New York Minknit

It’s good I started the sock over again because I realized I had been doing the double decrease wrong. I realize everyone and their mother in blogland has made Jaywalkers, so, this is hardly revelatory information, but when you slip the two stitches knitwise for the double decrease, slip them together, not indiviudally.

Okay, above is a photo of the sock waiting for Billy Joel at his Wednesday Final [ish] Play at Shea. I have always like Billy Joel, even though I know he is considered a little lame by many people. My theory about Billy Joel is that he’s like the Vows section in the New York Times–everyone is a fan, no one wants to admit it.* (If you read the Sunday New York Times, you read Vows, aka “the wedding section,” aka “the women’s sports pages,” even if you’re a man. It’s a fascinating section and if you claim you don’t read it, you’re lying.) *Except if you’re from Long Island, whose entire population showed up at Shea, I think. They love Billy Joel, without shame or reservations.

One of my friends claims she was a Billy Joel fan until she saw the video for Uptown Girl, which she claims was “him jumping around in a ridiculous jumpsuit,” which made her lose all respect for him. I never have had MTV, so I was spared this video (though I just watched it on YouTube, and it is kind of crazy. But it was the ’80s! I have another friend whose favorite movie is Grease 2…it was a weird time.)

Anyway, in college, my roommate and I (okay, it was mainly me) somehow borrowed a Best of Billy Joel tape from our neighbor (which dates when I went to college–people still had tapes, though even then, they were rare) and we were like, damn these old people, because we totally would have gone to see him in concert, if the tickets hadn’t been so expensive. But when I saw that he was playing at Shea, I thought that maybe the tickets were free, so I googled the concert the day of the event, and though it was not free, additional tickets had been released for that night. So, I was like “Hey! It’s historical! They’re tearing down Shea! We should go!” It was definitely fascinating. Though there were times that I felt like I was part of some crazy Manchurian-Candidate-esque stadium event (especially after John Cougar Mellencamp appeared and everyone started yelling “USA, USA,”), even I was touched when the entire stadium sang “Piano Man” to the Bard of Long Island.

P.S. My love for Billy Joel does NOT extend to a capella groups, which I hate, and who seem to share a love for Billy Joel. I’m guessing that my friend who hates the Uptown Girl video never saw an even worse video…For the Longest Time.

PPS It’s been so hot, I’ve been knitting wherever there’s air conditioning…the subway, the museum, etc.

Pattern: Japanese feather and fan shawl from Izzy’s Knitting. This stitch pattern is super-popular, and is also featured in the Baltic Sea Stole and Japanese Feather Stole.

Yarn: Most of two skeins of Fleece Artist Merino Sock, $24 each , from Knitty City, thanks to a gift from Sarah and her mom. Thanks Sarah and Sarah’s Mom! Their gift certificate has ended up being turned into two shawls, the Ella Shawl and this one.

Needles: Lace Addis, size 5

Project began/ended: Started April 28, finished July 11, or a little over two months.

Notes and Modifications: I was a little worried about how the variegated yarn was going to turn out, and probably, if I could turn back time, (to quote Cher), I would have picked a semi-solid. I even contemplated overdying the whole project, but once it was blocked out, I think it was fine. An interesting experiment–and it definitely turned out better than I had expected when it was on the needles.

I knit the pattern exactly as written. It’s pretty clear, though lacking in direction. If you haven’t figured it out, you knit as written on the chart to the end (from right to left), knit the middle stitch as indicated, then knit back from left to right for the other half of the stitches, reversing the directions of the decreases (replacing the SSK with K2TOG and vice versa). My edging didn’t really feather and fan, but no one else’s on Ravelry’s seemed to either.

Click through after the jump to see more photos.

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 So the shawl is pretty much done–it just needs to be cast off and blocked out. I had wanted to finish it before the 4th of July, but you know, life gets in the way.

We headed up to Ithaca for the holiday weekend and I took along a ball of rainbow sock yarn, intending to make a pair of Jaywalkers.

I cast on on the bus, and knit through to yellow in front of the Cascadilla Gorge…

…next to the Taughannock Falls…

…in the car…

…in front of the Beebe Dam..

but it was all for naught. The damn sock is too tight! I had cast on fewer stitches than the instructions said–and with size 0 needles, instead of 1s–because I am under the impression I have narrow calves and feet. Well, I measured my leg and foot, and it turns out I have average sized (and width) feet. Anyway, the whole leg–all the way through to the V of ROY G. BIV–is ripped, and waiting to be reknit. Grr.

Knitting in my neighbor’s yard.

