Best Quote I Heard All Day
I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.--Groucho Marx

That’s about where I’m at with TCI. Details next week, when I’m free to discuss in public what’s going on with me careerwise.

Slut-tique Knitting
Good discussion about Rowan’s R2 designs in the last entry’s Comments. Do the knitters who make these designs (and I use the term loosely) understand that what they are making look like shmattehs, as this native-born New Yorker likes to call them?

There’s something about Yiddish that, whether you’re a New York Jew or not, conveys the true sense of the meaning. Shmatteh in Yiddish means “rags.” But there’s a delicate connotation that implies a certain trashiness too, I think.

The garments in Rowan R2 are all shmattehs. In fact, the rise of shmattehs in all the magazines would worry me even more if it weren’t for the fact there are still decent designers using decent yarns.

Even if I were 25, svelte, and elfin, I would not make those garments in R2. I remember exactly what I was making at 25: Arans, simple sweaters with lace panels, that sort of thing. If you have any knitting booklets from the late ‘60s, you know that many of those sweaters were completely hideous and shmatteh-esque. It just seems to me that there’s been a recent proliferation of knitting crap the likes of which I haven’t seen in more than 30 years.

As long as the yarn companies keep selling the good stuff, the knitting sluts can wear what they want. I’m just not into making holes in my work unless it’s lace. And as long as the KnitDweebs buy eyelash to make scarves, the march down the road to knitting mediocrity will continue to be promoted by the yarn companies and the magazines.

It’s the economy, stupid. It surely is.

List-o-Mania
I keep records and lists of all my knitting fantasies and plans, not to mention my work tasks, grocery lists, birthday and Christmas lists, ad nauseam. My mother taught me at an early age to “write it down.” And so I do. There’s this vision in my head of some descendant of mine discovering my Franklin-Covey 200 years from now and going, “What the fuck?!”

This weekend’s fantasy includes winding and swatching the linen stitch jacket. It’s almost easier for me to work on writing the book than to force myself to set up the ballwinder, load up the swift, and get out all my plastic baggies. Yes, I’m putting the Koigu in plastic baggies, numbering them with the color code AND the sequence in which they’ll be used.

And this OCD behavior segues nicely into my absolute mania for detail and planning.

The problem with me is, I can’t just pick up sticks and string and go off into the woods singing a chant and knitting away. I have to plan. With 8 different colors of Koigu, all shading from one end to the other, I know I’ll never remember which color is which when doing the progressions in the jacket.

And then there’s writing the directions. I swatch a lot, get the gauge for the fabric I like best, and then write preliminary directions with all the math done first. As I go along, the directions get edited where needed if any adjustments are made.

Does this obsessive planning interfere with my creativity? I think not. My creativity lies in color sense, in balance of stitch patterns and texture, not in developing the Right Angle Motorized Five Decrease Modular Knit-Around Cardigan. Some people can do that—I prefer to work my color and texture ideas into a traditional garment shape. At least I know my sweaters fit.

I like to know where the pitfalls are before I put my foot into the swamp, you know?

And with that, I am off to lunch and to see what rare and handy entrees the cafeteria has to offer. That should take a nanosecond.

Best Quote I Heard All Day
No one traveling on a business trip would be missed if he failed to arrive.-- Thorstein Veblen

Unless, of course, you have 3 co-workers with you.

It’s good to be back. Florida was a trip, in the Timothy Leary sense of the word. Besides traveling from West Palm Beach to Delray Beach on I-95, which was really New Jersey dressed up with palm trees, it truly is a psychedelic land of amazement.

Little lizards that replace our ubiquitous chipmunks. Flora straight out of Little Shop of Horrors. I loved it. But I wouldn’t live there.

Traveling Stitches
So yes, I did take my bamboo dps on the plane, with dangling sock. However. When you have an aisle seat and another passenger next to you, it’s damned hard to negotiate the elbows, which in my case, have a singular ability to end up in the other person’s ribs. I didn’t knit on the way down; instead, I read an Ian Rankin mystery—quite good, if you like mysteries, which I do.

I’m not the sort of person who really cares whether there’s an abundance of yarn shops at my destination. In fact, I’ve found that, for the most part, yarn shops away from home generally carry the same crap I can buy anywhere. To my mind, there are three kinds of “shops”: the regular we-carry-some-imports-fuzzy-scarf-yarns-and-nice-acrylics; the high-end frou-frou atelier boutique; and the real honest-to-god fiber place. I only bother with the latter when I go away, if I yarn-shop at all.

