New York Minknit

I went to a talk at the American Craft library last year, and I never blogged about it. It’s a great resource that I had never heard of until I read a story about American Craft, which is a high-end craft magazine.  (It’s not a pattern or D.I.Y. magazine, more like an ArtForum or Art in America, but for crafts. You can read Alissa Walker‘s piece about the redesign in the April issue of PRINT.)

Anyway, the magazine is owned by the American Craft Council, and they have a library that’s open to the public (though by appointment only, I believe) and the library only consists of craft books. It’s really a wonderful treasure trove, filled with a lot of out-of-print books and periodicals. (A part of the knitting section is shown above.) 

The photos below (which are crappy, I know; Adam is the official photographer for New York Minknit, but I took these, hence their blurry and generally crappy quality) show a range of the works they have available, including an intriguing looking mitten book, a chapter from a book about “sweaterhags,” an old French knitting book, and a spread from a funky 1970s needlecraft book.

I’ve been dragging my sock around town, annoying everyone, but putting in a row here and a row there.

Here it is visiting the parachute jump at Coney Island. (My knitting has now visited two of the remaining remnants of the 1964 World’s Fair, the other being the awesome Panorama.) By the way, as an occasional reader of weird pop culture history books and through my years of research for work, I’ve discovered that almost everything was invented or debuted at a World’s Fair, including Belgian waffles, air conditioning, various electrical gadgets, and ice cream cones. Whenever someone wonders when the first “______” came about, if you answer “The World’s Fair!” you would, I think, be right at least 75% of the time.

I also made it pose next to many different types of magnolias, tulips, and cherry blossoms  at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, (and one patch of neighborhood jonquils). It’s like the gnome! It’s everywhere!

This is a small little yarn store in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Midwood, which is a short drive away from Coney Island. Adam and our former co-worker, Seltzerboy (pictured) wanted to eat pizza at Di Fara. (If you click through on the links, you can read about how the two of them are fanatical about Di Fara. I was the victim of much eye-rolling when I suggested that Di Fara should institute a line, instead of the free-for-all pizza ordering system they they currently have.) It’s just a neighborhood yarn store, with Red Heart and Patons, and similar brands, rather than the more high-end yarn stores in Manhattan or other parts of Brooklyn. It is, however, devoted entirely to yarn, unlike a lot of similar neighborhood stores, which tend to be a catch-all of fabric, yarn, Bedazzlers, and other craft supplies. I am guessing that they developed this inventory–of more inexpensive, and often acrylic, yarn–by observing customer demand, though I wonder if it would benefit (or hurt) the store to carry more boutique lines of yarn as well. Their inventory is so similar to that of Michael’s or Jo-Ann’s that it lacks any stock that might give it an advantage over those big-box craft stores. It may be, however, what the neighborhood wants, and a store carrying Koigu or Malabrigo might be seen as too expensive or too snobby by its customers. I don’t know; that’s just my guess.

Stitch N Stitch

1320 Coney Island Ave.

Phone: (718)-692-0100

This was on the same block, and I think it might be owned by the same people who owned Roxy Yarns, but I couldn’t find Roxy Yarns. Perhaps both stores are moving? I liked the name: “You’re SEW materialistic!”

Sometimes, I hate learning new things. I like doing things the way I always have, and assume, grouchily, that no new way can be better. I am, however, determined to try all of the different ways of how to knit a sock, and this pattern (Swirl Socks by Sulafaye), required learning how to knit toe-up. After some frustration trying to learn Judy’s magic cast-on, I went with the crochet cast-on, and I was amazed! It was so easy!

Combined with thicker needles (size 2) and sport-weight yarn, these socks have been flying along. I’ve become a total toe-up convert. That first progress shot (above) was after just five days of knitting. Probably, if I thought knitting taught life lessons, I would now say something about the importance of learning new things without fear.

