Sleepish in Seattle

It’s stuffy in here. My eyes are shut, but the glare of cheap fluorescent lights is barely tempered. The air smells of exasperation, perspiration and panic. Every few minutes, a woman with a voice like a Valkyrie hoots directions sternly into my ear. I’m either in seventh grade, taking a math test; or I’m at the airport.

Eyes open. Airport.

Which is worse. Airport? Algebra? Not sure.

But it's worth it. I’ve had a week and then some of intense knitting out here in Seattle; including a talk to the Seattle Knitters Guild,* and classes at two shops I love: Fiber Gallery and Weaving Works.** For that, I will bear a security officer (whose career consists largely of looking at nude X-rays of strangers) telling me that traveling in a kilt is A Little Weird and Asking for Trouble.

The first four days were spent in the company of these fellows:

Those are the faces of the Men’s Fall Knitting Retreat 2011, which I look forward to the way I used to look forward to the arrival of the Sears-Roebuck holiday catalogue. So many shiny new toys to look at,*** and always something interesting to see in the underwear section.

This year, Show and Tell Night was combined with a parade of non-bifurcated men’s garments–also known as kilts and sarongs.

Then we had a tickle fight. No, not really. But feel free to imagine that we did.

* I presented a new talk, and they laughed at the jokes. I am so very grateful.

** I bought books at both. I almost bought a loom at the latter, because I don't spend enough of my life playing with fiber already.

***I was particularly taken, not for the first time, by a demonstration of the Pocket Wheel; and left Skacel Collection headquarters with a dreamy hank of something that will become a new design this winter.

Edited to add: By popular demand, a larger version of the kilt photo is available here.

Yeah, I'm Working on Another Column For Knitty

Dear Anonymous Nineteenth-Century Designer,

Often, as I wend my way through your patterns, I wonder who you were and where you lived.

I imagine what it would have been like to meet you face-to-face; and ponder what you might have tried to say to me as my fingers closed firmly around your throat to choke the life out of you.

Love,
Franklin

Harry's Home Movies: Transatlantic Intermezzo

The first episode of Harry's video chronicle has shot past 3,500 views in just a few days. Very gratifying. Thank you.

In editing the rest, we discovered there's so much weird good stuff from Sock Summit that it's best to give the centerpiece of the trip–our voyage on the Cunard liner Queen Mary 2–its own installment. No knitting in this one, but there is a hint of what's to come near the end.

If you would care to experience the luscious filling of crème chantilly that separated our two gooey, high-calorie layers of fiber festival, please click over to my YouTube Channel and make a young ball of sock yarn very happy.

Proof That Knitting Makes You Smarter, Even If You're Me

Hi, kids. I'm sitting at O'Hare airport, waiting for a flight to Oklahoma. I'll be teaching this weekend at the Sealed With a Kiss Knit Out 2011 in Guthrie, in the exalted company of Fiona Ellis and Jane Thornley.

I only just got home from my last trip–a joyful co-production of Boston's Common Cod Fiber Guild and Mind's Eye Yarn in Cambridge. The first event was a talk at M.I.T., in a terribly swish lecture hall designed with verve aplenty by Frank Gehry. We arrived to find the place crawling with equations. It looked like Einstein had inhaled too much chalkdust and sneezed violently across all twelve blackboards.

I had a few minutes of downtime before curtain, so I put on my thinking cap and got to work finishing what the class had started. Piece o' cake. Add a couple yos, balance with a few k2togs, start and end with asterisks to indicate the repeat and now you have a theory of velocity (or electricity, or gravity, or energy, or something) that also makes a really cute lace capelet.



Hearty thanks to Patience for sharing her photograph with me. I hope the nastypants meanie meanie teacher who made me cry over long division in fourth grade in front of the entire class runs across this post and has a stroke.

A Stole Full of Peas

If Chicago's rainy streak doesn't break soon, I'm afraid I'll break out in moss. Everyone passing the café window is bent forward, shoulders hunched under the weight of the persistently beastly weather.

This has been a dreary spring even for a city in which dreary weather is a specialty. The only thing grayer than the sky is the grass. Optimistic trees that put out buds during a freak warm spell weeks ago are now shivering with regret. We got a few daffodils and tulips, here and there. Most died quick and humiliating deaths, beheaded or stabbed in the back by the north wind.

To garden near the lake in Chicago is to be a masochist. Nature intended this land to be swamp, wind-swept and mostly populated by grass and skunk cabbage.* You are reminded of this every time you watch a perennial trumpeted as "bulletproof" pop its clogs due to the sort of bizarre weather you thought went out of fashion after they put the finishing touches on the Book of Exodus.

Mind you, the city's official motto is Urbs in horto–city in a garden. Hah. A fib in Latin is still a fib.

But this is the first place I've actually got dirt to play with, after a frustrated lifetime of poring over gardening books and poking dejectedly at window boxes. It's not my dirt, but it's dirt. Though I don't own it–it's a series of neglected beds attached to a condominium in my neighborhood–as long as I've got it, I'm going to make it bloom, dammit.

Unlike many of my strong impulses, which will not be itemized here as my mother is probably reading this, I know where this urge to garden comes from.

One of my very earliest memories, clear as a bell, is of sitting on the turf by my grandmother's vegetable garden, watching her dig and plant. I can't have been older than a year-and-a-half. I may have only just learned to sit up. But I recall the scent, and the feeling of the clammy earth, and the print of her cotton shirt and the soft sound of the spade. It was a moment of pure joy, and before I die I plan to recapture it as nearly and as often as possible.

The garden is long gone, but I know for certain that my fascination with planting and growing–which for years has been stifled–comes from that moment.

