Archive for December, 2007

It’s not all about ideas, you know.

Saturday, December 29th, 2007

I wonder if my formatting is going to work this time.

Now. It’s time for an end of the year post, isn’t it? Well, I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait for that. I just don’t have the energy or motivation to think about just how much I haven’t done of late.

I’ve got two goals – get those cranes strung up and hung in the yarn shop. Which doesn’t mean I’m going to give up on the pictures of cranes left in random locations (not that I’m going out in the kind of slush-falling-from-the-sky weather this area is prone to), it just means I want to do something large and final, and I don’t have a fire-pit to burn everything in.

Second goal – make a series of pdf broadsides and one-sheet mini-books, put them into my online portfolio and see if anyone wants them. The problem with that is … well, you know how it is. I leave work when I can extricate myself from the craziness, all I want is a cup of coffee and some time to be not at work, and next thing I know, I’m falling asleep in my dinner. At that point, trying to make anything is kind of a losing proposition. If I’m very clever, maybe one a week. I’m not sure I’m that clever, given the extent to which that means I have to find fifty-two … wait, 52? Seriously? That’s a lot … bits of out of copyright or creative-commons text that I want to make broadsides out of. Best to think big, though, I suppose. There’s a chance that doing some designing will take my mind off the drudgery of being a grown-up. (I miss naptime and cookies after. I also miss being able to play hooky without dire consequences. Maybe I should go back to school.)

In which I block, and am amazed.

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

It took me long enough to realize this – but boy howdy, blocking is like magic. 

There are before and after pictures, but it has been a very long night with perhaps a bit too much shoveling involved, and I don’t have the energy to dig up my camera cables. Instead, I’ll write about blocking.

Did I mention it’s like magic? I had a couple of scarves (finished last year, before I discovered the joys of pinning damp things), and today seemed like a good day to actually finish them properly. One of them was this sort of shortish lumpy Van Dyke lace scarf in Malabrigo (I’m surprised it hadn’t felted as revenge for being ignored, given that Malabrigo seems to felt if you look at it funny…) and one of them was actually something I finished recently, a pine tree lace pattern in some Cascade yarn. They’re both, erm, much longer – like, well, actually scarf-length. And the lace! It opened up in the most amazing way… I know, the seasoned knitters are all out there going “and what have we all been telling you for years now,” but sometimes it takes some hands-on experience to believe this kind of thing. After all, somebody says “no, really, you get this piece of knitting wet, and pin it out, and all of a sudden it’s flat and open and the stitches even out and if it’s lace it opens up so you can actually see the yarnovers” and actually it sounds kind of crazy.  

Doing shawls is even better. There was this triangle shawl (really satisfying knit, the kind of incredibly simple thing that looks awfully classy), right, that I finished probably last year sometime. It was, oh, kind of big enough. The yarn was pretty nice, so it was ok. It just wasn’t really worth the effort. Well. Let me tell you, pinning that out was … enlightening. I think it may have nearly doubled in size. I think the top edge might actually be the length of my wingspan, and the bottom point stretched out beyond belief – unless you’ve been blocking all your lace, like a clever person, and then you’d believe it – and there are visible yarnovers and, well, it looks kind of amazing.

The final thing, and the one that I am just astonished by, is this feather and fan wrap I did back before I lived somewhere cold, so I didn’t really care that it was tiny. It was maybe three feet long, although quite possibly shorter, and a foot wide. We’re talking barely long enough to wrap around my neck, and not really wide enough to wrap in that useful over-the-head way one ought to be able to wear a shawl. It blocked out to the width of a full-sized mattress, and a good couple of feet wide. Ok, to be honest, this isn’t actually all that surprising – I did knit it on largish needles in this strangely unspun yarn – but wow, it’s stunning.

I like this finishing things plan. It means I can start something new. (After I finish my socks, ’cause my toes are cold.) 

So much time, so little to do … Strike that. Reverse it.

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

Winter does tend to be the time of year I get most overwhelmed with projects. I blame the lack of sunlight, which I understand is not entirely fair. (This is probably why I don’t have a graduate degree. You don’t actually get to slack off in the winter when you’re in school.)That said, it’s not really that I have too many projects in process – two pairs of socks, sure, a couple of shawls, some scarves, and that *expletive deleted* sweater that I thought was a good idea two years ago. Hmm. Also the quilts, and the books, and a notebook full of ideas for multi-media wall art. I suppose that might be too many projects by some definitions. Mostly I say it just guarantees that I won’t get bored anytime soon. (Unless I get tired of knitting miles and miles of tiny round stockinette.) 

