spud says hi

A few more notes, some involving transport

I am, for some reason, feeling not at all like going out onto the streets today, even though it's a rather nice Sunday, and even though I also don't really feel like doing much of anything at home.  It's a dilemma.

So instead, I shall catch up on a few things I've been meaning to post.

• I find it odd the way you can take the same path over and over and then suddenly, on your fifty fifth time along that path, see something you've never noticed.  That's happened a couple times recently as I ride the bus.  On one route, I noticed a giant "snow depository," obviously not currently in use.  I noticed that the intersection where the metro station Universitet is located is also Jawaharlal Nehru Square.  And not too far down the street from that intersection, at Indira Gandhi Square, there's a statue of THE Gandhi.
• Bus stops here are often places where people put up notices.  There were interesting differences between Moscow and Iaroslavl.  Here, they're mostly for apartments.  In Iaroslavl, they were mostly for trips.
• Also, one day as I waited for a bus an older women came up and started ripping down all the notices for apartments.  I've always assumed that those were notices put up by individuals, but the next day another woman came by and started pasting up a whole bunch of notices that look like they're from individuals, but obviously aren't.
• There's a small pack of dogs (I think three) who live around this abandoned building near my apartment.  They're remarkably happy seeming for stray dogs.  They actually play with each other, and although they occasionally bark, they seem only to bark at men, never at me.  I think their happiness may have to do with the fact that there aren't too many other strays in my relatively large neighborhood, and I've seen people dropping food out their windows to the dogs, so they must do OK, as stray dogs go.  And yet they still make me sad.
• Mushrooms can grow out of tree stumps.  I knew that, I guess, but I didn't realize they could grow HUGE out of tree stumps way up above the ground.  Like, taller than me above the ground.  See?

• I'm remarkably pleased with how I've packed for this trip.  I only made one bad clothing choice ( a shirt, too, so nothing major), and I haven't had to buy much of anything.  Even my planned knitting has gone well.  The socks were perfect to work on for a train ride, as I suspected (though, admittedly, I had a hard time with them on the return trip, as for some reason the car I was in was really shaky, so I gave up and turned to sudoko [I was seated backwards, so reading was right out]).  And the lace shawl?  Well, after I frogged the first few inches because I decided I needed smaller needles, it's gone well.  I'm on tier nine (of supposedly 23 but I'm hoping for 19 with the amount of yarn I have), and it's... well, really, it kind of looks a right hot mess at the moment, as lace tends to do before being blocked.  But I did finally manage to photograph it in such a way that the pattern is at least vaguely visible.

Spring has sprung

Mostly, at least, which is of course appropriate for Easter.

It's chilly but sunny, and though there's not much in the way of greenery yet, there are crocuses, and a few daffodils, and I've seen some hyacinths coming up and getting so ready to burst into color.

So how perfect that I finished a shawl made from the Springtime design by Marianne Kinzel?  Made with unidentified pale grey alpaca on size six needles, it turned out quite well (I think)!

It blocked out beautifully--and huge.  I'm sort of glad I didn't have enough yarn to do one more pattern repeat.

Because the yarn's a little thicker than lace weight (I think), and because it's alpaca, it's quite warm.  Just lovely!

It's funny, I wasn't all that into triangular shawls.  I didn't think I'd particularly like wearing them, and kept to stoles and squares.  But then I liked the look of the shawl I made my great aunt for Christmas, and made one for myself.  And lo and behold, I liked the triangular shape.  It's easy to wear, easy to tie, just... easier than expected.  That's one of the reasons I ended up knitting this.  I knew it'd be relatively quick, what with the thicker yarn, and I thought it'd be fun to try another one of these.

I even like how it looks folded up.  But I'm wearing it right now, so it might not get too much time like that.

System update

I realized just now, as I took pictures of what I've been knitting, that one of the reasons that I may not recently have been all that enthused about knitting or photographing knitting or writing about knitting is the simple fact that I've been doing all my knitting in somewhat related cool, even perhaps dull colors.  I'm thinking I need to make a move to incorporate more color in my knitting world in order to jump start some excitement.