A New Pattern

When Véronik Avery asked me to do something with Boréale, the fingering weight yarn from her St-Denis Yarns line, the color and texture sparked the memory of my grandmother's garden. I'm sure it was because of the richness of the brown–deep, not dull–very much like well-worked soil.

I turned into a stole, Pauline, named after this lady, to whom I owe more than I can ever hope to repay. It's in Issue 3 of the St-Denis Magazine, now winging its way to local shops and online shops pretty much everywhere.



The pattern is designed to be extremely adaptable. Without any complicated math whatsoever you can change the width and length to suit your purposes. It'll scale down to a scarf or up to a bedspread with ease.



And the framework will accommodate your own choice of small lace motifs if you so fancy. I've put in things I remember my grandmother growing: peas-in-the-pod, strawberry blossoms, and (because even a vegetable garden should be pretty) hydrangeas.



The overall look is rustic. I wanted to see if I could make lace look pretty, but tough...just like my Grandma.

Royal Wedding Report

In case you haven't been following the unfolding events via Twitter at @yarnpoetharry and @doloresvanh, Harry made it to London. So did Dolores. She wasn't supposed to go, of course, but was (this is what I've been told) a victim of her own selflessness.

So worried was she about Harry's ability to negotiate the perils of O'Hare Airport on his own that she jumped through hoops to secure a "gate pass" from the airline and accompanied him to the aircraft. After helping him settle his snickerdoodles in the overhead compartment, she tried to exit, but tripped and got stuck under an empty seat in First Class.

Fancy that. It's a good thing she had a toothbrush, a copy of Liberated Ewe Quarterly and a week's worth of clothing with her.

I asked why the airlines didn't send her right back upon arrival at Heathrow. All I got was somewhat incoherent babble about one of the pilots busting in on her in the loo, and now having something in his private life he'd rather not have her tell the tabloids. If you want to know more, you can ask her. I'm keeping out of it.

Harry's Twitter feed suggests that he is having a marvelous time, making friends with Australian yarns who are also staying at the International Yarn Hostel in Wapping, visiting Kew Gardens, and going to see friends at I Knit London. Dolores can barely type at all, so I infer that she is also having a marvelous time in her own way.

I have been promised a full report after the solemn occasion, so look for it here this weekend or keep an eye on Harry's tweets. I hope he remembers to iron his formal morning ball band before setting off for the Abbey.

*Shikaakwa or chee-ca-gou in the tongue of the native peoples, from which comes our name.

Moments at Madrona

It has taken me fully a week to recover from the Madrona Fiber Arts Winter Retreat.

It may be premature to speak of "full" recovery. I may never recover fully. I know I have been changed by the experience. I'm not sure I want to change back.

The retreat hurtled past with such velocity that I find myself unable to offer a fluid narrative. All I have are a sprinkling of moments, and a handful of dreadful photographs. (I know my limits. I can be a participant or I can be a decent photographer, but not both. I chose to be a participant. Carpe diem.)

Herewith, a small selection of the memories (sweet) and the photographs (otherwise).

Funny Moment: Meet Faye

I was prepping the classroom for round two of "Photographing Your Fiber" when I heard a student come through the door. I turned to welcome her, and was startled to meet a lady in dark glasses being led by a Seeing Eye dog.

Now, I've had students who've forgotten more about lace than I will ever know show up for my "Introduction to Lace" class, and I've managed to show them a good time; but I confess to a moment of panic at wondering how one teaches a blind lady to capture true color.

The lady in question was Michelle, and Michelle's guide was Faye.



Happily, Michelle can see well enough to knit and to make photographs; in fact, photographing objects makes them easier for her to encompass visually.

Faye, on the other hand, hadn't brought a camera. She settled herself under the table at Michelle's feet, with her furry derrière sticking out from under the cloth. Occasionally, while I was speaking, her tail would thump delicately against the floor. Or during a pause, I would hear a gentle complaint from her squeaky pony.

I'm thinking of re-writing my classroom requirements henceforth to include a desk, a flip chart, four thick markers of different colors, and a puppy dog.

Personal Note to the Universe Moment: Pocket Wheels

I rode on one of these and I @#$*!! WANT ONE. Just putting it out there, Universe.

Guess Again Moment: Mystery Knitting

A lady in my "Antique Patterns" class held up her half-finished mystery project and asked me, "Is it a vagina?"

No, it is not a vagina.

She's Pretty and Talented Moment: Sivia

I stopped by the Abstract Fiber booth and Jasmine showed me a glove design from Sivia Harding, so new it was still bleeding.



It's simple, yet intriguing. It's energetic, yet elegant. It's perfect. It's typically Sivia. If I didn't like Sivia so much, I would want to smack her.

Excuse Me for Drooling on Your Booth Moment: Retail Therapy



Churchmouse Yarns and Teas.



Socks That Rock.

No further explanation necessary. Moving on.

Sometimes It Pays to Have Puppy Dog Eyes Moment: Goth Socks

The night before everything started I got to peek around the marketplace and saw an entire booth of hanks by a dyer whose work makes my eyeballs knock together, Rainy Days and Wooly Dogs. This is she.



Steph dyes the increasingly famous Goth Socks–including the only self-striping I've seen in years that I truly want to knit with, if for "want" you read "lust with the fiery passion of a thousand guys fresh off a six-month deployment on a submarine."

By the time I got to the market the following morning, during the first break between classes, this is what all the shelves in the booth looked like.



Gone. Gone. That's not a rush, that's a feeding frenzy.

I grew despondent, until a gentleman to whom I'd just been introduced–the friend of a dear friend–took pity on me and insisted on sending me home with his own hank of Goth Socks "Dark and Twisty." And he's straight! He didn't demand sexual favors or anything!

The kindness of some human beings is not to be believed.

