A Bluestocking Knits

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    Booking Through Thursday: ‘Fess Up

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    Booking Through Thursday‘s questions for today call for a little confession —

    1. What books have you read that you hate to admit reading? (You can either limit this to recent reads or go way back in time. Your choice.)  I can think of two, one that I’m amused to confess that I read, and one that I now wish I hadn’t read. 
    2. Why? One was a certain novel — can’t remember the author or title at the moment — that was a time-travel story in which the heroine goes back to Elizabethan England, combining two favorite elements of mine.  It was good-humored but pretty sleazy.  I kept worrying about the poor heroine’s back, the rug burns she must have been getting from all of the sex on the floor.  I don’t think that was the point of the story.  I also read some years ago a (probably self-published) nonfiction book about the Lindbergh baby, whose author was determined to prove that Col. Lindbergh himself was responsible for the baby’s death.  The hypothesis made sense, but the author was so vindictive (and such a poor writer) that even years later it is unpleasant to think about.

  • Small Article of the Hand Knitting

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    I had a craving to knit something from the stuff I bought at GB Woollen in Kowloon Bay last July, the "Maurice" wool from a Japanese company called Puppy — I’m assuming that this link is the same company, but well, I just don’t know for sure.  This wool is in rich jewel-tones, thick and soft with the color shadings coming at fairly random moments, so that unlike, say, Silk Garden‘s blocks or stripes of color, these make subtle dashes.  Very pretty.  Like Silk Garden, too, it occasionally surprises with a burst of something new — I got through I think three balls before the turquoise joined in!

    I’ve just spent a lot of time, I confess, reading Babelfish Japanese-to-English translations from the Puppy page, things like, "The disappointment hue which it sees from the computer screen follows in the monitor and with actual hue it is accurate and there is a water service which will not agree."  (I can follow some of this, but the "water service" part has me stumped.)

    Ribwarmer_side1

    I am in fact making Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Ribwarmer from Knitting Workshop.  The weather is cooler, and my thoughts turn to sweaters and scarves.  This piece looks reassuringly just like the diagram in the book — here one side front is on the left, one side back on the right, with the open rectangle being the armhole (I decided to graft the shoulder seams instead of sewing them, so cast on provisionally).  I haven’t done many of EZ’s patterns.  She seems to be the country mouse to Rowan’s city mouse, but then I’ve always been torn between the two.

    Here is a close-up — you can see in some places how the colors blend sometimes two at a time, teal with rose, olive with teal, as they shift.

    Maurice_detail

    ("Ribwarmer"!  It’s, what, all of 60F/15C outside.  I’m such a lightweight.)

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    Saturday Stuff

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    Some miscellaneous thoughts this evening —

    I’ve never actually knitted with the jewelry kind of stitch markers before this — always admired the variety and beauty of ones I’ve seen on other people’s blogs — but find myself a little bit vexed by the maneuvers I have to go through to work with these.  A marker between two RS knit stitches isn’t a problem — it’s when the marker is hanging on the other side of the work, and you must move the yarn to the front, slip the marker, and put the yarn back, or between a knit/purl or purl/knit sequence and you must move the marker either before or after you move the yarn for the different stitch, and it makes a difference, depending on which is first in the combination.  Otherwise, Belle ends up with the yarn strapped around her waist, thus —

    Oversized_stitchmarker

    But it’s a niggly annoyance, and not yet enough to make me take out the markers altogether!

    Well, tomorrow is my choir’s concert, so I can at last get Honegger‘s "King David" out of my head.  A strange, clashing, cacophanous piece, and hard to sing.  If I liked it, the difficulty in singing it wouldn’t be a problem, but unfortunately the parts I do like are few and far between the parts I don’t.  I am certainly looking forward to starting on Vivaldi’s "Gloria" on Monday for the Christmas concert!  (I adore Vivaldi.  Some people complain about his repetitiveness — I can’t remember at the moment who quipped that Vivaldi "wrote the same concerto 500 times" — but it doesn’t bother me.  I find his music, even the often-melancholy cello concertos, to be wonderfully soul-refreshing, and it is rare that my spirits are not lifted by a lute concerto.  The "repetitiveness" I see as a friendly familiarity, a recognizability, like so much of Mozart, or even Dickens or Jane Austen.)

