but she's published pictures of them wearing them in a book!!!!! Years and years of therapy ahead...
The other book was the Readers Digest Ultimate Sourcebook of Knitting and Crochet Stitches which means poor old Jess may get a sweater that combines 47 different stitches, cables and colours. It'll have to be Jess, because Katie is now old enough to fight back dammit.

If I could cartwheel I would

The front of the garter stitch jersey is finished!
The essay is finished - ok so it sucks badly and it's 750 words over the limit, but it's finished!
The girls are both asleep, and what's more, in their own beds!
I am eating all their Easter eggs to celebrate! (I'm a mother, I'm entitled)

I'm putting off procrastinating till later...

Have finished the back of the cable jersey, and am about 3 cm off finishing the garter stitch one. Of course I shouldn't actually be knitting, or blogging, at the moment. What I should be doing is writing 2000 words on the ways in which Maori demonstrated their understanding of the Treaty of Waitangi in the period 1840 to 1872, and the ways in which the government accepted or refuted those understandings. Or something like that. I (foolishly?) decided to return to university part-time this year to complete my i n t e r m i n a b l e bachelor of arts (begun in 1990). Studying with small children around is harder than knitting with small children around I have to say!
Katie (4) is very intrigued by my being back at school. She suggested that I take something I'd knitted and stand up at the front of the class and show everyone. I like this idea - could I hand in a cabled jersey in place of an essay? Could we call it a post-modern interdisciplinary interpretation of the question? With the separate strands of wool represented the separate discourses that developed around the Treaty, and the cables representing the ways in which those disparate discourses came together before moving apart again? And the rows representing movement over time? And the bit I buggered up and cabled the wrong way could be a visual and tactile representation of the hostilities that arose when the differing interpretations of the Treaty clashed. It's tempting but I don't know that my tutor would buy it...