New York Minknit

It all began a couple months ago, when Adam asked me if I had heard of some sort of yarn festival upstate. One of his friends had gone a few years ago, and he thought I might be interested. I was like, “Yeah, I think it’s in Rhinebeck. I think it’s popular.” As of yesterday, I think Adam might have regretted suggesting going, since he probably saw enough yarn to last a lifetime, but I, at least, was happy. (Adam, as usual, took all the nice photos.)

Anyway. I was a little scared of being surrounded by fiber-loving fools, or “yarnies,” as I started calling them. (Who, as someone pointed out later, were like “carnies, but less evil.”) But I decided to try and be social and joined Rhinebeck Blogger Bingo, where you got a bingo card and marked off other knit bloggers that you saw (players were supposed to wear a badge or something that said “I’m a square,” to help you identify them). Adam was quite good at spotting fellow bingo players, but despite normally being a nosy and chatty person, both by personality and profession, I was kind of uncomfortable approaching people.  It felt weird to say, “Hey! Are you a square?” I did find several other players, and though I did not get a BINGO, I was glad I played. But even though the game made it okay to approach strangers and introduce myself, I hung back. Soon, though, my creepy side would emerge.

It all began when I walked by the Ravelry founders, Jess and Casey. (Also, it turned out to be a blogger bingo meetup, which I accidentally stumbled onto, and yet, I was STILL anxious about approaching other players.) I kind of shoved Adam and Casey together, and was all “Adam, this is the guy who made Ravelry.” “Hey Casey [Clearly, Casey had no idea who I was, yet I decided that Casey and I were on a first-name buddy-buddy level. Such is the madness of the Internet], this is my boyfriend, he works at an Internet start-up too.” Casey was very nice, though I’m sure a little weirded out by my forwardness.

Then, while we were wandering around the sheep barns, I spotted Yarn Harlot. Instead of politely saying something normal, (like “Oh, hello. You do look familar, are you the woman who writes Yarn Harlot,” or something) I said, “Hey, it’s the Yarn Harlot.” This is kind of like the time my uncle opened his car door and stood face to face with Norman Fell, and said, “Oh! Mr. Roper!” The Yarn Harlot looked decidedly uncomfortable, and said hello. Then like a hick, I yelled, “Hey Adam, look! It’s the Yarn Harlot!” Because nothing makes a person feel more comfortable then being referred to in the third person in front of their face. Anyway, she was also very polite, though I think she wandered away quickly to avoid being confronted by me.

Here’s a blurry photo of the back of Yarn Harlot, and I’m guessing from reading her blog, her escort, Juno.

Then, as the festival wound down, I saved my creepy speciality–conning strangers into spending time with me*–for last. I didn’t want to wait for a taxi to take us into the town, since they were being really slow, so I approached a hipster couple who seemed to be about my age and was like “Hey! Do you have a car? Are you going into Rhinebeck?” and after they said yes to both, said, “Can you give us a ride?” (Adam pointed out that by having assented to my first two questions, they were almost obligated to say yes to the third question.) They were so nice and gave us some good tips about places to dine in town (and made the funny yarnie=less evil carnie comment), but I did realize that I had potentially become some kind of horror-story stranger (“Please give us a ride…before we kill you.”)

* I have many stories, mainly from a few years ago where I did a lot of traveling by myself.

Anyway, click after the jump if you want to see more sheep photos. (And one very very cute little goat.) Read More…

(I will be referring to the photos from left to right, top to bottom.)

So, I recently bought  The Oregon Woodworker’s Mama Bear swift and the Royal ball winder. Together with shipping, it was $94.40.

If you are contemplating buying one, you have to ask yourself whether you really need this gadget. Personally, I have wanted one since I got caught up in the knitting fever two years ago, but I tried to hold off. Most yarn stores in the city will wind your yarn for you and many brands come pre-wound in balls. But I’ve recently acquired some skeins from the internet, unwound, and I didn’t want to wind 400 yards of sock yarn by hand. Thus, I gave in. I’m still not sure all knitters need a swift and ball winder, but I am thoroughly enjoying mine, so if you have an extra hundred dollars to spare, go for it.

I chose to get this flat one, instead of an umbrella swift because it took up less space and is easy to pack up. (See photo 1, the swift in its carrying bag.) I also chose to order the ball winder from The Oregon Woodworker, instead of using a coupon and ordering it from JoAnn’s, where it probably would have been a tad cheaper, because I figured if I had any problems, I could contact an actual person to complain, instead of a craft store bureaucracy.

(Photo 2) I love it. And thus, I am hugging it.

(Photo 3) The swift is probably pretty easy to make. I took two and a half years of woodworking in high school, and despite my lack of talent in the woodworking arena, even I think I could make it. You would need some kind of saw (like a band saw or a jigsaw) and some wood. That being said, $51.95 (the price of the swift alone) is fair. If you assume it takes about $10 of lumber and other materials costs, then I think $40 is a fair price for the labor. It’s very carefully made, and I was glad to pay the cost. But if you have a woodshop at home or know someone with one, you might try making one.

