Sample Knitting and Tim Ezell

I am temporarily out of base yarn. I took this short down time to knit much needed samples, including the beginnings of a tube scarf and a pair of socks from my own yarn. Unfortunately the socks won't fit over my heel or take a nice picture. The fuzzy blue picture is all I have of it. You will just have to trust me, it was lovely. Lovely and now frogged.



Last Friday Tim Ezell from Fox 2 News in the morning came to Knitorious to interview Sandy for Stitch N Pitch. The knitters and other shop owners turned out in force and in their jammies!



Lucinda unveiled her lovely Icarus shawl made from Dyeabolical Yarns Dark Envy and a skein of grass green. This picture does not do it justice. Her Tales of Yarn blog has much better pictures:

For St. Louis Knitters

I normally don't do this, but I thought I would pass this email on for you local knitters who might not have received the email. I will be at the filming, sputtering car willing, but I am going to try my damnedest not to actually be on TV.

SALE SALE SALE!!!


Knitorious has TWO opportunities for you to save.


The first opportunity will be held in conjunction with a visit from FOX 2's TIM EZELL! Tim Ezell will be at Knitorious this Friday, May 9th to take a knitting lesson and promote Stitch N Pitch. We are asking for knitters/crocheters interested in participating to please join us at Knitorious between 6:30 and 6:45 AM. We should be finished be 8:15.


Ideally filming will happen in the back room and people can come and go as they please. Hopefully we will have a variety of people knitting and enjoying the shop. Tim shared that he has gone to several places in St. Louis and documented several entertaining knitting experiences already.


I am encouraging everyone to wear their PJ’s (but we won't mind if you are on your way to the office). Coffee, donuts and a 30% discount on non-sale items for attendees between 7:00 to 8:00 AM.


The second opportunity to save will be this Saturday and Sunday. Like our previous sales, you will pull a lucky chip when you first enter the store. That lucky chip will tell you how much your discount will be on yarns not already on sale. The discount will be anywhere from 15-25% off. Discounts are for yarn only, please.


We hope to see you Friday, Saturday and Sunday!


Thank you for your business,


Sandy

Natural Knitter and shop update

The Natural Knitter: How to Choose, Use, and Knit Natural Fibers from Alpaca to Yak by Barbara Albright; photography by Alexandra Grablewski. Published by Potter Craft, $32.50 hardcover

Natural Knitter has been sitting on the shelves of the yarn shop I work at since it came out. A few copies sold when it first came out, but with the number of books hitting the market last year I never had a chance to spend any time with this one. I am sorry I waited so long. Natural Knitter is breath taking in both its presentation and content. It is not a book that you power through and then shelve. This is one you luxuriate in and leave by your bedside table.

Before you get to the content of the book, the presentation provides a sensory feast. Though the book is broken in to easily digestible chunks, this book was never meant to be a quick read. You are meant to luxuriate in its slick and substantial pages and to pore over the pictures of animals and their fibers. Even the layout and font choices lead one to want to linger on the page.

Each chapter is broken up in to several components. There is historical and agricultural information about the fiber animal or plant, patterns made from those fibers and profiles of companies dedicated to producing natural or organic fibers. There is information about spinning your own yarn, dyeing naturally and where to buy.

The information about fiber is fascinating and educational. As my twitter friends will attest to, I couldn't stop talking about vicuña mating calls (orgle! orgle! orgle!), the evolutionary origins of the camelid family (North American Plains) or that yaks can be ridden like horses (giddy up!). A good deal of the time I spent with this book was actually spent on the internet looking up more information on fiber animals (especially vicuñas), watching videos of these animals or finding sources for those elusive luxury fibers. Not all the fibers discussed were so rare. Natural Knitter profiles more widely known fiber companies, too, such as Blue Sky Alpaca, Classic Elite, Harrisville and Lorna's Laces.

The patterns are amazing. Without all the information about natural fibers, this book would be worth it for the patterns alone. Of the 21 patterns, I want to knit 10, at least.

This book came out last year so I'm not sure if there are many copies stocked in your local bookstores or yarn shops, but even if you have to order it through your local shops it is worth the wait. This will undoubtedly be a classic book to spend an afternoon with.

