I sewed a bag, to be specific. A knitting bag. I have a couple of bento bags I picked up in Japantown at the dollar store: squat, square-bottomed drawstring bags that are the perfect size for a ball of yarn and a small, portable, mass transit-friendly project.

These little guys are perfect for carrying small projects around before you absentmindedly stuff them into the back of a closet or into the "I swear I am going to go on a finishing spree; next week, maybe" box.

I didn’t use a pattern (but this pattern is pretty close), since I was using whatever scraps were left over from some too-long pillowcases. The red thread I already had on my sewing machine matched perfectly: not because I’d spent any effort on it, but because I keep buying such a narrow range of reds (”safety” through “fire engine” and “candy apple,” to be specific) that everything matches — to the point where last week, I accidentally-on-purpose dyed my hair the same vivid color as my little red satchel.

I went a little nuts on the construction: after having a couple of my earlier sewing projects fray in the wash, I’ve become militant about enclosing seams. In this one little bag there are French seams, flat-felled seams and rolled hems — I even broke out my new hemming foot for my sewing machine!  Any stray fabric that could shed threads, snag a needle or catch a pair of scissors is sewed down to within an inch of its life. This little dude is bulletproof. There’s even a pocket inside with a tiny compartment for my tiny, tiny sock needles.

I sweated over this little bastard for two hours, pinning and ironing and getting my corners EXACTLY right, making sure the exposed hem on the front of the pocket was lined up just so. The cotton yarn I used for drawstrings at first seemed too thin, so I ended up crocheting a few feet of chain stitch out of a neon orange acrylic yarn I’d picked up for making amigurumi. Once it was done, I popped a ball of yarn into it, tucked a set of tiny DPNs into the pocket, and tied the top shut with a flourish, to admire my handiwork.

And what I had was … a little red bag. A little red bag with a pocket you can’t even see.

That’s it?

Good lord. I think I’ve set a new personal craft record for overthinking the obvious.

I was up until 5 a.m. plowing through the last lace row of my mom’s Christmas shawl. As I was drawing near to the finish line, I screwed up part of the edge when I dropped a stitch that unravelled a few rows down and took several yarnovers and decreases with it.

In my hopelessly sleep-deprived state, I tried to make a go of it and reconstruct the lace, but it wasn’t coming together. I threw it down and went to sleep, figuring the exhaustion had made me so stupid that I would have to figure it out in the morning. I’d start binding off and I’d fix the broken part when I came to it.

This morning, well rested and prepared for the worst, I couldn’t find the part I’d screwed up. Whatever half-assed, beleaguered attempt I’d made had actually worked.

It’s a freakin’ Christmas miracle.

Yesterday: The great opus, started in June and seeing me through many episodes of Spongebob Squarepants and “A Bit of Fry and Laurie.”

Today: A mess of lace, blocking wires and T-pins that spans four feet and consumes three quarters of the dining room table.

Tomorrow: Christmas present for my mom.

Earflaps!

Just as I decided that what I really needed a hat with earflaps, someone on Ravelry posted a call for test knitters for a hat with earflaps.

Solved!

Instead of doing the quick braids the pattern called for, I spent almost as long on the i-cord ties with tiny contrast-color stripes as I did on the rest of the hat. It was worth it.

I’m starting to develop a taste for tiny, meticulous finishing details, especially after seeing a bunch of vintage and contemporary sewing projects with incredibly gorgeous (and finicky) stitching and accents. Striped i-cord is kind of a bitch to get right, but man, the results make me happy.

The black vertical stripes are actually cabled owls. They’re kinda hard to see, so I’m considering embroidering French knots on them, because I just learned to make French knots the other day and I’m so excited about it that I want to cover everything I own in French knots. Maybe if I make enough French knots, the embroidery gods will smile on me and fix my wobbly chain stitch!

And maybe the knitting gods will smile on me, too, for spending almost as much time on the embellishments as I spent on the rest of the hat. Anyway, the results are on Ravelry if you’re interested.

Less than an hour, even.

Honestly? It didn’t even last five minutes.

I’m retooling and rewriting one of my hat patterns, and made yet another hat from the pattern to make sure everything worked. I painstakingly grafted together the edges of the tubular bind-off, wove in the ends, and with a huge wave of satisfaction, declared it done. Then, in a move I really ought to know by now never ends well, I put it somewhere special to make sure I wouldn’t lose it.

