The Woman in White Read-A-Long (Among Other Things)

Goslings!

I have been off Mae West-ing it in the last few months, but I have not forgotten that I owe you more than a snarky review about a book most of you will hopefully never read (because I read it for you).  I know you are all on absolute tenterhooks to know what I've been knitting, reading, and doing in the regular world. The first two are easy: I have been knitting late Christmas socks for my mens and a shawl for my Nadia, and I have been reading All The Things. But I am house-sitting in San Jose for my friend Auntie Social and thus do not have access to said knitted things to take pictures of, and this kitchen table isn't conducive to a lot of typing which is why I haven't done my homework yet.

Speaking of homework, I am finishing up my LAST CLASS for my Master's degree in three weeks, and then the Real World kicks in. If any of you need an executive assistant/event planner, let me know. Brie: call me when you win the lottery and I will move to Philly and be your nanny and we will have lovely crafty fun all the time instead of that whole executive assistant thing.

And now, the Woman in White RAL, as hosted by the hilarious Alice, with whom I would like to be friends and prowl the Chicago Library looking for sexy nerd men books.

This will be my second-and-a-half time through this book. The half time came first in an ill-judged attempt on my part to take a class on 19th c. British Literature from a professor with a brand new shiny PhD. It was only ill-judged because I didn't know at the time that new PhDs are the worst teachers because a) they have very little actual training in how to teach*, b) they are still thinking about nothing beyond their dissertation, which in this woman's case was in the Romantics - whom I cordially despise because I don't particularly like nature or philandering cads, and c) they have developed a habit of proving they are right, so any deviation from their train of thought tends to be frowned mightily upon.**

Y'anyway. I sorta read the book just enough to pass the essay, so it only counts for half. The first WHOLE time I read WiW was right around when Raych read it for her big project, and those sassy emails were a delight.

Ok. Let's talk about Wilkie Collins, whom I thought was a woman for the longest time.

Clearly not a chick.

I learned from Alice and Contractually Obligated to Like Books that he was dude-bros with Charles Dickens to the point of occasionally sharing women. Now, I have a group of friends who spent the majority of their late teens and early twenties diligently dating everyone else within that group of friends. There were break-ups and make-ups and fights, and now that we're older and mostly settled down (the latest wedding was in December and I just went to a baby shower where I was the only unmarried girl and one of only 3 unpregnant, and the other two were not for lack of trying if you catch my drift) we occasionally play the "remember when you were dating me? That was hilarious!" game.

I borrowed a dress from my friend to wear at her wedding to my ex-boyfriend, at which I sat next to his ex-girlfriend-before-me and the two of us shed happy tears. This wedding resulted in my "niece" Evelyn, who has made an appearance here in the past and who is expecting a baby sister in June (see above re. baby shower).

I really wish this were in focus.

I'm not really one to knock someone for a little trading amongst friends is what I'm saying, although I will throw out some censure for being married while they did it. Jerks. So, Collins and Dickens were buds and clearly somewhat douchey, which we will come back to more toward the end of the book.

Woman in White was published in Dickens' magazine and was a sensation - possibly on the same scale as Old Curiosity Shop, for which people famously lined up at the NY Pier to discover whether Little Nell was dead***. It is considered to be the first "detective" novel and one of the first "sensation" novels, although I think Anne Radcliffe and Catherine Morland would have something to say about the latter.

And that's all I have to say so far because there is a pitcher of mimosas and a dance party of one waiting to happen on the back deck.





* She says, from the lofty tower of an upcoming Master's in education.
** Obviously this doesn't go for ALL new PhDs. But the ones in the humanities do seem to be particularly uppity. Feel free to remind me of this should I ever become a PhD.
*** She was. I just saved you from reading that book, too!

Death Comes to Pemberley - P.D. James

Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

First, let's talk about Jane Austen pastiche. You might think that I would like it; after all, I'm the girl who re-reads all 7 novels religiously every year or perhaps two if I'm deep in a Victoriana phase. Who would imagine that girl wouldn't want more Austen, amirite?