Even Ziti's been a bit on the sleepy side, so maybe it's not that.  But I think it perhaps is.

But in the meantime, I've been knitting three things, all of which got to a really annoying point earlier this week where I couldn't knit on any of them without thinking or frogging.

First, socks.

These are generic toe-up socks with footed toe shaping, and with a dropped stitch wavy rib/open pattern from one of the Barbara Walker books (I believe 2, since virtually every stitch I end up using comes from 2).  These had been going fine, but then I turned the heel while at a conference last weekend (during the last panel I decided to whip out the knitting, since I knew I had questions, and thus would be both participating and knitting, and thus showing all that that was possible) and I wasn't entirely sure I'd put it in the right place.  So I had to do a little comparison to be sure, and then also figure out what exactly I'd done at the back of the heel--basically, whether I'd started right in on the pattern or left some rows in plain stockinette.  I have figured all this out now, so I can get this going more rapidly now.

Then there's the shawl.  Now, at some point a few weeks back I decided I wanted to get to work on another shawl.  I didn't want to do another one pattern stole, because those get boring and I wasn't in the mood for that.  So I initially decided to do a sampler lace shawl, either the one from  A Gathering of Lace (ravelry) or the one from Victorian Lace Today (ravelry and... what the heck, desiknitter).  And  actually went out and bought some laceweight alpaca to do this.  But then I got home and didn't feel like starting either one.  Instead, I started this.

Hard to tell, right, like it always is with lace.  It's the Springtime design from Marianne Kinzel's First Book of Modern Lace Knitting.  The book was a great Christmas gift (thanks, Mom!), and one of the things I immediately fell for was this pattern, which was for a tablecloth in the original.  However, instead of cotton thread, I went for some grey alpaca I've had sitting around since I left Colorado--it's a thick laceweight or a fine fingering weight, I think, the same weight as the black alpaca I tried several things with before settling on the cabled shawl.

It went super quickly, until about a week ago when I tried to get one more round of pattern out of the yarn I had... but then realized that I wasn't going to have enough yarn to finish that round.  So I had to frog back to the beginning of the previous pattern repeat.  I had, for once, put in a lifeline at that place because I did know going in that I might not have enough yarn.  So this wasn't the worst thing in the world.  It just meant doing it, and although I'm sometimes too quick to frog things, when I know I have to do it I sometimes don't want to do it.

But, a few nights ago I did, and then I went on a rush to finish off the last set of pattern rows.  This involved in the end a complicated crocheted bind-off, which I finished this afternoon.  So now...

... it's blocking.  Again I got to use my cool blocking wires for the straight edge, although since the sides of this shawl are sort of scalloped a little bit I didn't use the wires for that.

Looking at what people have done with this on ravelry, I decided to imitate one alteration; the original pattern (aside from being square, which just means that I only did half of it) had a wider band of that open lattice pattern between the last leaves and those scalloped bits on the outer edge (not sure if this link works... it's pictured on page 87).  I decided I prefered this look, at least for a shawl.

The third thing is the green cardigan.  Again, this went quite quickly at first, but once I got to the armhole part, things slowed down.  First, I started the armholes too soon, and then frogged most of one front in order to make the body a little longer.  Second, I finished a whole front side and the back, but at that point I decided to see if I liked the armhole as shaped.  And I didn't.  It was far, far too big and gapey, given the way the fabric is likely to block out.

And so, here's where I am, and I'm about to be even less than this because I made a mistake on the armhole shaping again and want to redo it.

After all that, kind of boring.  I will say this:  I love the combination of yarn and stitch pattern, I really do.  I think the simple lattice is just enough interest without competing with the slight variegation of the yarn.  I think I'm really going to like the sweater once it's finished.  My plan is to do garter stitch button bands along the fronts, and actually possibly a garter stitch band around the bottom, too--I thought about doing that as I started, but ended up being uncertain whether it's what I wanted.  I now think it is.