    The girls and I watched our new "Cinderella" DVD last night, while I knitted.  They were frightened by the stepmother — that gloomy hallway, with her wicked eyes glowing in the shadows of the bedcurtains — and they laughed out loud at the clever mice outwitting that mean old cat.  Laura’s face as she watched Cinderella’s transformation from servant girl to princess was as beautiful and moving as the moment.

    Cinder5

    By the way; there is an interesting article at Mouse Planet (where this image is from) about the story, its various versions and what Walt Disney took from each, and lessons to be learned from the story.

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    Booking Through Thursday: Book Clubs

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    Today’s Booking Through Thursday is about reading groups —

    This refers to the reading type of book club, where members all read the same book, then gather to discuss it.

    1. Do you, or have you, ever belonged to a book club? No, I never have.  I’ve thought about it, and am still tempted now and then to join one of the two knitting/reading online groups I know of, Knit One, Read Too and Knit the Classics.
    2. Why, or why not? I like the idea of reading and talking about a book with other people — like-minded or not, as it may be.  My senior project class was on Mark Twain, and we read a great number of his books and discussed them excitedly, passionately, late into the night, and still managed to leave a lot to be said.  Great fun.  Why I haven’t joined a book group is mostly due to time, that reading on a fairly strict timetable is still difficult for me, both because I don’t like being rushed and because I have a lot of distractions.  (I also have a nagging reluctance to read books that I have little or no interest in.  Yes, there are many wonderful books out there that I would not have ordinarily given a second look.  But there are many that I am interested in and I haven’t read yet.  I might find that vowing to overcome my bias against "the uninteresting choice of the month" is finally what does get me to join a reading club!
    3. If you are in a book club, or were once, what did you like about it?
    4. What did you dislike about the book club?

    (Funny, what I have reservations about with knitalongs — making the same thing as everybody else — is actually what I would like about reading clubs — reading the same thing, and talking about it, finding out what other people see in a work, perhaps different from my reading and perhaps not, deepening and enriching the reading experience for everyone.  That said, it is often very interesting to see the different ways that people can make a Clapotis….)

  • Rereading

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    I have been spending the last few rainy evenings with "Rereadings" edited by Anne Fadiman, author of another favorite of mine, "Ex Libris", and formerly the editor of "The American Scholar", a feature of which was apparently essays on rereading.  (I mentally smack my forehead, as I’ve long thought it would be a great idea to review older books and classics, and now it seems that I’ve missed some eight years’ worth of the very thing!).  "Rereadings" is a collection of seventeen of these essays, from authors as diverse as Vivian Gornick, Pico Iyer, Philip Lopate, and Sven Birkerts, and others — but all readers, and all able to vividly convey the delights and, it must be said, now and then the disappointments of rereading old favorites.  Almost all of the titles are familiar to me from my years of shelving and cataloging untold numbers of them, but I have read less than half, and it is interesting to see that even though I’ve never read, say, the Helen Dore Boylston "Sue Barton" series, Katherine Ashenburg’s sense of amazement at both the liveliness of the writing and the stereotypes are still familiar to me.

    Rereadings

    And this is, by the way, a handsome little volume.  The dust jacket is simple and elegant, a sibling to "Ex Libris," and the edge is trimmed to a tidy curve that fits the tip of my finger perfectly.  It is true that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but certainly it is very pleasant to read a book that satisfies the eye as well as the mind.  (I have now spent far too much time this morning trying to eliminate the distortion from the digital camera of the solid lines around the cream-colored boxes on the dust jacket.  Please be assured that the lines on "Rereadings" are not dashed, but straight and clean, as on "Ex Libris."  As much as I would like to spend any number of hours figuring out why the one comes out right and the other doesn’t in the same photo, time, tide, and the kindergarten bell wait for no mother.)