You'd be wrong. I've come to realize that longing for more Austen is not the same as accepting the drivel that issues from the pens of writers, both recognized and otherwise, who attempt to parse The Magnificent Seven into continuations of the romances that people who are not me believe are at the heart of Austen's work. Yes, you read that right: I don't think that Austen is about romance, or at least not entirely. Obviously everyone ends up properly paired at the end; she was writing for women, after all, and if there's one thing we know from the shelves of used bookstores everywhere, women love their proper pairings - particularly if they're accompanied by a little bodice-ripping. Bu Austen's most pointed references are to society and the manipulations that people utilize to get what they want - the end result isn't romance, but attainment of desire at the expense of those who value "society" above human truths.

And now, let's talk a little about this novel.

Elizabeth and Darcy are happily ensconced in Pemberley with their two boys and regular visits from Jane and Bingley. But before this all can be explained, James gives us the gossip's view of Pride & Prejudice, which is that Elizabeth is a conniving fortune-hunter and that Darcy was, well, conned.

When you start to wonder if a book will get any better by page ivx, maybe it's time to put it down. But I didn't put it down because I love me some Lizzy Bennet. More fool, me.

What follows is a laundry list of what this novel's problem is. Feel free to imagine me going all brown-girl on this book, waving my finger in the air to great effect while raising an eyebrow and saying things like, "aaaand another thing!" I may possibly be a Latina hair stylist in Washington Heights for the rest of this review.

- Elizabeth does not still have feelings for her sister's husband. She never really did, so pasting heart-flutterings onto her 6 years after her marriage to Darcy is... stupid.
- Darcy and Elizabeth hardly interact at all. They interact even less with their children, who are relegated to the nursery and only mentioned as plot points.
- Charlotte was blamed for Lady Catherine finding out about Darcy and Elizabeth's supposed engagement. To take a life-long friendship and reduce it to petty "domestic revenge" tarnishes both the friendship and the character unnecessarily.
- James tied in other Austen books. I know that Austen's books were all written and set around the same time period, but Highbury and Pemberley do not exist in the same world. Wickham working for the Elliotts is absurd, and Harriet Roberts nee Smith would never take in someone's bastard, even if it was the nephew of Mr. Darcy of Pemberley. Tying in other Austen characters smacks of inside jokes where none are necessary.
- Darcy is a laconic character. He never uses 200 words when 20 will do, and marrying Elizabeth wouldn't have suddenly turned him into Mr. Infodump. Phrases like "As you know, Magistrate, the sheriff's job is to..." should never fall from ANY character's lips - much less from Mr. Darcy's!
- Wickham is not a killer, and to try to paint him as a suspect just means that the inevitable acquittal is boooo-ring.
- Even more boooo-ring than the big reveal of the killer was the mutual explaining that Darcy and Elizabeth did in the last 20 pages of the text. They go on a walk and he proceeds to mansplain to her why he chose her and how she changed him, blah blah. It's as if James realized that her two major characters hadn't interacted in any significant way, then conveniently forgot that the confession scene in P&P ever happened.


Death Comes to Pemberley was my final attempt to enjoy Austen pastiche, and that enjoyment was a miserable failure. So authors, please take note: even if you're wicked famous and super-awesome, please don't use these (or ANY) characters to try to prop up your poorly conceived plot lines.

4 of 11 yellows



View all my reviews

Oh Hello, February!

Where did you com from? Between continuing to travel all over the place, hosting some lovely friends, and running my league's very first home team bout, January seems to have passed me by - and with very little knitting done, not to mention any homework whatsoever for my penultimate Masters class.

Two unfinished socks, a stack of books, some tea, and a cat who is about to be an asshole. This sums up my January nicely.

Maybe today I'll peel myself away from the Derby Inbox of Doom and finish something knitting-related while I listen to Brideshead Revisited.

Yep. That sounds like a plan.

Someone is "helping."

.22 Down, 11.78 to Go!

The first knit of 2012 is complete! 

Austermann Step Yarn, 382 yds.

Late Christmas socks for my papa. Standard K3P1 rib with what I think is an Eye of the Partridge heel. My dad isn't really into crazy colors - and these qualify as "crazy colors" to that Federal employee - so I'll  over-dye them a little so the white places are also a shade of tan. I'm quite pleased with how well they matched up! 

Next up is a pair for my stepmother, Lisa. 

