Hey guess what?
For the month of April, I’m having a trunk show at All About Ewe, in Clark, NJ!! There’s going to be a little opening reception this Thursday evening, April 5th from about 6 to 10. I’m making cupcakes specially for the occasion. PLUS there will be some sneak peeks of a few things that will be coming out soon! (I may be wearing one.) You should definitely come. Even if you don’t knit…they’re pretty chill over there and there’ll be cupcakes.
quadratic formula
How to find the area of weird obscure shapes (we actually did learn this, but I forgot it because it seemed so useless but turns out, in knitwear design, this could actually be quite useful)
How to feed yourself
How to do your taxes
Knitting
Names and dates of wars
How the government actually works (both in theory AND in practice)
How to avoid urinary tract infections
How to knife-fight (they did teach this in the cafeteria, if you were paying attention before the security guards showed up)
Lord of the Flies
How to balance chemical equations
How magnets work (self-explanatory, I feel)
How to fool a lie detector test (this we did learn, but the teacher who taught us is in jail now so I’m not sure he knew what he was talking about)
How to sew a button (I learned this in middle school but I hear they’ve stopped teaching it, which is a huge mistake)
If it were up to me, I would totally revise the current general high school curriculum. I remember learning plenty of useless garbage that’s still vaguely cluttering up my brain, but, more importantly, there’s a lot I didn’t learn that I really wish I had.
New pattern up!!
(Yes, I’ve been working on it since January.)
Around the time this website launched, I realized quite suddenly that I was totally addicted to selling my own patterns and I no longer had the drive (or the time) to knit other peoples’ patterns. This left a few things in the lurch, including:
Leila Raabe’s Peabody (which has only the neckband left to knit and the sleeves to be attached and I really do intend to finish). For that I’m using Madelinetosh DK in Candlewick.
This striped sweater from Vogue Knitting Holiday 2011 which I was working on in Malabrigo worsted in Periwinkle and Brillante…I’m not sure if I’ll wind up finishing it or not. If I come up with a design idea that involves stripes, I may repurpose the yarn…when I saw these two colors, they TOLD me they needed to be together, so together they will stay.
Kirsten Kapur‘s Ulmus in Viola Merino Fingering in “Nut Brown” and “Smudge” that I got at Loop in London last summer. It was another case of yarn romance…these two insisted they needed to be together. Now I’m not sure this type of stripe is right for the yarn and I’m thinking I might design a shawl for the Violas.
Which leads me to my latest internal debate. Shawls sell really well, and that is just a fact. Pennywood has far outsold my other patterns so far and that is because shawls are so popular to knit. I totally get it: they generally take one skein of sock yarn (or, even more fun, one skein each of multiple colors), you don’t have to worry too much about gauge, and you don’t have to sew anything together. You hardly even have to weave in any ends. You can wear them with basically anything, almost year-round. They are the perfect portable project. I would love to design more of them.
The problem is this: when I look on ravelry at all the thousands of shawls people have designed, I don’t feel especially inspired to create my own because I feel satisfied by the selection. There is, on the other hand, a lack of sweaters to suit my taste. I can come up with countless sweaters, dresses, tunics, tank tops and the like that I’d love to wear, but can’t find published patterns for, so that’s what I’ve been designing lately.
So the problem boils down to this: I want to make money and have my patterns go viral, but I want to design what I want, which doesn’t happen to be shawls at the moment.
Maybe I’m just going through a sweater phase or something and a few months from now it’ll be all shawls all the time here in Tobyworld. It’s still frustrating to know that the type of garment that will make you the most money is one that leaves you cold, design-wise.
Yarn abuse exists.
I realize I’m on pretty thin ice here, but…you know you’ve seen it. Someone has knit something that leaves you totally speechless and the only thing you can think is “What did that poor yarn do to deserve THAT?” I’d post pictures of examples, but that would be mean-spirited (and I work at a yarn shop), so you’ll have to use your imagination.