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    It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like…

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    Christmas? already?  Yes, Country Living‘s Holiday issue is on the newsstands.  Let’s not call it over-anticipation, but practicality and advance preparation, for one of the articles is called "’Tis the season to be … knitting!", featuring these funky stockings (sic),

    Funky_stockings

    and other projects from Melanie Falick’s new book, "Handknit Holidays".  (This is the first I’ve heard of this book, but I must confess that I’m intrigued, as for some time I’ve harbored secret hankerings for a knitted treeskirt.)

  • From the Garden

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    "Souvenir de la Malmaison" —

    Souvenir_de_la_malmaison

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    Booking Through Thursday: How Bad is Bad?

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    Booking Through Thursday‘s questions for today are about books we don’t like!

    Here’s another set of questions from Nicki.

    1. What’s the worst book you’ve ever read?  It’s actually rather difficult to think of one.  I used to slog through a book even if I wasn’t enjoying it, but these days time is too valuable to waste on junk.  I tend to forget about them except for a vague sense of disappoinment.
    2. What’s the book you hated the most?  "Hate" is too strong a word.  "Disappointed," "disgusted," and "bored" are much more likely for me.  The last disappointing book that I actually finished was a Penelope Lively novel that I had to really work to get through — I’ve really enjoyed her earlier novels, so I kept hoping for a spark of inspiration, but it never came.  I didn’t make it through "Middlemarch," even though I had to write a paper on it.
    3. Is the answer the same to both questions? If not, why not? I guess that the answers to the first question would be more related to the quality of the grammar, typesetting and printing, etc. and the answers to the second question would be more often about the content, the ideas presented and the way that the characters (if fiction) interest me.
    4. Why was this book (or these books) so bad? Considering how many books I’ve read in my lifetime, the "bad" list is pretty short.  I think I’ve skewed the poll a little bit, though, in that I tend not to even bother with books I think I won’t like!

  • Deconstructing the Centered Eyelet

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    Have been humming along with Amy Detjen’s Beginner’s Triangle shawl, featuring the Centered Eyelet.  This is an interesting technique, and prompted me to take a closer look at it.  Frankly, I am amazed at the kind of mind that would come up with something that includes "k second st but do not remove from LH needle".  I say this with the utmost admiration, as it would certainly never occur to me to do anything of the sort, being a fairly unadventurous knitter technique-wise!

    Here is the problem —

    Some_eyelets

    that eyelets, worked either as k2tog, yo (bottom row) or as yo, ssk (middle row), are asymmetrical, leaning either to one side or the other.  This could be partly avoided with working the eyelets as ssk, yo (top row), but even though this disguises the slant somewhat, it is still obvious that there is a decrease on one side and none on the other.

    Of course, this slant or running stitch can be used decoratively, as in this little digression, in which the slant appears to travel upwards in a nice little s-curve —

    Running_eyelets

    But Detjen wanted to have rows of eyelets that crossed one another in a diamond-shaped pattern, and here the lack of symmetry bothered her.

    Leaning_x

    Notice the rather lackadaisical point where the X crosses (I used yo, ssk).  That single eyelet is certainly in the middle, but it is not centered, as the decrease makes the running sts, especially the ones traveling from lower right on each X to upper left, look bulky.  It would probably have been better to work a different decrease, as at least that side of the X would have a perfect line of running sts from bottom to top, but it would still not have been symmetrical.

    Here is Detjen’s solution, the centered eyelet:

    Centered_eyelet_2_2   

    (Worked over 3 sts; 3 sts remain.)  Sl first st knitwise, k second st but do not remove from LH needle, psso, yo, k2tog (3rd and 2nd sts).  On the next row (WS), k into st below each yo of the centered eyelet.  The garter st version on the left is as in the Beginner’s Triangle; the st st version, on the right, is for clarity.  (Note that in the stockinette version, I had to tweak the sts afterwards with the point of a needle, as they didn’t sit quite right.  The one on the left is untweaked, to show how it looks at first.)