Now, the problem with “somewhere special” is that “somewhere special” isn’t a certain place; it roughly translates as “somewhere that isn’t one of my usual places, and I’ll remember where because it’s special.” If only my brain worked like that. Instead, as I firmly think to myself this is where I am putting this thing right now in case I need it, my brain nods its metaphorical head, solemnly promises to cherish this information forever, and immediately jettisons it overboard, leaving only a tiny sensory trace in its wake. Very many clothes, drugs and important papers have disappeared this way, only to surface months or weeks later when they’re no longer needed.

So no, I don’t remember where the hat is. I only know that it’s somewhere special, it’s in my room, it was nighttime when I put it away, and that the place I jammed it so I wouldn’t lose it was soft and felt like fabric. Which is why I was up at 1 a.m. the other night, emptying my entire clothes drawer onto the floor and sifting fruitlessly through my million t-shirts, hoping that maybe, just this once, I hadn’t outsmarted myself again.

No dice, of course. I didn’t find it. I think maybe I scared it away.

I am doing intarsia again. It’s exactly as not-fun as I remember.

Garter-stitch intarsia, a.k.a. what doesn't kill me makes me stronger.

When I first started knitting, I got a copy of “Stitch ‘n’ Bitch” and plowed right through it. I think I only made one actual pattern from it, but I threw myself at every technique in the book. Cables? Sure. Knitting in the round? No problem. Full-fashioned increasing and decreasing? Absolutely. Fair Isle, lace double knitting — I took on whatever it could throw at me. The only one that seemed like more effort than it was worth was intarsia: lots of adjusting tension, endless tweaking and fifty bazillionty-eleven horrible little bobbins to keep untangled, all for a blocky, 8-bit picture of a ’80s-looking sheep? PASS.

Well, sort of. I only decided to give it a pass after I soldiered my way though a handful of swatches and proved to myself that I could make neat, even intarsia designs on demand. I needed to prove that if I wasn’t doing intarsia, it was from lack of interest, not lack of ability.

Things haven’t changed much since then.

Except — well, dammit, I found a project. It’s a scarf, but it’s OK –  it’s one of those mini scarves, so it won’t take me eight months, all my willpower and several speeches to myself about finishing what I start before I can wear it. And it’s got an Icelandic rose on it, which I love, and it’s got adorable style that’ll fit right in with my vintage clothes.

Aaaaand … it’s got intarsia. Slow, painful, deliberate, no-way-to-make-it-go-faster intarsia. The only saving grace is that’s it’s in garter stitch, so the stitches aren’t as visible, but that also means I have to retrain my brain not to purl along the wrong side.

As I counted out the color sections in the chart, I realized I could easily fudge it a little: I could carry one color of yarn on the back side of the work between two sections, instead of knitting each one with a separate piece of yarn that would have to be twisted with the background color on every row. “Only a true obsessive would do it the harder way,” I thought. “They’re really short floats, and maybe I could line the back of the scarf instead …”

I trailed off. Who would  rationalize doing something the easy way instead of just, y’know, doing it the easy way? You’d have to be some kind of nut to have to sweet-talk yourself into cutting corners. And slowly, slowly, it dawned on me: I am that nut. I’d rather grit my teeth and wind bobbins of yarn, constantly mutter and swear at them as they flop into my work, and pull and tug to perfection at — let’s see — four joins on every row, than carry some damn floats along the back that I didn’t want to see because they just weren’t perfect enough. And just the idea of fudging it, of doing it the easier-but-less-perfect way, was making me squirm. I’d rather do something right, even if it’s something I hate, than slack off.

Well, hell. After years spent trying to teach people around me to be more flexible, less particular,  and more forgiving of themselves and others, I turned out a knitting fascist. It’s the one area of my life where I am a harsh, merciless, bossy perfectionist. And worst of all … I think I kinda like it.

I like to think it’s because of my gradually decreasing materialism, but I have a nasty feeling that it’s because I ran out of room in the closet.

There’s probably another reason: thanks to the (shudder) moth infestation of this summer, I had to go through all of my yarn, check it for freeloading nasties, wash a bunch of it, then bag all of it and put it away again. As it turns out, in all that awesome yarn, I have … um … a whole lot of awesome yarn. So I’ve been doing what I’d call “shopping my stash,” if I weren’t so aggressively allergic to cutesy hobby-related phrases and acronyms. Hell, I even spell out “local yarn store” every time.

But most of what I’m knitting lately doesn’t warrant climbing on top of the dresser in the closet to get to the yarn boxes; most of it was already on the needles. For the last month, I’ve been entrenched in a grim war on unfinished projects. It’s no glamorous-but-doomed “Charge of the Light Brigade“; it’s a slow, protracted war of attrition, where I move the front lines forward one row at a time and never give up an inch of ground.

