All good things must end

Tonight was the last meeting of our knit night at the local yarn shop, since it is shortly closing down. We had a good turnout and there were some rowdy, rowdy folks there taking advantage of the fifty percent discount on all yarns in the shop. I know I started this blog with the intention of talking about rescued yarn, but come on…it was half price…I couldn’t just leave it there. I spent my whole allowance!

I do have one finished item to tell you about. Recently finished, in fact. SO recently finished that I wove in all the ends while chatting with the ladies at knit night and immediately gave it away. I took a snapshot a few weeks ago, when I was only down to the heel flap, so you will have to extrapolate for the finished product.

It is a pair of socks made in Cascade Fixation, which is a yarn composed mostly of cotton with a smidge of elastic thrown in. I have never worked with it before, it’s very springy and not at all what I expected. The pattern is “Broadripple Socks”, available free from Knitty.com. The pattern creator owns a yarn shop in Lansing that I visited last year. The pattern was easy, the yarn was nice…but I just felt lukewarm about the whole project.

I have a friend who is a dedicated sock knitter. I know that she has made scarves, blankets, and even one memorable sweater, but she really gets her thrill from making socks. Myself, well, I have made socks, and I can do so with no trouble, but I just don’t really enjoy either the process or the product. I should explain that a little further.

There are two main types of knitters, “process” knitters and “product” knitters. Process knitters enjoy the meditative, repetitive motion of the needles; passing the yarn through their hands; learning new techniques; and will eventually churn out some kind of finished object. A Process knitter can look at a scarf, see a few flaws in it, and say “Oh well, it was fun to work with that variegated stuff, what’s next?”

A Product knitter, on the other hand, is all about the end result, focused on having a beautiful piece of lace or a wonderful pair of mittens or the perfect hat. A Product knitter may not care about the zen-like calm of the knit rhythm when she sees that mistake oh-my-god-that-mistake-you-could-see-from-outer-space. A Product knitter will rip out and remake the item, as many times as it takes until the thing is perfect. Because if you are going to do it, do it right.

I would characterize myself as about 70% Process / 25 % Product / 5% rabid experimenter. I enjoy knitting, and will stop and fix a mistake if I see it, but I also strike out on my own occasionally just to see what will happen. It’s the right combination for me.

My friend, the original knitter of these socks, is a product knitter. She usually does quite well, but sadly she was stricken with a terrible disease: SSS. There is no charity for this disease and nobody raises funds for it. SSS stands for “Second Sock Syndrome”, and it is what happens when an otherwise perfectly normal pair of socks touch some hitherto unknown nerve in a knitter which makes them loathsome to look at. Symptoms are easily explained, as the first sock in a pair is knitted with no trouble, but the second sock…the second sock may never even be started. It may be started and then abandoned. The knitter may even convince herself that she never wanted a second sock in the first place and what are you looking at?? A few months ago, this innocent pair of purple stripey socks was thrust into my hands by my friend who said to get the damned things out of her sight! (I took no offense, as I know it was the disease talking).

I brought the socks and the little ball of yarn home where I promptly forgot about them. A few weeks ago, in a sweep for unfinished items, it floated to the surface again and became my travel knitting. Now my friend who gave these to me is a very tight knitter, and she had gotten about two inches into the second sock before the, um, infection took hold. I am not that tight of a knitter, so I had to do a little bit of experimenting to find the right needle size to match her gauge. I figured it out and was off, zooming down to the heel when I stopped to take the photo above. I kept at it, and finally finished the toe and grafted it shut tonight during our farewell party.

I tried to offer it back to my friend who originally started this whole thing, but she had some kind of lingering resentment toward the sock (perfectly innocent sock), so she declined. The socks would not exactly fit me, so I offered them up and one lady in the group took them home. So the socks have a new home, my friend is purged of her last pocket of SSS (with regard to that pair, anyway), and I have room on my agenda to start something new.

