KTS: also-ran / predictive

Tonight is the deadline for the first knitting sprint, and in case the previous posts did not tip you off: no, I didn't make it to the armholes on the double knitted jacket. However, I did make decent progress, and I got a lot of the planning (re)done, so I'm pleased. I'm sure I'll be even more pleased when I get to wear said jacket, but tonight I'll take what I can get.

Usually I post a KTS blog just after I've given up on knitting for the day. Today I'm about to start (okay, after a little bit more of tooling around on the computer). The Cheshin is visiting Toronto this weekend, so I did a bit of tidying up in readiness. Although far from as tidy as I want it to be (that's partly what KTS is about, clearing up space), it's a lot better than it was twenty-four hours ago.

If it's still the weekend when you read this, enjoy.

KTS: the light pours out of me

I wound up working on the double knitted jacket on the TTC again today, and had one of Those Conversations. If you've ever made stuff in public, you know how they go.

A woman asked what I was making, so I told her and showed her the photo of the finished jacket in my pattern book. She oohed and aaahed over it for a few seconds, then said she could barely manage granny squares. Uh huh. In point of  fact, granny squares and double knitting are roughly equal in complexity, but I knew I wasn't going to win that argument. Instead I just said you can do a lot with granny squares (it's true, after all), and told her about Attic 24. Attic 24 is a great place to go if you need inspiration.

That was the other thing: the woman told me I was inspiring several times during our brief conversation. She asked me twice about Attic 24 and said she was going to hit the internet and find it as soon as she got home.

It's funny: if you work on something creative in public, sooner or later you will get told you are inspirational. Yet most people don't even bring a book to read on their commute.

I think the perfect transit situation would be everyone on the bus or subway reading, knitting, embroidering, or whatever else took their fancy. Machine-knit sock and mitten sales would plummet, but there would be fewer bored people in the world.

KTS: health

Well that didn't take long.

I was supposed to go out tonight. Instead, I went home, had a nap, and woke up around half an hour ago — just in time to go to bed properly.

So no knitting tonight, but I think I did the right thing by staying in and taking care. There will be even less getting done if burnout occurs.

I did get some mental knitting done at lunch today — I'm pretty sure I have the rows figured out to get the double knitted jacket done without running out of yarn.

Stay tuned...

KTS: better

Tonight I went to Yonge & Dundas Square for a free outdoor screening of Harold and Maude. It was all the ever-cool Tara's idea, and we went together.

On the way downtown I managed to cast on and knit a few rounds of the second hearts & harps (aka Kristi) sock. So that is finally underway properly again.

But it's past midnight, and this is the second day this week that I haven't worked on the double knitted jacket. I'm going to lose that sprint I planned. Still, I have tomorrow night (except I'm going out), Thursday night (ditto), and Friday night to catch up. Let's see how close to the goal I can get.

KTS: curse you, Newtonian physics!

In another branch of the multiverse, I had a fabulous night knitting my double knitted jacket. The second hearts & harps sock got cast on and started correctly. Everything was peachy.

In this reality, I got home at 8 PM and proceeded to get my Tuesday serial episode out. Some weeks it only takes half an hour. This time it took all night. Ironically, it's a much shorter word count than I usually do.

So, no new knitting news today. Means I have to catch up tomorrow.

KTS: context is everything

Today I got up relatively early for a Sunday, knitted, got ready to go out, knitted some more, got on the streetcar, and knitted whilst in transit. I knitted standing up waiting with J-A for her friend Geoffrey to show up so we could all watch The Amazing Spider-Man together. I knitted before and after the meal at the restaurant we went to, and sitting at the Starbucks we went to afterwards. Then I knitted on the streetcar all the way home.

(I didn't knit during the film because it can bother other people, and because, since I was working on the colourwork double knitted jacket, I need light to see what I'm doing. Also, I'm not going to spend twenty bucks to sit in the dark and knit.)

The double knitted jacket got some appreciable progress made on it, although not as much as I was hoping for the weekend. It did, however, make me think.

I've never been shy about knitting in public the way some people are. I know sometimes strangers tell you it's offensive. Why it should be so, I've never been able to figure out. Are you making everyone else feel bad because they're sitting there like lumps while you get something done? That might explain why no-one with a book to read in public has ever told me I'm being offensive.

But knitting on transit and during "wait" times meant that I got a lot more knitting done today than I have on the days when I've just worked on it at home. At home I only last a few rows. Today, in public, I just wanted to knit.