I smiled a bit when reading Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Knitters Almanac this weekend. Writing about her apprehension about moving to the United States in 1937, she wrote:

“My idea of this country had been gathered from her traveling citizens, from the movies, and from ‘Babbit.’…I was convinced that we should have to live in a shabby brownstone walkup with four families to share the facilities; that we should spend our summers panting on the front steps, or walking along something called a boardwalk eating popcorn and cotton candy, and our vacations in a landscape strongly resembling the Jersey Flats. I knew we could never aspire to Cadillacs, to estates on Long Island, and the cool Adirondacks in the summer.”

I smiled because anyone who has read kids’ books from a certain era (like the All-of-a-Kind Family series, and yes, click through to read the cute Jezebel.com review of it), or were forced into watching too much early Woody Allen (Radio Days, anyone?) has a similar view of New York. I moved to New York in 1996, 59 years after Elizabeth Zimmermann came to the U.S., and even I thought of New York like that. But the funny thing is that it sort of still is. Despite all the carping about gentrification of the city, people here still sit on their front steps, multi-families still share apartments, we still go to the boardwalk, and Adam and I even go to the Jersey Shore every summer. (Though I think EZ meant the Jersey in the UK.) And by and large, I think that’s great. Elizabeth Zimmermann saw it as something to dread, saying that she saw the Statue of Liberty with “apprehensive gloom,” before launching into that description above, but I think it’s something to savor, and something to love about New York.

For every person like EZ, who sees stoop-sitting in the heat as some kind of urban misery, there’s someone who loves it. I don’t always; sometimes I just am dying to go on vacation. But actually, I often do love it–I love going to Coney Island, I love going to the Shore, I love eating bodega popsicles, I love eating outside for dinner, I love picnics in Central Park, I love walking around in the hot evenings, and I love how the city seems to belong to me. There’s a stillness in the heat that always seems filled with hope, for me and every other New York immigrant who comes to the city with their own dreams and images of what it will be live here.

There is nothing like New York in the summer, and for all of the heat and madness, I love summer in the city.

I smell like DEET…ahh the smell of summer.

* Random political thought: Why doesn’t Obama pick Al Gore for veep?  I know that my knitting blog, which has three readers, is the most influential place to put this idea. Anyway. My suggestion for McCain is Condoleeza Rice. Or Joe Lieberman.

* Random political thought #2: Oddly, the most thoughtful column I read about the weird use and connotations of phrases like “white working class”  was in AM New York.  

* Random weather thought: Heat waves reminds me INXS’ Never Tear Us Apart. I’m not totally sure why–since I am somewhat notorious for my lack of pop culture, particularly music, knowledge–INXS made an impression on my brain, but there you go. By the way, one of my friends calls Never Tear Us Apart “the middle-school dance song.” “Don’t ask me / what you know is true / Don’t have to tell you / I love your precious heaaaart” Ha! Now it’s stuck in your head too.

* Random summer thought: That INXS song always reminds me of a summer I spent in Boston.

* Random summer thought #2: That summer always makes me think of all the John Updike I read that year. Favorite John Updike book: Too Far to Go.  

* Random John Updike thought: When I waited to have John Updike sign his book of collected short stories a few years ago, I waited in a very very long line, and one woman said, “Reading one of his stories is what made me realized I had to get divorced,” and then a man in front of me said, “Really? One of his stories was why I decided to get married.”

And on that cheerful (or not) note…here’s to knitting on the subway, a surpringly air-conditioned oasis in the sweltering city.

I used to work near this store, and I have always thought it is a little weird. They did, however, have the idea of offering free knitting lessons in Bryant Park in the summer, which is a smart way to get new customers. The staff here is always nice, but it’s one of those cafe/knitting stores, which means that there are a bunch of tables and not as much room for yarn. Personally, I am opposed to the cafe/knitting combo, because it always seems to take up room that could be better used, and it never seems to generate that much additional business.

The store also has a bit of an odd layout. In the front room, they only have a couple of balls out of each color of yarn (I think the rest of the yarn might be in the drawers below) and then they have a weird back room with shelves of yarn. It’s the issue of abundance again–it never feels fully stocked. It’s near Union Square, but enough of a walk that it’s not that near Union Square. Also, it has very little sock yarn, which is always what I look at if I just want to buy a ball or two of something.

I know these reviews are kind of crappy–I need to develop some sort of bullet point system for evaluating stores: diversity of yarn lines in brands / weights / color / fiber; location; amount of yarn available; staff; etc. But I haven’t. Anyway, it’s worth popping in if you’re in the area, but not worth making a trip out of your way to go to, I think.

