Sheep On My Stuff

Merry Christmas!* A question that might be asked of me, if someone were asking me questions (and indeed she is! or rather, I am! check entries tagged "q & a" for more questions from myself to myself!), is: How much holiday knitting do you do, and how much time do you need to do it?

It varies! First of all, there's only one knitting project I do every year for the holidays, come hell or high water: I make my mom a hat. Mom likes hats, and I like knitting, and it is an excellent fit! Also, Mom lives in Indiana, where knitted hats are a joyful thing in the winter. I wonder if she'd like one in March. It's still cold there in March. ^_^ (I have decided that if Mom can send me things for Girls' Day, even though I am 30 and married, I can send her things for Girls' Day, too. So there.)

A hat for Mom takes maybe three days max, depending on the pattern. Hats are lovely and short and generally easy. However, marking out a week is not a bad idea; one of the things I was working on this year got derailed when I cut myself on the finger. It took three days for that to be healed enough for me to start knitting again.

Sometimes I'm working on other projects for the holidays; this year I made an aran sweater for a friend to give to her husband. That probably took four weeks, all told.

Sometimes I do scarves, shawls, or other items that I've made out of love for the recipient; mark out a good six to eight weeks for those.

This last year I made a last-minute argyle stocking for Grant; it took two weeks of only-during-work-hours knitting (and the weather buggered that up for me, too, because he worked from home half that time).

If you've been doing the math in your head, you may have noticed that these add up to a total of anywhere from 13 to 15 weeks, and to pad the estimate a little more, perhaps 16 weeks would be a good way to round that out.

Four months. Just for holiday knitting. Really? Yep! Really!

The moral of this story is this: If you think you might want me to knit something for you for the holidays, ask me by March. ^_^ (It also explains why, after the holidays, I spend a few months going OH GOD OH GOD I CAN KNIT FOR MYSELF ALL MY KNITS ARE BELONG TO ME AHAHAHAHA ME ME ME ME ME. When I spend a third of the year knitting for other people, and as the year goes by it's a greater and greater percentage of that time, by the time I'm done I really want my knitting time for myself again.)

* Merry belated Christmas, that is to say; I'm writing this as a catch-up post on February 16, 2009. >_>

Ah, knitting monogamy! Some knitters out there are virtuous knitters, knitters with only one project on their needles at a time, knitters who don't even have a stash because they buy only what they're going to knit — and they return unused skeins to the store for a refund.

What's up with those people?

The question has never actually been put to me with the phrasing "why aren't you a monogamous knitter?" It's more of, "Why the heck do you need to have seven projects on the needles at once?"

Well! That is an excellent question, and one for which I have an answer.

Different situations call for different types of knitting. My favorite thing in the world to knit is lace — but lace is delicate, involves charts (frequent attention to a pattern), and although it packs well into a purse or suitcase, whipping out a chart at a restaurant can really be a drag.

I've also knit sweaters. I don't mind taking a sleeve to a restaurant, but a whole bulky sweater for a 6'5" guy? What kind of purse does that take? I don't own one, in any event. (Same thing for blankets.)

Don't ask me to knit socks if I can't be sure I can look down at the floor and pick my DPN right up once I've dropped it. A plane? No. Planes move around. If I drop a DPN on a plane, it could roll all the way down the aisle before I can retrieve it. I'll pass!

Are we going to a movie? I need a project that can fit in my purse that has almost no pattern whatsoever. 2×2 ribbing works great. Also, I need a large-ish ball of yarn, so I don't have to mess with splicing in new yarn while I'm sitting in the dark.

In other words, I need different projects because I'm always knitting. I'm knitting when I go out to eat, to the movies, when I'm watching TV, when I'm listening to audiobooks, when I'm on the bus, and if I can get away with it, when I'm in classes. (French? Knitting works great. ASL? Not so much!) If I couldn't take a different project to wherever I'm going, based on the needs of the environment, I don't know how I'd cope!

I guess I just wouldn't knit. Which sounds like a horrible plan!

Huh. Now I have a question: How do people cope with not knitting all the time?

* …that's going to come out wrong to anyone who's not a knitter, isn't it? While I totally grok the concept of polyamory and I fully support anyone who does it conscientiously (a lot of people nowadays behave really jerkticiously and then chalk it up to "polyamory"; the healthy version of it involves honesty, communication, and care), that's not me! I only have so much romantic time and energy to give to other people; for me, they are a finite resource. One-on-one works best for me, and luckily, for my partner as well.

I admit, I'm really putting this in here because I am several posts behind, and will otherwise never catch up. However, I'm going to go ahead and add the category of "questions about knitting/answers about knitting/random things about knitting" to my blog, so that even if there isn't a picture of knitting to be found on a given day, I'll at least have some content. (Maybe that'll keep me from getting behind, too — if I don't feel like I must have a photo, I'm more likely to post on a day when there's been no real knitting progress.)