I'm still a little uncertain about what kind of neckline to do.  I think a round one will work best, with again perhaps a garter stitch band.  But that might change as I again tackle the fronts.

Other updates?  Well, I have sabbatical next year, which means that I'm heading back to Moscow, and to charming landlady E, in almost exactly a month, assuming my visa comes through.  Before that I need to pack up all my belongings and move them into storage (I'm hiring people for the moving part, but not all of the packing part).  This is making me eat strangely, because I'm trying to use up whatever's in my freezer and pantry, and not to buy too much replacement stuff.  I won't be in Russia the whole year, but when I'm not there (which will be a while this summer, and then next winter and spring) I'll be in Chicago, or at least so goes the current plan.  So, a whole slate of new things to blog about.  Perhaps I'll get my blogging mojo back.  We'll see.

And one more thing, just because it's annoying me.  My DVD player just stopped working.  It's standby light is on, but pressing buttons either on the remote or on the player itself does nothing.  It was a super cheap DVD player, but I'm annoyed because there's still a DVD in it.  Humpf.  Disassembly, ho, I guess.

I meant this to be a fall shawl

Among the many things I bought from the lovely Laura of Textiles a Mano before I left Colorado was some beautiful autumnally shaded fine merino.  Last summer I decided it needed to be paired with a leaf pattern, as in the Voyager Stole from elann.com.  And so I cast on and began to knit.  Initially I made it not quite wide enough, and tore out a good 12-16 inches.  But from that point on, it went swimmingly, but slowly.  I'd work a few pattern repeats here and there, between other projects, or when nothing else seemed appealing.  Just now, I decided to get it finished and out of my knitting basket, in part because I've been waiting to figure out what I'm going to do with the pink thing, and in part because... it's time.

And so, voila.  It blocked out beautifully, and even a bit larger than I expected it to be--and in a good way.  I tried to remember that lace grows when washed and blocked, and thus stopped knitting a little bit sooner than I might have otherwise.  And the result is just about the perfect size, as far as I'm concerned.  I've had issues recently with making things a touch too long, but this... nope!

You can't really tell here, but I got to use my newish blocking wires for the first time.  It just so happened that exactly the width of these boards was pretty much what I wanted (I think it came to about 27" across, which is strange, but there you go).  I figured I'd just use regular pins for the edge, because I wanted it a bit scalloped, but once I got used to threading the wires through the shawl edges (which took a bit of getting used to), the rest was much more pleasant than many of my blocking experiences.  This is after it sat overnight, MOSTLY undisturbed by small Ziti feet, I think.  Although there are a couple of pins pulled out on the lower left corner, and I suspect his involvement.

I am, in short, quite pleased with the combination of pattern, yarn, and blocking.  While knitting I worried a bit that the yarn, even though it's fairly subtle, was going to be too much for the pattern.  But in the end, after blocking, I think they balance fairly well.  I must, however, admit that doing this much of a single short-repeat pattern gets a little long in the tooth after a while.  This is why it took so long to finish (I first cast on last July), because I'd happily knit along, and then get deeply, deeply bored.

It's all the more impressive that I just finished, because of this.

That's Mii, getting ready for the hula hoop challenge.  And the step boxing thing?  Awesome.  I think I'll be getting all my aggression out easily this term, and in reasonably productive ways.  Except I also just downloaded World of Goo.  It may not look like it, but this could be problematic for my productivity.

Blergh

I'm sick.  And my internet's being weird, very slow and patchy.  Grrr.

But.  It's very spring like, finally, even if there aren't very many flowers yet.  I've seen a few crocuses, but that's it.  I'd have expected forsythia by now, but apparently it's usually later here.  Strange.

Anyway.

I thought I'd post about the strange little shrug I made, since I've been wearing it quite a lot, at least around the house.  And, actually, out, too.

It took less than 2 skeins of Malabrigo lace weight yarn, which I think is really more a fingering weight.