Good thing I cleaned up at that clearance sale!

Ode to a local yarn shop, or “A wise man learns from other’s mistakes, a fool from his own”

Many years ago, when my husband and I were having one of those what-if-we-won-the-lottery moments, we started talking about how we would spend the many millions of dollars that were sure to come our way if we would ever just buy a ticket. He had thoughts of travel, going around the world, and winding up in Antarctica for an extended stay. Not that I have anything against the cold, because that is when being a knitter gives you a marked advantage, but I am not sure I would like hanging out on a giant ice cube and waiting for it to be morning.

My dream, I said, would be to open a yarn shop. I would get to spend the day with all the stuff I like, I could have stitch markers whenever I needed them, and I could go to shows and see the new yarns before they were even out! Yeah, we told each other, someday we would get to travel around the world, and when we are finished I will open my shop and knit all day long. I imagined at the time that nothing could be better.

Fast forward a couple of years and one morning I was taking the hubs in for some medical testing. I was in an unfamiliar neighborhood and just happened to glance down a street and see a sign for a yarn shop that I didn’t even know about! About ten minutes from my house! This could not be. I waited with my husband through his procedure and when we got home I Googled the name of the shop and found….nothing.

That was weird, since I thought Google knew everything about everything. I went up a few days later to check out the shop and it seemed like a nice place, maybe a little pricey for my budget but still…it’s nice to have options. I spoke with the girl at the counter and she invited me to come on Wednesdays for their weekly gathering of knitters. I was just learning about Ravelry at the time and found the group, pulled together some courage, and dropped in.

I met the craziest group of women ever collected. We laughed, told stories and ribald jokes, encouraged each other, and so on. What a lot of fun this whole knit night was turning out to be! There was only one problem. The proprietress.

The owner of the shop was a just-a-lit-tle-bit of a pill. Not that this could discourage me from coming, since I enjoyed the company of the other knitters so much. However, I got tired of the shop owner complaining to us (a group of customers) about how “f*ckingshitty” her other customers were. We would make suggestions for the shop and she would get defensive . We suggested she should have test balls of yarn out for the customers to play with before buying a strange yarn, and she said “oh you would like that wouldn’t you, for me to just GIVE it away.”

We said she should carry Lorna’s Laces, and she did get a trial batch of it that sold out right away but never restocked it because she wanted people to buy up what was already in the store. We said she should get a full spectrum lamp because it was hard to compare colors in the overhead lighting and she went on a tirade about how there weren’t enough electrical outlets in the store. The suggestions went on, ie “You should have a website”, “You should go on Ravelry and promote the shop”, “You should advertise since most of us stumbled on the shop by accident,” “You should have a couple of sock models made up from this yarn so people can feel what it is like when it’s knitted.” Ah, she would get so mad at us.

About a year ago, I volunteered my husband to be her webmaster, because I thought it was just wrong for her to be running a business in 2009 that did not have a website. He talked with her a couple of times and got some vague ideas, put something together, and published it for her. For the past year he has maintained this website, gratis, with only my gratitude as his payment. Sadly, he just made the final update. The owner of the shop has announced its closing.

I can’t say we never saw it coming, because we did. In the past few months we have all commented on how the stock is not being replenished. Someone wanted to buy double pointed sock needles but found there was only one set in the store, take it or leave it. The proprietress would arrive a few minutes before closing and verbally fire off a stream of grievances (and shockingly, I heard her spout some racial epithets more than once). The knit night had a nominal fee for us to come and sit around the table and chatter…she said “I’m losing money on you b*tches.”

I hate to make her sound like such a terrible person, so I am only going to say this: if I ever do decide to open a yarn shop, I will have some good lessons under my belt already. Lessons like… respect your customers and don’t insult them the moment they walk out. Listen to your customers, find out what they want and try to provide it. Stay positive in the face of all adversity because people will remember how they are treated. Keep current with new publications, new color selections, new trends. Promote the shop in all kinds of venues – in the paper, on the web, on Ravelry, on bumper stickers. Most importantly, welcome new customers with openness and not suspicion (“Huh! That old broad just came in here to use my bathroom!”).