(Photo 4) The pegs are adjustable to fit different sized skeins.

(Photos 5-8) The pieces are carefully cut so they’re super easy to put together.

(Photo 9) Peter Charles, the maker, marks the arms with red dots so you know how to match them together.

(Photo 10) A needle-tip protector thing caps off the center pin.

(Photo 11) The ball winder is also very easy to use. The instructions (written by the ball winder people, not Peter Charles), however, are written in goobley-goop. Just look at the pictures and ignore the written words, which confuse “left” and “right.”

(Photos 12-14) I took out the center core to weigh it.

(Photos 15-16) Then I weighed by yarn.

(Photos 17-20) Putting the skein on the swift and attaching the yarn to the winder.

(Photo 21) Occasionally, I would take the ball off the winder, along with the core, and weigh it. I was hoping to have equal amounts in each ball.

(Photos 22-27) Winding…winding…winding…

(Photo 28) Argh! Despite my weighing, one yarn cake is still bigger than the other.

Anyway, my swift is great, and, (according to Peter Charles), since a tabletop swift is the same height as your ball winder, it creates no tension in your yarn cake, a possible problem with umbrella swifts. The only possible flaw I can see with this design is that it is trickier to move the pegs to hold the different sized skeins than in an umbrella swift, which might be a problem if you wind different sized skeins frequently. Otherwise, awesome!

Adam and I were discussing what constitutes a hobby, with Adam arguing that reading was not a hobby. His argument boiled down to two points: If the activity in question is a commonly listed question on an online dating profile (favorite book / favorite movie / favorite tv show)* and if it doesn’t require gear, it’s not a hobby. Though I agree that tv watching, is not, in general, a hobby, I was like, c’mon, reading! It’s a hobby!

*I think his theory was that if it was common enough to be a category in an online dating profile, then it meant it was practiced by most people, and thus, not a hobby.

Anyway. Gear. Gear is the favorite element of a hobby for many people, I think, and I finally bought some exciting gear for my hobby, knitting. Yup, I now own a swift and a ball winder! The purchase was somewhat expensive, but look what it makes:

Yarn cakes!

And I was so excited by my yarn cake that I started knitting these socks right away:

I am calling them the Queens Center Mall socks, because they seem kind of like the thing an eleven-year old outer borough* girl would buy after reading The Official Preppy Handbook, but getting it wrong, by buying the socks in a poly-blend at the Queens Center Mall. They’re pink and green, total ’80s prep colors, but also strangely garish, and kind of tacky. I totally love them. As you can see by my coat, which I had customized with the addition of pink ribbon (by my Queens dry cleaner), I think I just might be this girl. 

*If you’re not from New York, the “outer boroughs” are Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island, with the main borough being Manhattan. I think New York dominates the media enough that the rest of the country gets that each outer borough has its own sterotype. Queens, home of the Mets, Archie Bunker, The Nanny, The King of Queens, and George Constanza’s parents. I can’t think of any literature set in Queens. Apparently, we are an illiterate borough of tv-watching yahoos.

The traveling shawl has got to be the most uninteresting thing to photograph:

Stay tuned for a new traveling project!

 (illustrated with random stationery found in my desk drawers)

 Have you read OlgaJazzy and KnitLit‘s latest posts? I’m talking about this and this–where they both point us to knock-off patterns of designer knits.

Olga found a zillion knitting magazines that knocked-off that Pringle sweater that I was lured by a few months ago, and I have to say, despite me mocking Lion Brand a few posts ago, the Lion Brand version is definitely the best, in terms of fidelity to the original and the styling of the finished object. BUT! It’s still nowhere as nice as the original–look at the cables, they’re so simplified compared to the original which had cables of different sizes, styles, and directions. Plus, I remember learning during my last search for that Pringle sweater that the original was knit in 4-ply cashmere, which I doubt the knock-offs are.

(I think the bottom sentence, “I look at fashion magazines with my friends and try to keep myself up to date,” is the most logical, but I find the abbreviated version more amusing, as some sort of commentary on fashion and feminism: “I look at fashion magazines and try to keep myself.” I bought this stationery in 1997 when I visited Japan, and ten years and many, many moves later, still have it.)

Anyway. I am not opposed to knock-offs, and I don’t even think the quality of designer goods is always noticeably better than the knock-offs. But in some cases, like the Pringle sweater, the quality IS definitely better and the knock-offs seem significantly shoddier.

And that quality is what brings me to Knit Lit’s post about the Vogue Knitting version of Alexander McQueen’s sweater. Knit Lit Kate writes, “funny how fit, styling and color choices can make all the difference!” Absolutely–the McQueen version on the runway is cool and avant-garde and the Vogue Knitting version seems much more pedestrian.

(I fear that my decision to knit a shawl is going to make me look like this lady. Kerkdracht in de rouw! I have no idea what that means. This is from a set of Dutch regional dress postcards–or “nederlandse streekdrachten”–that Adam bought for me when he went to Amsterdam last year.)

