At the risk of being too too terribly Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, I offer you an image of the sock I on which I am currently working. The image is not so much meant to impress you with the quality or quantity of sock in it but with the background. It's supposed to illustrate how very travel-y I've been. That spike in the distance is the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, under which a number of Frenchmen were decapitated during the French Revolution. The sock and I were both resting in the lovely comfy chairs provided in Parisian parks. I do like those reclining chairs. I started that day in a different city and finished it in a different country, but I had a very nice lunch in the Tuilleries, so once in a while the travel offers its own reward.

But only once in a while.

My travel schedule, by the way, continues apace for the next few weeks, so I am not likely to return to daily posting for some time. I am, however, likely to finish one pair of socks.

A nice run while it lasted

Oh, well. I couldn't keep up with the internets while I was travelling. That's the way it goes some times.

I have been knitting that sock. Photos to follow. However, I've been doing a LOT of unpicking on it, too. Like, more than I think is normal. Too tired, I guess. It's the third time I'm knitting this pattern. I should be able to manage it, don't you think?

Socks again

Yes, I went and got another skein of sock yarn and I plan to turn it into another pair of ricks. They're so comfy. And good travelling knitting. It's what I gotta do.

Late & irregular posts will be the norm for the next little while, most likely.

A thousand and one words

I generally don't do much to a photograph after I've taken it. Once the shutter has opened and closed, I consider most of my task complete.

One thing I will do to post-process, especially when photographing knitting is to crop the picture. As my somewhat limited abilities go in the world of photography, I think that framing is a key part of the package. With cropping, you can re-frame to change the dynamism, remove unwanted visual clutter, or just plain old clarify the object of the picture. Plus, it's fast and not complicated.

My shallow depth-of-field lens is a 50mm fixed-length jobbie. Get yourself one. It will only set you back $100-$150. You can take a lovely, artistic image of any (stationary) object in just about any light. However, the fixed focal length means that framing isn't easy. Especially because the nearest focal length is something on the order of 1/2 a metre. I want to take this picture (from yesterday),

but instead I have to take this picture:

I cannot get any closer to the thing and have it in focus. That is the maximum amount of space the swatch can occupy.

I admit, I like them both. But one is a picture of knitting an the other is just art. You only see the shape in the real, uncropped picture. You don't see the knitting. Since I was trying to show images of knitting yesterday, the cropped photo was the choice I made. If I were trying to express something ... enigmatic (but not to do with the craft of knitting), I would be better off choosing the uncropped.

A thousand words?

This is what the dull grey swatch (which I took off the needles last night) looks like:

If I work it, work it, work it, I can take a picture that looks like this:

More attractive, sure. Still dull and grey. I think that photographing knitting with a very (very) short depth of field is a sure-fire way to get an attractive picture. It's a cliche by now, to be sure, but there is a reason why people take arty pictures of their knitwork in this fashion. It draws in the eye to the detailed stitchery and yet you still get the impression of all of that luscious, fluffy out-of focus stuff.

The other option I have is to frame it interestingly or position it interestingly (we're letting it be a given that the dull grey thing itself is manifestly NOT interesting).

The final thing I might do is to give it a really lovely background. That option wasn't available to me this morning, but I thought I'd mention it here as another way things that are dull as ditchwater can be used to generate photographs you'd want to look at.

Grey, dull, grey

The swatch is still dull and grey, but I've knit a few more centimetres. I'm thinking hard about whether or not this will be a good travel project. On the one hand, it's a good candidate because it's straightforward and there will be a lot of knitting to be done (it's small-gauge). On the other hand, I'm using a cone of yarn, not balls, and that can be awkward to carry, especially when there are lots of other things that I'd like to have close to hand like computers and so forth that are a very different shape.

Thinking, thinking.

What else is there, though? I could nip out and get another ball of sock yarn to keep up the good sock travelling trick, but I feel like my feet are OK and summer is on its way. I'd like to have something on the go more appropriate.

