… what, exactly, is a skein of yarn? There is a dictionary definition[2] but as you may have noticed, among crafty types, this word is applied to a rather surprising number of yarn-shaped things—so much so that it has made the word not much more specific than saying “some wound yarn”…
Read MoreGear Shifting
It’s been a spell. The past twelve-month has been many things, none of it business as usual. (Except for my long-standing tradition of not developing this website—that has carried on without interruption.)
I haven’t checked in here for some time because my world shrank considerably with the start of the pandemic and making knitting-related content wasn’t anywhere on my top-50 list of things I needed or wanted to do. Don’t get me wrong—I totally agree with people who feel that the pandemic is a great time to knit (please stay home and avoid sharing particles with other humans!)—I just had a long list of things that suddenly jumped the queue. I did knit a whole scarf in the fall when I was sidelined by an injury (nothing serious, just maddeningly persistent) and as much I love to knit, this past year I wanted to be too busy to knit.
I have been perpetually putting off building up this website into what I had planned and it seems I’ll be continuing on the same track for a little while longer. So while I haven’t been doing much in the way of knitting lately, here are a few photos of things I knit pre-pandemic but haven’t shared here:
(I’m sorry if the captions are difficult to read. I have never taken the time to work some CSS magic on this straight-out-of-the-can template.)
The oldest yarn in my stash
This was the deepest of deep stash. I bought this yarn at a Michael’s (from their clearance bin) because I was a student and couldn’t afford to buy yarn at the one nice LYS I knew about in Toronto at the time. This yarn was so old that it could legally buy alcohol by the time I pulled it out of my stash. Note to self: if you are keeping yarn for more than two decades before you knit it, you did not need to buy it no matter how good the deal was.
DIY hand-speckled yarn
Because the yarn had almost no value to me and I clearly wasn’t going to use it for anything else, I was more than willing to sacrifice it to my first (but hopefully not my last) yarn painting experiment.
Thief of Time
I had just enough yarn to crank out this sweater. It’s a modified version of Camilla Vad’s Magnolia sweater pattern from Laine Magazine, Issue 4. I had a whole post near completion about how I speckled the yarn without using dry pigments (and therefore, did not put my future lung health at risk) and how I modified the original pattern but I never published it because I never got around to taking decent FO photos (as you can see). And with all things that linger too long, the moment for it passed.
I love/hate variegated yarn. I love the yarn while it is in the form of a skein and I hate knitting it—all that unpleasant unpredictable pooling and general mess of colours. Then I realised that it could be made to behave with planned pooling.
Taming of the yarn
I won’t lie, it takes some work to keep the colours in line, but it was rather satisfying being the boss of a variegated yarn for once.
The Beginning of the Ends
The number of ends I had to deal with because nearly half of the 18 or so balls of yarn I used were riddled with knots, was not even the worst part of making this sweater, which was a years-long saga.
I might possibly privately consider this one sweater a testament to my stamina when it comes to knitting and my sheer obstinacy to make something work, come hell or high water. Or rather, come knots or innumerable froggings.
I’m quite astonished that the yarn survived not only the countless froggings, but the entire pandemic so far. I have been wearing this cardigan like a security blanket since it was completed just before lockdown last year. This photo was pre-pandemic (which is why there isn’t any pilling from the constant washing and wearing) and I can see now that the hanger (cool, Danish, and designed for a Viking-sized person) was not the best choice for showcasing my sweater. It definitely fits me better than it fits the hanger but only one of those two models was made to be in front of a camera.
All’s well that ends well
I’m going to toot my own horn here: I slayed the details on this sweater. The smocking, the garter-ridge pocket edge, the visible raised seams (which I didn’t photograph because then I’d have to explain how I did it to curious knitters and it would have melted their brains, as it very nearly did mine in the process. It involved the intentional dropping of edge stitches all the way from top to bottom). I felt like Gandalf emerging from his battle with the Balrog by the end of it—I even had more white hair. Don’t trouble yourself about the pattern. It’s not really the same sweater now since I reworked most of it after wasting several attempts at knitting the original pattern. I sound embittered because this project and I battled it out for years. (But I won, so I ought to be more gracious about it, I know.)
