image courtesy of KnitCircus

All the hubbub means it’s time for this blog to move house one more time.

Please keep following along at  SuperFunKnits.com.

If you’ve been a Facebook Fan, please “like” me over at the new Facebook page.

And if you read my tweets, I’m now @superfunknits.

If you want to keep getting this blog in your feed reader, the new RSS feed is over here.

The 10 Secrets

I’m really excited to see Vicki Stiefel and Lisa Souza‘s new book The Ten Secrets of the Laid Back Knitters. If you pay attention to knitting on Twitter ever, at all, you probably already know Vicki as the face behind  @knittingnews. The 10 Secrets is a whole bunch of things in one, with knit lit, knitter profiles, and advice all backed with a bunch of laid back patterns (including a circular pillow by yours truly) – as the review in the latest Knitty said, “come for the patterns, stay for the chat.” Stay tuned for more on this one – it hits the bookstore shelves May 10.

Fresh Designs

(c) Fractured Photography

The inimitable Shannon Okey (she of Knitgrrl, Stitch Cooperative,  and Knitgrrl Guide fame) is putting out a whole bunch of new titles this year on her new imprint, Cooperative Press. I’ll have designs in three of CP’s Fresh Designs books, and here’s a peek at the cabled wrap I did for the Shawls series.

Each book in the Fresh Designs series will feature the work of ten different designers, and the business model is way different than other anthologies and magazines – each of us Fresh Designers are sharing the wealth. Shannon’s doing a Kickstarter campaign to raise some of the capital, and the kickstarter video doubles as a preview of the whole Fresh Designs series – watch to the end and you’ll see my contribution to the Scarf series – it’s the purple one!

AND: Shannon will be in NYC this weekend! Saturday she’s doing a meet & greet at KnittyCity (I’ll be there, too!), and Sunday she’s teaching sweater design at Brooklyn General.

What I loved most about the film was watching the artists talk about their work – like the sense of play that comes through loud and clear just from watching Paul Jackson’s hands move:

And the fun continues – MIT origami theorist Erik Demaine, his scientist-and-artist dad-and-collaborator Martin Demaine, geometric sculptor George Hart, and math-y visual artist Susan Happersett will be speaking at Central Booking in NYC next Thursday night.

If you’re a fan of what I’m up to, or of other math-tinted knitters like Norah Gaughan or Woolly Thoughts or FuzzyJay, or of fiber-tinted mathematicians like Daina Taimina or sarah-marie belcastro or Catherine Yackel, you’ll probably love it.

Thursday, March 24 at 6:30
“Developments in Mathematical Art”
Central Booking
111 Front Street, Gallery 210
(F to York Street, down the hill and turn left)
More info here.

The solar wind of twin carbon stars AFGL3068 spiraling out into the universe. There’s a good Discover blog post about them here.

And here’s an artist’s rendering of the twin dwarf stars J0806.

They’re spinning around each other at a million miles an hour, orbiting one another completely every 5 and a half minutes. I’m a total romantic about twin stars, and I like to think of these ones as a couple doing a super-fast galactic version of the Lindy Hop.

I learned to knit in my first year of college. I was at Oberlin, which has a student-run experimental college (ExCo) as part of its curriculum – you could round out your regular coursework with a class on just about whatever you want. Seriously – they’ve got everything from Tai Chi to Steel Drum to Adult Cinema of th 1970s. I remember being in awe of one of the ExCo instructors who was teaching knitting. She was making yarn with a drop spindle, and when I asked her about it she said something like “It’s therapeutic – I have a lot of rage and this way I don’t kill people.” If you’ve known me long enough to remember my Somber Period*, you’ll guess that I was also instantly crushed out, but (in classic younger-me style) in a Now I Must Flee! kind of way.

I didn’t wind up taking the class, probably because of the fleeing thing, but when I found myself lonely and bored on a mostly-empty campus when my friends had cleared out for fall break, I decided to give myself a project – I would teach myself to knit. I went to the Ben Franklin and bought some big aluminum needles and some nice black acrylic yarn – black Red Heart, perfect for a beginner, right?

And I went to the library and checked out the best book I could find. The book had these beautiful line drawings in it, giving instructions for everything from the very basics to sweater construction. Even all these years later, I can probably trace my preference for human, hand-drawn schematics to that book. Illustrator and CorelDraw are “professional” and all, but the perfectly smooth shapes and straight lines look like they were drawn by a robot – and why, when the whole point of knitting is to do stuff by hand? But I digress.