Sock one is nearly complete, and it is to die. Pictures coming soon.

Getting to Know You Moment: Karen and Jacey

At the teachers' dinner I sat between Karen Alfke and Jacey Boggs, and amidst the lofty talk and low (but delicious) gossip going on around us, we shared our personal experiences of public nudity, both first- and second-hand.

That's all I'm saying. And no, there are no pictures.

Lord, Let Thy Servant Depart in Peace Moment: Evelyn

During the Teachers' Gallery event at which we displayed the patterns we'd written, Evelyn Clark came to my table, picked up Sahar and said, "This is absolutely lovely."

Fanboy Moment: Vivian

I got seated at the banquet next to Vivian Høxbro. It turns out she has to eat food, just like a normal person. I always figured her to be the type who lives on pure mountain air and ambrosia.

I asked if she would mind having a picture with me. She did not mind.



Jeepers Moment: View from the Lectern

Anybody who goes to Madrona will tell you that among all fiber retreats, it is Different. The reasons for the difference are legion, not least the organizers' insistence on treating the faculty with enormous respect and courtesy. (At some events, the employer/teacher relationship is closer to that of, say, Pharaoh and the Israelites.)

When the teachers are happy, everybody's happy. We all came together–students, teachers, organizers, vendors–for a merry banquet on Saturday night; and I had the honor of addressing the company.

This (if you will tip either your head or your monitor to one side) is what I saw when I looked down from my perch.



It's enough to make a guy choke on his angora.

The warm energy in that room was enough to sustain me through about 365 days of swatching, ripping, re-charting, re-writing, re-ripping, re-knitting and answering e-mails with the subject line "I Think There's a Mistake in Your Pattern."

But I still don't know how I'm going to wait until it's time for Madrona again.

And So We Begin

I flew to Tacoma, Washington yesterday morning* to teach at the Madrona Fiber Arts Winter Retreat, which kicks off in just an hour. I'm so excited I could pee, and have.

It's a honor to be here, and heaven knows I love to travel; but when you do it a great deal–as I lately have–confusion sets in.

This is the sort of note I now customarily leave for myself on the bedside table before I go to sleep. It helps immensely when I wake up in a cold sweat and can't remember where I am, or why I'm there.



Speaking of travel, wanna go to Iceland with me?

*Dolores flew in later because there were no seats left in First Class on the early flight. Yup, First Class. She also has a rider in her contract requiring a chocolate fountain in her hotel room. I got a granola bar.

Cookies

If this post smells of butter and drool it's because I've spent about half the day baking cookies. The kitchen looks like Open House at the Keebler Factory, including the flour-covered resident elf who is typing this from a perch by the cooling racks.

I hope you can't get fat from inhaling near a pile of fresh cookies. I just got back into these jeans.

Oh, such a display. We have pinwheels, we have brownies, we have chocolate chips–courtesy (respectively) of Maida Heatter, Irma Rombauer, and Ruth Wakefield.

Piled highest, at the back, are the other cookies. The special cookies. You won't find the recipe for them in any published book; and don't bother asking for it, because after I told you I'd have to kill you. It's a family secret–as deep and dark as the one that keeps the Kardashians on the air, except ours goes better with coffee.

These are Grandma's Jennie's cookies.

Grandma Jennie, rest her soul, was my mother's mother.



She's on the right, in the bow. That's my mother on the left, and the howling lump in the center is me–a week old. (I was either hungry, or commenting on the prevalence of drip-dry polyester fabrics in early 70s fashion.)

We assume Grandma learned how to make the cookies from her mother. We don't know for sure. We never thought to ask. It's a bizarre recipe. I've got about 32 linear feet of books on cookery ranging from 1747 to the present, and there's nothing in any of them that comes even close. It starts out a little bit like shortcake, only without sugar; and then–

No, wait. Can't tell you. Would have to kill you.

These cookies were the first thing I ever baked. I was about ten or eleven, and my younger sister was my accomplice. Every pass of the rolling pin was an act of transgression. Mom wasn't home, we didn't ask permission to use the stove, and these were Christmas cookies. We made unsupervised, unauthorized Christmas cookies in May.

I know that seems piffling at a time when the second graders on "Gossip Girl" get their kicks by snorting cocaine and crushed Flintstone vitamins during little bitty orgies in the VIP room at American Girl Place. But back then, to us, it was thrilling.

My sister, once the sous chef, is now the master baker. She inherited Mom's gigantic yellow Tupperware bowl–you could take a bath in it–which holds the stupendous amount of dough produced by the full recipe. She has developed and perfected a system that allows her to keep one hand clean and dry while the other adds ingredients and kneads them in. And her cookies always have the proper amount of crunch on the outside, while the inside melts in your mouth.

We grew up rolling out the dough and cutting it into moons and hearts and trees, which is what Mom does. But we were surprised to learn during a visit to Grandma's that she didn't use cutters. She rolled the dough out into long ropes with her hands, then twisted sections of rope into curlicues, knots and braids.

Her hands flew. She twisted, we watched. My grandmother was a lovely woman; but she didn't like children mucking around in the kitchen. Baking cookies wasn't a game, it was work. Without interference she could produce six dozen in record time. If you were good, you might be allowed to help with the sugar sprinkles. If you got too enthusiastic and sprinkled the floor, you'd better run.



Susan and I still mostly roll and cut, but near the end of each batch we also make a few twists as a tribute. It's not a hospital wing or a fountain in Central Park, but there are worse ways to be remembered than through a cookie recipe. I think Grandma Jennie would have appreciated it. Especially with coffee.

It Gets Better

(NOTE: I'm sorry that there won't be much today about knitting. I don't often veer off topic these days, but this is something I feel like I ought to write. I'll return to the usual yarn-based tomfoolery in my next entry.)

