Knitting (mostly) blog

Monday September 22nd 03

Yeah! Went to the California Wool and Fiber Festival, in Boonville. Camping was lovely, especially in a nice redwoody campground, with some Spindles & Flyers guild friends, and lots of good food. The festival itself was a little rough... It was happening this year along with the Mendocino County Fair, so there were hordes of people but few of them, proportionally, interested in fiber. The vendors spent a lot of time teaching, more keeping kids out of dangerous equipment, and didn't sell much. The hardest part for all was the temperature, well above 100o, outdoors, so the wool hall was an oven. We only managed with an ice-cream an hour.

So we stayed mostly outside, where we petted sheep after sheep. Great batch of churros, since they seem to be a local specialty. Rose was very taken for the Ace In the Hole Romney's ad for a shepherdess ('will train'), and would be sending off my phone number as we speak if it wasn't that one of the little ones butted another so hard while we were standing there that the gate almost flew open... The goats ranged from little brown Nubian ones with a black stripe down the back to very elegant very tall white ones. Not all were sociable, but the ones who were accepted head scratches very gracefully. We needed some serious hand washing when we were done.

I got started thinking again by the shearing demonstration... A nice older woman, talking through the history and techniques, demonstrated shearing one half of the sheep with electric shears, and the other half with hand shears. I'd thought about it last year, and got discouraged by the fact that electric shears were the only instrument I could find. But if I could talk someone into training me with hand shears...

At least we managed not to come home with yet more fleece. That was due in part to not being able to figure out how one could possibly buy one, which isn't a good thing for the farmers. But it's much better in terms of our closet space :-). And I did go around and write down the names of the shepherds for the churro fleeces we liked best, so all is not lost, should we be unusually efficient and need more before next spring.

I did knit in the car a bit, but slept most of the way back, knocked out by the heat. Sigh. Isn't it strange that one can be thoroughly incapable of reading in a car, tossing one's cookies after 10mn, but that knitting is perfectly OK? I've never quite understood that, especially since it's not like I can really knit without looking, but it's kept me cranking out socks during years of bus commutes. Still, I have to say that highway 128, right out of Cloverdale, is one road where even knitting is not something I can do, and if I remember correctly a break is always necessary. Next year, I should remember to wear those sailing bands that press on acupressure points above the wrists...

Monday August 25th 03

Something's been gnawing at me a while, as a larger problem of textile pattern publishing. A publication which will remain unnamed, because I don't think it's the only one with this wrong-headed approach, is proposing to pay less for 'easy' patterns published than for 'harder' ones. I alternate with indignation and horror at the depths of wrong-headedness this implies, on so many levels that it's hard to catalog them.

A major problem right off is the definition of easy, which much depends on how you learned what you're doing, what you've learned first, what you've practiced most. It leads for instance to outfits like Vogue Patterns defining complexity entirely on the number of pattern pieces. It's a method to be sure, but one so cosmically inadequate as to be laughable. A shirt with few pattern pieces but unfamiliar mitered corners, different hand-made buttonholes, and requiring subtle draping adjustments to bias-cut pieces gets flung into the easy category and flumoxes poor beginners. Likewise, some of Elizabeth Zimmerman's patterns use only very simple elements like garter stitch in such complex ways that many otherwise intelligent people have a hard time figuring out what's going on at all - it takes quite an effort of trust to finish your first 'surprise jacket' for instance.

Maybe a general definition of 'easy' would work in a Scandinavian country where everyone goes to school and learns a prescribed course of textile skills - there one could have a reliable 8th grade pattern or a grad-school one, clearly differentiated with set levels. The same criteria would lead to some very strange things in my own home ec experience though, where teaching 10 year olds to make baby shirts and fancy buttonholes were the only discernible testable achievements. In any case, all this is pretty much nonsense in the modern Western world, where instruction in textiles is haphazard at best, and one may be taught by any of several generations of craftwomen with very different methods and criteria, not to mention cultural backgrounds.

All these attempts at standardization also suggest that there are objective standards of difficulty that everyone could conform to. Alas, if it was so simple we could all agree to avoid.. piping, zippers? whatever is the problem, and all improve at once. Pattern companies presumably could do much better by having a higher success rate among their users. But this is completely untrue: everyone for whatever reason finds different things differently difficult. I've never had a problem with a set-in sleeve, but I've never met a lining that didn't drive me into paroxysms of swearing and throwing things about. Almost everyone I know has obstacles I find puzzling in their simplicity, while they can't fathom why I can't get the hang of what they toss off with ease. This is true pretty much no matter what the field - I can whip out a perfectly respectable souffle without batting an eyelash, while the simplest omelette is at best laboriously achieved, if at all. Maybe it's a matter of neurological makeup, or handedness (like the victims of childhood right-handed fascism who stay vaguely uncoordinated the rest of their life), maybe for some vision comes into play (astigmatics seem to like pop art, which produces patterns of a familiar weirdness, and many undiagnosed cases of mild color blindness are running among us), maybe some deep Freudian events influence our grasp of techniques we associate with certain people (as in my case with the omelettes). Whatever the reason, we're as unique in our perception of ease, and our ability to use a specific technique, as in any other endeavor.