I went on a business trip to Cincinnati this week, which entailed lots of airport waiting, and thus, lots of knitting. Something about getting to stay in a hotel suite still feels glamorous to me. Traveling for work–even if just to Ohio–seems so sophisticated! And a hotel suite without all the household chores of home meant more knitting time.

By the time I came back to New York, all the bulb flowers had blossomed. I had enough yarn to make these socks even taller and into knee-highs, but I had been knitting just this sock all week, and I got bored. Sometimes, when I read difficult [read: not particularly plot-driven] and long books, I get physically annoyed with the book. I remember reading Gravity’s Rainbow one summer and hitting the book against our dining room table. My dad looked up, and I was like, “This damn book won’t end!” It was slow-going in the beginning, and I seem to recall that the book was actually fairly interesting in the middle, but by the end, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I was like, “End, you stupid book, end.” I got that way with this sock, and just bound off mid-calf, with yarn left (I had pre-divided the yarn into two balls), because I couldn’t deal with knitting more of it. That’s the beauty of socks, though–you can just stop when you’ve had enough.

I had never seen this kind of flower (above) before. They looked like they were cut out of crepe paper, but they were real. The rectangular ends of the petals were what made them seem fake–most flower ends are tapered, but these look like they were snipped off neatly. If you know what kind of flowers these are, leave a comment.

Off I go to cast on for the second sock.

This photo is a bit dark, since it was 7:30 p.m. when it was taken.

Pattern: My own, detailed below.

Yarn: 1 skein Nashua Handknits Creative Focus Worsted, 75% wool, 25% alpaca, color: natural heather. $9 from Homespun, in Ithaca, NY.

Needles: 16″ bamboo Clovers, size 7

Gauge: 22 stitches per 4″, unstretched in pattern stitch

Project began/ended: I started this on February 16, and finished yesterday, March 31, while watching, of all things, an episode of Girlfriends about how knitting made you old. The funniest line was when Diana Ross’s daughter (in real life; not on the show), who is kind of the nerd of the group and is angry because she had been dragged out to a club to recapture her youth, says, “I would have been halfway through that headwrap if you had let me stay home and knit.”

How to make it:

1. Find some yarn. This yarn is 220 yards, and a quarter alpaca, so it has some drape and fuzz. If you want drape and no fuzz, go with something that has some silk or something slinky in it. Find a 16″ circular needle that goes with your yarn.

2. I don’t think gauge is very important in this project. Use a long-tail cast on to cast on some multiple of 4 stitches. I’m pretty sure I cast on 108 stitches. Cast on more or less based on your own experience with hats and gauge.

3. Join into a circle. Don’t twist. Though actually, I think this might have worked nicer as a moebius cowl, so if you want that, twist.

4. Place marker at beginning of round. (I actually found it helpful to place markers every 10 stitches until the pattern was established. If doing so, make sure the marker that identifies the beginning of the round is different than the others.)

5. Mistake rib:

Round 1: *K2, p2; repeat from *
Round 2: K1 *p2, k2; repeat from *, until you have 3 stitches left, then p2, k1.

By the way, I found it helpful to think of the pattern as a column of knits and a column of purls, each bordered with columns of alternating knits and purls. This is what gives the stitch such a raised and sunken surface, unlike regular ribbing.

6. Keep repeating these two rounds until you run out of yarn.

7. Bind off with Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Sewn Bind-Off.

8. No need to block. Wear dramatically.

Download the pattern: The Ithacowl [pdf]

Two balls of Ornaghi Filati Luna Park Sock Yarn.

Two years ago, (also in March), I went to visit Seaport Yarn, one of the weirdest yarn stores in Manhattan. Recently, I had heard that the store moved, and this weekend, since I was going near City Hall anyway, I took a visit to its new location. (It’s still in the Financial District, just in a different building.)

Okay, the store is still weird, and continues to be in an odd office space:

(I looked at the photos from two years ago and I was carrying that same handbag, which is funny because I actually don’t use it that often, as it’s quite heavy.) Anyway, that’s me pointing to a paper sign that says: “Seaport Yarn, Fifth Floor.”

