My computer, this very one I’m typing on, is very old. It’s about four years old, but in computer years, that’s probably about 80. It’s had some problems in the past (mostly my own fault: apparently when those little software update things pop up you’re supposed to actually DO them) and lately it’s been alright, but I’m still a little nervous about it. I still say my little made-up computer prayer whenever I close it up and put it in my bag:

“Now I lay you down to sleep,
I pray the lord your hard drive to keep.
If you should die before you wake,
I pray the Apple store people can recover your files.”

I had an external hard drive for a little while–I was very good about backing up all my work, and then…I bumped the table a TINY bit and it fell on the floor and never worked again. When I posted in the Computer Help group on Ravelry, people seemed to think I was pretty dumb. Apparently these external hard drives are NOT supposed to be dropped or else they WILL DIE. You can’t blame me for being a bit surprised because I drop my phone all the time, and that’s basically a computer. Even this very laptop has fallen prey to a few minor mishaps, and nothing has gone majorly wrong. I think they should put some kind of warning to that effect on the box external hard drives come in: “We know you people drop your phones all the time and that’s more or less alright, but this is NOT THE SAME THING.”

In college one of my best friends had an external hard drive that he attached to the wall behind his desk with approximately one entire roll of duct tape. I thought he was being melodramatic, but now…I’m starting to get it.

Hey guess what?

I’m going to be on the South Orange/Maplewood Artists Studio Tour!

Here’s the deets:
Sunday, June 3rd
11am to 5pm

If you’ve never been on one of these, it’s a cool concept. What happens is you go get a map (I think you have to pay a nominal fee like $5 or something) and using the map, you go around to a bunch of different artists’ studios. The artists are there, often working, and you can talk to them and look at art and buy it. My dad was a stop on the tour a few years ago and it was fun.

Here’s the tricky part: my actual studio isn’t on it–I’m going to be at Allie and Rebecca’s house on Prospect Place in South Orange as part of the Adult Contemporary Lifestyle Collective (what I do is a lifestyle choice, I can tell you that). It’s going to be really awesome–there will be I think a total of nine artists, all teenagers and twenty-somethings, and they’ll be doing everything from performance art to collage.

If you can, you should definitely drop by. I’m curious to see everything myself…and I will, of course, be there, along with all my samples and patterns.

Sometimes when I’m bummed, I watch the Daft Punk music video for Around the World and it makes me feel better. This has worked since I was 10, except back then I had to sit around watching MTV waiting for it to come on, which it almost never did, and that just made me sadder, unless Daria came on, which was awesome.

I’m not especially bummed today, but I woke up with a terrible headache that won’t relent to drugs and I don’t really feel like doing anything except lying down (preferably with my head packed in ice). Still, I’m in my studio trying to work. I’ll probably get here tomorrow and look at all the things I messed up in my headache fog and wish I’d stayed home today, but you know. I’m trying to limit myself to things like stockinette.

As promised, here’s the yarn I bought at Maryland. Meet my new friends:

Verdant Gryphon – Traveller colorway San Zhi

Verdant Gryphon – Traveller colorway Romania

Verdant Gryphon – Traveller colorway Experimental Love Child

Verdant Gryphon – Traveller colorway The Window

Dragonfly Fibers – Traveller colorway Flannel Pajamas

Miss Babs – Yowza colorway Spectrum

Miss Babs – Yowza colorway Biker Chick

Dragonfly Fibers – Super Traveller colorway Winter Woods

Cephalopod Yarns – Traveller colorway House of Strangers

Tess Yarns – Superwash Merino Petite

Miss Babs – Yowza colorway Mystery (already swatched and cast on!)

Blue Moon Fiber Arts – Mopsy colorway Vancouver Violet

Blue Moon Fiber Arts – Gaea colorway The Green That Sings

Cephalopod Yarns – Traveller colorway Ferry Bar Park

Whew! Now, for people who don’t knit who’ve read this far, I have to tell you that it is NORMAL for knitters to get emotional about yarn. I promise. Back me up, here.

Here’s a question. We have schools of fish, flocks of birds, gaggles of geese, prides of lions, packs of wolves, etc. So what would we call a group of knitters? Here are a few things my knitting group and I have come up with:

a skein of knitters
a fleece of knitters
a tangle of knitters
a sweater quantity of knitters. This one needs a bit of explanation. You can almost never make a sweater out of one skein of anything. So you could say, “Are we talking about a Miss Babs sweater quantity?” (Those skeins have 560 yards, so two can easily make a sweater.) “Or are we talking about a Louisa Harding sweater quantity?” (I’ve seen patterns that call for upwards of 25 balls.) (No offense to Louisa Harding–I adore her patterns.)

Just got back on Sunday from the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival! This was my first time going–I’ve been to Rhinebeck three times but I’d never been to Maryland before.

My mom and I drove up on Friday afternoon and stayed in a hotel in Ellicott City. The weather was not too bad on Saturday–kind of humid, but not terribly hot. Sunday was cool and overcast, which was lovely.

I set myself a budget, and TOTALLY blew it. (Restraint? That’s a kitchen utensil, right?) The first booth I got to that I bought anything at was Verdant Gryphon, one of the two offshoots of the now defunct Sanguine Gryphon. They kept a lot of the same bases, my favorite of which is Traveller (most people are obsessed with Bugga! which is a sock yarn and I set myself a rule against bringing home any more sock yarn that I actually stuck to). I’ll post pictures once I take some. It will be glorious.

