It’s Furious Balancing

You know you spend too much time at I Can Has Cheezburger when you start thinking in LOLspeak.  You’d never know I was a Phi Beta Kappa English major, would you?  Well, the title of this post does derive from a Robert Burns’ poem,  so it has a small amount of literary merit.  I’m not claiming much.

My Red Red Rose is actually a handknit beret — Rose Red — designed by Ysolda Teague.  I’m sure she was referencing the fairytale character Rose Red, but my searches on the fairytale didn’t yield much I could work with in a humorous vein.  I mean, the girl marries the brother of the prince bewitched into the form of a bear; her sister, Snow White, gets the prince.  This isn’t the Snow White with the dwarf fetish, although a dwarf does appear in the story, but another Snow White.  Oh, go read the whole thing here.

But anyway.  Rose Red.  Knitting.

This is not the first Ysolda Teague pattern I’ve done, and it most definitely will not be the last.  I love her designs; her patterns are well-written and clear.  Even though there are tons of free patterns on the Internet, I most happily will pay $6.00 to $7.00 for one of Ysolda’s.

I did my first Rose Red in Cascade Cloud 9 yarn in the Chili Pepper colorway.  The Cloud 9 was perfect for this project.  Even though it’s an angora blend, I had very little shedding.  It did shed quite a bit when I had to frog and re-knit a part of it, but not excessively.  It has an understated angora “halo” and the red did not bleed when I wet blocked it. 

However, since it’s red, it means that my pictures simply don’t do it justice.  I think the second photo is the closest to the yarn’s true color.

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My photography is getting a smidge better.  Not phenomenally better.  A smidge.  A tad.  An infinitesimal degree of better-ness.  I’m home from work with stomach issues, so I’m afraid there’s not any photos in natural light today.  It’s also 86°F outside, which is a little warm for a wool-angora beret, no matter how much I adore it.

Adore it I do.  I want seven in different colors so I can wear one each day of the week.  I would use the Cloud 9 all seven times, too.

This is my first finished project with cables, and it’s beautiful.

/sigh

I wish it were snowing.

I’ve got a love/hate relationship with my insomnia.  While I adore the wee morning hours, it definitely puts me on a radically different schedule than the rest of the people I live and work with at GMT -4 hours.

Steek (stēk) To pierce with a sharp instrument; hence, to stitch; to sew; also, to fix; to fasten.

From a knitter’s point of view, that’s an extremely tepid definition.  It concentrates far too much on the fixing/fastenening/sewing side of things and says far too little about taking scissors and hacking apart an almost-finished sweater.  The Wikipedia entry is more enlightening:

In knitting, steeking is a shortcut used to knit things like sweaters in the round without interruption for openings or sleeves until the end.  After completing a tube, a straight line is cut along the center of a column of stitches in order to make room for an opening…. The steek itself is a bridge of extra stitches in which the cut is made and is usually 6-10 stitches wide.  This technique was developed by the knitters of the Shetland archipelago and is particularly associated with Fair Isle sweaters, although it can be used for solid colors as well, blah, blah, blah.

The magic of knitting is that you can create a garment out of a length of string. The horror of steeking is that you must make a Leap of Faith and cut into the garment, praying all the while that it doesn’t unravel before your eyes.

Steeking is the one technique most likely to cause knitters to self-impale on their own needles.  It is seriously scary stuff.  Worse than turning the heel of a sock.  Worse than p3togtbl with Rowan Kidsilk Haze. Worse than, oh, I don’t know what, but I think that cutting a steek is the one technique most likely to cause a Major Knitting Freak Out.

To tell the truth, it really wasn’t all that bad.  I didn’t even need alcohol or chocolate cake to fortify myself beforehand — just a hot bath.

I think part of the Lack of Panic is because I chose a steek-appropriate yarn for my project.  I’ve been working on a Noro Kureyon striped vest the past few weeks.  The original pattern over on Knitty.com called for alternating two different colorways of Noro, but I fell in love with Colorway 195 (blue, black, olive, gray) and wanted a vest made entirely with that.

Steeking is best done with rougher, stickier wool, and Noro Kureyon is definitely sticky.  I wouldn’t have been so confident with something smoother (like Noro Silk Garden) or a less “rustic” (i.e., more processed) yarn.  The Kureyon, however, is perfect for steeking.

Despite this, I did have The Husband sew in a reinforcing zig-zag on either side of the line of knit stitches to go under the knife scissors.   I have heard of knitters who don’t use sewn or crocheted reinforcements and just cut a naked, unreinforced steek.  I might be crazy, but I’m not that crazy.   I basted a line of red yarn through the stitches to be cut and he obliged me with his l33t sewing skillz.  Click the Pic for “Really Big” Size.

I must apologize for my horrible pictures.  There is something about this colorway that defies a decent shot.  I think the “gray” stripes, which are an amalgam of purple, green, and silver, throw off the color balance feature on my digital camera.  I have not yet been able to take a halfway acceptable photograph of it. 