The new layout is much more open, and isn’t as kookily Being John Malkovitch-y as the old one. The owner continues to run her marketing business out of the same office though.

But it’s still hidden–it’s in that 181 building, surrounded by hawkers selling knock-off pashminas.

This brings me to a question I’ve been thinking about. Do you feel like you have to buy yarn at your local yarn store if you visit? What if you linger for more than a certain time? What if you’re the only person in the store? I do. If there’s a lot of people, or if I’m just in and out, then I don’t feel obligated to get anything, but if it’s just me (and Adam), and/or I browse for longer then 10-15 minutes, and especially if I’ve chatted with the store owner, I feel I have to buy something. (Hence the sock yarn in the top photo.)

It’s tricky, because I try not to have too much stash (in fact, I am aiming for zero stash), and it would be fiscally irresponsible for my own budget if I always bought something. (I’m not even going to discuss the enviromental and global pros and cons of consuming something you don’t need.) But small businesses do have a certain charm. I used to be less swayed by this argument–buy local to keep your neighborhood’s character–simply because I felt like businesses of any size needed to figure out how to compete with big box stores, instead of soliciting pity purchases from its customers. But with the growth of the internet, it’s something that’s become more and more of an issue.

We went to brunch on the Upper West Side today, and I was all grouchy thinking about the loss of Murder Ink. I never shopped there that much, but it was a GREAT bookstore, and it always sold a ton of Ellery Queens* (unlike *cough*The Strand,*cough* which is too highfalutin to ever have more than a couple of Agatha Christies on a sad little cart somewhere). It WAS something that contributed to the character of the neighborhood, and I was thinking about how if a murder mystery bookstore couldn’t survive on the Upper West Side, the heartland of cat-owning, tea-drinking, Agatha Christie-reading old ladies**, where can something like that thrive?

*If you like murder mysteries, I highly reccomend Ellery Queen. That said, one of my friends considers the detective “too smug,” so he’s not everyone’s taste.

** Totally me. I don’t own a cat or live on UWS, but I say that with respect. And as a former resident of Morningside Heights, I feel I know the UWS enough to comment on its change.

I grew up, like so many people, reading these kids books set in New York*** and watching Woody Allen movies (my dad is a big Woody fan, though I am on the fence myself), and wanting to live in that New York, a New York of the 1960s and 1970s–a New York that is now changed. I’m not so curmudgeonly that I think the change is always for the worse, and it’s easy to romanticize something that’s gone. (When I lived here in the 1970s with my parents, there was no air-conditioning in the subway, something that I think is Totally Insane.)

***E.g. The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline

I’ve always had an almost automatic dislike of the jingoism of “Buy American” or the righteous yuppieness of “Buy Local,” but as I age into a middle-aged crank, I’ve begun to understand the emotions behind these slogans more. Without local yarn stores and other small businesses, neighborhoods do lose some of their flavor. Anyway. I have more to say on this topic, including some supportive thoughts about the opposing point of view, but I’m interested to hear your thoughts about whether you shop at your LYS or online and why.

Oh, and the new Seaport Yarn info:

Address: 181 Broadway, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10007
Phone: 1-800-347-2662

Website: www.seaportyarn.com

One day I was chatting with my friend about this and that when she said, “Well, you know, there are blankets with sleeves.” I was like, “What in the world is a blanket with sleeves?” This was a concept that baffled me. I am no longer baffled.

Back when I was on my mini-break to Ithaca, I bought a copy of a knitting magazine called Creative Knitting because it had a cute skirt in it. It also had some of the most genuinely insane projects I have ever seen, like this:

Sometimes, there are no words.

Pattern: Tropicana, from MagKnits, by Sabine Riefler.

Yarn: One skein of Koigu KPPPM in P319 (pale purple and orange), and one skein of Koigu KPPPM in P113 (peacock) from Article Pract, in Oakland, California. Each skein is $13.50, so $27 for two.