Every time I start craving sock yarn, I give myself a stern reminder that I don’t need more, and distract myself by going through all my potential and half-started projects.The urge to consume quickly dissolves into despair that I’ll never finish anything, ever, and after checking my Ravelry projects to find out what I’ve been ignoring longest, I dig up a little bag with a half-finished project in it and pick up where I left off. I’ve even started ripping out half-started, totally pleasing projects that stalled out when I lost momentum, because I can’t look at them without seeing a giant glowing tally mark in the “CRAP YET TO DO” pile.

It all sounds incredibly depressing, but I swear it’s not. And there’s an unexpected benefit: I’m finally figuring out where all my needles went! It’s actually starting new projects that wears me out. Once the “oooh I’m starting something new and shiny” dopamine rush wears off, I’m staring at yet another project taking up time and resources I promised to something else, and it starts to feel hollow and meaningless.

I think what I’m saying is, I’m tired of cheating on my knitting, and I want to work things out. Is there some kind of hobby couples therapy out there I should look at?

I’m on my second project in a month where I decided I wanted to make something, found at least three different patterns for it, and scrapped all of them for not being perfect enough and decided to knit my own. And I am! The latest is coming along gorgeously, now that I’ve rejected nearly every single possible method I could use to build the thing for not being utterly and fanatically true to my vague vision.

First the edging in the one pattern I kind of liked wasn’t right, see, and I wanted an i-cord cast-on, but what should it be, two or three stitches wide? Then the first row of stitches was too loose, so I had to figure out how to fix that, and then the staghorn cable wasn’t wide enough, and then it wasn’t, well, staghorn enough, and all of that was after I figured out that ribbing the rest of it just wasn’t gonna work, and should I or should I not leave a purl gutter next to the seed stitch I settled on instead of the ribs?

Which is why it’s taken me three days of knitting to make … let’s see …

… two inches of a fingerless glove.

On the plus side, the yarn is fantastic to work with, a wool/alpaca blend that is totally itch-free and plush as a kitten. And, sadly, discontinued. Which is unfortunate, since my single large skein of it, while gamely playing along with the yarn-eating cable I chose, will never reach my elbows.

Damn. So close.

Now that my knitted spats are done but for the buttons — all existing spats patterns were rejected, by the way, because I couldn’t knit them with stripes going up instead of across — it’s only a few more days until I finally, finally, finally get to knit something just by following what a pattern says.

Crazy.

I have found over and over again the number one way to increase the amount of money you have in the bank is to just stop spending it.

More than once, I’ve thought about doing just that — the way I think about, say, climbing Everest on a package tour; or getting my back and shoulders and arms tattooed like a Japanese gangster’s, all covered in secret ink under my clothes; or throwing out all my clutter and painting my floors and walls white like in a chic Swedish apartment; or what it would feel like to walk on the moon and whether it’d feel crunchy under my feet; or the first thing I’d do if I became President.

Dammit how do you keep these shallow-depth-of-field photos from going all brooklyntweed on ya

The idea of saving money by only buying necessities for awhile floats and bobs before me like a soap bubble that pops soundlessly right around lunchtime, when I realize I’ve left my lunch in the fridge at home again or just forgotten to make it at all. Because lunch? Not negotiable. Totally necessary. And then half an hour and a Financial District sandwich later, I’m ten bucks poorer and that much further from liquidity.

Or I’ll drop a few bucks for a pattern and suddenly I’m at a yarn store, picking out something in a weight or blend or color I don’t have because that yarn is necessary to the project. The boxes and boxes of yarn I already have are slated for the sweaters I’ve been meaning to knit for a year; the one-off skeins in the stash are too small or too big or the wrong weight; and some are “special” and meant to be saved for I dunno what, to be used I dunno when.

I almost did it again with the Daybreak shawl I’ve been stalking since a Ravelry friend test-knitted one. I bought the pattern the day it came out and within an hour was figuring out how to fit a run for sock yarn into my day, because to get started on the pattern, I needed to buy yarn.

Wait — what?

I’ve worn holes in my socks, my other bra broke a month ago and I haven’t replaced it, and it’s been the better part of a year since I paid for a grown-up haircut. (I’ve been cutting it myself ever since, when I’m not talking my friends into trimming it with rusty scissors as we drink Pabst Blue Ribbon on the porch.) My bank account is dangerously thin, the layoffs happening all throughout my social circle and industry keep looming like ghosts, I have crap in the way of savings if something goes wrong … and in the meantime, I keep making runs to the Salvation Army with clothes I’ve gotten tired of, the trunk I keep fabric in is jammed so full it won’t close, I’ve already used up all the wall space for the posters and art prints I keep buying and framing, and I’m finally running out of places to put my yarn.