I know that Vogue Knitting offers designer knits, but I wish the designers would license more of their knits as kits or something. James Surowiecki alludes to this idea in the financial page of The New Yorker this week when he mentions the notion of “a registered original design,” when Jackie Kennedy and other society ladies of the fifties would buy Parisian runway designs made at Bergdorf Goodman or something through a licensing deal. They were Designer, with a captial D, but made here, probably in the garment district. It seems that the knitting community is small enough that they could offer similar kits or patterns for us knitters to recreate, without harming their business. (Well, maybe not. The kits would  be a blueprint for mass-manufacturers to knock-off these same garments, but this is already happening without the kits! And I shudder to think how expensive the kits or officially licensed patterns would be.)

Unfortunately, there seems to be a divide between knitting pattern–designers and couture and high-end pret-a-porter designers, and I wish we could have more of the latter available to us as knitters.

Okay, enough rambling for today.

I don’t often get to use the category tag “crazy knitting” here, but I have found an awesome subject, courtsey of JenLa. I don’t even know how I found this post* but it introduced me to a topic I have never thought of: knit landscapes.

These range from these strangely cute:

to the incredibly weird…Knitted Historical Figures. I think if I ever knit a Madame de Pompadour, I have crossed the line into CRAZY.

*There should be some word coined for when you google something but can never remember the magical combination of words used to find that page ever again.

So I can read when I knit, but I think I need some sort of geek contraption that holds out the book in front of my eyes (like on a helmet or something), because when I try to read when I knit, I get terrible posture. But tv…I love tv, much to the shame of my people (righteous San Franciscans who believe that tv rots your brain). And I just saw the best new show…Gossip Girl. So deliciously good. If you want to watch prep school kids in all their tv-trashtastic glory, this is the show for you.

I am lacking in knitting blogging material, and thus I turn to my favorite filler: The Traveling Project!

(Top left and bottom right) Adam and I were invited to a preview night at a new bowling alley/bar in Williamsburg, The Gutter (well, I think really Adam was, but I tagged along) and the shawl came along too.

(The photo in the lower left is Williamsburg at night.) Adam takes beautiful photos all the time, even when I am being annoying, and being like “Why so many photos!?” Then I steal them for my blog. Mwhahaha.

(Top right) We also went to IFC to see Helvetica, the documentary. This is me knitting in line. The shawl is too heavy to knit while standing up, but it’s the traveling project for now.

Pattern: generic top-down sock pattern
Yarn: 1 ball of Sockotta, 5% cotton/40% wool/15% nylon, $9 from The Homespun Boutique, in Ithaca.
Needles: Inox 2, set of 5
Time to make: Started February 20, finished September 8

Not much to report–the yarn is kind of stringy, and the pattern rather ugly, but I actually really enjoyed knitting the self-striping pattern. I would definitely knit a self-patterning yarn again, though I do think the result is weird.

Ugly socks meet ugly shoes. My inner San Franciscan comes out.

Ugly socks without the shoes.

It only took me half a year to knit these socks! Here’s a flashback montage of the sock over the seasons.

I was reading my September Vogue the other day, and I came across this article. The author of the article goes to Wenlan Chia’s studio–and never having knit before!–knits herself this tunic. It’s pretty cute, actually, and it’s one of the patterns in Twinkle’s Big City’s Knits (which I own, and was planning on making some stuff from). There’s a whole flickr group devoted to Big City Knits here–pretty cute.

(And I just noticed on the flickr bulletin board that Wenlan Chia was recruiting knitters in NYC to teach at Anthropologie to make her clothes–and that Vogue would be covering the classes. That might be where this article originated…)

In the fashion spreads of the same issue, there are also tons of GINORMOUS knits. Kind of crazy, and probably not all that wearable, but cute.

(I know there’s a ton of hatred around The Internets about Twinkle and Vogue–generally separate camps of hate–because of their tendency to only show clothes for skinny ladies. I’ve got some thoughts on this, but am too tired to blog about it. Sorry.)

(My parents have these weird Polaroids from the ’70s, where some sort of chemical reaction between the photo album and the photos must have occured, that have the same tint as the photo above. Digital photography–even capturing the weird light of Polaroids gone wrong.)

It’s overcast and rainy in New York, hence the weird coloring of the shawl. (It’s actually much greener–closer to the color in this photo.) I’m almost done with the first skein and I think I might need to take a little break. The shawl was sufficently interesting that I knit it all summer, but now that I have another whole skein to go, I’ve slowed down a bit.

Spring/ugly socks are close to being finished, but my recent revelation that one sock is much too short and needs to be re-knit, has also dampened my enthusiasm for them.

In short, I have become a grouchy knitter.

In response to the comments on the post below, I did know that Lion Brand has some new, cuter patterns available, but unfortunately, none were at the store. Seriously, they had ordered these brand-new fugly fugly brochures that must have dated from the early ’80s (and the insides from the ’50s or so–in some ways, a godsend. Imagine if they taught you how to make an ’80s-sweater instead!)