My last post, in which I suggested via t-shirt that persons unspecified should do something anatomically impossible to themselves and repeat from asterisk, has been up rather longer than intended. The plan was to follow up with something considerably chirpier, since bad moods are just that–moods. They pass.

The chirp has been pre-empted, however, due to a recent spate of suicides by young gay people.

This is not a new problem. Nor, sadly, is it uncommon. Suicide is the third-highest cause of death among Americans aged 15-24; and studies published in the past 15 years by the Federal government and the American Journal of Public Health suggest that youth who identify as gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender are two to three times more likely still to attempt to kill themselves.

It’s probably the lurid nature of the events leading up to the death of Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University freshman, that have pushed the problem out of the pages of specialty publications like our own, dear Windy City Times and into the mainstream media. Tyler Clementi’s private life was surreptitiously streamed onto the Internet by his roommate, who also Twittered to let the world know what he was doing. Tyler, distraught at his abrupt outing and the subsequent torment by his peers, jumped off the George Washington Bridge.

Tyler was one of at least nine young gay men known to have taken their own lives in the past few weeks due to anti-gay bullying.

As a result there have been, and continue to be, statements made by high-profile types–Ellen DeGeneres, Tim Gunn, the cast of “Modern Family,” etc.–under the theme I’ve used as the title of this post: It Gets Better. The message is simple, short, and (one hopes) effective: it may seem like life isn’t worth living, but don’t give up just yet. As you grow older, it gets better.

I’m certainly no celebrity, but I’m adding my squeaky voice to the chorus on the off chance that it might, in a small way, help somebody somewhere sometime. Who knows? Maybe there’s a gay kid out there who’s suffering at the hands of his classmates because he’d rather knit than kick soccer balls. And maybe he wandered in here after Googling “garter stitch” or “toy elephant.”

If you’re reading this, kid, it’s for you.

I know what you’re going through. That’s not an empty statement. I mean I know exactly what you’re going through, because I walked a mile and then some in those leaden sneakers when I was your age.

Thinking about suicide? So did I. In fact, I did more than think about it. I tried it.

It wasn’t my idea.

I was egged on by quite a few authority figures, the ones who seemed at the time to run the world. They weren’t my parents, I hasten to add. I got lucky in the parental department; they didn’t always understand me, but they always loved me.

They–my bullies–were mostly teachers and school administrators. You see, I went to this really, really awful little private high school devoted less to academics than to promoting the veins-in-your-teeth cult of virility. It was no place for sissies, and if they suspected you might be a sissy they did their best to beat it out of you.

I was only there for two years, but the life lessons they taught on a daily basis have always stuck with me. Here’s a small sampler, verbatim, including the language they felt was appropriate to use in front of schoolboys:

“We have to believe gay men choose to be gay. Otherwise we would have to admit that God makes mistakes, because there is no sorrier mistake than a bunch of faggots.”

“If my son turned out to be gay, he’d have two choices. He could shape up, or he could get the hell out of my house before I shot him through the head.”

“God created you to be a man, and to fuck women. If you don’t fuck women, you’re not a man. If you’re not a man or a woman, you don’t fit into creation and the sooner you leave it the better.”

“Frankly, if I was a gay man I’d shoot myself. I mean, I’d be going to Hell anyway and I might as well get on with it and skip over dying from AIDS.”

(Isn't it funny, Mr. Roberts? I don’t remember anything you taught about biology–you were a lousy teacher, so that’s no surprise. Yet I remember so much of what you said with shocking clarity.)

Day in, day out for two long, painful years, I drank it in. I remember being flabbergasted at how often our teachers could work jabs at homosexuality into topics you’d think were completely unrelated. I was 13 and hitting puberty hard, yet I swear I was less obsessed with dick than they were.

Usually these barbs were volleyed at all of us, a general exhortation against the evils of buggery. But on especially bad days, they were aimed pointedly at me, the designated class pansy–while the other boys listened and smirked.

That led directly to problems with a classmate who decided after one such lecture that he was going to prune me, the mutant bud, from the Tree of Life with his own hands–since that’s what God, the saints, and the faculty wanted. I appealed for help to a couple of teachers and to the dean, all of whom told me I was on my own.

If you’re going to act like that, they said, you deserve what you get.

Sound familiar?

Now, I was brought up to be a good kid and respect authority. And authority was telling me I was a horror in God’s eyes, and ought to bump myself off.

So I tried it. Not successfully, obviously. And not right then. I have a strong constitution; it took years for their poison to reach my vital organs. But it was probably bound to happen sooner or later.

It might not have if somebody, anybody, had been there tell me what I’m going to tell you.

People–teachers, parents, classmates, pastors, whoever–who call you a mistake are wrong. Totally wrong. Completely wrong. Wrongeddy-wrong-wrong.

You’re no more messed up than the straight kid in the next chair.

When they say that your nature is unnatural, they do not speak from wisdom. They are either misguided themselves, or they know better and are deliberately lying to you. Either way–you don’t have to listen. In fact, you shouldn’t. In fact, don’t.

I know. They appear to hold all the cards. They can force you to run laps, sit in detention, do punishment homework. But you have my solemn promise that this is temporary. One of these days you’ll be out of there, and such petty power as they possess can no longer touch you.

Hang on. Don’t let them keep you from pushing forward, because what’s waiting for you beyond is quite wonderful. It’s not all couleur de rose, but it’s so much better than what you’re going through right now.

There are ways to get help. The Trevor Project is a good place to start. You don't have to be desperate, either. Better, in fact, to seek a little support before you are desperate.