Seacoast Handpaints Panda Yarn, "Bee Balm"

This will end up being Thelonius socks. I spent a happy evening last night winding yarn at my coffee table and watching Leverage, then I cleaned out a random basket that was sitting around - how do I end up with random baskets? I never think of myself as a "basket person" (basket CASE, maybe...) and yet they're lying about - and put all my Late Christmas Pre-Knitting (aka yarn) into it. Efficiency! Focus! Late night caffeine! 

In keeping with my streak of not spending weekends at home since August, I'm heading down to San Jose on Friday to see a Tennessee Williams play with some friends and then attend Jasmin's baby shower. Little Genevieve made her debut yesterday at 4pm, adding the definite eventuality of baby-huffing to the enjoyment of seeing good friends and the wool fumes of a well-stocked yarn store!

Tika 2012

2011 was pretty swell. I joined a roller derby league, traveled all over the place visiting old friends and making  new ones, and settled in to my (no longer) new apartment. I knitted not as much as I anticipated (a meager 6-ish miles) but nailed my goal of reading 75 books (29,060 pages!!) and revisited spinning.

Like years before, I didn't finish my crafting goals. This seems to happen to me more often than not; Largely Unrepeatable is full of "I tried this and failed, then I tried THAT and failed, and now I'm doing this with no real hope of success given the time frame! Go me!" In regular conversation, that's often called overstretching oneself or delusions of grandeur, but I feel strongly that goals and challenges aren't always meant to be met, especially if they're truly challenging. They're also a way for me to figure out what is important to me. If you've been around here for awhile, you're probably aware that I'm not very fussed if I can't knit through 11 or 12 miles of yarn in a year, but it was important enough to me to complete the goodreads challenge that I picked up books when I might have occupied myself doing other things. Goals (and the revisiting thereof) give me a chance to focus (and refocus) on what I like and who I want to be. And who knows? Maybe this year is the year I complete the 12-Mile Quest; after all, it's right there in the date.

Becoming part of Sacred City's family of hard, confident, passionate women has helped me to find the steel, confidence and passion I misplaced somewhere along the road. I've thought a lot over the last few days about when I was happiest in 2011, and the answers were fairly simple: I was happiest when I was cheering for my team, listening my niece tell me that "T is for Tika," and laughing so hard I cried - most recently over my own inability to add two coins into 35 cents.* At none of those times was I taking myself too seriously or worried about How Things Appear to Others, and there's a lesson there if I can only grasp it.

So with that in mind, Tika 2012 is about focus.**
I will focus on:

- Reading 100 books 

- Maintaining the relatively healthy agenda I've been following since October (hello waist! Nice to see you again!)

- Working diligently through the sometimes-oppressive amount of yarn and fiber at my fingertips, with the addendum of keeping incoming purchases to a reasonable incoming/outgoing ratio
- Finding employment
- Finishing my Master's degree
- Applying for PhD programs

But above all, I want to focus on:
- Making good and thoughtful choices


That's a lot of gerunds.





*Feel free to remind me of this next time I'm crowing over being Sooooooo Smart.
**Or, if you'd rather join me in my already-oft-repeated 2012 mantra, "pay the fuck attention, T!"

Finished Objects: 2011

1/1 - Green Vanilla Socks - 316 yds.

3/10 - Composition Scarf - 420 yds.

4/10 - Spidey Blanket #2 - 1738 yds.

5/13 - Hera Mountain Shawl - 1760 yds.

6/19 - Blueblood Island Shawl - 705 yds.

7/9 - Chantilly Lace yarn - 220 yds.

8/19 - Moderne Baby Blanket - 1603 yds.

8/24 - Shetland Shorty - 380 yds.

9/1 - Bright Fig Yarn - 716 yds.

9/5 - Be-Bop-a-Lula Yarn - 960 yds

9/10 - LD Experiment #1 - 48 yds

9/17 - Prairie Lady Yarn - 132 yds.

9/29 - Sacred Scarf - 652 yds.

10/6 - High Seas Shawl - 920 yds.

Addendum

1. I got my family tickets to see It's A Wonderful Life at Ye Old Local Movie Theater. Not one of the 6 of us has ever seen it, so perhaps this will be the beginning of a lovely new Christmas tradition. Equally possible: we will be cynical while my brothers and I sip hot buttered rum out of a flask all night. Either way, fun will be had by all!

