Rememberance

I just finished my Intolerable Cruelty skirt, and I love the way it turned out. Except…there are a few rows near the end which are worked at a much — visibly — looser tension than the rest of the skirt. This is unusual for me. I have incredibly steady gauge. I can switch from flat to round to DPNs, from picking to throwing, from wooden needles to aluminum, working while calm/excited/angry/tired, all with barely a stutter. On the rare occasions when I have gone off tension, I have immediately ripped back and reknit. This time, though, I know why those stitches are off…those rows were knitted during my last visit with my father…as I sat with my stepmother at the hospital and we watched him sleep…as we joked and laughed and planned what we would do when he got home…as I avoided watching the nurses do things that made my squeamish stomach roil a little.

I made most of the skirt — all but the first and last few inches — while I was visiting my dad, first back in January and then again just a few weeks ago. It’s mostly stockinette stitch, which was perfect to work on while we chatted and watched TV and read and just enjoyed each other’s company.

I hadn’t seen my dad in a couple of years…travel had gotten so expensive, and the kids were too young to drag across the country, and my stepmom needed to stay local so she could take care of her parents. Then last November I made my annual Veteran’s Day call, and he told me he hadn’t been feeling great and was waiting for some test results. When the results finally came, it was bad: Stage IV pancreatic cancer, which had already spread to his liver. Despite the diagnosis, though, he was optimistic. He was in good health otherwise and his doctor was starting him on an aggressive chemo regimen. I knew my stepmom and stepsisters were there to take care of him, which made me feel somewhat better, but I needed to go see him, too.

I flew down in January, and we spent a great week together. He cooked chili for me, and spaghetti, and took me shopping for boots. He was tired, and thin, but otherwise much as he’d always been, cracking jokes and teasing and full of fun and life and laughter. I hadn’t realized just how much I’d missed spending time with my dad and my stepmom and stepsisters until I was there…when I lived down there, we all got together once or twice a week for a meal and to hang out a bit and always had a great time. Dad and I didn’t talk a lot on the phone after I moved up here — maybe once a month or so, whenever one of us felt the urge to make sure the other was doing okay — and when we did chat, it wasn’t ever for long. We just weren’t great at talking on the phone. I always knew, though — as I had from the time I was a little girl — that if ever I needed anything all I had to do was say so and he would make sure I was taken care of. No matter what I did or how big I screwed up (and believe me, I’ve screwed up pretty big a time or two) I knew my daddy loved me and would do whatever was in his power to help me. Just as importantly, I knew I could count on him to let me do what I felt I needed to do…he was always there, supporting and available, but never imposing.

I’d only been back up here for a couple of weeks when he went into the hospital — he couldn’t stay hydrated (I’ll spare you the details). They had trouble keeping him hydrated in the hospital, too, so I flew back down, just in case. I flew down on a Friday and was scheduled to fly out on Monday, but figured I’d stay if I needed to. He seemed to be improving, though — at one point he’d had a feeding tube (which he’d threatened to pull out and stick up someone’s ass, much to all of our amusement) and nothing at all by mouth, but by the time we left the hospital Sunday night they’d started giving him some solid food again. There had been some other issues, too, with his blood pressure and heart rate and respiration, but those also seemed to be stabilizing and improving.

By the time I got home Monday, things had turned around again and he was getting worse. Tuesday evening he seemed to have stabilized, but then his system just started shutting down. He passed away while I was in the air on my way back down Wednesday morning. My flight down had a connection in Houston, and on the way there, I looked out the window and saw the ring of a rainbow underneath us. It stayed with us for a good 15 minutes, maybe longer, and I thought, “Won’t that be odd, if he’s just passed?” (If you know me, you know I am not a particularly spiritual person, nor given to flights of fancy. So it was odd even that this occurred to me. But there it is.) When we landed, I had a message from my stepsister to call…he had passed at just about the time that rainbow appeared.

