d'oh!mestic

Harriet showed up about 38 weeks after my knitting mojo disappeared. I think I’ll keep her.

Again, seriously, dude!

Arroyo showed up on Ravely’s big board this morning.

It’s a big damn deal to me, because I’m a knitting dilettante. I think we can all agree on that. I haven’t finished a sweater, I can barely handle sock yarn and I was knitting through the back loops for the first fifteen years of my knitting career.

I am the definition of the knitting dilettante.

But you guys, you guys — you liked Arroyo. That is so amazing and wonderful. Thank you so much for that. It means a great deal to this hack that you’ve downloaded and made it. You’ve given it its own interpretations. I am amazed and inspired by the work you’re doing. Your collective talent puts this dilettante to shame.

And once more, for the cheap seats in the back! Arroyo. Click to download

The Capt’n's reaction is a mixture of pride and puritan work ethic. “Get the next one up!” he says. “Get it up and get it done!”

The next pattern is still being swatched. The pattern after that is in the Excel-and-graft-paper stage.

Stay tuned.

Six skeins into it, and I think I can say that I’m going to be an almost-solid kettle dyer and not a hand-painted, self-striping, clashing-complementing variegated dyer.

Mostly, it has to do with patience. Dyeing as a process is testing the limits of mine. If I tried to move beyond the almost solids, I’d have batch after batch of muddied colors and clown barf.

What did Yoda say? “Control, control, you must learn control.” Yeah, that’s not happening with me. I can focus long enough to mix up a dye bath and drop in a skein, but I do not have enough control or patience or strength of character to make variegation happen.

I might find the patience eventually. Might. Maybe. But for now, I’m ever so pleased with the single, marbled colors. And that’s good enough for now.

Mission Falls is dead, and it has only taken me two weeks to hear the news.

I am absolutely devastated.

There are two merino superwash lines — the 1824 worsted and the 136 sport weight — and I love them both. The colors have always been rich and even; the yarn’s a pleasure to work with. My hands never came away from a project blotchy from the wool or tinged from the dye. Mission Falls put out a quality product, one I’ve picked over Cascade or Knit Picks time and time again. I have a dozen stray skeins floating around in my stash and I’m debating hitting up the local yarn store in disguise and buying them out of their stock. God only knows when I’ll want to knit a modern log cabin afghan big enough to cover my bed — and when that day comes, the only yarn that would do in a pinch would be Mission Falls.

There are other beautiful yarns out there. There are other reasonably priced yarns out there. There are other merino superwash yarns out there. No doubt I will run across a beautiful, reasonably priced merino superwash. I’ll probably run across it sooner, rather than later.

But I’m bummed out now.

Godspeed, Mission Falls. You were good to me.

For Christmas, my mother gave me a starter set of Ashford dyes and two of everything in the Knit Picks Bare line. I gave her a Lantern Moon project bag filled with yarn hand picked by the Capt’n. The Capt’n's particular to merino and cashmere, if that sheds any light on the contents of her Christmas haul.

The day after Christmas, the Capt’n and I hit the sales hard. In short order, I acquired:

• a tarp
• a box of nitrate gloves
• a face shield
• sponge brushes
• measuring spoons
• an enamel pot
• zebra striped dish gloves
• a bucket
• and my own 3M Respirator.

Out of all of the purchases, the respirator’s been the most exciting. My dude friends have become serious when discussing the dye business, because yo, girl’s got a respirator; she’s not playing. OK, maybe a respirator’s a touch overzealous when just a dust mask would do, but in my life, I’ve learned you don’t turn down an opportunity to buy a cool piece of equipment. I mean, dude. A respirator.

And then, as we all must eventually do, I dyed.

I’ve run three skeins through the kettle. The first was a gorgeous shade of red. The second was not so gorgeous. And the third, the one above? Perfection.

The guy who programmed the HVAC in my office is a sadist. I say this having never met the person — it’s possible “he” could be a very loving grandmother of six. Still, regardless of gender or familial status, I maintain that the HVAC programmer is a right sadist because every day, regardless of the outside temperature, I sit under a blower spilling out 32°F air and I freeze.

The remedies run the gamut of my wardrobe: lightweight jackets, scarfs, shawls, hoodies and the black overcoat from 1995 that I’m never getting rid of, ever.

Arroyo’s another soldier in my battle against the cold — slightly more professional than say, the torn black hoodie with the hot pink Anarchist symbol that I normally prefer. It was also salvo against triangle shawls. As beautiful as they are, I don’t find them to be wearable. Throw a triangle around my shoulders and it’s Hello, Aunt Sally, how are all your cats?

Designing the pattern was fun. During the last weeks of 2010, I played around with graph paper and an Estonian lace compendium, and I swatched. I swatched a lot. I think I’ve previously mentioned that I hate swatching. I swatched like crazy here. Every free moment was spent swatching, or blocking a swatch, or pinning up a swatch at my desk and pestering coworkers about the latest swatch.

(I still hate swatching.)

Once I had a lace pattern that I liked, it was a matter of deciding on the wrap’s particular shape and then knitting like the dickens until it was done.

A new year, a new pattern.

Arroyo (Click to download)
400 yards of Madelinetosh Vintage
Crescent moon wrap

A free D’oh!Mestic download.

Oh, Christmas creep. We all know that as of August 1, Walgreens and Hobby Lobby will start decking the halls, and that the seasonal Christmas radio station’s going live the Tuesday after Labor Day. That’s just how we roll on the North American continent.

Which is why I’m so disappointed in myself — again — for putting off the Christmas knitting until the absolute last possible minute. Just, you’d think I’d learn by now.

It’s Comic-Con weekend. My friend, the lovely and talented Sarah Kuhn, presented on a panel on Thursday, and I’m still kicking myself for not finding a way to get to San Diego and back without anyone in the office noticing I was gone.

It’s also CONVERGENCE 2010 here in the 505, meaning that handweavers, um, converged on Downtown to weave and spin and knot together over a mutual love of fiber. It’s like Comic-Con, only with less cosplay, but just as much sheep love. (Hey-o!)

Mary-Heather, she of Ravelry, is a local and was kind enough to set up a Ravelry meet-up, and I now have a coveted Ravelry name button, which I suppose I could scrub and sell on Ebay for tens of pennies, but I won’t, because some day, far in the future, I will go to a Rhinebeck or a TNNA or a Stitches event, and I will want that button.

My haul wasn’t spectacular — I got a skein of 100% angora, and some repurposed knitting needle jewelry, but I had a lovely time and handed out links and email addresses left and right. So hello to all of you!

I finally cleared the sofa of the loitering finished projects — the two pairs of socks that need to be photographed and turned into PDFs, the doofy hat that I knocked out last week, the spare pair of booties for when the next co-worker announces she’s knocked up — and put them in a drawer in the coffee table, for want of a better place to stash them. I figure, if I have them downstairs, I’m more likely to remember that they’re there and are in need of photographing and PDFing and posting.

On the other hand, out of sight is out of mind.

Maybe I’d better get that drawer cedar lined.