It made me a little worried. What if all this knitting in transit and knitting socially has kind of ruined me for knitting by myself?

The other thing to consider is that the double knitted jacket is not "TV knitting." I can't sit down with it and pop a DVD on to watch. That means that since this meta-project started, I've been rediscovering my music collection. Before, I'd drifted into the habit of only listening to music in the car — stupid since I've actually got a decent-sounding (if inexpensive) home stereo, whereas my car stereo is noticeably awful.

Maybe that's one of the reasons why these projects weren't getting done: they didn't have a proper context. Making the deadline is forcing me to create contexts where they can be worked.

KTS: this is your brain on knitting

Late last night (more like early this morning) I managed to find some of the yarn I'm going to need for some of the things on the project list. I found the most likely candidate for the black sock yarn I need to complete the Space Invaders socks:

I also discovered that the most likely candidate for the correct grey yarn was already stowed away with the partially finished sock in the photo above.

The fractal cardigan that is already on the needles and therefore counts as a fifteenth project had its photo taken today:

I found some of the yarn I need with it, but not all. Still, it's something. What's in the photo is the lower back and the start of the sleeves.

Today I was on the subway and hanging out downtown a lot. I took the first timeslot to go see the Picasso exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario, met J-A for lunch, did some bookstore shopping, and then hit the library on the way home to pick up some DVDs I'd put on hold. During that time, I made zero progress on my knitting. Oh, I was knitting. I even knitted a lot. But I kept screwing up the casting on and first two rounds of the mate to the hearts and harps (Kristi) sock:

So the only thing for it (obviously) is to sit down quietly tomorrow morning and get that sucker going before it completely kills my progress. The thing is, the second sock is a mirror image of the first one, so I have to read the charts backwards. This should not be a big deal. I have been reading charts backwards for as long as I have been reading charts — since the early 80s. And I've read a lot of charts. I got into knitting right during the height of the last Great Age of Intarsia, when conversations about knitting would go like this:

"What are you working on?"

"Oh, you know, the koala bear."

"Is there anything on the back?"

We were all using DK and worsted weight yarns, and we were all making oversized pullovers with dropped sleeves, the better to knit pictures into them. The pictures were all that was left to talk about.

I screwed up that sock chart three times this morning.  I really don't want to make it a fourth.

Speaking of chart knitting, the last bit of yarn hunting I did in the wee hours of the morning was to find the rest of the yarn for the double knitted jacket:

I did find it, which is good. I even figured out which rows to omit to get the jacket to work. I think.

Speaking of the jacket, the yarn sprint is going... haltingly. Already the amount done in the photo is noticeably shorter than what I have now, but I need to get a lot more done. Which is as good a prompt as any to go do it.

KTS: the numbers

I don't seem to be having any trouble finding opportunities to work on my easier, more portable projects. Tomorrow I'm going to the Picasso exhibit at the AGO, then run around getting some errands done downtown. Sunday I may wind up watching the new Spider-Man film with J-A & G (woo hoo! culture weekend!).

That leaves the double knitting jacket to work on. It's still portable enough to, say, bring over to someone's house (if it's a knitting-friendly environment), but it's too awkward to work on in transit.

There's also a time-and-labour factor to it. There's about 60 rows to the armholes (depending on how much I wind up taking out to accommodate how much yarn I have left). A row takes nearly half an hour to work. So if I get 3 rows done every day on it, that means it will take 20 days just to get to the armholes. That leaves the upper back, upper fronts, and sleeves to do on top of that.

That's too long. Thus starts the first Knit that Shit Sprint: get to the armholes by this time (Friday night) next week.

There's a temptation to say, "Okay, so 12 rows in 5 days, plus a couple of days for slack," but in real life stuff like this gets done on the weekends. In other words, Saturday and Sunday nights' posts better show some real progress.

On that joyful note, I'm going to settle in to do a few more rows before I go to bed tonight.

that shit is KNIT

Tonight I got together with a bunch of knit friends for dinner. Because we were out and about, I packed my hearts & harps socks (the Kristi sock from Sock Innovations).

Progress at last. I managed to finish the first sock of the pair. Here's the evidence (photo taken at the restaurant to prove I do get out and about):

See the teeny tiny ball of yarn beside the sock? That's how much I had left. It's about five metres. In terms of sock-making, that's really going down to the wire, especially on a pattern like that has lots of cables (cabled patterns use up more yarn than plain).