Those rows are visible reminders of my last conversations with my daddy. I wish more than anything that he was still here for me to ask advice from and laugh with and enjoy time with…but I’m glad he’s not in pain or discomfort anymore, and I’m so thankful I got to spend time with him, that I got to tell him I loved him, that I was lucky enough to have a wonderful father, that we got to spend some time doing some of our favorite things one last time. I miss him but even though it hurts that he’s gone, I smile when I remember him.

I can’t bear to rip those rows out, so I have left them. The skirt is beautiful, and fits beautifully, and I can almost hear my dad say, “That looks real nice, Laura. You did a good job on that. What’s up with those rows, though? You forget how to knit for a minute there?” in that great way he had of complimenting and teasing and making you laugh at yourself when you were taking yourself too seriously. My dad was a great guy, and a good man, and the best daddy a girl ever had.

If you want to read more about my dad, his obituary is online here. There will be pictures of the skirt on another day.

It’s All About the Follow-Through

Started this sideways crocheted sweater this morning -- need to have it done for VKLive in 3 weeks!

I have about 5 posts mostly written but not yet published…I’m not sure why I haven’t been able to complete them (I suspect it’s partially due to extremely high level of kitchen fail I’ve been experiencing lately…last weekend alone I screwed up cookies, the easiest pie I know how to make — recipe below — and lasagna. I screwed up lasagna. How does that even happen?). I need to tell you about my fabulous Thanksgiving dinner (turbaducken! — this was before all the kitchen fails started) and my miserable weekend of cake baking for Zacky’s birthday and the things that have been angering me on the interwebs lately, and all the great knitting and crocheting I’ve been doing…and I just have no follow-through. None. Not even a little. So I’m sorry about that, and hopefully the new year will bring some changes, but I’m not making any promises. Nor am I making any resolutions. What I will make is a list of hopes for 2012:

In 2012, I hope to:

• Learn to use my knitting machine.
• Learn to use my serger (tshirt alterations and lettuce edges, here I come!).
• Make my studio a usable, organized space (do I sort yarn by color, weight, yardage, or fiber content? Hmmmm…)
• Post more often.
• Publish more patterns, both personally and through other publishers. This in turn means I hope to…
• Design and write more patterns.
• Be a kinder, nicer person.
• Spend more time playing and crafting and cooking with my kids.
• Finish the things I start.

I hope to do all of those things, and I’m sure there are others that I’ve not thought of or that will come up as the year progresses, but I think this is a pretty good start. Now all I need is a little follow-through. Part of which means not waiting until 2012 to get going on this list. I’ve got a submission to finish and submit tonight. Over the next couple of days I’m going to finish up those posts that have been sitting there waiting patiently, and this weekend I’m going to focus on whipping my studio into shape (okay, that will actually be happening on the 1st and 2nd, but I’m going to start planning it and making decisions about organization now!). I might even finish a knitting project this weekend that’s been in progress for over a year (and yes, you will totally wonder why when you see it — it’s big yarn on big needles and not particularly complicated…I just kept getting distracted by other things).

What do you hope for in 2012?

 

Rumor has it…

…that I’ve been crazy busy knitting on a Sooper Sekrit project that you lovely folks will not get to see until next summer (I’ll give you deets when I can, promise). This means that there is not a lot of time for writing lovingly crafted posts for y’all, or doing Found it on the Internet Friday projects (though I may dig through my files and see if I can find something quick and easy and did I mention quick? Also there will be one this week because it’s already setup to go.).

What I *do* have time for is re-posting crafty stuff from my old blog (A Frayed Knot Knits)*, which I’ve been thinking about doing for awhile now anyhow. There was some pretty cool stuff over there — like the posts about the older recipes — and I don’t want to lose it down the internet black hole. So that will start happening in just a bit…I need to go through the posts, tidy them up, tag them(!! – I didn’t tag at all on the old blog). And then I should (need to be) done with this particular deadline-y thing by early next week, and we can go back to our regularly irregular schedule. But I’ll probably still keep reposting occasionally until I get everything moved over. Especially since, hopefully, there will be more and more crazy-deadline-y type stuff.