Then, across the way was Miss Babs, a favorite of mine. I love Yowza, the 560-yard skeins of light-worsted weight. Two skeins makes sweater! $70! I went a little nuts in that booth and brought home what I think is my absolute favorite find of the trip. (Again, pictures later.)

Discovered Dragonfly Fibers, which I had only ever seen advertised online before. Bought some worsted weight (also called Traveller! weird! am I missing something about a collaboration or something?) and some chunky, which is so rare to find at a festival.

Also spent some time at The Fold, where they have all Blue Moon Fiber Arts. Everyone loves Socks That Rock, but I go for the thicker yarns like Gaea (got a few skeins of “The Green that Sings”) and Mopsy (a beautiful worsted weight angora blend–”Vancouver Violet”).

Also met some sheep:

I also saw some excellent t-shirts. Here are the top three:
Third place – “If you don’t talk to your cat about catnip, WHO WILL?” Maybe this isn’t funny unless you have a cat. I’m not sure why I was so tickled by this one, but let me tell you, I was.
Second Place – “I swatched Ravelry” I asked the girl who was wearing this about it and she said it was available in the early days of ravelry for the people who, like beta tested it. Which is kind of like swatching. I liked it.
First Place – “That sh*t will block right out.” I laughed. I laughed hard.

Anyway, more pictures later, once I photograph the new yarn in the family. For now, here’s this, from Saturday afternoon:

Ummmm…so…has anyone been on Ravelry today?

Because on the patterns page, where they have a list of the top 20 “hot right now” patterns for the day?

Westminster is number 7.

! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

ANOTHER one already!!

Can’t promise the next one will be as quick on this one’s heels, but I do have a whole bunch of things in the works (and not just shawls). I think that’s enough to keep you going, at least for a little while.
(See it on the patterns page and on ravelry.)

Sooner than anticipated, the first shawl in the series is here!! In case you didn’t get it from the mug, these shawls are all named after stations on the London Underground. Meet Knightsbridge:

It’s up on Ravelry and the printed copies I ordered are on a brown truck to my house as I type, so they’ll be showing up at a yarn shop near you!

Oh, my dear god it is HOT in here.

I’m in my studio right now (where there is no air conditioner…yet) and it is actually too hot to knit. Unfortunately, that means I should be working on things like sizing and schematics, but obviously, I’m procrastinating.

Had a really good photo shoot this morning, which means that the first shawl of the mystery series is due out sometime this week! And the second one hopefully next week!

This weekend is the Garden State Yarn Crawl, which, for those of you who don’t know, is like a pub crawl except with yarn stores. I’ll be working Friday Saturday and Sunday at The Blue Purl (and after that I’m going to need an industrial strength foot massage. Any offers?).

Last Wednesday I realized I wasn’t all that excited about anything I was knitting, mostly just because I’m not at very exciting parts of any of my projects. I thought maybe what I needed was to cast on for something that is NOT a design of my own. Sometimes it’s nice to just…follow a pattern. Not worry about whether it’s going to fit a human of any shape, whether I’m going to have to re-jigger the stitch count to make the lace pattern work, or what the HELL is going to happen once the armholes measure 7.5″.

So I spent the entire evening after work looking through all my Ravelry favorites, magazines, books and pattern binders. (If you’re anything like me, you laughed when you read that I was going to try to cast on for a project THE SAME NIGHT I thought of it because it takes DAYS, if not WEEKS of planning for this kind of thing. Except for the things you cast on on a whim just because you feel like it and the yarn happened to be right there and the needles were free. I don’t know about you, but those rarely end well for me…if they end at all.)

Needless to say, I didn’t come up with a project, but it did get me thinking about the whole concept of knitting from patterns again. I think people often don’t think of knitting as an art form simply because many knitters use other peoples’ patterns to create a finished garment. Now let’s think about this. I’ve never heard of a pianist being criticized for only playing the works of other composers rather than creating their own. You don’t scoff at people on the subway for reading books rather then writing their own.

Maybe I’m getting carried away. I guess in my own life, there’s a constant struggle going on: Art vs. Craft. Having grown up with an artist parent and always having been surrounded by that type (particularly in college), I’ve always considered art to be The Goal. At the same time, I was always drawn to things that were deemed “crafty” by my “arty” friends. I remember when I was in college and having a fling with counted cross stitch, one of my friends said to me, “Isn’t that sort of like paint-by-numbers?”

I still think of that as one of the most wounding things anyone has ever said to me. I’m always striving to make Art with a capital A, and now that I’m designing, I think I can legitimately say that I am (maybe not with the capital A, but art nonetheless). When the knitting bug first bit me and I was knitting from patterns, I was out of college and not quite so immersed in the art world, but I still felt that I needed to justify what I was doing because that bitchy little voice in my head was saying that this seemed an AWFUL lot like the dreaded paint-by-numbers.

My argument for knitting from patterns is this: I have learned so much from every pattern I’ve ever knit. I’ve learned how lace works, ways to incorporate shaping into various design elements, I’ve learned all kinds of finishing techniques and positively COUNTLESS other things. So even though I’m really busy with my own designs, I can’t imagine not ever knitting from a pattern ever again because I still have so much to learn from them. We all do.