The OpArt baby blanket continues to grow. Being all garter stitch with very obvious markers to wake the fingers up when the four increase points are reached, it's an autopilot project, ideal for knitting while watching subtitled movies:

Right now it's approximately 22 inches across, and I'm not finished with the second 6-ridge (12 row) set of stripes. The pattern continues on for four more stripes, one each of 7, 8, 9, and 10 ridges, alternating colors (a larger size goes on for two more stripes of 11 and 12 ridges respectively). I'll keep going until I either run out of yarn, or I feel the thing is big enough to be a lap/basket/car seat blanket - at least another two stripes. The jury is still out on whether or not I'll end off with one last stripe of orange. The Record 210 yarn is holding out fine. I'm on my third skein of each color, and have at least two more of each as yet untouched. I did hit a couple of poorly plied spots in one skein of the yellow. They were bad enough to excise rather than work in, although that made even more ends.

For the record, given the vast number of ends, I've been finishing them off as I go rather than waiting until the knitting is complete. I strongly recommend doing it that way, unless you've got a "finishing party" to go to.

What subtitled movie was I watching? Sansho the Bailiff. It's from famous Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi, made in 1954. It's bout the development of compassion in a brutal time. In the movie the family of a noble minded official is torn apart, and the children grow up in the most wretched of circumstances, yet maintain their absent father's ideals. An excellent film, but very affecting. Bring a box of tissues.

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The amazing flood of fecundity exhibited by my friends and co-workers has not yet crested. More baby gifts are required. Being at this moment long on leftover yarn but short on inspiration and time I was delighted to notice something simple and clever in Knitty. Melissa Dominguez' OpArt baby blanket fits the bill. It's similar in principle to the Centerpiece Treasure pattern offered by Lion Brand, which I believe was a licensed outgrowth of a square published in the first Knitters Magazine Afghan competition in the spring of 1995. All are squares knit center out, relying on a simple non-eyelet increase in the corners to create a spiraling effect, and stripes in multiple colors to magnify the visual spiral effect. Melissa's very successful bit of cleverness is to graduate the width of the stripes in the spiral throughout the piece, and limit the colors used to two. That takes the pleasing but static swirl and gives it depth and a striking appearance very true to her Op Art inspiration.

Diving into the stash of remnants, knowing that exact gauge doesn't matter in this type of project, I came up with some Austermann Record 210 - a non-mercerized cotton. It's listed on the label as Aran weight (18 stitches/27 rows =4 inches or 10cm), but I found in the past that it knits up closer to Worsted (20 stitches = 4 inches). I used it before to make my citrus-color Ridged Raglan pullover from another pre-2000 issue of Knitters, back before they fell into their current self-referential rut.

210 is a durable matte-finish cotton that holds its color and shape through repeated washings, after a small bit of shrinkage in the first wash. It's biggest drawback is that it's composed of lots of small plies and isn't very tightly twisted, so it splits like crazy while being worked. I'm using US #6s (4mm) and am getting a gauge of 5spi in garter stitch.

I'm pretty sure I have enough of the lemon and lime to make up a small crib or travel size throw. If not, I'll figure out a way to introduce the orange. Perhaps as a framing stripe around the outside. In any case, the thing is already on its way:

You can see Melissa's spiral effect and illusion of depth already starting. You'll also note the one bit of annoyance inherent in this type of pattern. Each stripe means two ends to finish off. I've ended off the first four stripe's worth so I could see the joins would look, but you can see the chain of holes at 2:00 - each one signaling two more strands to tame.

I'll keep going on this one until I run out of yarn. At that point, it will be big enough. Thank you Melissa!

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For those who have asked, the dragon panel pattern from the Siebmacher modelbook I regraphed for The New Carolingian Modelbook has been posted over at Bibliodyssey.



Apologies to anyone who wondered why this was posted three times.  I've had problems wrestling with the "post away from home" feature.

Enjoy!

Progress on all fronts, but slow progress here. My green tablecloth continues to grow, at the glacial pace of of four rounds per week due to the massive number of stitches per round. I've got two projects in the noodling stage, things that give me ample daydreaming fodder for my commute. One is a rescue of glorious fall foliage color hand-painted yarn from a project long consigned to my Chest of Knitting Horrors™. The other is the long patterned stockings inspired by the fashion clip I posted two weeks ago.

I don't know how other people design things, but my own processes are more like back burner simmering than line cook production. But this can happen in one of two ways.

The first is more project-centric. An idea occurs, I chew on it a while, running through mental CADD rotations to visualize it in three dimensions. Sometimes an idea dies during this process. Some factor (or more usually, reality) makes me realize that the thing can't be knit or would not have a high probability of success. Other times all things fall into place. I see the finished product, the materials and techniques required, and have worked out all but the final math and gauge long before I pick up the needles. I do this think-work mostly during my commute back and forth to work, and its one of those insidious things that I have to fight off during long, boring meetings. I'd say about half of my projects start this way, and tend to finish almost all of them.

The second is more yarn-centric. If I have a particular yarn in hand the process works a bit differently. It moves out of the think stage very quickly, and often with only the vaguest of notions on how to proceed. In this case I get the yarn on the needles and begin to play. That's how the Kureopatora's Snake happened. I stumbled across a couple of left over skeins of the stuff and my magpie color sense was rekindled. I needed a scarf to give as a gift and the yarn's colors held me in thrall, so I sat down and played. It took me half a movie's worth of fiddling to get started, but the thing shaped up quickly after that. I ended up ripping out my beginning and starting a second time so I could write down what I had been doing before I forgot.