These are things I have learned from a year of watching someone else live my dream, and I hope I will be the wiser for it whenever my day comes. In the meantime I am going to hit the clearance sale like there is no tomorrow. Of course, since I will not go into business until after I have won the lottery, the odds are good it will never happen. But still, if one day you are out shopping and see a very eccentric yarn shop with only the owner sitting and contentedly knitting while surrounded by walls of wool…it will probably be me. Stop in and say hi, or just use the bathroom. I will try not to mind.

Carnival of WIPs

What is a WIP? It is a "Work in progress". I have some few works in progress, things that I am working on slowly and have not yet finished. Some folks call these partially finished projects UFOs, for UnFinishedObject, but I am not geeky enough for that. My unfinished business is referred to as WIPs...because it's my job to "whip" them into shape.

The most vintage WIP in my craft room is the dreaded green sweater. This sweater dates from the era of Y2K fears and dial-up internet. It currently lives in a wicker basket and optimistically waits for me to get back to work on it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with either this sweater or its simple raglan pattern. It's yarn is a perfectly respectable Cascade 220. It has been worked from the top down and the sleeves have been separated and the body is ready to be continued. The sweater, yarn, and pattern are all blameless, I tell you. Blameless.

The only thing that happened to it was it got packed away when I moved, once, and I lost its pattern. Then I found the pattern and stuffed it into the wicker basket, with the complete intention of getting back to it someday. And I swear I will...I just wish it wouldn't look at me like that.

Next on my WIP list is a blue lace scarf, made from some of that ancient blue acrylic that has no name and no label. I know it is acrylic because I burnt it! Yes I did. If you don't know the composition of an anonymous yarn you can try a burn test and observe how it burns, if it melts, what it smells like, and what kind of residue it leaves behind. Use Google to search for "Fiber Burn Test" or "Fiber Burn Chart", or you can do like I did and use the info from The Yarn Harlot's book, Knitting Rules! I just want to warn you to snip off a bit before you go burning...some of that stuff is made from pure petroleum and the flame travels FAST.

So the old green sweater, the blue acrylic scarf that had actually been forgotten and was just unearthed the other day...what else? There is a green scarf that I am almost done with, I don't even want to count that because it's so close to being a Finished Object that I can't feel bad about it. There is a plain garter stitch washcloth that is almost done too, it is my TV watching project because I don't have to think or count or anything, just churn away on the garter stitch until it's time to turn.

That just leaves us the Big Kahuna of unfinished projects...the sweater I never finished for the Knitting Olympics. The Knitting Olympics guidelines said to find a project that you would be able to complete during the 16 days of the 2010 Winter Olympics. I chose a beautiful sweater from Jillian Moreno's Curvy Knits series, and the fact that we are even discussing it should tell you that it didn't get done in that 16 day limit. It's gorgeous though. So yeah.

I think I will finish off the washcloth, churn out the rest of that green scarf, then revisit one of the sweaters. I have a big trip this weekend so I will need a good car project, and I think the pink sweater is going to be coming with me. Come on, doesn't everyone plan for their vacation knitting?

Portrait of yarn that has been rescued

I thought it would be appropriate to share with you a little project that I took on as part of my yarn rehabilitation program. This project started out as an afghan…or the beginnings of an afghan. Like a third of an afghan, or maybe a fifth. Let it be known far and wide that my mother has the attention span of a first grader filled with Easter candy.

My mom is a crocheter, as were both of her parents. I used to like going to my grandparents’ house and seeing the newest blankets and pillow covers and whatnot. You could always tell which things my granny had made because they were soft, flowing, and cuddly. You knew which things my grandpa had made because they were stiff, rigid, and made exactly to specifications. My grandpa crocheted in the winter when it was too cold for woodworking out in his workshop, but he never left the “measure twice cut once” mentality behind. My granny crocheted like she cooked, a pinch of this and a dash of that, nothing came out the same twice in a row but it was always good.