Knit New York

website: www.knitnewyork.com

address: 307 East 14th St., / New York, NY / 10003

phone: 212-387-0707

I’m a little worried I might have a stinker on my hands. When I bought the yarn, I was hestiating at Knitty City between a lace-weight Dream in Color in a wine color and this vareigated Fleece Artist yarn. The Dream in Color yarn was actually cheaper, yardage-wise, and a semi-solid. I had actually planned to buy a solid or a semi-solid color. But buoyed by the success of my other vareigated shawl, and lured by the splotches of hot pink in the Fleece Artist skeins, I bought the variegated. I fear that it may turn out looking like a ground-up Rainbow Brite doll, but even so, I’m going to wear it around, because it’s taken quite a lot of work to knit. Plus, I hate ripping.

My boss found this shirt in a package of stuff sent to our office last year and dropped it off at my desk, and now that it’s finally hot, I can wear it. It says “Needle Dudes.”

On another note, Adam and I were talking about how local yarn stores can compete with the internet, and he wondered if they had tried teaching knitting in schools, to breed future customers. I started laughing because I had recently read a David Sedaris article where he talked about visiting tobacco factories as a school field trip (complete with free cigarettes), and I remembered that a friend (and occasional commenter) had mentioned going to the local bread factory as a child. I don’t think we went to anything as super-branded as a tobacco factory as a field trip when I was kid (though I do remember visiting some television show which starred someone from Laugh-In, which was way before our time, and thus, not very impressive). It seems a bit intense to try to sell yarn (or tobacco) to kids through school, though I do remember during a crochet phase in my youth, sending away for some sort of yarn newsletter that came with sample cards on their newest yarn. (I have no idea how I found this company or their address, since this was years before the internet, though I suspect it may have been through this book I had, which had the addresses of many weird clubs kids could write to and ask for membership. I remember being particularly taken with the idea of joining a sugar-packet collectors club, which speaks highly of my coolness factor in elementary school.) We had a sewing class in junior high, which required buying fabric, and I know many Waldorf schools teach their students to knit, so maybe knitting in the schools is a good way to create future customers.

I actually have all four pages of this Daniel Clowes comic, thanks to my neighbor and FOA (Friend of Adam’s ) who is an art school alum and who mailed a copy of it to me after we saw the movie. My scanner seems to be broken though, so I’m just linking the first panel from Wikipedia.

Anyway, I’ve realized this whole “art” idea is great! Now I can justify my ugly knitting! Who knew that any of my readers and commenters went to art school? I love it! I did not go to art school, though I did major in history, which is bullshitty in its own way, particularly if you wrote the kinds of papers I did. (Including my totally awesome paper “The Semiotics of the Autumn 1996 Men’s J. Crew Catalog.” And no, I did not go to Brown.)

I read KnitKnit a while back (and I saw Sabrina Gschwandtner speak at that American Craft event I went to) and I thought it was fairly interesting. It’s a mix of people who definitely see knitting as Art, fashion designers, and handknitting designers. They each gave a pattern, so it’s actually quite an eclectic collection, and an interesting book, if not necessarily the most useful.

I’m not really sure if I’m a process or a product knitter. I think I’m kind of a product knitter, because I wouldn’t knit something just to learn a technique, yet I often choose to knit ugly things. I think I might be is a knitting-product knitter, versus a clothing-product knitter. I knit things because I like the look of the finished object, versus the look of the finished object on me. Though I have a tendency to buy extremely weird clothes too, so it might be a life problem.

By the way, I know this blog totally ignores actual news–like the earthquake in China, the problems in Myanmar, or even the election–but I’m not sure I have any useful thoughts to offer on any of those situations.

Did you know that part of the Berlin Wall (above) is in New York? Who knew? It’s hidden away in Midtown, near the Museum of Modern Art. Anyhow, I have a total dearth of exciting knit-blogging fodder, or exciting life-blogging fodder. (Not that my normal posts are SO exciting, but anyway.)

I’m knitting another shawl, out of variegated yarn. I realize that these are weird and possibly ugly, and the fact that I spend the majority of my free time and disposable income on crazy colored yarns to knit potentially ugly accessories, is, perhaps, a bad direction for my life. This could, if my life was a novel, or some kind of art project, be kind of tragic, and a metaphor for modern American life or something.

By the way, in my boring life, I’ve recently went to this year’s Whitney Biennial, and it was so crappy. (Beyond the low quality of the art, there was a really low level of craftsmanship to the work.) Plus, a whole bunch of the explanations seemed, um, bullshitty. So maybe I will try to justify my craft projects with similar explanations: “New York Minknit’s work posits the question of how chance and gender interact in modern life. By using variegated yarn, the artist is showing the randomness of choice, and interprets the concept for the fiber arts. Shawls have traditionally been worn by older women, many of whom have been forgotten by modern society, and by crafting shawls using traditional needle-work, she reinvents the definition of third-wave feminism.”

