Mindless knitting

It's my practice to have several ongoing knitting projects, and there's always one I think of as "mindless." This means I can do it automatically, so I can talk to others while knitting, or stop and start it often, as when I'm traveling and have to sit down/get up/embark/disembark/board/deplane, etc., and not worry about losing my place. My place in the knitting, that is.

The Knitting Goddess once observed that all knitting design was nothing more than rectangles and tubes. With this in mind, and knowing well my own limited ability to combine shapes, I decided that my current Mindless Project would be a long rectangle knitted of lace-weight mohair on #9 needles. (I use a circular so I don't worry about dropping stitches when it's packed away.) Said project accompanied me during a recent trip to a shockingly beautiful part of the world called New Mexico. Ultimately the project will become a very lightweight, warm, and lovely shawl/scarf thing.

I'm using Schoppel Mohair Lady yarn, 80% mohair, 20% nylon, in 50 gram balls. One ball yielded about 18" of generously wide shawl, so I'm thinking maybe four or five will do the entire job. The color, teal, is gorgeous; the yarn is not so wonderful to knit, however, even though it looks great. Mohair knitting is not for the faint of heart. It snags and slips, and it's a horror to frog. (At the unfortunate Brandon Mably workshop I attended last winter, I did learn one useful thing--that if you have to frog mohair, put the yarn in the freezer first. Apparently mohair is a very juicy kind of yarn, and freezing will tamp down the cling action.)

So, we had a wonderful week in New Mexico (the usual suspects: Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos), and I met some great fiber people, bought some amazing hand-dyed yarns, and all the while knitted my Mindless Project.

Outside the Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe NM

We came home, unpacked, unpacked, unpacked (translation: still unpacking), I caught up on things, knitted this and that, and suddenly realized I couldn't locate my Mindless Project.

In typical extremist fashion, I ripped through all my usual hiding places, interrogated H whom I trust to know where everything I've lost is (he didn't), replayed endless scenarios of when and what I'd been knitting in the week since our return, and finally decided I'd lost my knitting. I began to mourn it. I had sleepless nights. I considered a fairly reliable but desperate last-ditch tactic--to begin knitting the project all over again. This would once again validate my Theory of Duplicates, which goes thus: If you lose something, buy or create an exact replacement. This guarantees that the original will reappear.  I was very reluctantly screwing up my courage to do this.

But then I noticed a tote bag on top of a shelf in my closet. I opened it, and there was the knitting! 

Calloo, callay, O frabjous day! she chortled in her joy.

It's remarkable how impacted I am by a vast, though somewhat repetitive, cycle of self-created dramas. Most of them are pointless and downright neurotic. At least this one had a good ending, even if it temporarily disproved my concept of mindless knitting .

A blizzard is for knitting

The nor'easter-blizzard currently visiting New England (and several, more southerly states) has compelled me to think of all the happy knitters who are "hunkered down" (a term oft-used of late) with their needles and yarn. I count myself among them, certainly, though I keep reminding myself that if the forecast had played out only a wee bit differently, I would at the moment be staring, in an opiate haze, at my left foot in a fiberglass cast, since I was scheduled for surgery at 8 a.m.  Well, life turns on a dime, doesn't it? Along comes a Weather Event, accompanied by a Travel Ban, and expectations of power outages, foodlessness, and all that other sort of fun stuff, and the Surgical Center shuts down for the nonce. FORTUNATELY, none of the bad stuff has come to pass except for lots and lots of snow (it's still falling). We have at least two feet, but there are higher drifts.

I am now knitting that hat with the vulgar but realistic message mentioned on the previous post. I shall post an image of the FO soon, I hope.

Where is the Subaru?

Where is the nuthatch?

***

Luckily the snow didn't hit until after Brandon Mably gave his workshop at Knit One, Quilt Too in Barrington, Rhode Island, on Sunday the 25th.

It was overwhelmingly well-attended, and all of the knitters, strung around the perimeter likecloselyplacedpickets in a fence, diligently followed the "poppies" Fair Isle graph distributed at the start. Brandon played mixtapes of music to knit by so as, he said, in a voice that brooked no dissent, to discourage talking and encourage knitting. Many knitters sang along to the Beatles, highlights from the musical "Hair," and other pop tunes that delivered me swiftly to my high school cafeteria at lunchtime, ca. 1971.

You can see, behind Brandon, some of the poppies swatches pinned to cardboard; here are more. (Mine is in the middle, on the pink plastic needle.)

It was intense, gentle knitters, and it was long. The room was very hot and very cramped. (I kept getting flashbacks to knitting on the rush-hour N train as I traveled to and from school, in those dark old days when I also used knitting needles as protection against muggers.) Knitting in such close quarters, with no table to hold my yarn or other stuff, was like one of those dreams I sometimes have, in which mechanical entities like computers and cars repeatedly malfunction, and I wake up just as I'm about to delete my magnum opus, or drive over a cliff. 

After a while I just couldn't stick it out. And so I left an hour early, despite Brandon's stern warning that I would be missing the best part.

What is this thing called elbow room?

Did I learn anything at this workshop?
Yes.
Was it worthwhile?
I believe that many of those who attended would reply affirmatively.

Charming handknits from the needles of Brandon Mably and Kaffe Fassett.

Guts and glory

The quilt-inspired Log Cabin Afghan is nearing completion.

The closest I've been to mathematics since barely squeaking by trigonometry in high school, is knitting. (Music employs counting, not math.) Honestly, I love the geometry of knitted textiles, and discovering Kaffe Fassett's Glorious Knits book in 1985 was mind-expanding (not that I made any of its lyrical, geometric patterns. At that point, with two small kids and multiple teaching jobs, I hadn't time to knit...in fact, I gave it up for nearly twenty years).

But the thing about a great knitting book is that you don't have to follow its instructions. You can enjoy its inspirational qualities--images, ideas, and designs that are springboards to future projects. During The Years of Knitting Withdrawal there was a lot of unconscious processing. I returned to my needles about twelve years ago with a stronger sense of color and design. Naturally I was thrilled when a review copy of KF's latest book, Knitting With the Color Guys:  Inspiration, Ideas, and Projects from the Kaffe Fassett Studio (co-authored with Brandon Mably, published by Sixth and Spring Books), recently appeared in the mail.

In the score of years between Glorious Knits and The Color Guys, Fassett and Mably produced a wealth of design books focused on decor, quilting, and needlepoint, as well as knitting. Throughout, though, there's been a consistent reiteration and incremental development of colorwork and geometric themes, most inspired by historic or classic patterns and/or decorative arts. Thus it was interesting to compare the bookends, as it were.

To cite only one example, a classic quilting pattern, "Tumbling Blocks," appears as a sweater design in Glorious Knits, while in The Color Guys it has been distilled into a rectangular "Trapezoidal Throw." It's about as close as you can come to painting in knitting, I think.

***

But once you start seeing artful geometry in knitting, it's everywhere. (What is it about textiles that makes us love their patterned repetitions?) My estimable friend Neuroknitter dropped by yesterday with a package of the world's greatest Girl Scout Cookies (chocolate thin mints, of course) and several examples of her stunning hand-dyed yarn in the form of socks and a clapotis shawl-in-process whose patterning depends on a rhythmically raveled stripe. What a treat!