2. What is WITH the sudden Lord of the Rings Love Fest going on in Blogland? Does JRR bring out the holiday spirit in readers, or did I miss something (besides The Hobbit trailer, which I admit gave me a warmness in my belly)? Tolkein may have been a visionary, but any good editor worth their salt should have picked up on the ridiculosity of naming your two main villains basically the same name, and then repeating that scheme with two main lady-loves. Plus, I don't care how the leaves crackle underfoot while you walk across the entirety of New Zealand. Twice.

Pull your pitchforks out of storage if you must, but in your heart you know you can't always keep Sauron and Saruman straight.

3. I need more bookshelves. Good thing it's the holiday season! Maybe there's an IKEA gift card in my future...

Who DOES That?!?

Every once in awhile, I astonish myself with the scope of my... let's not call it delusion, let's call it ambition. 

Three days ago, or exactly a week until Christmas, I decided to knit my Christmas gifts. I'll pause to let that sink in. 

Now, I'm not quite delusional ambitious enough to think that even I, with my super powers of knitting at an average pace, could finish a hat and 7 pairs of socks - three of them for mens' size 11-13 feet - in a week. On a good day of watching Dr. Who I can crank out one sock for myself! But it's looking like I'm not in any shape to finish the 11-Mile Quest this year. I did work hard and there are several pieces on the needles within a few hours solid work of counting toward the total, but I miscalculated somewhere and I'm really only in the 6-Mile range when I thought I was farther along. Therefore everyone* is getting yarn for Christmas. 

Ambitious!!

Then I will knit furiously and hope to have everyone's gifts finished by a reasonable date in January. I won't lie to you, holidaylettes, there may be a pair of socks that waits to get Kitchenered together until Jan 1. But you won't tell on me, will you?

There is a wrap-up post coming some time next week (maybe. I've at least been thinking about a wrap-up post) and a solid set of goals for 2012, which includes Reading Many Books and Finishing the Quest as well as perhaps Finding a Job: The Horror! and Applying to Grad School.

*with the exception of Sister of the Art, whose box to OH CANADA is in the mail! Send pictures!! 

It Is December.

Polarlings, you may not have noticed, but it is now the end month of 2011. This means many things!

- I have been a year older for six days

- The 11-Mile Quest is coming to a close

- Christmas is coming and, I assume, the goose is getting fat. Deposit your pennies to the left with all your stuff. 

- The goodreads challenge is nearly over and I am on hooks of the tentered variety over whether or not I will complete my challenge there. Although I'm not sure why, since I completed my original challenge in October and then upped the number of books. I wasn't the Juneau Public Library Summer Reading Champion of 1985-89 for nothing, people. 

- One year from today, my darling CoffeeBean will marry her adorable Theater Teacher. There will be copious tears on my part and I'm saying now that someone may just crash their beach wedding in Hawaii unless that someone (me) gets family dispensation to be there legitimately. 

SO! How many weekends have you spent at home since I last gabbled at you? I have spent... zero.

First I went to Tahoe for my friend Sara's birthday, where it snowed and we stayed in a cabin and generally had a delightful time.

Then the next weekend I got on a plane

And ended up in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico for two weeks where I did nothing more strenuous than debate about whether to lay at the beach or at the pool, and whether it would be a rum-and-chocolate or tequila-and-lime kind of afternoon.

It is SO HARD being me.

THB and I participated in the lesser-known variant of Settlers of Catan called "Stack Your Pieces As High As Possible While Waiting for your Stepfather to Make His Move"

I win! 

We went to a beautiful restaurant

Where the dudes lit our dessert on fire!

I came back happy and tan. It was awesome.

And then the next weekend I drove to San Luis Obispo to sit literally at the feet of the amazing Abby Franquemont, who is a Master Chinchero Weaver and also a Bad Ass Spinner AND, like yours truly, brown on the inside.

And then this last weekend I flew to Phoenix, AZ for my friend Randy's wedding, of which I have no pictures because even though I packed very carefully for 4 days to make sure I had everything I needed to look stunning, I managed to leave my phone and my camera battery charger on the counter. My remembering skills are NOT SO GOOD at 6:30am, it would seem. However, rest assured that I did, indeed, look stunning and managed to be charming and witty for an entire weekend and also managed not to laugh in the face of a Certain Ex, whose current girlfriend is twenty-three years old. Poor child.

And in all this time, I have finished exactly ONE knitted project:

Ella Rae Lace Merino, 290 yds.