And just a little something to look forward to: when I have time after this deadline, I’m going to be posting my recipe for meat sauce, which makes a giant batch of rich, thick, delicious goodness. So look for that next week sometime.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1 Things About…ME!

The folks over at Craft do this interview thing called “5, 4, 3, 2, 1 Things About…”, and it’s kind of cool. Sort of a Proust Questionnaire for crafters. Craft has invited their readers to join in and self-publish their own answers, and I thought it’d be a fun little meme to get involved in. So here we go:

One Project You Are Particularly Proud Of

1. I think I’d have to go with my very first self-designed sweater. It was right after 9-11 and like many other knitters, I wanted an American Flag sweater, but I didn’t like any of the patterns I was finding so I decided to make up my own. I wanted something very simple, with more of an Old Glory feel than a bright red, white, and blue. I found the perfect yarn at Smiley’s, but couldn’t figure out how to do the stars since I knew that I didn’t enjoy intarsia. Finally, I decided to use fabric paint for the stars.

C'mon, I gotta have at least one "picture in the mirror" shot on the blog.

I hardly every wear it anymore because it’s gotten so pilled (and I’ve lost a ton of weight so it doesn’t really fit right anymore, either), but during the years I did wear it, I got constant compliments on it. That’s what gave me the courage to continue designing, even if for a long time it was just designing for myself.

Two Mistakes You’ve Made In the Past

1. I was going on a long plane trip and thought I’d knit me some socks, a la the Yarn Harlot. However, since I can’t bear to knit plain socks, I threw in some cabling. Way, way too much cabling. I work toe up and ribbed the bottom of the foot (it’s like a little built-in massager!), and when I completed the outbound leg of the trip I was just finished with that part of the sock. I tried them on and they fit fine. On the way home, I finished up the cuffs, with cabling all around. They pulled in so much I couldn’t even get my toes in.

2. My favorite baking mistake: When I was 12 or 13, I was home after school by myself and I was allowed to bake, should I be so inclined. I’ve always enjoyed trying out new recipes and techniques, and I found a recipe for some sort of baked fudgey concoction. There was one ingredient that I had never encountered before, and so I called my mom at work to find out a) what it was and b) did we have any? She was in a meeting, so her secretary passed her a message and then gave me the reply: it was something we had on hand and I was indeed familiar with it. So I whipped up a batch of this stuff and waited eagerly and pulled it out of the oven, and it was clearly wrong. I called Mom back; she was still in a meeting, and her answer was the same as last time. So I figured maybe I screwed something up with the first batch and I threw together the second batch. Same results. It wasn’t until Mom got home and was reviewing the recipe for me to try to figure out what had gone so horribly wrong that we realized that somewhere along the way, “corn syrup” had gotten translated as “corn oil”. Let me tell you, a cup of Wesson is not the same as a cup of Karo syrup.

Three Things That Make Your Work Unique

1. I once read an interview, or perhaps a blog post, wherein Neil Gaiman spoke about how he enjoys writing in many different mediums and likes to continue to explore different ways of working in his chosen craft. I kind of feel the same way…I consider myself “polycraftual” but mostly I work in fiber-related crafts, like knitting, crocheting, cross-stitch, a little quilting, weaving, dyeing, etc. When I hear about a new technique for working with yarn or fabric, I almost always give it at least one try. I occasionally branch out into other mediums, but not often and it doesn’t usually stick for long. But I find that I often am able to incorporate techniques or lessons learned from my branching-out projects, and that makes my main body of work richer and more interesting.

2. Despite my polycraftual-ness, I tend to be a bit of a purist. Although I see lots of art and craft that combines, for instance, crochet and quilting and embroidery and papercraft, it’s not me. I keep my paintings painted and my sweaters knitted, and the twain very rarely meet for me when it comes to mixing media. I find this is true of my work with food as well. I enjoy lots of different flavors, but I would rather have them available separately and then combine them as I eat, trying out different combinations that way.