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I have a small update in my etsy shop, including a few new sock yarn colors and a new line of barber poled DK merino called Twisted! (dyed in mostly semi-solid shades). I will be adding a few more "mutant" colors in a fingering sock weight later this week. Mutant colors are one of a kind colors made from left over dyes. This time they turned out to be beautiful nearly edible semi-sold shades of pink grapefruit, chocolate, avocado, pomegranate and saffron. You will be seeing more muted shades in my shop soon. I love the bright vivid colors and so do my customers. However, there have been requests for more toned down colors lately for cable and lace work. If bright vivid saturated colors aren't your thing, stay tuned and you might see something you like. If bright vivid saturated colors are your thing, don't fret. I'm working on some great new colors. *grin*

Pink Fuzzy Fluffy Extremely Feminine Mohair Cardigan with Pearl Buttons

Yesterday, I went in to work for a few hours in the morning. A man called asking if anyone at the shop would knit him a pink fuzzy fluffy extremely feminine mohair shawl for him to wear out to dinner. I thought for a minute about giving him the quote I give most people who want me to knit for them, a living wage. I thought for a minute about hanging up on what I know was about to be an attempt to make a knitting question obscene. I decided against both and handed the phone over to the owner. I had talked to this guy before and this time the owner deserved the lolz. Oh, and there were lolz, especially when I pulled up the purple mohair catsuit on What Not to Knit and suggested to the owner that the caller might be interested in it.

Oh, the entertainment value of the obscene phone call! And I was entertained, mind you, but mad. Mad because the caller made an assumption that many men have been making more and more often lately*. He assumed he had a right to involve an unwitting stranger in fulfilling his sexual fantasy. He failed, but he tried. And it is that trying, both by the caller and by a handful of others, that Makes Me Mad.

The last time the person called he wanted a pink fuzzy fluffy extremely feminine mohair cardigan with pearl buttons, but didn't want to pay the $400 I quoted him. He didn't want to learn to knit it himself. He was irritated when I suggested, tongue in cheek, that a man knitting a pink fuzzy fluffy extremely feminine mohair cardigan with pearl buttons is far more "shocking" than just wearing one.

He was very polite about it and not overtly obscene, but you could tell. You can always tell. This man was trying to get off and he thought he had pegged us as a target. When I talked to him that first time, he asked "do you get it? Don't you think it is unheard of? Don't you think it is DEVIANT? Don't you see? A MAN wearing an obviously FEMININE sweater?" Yeah, I get it. You're a pervert trying to get a reaction out of me. Barking up the wrong tree, dude. You can't phase someone who did undergrad theses on the social and psychological development of fetishes and the psychosocial issues of medicalization of sexual fetishes.

What you can do, Mr. Pink and Fluffy, is provoke me in to talking about it in my public journal. Regardless of how thickly veiled you think your fetish is or how polite you are, you are trying to coerce innocent people in to fulfilling a role in your sexual fantasy. How dare you think we are dumb enough to fall for it and how dare you try? And since we're on the subject, how dare you diminish those who do struggle against rigid gender lines on a daily basis? How dare you hold up what to you is obviously a symbol of femininity and then pervert it by seeking to infuse it with shame? How dare you waste our time.

The caller kept his requests conversational. He never crossed the line in to obscene. There is a possibility, I suppose, that he really just wanted a pink mohair shawl. I thought about that. Then I thought about how hard he was hinting for the right kind of reaction, the kind that would affirm that he was the deviant he so clearly wanted to be. He wanted to shock and outrage what he probably thought were little old straight grandmas and get off on their discomfort. He kept pressing trying to embarrass and shock the owner when she talked to him. Nothing doing. She was on to his game, too. She answered his knitting questions politely and professionally and ignored the rest. You think he would have made notes last time he called that the women at our yarn shop will politely answer his knitting questions and not be drawn in to his sexual fantasy. He hung up the phone frustrated.

Good.

Coral Snakes, Twisted and WIPs

I have spent the last few weeks in a funk completely unrelated to my online or fiber life. I find myself slightly behind again on blog reading, commenting and returning emails. On the bright side, my apartment is mostly clean, my shop is mostly stocked, my to-read pile is getting smaller and knitting has happened. This being a knitting blog, happening knitting is a good thing.

Finished Project:



Project: Coral Snakes Scarf
Pattern: Alexio Ocean Waves Scarf
Yarn: Dyeabolical Yarns Super Ego in color Firefly, 155g
Notes: I widened the scarf by casting on 60 stitches rather than the 36 the orginal pattern calls for. The designer is sheer genius and makes a wicked omelet. The yarn was smooshy and pooled in delightful ways. I highly recommend going to this indie dyer's etsy site and buying all of her yarn. Ahem.