Today's chatter is going to be on the topic of "Questions That Make Me Crazy", and it's the major one, the big one, the one most people are likely to ask at some point:

How long did it take you to make that?

This question makes me crazy on two levels. One, I know it's a way for people to gauge the effort required to do something, because if it takes longer to do something, it must be more difficult (and therefore more worthy of respect and praise, because in the Puritan work-ethic culture of the United States, tenacity and the willingness to see something through are highly-valued traits).

Two, I don't know how long it took me.

Knitting is not like World of Warcraft. You can't just type /knit at the end of a project and have it tell you just how long, down to the second, you've spent on that project. If you want to know in that kind of detail, you need to have a stopwatch and a journal handy. I'm sure there are some knitters out there in the world who knit that way, with a stopwatch keeping track of every moment they spend knitting, but I'm sure not one of them!

The best I can do is say, "Oh, probably two weeks of hard work," where by "hard work", I don't mean "sitting on the couch while watching TV after Grant gets home from work." I mean twelve to fifteen hours of knitting. Per day. I'm estimating that the sweater I knit probably took me 168 hours to knit — the equivalent of spending a week straight doing nothing but knitting, not even sleeping.

One of the FiberTrends "Felt Flock" sheep probably takes me 18 hours to make. A pair of socks, maybe 40 hours. And sure, I go through knitting binges where I sit down with a new TV series ("new" meaning "I've never watched it before and thus have seven DVD sets to go through") and I really do knit for fourteen hours a day. But I don't do that every day, week, or month. (Okay, maybe once or twice a month.)

So how long does it take me in human terms? I don't know. I might have cast something on in March only to finish it in August. Maybe I cast something on and was so consumed with love for it that I knit nothing else and took this project to the movies; maybe it took a week. I might have cast on a year or two ago and finished up the project because I thought, hey, I'd like to get those needles back! Or maybe I've been working on it every time I go out to eat, but I don't go out to eat so much anymore, so last year it might've taken six weeks… and this year it takes six months.

I fit knitting into pockets of time everywhere. If I'm waiting for the bus (and the weather's nice), I'm knitting. If I'm on the bus, I'm knitting. If I'm out to dinner, I knit. If I'm watching TV, a movie, a sports event, I'm knitting. I knit while waiting in line at the grocery store, while waiting for Grant to come pick me up somewhere, and if I drank coffee, I'd knit while having a cup of coffee in the morning. Or something. If I can knit while I do it, I knit. My hands are seldom idle.

But I hate the idea of time as a measure of something's value. I hate it because I've had knitting projects I thought were glorious that only took a little bit of time, and I've had knitting projects that I suffered through for weeks on end in order to finish. I've also had knitting projects that took no time at all that I wouldn't want to knit again for anything, and knitting projects that took months that I'd knit again in a heartbeat. The fact that something took a long time doesn't make it great, and the fact that something took barely any time doesn't make it "no big deal". And, especially, the fact that something may have taken me a week or less — or a day or less — doesn't mean I'll whip one out for anybody for any reason.

I've had an awful lot of requests for Rainbow Pride Sheep. People like them; they're cute, and they take little yarn and practically no time; I can have one knit, felted, stuffed, and drying in a day. But I knit fourteen of those sheep in just over two weeks; I am done with Rainbow Pride Sheep, or any other kind of sheep, unless it's for me and I happen to feel like knitting a sheep that day.

Yes, I love sheep. I love the pattern. I love the felting. I love everything about it. But imagine if you had your favorite book in your hands. Okay? Now read that one book fourteen times. In a row. Without getting to read so much as a blog post or a newspaper article before you have to start that same book again. You don't even get to read a magazine in the bathroom; you have to take that book with you. (Um, no, I didn't knit in the bathroom, but work with me here; I'm making a comparison.) You might love that book every bit as much after the fourteenth read, but boy howdy, you'll be ready to read something else when you're done reading it for the fourteenth time, and if someone offers you money to read it again? You'll probably say, "No, thanks" — especially if you can do without the money.

I wish knitting did have a built-in WoW-style /played (rather, /knit) counter. I wish I could look back on all my projects and see how long it took me to knit them. But I know me: carrying a stopwatch around, and remembering to use it every time, is beyond my capabilities. :)

I love knitting lace. I mean, I love knitting most things, but lace is one of my favorite things. It looks so delicate and fragile, but it isn't. It's complicated, but in a way that suits me. It comes out looking beautiful, and you do have to do some detail work when you're blocking it to get everything just right. I've done several lace shawls, and I've got a few currently in progress, but I've never done anything in the Orenberg style.