I’m signing off for the foreseeable future but as always, I wish you and your loved ones good health, both of the body and mind!
A Y
Unearthing sunshine
I’m really glad there is such a thing as knitting because it seems quite a few people have found a lot of comfort in it these last few weeks as the world has ground to a halt and seemingly upended itself. I have a lot of faith in the calming and regenerative power of things like knitting or any kind of work that occupies the hands and requires a certain amount of concentration so that one can release a few brain cells being held hostage by feelings of anxiety. I’ve been keeping my hands busy but not with knitting so I haven’t much to share on that front except my last FO from a few months ago. Staying home in self-isolation with what is still statistically likely to be a cold but must be treated as if it’s a mild case of Covid-19 for the safety and sanity of all (my sanity excluded because try as I might, I can’t help wondering if I do in fact have it) has got me looking for the proverbial ray of sunshine where I can get it.
It was surprisingly easy to find it within my own home, it just required a slight recalibration of my eyes, or a change of perspective, in a manner of speaking. (There’s nothing like a global crisis to make a person realise they’ve taken a lot of things for granted.) Remember Marie Kondo and her signature line about only keeping items that “spark joy”? Yeah, trouble is, a lot of stuff sparks joy for me, I’m that kind of person. So I have a lot of stuff and a lot of it makes me smile. I thought I’d bring out some bright yellow things I have or have photographed to brighten up the interior.
Of course, there are the requisite handknits like these loud socks I made earlier this year:
The pattern is quite appropriately entitled Socks for Hermits and Homebodies. (My project notes are here). It’s available to Dawn Henderson’s Patreon members. If you are also a patron of Dawn and you’d like to know how I worked the cuff modification, get in touch! Incidentally, Dawn has offered her independently published patterns for free on Ravelry during the pandemic for the many people who are finding themselves stuck at home and short on funds. This despite being an independent designer and a mother of four who also suddenly lost her husband earlier this year. If you knit her patterns and can afford it, consider buying her a ko-fi?
And the houseplants, which as far as I’m concerned are sunlight storage modules:
And books are always good for a dash of colour on a coffee table or display shelf:
Now, I’d like to think I’m not even remotely crass and I do not find scatological humour particularly funny, I’m not a four year-old boy after all, but I have to say, this little collection either says a lot about me[1] or about what book publishers associate with the colour yellow.
This book in particular has provided me with a certain amount of entertainment in recent days:
I picked this up at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale as a memento. It was one of a series of books dealing with individual elements of architecture and the only one I chose to bring back in my limited luggage space because a.) I guess I am a four year-old boy at heart, and b.) it is actually incredibly interesting. To quote bits from the introduction,
The toilet is the fundamental zone of interaction—on the most intimate level—between humans and architecture…. The domestication, privatization, and proliferation of the toilet is the great unspoken driver behind much architecture and urban planning…. The toilet is at once the most private and the most political element, subject to government interference…. Today, the toilet is the site of cultural superimpositions…, philanthropy,… and habits that only seem to be intractable…
Also good for a laugh: this Wikipedia entry on toilet paper. Given all the toilet paper panic buying/stockpiling, I started wondering: what did people do before the invention of toilet paper?
Frankly, even if I’m not able to get my hands on a pack of TP at the grocery store when we run out in a few weeks, I won’t really be worried. Not because I have spare goose necks lying about or a handful of pebbles in my pocket, but because as long as we have David Eddings on our bookshelf, I consider us to not be out of toilet paper.