I have started and nearly finished several more, but then I look at my pitiful yardage for the year and think, "I could just finish this after January 1 and have a good head start to NEXT year's 12-Mile Quest.." So now there's a box in my room with several all-but-cast-off projects in it. I am nothing if not resourceful!

And then there's this waiting for me as a carrot for finishing a bright red something for a certain Sister of the Art:

Who knew carrots look so much like brain candy?!?

I'm so close. SO CLOSE.

Check It!

Lookie what came in the mail today!

BOOKS!

These are the s-m-r-t books about women's lives in Regency, Victorian, and Georgian England. I also got a couple of mass market fantasy novels to read while I'm in Mexico this month, season 6 of How I Met Your Mother, and season 1 of Big Bang Theory; but those aren't quite so important-looking so they didn't make it into the picture. They also already had places on my shelves, while these need a solid foot of room next to one another. Did I hear someone say "more bookshelves"?

I've been thinking more about knitting a sweater this month, and I've pretty much decided against it. I have a lot of knitting already going on that I'd like to finish in order to complete the 11-Mile Quest, and it's already the fourth of November! Plus there's the wedding coming up in early December that I'd like to knit a shawl for if possible. I've been on a finishing kick over the last couple of days; the nearly-finished items sitting on my coffee table finally banded together and glared at me hard enough that I pulled out my darning needle and went to town:

Day-Glo Socks, Regia and Araucania Solid, 263 yds.

Plain k3p1 rib socks over 56 stitches. How about that neon, huh? Wow.

Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock "Chocolate" and Lisa Souza Hardtwist Merino Petite "South Pacific," 414 yds.
(Large white paperclip for scale)

This was an experiment that I'm quite pleased with! I held both yarns double throughout, and ended up with only 3g total left over. How's that for using up half-skeins of yarn!?! I got the idea from Brie, who regularly doubles up her huge Palette stash to make sweaters with unreal yardage and thus achieves her mileage goals much more often than I do.

Karabella Aurora 8 "Ocean," 159 yds.

I was tickled pink to find these wooden buttons in my button tin last night! I don't remember buying them or even whether I had a specific project in mind for them, but I'm thrilled with how they contrast with the blue of the cowl. They're anchored in the back with random 3/4" buttons so that they don't pull against the yarn itself.

I just realized that none of these 3 projects ever even made it to my Ravelry projects page. That's how scattershot my knitting has been lately! For the end of the year, I'd like to finish my Tide Pool Pi and Rosebud shawls, as well as the Verbena yarn and perhaps the Sacred Tempest if it can stop driving me crazy. I have an idea about re-knitting the sleeves from the shoulder down so I can try them on as I go that might make it worthwhile.

But first, a project I've been sitting on for FAR too long.

Decisions, Decisions

I don't know if you've looked around in the last day or so, but it's November, my poppets. Where I grew up, November would mean we'd had our winter clothes out for over a month already, that the air smelled like cold, and that five months of slush were about to fall out of the sky. Not enough to make a white Christmas, mind you. Just enough to be miserable and make the roads treacherous when it got dark - which was between about 3pm and 8am.

Here in California, however, the cooler weather (a predicted high of 75 today) means that my tomatoes have found a new lease on life:

I sometimes think that this is too far south for me. There is definitely sweater-and-scarf weather here, but true jacket weather is something I don't encounter unless I go up to Lake Tahoe. Speaking of which, that's happening this weekend and I've discovered that with the exception of Cute Fall Boots and one pair of running shoes, I have no footwear that covers both my toes and the tops of my feet. My "winter" shoes are Doc Marten's Mary Janes, for goodness sake!

Ahh, how far the Alaskan has fallen. Unlike the leaves on the trees outside my window.

My October knitting was somewhat lackluster, but I do have some almost-finished objects to show you! When I did my Great Stash Cataloguing of 2011, I pulled out a couple of skeins of yarn that could make some good quick knits. I got around to one of them in the form of this:

Lace Ribbon Cowl, Karabella Yarns

A simple pattern that looks pretty impressive when it's finished is always nice! I knitted it flat and it just needs the ends sewn in and buttons. I don't think I'll even bother with buttonholes; instead I'll just tuck the buttons into the lace wherever is appropriate!