I hope to be visiting some family, including some rather new family (under 12mo) and I could pop something off the needles for them EXCEPT that they're just about to move to Dallas, and I cannot believe that there is anything about knitted goods that fits in a Texan lifestyle, especially as summer rolls in.

Still thinking.

Spurred

I did crack out the ol' needles (which I think of as kneedles, since they're knitting needles and my propensities for conflationary typos are mighty) and start a swatch. For a boring sweater. A boring grey sweater. I need one. I need a boring grey sweater that I can wear over boring shirts and boring trousers at work. I need it to be a little bit warm, but not so warm that I regret it by the time the heat of the day kicks in at noon. I need it to be practical, not embarrassing and not particularly one thing or another. Just vanilla, please.

Actually, more like cinnamon, which is the spice that goes with so many foods it's hard to believe in. We occasionally discuss the two major food groups: "chocolate" and "salsa". This is sort of a way to separate the world into savoury and sweet foods, although there are a surprising number of things that are difficult to restrict to just one group. Anyway, cinnamon is definitely OK combined with chocolate and it's definitely OK combined with salsa. So, I'm looking for a cinnamon sweater, I guess.

Hopefully, its plain-ness will help it be a quick knit so I can move on to the next (interesting) thing in a hurry. You'll note that there are no photographs of the 10 or so rows of plain grey stocking stitch I managed before bed. Brace yourself for more no-photo posts. I guess we could have some very dull photo posts. There is this thing about being able to take something dull (like 10 rows of grey st st) and photograph it in a way that suggests it is the coolest most desirable thing around. It's not a skill I make claims to. Nonetheless, the blog is about skill-building and spurring. Watch this space ...

Uh oh

I shouldn't have gloated about posting every day for two solid months. Hubris. I learned about that in school. (I also knew someone who had a "hubris" key on his computer. It wasn't a key that secured his downfall through the proud assumption that he was better than the gods; rather it was a key that, when pressed, would type the whole word "hubris", saving him 5 keystrokes.) The well is pretty much dry. You may have noticed that I'm telling you about stuff I did ... a while ago.

I haven't been knitting much in the last little while. It comes and goes. I'm travelling again soon, and no doubt that will help churn some material out of the needles (although it's a lot of overnight flights, so I hope to be asleep rather than up all night knitting). But I don't have a plan for the travelling and I don't have much to tell you about in the interim.

That said, part of the purpose of keeping a blog and forcing myself to post every day is to spur me into action of some sort.

Spur, spur. Let's see what happens, eh?

Past actions, other

Another thing I did while this blog was asleep was to make "Owls" by Kate Davies. You knit it in really bulky yarn and I was knitting it while I was travelling and travelling within travelling, too (long transit rides between UBC and SFU, as a matter of fact) so it zoomed off my needles at a tremendous pace. I can't remember how few days it took, but it was definitely less than a week. Most of the torso was knit in a day; I had to stop knitting on the return bus trip because I had not brought the pattern with me on the assumption that several inches of tubular knitting would take longer than I had available (lesson learned!).

Update on the pits & bottom

The hairy armpits are partially pocketed. It's fussy work and I am not loving it. I suppose I would feel the same about weaving in the millions of ends. Some people just leave 'em. I wish I were some people. Nonetheless, here is a picture of the trimmed arm steek ends and pocketed cycle ends to prove that I haven't completely neglected my duties towards the finishing of this sweater.

I also fixed the base of the sweater. It's got a bottom which won't curl up, I think. I hope.

I have been wearing it, anyway, but I haven't blocked it yet, so I probably should hold off. Definitely.

Great lace coaster

I knit a little lace coaster. It took but an evening. It's from Marianne Kinzel's book (of course) and it's only one plain square of the deck of cards pattern. I obviously don't have the book close to hand, or I'd be more specific. Anyway, it's a fine little square and a quick knit.

I knit so tightly that it pulls a little to one side. I hope that the blocking will deal with that issue, but even if it doesn't who cares? It's going to be able to keep my glass separate from my bedside table, and that is all I ask of it.