It took me hours of fumbling, but I figured out casting on and the knit stitch, lining my yarn and needles up like those in the drawing. Another thing about my knitting life that I can trace to learning out of a book (the pictures showed the yarn and needles, but not the hands!) is that I still knit right-handed (English), and I still tension by simply grabbing the yarn between my thumb and forefinger. I’ve had Russian ladies on the subway chide me for doing it “wrong,” but it works just fine for me!

As you can probably guess, my first black scarf was kind of a disaster. I kept adding stitches at the ends, and it got wider and wider as I went. And I couldn’t see what was going wrong in the dark yarn I was using. After some practice (when it was a couple feet long and – oh, sixty or seventy extra stitches wide) I got the hang of it. I chalked the black monster up to practice, chucked it and started over with some lighter colors. Army green and rusty orange that I knit up in two-inch-thick stripes about ten feet long – the perfect accompaniment to the fuzzy blue bathrobe and pink Muu Muu I was wearing around campus that fall. (Want pictures? too bad!)

I hadn’t even learned to purl yet, but even with that first orange and green scarf, I started to get the bug. I could see the rows of garter stitch stretched out like a million square knots all in a row. And when I switched colors I got a little transitional line, (what TechKnitter calls “icky bumps“), but only on one side, and why was that?

someday, all of this will be yours

After I learned more, and as my bag of tricks expanded from ribbing to cables to lace, I’d find myself staring transfixedly at any knitted object in my vicinity, my fingers feeling kind of twitchy as I imagined myself knitting along on the surface of it. For me my designer-mind has always had that element to it – the concrete, tactile feeling and structure of the stitches starts to feel like a place. A real place and a conceptual place mixed together. Like Tron. I’ve heard other obsessed knitters and designers say they knew they were in for a ride when they realized they couldn’t turn it off. Knitting is a way of making a thing, and a really darned low-tech way at that, with just yarn to work with, some pointy sticks, two basic stitches and a couple fancy moves, but it’s also so much more.

I don’t know what happened to that first scarf, or to most of the first couple dozen things I made, mostly given as gifts for family, friends, and sweethearts. I do remember wrapping my new scarf around my head in the brutal Northeast Ohio winter and sadly discovering that acrylic is not warm. Oberlin had an awesome thrift store where you could get a paper shopping bag full of anything for three dollars. I got a bunch of sweaters and started unraveling myself some wool. And the rest, as they say, is history…

In the years since, I’ve checked the bookstore shelves wondering if I’d find my knitting book again. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember the title – I just remembered the size and the drawings. I’d almost convinced myself it must have been an older edition of the Reader’s Digest Knitters Handbook when I found America’s Knitting Book on the shelves at Powell’s in Portland. It’s seriously chock full of several decades’ worth of knitting information, all presented in a very accessible, easy-to-understand, “of course you can do this” style. I’m excited to delve into it again, now 18 years further down my path.

So, gentle readers, that’s my story. What got you started, and what keeps you at it?

—–

*think hippie mixed with goth, reading Angry Women and Yukio Mishima, listening to Diamanda Galas and the Legendary Pink Dots, and taking things Very, Very Seriously…

The Pittsburgh Knit & Crochet Show last weekend was absolutely super. The festival’s in its seventh year now, and each year it grows bigger and adds something new. This year the festivities were extended to three days and we kicked things off with a glam Friday night fashion show hosted by Steven Be, with garments by the festival teachers, Steven, Nicky Epstein, and Tahki Stacy Charles.

I caught up with some old friends Friday night, and had wonderful students in my workshops Saturday and Sunday. Teaching two three-hour classes each day also kept me off the Market floor – so keeping my No New Yarn Until You Stash Down resolution was no sweat, though I did pick up a gorgeous oak swift from the Knitting Notions booth.

Thanks yet again to Barb and her amazing helpers for putting on such a wonderful, well-organized show with such a good feeling to it. Thanks also to Stacey from KnitOne in Pittsburgh for selling my patterns during the show. I know I should have some festival pictures to share with you – Vicki my Number One Fan, if you’re reading this, can you send me some?

The Beagle Brothers!

Straight From Fiber Fest to Clog Dancing!

On my way home from Pittsburgh I stayed with my cousins, and I had the chance to see their band the Beagle Brothers play. They do sweet old-timey music, and the band they brought in to play after them had clog dancers! Seriously – dancing with wooden shoes! It was awesome. I was rushing from one cultural event to another!

