Tag Archives: Knitting

Knitting Xmas presents on Bondi Beach

Posted by —

0

Am in my home town, Sydney,  for a few days.  Whenever I come back, I spend the first few hours wondering how me and my curly hair were ever born and raised here.  And then the sub-tropical languor gets in and I put on my mental shorts and let my hair go crazy.

Yesterday in a cab to Coogee Beach I looked out the window and saw a guy of about 20 or 21 walk past a gardenia bush bowed down by the weight of its flowers in the front garden of a house.  He took a few steps past, then stopped and went back and leant his face in amongst the white-velvet perfume.

Only in Sydney.

And only in Sydney can one knit Xmas presents on Bondi Beach. Which is what I plan to do tomorrow.

Back soon.  SGx

On not fondling one’s moustaches

Posted by —

2

I didn’t always knit socks.  I used to knit important things like jumpers and, even, pièce de résistance, a skirt.  The skirt’s the biggest success I’ve ever had in the knitting department and I finished it as recently as two years ago. It’s in Jo Sharp’s DK Cotton in the colourway, Sage, and you can see the easy but complicated-looking pattern below.  Every time I wear this skirt, I get a thrill.  It’s slinky, comfortable and thank you, no, it doesn’t drop.

DSCN1401

 

Since I discovered the joys of sock knitting, however, it’s taken over and now I knit little else.  There are so many reasons to like sock knitting.  Here are just ten of them:

  1. It’s light and portable; no having to carry funny-looking bags you wouldn’t normally be caught dead with.  You can just stick it in a corner of your handbag, or a pocket, like I do.  In short, as Clive Robertson once said of the newsreader Richard Moorecroft and his penchant for hiding injured marsupials, it can be “secreted upon one’s person”.
  2. You get to finish a project in a week or two.
  3. A quick half row at the traffic lights makes them turn green.
  4. It confers the most sturdy phlegmatism on the knitter …
  5. … and a curious expansiveness on the watcher.  It’s no coincidence Agatha Christie had Miss Marple knit her way to finding out whodunnit (while poor old Hercule had to rely on fondling his moustaches).  I often have to interview people in my work, and I would love to pull out my knitting when asking questions; I’m positive I’d get some revealing answers.
  6. There’s something peculiarly satisfying about hand knitting something as utilitarian as a pair of socks; like the bathmat I knitted last year, it’s something that was born to be machine-made.
  7. Everyone thinks you’re so clever, and if you’re using self-patterning wool, they literally goggle.
  8. It’s the ultimate hedge against boredom: the boredom of the long-distance knitter and external boredoms, as it were.  The waiting in queues kind.
  9. At the end of the process one has a perfect present to give away, a present that’s surprising, intimate and useful.
  10. There’s no sewing up.  Enough said?

*****

Having my own summit

Posted by —

6

Somewhere there’s a Sock Summit going on and I’m not there. It’s in Portland, Oregon and Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, aka the Yarn Harlot, has a hand in it so it’s bound to be good.  I aspire to Stephanie’s sock habits; this is a woman who’ll knock up a pair while waiting for a plane or having a beer before dinner.  And when she’s not producing socks she’s writing the world’s most commented-on blog (300-400 comments every day, and a phenomenal 4,400 when she recently discussed being cyber-stalked by a nutter who didn’t like her celebration of all things Canadian).

Earlier this year when I was in the full flush of Landmark fervour and setting myself six impossible things before breakfast (apols and thanks to Lewis Carroll and Joanna Young), I fantasised about going to the Sock Summit — “Taking sock knitting almost too far” –  and then coming back and heading off again in October, this time to New York, to give a paper at a walking conference about my community project, A Walk in the Park.  Well, these things haven’t come to pass, so I’m hereby declaring open my own Sock Summit, taking place this very day in Melbourne, Australia.

First exhibit is the pair I’ve almost finished for my mother.  The dusty pinks and browns are very much her “palette”.  She is a superb and prolific quilter (you daren’t walk too fast past cupboards in her house lest the doors spring open and you become buried in fabric squares and triangles), and you can see this palette in the Roebuck quilt shown here.  The Roebuck quilt is the design first made by the Roebuck sisters on their voyage to Australia around 1860.

 DSCN1367

Very pleased with these socks. They’re in a new yarn called Regia, made in Italy for Coats GmbH Germany.  It’s in the colourway called “Mirage Canyon” which made it just right to take with me in the 4WD bouncing over the red stones of the desert last week.  Incredibly, it comes with a 10 year guarantee and is “dryer proof.”  The yarn is impeccably smooth and even, and spools through the hand so effortlessly it practically knits itself.  The one curious thing is that it’s designed by the longstanding master of colour in all things craft — Kaffe Fassett — and yet, in comparison with Opal and Online and the other specialist sock yarns, the colours are muted. 

If Mum’s palette is dusty pinks and browns, I’m more of a green, pink and red woman. Hence my attraction to all things Noro, the Japanese manufacturer of the Kureyon sock yarn in the second exhibit below.