The “dirty” secret of my granny’s house is that there was one room stuffed to the ceiling with projects that got started but never got finished. Sewing and craft projects, mostly. We were never allowed in that room. It was a product of my grandmother’s mind, I guess, where she would lay out a pattern on fabric, carefully pin and cut it out, then add it to the stack in the corner. This was a pile of shirts that would never be made and slacks that might only need a few buttons or a hem, but somehow she never got back to them. I don’t know what my grandpa thought of that overwhelming mess of a room, but as long as the door could be shut I can’t recall hearing him mention it. Suffice to say once he started a project, even the complicated red plaid afghan, he saw it through to the very end.

It has been many years now since they left us but my grandmother’s enthusiastic trait for starting a project lives on in my mom. I have at times felt the same drive, the urge to drop a project mid-row and start something new, but keeping in mind the lessons of history I have tried to curb the tendency in myself and say “Whoa, that’s four projects on the go already, time to finish something up before you lust after that cute lace pattern!” I guess I am a work in progress.

So that is the back story of the half-ghan my mom handed over to me. It was made of many colors of baby yarn, held together two strands at a time and single crocheted into a piece of fabric that was about three feet wide (with another six inches of fringe on either end) and maybe two feet long. That is to say, she got two feet into this blanket before her enthusiasm waned. I received a mat of afghan and a couple of cat litter buckets (mom’s storage idea) full of baby yarn. I think her notion was that I would finish the blanket and hand it off to some deserving baby, but I just couldn’t.















Not to say that I was unable, because single crochet is the easiest thing in the world. The fact is that the fabric was coming out thick and heavy, something better suited for a pot holder than a baby blanket. It also had tons of this fringe on the edges…and what new mom wants to worry about laundering a blanket with a thousand loose threads that are going to get caught in everything and sweep up random bits of dirt? No, I thought, this afghan was ill-conceived and I had no desire to finish it. This afghan should be disassembled and it’s component parts turned into something more useful.

I had a notion that, since it looked like a scarf on steroids anyway, that maybe I could just separate the two foot length of it into three or four scarves. I managed to get off a strip of fabric about five inches wide by sacrificing one row and snipping it out. Because of the fringes that were already there it looked like it wanted to be a scarf, and I had plans to maybe put it into my annual Christmas donation bag for the homeless. Sadly it was not to be, because even at three feet by five inches the fabric was too dense to cling to the neck and stubbornly refused to knot and be stuffed into a coat. The yarn was going to have to come out.

So a couple of night’s work while watching TV saw me breaking this afghan down into piles of yarn. Because the yarn had been worked double, and at random, each row pulled out individually and I was left surrounded by multicolored piles of pastel acrylic. I took time to separate each row and wind up the colors individually. By the time I was finished, I had quite the nice collection of pink and purple and blue and green golf balls!

Now, what to do with all these little balls? I could try a fair isle project, since the yarn was fingering weight and it would probably work…that’s an idea. These little balls might be good to practice entrelac, which I have been meaning to learn. I could make some striped hats and mittens for kids, I bet that would be quick and they would love the colors. I also thought of the mitered square afghan which some of my friends tried when they wanted to use up sock yarn. All good ideas…

Then I read about something called the “magic ball”, where you join up a bunch of scraps and then wind them up in a giant ball and use it as one yarn. The color changes are random and that’s the beauty of it. I decided on that, but I also had to do some research on the “Russian join” technique to get all these yarn ends joined up. Lucky for me there are plenty of videos on YouTube for knitting skills! I took about half of the yarn and used the Russian join to make a couple of magic balls, but I kept some of it out in its original mini-ball format for now.