Knitting as Meditation

I mentioned this in one of my workshops – I’m really curious about this all-day knitting-as-meditation session that’s happening this April at the Shambhala Center – And I think I’m curious enough to actually go! So many knitters talk about the meditative qualities of knitting, and I know that knitting-as-meditation has had a huge positive effect on my life – your hands get busy and your mind wanders, then comes back to the knitting, then wanders again… breathe in, breathe out…

It’s all day (10 to 5) on April 9 at the Shambhala Center, 188 West 22nd Street in NYC – here’s the link for more info.

Next Stop, DC!

I’ll be teaching a Knitting on the Bias workshop at the Yarn Spot in Wheaton, Maryland on Sunday, March 6. I’d love to see any of you DC area folks there! Check out the Yarn Spot for more details.

I spent some time organizing my yarn cabinet today, and pulled out all of these partial skeins, each earmarked for or still attached to works in progress.  Oy! I’ve got start-itis, but bad! Swatches and samples for future projects, a blanket for my new niece Zoe, samples for the workshops I’m teaching in Pittsburgh on ruffles and bias knitting, and my still-unfinished NaKniSweMo vest.  I’ve been playing with colorwork lately, so this heap of yarn doesn’t amount to as huge a number of projects as it might seem, but still I’ve got 8 projects currently going on my needles.  If only I could knit them all at once! And here’s to developing just as fearsome a case of finish-itis!

What about you, gentle readers? Do you cast on like crazy and alternate between multiple projects, or are you “monogamous” knitters?

Taking its name from a thousand year old tree, Wonderboom is knit in a delightfully addictive lace leaf pattern. Tricky enough to make you feel like a rockstar knitter yet intuitive enough that your fingers will remember the way.

The traditional bat-winged Faroese shawl shape features contoured shoulders for a garment that will stay put without a pin, even on the most blustery day.

This one’s been in the hopper for quite some time – if you took my classes at TKGA or Camp Medomak last summer, you may have seen it already!

Many, many thanks to Lisa (a wickedly awesome spinner, of Knithound Brooklyn fame) for modeling!

almost to the armpits

NaKniSweMo has now more than come and gone. Silly me left my project bag at work on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and I just didn’t have it in me to run back to the office to retrieve it. So I spent Thanksgiving weekend Giving Thanks, and knitting a few of my Other Projects while the sweater waited. So much for my plans of marathon knitting to claim those NaKniSweMo bragging rights, (And congrats to everyone who succeeded!) but I’m still happy with the project, and excited to wear it .

but miles to go before I sleep

I’m loving the all-over cabled texture of the fabric as this piece takes shape, and looking forward to its practical value as well. Lofty mule-spun yarn plus the thickness of the cabling will equal extra warmth in the bitter cold snaps we’ve been having.

And did I mention there was pie?

Since Thanksgiving, sweetie and I have been on a mini pie-kick. This one started with a fresh sugar pumpkin. I more or less followed this recipe with a bit more spices. Yummy!

You’re Cate Blanchett as Queen Elizabeth in the thinly-plotted but gorgeously costumed bodice-ripper Elizabeth: the Golden Age. You’re pining for the good old days before your sweetie, Sir Walter, started canoodling with your best girl maidservant. A mysterious visitor from the East brings you a mechanical oddity, a golden scarab beetle that moves on wind-up springs.

www.sanguinegryphon.com

The scarab turns out to be a nanotechnology robot time machine, and the next thing you know, you’ve been zapped into a dystopian city in the far future. This doesn’t make much sense, but the director was also the costume designer, so plot considerations are secondary. Now everybody wears aviator goggles or monocles, and they tap emails into their wooden-cased iphones with froofy feather quills. It’s a relief that nobody’s wearing corsets any more, but it turns out your neckruffle is all the rage.

www.sanguinegryphon.com

Thanks to the inimitable Sarah and Gryphon, the brains, beauty and brawn behind Sanguine Gryphon yarns, now you can ruffle it up to your heart’s content! It was a joy to work with Sappho, their ultra-soft laceweight Uruguayan merino, and a sacrilegious, gluey glee to starch the tar out of it as this garment took its final shape.

Patterns for all three garments – knitted peacock ruff, lacey partlet and the post-punk, steampunk neckruffle are available for your downloading pleasure as Elizabeth: The Steam Age. Head on over to SanguineGryphon.com to get your downloading and ruffle-knitting on.

P.S. – Ever wonder why neckruffles were a status symbol back in the day? Cast on five hundred and sixty stitches and ask me again!