Most yarns have souls. Wool comes from living creatures. Even cotton comes from a plant, and silk is made by worms. At the risk of getting all new-age-y on you, sometimes when I see a particularly beautiful skein of yarn, I want to adopt it rather than buy it. On the other hand, yarn that’s made from man-made fiber (acrylic) has no soul and can take whatever abuse you throw at it.
So I guess..the moral of this story is: if you know you’re about to make something horrendous, don’t use yarn with a soul.
Sorry, I have spring fever. My brain hasn’t caught up with the drastic change in temperature and it’s all…foggy. I was trying to grade sizes for something this afternoon, which is basically like doing a giant set of math problems, and it just was not computing and then I had to go take a nap.
There are some characters in my life that I think it’s time you met.
Esme:
and Jack.
At least, I’m pretty sure the one that says Esme is Esme and the one that says Jack is Jack. If you hadn’t noticed, they’re identical.
Normally we have a collar on at least one of them and that’s how we tell them apart…when they’re next to each other, you can tell the difference, but if you only see one from far away it’s anyone’s guess.
We adopted them in August of 2009, when they were 4 months old. They’re brother and sister, littermates, and though they occasionally cuddle,
mostly they bicker.
They do love us very much, though.
When I think about it, I’m totally astonished by the impact my studio has on my level of productivity.
I rented this little studio back in October, 4 days after coming home from London, 2 days before going to Rhinebeck. I was pretty lucky to find it, I think. And it made SUCH a huge difference in the amount of work I did–I realized, in retrospect, that I am not the kind of person who can just wake up and start working. I have to get dressed, brush my teeth, leave the house, and THEN start working. Plus, before, my workspace was half the couch and the floor in front of it, and people were always bagging up my stuff, trying to clean up. It was terrible. I never got ANYTHING done. But now:
And here’s my marvelous shelf:
And here’s the view from my window (I can see into Starbucks, where I spy on the mayor):
Sometimes, like when I listen to Brenda Dayne, I get all fired up about knitting. Knitting is NOT the new yoga (journalists have been saying this for years)! The world thinks we make nothing but hideous Christmas sweaters and force them onto small children but in addition to this not being true of most of us, we are saving the world from mass production one hand-knit at a time! This is a REVOLUTION!! And we must all unite and be proud!!
And then I’m reminded of a conversation I once overheard on a playground when I was about 8. Some younger kids were arguing about the purpose of music: “It’s for dancing to!”
“Nuh uh it’s for listening to!”
“No! Dancing!”
My friend and I decided to intervene, since it was obvious that we were much older and wiser than they. We explained to them that music can be for all of those things–music is for whatever you want it to be for.
I think we can take from this that knitting can be the new yoga. For some people, it’s a revolution. For people in the past, it was a necessity. But I suspect most of all, and I think Brenda Dayne agrees with me, it’s about a very basic human need: to create.
To use myself as an example, I need to make things in order to be happy. I’ve known this about myself for a long time. And I always knew I would find my medium–it wasn’t pencil, charcoal, oil paint, acrylics, piano, welding (see: Burt the Skeleton Lamp), cross-stitch, pen & ink, marker, sewing, water color, print making, clay molding, crochet, book making, spray paint, oil pastels, or anything else I’ve tried–it just happened to be knitting. That doesn’t make it any less valid than any other artistic pursuit. I express myself through knitwear. The fact that it’s a form of resistance against mass production is cool, but it doesn’t mean I don’t buy 5 packs of socks. And sure, it’s relaxing in that it keeps me from peeling the paint off the walls, but…when I want to do yoga, I do yoga.
Really though, none of the reasons people knit define the urge. If you ask an artist why they make things, they might tell you they don’t have a choice. Or, more likely, they might have no idea what you’re talking about.
I don’t think knitters should have to constantly justify their craft by comparing it to yoga or a revolution. The fact that we make things–and we happen to use some pointy sticks and a really long piece of string to do so–should be enough.
Last Friday at the shop we got 77 lbs of Madelinetosh yarn.
I think we can all relate.