So: the work is on its way. Now what I'd really like to do tonight (except it's getting late and I have to finish off my Friday Flash for tomorrow) is get another row and a half done on the double knitted jacket.

KTS: well that sucks

This morning I found four of the crocheted flowers I need for the Doris Daymat Mark II, plus the yarn with which to make some more. This is reassuring, because I only remembered two flowers, and it means that I'm a little bit further ahead than I thought I was.

That's the good news. The bad news is that I also discovered one more project to go on the KTS list: a fractal jacket I started about four years ago whilst standing in queues at the Toronto International Film Festival. The previous year I had knitted most of a Sunrise Circle jacket in the queues (people would check nervously on my progress, realising it was a tangible way to see just how long you wind up standing in those queues with your pre-ordered ticket).

So the year after the Sunrise Circle I decided to make a fractal jacket with random stripes using the snakeskin rule from Debbie New. Because, you know, nothing makes standing in line at a film festival more fun than carting around 600g of knitting yarn and constantly searching for flat surfaces on which to roll a six-sided die (to determine the row height of the next stripe). Any time I got a weird look from someone, I'd explain that I finished nearly an entire jacket in line the previous year, so I needed a bigger challenge. Usually they'd come around and say something encouraging. Usually.

Tonight I got some more done on the double knitted jacket, but also had some more depressing thoughts about it. More on that tomorrow.

KTS: strategy development

The first day of KTS had a lot of opportunities for reaching goals. It also had some conclusions that were, well, shitty.

After a good discussion with the ever-practical J-A last night, I did a rough sort of the projects into two categories: "easy to knit in public/socially" and "headbreakingly difficult".

Easy to knit in public/socially means:

• small enough to carry around comfortably
• able to talk to other people and knit without screwing up the pattern
• not so weird-looking that strangers on the subway will keep asking what the hell it is

Headbreakingly difficult means:

• the project and/or amount of yarn needed to be on hand is too large to carry around comfortably in a garbage bag
• the knitter is slave to the pattern, needing to check the instructions several times per round/row
• the project has previously encouraged strangers on the subway to ask what the hell it is

The current strategy is to keep one project in the "easy" category in a small bag and take it out in public/socially. The first project up for this are the "hearts and harps" socks, whose proper pattern name is "Kristi":

Since this photo was taken on the weekend, I've got one more motif repeat done. One more repeat after that and some toe shaping, and I should have a finished sock to blog about. Which means... I'll be at the 50% mark with that particular project.

I picked the double knitted jacket as the difficult project. It really is freaking difficult, and tedious, and heavy, and impossible to work on when there are other people around. I've tried in the past, and I always wind up ripping out what I did. On 420 stitches, that is no fun. Each row of that thing takes over half an hour.

On the other hand, unlike some of the other stuff on this list, I'm looking forward to wearing this one.

This isn't going to be a series of daily "ta-da" moments. This is going to be more like watching a marathon or the Tour de France. Except, you know, knitting. Stay tuned...

and so it begins

When the film Julie & Julia came out, some of my friends were very insistent that I see it.

"It'll be inspiring," they said.

"It'll give you confidence you can be published," they said.

Instead I sat through a film that was all about getting published thanks to an almost always-supportive husband (which I don't have), and thanks to a blog written in 2002 (which I didn't have, and it's not 2002 anymore). Although I thought Julie Powell's Project was super-cool, it was pretty depressing as far as "inspiring" films go.

But since Nora Ephron passed away recently, it reminded me that I always wanted to give the Julie and Julia book a go, so I read it this past weekend.

And it was still depressing, for much the same reasons.

But, because I finished these socks during the same weekend, it gave me an idea for a Project of my own. So I went around the apartment, gathered all the stuff I already had on the needles (or hook), and made a blog page, and a title.

I called it Knit That Shit (and Crochet, Too!). The goal is to get all the stuff in the photos done before 1 January 2013. So I have almost exactly six months to finish the fourteen projects I already have on the go. I also have beading and sewing stuff to do, but those will be kind of... bonus things.

Usually I keep my posts pretty G-rated (but not always), but it was the only catchy thing I could think of that had the appropriate attitude. Besides, it goes with the whole Julie & Julia aesthetic.

If I'm going to make this work, I'm going to have to check in once a week day and whenever I finish something. I doubt very much this will lead to a book deal, but it will definitely lead to a tidier apartment, and I'm all for that.

Stay tuned.