 DSCN1359

Gorgeous colour, isn’t it?  But not at all like the well-behaved Regia. This yarn twists and knots, and even — ultimate yarn transgression — breaks off in one’s hand.  As they used to say of driving Volkswagon beetles, one has to knit it like one hates it.  The resulting fabric also has very little springiness or energy and I suspect they’ll sag quite quickly on wearing.  Still, maybe I could frame them, what?

Kate of the jungle + Guest editor

Posted by —

0

Here for your delectation is the cover of my latest book purchase, Knitwear in Fashion by Sandy Black. God knows what the rest of the book’s like; I’m yet to get beyond the cover, so riveting is Kate Moss in her Rousseau jungle and the immaculate Missoni.  Oh to own a dress like this …

 DSCN1226

*****

I’m about to go on holidays for a week. While I’m away my friend, Bluehorn, has kindly agreed to be guest editor.

Back on air + man magnet

Posted by —

2

Transmission has resumed.  I’m back knitting socks after months off air, and it’s due to these two green-speckled suspects.  The wool is the German-made Opal which is dyed in such a way that one ball produces two socks in a mock fair-isle pattern.  It’s the original of the self-patterning yarns, and still the best.

DSCN1199

There must have been a bug, however, in the computer programmed-dyeing of this ball.  Halfway through the second sock the green speckles turned into great green gobs and looked very ugly compared to the first sock.  Knowing I wouldn’t be able to get another ball of the wool, I did what any knitter would do: plunged the whole thing deep into my knitting bag and had a sulk.  I only dragged it into the daylight a few weeks ago.

Deciding to explore the problem, I found the green gobs became speckles again further along in the ball.  So I recommenced knitting from that point and for several days held my breath I wouldn’t be foiled again by running out of wool.  But this time all was well, and finally after many months, I’ve finished them.  Very, very pleased.  They’re finished and they’re pretty.

*****

As well as emotional drama, knitting produces another curious effect.  Do it in public, and you’ll have a man ask you out.  Foolproof.  100% guaranteed.  When not holding some knitting, I’ve been asked out probably only five or six times in the last few years, and that’s giving the benefit of the doubt to the ones who merely smile and start asking about husbands.  But give me some knitting and put me in a tramstop, a bus, a deserted park on a midweek noon (as happened today), and a man will emerge from somewhere, always with what I can only describe as the fondest smile, and ask me out.  Every single time.  Many of them are European-born and tell me nostalgic stories about homelands and mothers; many of them, finding themselves with a woolly, innocent buffer, become loquacious in a way that surprises them so much they look for a cause and fasten on me. 

Never mind laneway bars, the trivia night or the Wednesday night running, if you’re a woman looking for a date, take up knitting and do it on public transport.  Guaranteed man magnet.

The second sock syndrome

Posted by —

0

Lounging on painting by my friend, Roshni

Painting by Roshni

dscn10371

‘The second sock syndrome,’ I read in a book by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee while browsing in Reader’s Feast some months ago.  ‘Of course,’ I thought, and stopped reading.  I didn’t have to read another word.  Because I knew everything she’d say. 

How the first sock is a magical mystery tour, no matter how many socks you’ve knitted before.  So enjoyable, the pushing off into new territory, with yarn new and unknown, and the person you’re knitting for fresh in your mind.

The first pleasurable canter down the ankle stretch, no complications, no thought required, just round and round in meditative ease. Then just when you’re hitting your straps, the first milestone arrives: the small chore of switching from four needles to two and dividing the stitches in preparation for the heel.

Then it’s all sweet again and you’re off down the easy-as-pie heel flap.  Child’s play but very brief.  What with few stitches and heels being rather squat items, the second milestone, the grand occasion, the raison d’etre of the sock arrives all too quickly.  This is the heel turning, the contraction of stitches in such a way the tube of knitting turns 90 degrees and faces out, for the first time, to survey the terrain of the foot. 

But this is the best kind of trick, one that looks much harder than it is, and very soon, the corner is turned and the foot beckons.  Then you remember. Ugh. For immediately, the third milestone, the low point of the whole affair, is upon you.  Now you have to pick up stitches along both sides of the ’square’ opening, with all the anxiety about picking them up evenly.  Not so crammed in that you run out of stitches before you run out of side, not so spaced out that you arrive at the corner with five stitches still to make.  So you hold your breath and try to get it over with in as few attempts as possible.

And then it is over, and after some easy decreasing, there’s nothing between you and the toe except a long stretch of uninterrupted round and round, nothing to do except relax and knit the stitches as they present themselves.  This is the high point, tempest past, all preparations made, as you gallop easily and with gathering speed down the homeward stretch. 

The toe looms but now everything’s easy.  Now you have a sock and nothing’s changing that.  The moment of indecision about when to start making the toe, mysteriously always a matter of feel not pattern, and then in a rush, the toe forms, the top is grafted together, and bingo, you really have a sock.  One perfect, handmade sock, embodied human care and energy, ready to wear.  One perfect sock.  One sock.  One sock of two.  Ah yes, the second sock. ‘You mean I have to do it all over again?’  And there it is: the second sock syndrome.