[As I knit it, this shrug weighs 75 g--that's exactly 1.5 skeins of the Malabrigo lace weight.]

I'm not entirely sold on the yarn, by the way.  It's totally soft, but it's also already really, really fuzzy looking.  But.  Anyway.

I knit it on size 2 needles, but that's in large part because I'm a loose knitter.  Most people would want to go up a bit.

I knit up from both sleeves at the same time, and then joined at the back.  So, do the following twice, either sequentially or at the same time.

Cast on 62 stitches (this easily fits a fairly average sized arm, especially after blocking; if yours is a bit bigger, or smaller, I'd increase or decrease by 10).

Knit about an inch and a half of k2 p2 ribbing, starting and ending with a k2 on the right side.

Do substantial increase row:  knit into the front and back of every other stitch, plus throw in a few extra increases there and there, to end up with 100 stitches on the needle.  (Or some other number evenly divisible by 10).

Treat that row as row one of the seafoam stitch pattern.

Knit one full repeat of the pattern:  there are an extra two stitches at each end as selvage stitches, otherwise it's just the pattern.

[That is, on each end, keep two stitches in stockinette stitch:  k2, pattern, k2 on odd rows; p2, pattern, p2 on even rows.  This will make a nice edge for sewing up the sleeves and then picking up stitches for the ribbed border.]

After one repeat, start increasing one stitch at each end of every other row five times.

Continue knitting in pattern straight until the sleeves are long enough:  from mid-back to about elbow length.  Obviously, this'll be slightly different for everybody, but approximately 20 inches.

Do a three needle bind off to join the two sides.

(You can obviously also do this all in one piece; in that case, knit straight across the back and then do decreases.)

Trying on the shrug as you go, sew up the sleeves evenly, until they reach the armpit (this REALLY would vary from person to person, I think).

Around the remaining opening of the shrug, pick up 3 stitches for every four rows of the main body, fudging as necessary to end up with a multiple of four stitches.

Knit about an inch of k2 p2 ribbing around the opening (in the round).

At that point, add an increase into every other p2, and knit another two rounds of ribbing.  Then, add an increase into the non-increased p2s ON ONE HALF of the shrug, and knit another two rounds of ribbing.

Bind off using the stretchiest bind off you can.  I used the sewn bind off, which is a pain in the neck for something this big, because you need a really long length of the yarn left hanging.  But it worked well.

Weave in ends, wash, and gently block to loosen up the seafoam pattern.

And, there you go.  A shrug.  Woohoo.

Last lace for a while

And now, this is done, too.

The Alpine Lace Shawl, from Victorian Lace Today, by Jane Sowerby.  A lovely, straightforward pattern, with only two elements arranged neatly.

Knitted in Laura Macagno-Shang's laceweight alpaca.  A lovely yarn, in lovely colors.

See?  Blue, mostly, but with bits of green and purple, very subtly varying the colors.

I'm very happy with this.  I wasn't entirely sure I would be; the leaf pattern isn't as clear and as bold as it would be in a slightly heavier yarn, or with slightly smaller needles.  But I think it still works quite well.

I wasn't sure how long it was going to be with the number of repeats in the pattern, so I added in a few extra repeats of the leaves.  It blocked very well, and the only problem I noted with it was mine--I knit the end of the piece significantly more loosely than the start.  It's a little crazy to me that it's possible to change tension that much with the same yarn and on the same needles.  But.  There you go.  Perhaps this is what I get for not working on this for months at a time.

Anyway, it's barely noticeable in the final, blocked version.  The open diamond pattern at one end is a little longer than at the other, but that's it.  And that, I can live with.

Muddle into music

(First, a disclaimer... there is, I realize something problematic, even in poor taste, about using an example from Stalinist Russia to build a metaphor about knitting.  But I woke up thinking about this, and... there you go.)