3. When I was little, my dad was an accountant for a women’s suit company. He and my mother both instilled in me the ideas that line and quality will always out over fads. I like to incorporate quirky and fun details into my designs, but at their core I try to always have a sense of the classic, something that will last for decades, not a season or two. It’s a little different with food — I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m firmly on the bacon fad-wagon — but while the food itself is consumable and ephemeral in nature, the recipes themselves do still have that very basic core that can be dressed and re-dressed for different palates and changing tastes.

Four Tools You Love To Use

1. Wood needles and hooks. I’d almost rather not make something than make it with metal or plastic hooks/needles…I just like the feel of warmth and quality I get from wood. Knit Picks interchangeables are my current  faves — they’re really just great quality and ability to pick and choose which pieces I need is fabulous (though it has resulted in my having several sets of the same size tip).

2. My electric ball winder. I have gone through at least five (and possibly more) of the manual winders, and I hate them. With that added to my health/mobility issues, I decided it was time to upgrade. My fabulous LYS owner helped me pick one out, and it’s been wonderful. It did take some getting used to, as you need to tension the yarn on the swift differently than you would for the manual sort, but now that I’m used to it I don’t think I could go back.

3. The internet. Seriously, how freaking awesome is the internet? When I was in high school I was on the debate team and we spent our evenings glued to the microfiche machines at the library, going blind reading all that tiny, blurry print (well, except for the evenings when we were out TPing/saran wrapping people’s houses) (or so I heard…not me, Mom). If we wanted to access more extensive sources, we all piled into someone’s car and took a road trip to one of the colleges in town and used their library. If you couldn’t remember who was in a movie, you had to go to the video store and look, or wait until it came on cable (I have no idea what people did in dark ages before there was cable and video tapes). Now you just pop over to IMDB.com and Bob’s your uncle. Not only that, I can have 40 pounds of kitty litter delivered to my door tomorrow, should I need it. Man, that is just crazy. But crazy awesome. Because in addition to all of that, I can use the internet to find awesome new crafts and techniques, to access stitch dictionaries, to check equivalency charts, to hang out with other like-minded individuals, to see what my friends are up to, to read about the latest progress in the search for the Higgs boson…the potential is really pretty much unlimited.

4. How am I going to top the internet? With BRAAAIIINNNS, of course. My brain is the best tool I have. It can problem solve (most of the time) and figure out what other tools I need and just keeps spitting out fun new ideas to try (though it seems to be stuck in a bacon loop lately, but I’m kind of okay with that).

Five Inspirations

1. People who love what they do.

2. Nature. Yeah, it’s kind of a cop-out, but really? From the violence of a hurricane to the softness of a kitten, there’s just so much there. 

3. Science fiction and fantasy. Books, tv and movies, whatever…the scope of the human imagination is astonishing.

4. Other designers and crafters, especially those who have found a different/better way to do something.

5. Otherworld, which now that I’m thinking about it, is really a combination of the other four. Otherworld somehow manages to be energizing and relaxing and exhausting (in a good way) and revitalizing all at once. It takes place in one of the most beautiful locations I’ve ever seen, was created and is still written and run by one of the most wonderful women I know, who has surrounded herself with an awesome group of people (which I am incredibly proud to be part of) who love to be there and who are amazing at finding better ways to get things done. Oh yeah, and it’s a fantasy setting. It is a fabulously unique happening, and every year 48 new people are lucky enough to get to join us in the experience (you could be one of them, I’m just sayin’).

So that’s me, in a very large and verbose nutshell. Thanks, Craft! This was fun!

Yeah, I Bacon-ated It

Many of my friends believe that I will put bacon on (or in) anything, and that’s just not true. There are lots of things that I will not put bacon on. I can’t think of any of them right now, but I’m sure they exist. PB&J sammies are not on the list. I made the week’s bread (in the bread machine instead of the oven — it’s still too damn hot for baking) and the smell just gave me a wicked craving for PB&J. Fortunately I had both the PB and the J (technically I used apricot-raspberry preserves, so I suppose it’s a PB&P), so I decided it was A Plan. Then I remembered I had some bacon, too, and that just sounded freaking awesome. And lo, I created the PB&P&B and it was, indeed, awesome:

This is not going to help me convince people that I don't just slather everything I eat with bacon. I'm okay with that.