Other paths

The other day, I was out of energy and generally feeling like crawling under the blankets (only, given my mood, calling them "blankies") and letting the day go by. I wanted to knit, but I didn't have the resources to actually make anything. I thought I would try my doily idea, but that fell through pretty quickly when I was looking at tiny stitches and tiny needles and tiny thread and trying to concentrate.

So, I got out some very bright sock yarn and opened up "Unexpected Knitting" by Debbie New.

That's a great book. That's a book that has a lot going for it. It lives up to its title completely. I haven't knit much from it, I have to admit. I made an ouroborus sweater for my (ever more handsome) nephew. It had an orange stripe and a variegated red background (ravelry link) and was mindbending to knit. I knit a calyx hat (also ravelry) and it, too, hurt my brain to get it going. Debbie New wants you to think, really think about what you're knitting.

But, at the same time, she's keen to go for really simple stuff, like garter stitch. I needed a bit of distraction but not a huge challenge and certainly not anything that mattered. Not a project; just a game. Debbie New came through for me in the form of what she calls "Labyrinth Knitting".

You knit things along very long bendy paths. You knit them in a way that the long bending paths are space-filling. The actual number of rows isn't large because the length of the row is huge. And there are a few practice blocks for people in my state who can't face thinking and yet want to be having fun doing.

This is a nice way to get colour into the mix. I returned to my bright orange and added some bright red and a bit of yellow. The colours are, I grant you, rather McColours, but I happen to like the way those brights go together and I wanted a striking effect.

I got it.

Now I want to think about what a larger sweater would look like. What would it be like to have a full-on fair isle pattern going? Probably pretty nice, I think. I think there might be an interesting and fun sweater in that.

TWO!! ha,.. ha ... ha!

I'm not the count from Sesame street, but I am chuffed with myself for managing to go two solid months posting every day. I am certainly not going to pretend that I'm posting much, but I'm posting often and that's better than can be said for the previous months.

Also, I made a mitten. It's got a thumb that is too short for its intended recipient and a fingertip-tip that is too pointy for its intended recipient, but I think that it's good enough to eventually be joined by another one. It was airplane knitting on that second journey.

It's a mitten with fingers. It's one of those glove-like things. Hard to describe (shoulda taken a picture, huh?). It's a fingerless glove only with a little pocket that flips over the fingerless fingers to make it into a closed mitten. Yes?

I don't mind the added fooferah of the fingers as much as I thought I would. Looking at the photographs in the pattern before starting, it really seemed as though I would be fussing with knitting little tubes for ages. However, the actual doing was nothing like that bad. It's only a few rows per finger and (of course) they whip by because there are relatively few stitches on the needles.

lace curtains

Hey! Guess what I finished that has nothing whatsoever to do with fair isle knitting? It's the rose leaf curtain design from "The First Book of Modern Lace Knitting" by Marianne Kinzel.

You want to know something about Ms Kinzel? She had a lot of blocking pins. A lot. I have a lot of blocking pins, and I can't keep up with her outrageous blocking pin demands. Thank heavens I have wires. And a generally lackadaisical attitude towards pointy picots.

Overall, I am pleased with this. I can't believe that I can generate a whole curtain from a single ball (actually, a little less) of DMC. That's unreal. I'm not used to using cotton, but I think I could get used to it, if that's normal. I find myself thinking of places we might be better off having a doily-ish object. This is silly. I'm not a doily-keeper and my house doesn't lend itself to doily-keeperage. But, now I'm thinking of the next thing and it might just be ... a doily!

past actions: overall

One thing that I really haven't learned is what colour the thing will appear to be overall. Which colours will absolutely catch the eye? I know that there is some colour theory and I was trying to work through the nice book by Margaret Radcliffe "The Essential Guide to Colour Knitting Techniques", but somehow the reality of a combination of colours is a surprise. There isn't actually all that much in the way of blue-grey and orange in the swatch I made with palette yarn. But, to me, it looks like there is an awful lot. And there is some quite nice straw colour going on, which gets turned into a not-nice orange when it's put near the orange-y ones or the red. The blue was a huge surprise. I think it was called "wallaby". On screen, it looked like a nice transition from green to grey. In reality it is horrible in combination with either.