(And in the meantime, if you don’t know how to knit, please consider learning. It’s a marvelous way to keep calm, knitters are wonderful people to gather ’round you, and nothing says “piss off” to the bigots like a really amazing hand-knitted scarf.)

Pins and Needles, Needles and Pins

One of the side effects of having your avocation become your vocation is that you have to find another avocation. I love knitting as much as I ever did–more, if possible–but most of my projects now come with contracts and deadlines attached to them. This will, on occasion, tend to harsh one's mellow.

My alternative mellow for quite some time has been working out. It clears my head, it calms me down. If I don't get to do it for an entire day, I turn crabby and starting hitting people. Since it also makes my jeans fit better, it's productive fidgeting–which happens also to be my friend Joe's incredibly apt description of knitting.

Unfortunately, the weight room at the gym can't be kept in a pretty basket on an end table or stuffed into hand luggage. It cannot be employed to pass the time while waiting for a flight, or casually picked up when the after-dinner conversation lulls.

But a guy has to have something to do in those restless moments when after six hours of knitting I really, truly cannot stand to look at yarn one single minute more. I was at a loss until, while sorting through files, I found my notes from a PieceWork article about my grandmother's childhood...and her quilts.

Then there was a hazy patch, and a flurry of e-mails with a friend who plays with fabric for a living, and a surprise from another friend across the sea who sent me this.



Then another hazy patch, and last night I came to while standing at the ironing board. It seems I was pressing my first quilt block.



It's made from men's shirts I picked up for a buck apiece at the thrift store down the block. There will be six fabrics in the finished piece, and when I looked at my pattern after laying it out, I realized I've moved progressively through all the colors in the same way I'd put together a swatch of Fair Isle.

Once a knitter, always a knitter.

Gimme Gimme Gimme

I'm piecing the quilt top by hand–it's incredibly soothing–using needles I bought at Stitches Midwest. They were imported by Bag Smith from a French needlework company called Sajou.

I had never heard of Sajou before I walked up to the Bag Smith booth. They were founded in the nineteenth century; and though the company folded in the mid-twentieth century, it has now been revived by the descendants and is producing all the old lines in their original styles.

I opened the Sajou catalogue and wanted to climb inside and stay there.

I didn't know you could still buy things like this. Embroidered cotton labels for marking household linen, or adding little tags to your work that say ATELIER or FAIT MAIN in dignified red letters. A positive fleet of albums (including the gorgeous old DMC books) stuffed with elegant, playful alphabets, borders, friezes and motifs to embroider–none of which include Sunbonnet Sue or Kountry Kitchen geese in bandannas. I want them all. Wooden mercery drawers and pin boxes, porcelain bridal thimbles, and the scissors...oh, the scissors.

Even the packaging is glorious. This is the packet of needles I bought.



I spent fifteen minutes dithering, because there were half-a-dozen designs in the booth and they were all glorious. You should see the three or four that include spinning wheels. When the needles are used up, I'm putting it into a frame.

Now, honestly–isn't that easier on the eyes than this?



Who the hell thought that was a good idea? When was it decided that the utilitarian need not be a pleasure to look at?

On a practical note, the needles are so well made they leap through fabric like dolphins playing in gentle surf.

Personal to the people in my family who always want my wish list at Christmastime: here it is. The whole site. Just pick something.

Do Not Do This

When you are sitting in a coffee shop working on an entry about the amazing stuff you saw at Stitches Midwest, and you look up what you know perfectly well to be a lace weight yarn in both Ravelry and Yarndex to double-check the fiber content, and you note that in both places this lace yarn is listed as fingering weight, do not accidentally exclaim in your outside voice, "Fingering my ass!"

Bridal Suite

Talk to any professional artist or designer you can find (seedy bars and discount grocery stores are good places to look) and chances are they will agree that inspiration is probably the most misunderstood ingredient in the murky chowder of creativity.

In movies, inspiration looks much like the manic half of manic depression. The artist runs amok in montage, flinging paint around in a large, white studio while loud bits of Mahler (or possibly the Pointer Sisters singing "I'm So Excited") flood the soundtrack. He is hyperkinetic, unfettered, unstoppable. He is not the person you want living in the apartment upstairs. But he can't help himself...he is inspired.

I admit that occasionally, out of nowhere, the Inspiration Fairy socks you in the gut with a full-grown idea so damned good it almost lifts you right off the barstool. But if you intend to make a living from your ideas, and you only sit down to work when that happens, you'd better have a rich uncle or a back-up plan in something nice and stable like accounting or dog grooming.

Inspiration (for me, anyhow) is less like a lightning bolt than like being constantly pecked by a flock of unfocused chickens. Here a peck, there a peck, until the combined pecking reaches critical mass and you can't take it any more and you scream, "Stop, chickens! Stop! Stop!"* and you sit down and draw the cartoon.

This can be every bit as unpleasant as it sounds.

The only way to avoid going mad, which usually happens to artists in movies shortly after the Pointer Sisters stop singing, is to learn to love your chickens. Think of the pecking as their way of alerting you to little details that will move you along, by slow inches, towards something good and whole and new.

And now I want to show you some drawings of old wedding dresses.

That sounds like a non sequitur, I know, but the old wedding dresses were inspiring. Everything you've just read was intended to lead up to them. But then I introduced the chicken motif, and it hasn't come out where I thought it would, and it's almost dinner time so I'm not going back and rewriting it. Sorry.

Inspiration at the Chicago History Museum

This is my second year as a member of the Chicago History Museum, which not so long ago was the Chicago Historical Society. In the old incarnation, it was just as clubby and dusty as it sounds–mostly of interest to the people around here who have major streets named after them.