Footnotes:
[1] In my defence, all but one of those books were acquired in my youth, now long past. I have a lot of bookshelves and I stuck those in just for the entertainment of visitors perusing my book collection. Turns out I was far too optimistic that anyone would be interested in what I read (or, more accurately, what I have ambitions to read). Yet, I’m going to list some titles I am currently reading/re-reading/listening to during lockdown (some of which were only coincidentally very timely):
Although the author makes a very strong case for the benefits of diversifying our personal microbiome and “letting the outdoors inside”, in this day of Covid-19, I’m going to opt for annihilation of viruses in my home at the expense of the good bacteria, until instructed otherwise, thanks. I will, however, take his advice to grow more plants indoors.
How to Grow Fruits, Vegetables & Houseplants Without Soil by Rick Helweg (2014)
I’m hydro-curious at the moment because ordering potting soil for home delivery seems like a cruel and unusual punishment for my postman who is working hard and putting himself in danger’s way every day. I’ve always liked having houseplants but for the most part, they are all ornamental. That’s going to change this year because our local grocery stores are (reportedly) filled with people who seem to have no regard for either social distancing or government pleas to not panic buy and/or stockpile. I already have my first crop of lettuce greens germinating!
Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert (2015)
This book is in fact quite interesting, combining many topics and themes that occupy my thoughts, but I admit I’m listening to the audiobook version to help me fall asleep at night. It is exactly the thing I need these days: interesting enough to take my mind off my many worries for just long enough to fall asleep but not so exciting that I stay awake just to listen to the next 10 minutes and then another 10 minutes and so on. I’ll probably read the print version in the future because I’m missing 4 minutes out of every 10 at the moment.
Discworld by Terry Pratchett (1983-2015) (the entire series, books 1 through 41)
Collectively, the Discworld series is my personal bible. I cannot adequately describe the series to a non-initiate except to say that it is possibly the greatest series in any genre (that I have) ever (read). I’m a better person (than I would have been) because of it, I’m certain.
The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss by Jason Fung, M.D. (2015)
Although I read this a few years ago and I now only do 16-hour fasts, more or less daily, I’m skimming bits of this book again. I read it then because, for various reasons, I am at a higher risk of developing Type II Diabetes and I wasn’t waiting around for it to happen first. I used to joke that this intermittent fasting diet was basically the genius diet plan that Famine was promoting in Good Omens (by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman). In truth, intermittent fasting does mean you are likely consuming less food overall but for me, one of the most useful by-products of this type of diet is acquiring the ability to control your hunger, rather than having your hunger control you (hangry much?) There is an element of self-discipline in this, but as Dr. Fung explains, hunger isn’t simply an issue of willpower but rather “numerous overlapping hormonal systems [which] influence the decision of when to eat and when to stop.” I found that training myself to fast intermittently was only initially a matter of self-discipline and that eventually, as I acclimatised, my body was no longer demanding constant glycogen top-ups. Another way to put it, I went through a hanger-management program and it has profoundly changed my relationship with food (and probably my actual relationships) for the better. I’m not advocating this type of diet for anyone without seeking qualified medical advice first but if you were already interested in intermittent fasting, this might be an opportune time to explore it. (I’m only half-joking.)
Jokes and half-jokes aside, please stay smart, stay safe, stay put, and stay positive. This won’t last forever and the better we comply with our public health officials and accept these temporary inconveniences, the sooner we’ll come through this, and gods willing, the fewer the people who will lose their loved ones during this pandemic.
Courage, friends.
You see endless, excruciatingly boring garter stitch. I see fun to be had.
Of mice and levers, or how to knit a garter stitch scarf for the fun of it
I frequently find my best laid plans often go awry. I like to think this is just part and parcel of being human (and apparently, mouse) but I have this inner Hermione Granger shaking her head in disappointment and disapproval every time I fail to follow through on a plan, such as the one I had made for this website at the beginning of this year and then suddenly abandoned before February even had time to get going. That sense of guilt is rather absent in this case or at least easily ignored since neglecting this website has sort of been the MO since I first obtained this domain name[1] and, frankly, trees falling in forests.