Needles: Inox 8″ DPNs, size 1, also from Article Pract. They come in a set of five; I lost one the first day. I prefer the Susan Bates DPNs, which are shorter and slicker, but yarn stores seem to only carry Inox.

Project began/ended: December 28, 2007 to March 15, 2008.

Notes and Modifications: 

Notes: First, a little info about the name of the socks. Even though Article Pract is in Oakland, I kept thinking it was in Berkeley, since I seem to think all of the East Bay is one big entity. A couple of years ago, when Adam and I went to visit my family, we ate at Pizzaiolo and I was like, OMG, this pizza place is next to a yarn store! But unfortunately, it was closed, which made me sad. So, this past Christmas, when I was having lunch with a friend who had eaten with us at Pizzaiolo, I was like “I need to go to that yarn store.” (This is the same friend who said, “I thought when you said you started a knitting blog, you meant that you were going to use knitting as a metaphor for life; I didn’t realize it was actually going to be about knitting.”) Anyway, I also think the colors are Very Berkeley: Rainbow! Hippy! Vaguely ethnic! Earthy! Peace-loving!

Modifications: The first and most obvious modification was that I striped two colors in the pattern. This was an idea that I got from the many many chevron scarves floating around the internet that use this same feather and fan pattern, and specifically, from Doggedknits.com’s chevron scarf, aka the scarf that inspired many. I picked two colors of Koigu that I thought would contrast well; the final effect is a little weird, but I do like them. I think ugly colors of sock yarns have a special siren call for me.

The other modification I made is that I started with 66 stitches in a k2, p1 rib, and then I decreased immediately to 55 stitches to begin the pattern. After a few rounds I decreased again to 44 stitches to finish off the rest of the sock. (You can sort of see how I tried two different methods of decreasing–one from the outside in of one repeat and one from the inside out of one repeat above.) This turned out to be a bad idea.

It would have been okay if I had made the sock a little longer, closer to 7″ or 7.5″ instead of 6″, but I freaked out due to the short yardage of Koigu, and began the foot after 6″ of leg. (Also, I was kind of mad, because I had paid almost $30 for this yarn, and I think that buying another skein of yarn would have made these super-expensive socks, only suitable for black-tie events.) In fact, I actually had some yarn left over, so I could have made the leg a little longer, but the way it is now, it kind of puckers and puffs out around the top. Also, the ankle area is tight, but I’m hoping that is going to stretch.

Photo shoot notes: While these photos were being taken, Laura Bennett, Project Runway Season 3 finalist, her husband, and her children were frolicking in the background. I thought about asking her to pose with the socks, but Adam was like, “Um, after she’s seen you wearing them?” And then I realized that asking a reality show celebrity to hold your sweaty socks might be good blog fodder, but potentially really weird behavior.

I’m never quite sure how interested my readers are in vacation photos. I always think I’m going to think other people’s vacation photos are boring, but actually, I find them fairly interesting. For example, I want to go everywhere Fig and Plum goes. So, in the spirit of conducting a little service journalism, here are some more photos of Ithaca: 2008. (I reviewed all of the yarn stores in Ithaca last year in these posts: Michael’s, Homespun, Knitting Etc.)

Ithaca is Gorges. I am someone who is fairly immune to beauty in nature, and have always felt a certain sympathy for Ronald Reagan’s oft-derided (para)phrase, “You’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all,” particularly because my mother was constantly bringing houseguests (and by extension, me) to Muir Woods during my childhood, which were the woods that inspired Reagan’s comment. My parents always tell a story about how I was reading a book when they tried to make me appreciate some natural California scenery, and without looking up, I said, “Beautiful, so beautiful.”* I lack a certain part of the soul, I guess.