 

 

On another note, I have had a Very Productive Weekend, and am pleased with all the progress I’ve made. Most of the Soopah Sekrit projects I’m working right now for design submissions are of either the small-ish or swatch-ish variety, but I do have one ginormous piece that I’m working on that needs to get done sooner rather than later. And by “ginormous” I mean superbulky wool and plenty of it. Perfect for working on during those sweltering summer evenings! (That last bit was my sarcastic voice.) On top of that, there’s a big colorwork section that needed to get done, and that was my goal for the weekend: finish the colorwork section. And I did! So I’m putting that down for now and taking a look at some of the smaller things I need to get going on, and also maybe I’ll do the dishes and whatnot. Since I expected to really be pushing to get this far by bedtime, I’m feeling pretty good and ahead of schedule for a change. I kinda like it.

 

 

Doing the Math

I’m going to get a little ranty here — consider yourself warned. One of my pattern pet peeves is the instruction to increase or decrease X stitches “evenly around/across”. I feel like it’s just plain lazy on the part of the designer, and I promise you will never see that instruction in one of my patterns. I do believe that in general knitters and crocheters are pretty bright and are perfectly capable of doing the required math to figure it out, but why should they have to? When I’m writing the pattern, I’ve already done the math…why in the world wouldn’t I provide those numbers in the final pattern? Even, or maybe especially, for pieces with multiple sizes, it’s just not that much more effort on my (the designer’s) part and it’s an opportunity to remove a potentially frustrating aspect of the pattern. I’ll admit, it gets a little dicey when the numbers don’t work out quite evenly, but better to include several lines of instructions describing how to make it work than to make the poor end user figure it out on their own.

Unfortunately, not everyone feels the same way I do, and there are still a lot of patterns out there with “evenly around/across” type instructions. So I wrote up some tips over on the Lion Brand blog to help you quickly and easily work out what you need to do when you encounter patterns like this.

Nothing to see here

I had hoped that this post would have a link to that long-promised hat pattern. I’ve got the kinks worked out of the pattern, knitted not one but two samples, typed it up, formatted it, made it pretty, and taken pictures. Yeah. About those pictures…I’ve got this one:

Ain't I purty?

Which, while not a bad picture of me, doesn’t really show the hat at all. And then there are these:

Yeah, it's a hat.

Oooo...exciting! Another hat! /sarcasm

Which show the hat, sort of, but are just really boring. And the rest of the pics showing the hat(s) worn just, well, don’t work. So I’m going to have to reshoot, hopefully Wednesday or Thursday. And then…then, there will be a hat pattern.

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-Yn9oF35IIjw/Te2Cjp_Jv-I/AAAAAAAAVo4/MPF1yLM_sTw/s144/P1017759.JPG

Bacon is the new black

Bacon cheddar scones. Yes, they're in the shape of a tie fighter. That only makes them more delicious. Also, how do I not have any actual pictures of bacon? Clearly, I need to whip up a big ol' pile of bacon post-haste and fix that.

A co-worker sent me a link this morning to  a wonderfully well-thought-out, well-written, well-supported post about the non-evilness of bacon. When I read the introductory paragraphs, I felt like they were something I could have written…my reputation as a baconeater (not to be confused with a Baconator) often precedes me, and since I’m relatively slender these days, I get a lot of astonished reactions when I talk about all of the delicious things I do with said bacon. You know, like put it in cookies, or replace the veggies in chicken pot pie with it, or throw some in a burrito, or — my favorite, which is really not one I make, but I do love to eat it — wrapping it around a cheddar-stuffed hotdog from the local butcher and then deep-frying the whole concoction. Excuse me while I slaver.

I now pass it on to you, because it is interesting and informative, and will make you feel much less guilty about loving and consuming bacon regularly. At least, that’s what it did for me. It’s long, but it’s totally worth reading. Bacon: Health Food or Devil in Delicious Disguise? (From the Balanced Bites blog)