Best Quote I Heard All Day
One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite--that particular peach is but a detail--Pablo Picasso

I often become enamored of the mere act and result of decreasing.

There's something about the lined-up pairs of decreases on a sleeve or a raglan armhole that gives me the ultimate rush, more than a successfully executed, complex stitch pattern.

JamaicanMeCrayzee Hoodie--Small Details, Small Rewards


I wasn't going to put up any more pictures of the hoodie until it was finished but last night, as I worked down the first sleeve, I thought about how nice the decreases looked, even though they won't be all that visible when Liz wears the hoodie, particularly since the yarn is black.

This is a very simple sweater, really. Besides the Fair Isle, which constitutes a small percentage of the sweater, the rest of it is stockinette. However, there can be badly done simple sweaters and simple sweaters that require some thought to raise them above the pack.

I did not want merely to decrease one stitch at the beginning and the end of each round. I don't like two decreases right next to each other when shaping a sleeve or an armscye, as a rule. I want a separator stitch or two between them. This makes no difference as to the shape of the sleeve and adds plenty to how it looks.

I also like a place to keep my beginning-of-the- round marker. By starting the decrease round with K1, ssk, I can put the marker after the K1, which will stay constant. Not a big deal until the double-pointed needles are needed.

Directions for simple sweaters rarely tell you how to handle the decreases for the sleeves, the armscye and the neckline. It's usually the ole "dec 1 every other row" routine. I never, ever put a decrease right at the edge of a neckline, either. You've got to have one selvedge stitch to use for pick-up purposes. And I make sure that my decreases slant in the right directions.

So that's where I am with this project. I was hoping to have this completed by next week because I really need to move on to other things. Like that fucking shawl for Corinne. Which has not been touched in weeks.

X-ymorons
Here's what really scares me--the new book from XRX. The Knitter's Handbook: Essential Skills and Helpful Hints from Knitter's Magazine.

A lot of info culled, no doubt, from SnitU. I'm not concerned about the competition between this, my book and other books out there. I'm more concerned about the lousy editing that exists in XRX publications.

Mistakes in knitting directions are common. Everyone makes them because knitting directions are very difficult to edit and it's so easy to miss something, even if you are experienced. However, XRX surely has the highest percentage of errors per book in the entire industry. I haven't looked at the book yet but I will. And not buy it.

It's little wonder that there's scant traffic on Knit U. Why bother when you know what you write immediately belongs to the X-men when you hit "Send"? And when you know that the list is censored.

After more than 11 years of mailing lists, most of them ceased to be rare and handy anyway. Blogging has taken over the lists and despite the proliferation of FO! blogs, that's a good thing.