Or maybe I just love ugly shawls. 

Pattern: Swirl Socks, by Sulafaye

Yarn: One skein of hand-painted merino fingerling (or maybe sport-weight?) wool from Traveling Rhinos, color: Northport, 440 yards. I bought this last year at the Renegade Craft Fair in Brooklyn [see the yarn in skein form here]. This year’s fair is coming up again in June, if you’re interested.

Needles: No. 2 Inox DPN, set of 4

Project began/ended: Started March 18, ended April 27, or a little over five weeks.

Notes and Modifications: First off, yarn review: This yarn has a ton of yardage. I had a lot left over, and the legs of the socks are pretty high. It’s also nice and warm and wooly, which I liked. (Koigu, which I used for my Berkeley socks, felt oddly crisp, and un-wool-like. However, Koigu feels great on the feet, so who knows?) The socks seem like they’re be nice for hanging around the house in the winter, or wearing when it gets cold. They’re hand-wash only, which is probably why they’re more wooly feeling than my other socks, and are nice and soft. The bad part about the yarn is that there were definitely spots where you could see that the dyer had tied the yarn in a skein for dying, and so there were white bits that showed up randomly throughout the skein.

As for the pattern, it’s great. It’s a nice way to break up hand-painted yarns, while remaining fairly simple. I also liked the sculptural quality of the raised stitches on a stockinette background. The pattern called for DK yarn and bigger needles, so I followed the instructions for the medium size, with smaller yarn and smaller needles. I think my socks are actually a little too stretched out, so maybe I should have followed the large size instead. Oh well. Also, for some reason, in my right-swirling sock, the traveling stitches that form the swirls were less plump than in the left-swirling sock, though I’m not sure why.

I used the crochet cast-on from Wendy Knits, and I used Cosmic Pluto’s short-row heel instead of the one suggested.

Since I had so much yarn, I made them taller than suggested, and it’s pretty easy to hide the increases under the swirls. I think my increases did end up pulling the fabric a little, as you can see in the top photo. Anyway, if you want to increase, here’s how I did it:

On the first, left-swirling sock: Instead of doing the left twist, as instructed by the pattern, slip the first two stitches on the LH needle off. Reverse them so that the second stitch is closer to the end of the needle, with the first stitch in front; knit in the front and back of this (original second) stitch. Slip purl-wise the next stitch (the original first stitch) onto RH needle. Continue on. (Basically slip one to the left as you’ve been doing, and kfb in the non-slipped stitch.) I increased two stitches per row (in the fatter space between the swirls) over six rows, and then knit plain for a few, and then increased at the same rate over another six rows, etc. I tried it on as a I went along, so it wasn’t super well-planned. I did write down at what rows I increased though, so I could try to match it on the other sock.

On the right-swirling sock, you will need to do a different type of increase, because the kfb gives you a raised bar on the left, which is hidden by the swirl on the first sock. So, on the second sock, what I did is slip the second stitch on the LH needle onto the right needle, and now, ALSO slip the original first stitch (in back of the second) onto the right needle. Now turn your work around, and purl into the front and back of that stitch (which is the closest one on the tip of your now-LH needle/your former RH needle), so that the bar is closest to the swirl. Turn your work back to its regular position, with the stockinette side out. You’ve essentially created a reverse kfb. Continue, bringing the yarn behind the slipped stitch. (This sounds more complicated than it is, and will make more sense if you just do it. I probably should have taken photos, but I didn’t.)

Increasing, particularly on the right-swirling sock, leads to some loose stitches and uneven tension. You will need to adjust the tension (or at least I did.) I learned this from Stitch and Bitch, and it’s is a pretty basic technique, I think, but in case you don’t know how to do it: Pull one arm of the loose stitch out until it is big and floppy. Try to figure out where the stitch connects to (in the case of the swirl, it may be the strip between the “v’s,” rather than the “v”-itself). Yank on the bar or the “v,” and continue along to distribute the tension through the adjoining “v’s,” so that the tension is less noticeably concentrated in one area.

One final non-knitting note. I am rather impressed by how New Yorkers ignore all weirdness around them. Pretty much everyone ignores me when I make Adam take photos of my socks around town–though at the Cherry Blossom Festival last week, one lady was heard to say, “Is that a sock in the tree?”–including when I am wearing my socks (and no shoes) in public places. Maybe they just think we’re odd sock feti*hists or something.