I have been sitting with these magic balls on my craft table for a couple months now and I still haven’t found “just the right” project for them, but I completely believe that in their current state they represent knit potential that just wasn’t there when they were part of a failed half-ghan. Yarn…rescued!

Who would want to rescue yarn, of all things?

Who would want to rescue yarn, of all things?
Hi. My name is Cindy and I rescue yarn. Not just the pretty yarn, not just the fancy yarn, but ALL the yarn. Give me your tired, your poor, your eyelash and glittery. I know each yarn has a destiny and somehow, gosh darnit, I am going to find it.

What weird thing to do, you might think. I think so too. This whole yarn rescuer business came about when I joined a local knit group (Needle Nutz on Ravelry, if you are the ravelling type). One lady in the group started emailing with me and we got to know each other better. She asked me one time if I am a "yarn snob." Yarn snob? What is that?

I learned that there are some folks who only want to work with the best. They want merino, cashmere, mohair, alpaca, and llama. For these folks - and I am not passing judgement on them one whit - for these folks the idea of working with Red Heart Super Saver sends a shiver down their spines worse than waking up and finding a spider on their upper lip.

Yarn snobbery. What a foreign concept, I replied to her email. I have used miles of RHSS and found it to be just fine. What could be wrong with it? It is cheap, durable, comes in a lot of colors, etc. So I had to learn more about this whole yarn snob business...mainly so I could find out what constituted the opposite. Because friends, whatever the opposite of a yarn snob is, that is what I am.

Once you start knitting, or just reading knit blogs, you hear people start talking about their "stash". And "stash" is a funny way to describe it, because it sounds like something a druggie would have. It sounds illicit, dangerous, and sexy. Hey man, wanna see my stash? No man, I gotta stash of my own at home.

So this lady I made friends with...she has a stash. Her stash is to my stash as a twelve course gourmet meal is to the chicken-and-mushroom-soup casserole your favorite grandma makes. It doesn't even compare...although both are damned good. This lady, we'll call her Dana, is a knitter but she is also a yarn collector. She wants to lust after the most beautiful, the rarest, the finest. And then she wants it in all the available colors just to say the set is complete.

Now my stash, on the other hand, is a great jumble of unlabelled skeins and half-skeins that lives in my craft room. Some of that yarn is OLD. Some of that yarn has outlived it's original owner by decades. How do I know this? Because I have googled some of the brand names and found them in the depths of history. "Gold Medal Yarn Company" was registered in 1948, and pattern booklets for "Raphael Brand Gimp" come from the 1930's. That's some old yarn.

How do I get this old yarn and what do I do with it? I get it from all the places that old yarn hangs out...garage sales, thrift shops, unsolicited donations from someone who knows I like to knit. It comes in balls, skeins, and on one memorable occasion...garbage bags. Where does it go when I am done with it? Through the magic of knitting I transform that obnoxious mauve, loud turquoise, baby poo green, or dingy grey into warm functional and attractive items. Hats, scarves, mittens, etc leave my house and go to the local charities for distribution in the colder months. Some of it is destined to become afghan squares for Warm Up America, some of it goes to cancer patients at the hospital where a friend works. Every time some knitted object leaves my house, I consider that I have added value to the original yarn.

Every yarn has its destiny, is what I tried to tell Dana. Even though you look at that eyeball-scorching neon orange and think it's horrible, I know that if I throw it into my spare ball bin, eventually it will snuggle up to some other yarn, maybe a creamy white, that will inspire me to make a brightly patterned pair of mittens that will tickle a little girl's fancy. And while I know that scratchy bunch of brown OLEFIN would make a horrible scarf...it could be perfect for some indestructible dish scrubbies in a way your Malabrigo just couldn't.

So, I told Dana, while groping for just the right word...I am not a yarn snob. I am a Yarn Rescuer. Somewhere out there is a family whose grandmother passed away and left a basement full of multicolored acrylic. I just wish they had my phone number.