When I go to NH, the Fiber Studio in Henniker is always on my list, as is the Yarn Shop in Laconia. One of these days I’ll get to Harrisville. And of course, Patternworks is now located in Center Harbor, NH, with a retail shop. I know Keepsake Quilting well, since I occasionally delude myself into thinking I’ll do a quilting project one of these days.

General Knitting Shit
I’m finishing up the Ran tunic, working on the Forest Path Stole here and there, and about to swatch for the linen stitch jacket. I don’t count socks as projects, ever. As far as I’m concerned, I make socks mindlessly with an eye to stuffing my drawer full of them for winter. Why people consider them “projects” is beyond me. It’s like calling a swatch a project. Or worse, calling a warshcloth a project.

What wid dat? People’s definition of “project” seems to extend to the minutest piece of knitting. By the way, on Joe’s blog in the Comments, Kim Salazar left the link for a free Fuzzy Dice knitting pattern. I printed it out.

That’s my next “project.” In pink, with black dots. What else? Can you think of anything more rare and handy than angora fuzzy dice?

Best Quote I Heard All Day
Miami Beach is where neon goes to die.—Lenny Bruce

OK, so I’m going to West Palm Beach on Wednesday. Is there any difference?

I’ll be bringing the laptop with me but I don’t know if I’ll have much time to blog. There is the issue of going to the Campus Management Conference in Delray Beach and knitting poolside at the Delray Marriott whenever possible.

Yes, I am bringing socks to knit on the plane.

No, I am not writing the Knit List to ask their collective permission to do so.


Bowing to the Goddess, Kinda
You know I don’t buy that “wo-man as goddess” bullshit. But I have to say, some of the nicest yarn I’ve seen recently is the Goddess line by Maria Gornatti. Check out the link here.

This is a basic line of yarn that parallels Debby Bliss’s, with two notable exceptions: It’s better quality all around (and cheaper, too), and the color saturation in all of the fiber blends is remarkable. The pictures on the website do not do this yarn justice. In addition, Gornatti’s pattern line, while a bit simplistic for me to consider, is well worth a novice/intermediate’s attention. These are classic sweaters with classic shaping, a cable here and there, even some beads thrown in, but all beautifully presented and far better than the crap in the magazines. The directions appeared to be very well-written. I will most certainly work with this yarn at some point.

I was fortunate enough to see and handle the yarn at The Knitting Basket in Denville, NJ. The pima cotton/silk is far superior to Bliss’s. And I don’t care for cotton. But I sure would knit this. Karen, the owner, said she’s the only shop in the country to carry this yarn—you have to buy it online, generally, and she had a tough time convincing Maria Gornatti to sell it to her. Gornatti is concerned that if she sells to shops, she’ll have a hard time keeping up with the demand. She’s right. This is fantastic stuff.

While I was in the shop, Kristin Nicholas’s sister, who lives in Denville, came in and said that Kristin was in town visiting their father in the hospital. Karen is hoping to entice Kristin to do a workshop for her. I may break my rule of “no classes” and go to that one, if it happens. Kristin is apparently doing a great deal of designing with the Goddess yarns. Certainly Classic Elite’s loss. Have you noticed how ghastly their designs have become since Kristin left the company? And the Classic Elite yarn? Right down the old shitter, in my opinion. I still have 20 skeins of Willough that I’m hoarding for a special occasion. Wouldn’t touch CE now if my life depended on it.

MDS&W
I didn’t go. So you’ll have to read Joe’s blog to hear all about it and how much Joe hated the smell of sheep dip. Wish I could have gone but since I’m off to FL, I figured I’d better save my money. Besides, did I need anything? That’s strictly a rhetorical question, at the very least. I do agree with him that it is a better show than Stitches, insofar as you will see yarns from small producers that are truly unique. And if you spin and/or weave, you can’t beat it for buying opportunities.

I expect to make Rhinebeck in October, which I understand is becoming almost as big as MDS&W. On top of that, SOAR is being held at the Pocono Manor in October this year, a mere 45 minutes from minutes from my house. So it will be a one-two-three weekend fiber extravaganza in October, with SOAR the first weekend, Stitches the second, and Rhinebeck the third.

Contributions to my October FiberWallow Fund will be graciously accepted.

Let me ask my Florida readers: Any good yarn shops in Delray Beach?

Heh heh. I’ve already looked them up. Because I believe in Google as an art form. So rare and handy (and recently gone public, too).

See ya after Florida.