So, Dmitry Shostakovich is one of, if not the most, prominent composers of the twentieth century.  He was at various times feted well beyond the borders of the Soviet Union, and also, at times, demonized within them.  He was in and out of favor depending on what he was producing.  A symphony that commemorates the horrors of the siege of Leningrad?  Great.  Go for it. 

A tricky piano concerto that features a crazy trumpet part?  Hmmm, OK.  (Y'all, this video clip, by the way, is AMAZING.  I've been to many a concert in that hall, some of them truly great.  But to see Shostakovich playing there is... well, it's something.)

An opera about murder and passion and greed?  Er... well... not so much.  In response to Shostakovich's opera "Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk District," Stalin famously published an article in Pravda denouncing the piece as "muddle instead of music."  (Here's some stuff about the incident and about Shostakovich.)

But I've been thinking this morning about the way that that totally misunderstands music.  Even totally "traditional" "classical" music uses what could be heard as muddle--moments of dissonance, say--to create music; the power of the harmony is emphasized by its emergence from absence, and the resolution of those moments of dissonance can be among the most powerful moments in any given piece of music.

And that's what happens in knitting lace... when something's on the needles, or just off, it often looks like muddle, like mess, like nothing in particular.

It's not flat, it smooshes together oddly, it's just not anything in particular.

This could make knitting lace a very discouraging process, since it really doesn't give much of a hint of what it can become.

(I should note that there are exceptions to this.  My frost flowers cardigan, which was knit more tightly and wasn't supposed to be heavily blocked, looked much the same  while being knit as being worn; this is obviously useful in knitting lack into clothing instead of shawls.)

But after.  Wow, after.  Even when it's still just pinned out the harmony of lace starts to emerge.

The patterns open up to reveal their true nature.

The regularity (or lack thereof) of the patterns starts to hit the eye.

In something like this, you see the swirls created by the 32 separate sections, and the gradual shifting of form from tiny eyelets to big peacock feather eye designs (you're totally right, Uncle John, and I sort of wish I'd used blue-green yarn instead of the red to emphasize the peacock nature of the piece).

In the end, the lace floats, and drapes, and slides, and glides, its pieces coming together in a glorious harmony of shape, color, design, and function.

Alone, it seems almost too light, too ethereal, to have substance.

Airy.

Fairy?

Gossamer?

*

*

*

*

Even doubled, the pattern emerges.  Indeed, then the pattern, in a way, becomes yet more complicated, as its parts do not compete with each other, but rather highlight the swirling and the pointing and the growing.

 

In other words, I like this shawl.

Edited to play with the layout, and to add the source!  I can't believe I forgot that!

The pattern:  MMario's Queen Anne's Lace Shawl.  The pattern's ravelry page is here.  You can find the pattern, plus a discussion of it, here.

I made virtually no changes, except in the weight of the yarn and the size of the needles I used.  I used a very fine laceweight, probably really a cobweb weight yarn, a wool I bought in Russia last year.  Therefore, I also used quite small needles.  1.5 millimeter harmony needles, to be exact.

One result is my shawl's a bit smaller than the forum discussion suggests:  pinned it was about 50 " diameter, once unpinned it jumped back to about 45-45" diameter.  Given how loosely I knit, I don't think I'd have wanted it to be on bigger needles--talk about airy and open!

Robots. And a lace shawl. (Not together.)

For some reason, I've been going through a robot phase in my popular culture consumption.  Even more, a "humanoid robots don't know they're robots" phase.  Which means reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and watching a bunch of the new Battlestar Galactica.

Both are things I probably ought to have done before now, given my general pop culture proclivities (I'm not a huge sci fi person, but I'm enough of a dabbler in sci fi that I'm at least familiar with a lot of big name things).

This picture, by the way?  An example Ziti's moments of turning into an attack cat.  Every so often, he decides that the paper towels are his enemy.  It's as if suddenly his true Cylon nature is emerging from his normal sweet cat persona!

OK, that's a stretch.