After a grand renovation and expansion, however, it has become one of my favorite places in the city. Along with a first-class permanent exhibit about the Great Fire of 1871 and several rooms of Lincolniana unmatched by anything at the Smithsonian, they have frequent and splendid shows of items from the textiles collection.

The latest is called "I Do! Chicago Ties the Knot," and it's a doozy. Wedding gear from the mid-19th century (when Chicago sprang, almost overnight, from the mud) to the present day, including bridal gowns, corsetry, going-away attire, and men's costumes–including a pair of matching tuxedos worn by a gay couple, thankyouverymuch.

Oh, and there's a perfectly preserved 120-year-old top tier from a wedding cake, just for good measure.

They don't allow photography in the exhibit, but I spent a fun afternoon there, sketchbook in hand, drawing interesting details under the puzzled eye of the guard.

Here are a few. I plan to go back soon and collect more.

I would write something about the chickens here if I could think of a good tie-in, but it's Thai delivery night and I want my panang curry.

*If it's near Christmas and so they happen to be French hens, I suppose you could scream "Arretez-vous, poulardes, s'il vous plaît!" If they're German chickens, I got nothing, but that almost never happens.

B.Y.O.D.

This afternoon I've been knitting at the neighborhood coffee shop where I do so much work we've begun to call it my Field Office.

The largest of the pieces-in-progress is a lace shawl design. As usual, the swatches for it have run to about a dozen, and I had them scattered across the tabletop along with the usual litter of tea cup, cookie plate, and laptop.

A lady in head-to-toe official Cubs regalia (we're near Wrigley Field and it's a game day) came in and settled herself with a latte at the next table. After a few sips, she looked over at me, and then at the pile of lace swatches. I could feel an interview coming on, and braced myself for the usual battery of questions. They're so predictable I've toyed with having the answers printed on a card so I could just hand it over and save everybody some time.

"Hi," she said.

"Hello," I said.

"Sorry to stare."

"It's okay. Happens all the time."

"I'm sure it does. You're pretty unusual."

"Heh...I suppose you could say that."

"Definitely. A lot of people sneak their own snacks into coffee places, but you're the first guy I've ever seen who brings his own doilies."

Speaking of Lace...

I'm teaching it at Loopy Yarns on Saturday. To be specific, I'm teaching "Lace Edgings: Before, During and After," which is a new class focused on sewing on edgings, knitting on edgings, and working edgings simultaneously with the shawl center. I premiered it at Renaissance Yarns out in Kent, Washington last month and we had a jolly good time. Do join us if you can.

And that's not all that's happening at Loopy. Veronik Avery's coming to town, and she's signing her new book on Friday and teaching a class on Sunday–visit Loopy's site for details.

A Few Choice Words from Seattle/Tacoma Airport

For the parents of the dozens of little children on spring break who keep sneezing and coughing on me.

Whatever I catch from those ill-bred little bastards, I hope you catch double.

For the man who "forgot about" the hacksaw blade in his carry-on bag.

Pray tell, what is the weather like on the planet from which you come?

For myself.

Putting knitting needles in your carry-on is rather pointless when you pack all your yarn in your checked bag.

For airport concessionaires.

Keep a couple pre-wound balls of Cascade 220 and a few pairs of size fives behind the counter, for knitters who aren't very bright in the morning. You could charge fifty bucks a ball. We'd pay it.

Same Airport, Different Scene

So this morning I was at O'Hare again, this time heading west to Seattle. I've flown enough lately that I can now go through uppity fancy foo-foo special security when I'm on American Airlines, which is no small boon when Terminal 3 starts to feel more familiar than the living room.

On either side of me in line were standard-issue uppity fancy foo-foo special people. Guys in suits. Guys in golf clothes. Women in suits. Women in resort clothes. One woman took the stereotype to the limit and was pulling the bag containing her microscopic dog in one hand, and her plaid-clad golf-shirted husband in the other.

And there was...me. I am neither uppity, nor fancy, nor foo-foo. I don't even qualify as foo. And I'm wearing the kind of stuff I always wear–leather jacket, engineer boots, jeans. Come to think of it, I looked like this:



The nice people at Skacel made that photograph, as one of a series of magazine ads promoting their Addi Lace needles, which I do in fact happen to adore. (My mother called in a froth from the magazine aisle at the supermarket when she opened Vogue Knitting and found this version of me staring up at her.)

To say I struck an anomalous note in my surroundings is to understate the case. But nobody seemed to notice. Even in uppity fancy foo-foo special security, the passengers are generally too concerned with hanging onto a shred of dignity while disrobing and emptying their bags to care who else is wearing what.

But then I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was a woman, of emphatically indeterminate age, without dog or husband but still very much in the second-home-in-Palm-Springs mode.

"Excuse me," she said, not unkindly, "but I just have to guess...you're a musician, right?"

I laughed. "No," I said. "I'm a knitter."

She looked confused for a split second, then she frowned–and snapped, "Jesus Christ, I was only asking. There's no need to get sarcastic."

Next time I'm just going to say why yes, I am in fact Willie Nelson.

Whilst in Seattle

I'm only here in Seattle for a couple of hours, then I'm heading north for a sort of knitting conclave on what I understand to be a very pretty island with lots of trees and water and absolutely no cell phone reception.

After that, it's back to Seattle, where the good folks at Renaissance Yarns are hosting me (on Sunday, March 28) for a day of lace knitting classes. In the morning, we'll have "Introduction to the History, Methods and Styles of Lace Knitting;" and in the afternoon, "Lace Edgings: Before, During and After."

If you're interested, as of this writing there are still a few spaces left. You can call the shop at (253) 852-YARN or (877) 852-YARN, or write to info@renaissanceyarns.com for more information.