My revised 2019 plans included a serious decrease in the amount of time I spent online (and particularly on Instagram) in order to reclaim some of my headspace. Maybe not coincidentally, my knitting and sewing plans shifted without deliberate intent to become, well, intentionally deliberate. I had already been choosing my projects carefully and now I really wanted to level-up my skill-set by making my projects with intent to learn new skills and to improve the ones I thought I already had. In some ways, I went right back to the beginning. I was (and still am) in the midst of re-examining some of my long-held beliefs and my views on what it means to be a good person (I thought I had this all figured out ages ago, but it turns out that if you aren’t careful, these things either get dated or they get warped over time in such small increments, you don’t even see it happening) and I couldn’t help but notice how much room for improvement there was in many aspects of my life, even my knitting.
Maybe this explains why for the first time ever, I knit a plain garter stitch scarf. Most people begin their knitting journey with that wonky garter stitch scarf, but I waited some twenty-odd years after my first intro to knitting to make one. Granted, this wasn’t the type of project I would assign a beginner knitter since I knit it using fine laceweight on size 0 needles and it was technically an infinity scarf worked in the round, but it was worked in garter stitch and it was an item to be worn around the neck, so by definition, a garter stitch scarf.
I dubbed this project "Hithlain” —not because of any affinity I have to the elves of Lothlórien (which is none whatsoever) but because cashmere is light and soft and slightly wondrous. Cashmere mass-production is also responsible for the desertification of entire regions in Asia so that’s not cool. I think if I ever knit with cashmere again, I’ll upcycle the yarn from an old sweater.
This wasn’t something I had in my knitting queue but it seemed like a good idea at the time because a.) this nearly decade-old yarn kept making its way to the top of every stash re-organisation spree I went on in the last few years even though I could not think of anything to make with it, and b.) I wanted a simple project with a good amount of yardage to practice my Continental knitting. I switched from English to Continental a few years ago but I still don’t feel like I have fully gotten the hang of it. I haven’t given up on it though because I’m absolutely convinced that if I ever master it, I will be able to knit twice as fast as I do now. (Twice as fast as a snail is probably just a very slow turtle, but nonetheless, it would be a vast improvement.)
The commonly held belief is that garter stitch is a great practice stitch for beginners because it’s just knit stitch repeated over and over (and over) again. (Yes, good spot, garter stitch in the round is actually one round of knitting, followed by one round of purling, but also repeated over and over and over again.) Wherein lies the problem for a lot of knitters. I may love how garter stitch looks, especially in really fine or really bulky yarn, but how often do you hear a knitter say something like, “I love knitting garter stitch!”? I was none too fond of knitting it myself. Endless knit stitch and demoralizingly slow progress? Yikes. I knit a baby sweater once in garter stitch and I was ready to throw myself onto upturned knitting needles about halfway through. Yet somehow, this time around, I enjoyed knitting some 1,350 yards of laceweight into a garter stitch scarf, so much so that I could hardly tear myself away from it.
How? The answer is, in a word, gamification.
Because I was trying to increase my knitting speed, I was timing my rounds with a stopwatch. I realise that for some people, this would be the exact opposite of enjoyable, but when your goal is to score a better lap time, well, this exercise can become rather addictive and dare I say, fun. I had trouble putting my knitting down to do other things because maybe I could beat my time on the next round! or because I had just beat my fastest time! and let’s see how I do on the next round! Yeah, it was not very different from my obsession with Train of Thought or, back in the 90s, my addiction to Minesweeper. All these things had one thing in common and that is variable rewards. I, too, am a rat in a cage with a lever, no matter how much I want to believe I am not.[2]
So now, I’m trying to harness that psychological quirk to train myself to knit better (and faster). I’m going to pretend the whole knitting speed thing is about improving the quality of my knitting because conventional wisdom says that if you knit fast, your stitches will be more even and so your projects will not only take less time, they will look better. That is a very attractive proposition. Plus, this stash isn’t going to knit itself and neither am I if I don’t find a way to do more actual knitting during my knitting time.