Gossamer Webs is a book that both covers the history of Orenberg lace knitting (a style local to a small town in the former Soviet Union — under the USSR, people who were lace knitters had to turn out 24 shawls a year, and that was often very difficult for a single person, so daughters were often recruited to help) and shows a few pattern options, but this is more a book about how to design your own shawl than how to follow a specific pattern. (The same author, Gamina Khmeleva, also put together a pamphlet called "The Gossamer Webs Design Collection" that does have three gorgeous shawls in it.)

I'd recommend this book to lace lovers, and anyone who's really interested in the international history of knitting, but if you're just looking for lace patterns, this probably isn't the book for you.

Grant and I have often talked about having me knit us Christmas stockings. The ones we have are velour and quite plain. So in a last-minute burst of energy, I knit Grant an argyle stocking — which required kicking him out of the downstairs for the last three or so days before Christmas so I could finish it in private. >_>

I made it out of Cascade 220, with a heathery light grey for the main portion and some really nice print/hand-dyed yarn for the red and green. I had some leftover blue and yellow for the little lines…

…which, in retrospect, and if I ever do argyle again, I'll do them in duplicate stitch; doing them as part of the pattern was an unnecessary pain in the butt! But for my first argyle project, I wanted to do it the old-fashioned way. Next time I'll save myself the work! :)

One thing I used that was really, really helpful was — well, were; I used several — fish-shaped yarn bobbins from Pony. I ordered mine from SpinBlessing.com, where they're now on backorder, but if you poke around you may be able to turn them up. The shape is great, and the bobbins are substantial enough not to feel like they're getting all bent out of shape as I wind yarn around them. :)

All in all, a wonderful success — the only problem now is that I don't have a stocking of my own! But I've got an aran one in the works. :)

I did not do so well taking pictures this year! I'm afraid all I can say is that I did this hat in this yarn:

And it was lovely! :)

Here's one of my mystery projects! I knit a lovely lace shawl for my cousin Kristen. It's in the undyed equivalent of Gloss Lace from KnitPicks, and it took precisely three skeins (although I don't believe I got the recommended number of repeats out of it). The pattern is "Kimono Shawl" from Cheryl Oberle's Folk Shawls, one of my favorite shawl books:

I had it done in plenty of time to ship, but ended up procrastinating and then bringing it with me to the wedding. I hope she liked it!

It is, however, marginally a sheep:

What it is is my first attempt at a bath fizzy! I've been looking and looking and looking for ones I like on Etsy, and all too often I see the fatal word: cornstarch. I have had extremely bad reactions to cornstarch in sensitive regions, and I'm not willing to trust the stuff. Plus I liked the idea that it was a minimal-ingredients kind of thing. I couldn't go wrong, right?

I started with the recipe on this page, as well as some baking soda from the kitchen, and citric acid and witch hazel and fragrance oil from Brambleberry (recommended by several of the soap blogs I frequent). Brambleberry is also a (semi-)local business for me, situated in Bellingham. I picked up Cranberry Fig, and oh man, it smells AMAZING. Very fresh and fruity and delightful! (I also have "Ginger Fish", rosemary, and peppermint — and a Red Lychee Tea they threw in free.)

Well, I overdid it on the witch hazel, as perhaps you can see. While it doesn't set off the reaction as quickly as water will, it does set it off slowly. By the time a few minutes had gone by, my bombs-to-be had grown a bit larger, and they hadn't hardened enough to get them out of the molds.

(Yes. I did buy a sheep mold! :D I bought two, but only used this one.)

So I kind of pried them out, then rinsed out the ice cube tray and the sheep mold. Now, I'd been told that if you use much too much witch hazel, they won't fizz, but the leftover stuff sure fizzed in the trays and the mold, so I figured I'd let them harden and see what happened.

(Lesson two: Don't set them on toilet paper to harden! It doesn't peel off.)

I tried out a bath with them, and they fizz and float and I seem to have gotten the scent just right — strong enough to use, but not strong enough to linger. (Again with the wanting to make things myself; I don't want the scent from a bath fizzy to linger. Lingering scents can trigger migraines, especially if they don't wash off.) You can smell it if you sniff me, and it was great in the bath, but no more than that!

While I'm not expecting bath stuff to take over from knitting by any means (indeed, I have started a good half-dozen projects since finishing the Great Big Mystery Project — a sweater for a dear friend's husband [who is also a good friend!], which I am told went over really, really well, HUZZAH!!! — just from the sheer joy of being able to branch out that way), it is the first thing I've taken pictures of, and I'm pretty pleased by it. :) The results may not have been ideal, but they were functional, and for a first project I think that's pretty good.

(This post was backdated and was actually written on December 26th. Whee, catch-up posts…)