Anyway. I’ve never been a huge fan of vacations that have nature-gazing as their primary focus, but I don’t mind it as a side feature, as long as I don’t have to sleep in a tent. Ithaca is actually rather nice for this, because it has some quite spectacular scenery built-in. My sister actually walks across this gorge every day, which even I, nature-hater, have to admit is pretty spectacular.

Last year, we came at the same time, and the gorges were frozen over.

*Sarah once made me a hilarious calendar of photos of me at different stages in my childhood looking annoyed and reading books like The Shaggy Dog in the middle of trees and camp equipment, photos that were taken over a decade’s worth of annual school-mandated camping trips.

I crave different kinds of vacations at different times of the year–sometimes I want to travel alone, sometimes with friends, etc., but I often am in the mood for a paperback mystery reading / knitting / slothing-kind of vacation, and Ithaca suits that need.

A few weeks ago, I went to Ithaca, and I popped into Homespun to get a ball of yarn. I just wanted a one-skein project. I thought this skein was pretty, but once I started unwinding it, I realized it was part alpaca, which means that the result project would be drape-y, and hairy, which means that it would be difficult to do anything requiring a lot of stitch definition. Combined with a desire to do something simple, I went into the Ithaca public library, where they had a wonderfully large knitting section, including Books 1-3 of Barbara Walker’s stitch treasuries, and decided to do a cowl in mistake rib. Here’s the start of it:

(Oh, and Knitsane tagged me a while back with a You Make My Day list. Thanks! I’ve got some more blogs I want to link to, but I’m going to spread them out over the next few posts, instead of listing them in this post.)

Adam has become obsessed with Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. So obsessed in fact, that he was champing at the bit for volumes 2 and 3, which no Barnes and Noble had in stock. We had to go to Forbidden Planet to find them, and inside, we saw this Dalek [which due to Adam’s other nerd hobbies–like watching Dr. Who–I recognized]. I was like “Nerd hobbies collide! Traveling sock must pose with the Dalek!”

I was actually rather sympathetic to Adam’s plight because I had been searching every Barnes and Noble and yarn store in the city for this issue of Piecework, which features an article about how to make these Finnish mittens. Somehow, every other knitter in New York had snatched them up, and I was forced to order it off the internet, but I did get a copy.

I read some article once and the now-forgotten person being profiled said to their intern, “This is New York. You can find anything.” I have held this quote firmly to my bosom, but I have news for whoever said this. There are things you cannot find here.

Traveling socks…in the snow.

I may have acquired Piecework, but I often see beautiful knitting projects on the internet, and they are–unless one is willing to pay ridiculous shipping fees–impossible to get. (Though I sometimes think most of the fun of shopping for hard to find items is the search, no? The end product isn’t even that important.) Here for you to lust after, Things I Cannot Find in New York:

1.) Germany: Sport & Strumpfwolle Color-Ringel, color 15742. I saw Elemmaciltur‘s socks and I have been lusting ever since, though my babelfish-translated email to the company garnered me a depressing response: shipping to the U.S. is incredibly expensive.

2.) Japan: Ooh! Exciting news! I just realized one of my long-time favorite Flickr projects, this Japanese shawl, is actually a pattern I have! It’s a variation of a tablecloth in Marianne Kinzel’s First Book of Modern Lace Knitting–Yarn Harlot made it into a shawl here.

But Japan continues to lure me with cute things. Look at this beautiful baby sweater! So refined, yet cute!

3.) France: I actually tracked down (and bought) this pattern via ebay, but the yarn has been discontinued, and the occasional lots that pop up on ebay.fr cost way to much to ship here, especially for a novelty acrylic yarn.

4.) U.S.: Even things in my own country continue to elude me. Like Jess Hutchison’s booklet of Unusual Toys for You to Knit and Enjoy [the ethics of copying her out-of-print booklet has been hotly debated on Ravelry–a topic, interestingly, that is discussed almost point for point in today’s The Ethicist] and Hello Yarn’s fiddlehead mitten kit (good news on that front though–Hello Yarn is going to release just the pattern soon).