Knitting: March 2008 Archives
So I was at the pool the other day, and a woman asked me where I get my bathing suits. "Depends. Sometimes I order from Amazon, sometimes I buy from a swim-specific place."
"How much?"
"Well, I just ordered some new ones - they were on a good sale. About $45 each."
"Forty?! I paid four dollars for this," she said, holding a dripping leotard (clearly not an actual swimsuit) right in my face while I was in the shower.
Now, let's just look separately, for a moment here, at the fact that this woman was invading my shower stall with her naked body (I was wearing my suit; I shower for real when I get home) to ask me the question in the first place.
Oy.
I mean, NYC is a big object lesson in losing your personal space and freedoms in all kinds of ways, but there really ought to be a limit. And I'd like to draw mine at the door of my shower, thank you very much.
Then there is the whole other question of Getting What You Pay For. On that subject, I am about to descend into hitherto unheard-of regions of bike geekdom. Because My Goddamned Knees Hurt. Like Hell. Every fracking day, and for several days after each bike ride, no matter how careful I am, despite my new easier rear cog.
So here we go, with the discontinued obscure expensive-as-hell cranksets in impossible-to-find short lengths. Here we go with the Q-angle, and the vintage parts market, and ohmygodI'vebecomeabonafidenutcase.
But it's not for the esoteric love of vintage parts (not that there's anything wrong with the esoteric love of vintage parts, mind you). It's because, as I keep plaintively crying to Boywich on the phone at all hours of the day, "The world does not fit me!"
Waaaaaah.
Anyway, now that I've got that off my proverbial chest, I can tell you that I have knit eight whole inches of a legwarmer. Whoop de dooh.
And I have to get back to work.
This will have to be short, since I am wiped out. The brilliant combination of very little sleep (even for me), a long night of tax crunching, a long day of this and that, the kind of work-perfect-storm where your head just explodes and explodes and explodes some more, and lots of knee pain in payment for yesterday's ride has me ready to just collapse.
But I wanted to tell you this: I learned a new trick, which does not happen to me that often in the knitting realm, not because there aren't tons of knitting techniques that I don't know how to do, but because I tend to just keep to the known universe when it comes to knitting. I am weird like that.
I do not know how to make cables, and I have never tried. I have never knit a sock. I have never successfully knit anything out of lace. And I tend to avoid patterns that require seams, even though I know damn well how to wield a sewing needle.
I may be adventurous as all hell in other areas of life, but as a knitter, I am a stick in the mud.
So, in that vein, I have begun knitting a pair of legwarmers that are pretty much exactly the color of mud. And sticks. Well, but they are pretty mud and sticks, you see. A lovely variety of browns from Briar Rose Fibers.
I don't have photos of any of the knitting I'm working on right now (I also have a brighter pair of legwarmers and Snow White on the various needles), but the big news about these particular brown 'warmers is that I am knitting them using 2 circular needles, which is a technique I'd never tried before. After attempting to learn Magic Loop and failing to get the hang of it, I wasn't all that wowza about doing the 2 circs thing, but someone convinced me to learn it as part of the Learn to Knit Socks Already initiative. Well, the socks will have to wait till I've got enough legwarmers to see my biking self through the spring, but step 1 has been accomplished. I have about 2 inches worth of ribbing done, so I think I can officially say that I've learned the technique.
All very exciting for you sock-making, lace-knitting, cable-contortionist fiends, I am certain.
But that's all I've got right now, gang. That and a bunch of complaints and tiredness and yearning for milder weather.
