… 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
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
Slow knitting
Maybe I shouldn’t be, but I’m pretty happy with how this sweater turned out. I don’t even remember exactly what I was envisioning when I began it, but I think it finally got there, or somewhere in the general vicinity.
Pattern: Arboreal by Knit.Love.Wool. Yarn purchased from Alpaca Avenue
This sweater was supposed to have been a relatively quick diversion from my #2018makenine lineup, which had been progressing at a good pace back in April, when I cast on. I allowed myself to go off-script and break my own rule about only using existing stash* because the Make Nine Challenge isn’t meant to be restrictive in any way. Besides, I reasoned, I had a long standing ambition to become proficient in stranded knitting** and although I have dabbled with small Fair Isle projects over the last several years (mainly hats), the goal all along has been to knit a full-on Fair Isle garment of some kind. I needed practice! A simple stranded yoke sweater seemed like the ideal project to get my feet wet instead of trying to dive straight into Marie Wallin depths. And, let’s be perfectly honest, I got sucked into the vortex of amazing colourwork projects on IG.
Arboreal has an easy-to-follow colourwork pattern with very few long floats but I also just enjoyed the idea of a leaf motif because I wanted this sweater to represent something personal. I wanted it to be an ode of sorts to Ontario, to home. In particular, I wanted it to be about autumn in Ontario because no matter where I travel in the world, no matter the season, no matter how impressive everywhere else is, I will love an Ontario autumn more than anything else because nothing else feels so much like home to my soul.
It seems improbable, but I didn’t have any appropriate yarn for this sort of project in my oversized yarn stash (I’m a recovering superwash wool addict), so I decided that if I was going to break my yarn diet, I would do it by buying as local as possible. I’m all for supporting my local fibreshed but since I buy much less yarn than I did in the past, I don’t have a lot of opportunities to do so and this project seemed like an especially good excuse to shop local. That meant paying a visit to my go-to source for ethical and local yarn, Alpaca Avenue (which is no longer a brick & mortar shop, but Kerstin is keeping it all going in an on-line capacity).
I really only needed two colours for this pattern, the main and the contrast, but I figured if I was going to knit with colour, it might as well be colourful, right? For my main, Kerstin showed me a really unique yarn that she had had processed from a batch of fleeces she obtained almost by chance from a sheep farm on St. Joseph Island. The colour is a lovely natural heathered grey (my favourite) and the wool is airy but warm. I knew that I was looking for a Canadian-dyed yarn for the contrast, preferably in some sort of gradient of fall colours but I knew that was going to be a tall order since my extensive online browsing did not find me any likely candidates in the right weight, regardless of the country of origin.
Kerstin had something quite nearly perfect--the wool was even grown, milled, and dyed locally*** -- except that it only came in a fingering weight. I was a little disheartened because I had my heart set on nearly this precise colour combination but while we chatted and brainstormed, it hit me that I could double the fingering weight yarn to get a worsted weight and I could make the gradient pack of minis blend even more smoothly by changing the strand combination every few rows. Doubling yarn while knitting Fair Isle is probably not something a beginner should dive right into, but the colours called to me. The yarn is Elora in the “Girl of the Limberlost” gradient pack. (More yarn details are on my Ravelry page for this project.)
Because she is just a super person, Kerstin kindly gave me some partials she had sitting around so that I could test the colour combination before committing to buying the pack. (She’s really the best! She cares as much as you do about the success of your project). Once I had blocked my swatch, I felt like it was going to be a great project. I was prepared to hit a few speed bumps on the way because I was completely new to colourwork sweaters, but even with that proviso, things did not go as I had hoped.
For a long time, this sweater was touch and go. I spent the majority of the many hours I put into this sweater highly doubting if I was going to end up with something I’d be happy with. After the initial euphoria of knitting my first colourwork yoke and being quite delighted with the colour combination, I soon came to the demoralizing realization that it was probably not going to fit me very well. I had a pattern drafting instructor who always admonished us to be aware of how “flesh is distributed differently on different people even if they are the same size”. Truer words were never spoken (in a pattern drafting class, at least). Let us just say that I do not have a fleshy upper body so a partially knit circular yoke sweater on me looks a bit like an opened umbrella. I checked my stitch counts and my gauge and everything was presumably spot on. I perused the projects in Ravelry to see if anyone with a similar body type had the same issues, but no one seemed to. So I pressed on, hoping that it would all work out. It didn’t.
This sweater was begun eight months ago. Even if you don’t count the months-long hiatus I took from it, I spent a ridiculous amount of time working on this sweater. I ripped out entire sections multiple times and fiddled with different needle sizes, stitch counts, shapes, and more until I felt that I was satisfied. I even cut off the neckband after I had blocked the completed sweater because the garter stitch just didn’t seem to work for me. This is not how I like a project to go, but sometimes, you just know that it isn’t right. And when it isn’t right, it isn’t likely to be worn by me or anyone else. I am not by nature someone who enjoys torture, but I will (sometimes) subject myself to the pain of frogging and reknitting when faced with the prospect of an unusable end product. (It probably helps that I am as much a process knitter as I am a product knitter.)
I don’t think this is what people mean when they refer to “slow fashion”, but it does fit into my notion of slow fashion. It does no one any good if I make a sweater that won’t be worn with joy by anyone, because then it isn’t going to be worn, period. I really don’t ever want to make a thing that won’t be used or won’t last long because I was too lazy to do it right.**** By “right”, I mean that the quality of my workmanship has to be high, the fit has to be appropriate, and the aesthetic has to be pleasing (at the very least to my eye). I think this is one of the reasons I don’t manage to make a whole lot in a year. I’m not expert enough to get things right without a lot of re-working so I probably need three times the number of hours as anyone else to finish the same garment. Definitely, this sweater took me at least three times longer than I anticipated.
However, I don’t know if in truth I just finally took pity on myself and called it done. I have to wonder because my partner, who is always perfectly politic about my style choices, had to choke back some laughter when he saw me wearing this. Maybe after I pack it away for the summer next year, I’ll have a better sense of how well (or not well) this all turned out since it will give me time to regain some objectivity.
For now, I’m going to be toasty warm and totally secretly smug that the extra effort wasn’t utterly wasted.
Footnotes
*Using stash yarns, stash fabric, and preferably stash patterns, was part of the reason I participated in #2018makenine. I already had everything I needed to participate and I thought this would give me some motivation to finally make use of stuff that had been waiting for ages to be made up into something
**Cabled sweaters and Fair Isle sweaters were the reason I took up knitting in the first place. Cables were easy to learn and for the first few years, virtually everything I knit was laden with cables. Fair Isle was a whole other can of worms. I have an old Istex Lopi pattern book I picked up when I was too young to even afford the amount of yarn that was required (12 or so different colours plus the main colour!?) for the sweater that I wanted to (one day) knit. I think I only hang on to that old pattern book to remind myself of my propensity for making grand plans and then abandoning them
***Quebec is local enough, n’est-ce pas?
****I never want to make a failure of a project, but I can’t lie, it definitely happens. Sometimes, I just can’t bear another day struggling with a project and I have to concede and move on, presumably to return to it when I’ve had a chance to regroup. (My life is littered with the remnants of failed projects.) If/when I post my #2018makenine wrap-up, I’ll have some examples to share