Something similar happened when I did my old See Saw Socks pattern. Regia Ringel was new then, and not widely distributed. I ran across a couple of skeins in a discount bin at the old Women's Industrial Union crafts shop downtown in Boston (now long gone). The shop person lamented that the colors were nice, but no one was buying this splotchy stuff. Now stripers are understood and appreciated but back then, there being no knit samples or on-line pix of the finished product, the piebald skeins were a hard sell. I started the toe-ups and was delighted by the striping, but didn't want to make a boring-to-knit all stockinette ankle. So having determined the depth of each stripe (more or less) I began to play with various directionally skewed designs that worked into my stitch count and that row count. And serendipity hit:

Please don't ask me for the pattern. I sold the original pattern and all reprint rights for See Saw to KnitNet. They've subsequently featured it twice in their newsletter. If you want it, you'll have to go through them.

While the remaining half of my projects do begin with the yarn instead of the extended think session, it's worth noting that my most spectacular failures and most happy successes all came from this method. The sobering note is that failures that began with the yarn instead of the planning do outnumber the successes, and most of my Chest of Knitting Horrors™ residents were yarn-inspired.

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Elder daughter's Walker Learn to Knit book afghan continues to grow. She's working in Cascade 220, in assorted greens gleaned from the orphan skein shelf at Wild & Woolly in Lexington (our local yarn shop).

Her goal is to have enough finished by next fall to furnish herself with an off-to-college blanket. Younger daughter has decided that crochet is easier for her to handle than knitting, and armed with books from my library and yarn from my stash, is making a stab at a zig-zag blanket for her favorite stuffed animal. So the transmission of obsession is prospering here at String.

On my own knitting - I am making good albeit slow progress on the olive green tablecloth. The section I'm working now is rather spider-webby. It's an eternity of rows alternating between [S2-k1-PSSO, (YO)2] and [K (K1,P1)] to make an infinitude of center double decrease columns with large eyelets between them. Given that the piece has something close to 1,200 stitches per round at this point, each row takes forever. Especially the double decrease row. The last thing I want to do is miss a loop. So progress is slow to accumulate, especially because I want this spider web area to be at least six to eight inches deep (yes I do have the play in the linking brides to accommodate the fixed stitch count of this patten and corresponding total diameter increase of the round cloth over the added depth).

In other news, I heard that a local yarn source is closing. Not my favorite shop (thank goodness), but a two-outlet big-box store that focused mostly on fabric and decorating, that greatly expanded and then shrank its yarn department in response to the scarf knitting fad of a couple of years ago. I was always ambivalent about it. Although I did buy fabric there on occasion, didn't buy their yarn because I wasn't fond of that store's effect on other area yarn shops. At one point they absorbed several of the better mid-range suppliers' products, then using their volume purchase to engineer discounts from the makers, sold those yarns at prices significantly lower than smaller stores could manage. Doing this they cornered the market on (for example) Plymouth Lopi. Small knitshops could no longer afford to stock it and lost significant foot traffic as a result. Now the big box store is closing. No more yarn, no more fabric.

Now the reversal of yarn sales wasn't the cause. I suspect rising rents (the mall in which it is located has expanded considerably in the past two years), the general decrease in discretionary spending (much of their revenue was from their home decoration department), and a decrease in interest in quilting and home sewing in general. Most of the times I hit the fabric department, I was the youngest person shopping, and being a Boomer, I'm no longer a sweet, young thing. Changes in the economy, changing customer demographics, crashes in the popularity of multiple hobbies, rising infrastructure costs all add up to the loss.

Now there's a new problem. Where to buy fabric? What's left in the inner/outer suburb belt here is woefully inadequate - shops that have scaled back their sewing departments in favor of scrapbooking and other low-investment/low skill hobbies. There are a couple of small stores scattered around, useful but with very limited stocks. I haven't been downtown to what used to be the garment district in Boston in years. It used to be the home of several stores where bolts went to die - remnant shops and mill end type places. But that was long ago, and that neighborhood has gone upscale.

In the mean time, I note the store's passing, plus the closing of a couple of the smaller yarn shops that opened up at the crest of the scarf knitting fad, and hope that retrenchment will leave us with local yarn stores. I for one need to see and feel yarn for inspiration - the texture, the drape, the weight, the loft, and most of all - the color. I can't buy blind off the web, based on photos, descriptions, and reviews - even those on wiseNeedle. I value the expertise and help available at local shops, and am willing to pay a small surcharge per skein to support that help (rather than spending it on shipping). And most of all, I like the experience of seeing and evaluating alternatives in person, being able to take leaps of inspiration based on the stock of yarns and patterns at hand.

Perhaps the rise in Internet yarn shopping is part of the stampede towards sameness I see across many knitters' projects reported on line. Someone knits something, and it turns out quite well. Other well-connected knitters see the success and want to duplicate it. So they too buy the same pattern and same yarn. Both being known entities, purchase sight-unseen is a viable option. Now there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing any of that, knitting up something that's a proven winner, or using the exact yarns (or even colors) specified in a pattern or that someone else has used. It's safe. It's proven, and the chances of success are magnified. But it's not the way I knit. And I'm guessing that there are other "bungie jumping" knitters out there that find the proliferation of the latest got-to-knit item stifling, and yearn for a wander through a warren of tactile and visual inspiration. If you're out there, please speak up. And visit your local yarn shop before it's gone, too.

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