Projects in progress:


I am so relieved to find the Regia Mosaik socks (left). These were my line and waiting room socks. I finally had to cast on a new pair from Rio de la Plata (right) to throw in my bag until these socks decided to reveal where they were hiding.


I finished the second sleeve of the reverse stockinette Oat Couture sweater. I love the softness and drape of the yarn I'm using (Plymouth Jeanee, 50 cotton/50 acrylic) but it shows every tension problem. You can see I am rowing out pretty badly. I'm not quite sure what to do about it. If every other row had loose tension I could use two different size needles. This is more a case of not maintaining even tension throughout the row, possibly because I get bored halfway through the row possibly because I am not paying enough attention to what my hands are doing. I thought I had this problem licked by switching to combination knitting. Guess not. The good news is that washing the pieces will help some of the tension issues. This sweater is supposed to be a comfortable throw in the washer and dryer and lay around the house sweater so it doesn't matter as much if it isn't perfect. There is miles and miles of stockinette to improve my tension on. And finally, if I decide it is too horrible I have plenty of yarn to reknit the sleeves with.


This morning I decided I will never finish the Irish Diamond Shawl. I love the pattern, but I am about 30% through and the rows are already 400 stitches and take 15 minutes to knit on the lace side. I'm not even sure I like the color. I marked it "frogged" on Ravelry and shoved needles and everything in a bag and hung it up on a hook to be forgotten about until such time that knitting a teal lace table cloth sounds appealing.


My plan for the rest of the day is to jump start the star project. Have you tried knitting a small intarsia star before? I'm finding the shape of the star isn't suited well for the geometry of knitting. That explains the lack of knitted star charts, too. I have had these designs brewing in my head for so long that I'm determined to work it out.


I have fallen out of love with the Noro Sakura side-to-side cardigan jacket by Adrienne Vittadini (left). I am thinking about ripping it and casting on for the Falkenberg-esque DROPS side-to-side cardigan (right). I have to think about this some more. I'm not even sure I like the color of the yarn, but it is a matter of principle. How could I have possibly have walked past a sweaters worth of Noro yarn at 40% off and not purchased it regardless of what color it was?

Shop talk:


I added a new yarn to my etsy shop yesterday. This new yarn is a 4-ply DK weight merino. 1 of the 4 plies takes the dye up faster than the other 3 plies giving it an interesting barber pole look. I love this yarn and the way it knits.

I did a few things differently with this yarn. About half of the batch was dyed in 200g skeins, the rest in 100g skeins. Each 100g has 260 yards and sells for $18. The 200g skeins are 520 yards and sell for $36. I used a dyeing technique a little different than I normally do. This technique created skeins that have more variation from skein to skein, but those variations are subtle and subdued rather than the bright and colorful like my normal colorways.

Book Meme

Lifted from non-knitting blog friends.

1. Which book(s) do you irrationally cringe away from reading, despite seeing only positive reviews?

I rarely see exclusively positive reviews of any book or books.

I get a lot of recommendations for wordy 600+ page sci-fi/fantasy multi-volume tomes from friends who read fast like freaks. These books often start off the first 200 pages with so much detail and twisty plot that I can't follow it enough in the 20 minutes of bed reading to get in to it. I also generally dislike any fiction that assumes you know what the world is about and who the people are without any introduction at all. While these books might be valuable in their own way and while I may come to love them if I have the time, my reading time is limited and my to-be-read pile is alarmingly tall.

2. Borrowing shamelessly from the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde, you are told you can't die until you read the most boring novel on the planet. While this immortality is great for a while, eventually you realize it’s past time to die. Which book would you expect to get you a nice grave?

If I said what I really mean in response to this question there would be an uproar among my geeky friends. Geeks every where would stop talking to me. For this reason, I choose instead War and Peace. Maybe it is the most fascinating book in all creation, but it's long and would at least take me a good little while to get through it.

3. Which book have you pretended, or at least hinted, that you’ve read, when in fact you’ve been nowhere near it?

I know 3 authors in real life. I have friends who buy me books they think I will like and expect me to read them in a timely manner. [I promise I do. Don't stop buying me books.] I sell books. I converse casually with a few authors of knitting books. So you see, I cannot really answer this question, either. Suffice it to say that bears might get me if the truth were to come out.

4. You’re interviewing for the post of Official Book Adviser to some VIP (who’s not a big reader). What’s the first book you’d recommend and why?

Stop Hiring Failures--by Steven Springer. Amazon.com tells me it is a good book. What does The VIP expect from someone who is also not a big reader? Seriously, Mr/s. VIP, hire someone who reads a decent amount, not just someone who wishes she read more.