When it came time to actually take scissors to my knitting — the knitting I had worked on for 3 weeks, the knitting made with my favorite color of Noro Kureyon — I was quite calm.  I’m the sort of person who doesn’t see much sense in making a fuss about inevitabilities.  The vest was knitted; the steek was sewn.  What’s to be gained by wringing my hands and whining about it?

Not much, aside from looking weak and/or foolish.  So I just got ‘er done.

I get to use my nifty Addi Cro-Hook to pick up stitches for the neck and armhole bands once she dries from her wet block.  I should have Finished Object pictures soon.

Permission to look smug?

Every now and then, since I’ve watched the Lord of the Rings movies half a dozen times, I get bits of dialogue stuck in my head.  Gollum’s dialogue usually.  I wonder where this bit came from?

Sam:  What are you up to?  Sneaking off, are we?

Gollum:  Sneaking?  Sneaking?  Fat hobbit is always so polite.  Smeagol shows them secret ways that nobody else could find and they say “sneak.”  Sneak?  Very nice friend.  Oh, yes, my precious.  Very nice, very nice.

Sam:  All right, all right!  You just startled me is all.  What were you doing?

Gollum:  Steeking.  Sneaking.

The cat picture is gratuitous, but I told Kissy he would get some screen time.

Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

I’ve had those two lines of poetry rattling around in my head because I’m feeling quite smug about two new knitting tools I’ve discovered.  “New to me” anyway; they’ve been around a while.

The first will warm the cockles of anyone’s heart — anyone who has ever felt discouraged or apprehensive about those ubiquitous finishing instructions, “Pick up and knit 124 stitches around the neckline.”

That’s an Addi Turbo Cro-Needle — a 32-inch circular needle with a US size 2 crochet hook on one end and a US size 3 needle tip on the other.  I believe that the person who came up with this one should be beatified; I certainly think it’s a miracle.  In my Innernet surfing research, it appears that there was a Sticks & String podcast some 6 months or so ago that mentioned the Cro-Needle, but I found out about it on Ravelry.

Ravelry is also to blame for my next purchase, which arrived on my doorstep yesterday.  I’ve been looking for an organizational solution to the circular needle mess that is currently breeding in a shoebox in my study.  Perhaps if I contain the prurient little buggers in individual self-sealing PVC sleeves (sorted by size) things will settle down.

This was an inexpensive purchase.  A short Innernet shopping search found an equivalent knitting needle organizer for $34.99.  I paid $17.99 for this.  The explanation for the price difference?

Yes, cats and kittens, it’s a fishing tackle organizer.  I am the proud owner of a Bass Pro Shop Extreme Worm Binder. Since it came, I’ve been dying to write a faux review on the Bass Pro Web site raving about how the circular knitting needle mess on my boat is a thing of the past, how well it stands up to a salt-water knitting environment, and does it come in pink?

There are a few enjoyable things about the warmer weather.  Click the pretty flowers for the Big Shiny Pictures.

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When I heard of “The Game,” my first thought was of Thomas Tryon’s book The Other.  “The Game” referred to the twins’ ability to psychically project their awareness outside of themselves and into another.  For me, there’s all sorts of malevolent overtones to the phrase.

However, The Game I’m writing about today is wholly different, completely innocuous, and gives me something moderately interesting to post on the blog since I can’t think of a damned thing to write about this morning.   The Game is an Internet Flickr meme that I discovered on Pierre, The Yarn Snob’s blog.

What you do is:

1. Type your answer to each of the questions in the Flickr search feature.
2. Pick an image on the first page of the search results.
3. Copy/paste the image’s URL into the Mosaic Maker, using whatever layout you desire — providing it shows the 12 images.

You’ll wind up with something like this (Click for biggie size.  It looks much better) :

So, here are the questions (with my answers).

1. What is your first name? [edited out for privacy reasons]
2. What is your favorite food? Chocolate
3. What high school did you attend? [edited out for privacy reasons]
4. What is your favorite color? Cobalt blue
5. Who is your celebrity crush? Michael Kitchen
6. What is your favorite drink? Latte
7. Where would your dream vacation be? Paris
8. What is your favorite dessert? Ice cream
9. What do you want to be when you grow up? What?
10. What do you love most in life? Quiet
11. What is one word you use to describe yourself? Introverted
12. What is your Flickr user name? Laiane (I find it terribly amusing there’s a supermodel out there somewhere who shares my name.)
    

Et voilà.

Here’s another version of The Game where you keyword search (your answer) + sign.  I think I like this one on a more aesthetic level.

There are some fun things you can do with Big Huge Labs and your uploaded photos on Flickr.   I’ve posted a mosaic of my raindrop laden irises, and here’s a mosaic of my yarn pr0n pictures.  Well, my valiant attempt at yarn pr0n pictures.

Ooooo…..shiny.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend, cats and kittens.  I’m off to do some knitting.