Hello Knitters
I swam again. That's four days in a row. Half a mile again, in 22:50, with lots of stops because there was a fast guy in my lane. There was a woman just a hair slower than me in the lane when I started. She kept stopping to see if I wanted to pass, but I knew I was going to slow down more and I'd be in her way if I did.
Theresa was kind enough to link me, so I expect there are some people visiting Rolling On One for the first time. Hi! Of course you can just look around here and try to figure me out, but maybe an introduction is in order.
I'm a mathematician by training, a software engineer by profession, but I've learned not to talk about those things much. I have two grown-up kids. My wife and I, and our son and daughter, all live in the Boston area. There are some pictures I like of Arlene, my wife, down towards the bottom of the page about the Dr. Seuss memorial. There are pictures of all of us on the page about Anne's wedding.
Arlene once said of me, "You know how some people break out in hives? You break out in hobbies." Sometimes I come back to things I've done before, sometimes I just move on. Right now it's coming back to something I've done long ago, knitting.
I don't have a lot of use for sex role stereotypes. If something takes skill and practice to do, I try to respect that, whether it's throwing a football accurately (this is Boston during super hype week, after all), sewing, knitting, woodworking, canoeing, really, you name it. And chances are I'm at least a little interested in learning about it. Football less so; I'm a small guy and never got into the sports where size is a big advantage. But I like to cook, especially bake, especially bread, and I've sewed several shirts and some hats for myself. Actually, there are four shirts that I started at least three years ago waiting for some attention. Oh well. I've been reading about UFOs on knitting blogs so I'm sure you understand.
So how I got back into knitting is, we were at a family reunion (of Arlene's cousins on her father's side) just before Halloween. One cousin's wife was knitting a shawl with two novelty yarns, an eyelash yarn and something else glitzy, and all the women there were oohing and aahing over it and comissioning her to make them one. Lee (not Arlene's Aunt Lee, that's another generation older and the other side of the family), the knitter, was talking enthusiastically about the handmade wooden knitting needles she was using. I thought,
- how hard could it be to make a pair of wooden knitting needles?
- hmm, a way to get women to talk to you
- hmm, something to do when you're not very good at socializing
- that headband I made decades ago is pretty badly stretched out, I could re-learn and make myself a new one.
... so I bought some wooden beads at Pearl Paint when we were in Central Square shortly after that, and some dowels, and made some knitting needles. Remind me to put up a page about that because I did figure out a couple of subtleties.
Charley's girlfriend has been knitting. She recommended an instruction booklet published by Abbott Yarns (sorry I can't find it at the moment) and between that and Mary Walker Phillips' Step-by-Step Knitting (Golden Press, 1967), which I had learned from 30 years ago (and my mother taught me the very basics of knitting when I was a kid, 20 years before that, but I don't think I did anything but a little flat piece then), anyway if I may go on with the main thought, between those two books I did manage to get started up again. The Mary Walker Phillips book had the instructions for ski headband that needed replacement. I brought it along when we went to visit Arlene's Aunt Lee, cf. above, in Buffalo just before Christmas. Lee, who is a dynamo weaver and fiber artist in general, gave me a ball of scrap yarn to practice with and told me yes, I was moving the yarn between the needles properly when I was switching between knit and purl. I came home from that trip with an ugly red headband in yarn too scratchy to wear, but I had caught on to the basic moves and had one pair of handmade wooden knitting needles warmed up to use.
I went to Putting On the Knitz in West Newton with the stretched-out headband and asked for yarn to replace it. Pretty soon I had a replacement headband in good wool, and I made one for Arlene (though I don't think she's worn it except to try on) right after. Then I noticed, up on the top shelf of the bookcase by our sewing center, a plastic shoebox with about two inches of ribbing in navy and white orlon (two yarns knit together) in a ring on a circular needle. The yarn had ball bands with a price tag, 78 cents, from Kings. If you didn't know they went out of business over 20 years ago, could you have guessed from the price? That's how I get to be with UFOs. Back in the Mary Walker Phillips book I found directions for a stocking cap that looked as though I might have been thinking of it when I started that circle, and finished it.
Meanwhile at the Newton library, looking through the shelf of knitting books, I had the great good fortune to come across Elizabeth Zimmerman's Knitting Without Tears. The title sounded like what I wanted to read -- not just directions, certainly not patterns, but more about the philosophy of knitting. And it was. It was just what I needed. It's been amazing to see how many people refer to her, in Knitty and other knitting sites.
That book went back to the library, but I have a copy on order from Amazon. Next out of the library were Montse Stanley's big Reader's Digest book and Alice Starmore's Book of Fair Isle Knitting. Again it's remarkable to see how influential the authors I've picked out seem to be.
Arlene's best friend Sue and her daughter came over when I was on my way to Putting On the Knitz to get double-pointed needles to finish the formerly-UFO stocking cap and checked it out. On the basis of that, when I emailed Sue and asked, "How will I know when I'm ready for a sweater?", she answered, "You're ready for a sweater," and suggested that I could find a pattern for a relatively easy Aran sweater at POtK. So I got one, and seven skeins of Bartlett Yarns Oatmeal yarn. Two and a half inches of ribbing for the back are done. It took me a couple of rounds to catch on to what the pattern calls mock cable, knit into the second stitch and keep it on the needle, knit into the first stitch and drop both, but it's going faster by now.
Am I making my pictures too big? A little, but you wanted to see that yarn, didn't you?
Meanwhile, we were in New Jersey for a funeral, and I asked my niece if I could knit something for her kids. She said, "Hats are good," so I've got a pattern for a stocking cap and two balls of multicolored 80% acrylic/20% wool. I can cruise on this kind of thing by now, stockinette in the round.