Even the red, which I like very well, gets muddied and dragged down by the combination with the straws and oranges.

The photograph doesn't quite communicate what colour(s) the swatch appears to be. Somehow it isn't a combination of the colours I got. They are changed dramatically by their neighbours, and not just by their next-door neighbours. The flavour of the whole neighbourhood is important.

That was a learning experience, too.

past actions: stripes

One nice thing this exercise cemented in my brain is that I like the thing of having thick stripes and thin stripes. I think that works. In fact, I think it works to have a thick stripe effectively framed by two thin stripes. With a small-gauge yarn like this, I could have considered going so far as to frame with the same stripe (maybe inverted) above and below a wide strip. With the thick yarn I made my sweater with, that would be too much, but I think that it's rather a nice idea with fine yarn.

I like the stripes that are similar, but variants. I like that they're separated by something very different.

past actions: unsuccessful failure

I so desperately want this one to be better than it is. It's a pattern I like and a pair of colour sets that I like and I thought should compliment each other. When placed side-by-side, you wouldn't have any difficulty keeping them distinct. However, when they're all piled together like this it is just hopelessly muddy. Such a shame. Too dark, too similar, too brown.

past actions: successful failure

This one is a successful failure. I like a number of things about it, but I'd hate to incorporate it into an actual sweater. I like the colour flow of both the foreground and the background. I like the browns and the reds and how they set off the straw colours in the middle. I like the way the middle appears to be luminous because it flows from dark to light.

I don't like the way the pattern is completely muddy at the edge. There was a lot of action in the pattern out there at the peripheries, and you wouldn't know it at all looking at this picture. I don't like the way the straw colour takes over. I like the browns and reds better than the straw colour & I'd like them to be a little better shown than they are with that scene-stealer.

past actions: success 5

This one, despite being rather pale and slightly difficult to resolve, I like. (I like, with reservations the orange to the south, too, but let's focus on the grey one here.)

Somehow the colour distinction is enough for the edges to seem to me to be something fluffy rather than muddy. I don't think that this is merely a matter of it being a light shade. I think that the grey/pale yellow match-up is distinctive but subtle.

I like the way it gets darker and more distinct at the centre, too.

past actions: success 4

Did I mention that I liked the dark brown/green stripe to the south of the previous pattern? I do. I think this one showed me, among other things, that a short burst can work well. Even with colour changing over only 2 colours, it can be a good thing and work. I also like the effect of the hard stripe boundary.

past actions: success 3

I really like this one. It's got good colour flow, it's an old standby pattern that I think works well. The foreground and background are clearly delineated. I think it's good. I also think it's complemented better by the brown-background pattern to the south than it is by the pale-background pattern to the north.

I like the way the colours in the background flow, but I wouldn't want actually to wear something those colours. I'll return to that idea later.

I like the foreground colours, though. Can't say enough about that deep, rich brown and mellow wine-dark red.

past actions: success 2

This one I think is actually good. There is enough contrast between the colours to see every line in the pattern, but there isn't that bright colour contrast stealing the show. I like the wine-coloured red and the way it melds with the browns.

I don't much like the actual pattern itself, but that's not important. I was working with colour, here.

Past actions: success 1

This brown stripe is one of the ones I think worked well. It goes from a very dark brown and a light grey to a paler brown and an orange-y yellow. I like the combination and I think the colour flow is nice and smooth. Even with the orange-y yellow, which doesn't run smoothly, I think it works as a central stripe.

I guess that's a good lesson for me: a single incongruous stripe down the centre of the pattern isn't the end of the world; it can be nice, even.

Another of the things I think make this pattern work well is the fact that the contrast between each pair is strong enough that it's possible to see the pattern the whole way through. All too often (examples to follow), I ended up with pretty colour flow but a mushy mess when it came to the patterns.

I also like those browns. I like brown in ways that I didn't 15 years ago. That's neither here nor there, but I was aiming for brown-ness with these yarns & it's good to know that I did achieve it once in a while.