Wait — what?

Oh hell no, I thought, and nixed the yarn store. Instead I attacked my stash like a wounded lion, tearing through it mercilessly, trying to dig up something as sexy as a couple skeins of Noro sock yarn. It didn’t seem likely, since I’d been lusting after Noro Sock for weeks without a project that called for it, and half the fun of getting the pattern was gonna be finally getting a crack at that yarn.

I came to a DK-weight Malabrigo silk/merino blend — it was too thick and too dark, but it had a nice shine to it, so I set it aside and grudgingly kept digging. A minute later, I pulled up a glossy two-ply alpaca yarn in the deepest cocoa color I’ve ever seen. “It’s nice,” I thought, and plopped it onto my desk.

“Nope,” I thought as I pulled out box after box, “too bright, too dull, not enough contrast, not enough yardage, too fuzzy, not fuzzy enough — and what the hell was I thinking with this one?”

I turned back to the two I’d set aside — maybe they’d work? They were both too thick but not exactly the same weight. They seemed too dark for stripes, too, and stripes were the point of the whole shawl.

But something happened when I put the yarns next to each other. The dark brown and the dark gray both had a shine to them, but next to each other, they practically glowed. They looked deep, silky, impossibly rich. The sight of those two yarns side by side pulled me right back into a cool afternoon with friends in a wood-fired hot tub, holding an impromptu Scotch-with-chocolate tasting. As I twisted strands of the two colors together, I could practically taste the way the silky, bitter, slightly salted chocolate had eased into the dark, smoky peat of the ten-year-old single malt, and how the alcohol had glinted around the edges of my tongue.

The hell with the fact the yarn’s too thick. The hell with the sock yarn I can’t afford. The hell with never having enough when I’m up to my neck in stuff. I think I’ve found a winner.

Take a look!

But one downside of the “well-lit” part is a streetlight up the hill that lays one incredibly brilliant stripe of light over the top of the house, across the balcony, in through the door, across my bed and straight into one eye. The precision is amazing, as is the intensity: it’s like having a pet laser that lives to dump orange light in my face.

So I made a curtain.

Blocking a million miles of curtain

I swatched several crochet patterns: I wanted something not too fussy or remotely granny-square-like. I settled on a simple stitch with a strong vertical stripe, then started hooking. It took a couple months, two trips to Michael’s for yarn, some nonconsensual striping and about all the patience I could muster to finish it, and when it was finally done, I had nowhere to block it. My nine blocking squares are great, but nine square feet is nowhere near enough the surface area of a five-foot-long curtain.

I figured ah, hell, I needed to wash the sheets anyway, and I stripped the sheets off my bed, folded back the memory foam pad, and soaked the cotton curtain in water until it weighed about a ton, then pinned it to my mattress and stretched it out until it cried.

And there it sat, damp, bathing in a mild, dry breeze from the open window and reveling in its dampness. For hours. Damply.

By 10 that night, I’d already resigned myself to a night on the mattress pad on the floor when the boyfriend called to ask about the vegetables he’d left in my fridge.

“Um … would you mind bringing them over?” he asked.

I flicked my eyes toward the ceiling. So I’m a vegetable delivery service, huh?

“You can stay the night!” he added.

My eyes came back down to the miles and miles of soggy cotton stretched out on my bed.

And that’s how my hobby kicked me out bed last night.

It sure is red, isn't it.

[See this project on Ravelry]

AAAUUUUUUUUUUGGGHHHHHH

I’d been seeing the occasional lost-looking moth in my room for the last month or so and idly wondering where they might be camping out.

The answer: IN MY YARN STASH.

There are four skeins (one relatively pricey, the others a gift) of Snow Leopard Trust handspun camel yarn in my stash that are bitten into pieces, crawling with tiny larvae, embedded with little moth corpses and shedding tiny sand-like crumbs of moth crap.

AAAAUUUUUUGH

Fortunately, the other items in that bin are mostly stored in plastic bags and seem untouched. I guess the moths were so enamored with the twig-laden, gloriously unprocessed and still slightly musty camel yarn that they didn’t notice anything else.

OK, I’m gonna go run to the closet and start tearing everything apart RIGHT NOW.