Franklin in Wonderland

The last time I changed apartments, the moving crew was deeply amused to find that I had five smallish pieces of furniture, eight huge bookcases, and 110 boxes, 97 of which were labeled BOOKS.

I attract books the way velcro attracts cashmere. In spite of a strict policy of twice-yearly culling, which sometimes eliminates as many as seven volumes, I'm still hovering around the 3,000 mark and fear that my cataloguing project will never be complete.

Some of what's on my shelves has been known, read and loved for so long that the books themselves have become almost superfluous; the contents are embedded in my brain and will likely remain until I am otherwise old and dotty and pluck at specks of dust, unable even to spell my own name.

The Alice books are on that list. I remember with absolute clarity the first time I met them, in the first library I can remember, at my first school. I didn't twig to all the jokes–unlike Alice, I had been deprived of peeks into an elder brother's Latin grammar–but I loved Tenniel's pictures.

They were unlike anything in my other favorites: Curious George, Corduroy or even Where the Wild Things Are. The last of these had scenes that were twilit and vaguely threatening; but the illustrations in Alice touched a level of absurd creepy chaos so spine-tingling and delicious that I suspected that I wasn't supposed to be looking at them.

Which is why Alice was the first book I ever stole from a library and hid in my bedroom. (Don't make that face. I felt guilty and brought it back two days later. I always brought the stolen books back.)

When I started working on the Looking Glass Socks I didn't want to get too elaborate. These needed to be low-stress travel knitting. I still hoped to have some kind of visual reference to Wonderland, but after the chessboard fiasco I gave up and settled for plain ol' stripes.

It wasn't until I was getting ready to write this entry, and actually pulled my copy off the shelf to scan an illustration, that I looked at Alice meeting Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum...



...and was startled to notice that in the second book, Alice is wearing striped stockings.

As the second of my pair reverses the colors of the first,



I've decided that one sock must be from the waking side of the looking glass; the other is from the dreaming side.



And I did it without realizing what I was doing. Funny, isn't it, the things that knitting will pull out of the deepest wrinkles in your brain?

Six Things Passengers Waiting for This Flight to St. Louis Would Rather Do Than Sit in the One Empty Seat Next to the Guy with the Knitting Needles

1. Perch on an armrest next to a ten-year-old who spews BBQ Pringles every time he makes a big kill on his little video game player.
   
   
2. Sprawl on a carpet that is visibly soiled with popcorn droppings and invisibly soiled with heaven knows what else.
   
   
3. Spy on said Knitting Guy from behind a pillar and take his picture with an iPhone.
   
   
4. Move toward the empty seat as though to sit down, then reconsider and walk away, then come back, then walk away, then come back, then walk away, then come back, then walk away, then come back, then walk away, then come back, then walk away.
   
   
5. Greedily devour a McDonald's Extra Value Meal while balanced unsteadily on the rim of a garbage can.
   
   
6. Call "Maureen" and tell her you're "still in Chicago" and that now you've "seen everything."
   

Go Go Kimono

Once upon a time (January 2008) a knitter (me) put the finishing touches (three embroidered dragonflies) on the baby kimono from Thoroughly Exceptional Babies and the Men Who Knit for Them by Debbie Bliss.



I wrote in this entry that I'd begun working the 9–12 months version when it seemed impossible that the exceptional baby in question–Abigail, my niece–could ever be so large as to fill it out. Each flat piece was a square acre of stockinette; Abigail could have fit into a shoebox. Not that we tried it, but she could have.

But she did grow. She grew at such an alarming rate that I accused my sister of feeding her on a diet of breast milk and



small cakes inscribed EAT ME.

I finished the kimono in what I figured was the nick of time, so that Abby could cuddle up in it for a month or two before it would be relegated to the chest of outgrown knits. It fit her like a mid-length spa robe (simple, but chic) and became a go-to woolen garment for chilly weather.



A year later, when the frost returned to the pumpkins, it still fit. But it had become a short jacket.





A year after that (two days ago, in fact), a freak spell of mild weather in southern Maine caused my sister to reach for it again. It is now a little shirt with three-quarter sleeves.



For those of you who knit, crochet, sew or otherwise fashion handmade clothing for children, I need not explain to you why this series of photographs fills me with matchless gratification.

For those who do not, let me walk you through it:

• I made it for her to wear, and she wore it.
  
  
• Her mother made sure I got to see her wearing it.
  
  
• There's honorable evidence of heavy use (note the pilling on the sleeves) but also of proper care (and it isn't machine-washable).
  

You make a baby garment hoping it'll fit for an entire season. Three seasons? A small miracle. And sometimes I think the small ones are the best.

Then Again, Let's Not

Confession time.

There are moments when I feel ungentlemanly for shooting peas at these old magazines. Part of it has to do with being a budding designer myself, and wondering which things I'm putting out there will some day make the Hit Parade of a "You Knit What?" as yet unborn.

The other part stems from an honest-to-goodness feeling of gratitude for publications like Workbasket. That plucky little thing toodled along for sixty years–a magnificent run for a periodical by anyone's standards–even though by the mid-1970s knitting and crochet were both on life support. Granted, Workbasket was heavy with flights of fancy that should have been grounded on the tarmac. Toward the end, fiber arts content was heavily supplemented with forays into tuna cookery and making your own beef jerky. But the editors kept putting it out there, month after month, long after more mainstream mags like Woman's Day and Family Circle had given up on any craft that required mastery of an actual skill.

On the other hand, just when I'm in danger of smudging the faded ink with tears of thankfulness, I turn the page and run into something like this.



In case they don't have doors where you come from, this is a doorknob cover. In case they don't have doorknob covers where you come from, you may be wondering why a doorknob needs a cover.

Me too.