    Here are the steps for the centered eyelet (garter st version), partially broken down:

    "Sl first st knitwise, k second st but do not remove from LH needle…"

    Do_not_remove

    "psso…"

    Sl_st_over

    "yo…"

    Yarn_over

    "k2tog (3rd and 2nd sts)…."

    K2tog

    Centered_eyelet

    On the WS row, at the yo of the centered eyelet, "K into st 1 row below…."

    Ws_k_into_st_below

    Detjen says that she based the centered eyelet on Robert Powell’s 3-into-2 decrease, which is identical to the centered eyelet but without the yo in the middle (and so without the "k into st below" in the second row as well).

    Here is the beta version, if you will, of the centered eyelet:

    Centered_eyelet_beta

    Notice the horizontal bar across the eyelet.  (Interestingly, the bar is in the middle of the eyelet in the garter st version, and across the top of it in st st.)  On the next (WS) row, knitting into the st below the yo (and of course including the yo, which gave me pause for a moment) solves this problem, by simply pulling the bar up out of the way. On the st st version, you would purl into the stitch below.

    Two Xs worked with the centered eyelet, one in garter and one in st st, nice and tidy:

    Centered_eyelet_x

    Leaning_x_small Centered_eyelet_x_small

    It might be interesting to try this in an all-over eyelet pattern….

    And as a bonus, we can now do the 3-into-2 decrease!

    3_into_2

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    Booking Through Thursday: Inconvenient

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    Booking Through Thursday‘s questions for today are similar to last week’s, but with a bit of a spin:

    Go get a book that is in the most inconvenient place in your home.

    1. What corner of your house did you dig this book out of?   Actually, I went out to the garage and moved a bundle of newspapers to get to a stack of boxes filled with the books we’d stored so that we could ship a bookcase with us to Hong Kong last February.  The book I chose today was not really the hardest one to get to, but after heaving four rather heavy boxes around, I decided to not even open the fifth.  (I skipped the most "inconvenient" book that was actually in the house, "Patterns of Fashion 2 : Englishwomen’s dresses and their construction c. 1860-1940" by Janet Arnold, because it has only 88 pages!)
    2. What are the book’s title and author? "Fathom Five" by Robert Westall.
    3. Turn to page 127. Locate the third paragraph, first sentence. Type that sentence here: "The woman’s pinny had flowers on it."
    4. Does the sentence make sense out of context? I think it’s a bit too simple to make much sense out of context.
    5. Seeing it sitting here by itself, out of the book, is it funny? Sad? Strange? Does it make you want to explore its source? I didn’t recall many of the details in this story, just a memory of being utterly absorbed by it.  To me, the sentence has a rather chilling poignance, but then I remember the rest of Westall’s stories, too (which are mostly for teens, with one adult non-fiction that I know of).  I first read this book after watching the fascinating  "Danger UXB" on PBS, when anything on Britain during WWII caught my eye.  When I finished "Fathom Five," I searched out "The Machine Gunners", the first book featuring Chas McGill of "Fathom Five," and in fact as many of Westall’s books as I could find.  I still have all that I did — he’s a fabulous writer, with a deceptively easy style.  Sometimes his books are realistic, sometimes with a supernatural twist, always engrossing.  I remember reading one of his books, "The Watch House," I think, sitting in the living room of the family home — I can picture the moment still — feeling the hairs on the back of my neck standing up (something I’d only heard about before, never felt).  I was almost afraid to put my feet on the floor, the story was so creepy.  Wonderful stuff!
    6. Are you currently reading this book? Why? I was going to say, "No, see number 1," but I just found myself reading the rest of page 127, about the woman in the flowered apron, sitting in her cold, cold house, waiting to hear the footsteps of her Bill coming home from work, even though he’d been killed on the Russian convoys eight months earlier….

Knitting, reading, other stuff.

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