This will eventually be a baby sweater:

Even though at the moment it looks like nothing whatever, all it needs are sleeves and blocking. I was originally going to knit matching baby sweaters for my friends Piper and Kelly, but since Kelly isn't finding out the sex of her baby until December when her husband comes home from Afghanistan and Piper isn't the sort of person to put her baby girl in blue, I instead promised them sweaters after Kelly knows what she's having. Plus, this "newborn sweater" would probably fit Evelyn. Who is two.

Coconuts not included.

In the mean time, the OTHER sweater attempts have become something I haven't knitted in quite awhile:

Socks!

I only have one skein of that striped stuff, so I'm combining it with some Arucania sock yarn I got cheap from WEBS last year. It's a cheerful combination, non? And there will be enough left over in the green to make a whole pair of socks later.

I've also come to the border of my Tide Pool Pi shawl with just over 25% of my yarn left to go - right on target! Now I just need a border pattern. I'm actually going to dig through my collection today and see if I can find something suitable.

And lastly, it's National Sweater Knitting Month, that offshoot of National Novel Writing Month in which knitters try to knit a whole sweater in - you guessed it - a month. I'm waffling on this one; should I really start a new project with the end of my 11-Mile Quest looming on the horizon? You've all seen how terrible I am at finishing fitted garments. Perhaps instead I should tackle the too-tight sleeves on my Sacred Tempest sweater and finish the damn thing. But then there's the Vivian sweater, and the Blackberry Cabled Cardigan, and of course the fabled Central Park Hoodie.

What's a girl to do?

The Progression

First I got a lovely skein of yarn from a friend.

Gifted Helen's Lace, original color

It sat in my stash for a year - or three - and then I got the brilliant idea to overdye it because the colors are just a little too variegated for my taste.

Helen's Lace, overdyed with Jaquard Sapphire Blue

It goes from looking like autumn in Vermont to storm-tossed seas, which inspired its use in a lace pattern called - appropriately enough - High Seas. Then came the inevitable "looking like bubble bath stage."

It is at this point that I always have to go back through my knitting photos and remind myself that I am not screwing up the pattern and to soldier through it. Then I get to the end and I gleefully drop it in a bowl of water to soak; pull out my blocking mats, wires, and pins; squeeze the shawl as dry as I can; then lay it out on the mats to pin.

At this point I usually get "help."

I stretch and pin and stretch some more until the lace creaks. It's a delightfully creepy sound, and it always rides that line between glee and terror that some thread will snap and all my hard work will be for naught. (Homophones are funny! Work with me here.)

Then I chase the cat out, let the piece dry, and get to my favorite part: pulling out the wires and pins. The shawl just stays where I pinned it, all openwork and flat where hours before there was a curled up, bumpy mess.

"Rafting on the High Seas," Helen's lace overdye, 920 yards.

Then I give it to my cousin for her wedding, we go hang out on a boat in the San Francisco Bay, and the whole family gets delightfully sauced while watching the Snowbirds fly overhead during Fleet Week.

Mom, THB, Skye (BFF of the bride), and me. 

On second thought, that last bit might be my favorite part.

Like So Many Things...

I didn't succeed in finishing 7 miles of knitting by October first. I really like lofty goals, especially because when I don't meet them I'm not overly fussed. I really, really would like to finish the 11-Mile Quest by December 31, though. For reals.

I did manage to churn out a bunch of knits, stay project-focused (mostly), and rekindle my love of spinning. I also managed to not buy any more yarn.  I made a very successful Yarn Trade with Spilly Jane in which I gave her my poor unloved Kauni and she gave me some Mad Tosh Merino Light and some Knit Picks Shadow - I'm pretty sure I won that round, but shhh! The overall yardage in was higher than the yardage out, but at least it's yards I'll actually end up knitting. My last September finished knit is my Sacred Scarf, which I cast off and sewed the ends into almost exactly as my train from the Bay Area pulled in to Sacramento yesterday evening. I'm quite pleased with it and will not be giving it away no matter who asks. Unless it's The 4 Closer, because she's effing incredible and I would bribe her with knitting to be my friend if I thought she'd let me. 

Regia Silk/Wool and Cascade Heritage Silk, 652 yds. total

But anyway. 