I have encountered doorknob covers in real life–including several sisters, cousins and aunts of the Scary Clown variation shown below. They were to be found on various knobs around my paternal grandmother's house when I was a little boy, and I hated them.



When you are five years old, and small for your age at that, a doorknob cover is less a piece of handmade whimsy than a torture device. The doorknobs on the heavy old doors in grandma's house were either metal or china. They were slippery when nude. Tricked out in equally slippery acrylic, they became almost entirely impossible to turn, even with both hands.

And there was one on the bathroom door.

Place yourself, if you will, in the tiny shoes and underpants of a newly housebroken child who has had three glasses of Kool Aid and has just felt the alarming and unmistakeable call of nature. He heads for the commode, but finds the way barred by the immovable head of a smirking clown. He struggles, he bangs, he cries a little bit.

Finally, in desperation, he goes against everything Grandma and Sunday School have taught him rather than face the shame of admitting to the grown-ups that there's been an accident.

Grandma, if you're reading this, I used one of your good tablespoons to bury the doorknob cover over by where the plum tree used to be. I'm sorry. The tree is long gone; but since the clown face was made out of Red Heart, it's probably still there. At least you didn't have to mop the hallway.

The Story of a Scarf

I flicked open a discussion thread on Ravelry last week wherein a group of regulars had clustered around a new knitter to perform the customary dance of welcome, which in my imagination always mixes aspects of the Highland Fling with the “One of Us, One of Us” scene from Freaks.

The new knitter–let’s call her Petronella–had posted a shy query about something fundamental, like how to count rows in garter stitch or the proper method of stealing Alice Starmore books from the public library–and ended with a sigh about How Very Bewildering It All Is and How She’d Never Get It.

The regulars explained, encouraged, cheered, cajoled.

Of course you will get it, they said. And she will, will Petronella. She will get it, and then she will get more, and more still until the yarn begins to block out the sun from the living room windows and she joins the ring of knitters chanting “One of Us, One of Us” around an unsuspecting newbie–let’s call him Wenceslas–who was only looking for something to help pass the time while “Stargate” is in reruns.

We’ve all been there, or most of us have, and I have been thinking this week about how sneaky people are when they encourage you to take up knitting. They always emphasize the empowerment, the creativity, the yarn that’s as much fun to pet as a Shar-Pei but which will never chew your slippers or wet the carpet.

They glide right past the inconvenient truth that becoming a knitter (or a crocheter, for that matter) also makes you susceptible to an entire flotilla of neuroses of which non-initiates are cheerfully unaware.

For example, I am unable to contemplate the purchase of a winter hat–however fine or functional it might be–without a corresponding wave of guilt. I am a knitter. I do not buy hats. Why would I buy hats? It would be wrong for me to buy hats. I knit hats. Same goes for scarves.

Except that I don’t like knitting scarves.

My first project, years ago, was a scarf. So was my second project. My third was a pair of mittens. After that, four more scarves.

It was a joy, back then, to make my own scarves. You couldn’t buy anything long enough in a shop–just wimpy five-foot swatches of acrylic in WASPy oatmeal-and-rust plaids or boring stripes. It was empowering to motor through seven feet of garter stitch and end up with something superabundant that I could wrap around my neck and face, with enough extra to trail fetchingly in the Atlantic wind.

But, with all due respect to St. Elizabeth of the Schoolhouse, time and repeated exposure take the zing out of garter stitch, at least in the shape of a seven-foot rectangle.

That, kids, is why you’re not going to find a lot of scarves on my to-do list. I don’t cast them on for pure pleasure, portable though they are. On the other hand, life and winter make demands that cannot be ignored. When it happens, the best thing is try to liven up necessity with a challenge or two.

I just finished what I’m calling the Transatlantic Scarf. Last year, I made the triple-thick Transatlantic Hat for Tom, which he obligingly wore as we sailed home from London (hence the name) and which withstood a nasty and prolonged Chicago winter with nary a pill.

However, I wearied of seeing the hat paired with a selection of store-bought partners–thin and wimpy, not a patch on the rich, deep hand-dyed blue of the hat. I needed to fashion a proper mate. And I had enough of the identical yarn stashed away to make that happen.

Of course, the finished scarf needed to be six feet long, and the yarn in question (Sheep's Gift Solid from Joslyn's Fiber Farm) is DK. Garter stitch? No.

The hat was cabled, so I could cable the scarf. Parallel ropes of three-over-three twisted every sixth round would match perfectly. Perhaps with a nice moss stitch border.

Tried it. Got about four inches finished. Had visions of self lying in a box in a funeral home, with friends standing around whispering, “They say it was boredom.” Frogged it.

I dug into my stitch dictionaries and came up with a pattern that looked simple enough to

a) memorize, and
b) work without a cable needle

and which was also

c) the same in both directions–a visual palindrome, if you will.

That third quality meant I could use it to knit a scarf in the seaman's style, but end-to-end. No fuss with provisional cast-ons, working two pieces, and grafting.

A seaman’s scarf, if you don’t already know, consists of two wide, flat ends with the narrower center bit–the part that goes across the back of the neck–worked in ribbing. A tried-and-true concept with a comfortable fit. And psychologically, it would break up the work into three acts. Good enough for Puccini, good enough for me.

My first thought was to abruptly end the cable pattern when I reached the center and start ribbing. But as the transition approached, I knew in my gut it would be more fun–and probably handsomer–to somehow flow into the ribbing and out of it while preserving the integrity of the cables. After only two false starts (a new record for me), success.

And so it’s complete, and awaiting bestowal upon the intended neck. I keep looking at it and squishing it and unrolling it and rolling it up again. I’ve started writing the pattern.

I also realized, looking this morning through the box of winter accessories, that I have nothing decent with which to cover my own neck.

I’m thinking "cowl."