I also have to wonder at the implications for textiles of introducing better returns on complicated patterns, and so encouraging the publications of more of them, even subconsciously and indirectly, Do we really want the kind of culture that rewards complication for its own sake? What my quilting friends call the 'White Glove Mafia', the kind of people who scrutinize the size of your stitches and their regularity, or catalog quilts solely by the number of pieces, don't encourage the vitality of any artistic field. No young person, tentatively taking their first steps in any endeavor, would be attracted to a field dominated by this kind of petty, suffocating, beside-the-point criticism. Technique is good, don't get me wrong, and mastery of it sure helps you get your ideas out there. But technique for its own sake is somewhere between boring and pretentious, neither worthwhile goals and the middle a nasty swamp.

In addition, it's a rare beginner who enjoys turning out obviously misshapen objects and basking in the glow of what they'll be able to accomplish with another decade of constant practice. Maybe that was the case in the Middle Ages, where long-winded apprenticeships were more the norm than in our days, but I suspect they liked to whip out a perfect little potholder right off too! Even the most old-fashioned teachers that I've heard of, even the mothers who were as likely to slap you and rip your masterpiece if anything was wrong at all, tried to start the kids with scarves, or something that could easily lead to pride in a nice finished product. In my opinion, one of the benefits of the recent upsurge of knitting among younger women has been not only the much-needed updating of styles but the conscious effort to publish easy patterns that lead to smashing results without a lot of fuss.

That said, of course some things are simpler than others. But simpler to make hardly translates into simpler to explain, or simpler to design. I'm sure most of you have noticed that I tend to run on at the mouth, my grandmother used to complain about being subjected to 'Russian novels' :-). but that's usually most obvious when I don't take the time to edit properly. Quantity tends to come at first, and only careful thought and several iterations can produce the kind of elegant simplicity we try to achieve no matter what the medium. I really believe that's true no matter whether you're talking about poetry, ceramics, or knitting patterns. Maybe I'm showing my age and education too much here, obviously I grew up at a very Modernist time in a country still profoundly influenced by Japanese art and African abstraction, both so unlike its own rococo excesses (and the whole Second Empire! Eeeuw!). But while I intellectually agree with the delicious Mae West that 'too much of a good thing is wonderful', and all the im/moral implications of that philosophy, in practice my esthetic judgement tends to approve most of things much more restrained. Still, I'm hardly unique in recognizing that elegant simplicity is something that takes a whole lot of work and experience, and that making things look easy is the mark of the true master.

Let me give you a small example of how the utmost of simplicity in a pattern doesn't necessarily reflect an easy, stress-free experience in design. I recently posted for you a pattern for a Hawaiian crocheted ribbon lei. My beloved sister is all agog at the kitsch level of such an object, being herself a very proper French girl who'd hardly dream of wearing a lei, even a real flower one, even while lying half-naked on a Napali beach :-), but that's another topic. What could be simpler than a tube with no shaping and no fancy stitches? Yet, it took me over a week of fiddling to get to the desired result.

First, I had to decide what yarns to use. The hairy Fizz was the obvious choice of eyelash, very much like the density of frayed ribbon, but the ribbon was another matter. Deco-Ribbon has what I thought was the perfect crispness, but its width precludes its use in such a relatively small object, as I quickly confirmed with a misshapen sample. I thought a ribbon was definitely necessary, the stitch definition is an integral part of the design. So that left the Mikado, which is the perfect width but a bit heavier and drapier. So I had to make several tubes long enough to determine what size would be large enough to look like a proper lei and not some anemic imitation, kitsch oblige, but wouldn't be so large as to make the thing collapse under its own weight. Stuffing is an option, but one that I personally dislike, I suspect a form of cheating.

Then I was struck by another idea and discovered that the plain ribbon usually pictured in those leis is too flimsy to hold up the lei, not to mention too slick, and that I needed to use a chain for the ends instead (not an option if you're not crocheting, that's probably why it's not seen elsewhere). Stitch choice was fairly obvious, fortunately, as single crochet was the most likely to produce a firm enough fabric to make a larger diameter object with some body. But what was less obvious was the general pattern. Normally, knitting or crocheting in the round leads to all sorts of gyrations to avoid making a pattern jig at the row change. So you'd think that trying to make a simple spiral would be ideal. But actually changing color at every row meant the ickiest, most obvious jig, basically a mid-row color change, and one that kept rolling to the forefront in every try-on to boot. Sigh. Back to regular stripes. I then decided to make the ribbon stripe wider, to show stitches more, especially since I was getting confused in the making and kept having to count my stitches to figure out whether I was still on track. This led to a doubling of the Fizz eyelash, because the virtual pistils had thinned out too much by then. And finally I decided that my initial high-contrast color choice (flame ribbon with my favorite yellow) made the thing look more like a killer bee than a flower, so I backpedaled to matching Fizz.