I have a bunch of things with a good amount of yardage knitted into them already. My High Seas shawl has only 60 rows and the edging to be done, the Tide Pool Pi is less finished but it's been TV knitting, which has to share time with TV spinning (and you know how well that's been going! Yay!). My Rosebud Shawl hasn't seen much action, but a girl can only focus on so many things at once, right? Plus I haven't quite figured out Fleegle's no-purl garter stitch method, so there is a LOT of purling. Ick.

And then there are the bebehs. I'm going to a joint baby shower with two of my good friends on October 29th. They're besties and of course are due right around the same time, but in a fit of pique that can ONLY be aimed at me, one of them refuses to figure out the gender of her baby until it's born. I ask you, how am I supposed to knit matching baby outfits if I don't know whether or not I can make this adorable baby dress?

Evelyn thinks this is SO RUDE. 

And then there's a wedding on December 10th in Arizona that I have to go to, and my Awful Ex will be there so naturally I need to look smashing and have something I can throw over my shoulders that exactly matches my dress and I can say, "Oh, this old thing?" Because that's how you do when you see your Awful Ex at a wedding and you're the only single people there. My secret weapons are: a Groupon for 6 weeks of CrossFit and the 2 weeks I'll be spending in Mexico in November.  And some killer shoes.*

Well, it lacks 50 minutes to October first, so I think I'll plug myself back in to Pride and Prejudice and see if I can knock some of those rows out of the High Seas shawl. I could conceivably finish it tomorrow, and then there would be pictures! 

*Whether they slay him or kill me first is up for debate.

The Long Draw

I've decided it's time to learn how to spin.

"What?" I hear you say. "Isn't that handspun in your last post?" Well, yes, it is. And I spun it, which means I know how to spin already.

What I mean is, I'd like to know that such-and-such a fiber would be best spun such-and-such a way, to be able to spin multiple thicknesses of yarn on purpose (as opposed to varying degrees of thin), to spin fluffy yarns or tight sock yarns as I choose, and to spin stuff like this for fun:

Sparkles! Flowers! So cheerful! 

Puffy! The orange reminds me of a certain favorite Sister of the Art for some reason...

Basically, I want to be the boss of my spinning.

Now that my desires have been established, let me take you back to the very early days of my current knitting career. I learned to knit English style, with the working yarn in my right hand. In its infinite wisdom, the Internet informed me that this was not, in fact, the only way to knit! I found a video, watched it a mazillion times, cursed a lot, and learned to knit Continental, with the working yarn in my left hand. It was, to say the least, an interesting experience to take something my muscles already knew how to do and try to change it.

Learning to spin long draw is much like that experience. Here is my first attempt, rudely chain-plied and completely unstable, unstructured and not really good for anything:

48 yards!

Still, it's finished, and I learned something. For the next attempt I dug into my Copperpot Woolies bag and pulled out 5.1 oz of the Prairie Lady colorway. I don't really know why I bought this one, although I suspect the wool fumes may have something to do with it. The colors aren't my favorite (what gave it away?), so it was first in line to become Long Draw Experiment #2:

132 yds., sport-to-bulky weight

This one worked out better, although I still have some serious kinks to work out with the next experiment, which will happen when I come back from Portland next week.

In the mean time, I've revived a project I started back when I was still living in San Jose. I haven't done a lot of spinning since then so I have no idea why it's easier this time around, but it is. When I started spinning this Falkland from Pigeon Roof Studios, it immediately spun very fine. I've never really encountered a yarn that "wanted" to spin at a certain weight, but this one definitely does. With a very little fluffing and pre-drafting - which might account for it being easier to spin now - it wound onto the bobbin at a very satisfactory rate.

I don't have any illusions that this yarn will be finished before October; I got 2 braids as a gift from my friend Colleen that weight in at 232 grams, of which I've spun... 32 grams. It'll make a lovely addition to my spun yarn total by the end of the year, though!

Fiber Surprise!

On Monday I delved into my Box of Surprise Spinning and pulled out one of the Big Bags. What can I say? After a weekend of completed spinning projects, I was feeling cocky.

Remember me from Monday? I knew you would.

Even though I packed the bags myself, and even though I thought I had an idea of what could be in it, I still jumped up and down a little and squealed "Ooooooo! Yay!" when I opened it.

It feels like sheepy clouds.

I should hide things from myself more often if I'm that easily delighted, is what I'm saying.