If I were recommending books I have actually read that weren't knitting books or mind candy, For her own good: Two centuries of the experts advice for women by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Intimate Matters: A history of sexuality in America by John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman and The invention of heterosexuality by Jonathan Katz. These books formed the cornerstones of many a sociology/anthropology/history paper in college. They are quick reads that give a valuable look back at the way sexuality, gender and politics are intertwined and manipulated in America.

I would also make The VIP read Casts Off by Stephanie Pearl McPhee and Knitting Without Tears by Elizabeth Zimmerman. It is so much easier to sort out very important priorities while doing a bit of knitting.

5.A good fairy comes and grants you one wish: you will have perfect reading comprehension in the foreign language of your choice. Which language do you go with?

Japanese and not just because I want to read Japanese amigurumi and lace patterns.

6. A mischievous fairy comes and says that you must choose one book that you will reread once a year for the rest of your life (you can read other books as well). Which book would you pick?

I usually end up re-reading one Harry Potter book, one Diana Gabaldon book and one Stephanie Pearl McPhee book every year anyway.

7. I know that the book blogging community, and its various challenges, have pushed my reading borders. What’s one bookish thing you ‘discovered’ from book blogging (maybe a new genre, or author, or new appreciation for cover art – anything)?

You mean there is life outside knitting blogs? Do podcasts about comic books count? There is one thing I discovered--audio books. They have been around for years and years, but I just this year started listening to them.

8. That good fairy is back for one final visit. Now, she’s granting you your dream library! Describe it. Is everything leather-bound? Is it full of first edition hard covers? Pristine trade paperbacks? Perhaps a few favourite authors have inscribed their works? Go ahead – let your imagination run free.

The books in my perfect library would include a hefty reference section on any topic that might come up, knitting pattern and technique books, books of legal theory, graphic novels and trades, comfort fiction and serious, but important novels. There probably would not be many biographies, but there would probably be a lot of books about how people lived in the Victorian and post-Reconstruction eras. All of these books would hardbacked, spiral bound to lay flat, fit nicely in to my book holder, have large pages and have the text divided in to easy to read at a glance columns, all of which would make for easier reading while knitting. Priorities, you know...

PSA, Ravelry, Snakes on a Scarf

PSA #1: Know the boundaries of your own vehicle and embrace the power of personal space for both driver and vehicle.

PSA #2: Pulling right up on someone's rear is rude, be it while parking, driving, or heavens forbid, biking or walking.

PSA#3: If you don't know the boundaries of your own vehicle and hit the girl in front of you while waiting in line at the drive thru, don't be an asshole and say "No I didn't hit your car you stupid bitch! Now pull the fuck forward!"

PSA #4: If you are that girl, don't immediately run in to the drive thru wall while pulling the fuck forward.

My insides shook for about 2 hours afterwards, but I am fine. The car is fine, minus a tiny little bit paint. The drive thru wall is fine. The employee at the window assures me that I am not the first or last to run in to that wall today. If he would have just leaned his head out, waved and apologized for bumping me it would not have been an issue. But today...it just capped off an already crappy day and it was only 11AM. I am getting a little sick of having really good reasons to cuss in my blog, too. How about some nice knitterly things?


I sold this bit of scarf and the rest of the ball right off my needles. That sounds so rockstar cool when I say it like that, like someone came up and begged me to buy the very yarn I was knitting with. In reality, 7-letter Deborah liked the skein with just a little bit of yellow which I considered seconds better than the more vibrant yellow firsts so I took my needles out and handed it to her. Here is the same scarf started with a new skein. See? More yellow.

Me likes it. I cast on starting at a different spot in the repeat to see how it would affect pooling. Do you see the difference? Poppymom pointed out that it looks more like coral snakes than fireflies. I am going to try not remember she said that while the scarf is around my neck. I probably just lost a bunch of sales from people with snake phobias, didn't I?

The pattern I'm using, Scott's Alexio Ocean Waves (love that man), which was linked in Lime & Violet's Daily Chum yesterday! Thanks, V! Thanks adminnie!

If you are interested in getting a skein of Firefly all for yourself for FREE, check out the "10 Lousy Bucks" group on Ravelry. For every $10 donation to Ravelry to help offset the costs of this great website, you will have a chance to win some pretty cool prizes. I donated 4 oz. of the merino/tencel "Can't Hit the Side of A..." colorway to the dream fiber stash and a gift certificate for a free skein of Dyeabolical Yarns. You know Ravelry, you use Ravelry, go donate! :)