The problem, the more I think about it, isn’t the number of projects. It’s my bizarre inability to organize myself. Given that the last time I was even a little bit artistically organized, I was working a completely different kind of day job, I think it’s that I spend forty hours a week sorting things. When I get home, the last thing I want to do is keep sorting. (This explains the not-order I keep my books in, too.) Mostly, that’s ok, except sometimes I think of something I want to do which I totally have the materials for and I can’t remember what I did with them. Or I lose track of a project for months … sometimes that works out all right, though, and when I come back to it I feel much less frazzled about it. 

Like stitch markers. I was totally going to make stitch markers, but the I can’t find the bag of rings I know I have. Not useful at all. The solution, obviously, is to clean up and organize. At least then the stalling point wouldn’t be finding things, right? Of course. Makes perfect sense.

Which brings me back to that winter thing – it’s cold. It’s dark. Come on, do you really think I want to be sitting around sorting all the time? No way. Give me hot cocoa and a book to curl up with. 

I’m going to solve this problem by giving myself permission to continue being kind of disorganized all winter, and noodling around on projects when I’m actually inclined to but mostly tucking my toes under a nice warm blanket and reading. Or, you know, plotting. Which means, actually, that in the spring I need to organize. Take a vacation and sort my life, instead of someone else’s. I’ll make a note of it – I did get a calendar already.

Just for good measure, I’ve got a picture of a dragonfly.dragonfly.jpg 

Posts I thought I’d already written.

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

So there are a couple of posts I thought I’d made last month (Good grief. Time does fly this time of year. Seems like only last week it was warm enough to sit outside without gloves on.) which clearly I was making up in my head. Also a couple of newish ones. Fortunately, the procrastination has some side-benefits. Most of which come in the form of pictures. First nifty thing – one of the lovely ladies of Wednesday night knitting had a party with fun activities – sugar skulls! Which I’d been wanting to play with for ages. They were absolutely as much fun as I thought they’d be.

sugarskulls.jpg 

Second nifty thing – I blocked some more lace. The red scarf (which I assure you is actually a nice dark red and not that awful bright orangey thing my camera wants you to believe it is) was finished something like two years ago, and languished in a box being all small and not actually very interesting until last week, when … well, blocking is totally magic. The green doily got blocked almost as soon as I finished casting off, ’cause it was so darn neat and so intensely lumpy and awful straight off the needles. I think I might want to make more doilies; they’re incredibly satisfying and so much faster than shawls.

redlace.jpg 

greenbefore.jpg 

greencenter.jpg 

Speaking of which, yeah, I finally finished the blue jellyfish shawl. It’s not blocked yet, though, since I need something like my bed to pin it to and frankly I’d like to be able to sleep on a nice dry mattress.I’ve got blue silky wool to finish the nerdy morse code scarf, but there’s some major charting left to do, so that’s going to have to wait. It’s not like I don’t have anything to do in the meantime, though, as I’ve got twenty-five rows left on the doily blanket (the one brooklyntweed posted on way back in august) and a couple of pairs of socks and scarves for relatives.  Speaking of which, why did I agree to make a non-knitter a pair of wool socks? Aside from the fact that the colorway had her name written all over it. That doesn’t count.  Special bonus picture – a finished nautilus in cashmere and angora, with fancy button eyes and loose ends like you wouldn’t believe.

finishednautie.jpg 

Now, if my time-management skills were up to par, I’d say, oh, I’ll finish my blanket and the second sock of the current pair, and get to work on some of the weirder non-knitting projects I have on back burners. I think I’ve known myself long enough to realize just how foolish that kind of assumption is. I choose to blame the lack of space to keep my sewing machine set up for the quilt not being done. Ah, well, it’s not like I’ve got hard and fast deadlines on any of these things. Actually, that’s quite refreshing when I stop to think about it. Working on a deadline has its advantages, certainly, but there’s a whole lot to be said for leisurely progress (as long as there is progress, and I think I’m at least still managing that).  While I’m at this ridiculously long update, there’s been some changes to the website, including a shiny new anti-thesis proposal. I’m a whole lot happier with this anti-thesis than I was with my thesis, which is probably indicative of some major attitude problem on my part. This surprises nobody, I’m sure. In any case, now that I’ve got an anti-thesis proposal that actually makes sense with my theories of artistic practice and creation, all that remains is to … focus on making and stop fretting about finishing or how I never seem to have time to do everything (a gal does have to sleep once in a while, unfortunately).