Although, I suspect there might be a component of my (mostly well-repressed) competitive nature at play. Was it after watching some videos of speed knitters[3] or was it a consequence of reading Peak by Anders Ericsson that suddenly got me fixated on my knitting speed? Does it matter? Could I, in fact, learn to speed knit with deliberate practice?? I haven’t found out yet (apparently I’m going to need to put in more years of intense deliberate practice before I can declare this experiment a success or a failure) but as I have seen an increase in my knitting speed this past year, I’m thinking it might not be impossible. (That is effectively the closest I ever get to optimism.)
Ericsson’s theories are the subject of debate but I’m choosing to believe at least one basic tenet of the book and that is: there are different types of practice and plain old repetition is not going to cut it if you want to really excel. He distinguishes between naïve practice (repeating the same thing forevermore), purposeful practice (setting specific goals and pushing yourself past your comfort level), and deliberate practice (everything that purposeful practice is but with direct feedback and guidance from an expert, oh, and a whole lot of time). (This is obviously an oversimplification, but you get the gist). So while a garter stitch scarf is nothing but repetition, I tried to employ the principles of purposeful practice and some of the principles of deliberate practice for this project.
My specific goals were determined as I went along because if I already knew specifically what was holding me back, I would have fixed it already. I observed myself knitting as objectively as I could, I experimented, and when I saw no real improvement, I observed and experimented some more. The closest I could get to expert advice was studying those grainy videos of people who could speed knit to see what they were doing that I was not (aside from knitting four times faster than me), and by extension, what I was doing that they were not.
The first and easiest step was determining my baseline speed to have a basis for comparison. I used a stopwatch to measure the time it took me to complete one round and since the rounds were all the same number of stitches (a little more than 500), I could compare my time for each round without the hassle of calculating speed every time.[4] I also used a metronome to compare my time between stitches. Let’s say by the end of the infinity scarf experiment I could keep time with a metronome set to 72 BPM, i.e., beats per minute, (I’ll call this my “needle speed”), but my fastest round time came out to just over 40 stitches per minute (i.e., my actual knitting speed). That sounds like a blatant contradiction because I have yet to clarify that I could keep pace with the metronome, but only for short stretches at a time. I imagine no one has 100% knitting efficiency, as in, if Miriam Tegels is knitting 118 stitches in 60 seconds (!!!) her needles are probably moving faster than 118 beats per minute because time, no matter how efficient you are, is being used to move stitches along the needles, to turn your work, to re-tension your working yarn, to reel yarn off the ball, and the list goes on the less efficient you are.
I started paying very close attention to the myriad ways I was losing time to my knitting inefficiencies. I used to think that this was “just the way I knit” but I eventually realised that these were mostly just bad habits that got incorporated into my muscle memory. For instance, I was throwing in completely redundant movements, I wasn’t being very precise with my working needle and would have to make multiple passes at the same stitch pretty frequently or, I wouldn’t throw my yarn around the working needle accurately enough to catch it every single stitch. I was also constantly re-tensioning my yarn on my fingers, especially after shuffling sections of the work along the needles. These were just some of the ways my knitting efficiency was suffering.
(I feel this might be a good time to address your questions/concerns about my soundness of mind. My pursuit of machine-like efficiency may not appeal to people whose notion of fun does not include critical analysis and systematic revision of said fun. If all this sounds perfectly nuts to you, you may be right. I’m clearly in no position to judge.
Back to the madness at hand.)
So, if I made the effort to correct my bad form, I could easily increase my knitting speed even without increasing my needle speed. (Because less inefficiency means more stitches being made in the same amount of time.) Of course, the next step after maximising my knitting efficiency will be to increase my needle speed, but I have some ways to go yet.