Every single one of those insights took at least several inches to work out, sometimes half a lei when I was being particularly dense. For some reason, I don't seem capable of getting more than one insight per iteration, or only on rare occasions. So by the end of all this, I had crocheted a virtual lei that could have gone several times generously around my butt... And of course I felt a bit sick of it by the end. Only the deepest swell of altruism, knowing that I could spare thousands the same travails, kept me going to the point where the thing was wearable :-).

Likewise, it had taken me nearly a month of futzing to work out the Vegan Fox design, and to make it easy. The fact is that, if you're working out something for yourself, you can look at it and think to yourself 'mmm. should have done this instead over here, it'd have been more straightforward' and leave it at that, hoping the experience gets filed away in an accessible corner of your brain. But if you intend to write something up for others, at that point you'd better rip and see whether it really does work out to do it the simpler way. Although I guess my cheap digital camera's awful resolution might successfully disguise making one object and writing different directions :-)... But seriously, in my opinion it's much harder to design an easy pattern... And if publishers are going to distinguish on some arbitrary lines, they should be paying more for easy patterns.

Wednesday July 30th 03

Have been somewhat in a knitting mode, but much less in a writing one... Several batches of visitors and associated festivities, more un/employment gyrations, nasty summer colds, there has been lots of non-fiber activity to distract us. The biggest accomplishment in the interim has been Rose's. She made a sweater in a couple weeks, a feat that leaves me half dazzled and half wistful. As the maker of not one but TWO separate four-year sweaters, I still can't quite understand people like Rose or Priscilla who toss off a sweater as if it was a casual event. So it's both humbling and educational for me to watch the process up close. Discipline and persistence help :-). Ah well, I knew that...

The masterpiece is from the Fall 2002 issue of Interweave Knit. It's a simple sweater, but it has interesting hip shaping. A bit puzzling though, I did a real double take when Rose asked what I thought of the instructions, as you decrease every row but at the same time increase one every other row. Guess that has the effect of making a clearer, stronger decrease line, and it's been judged nice-looking enough around here that it's being recycled into the next sweater. Garter stitch was substituted for the bottom ribs, since both Rose and I loathe the bottom ribs that make any sweater ride your butt funny, no matter what the butt. The distance between the top and bottom of the armhole seemed very exagerated and was shortened quite a bit without any ill effect. Rose really picked this pattern because of the neck, since she is a hot-blooded kind of person, at least as soon as she's moving, and she likes sweaters with open necks much better. You may not think it fits nicely from the picture, but that's because it's my dressform, and I'm bigger than her :-). It looks quite nice on her.

The hardest part to determine was the yarn. Rose had a big pile of handspun corriedale begging to be used. The sheep was Taffy, one of the pampered prize flock from Ranchito del Sol in Sebastopol. I had originally gotten that lovely medium grey thinking that it'd overdye very nicely, but hadn't gotten around to it by the time Rose needed some serious practice. Corriedale is an excellent beginner's fleece, soft and spunky pretty much no matter what overtwisting abuse is dished out to it. Rose did learn to do a good woolen draft in the process, and made some nice elastic but soft yarn. But she had the same response to the final product as our friend Paula usually does after she finishes her great, tastefully natural colored projects - blah. I think spinning, because of the time involved, does lead to being greyed out more easily. So she got an idea from the yarn used in the original pattern, and experimented carrying a strand of Waikiki along, a cotton/rayon slubbed yarn. We both liked the color effect very much, where the mostly cotton thin yarn practically disappears into the wool, leaving varying colors of mostly rayon slubs to give texture contrast as well as color one. We had some qualms about the texture, because the swatch felt not as soft as the original wool. In the end it worked out - the sweater is a bit crunchier, heavier and drapier than if it'd had been only wool, but it's so much more interesting that the trade-off is worth it. Because the Waikiki is so much thinner, there is no appreciable cotton sag that'd make the pattern unsuitable. And it's still very warm and cozy.

Apart from that, I heard a lot of muffled snarling as the body was getting seamed together. Keep in mind Rose has Mom's standards in finishing, ie much higher than the norm. But no matter what your standards, it -is- difficult to make perfect seams. So she wrestled with the body, and then she adapted the pattern to make the sleeves in the round. And looked some more and figured out that she could have pretty much made the whole body in the round too. Swore that every next sweater would get that treatment. No point in doing any more seams than necessary... And I (and the shade of Elizabeth Zimmerman) agree wholeheartedly.

Previous Next Random List	Previous Next Random List	Previous Next Random List
Previous Next Random List	Previous Next Random List	Previous Next Random List