The geographer, the novelist, the physicist and their loves

Posted by —

0

Heard a brilliant radio program yesterday on News Radio from the BBC World Service.  It was a special edition of The Forum recorded before an audience at The Royal Geographic Society in London.  It featured Doreen Massey, a Professor of Geography, Andrei Kurkov, a Ukranian novelist and Jim Al-Khalili, a Professor of Theoretical Nuclear Physics.  

Only managed to finish half my Dad's Christmas present

Well, I managed to finish half my Dad's Christmas present

Somehow, the facilitator, a woman called Bridget Kendall, created a fluent, highly stimulating program out of three such diverse guests.  It helped that each could talk about his or her special subject and not be asked to offer opinions on events outside their subject, as they would on an Australian program.  It also helped that each was exuberant, supremely articulate, quick-witted.

Doreen Massey, the geographer, rejects the idea that space is being annihilated through globalisation. Proponents of globalisation say ”be patient”, “they’re just slow”, when one raises the case of poor countries like Mali. However, she says, this is like ”taking the whole variety of the world … and reorganising it into a historical queue”.  Or, like “taking geography and making it into history”. 

It also creates a kind of unquestioned belief that there’s only one future and it’s the future that “those who designed the queue have already reached: the USA, the UK, parts of Europe”.  Yet, she says, the key point about space is that “there are always options; it is always multiple”.

Jim Al-Khalili too was brilliant.  He is a professor of quantum mechanics, the realm of sub-atomic particles that can only be glimpsed “through mathematical symbols”. He points out that there are many people intent on looking for mystery and wonder in the world, people who make statements along the lines that scientists “have removed the wonder from the world”.  Yet, as he says, there is actually “nothing weirder or more wonderful than the world of quantum physics”.

And it’s not weird merely because it’s a world composed of very small objects, but because of the behaviour of these objects. For example, “a single atom can be in two places at the same time” and “an atom can spin clockwise and anti-clockwise at the same time”. Even weirder, when the scientist sets out to take a closer look at such phenomena, he says, the particles suddenly behave very sensibly and reasonably, as if they know they’re being watched.

Click here to listen to the program from the BBC website.

A blue and rusty Opal

Posted by —

0

Geez, after fancying myself as an initiated sock knitter I discovered last week I’ve been using the wrong-sized needles all my sock-knitting career.  Have been dutifully following the instructions on a trusty old pattern and the guidance of a sock supremo called Val, a woman with over 200 pairs to her credit.  Both specified 3.25mm. Was disabused of the modest pride in my six or so completed pairs when I went to buy a backup set of needles at my non-usual wool shop and was told I should be knitting on 2.5 or even 2.25.  Suddenly, the reports of stretching I’d received from my mostly grateful recipients flashed over me. And I’d thought it was just another endearing, excusable fact of life in the handmade world!

The wind taken out of my sails, suddenly everything was up for question – tension (am I normal, am I tight), type (stick with steel? get over the twigginess of bamboo? try to like, yet again, those ones made of milk?), taste (weren’t self-patterns a wee bit amateur?).  And in such a mood I started and demolished no less than four different socks (including the still-unloved Popsicle).  But now thankfully, my crisis of confidence seems to have passed and I’ve settled down into the comfortable crudity of a blue and rusty Opal.

Forcefield of imperturbability

Posted by —

1

Finished knitting a bathmat from a Purlbee pattern on the weekend. Is small and naive-looking and actually works. The idea of knitting this appealed to me instantly. I’ve always been attracted to making things that are functional.  But this takes it one step further into the realm of the positively industrial. So perhaps I’m a ”product” knitter, as distinct from a “process” knitter (as per the Yarn Harlot, aka Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s distinction).  Though there are so many aspects of the process essential to me too: the meditativeness, the soothingness, the promise of the yarn, the transformation of idle time into productive time, the sense of participation in women’s business, the forcefield of imperturbability it confers.

Have started some socks using Collinette’s Jitterbug in the colourway called Popsicle. It’s been in my stash for a while, languishing, while I tried to exhaust my obsession with the self-patterning sock yarns.  Had bought it mainly for the “Popsicle”, though it is also has the attractions of an ultra smooth, slightly corded look and a palette like Derwent colour pencils. The obsession hasn’t waned, but feel it’s only fair to give poor popsicle a chance at love.

A less inevitable chartreuse

Posted by —

1

About an inch away from finishing the last half of my green scarf.  Like the Sydney Harbour Bridge the two halves are to meet in the centre via a ”three-needle join” which Joanne from Wool Baa, whose pattern it is and who knits nothing other than these scarves, has promised to show me. 

Am pretty pleased with its cobweb beauty, and the colour is superb.  Chartreuse is such an inevitable colour for born redheads that, despite its strength, it can be blanked out by the eye.  It’s like the brain does an instantaneous calculation: celtic colouring = green = chartreuse = nothing more to know.  But this is not just any old chartreuse.  This is Kidsilk Haze for a start, the creme de la creme of yarns.  And the silk glistens amongst the green haze to give it a depth and freshness that is entirely unlike other chartreuses. I swear it’s refreshed the eyes of all who’ve noticed me knitting it and exclaimed on its colour.