Also, an interesting thing about needle speed, I discovered, is that it has a lot to do with an internal, subconscious sense of one’s own knitting pace.[5] I presume most knitters have some sense of what their “normal” or comfortable pace is and we usually know when we’re going slower than normal and we don’t try to go any faster than that (unless Christmas or someone’s birthday or a baby shower is in the next few days).[6] I think this pace, which differs greatly from one knitter to the next, is the speed above which you’re dropping or splitting or completely missing stitches so frequently you’re actually making slower progress. This means it makes little sense to knit faster than that speed. What I realised at some point was that if I could tweak my knitting technique so that I was able to decrease the likelihood of those “misknits” (as I like to call them), well, then I’d be knitting faster, wouldn’t I? It seems so obvious, but let me tell you, that belief in “this is just how I knit” is strong, maybe even stronger than muscle memory.
The metronome proved itself an indispensable tool for pushing past this mental barrier. I used it to determine what I felt was my comfortable knitting pace. When I got into that rhythm, I would increase the metronome by 2 BPM--a hardly perceptible difference. I kept doing this and wouldn’t you know, I kept pace and I wasn’t making more misknits than I was at my slower pace. (I was actually making fewer misknits by this point because I was also experimenting with the way I was holding my knitting and wrapping my working yarn in order to minimise the chance that there would be a misfire on any given stitch.) Of course, it wasn’t long before I would hit the limit of the BPM I could keep pace with but the goal was to keep raising my internal pace setter, which was stubbornly persistent. Without the metronome, I would slip back into my old pace when I wasn’t concentrating. It took time, but I have been able to bump up that internal pace-setter.
Progress isn’t happening nearly as quickly as I would like but the interesting thing about deliberate practice is that it requires you keep assessing your methods of practice and make adjustments when you hit a wall instead of just repeating the same thing ad infinitum. This is when a trainer would really come in handy, but speed knitting coaches don’t seem to be a thing yet and I’m a die-hard DIYer anyway.
Believe it or not, I’ve got a few more garter stitch scarf projects on deck because I haven’t tired of this game just yet.
And if you’re wondering why not just knit a garter stitch sweater or shawl or literally anything else for the love of Om?? Two reasons: first, I discovered I totally love wearing garter stitch infinity scarves (they are squishy, they’re warm, and they stay put), and second, all the time I spent knitting them this year gave me ample opportunity to ponder the mysteries of garter stitch in the round. You read that right. I even have a whole post coming up dedicated to this topic.
Yep, completely nuts.
Footnotes:
[1] I chose the name of Amusing Yarns for reasons that would have been more apparent had I executed any of my real plans for this little enterprise. Hint, it had nothing to do with the telling of funny stories (as you have perhaps noticed) or my stellar sense of humour, which is obscure even at the best of times. I stuck with the name partly because I haven’t completely given up on the possibility of seeing some of those ideas come to fruition and partly because it is hard to find a domain name, good or otherwise, that isn’t claimed already. Plus, I got overly attached to my logo, possibly because I made it myself
[2] One of the most well-known of B.F. Skinner’s discoveries: if you train a rat to push a lever that delivers a snack into its cage, the rat will push the lever more frequently and persistently if the snacks are not guaranteed with every push (i.e., it receives variable rewards) compared with the rats given a reliably predictable lever-push-to-snack ratio. Slot machines, social media, and pretty much every game on your phone exploit this behaviour, which is present in rats and other animals, including humans, to keep us glued to our seats or screens
[3] Miriam Tegels and Hazel Tindall being the most famous speed knitters I know of
[4] I suppose I could have found some way to upload data from my stopwatch app to a spreadsheet that spit out statistical data automatically, but that seemed a step too far. Or I just hadn’t thought of it at the time
[5] I was also reading Endure by Alex Hutchinson and his anecdote about his experiences with pace-setting while training as a distance runner seemed particularly relevant to me. I’m going to guess he wasn’t thinking of knitters when he wrote the book but maybe he was. Belief in unlocking potential is, logically, a cornerstone of every yarn stash in existence
[6] In case you haven’t read the rest of this blog, I have opinions about gift knitting, mainly that selfish knitting is a gift to your loved ones and yourself. Let’s call it my version of self-care