Anyway, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about either of them.  I'm not sure what I expected from the novella--I know I've seen Blade Runner, but I don't remember when, or which version.  So I had vague expectations for the novella, plot-wise, few of which were realized.

And the TV show?  Again, I think there's a bit of a problem in that I have at least a vague sense of where the whole story goes, from general pop culture, which takes away some of the suspense.  As a result, I find bits of it kind of draggy.  And the whole thing needs a significantly higher dose of humor, as far as I'm concerned.  I think it's possible that the Dr. Baltar/Six stuff is supposed to be funny.  But I find it deeply, deeply annoying, unpleasant, and unfunny, but for a couple of exceptional moments.  So, there you go. 

The BG watching has been part of my general catching up on pop culture things I've been behind on over the last couple of year.  I've gone to see very few movies in theatres since moving here (the film festival was an exception).  While I was in Chicago at the holidays, my parents and I watched Ratatouille, which I thought was pretty darned brilliant.  And just today, I came across a link to this:  "The Rat's Ratatouille," which I'm now hankering to make.  I think, though, that it probably deserves to be reserved for the harvest.

And now the lace shawl.

I finished the Queen Anne's Lace shawl!  For some reason this past weekend I was struck with an intense desire to finish, so finish I did.

It was a lovely knit.  Different every round, so it kept my interest.  The pattern was virtually error free--I think two rows in the chart were off by a stitch, but it was easy to see and correct the mistake.  The only issue for me was the yarn I used.  It broke.  Several times.  And at one point the skein itself seemed to be broken internally.  And at various points I could see that one of the two plies was broken.  My solution, perhaps not the best one, was a whole bunch of spit splicing, with a loooooong overhang, so that even if the felting gives way, the two ends are well knitted in.  Hopefully it'll survive.

This isn't, by the way, its final blocking.  I need a larger blocking surface, so I'm either going to start the process early in the day and use my mattress, or I'm going to hit Home Depot and buy a couple more panels of foam insulation.  But, I wanted to get a sense of how big it'll be, and how it'll look blocked, so I pinned out this half.

Not bad, eh?

(And, oh, crap, now I have to run and teach.)

C'MON!

How is it fair to have gone from this:

to this?

Hmpf.  Whatever.

Two more quick notes before I run off to teach (Rise of Stalin, today, woohoo [not that I approve of Stalin, of course, but it's an interesting lecture, if I do say so myself]).

So, Ziti stayed with a very nice couple here, who gave him a nickname:  Mr. Needy Pants.  Why?  Because of his incessant desire for attention and LOVE.

See, they have a rabbit who has free range of one of the floors of their house, the floor with the bedrooms.  Hence, Ziti was not allowed where the people were at night.  And apparently, he did not approve of this, and meowed a lot, which freaked out the rabbit, who reacted by... thumping.  Silly rabbit.  Silly Ziti.

Anyway, he's happy to be home, I think, and has indeed been spending a lot of time very close to me, which is sweet.

However, it's also a bit troubling for the knitting.

Here's what I worked on while traveling:  the Queen Anne's Lace shawl by MMario.  It's a very nice pattern for a circular shawl.  I'm using quite fine yarn and small needles, so I'm actually not entirely sure it's going to be an appropriate size--but it'll be pretty, no matter what happens.  I'm through row 108, I think, of 159 rows.  Except since it's circular, and thus the rows get longer and longer, that doesn't mean I'm 2/3 of the way done.

I didn't knit much on transport, but I did knit a fair bit in hotels in the evening (I'm a good solo traveler, but I'm not much of a night wanderer when being a solo traveler).  I intended to read, but instead did some music listening, or some TV watching (something made easier by the fact that both Finland and Portugal are subtitle rather than dubbing countries when it comes to foreign shows on TV).

I'm kind of obsessed with finishing this now, in large part because I want to see if the yarn works out.  It's some Russian laceweight I bought last year, and in some ways I really like it.  But it's also been breaking a fair bit, which worries me when it comes to blocking.  This might literally fall apart at that point, but... we'll see!