Becca's Blog

Ten miles is nothing to sniff at.

Yesterday I went with Jane on her training walk for the Breast Cancer 3-Day, and we walked 10 miles in 3 hours. Jane has a much better fitness base than I do, since she exercises regularly, but I figured this would be a walk in the park (heh), because hey, I've run 10Ks plenty of times on practically no training.

Not really. I was tired after 5 miles, and by the time we got done, everything from my waist down hurt. I was hobbling slightly today. I'm very glad it's not me who's doing twice that distance for three consecutive days--and sleeping on the ground.

Team Shirley.

Jane's family, the one I married into, has always been very close. They--I mean we--face all of life's events, good and bad, together. Jane's mom, Shirley, was influential in keeping that connection going, and when Shirley became ill with breast cancer she had the best support team anyone could have. Her health and quality of life during her seven-year fight can be credited mostly to her devoted daughters and husband.

This year Jane's oldest sister, Susan (the one I ran my first half-marathon with), decided to do the San Diego Breast Cancer Three-Day to raise funds and honor Shirley's memory. Jane and I talked about how best to support Susan, and considered whether we should serve on the walk crew. We decided we'd go down to San Diego and cheer Susan on, and vowed that we'd walk next year. But our plans changed. When it looked like Susan's walking partner probably wouldn't be able to do the walk with her, Jane jumped in and signed up, three weeks before the event--because that's what sticking together means. So she's walking on November 9 to 11, and raising funds. She's trying to raise $2200 in the remaining 13 days before the walk, and I'm asking you to donate to her if you would support me in a similar venture. Because I'm a part of Team Shirley too, even if this time I'm the waterboy.

Sign me UP!

The city of Berkeley will pay to install solar panels on my house? I'm so there.

Sad day.

I was all ready to compose a triumphant post about persistence paying off, being the mistress of the hunt, yada, yada. Yesterday morning I caught Big Daddy, the older tomcat who probably sired the rest of our feral pack. I've wanted to get him fixed because I do think he's responsible for lots of our neighborhood's strays. He's been around off and on for several years, and he usually gives me that cat steady stare and blink. And I blink back at him, because we know each other. This year I've been telling him that he doesn't look so good, he should come in from the cold, settle down and become semi-civilized. Lately he's sort of been doing that--showing up for breakfast, hanging out with the other three, and sleeping in the sun. So I was able to trap him.

This morning we headed off to my usual vet clinic, which fixed the mom and two kittens last summer. The new vet suggested that this one be tested for FLV/FIV but said the choice to test or not was up to me. Of course I said yes, because I always want to do the proper thing.

And he came back positive for FIV. The vet and I agreed that the proper thing to do was put him down, so he won't infect other cats, and he won't eventually die of pneumonia on the street. But it feels bad.

Enjoying my sour grapes.

If Eunny Jang were a real editor, she wouldn't use concept as a verb. And so far, nothing in the Winter issue grabs me.

Color class with Vivan Høxbro

For the second day of the Nordic Knitting Conference in Seattle, I took an all-day class on color in knitting. I was drawn to the topic of colorwork more than the teacher. Although her color combinations are bold and masterful, Vivian Høxbro 's garment designs are rather too dramatic for me. And to be honest, at the beginning of the day, I wasn't optimistic about the class--I even considered cutting out at lunchtime to do a little Seattle sightseeing on my own. We received a handout with instructions for knitting a color wheel. Terrific, I thought. If this is the extent of the class, a boring talk about the color wheel and knitting an ugly thing, I'm out of here.

But we didn't have to knit a color wheel in class, to my relief. Vivian had us wind off mini-hanks of yarn in all the colors of the color wheel.  This took a significant amount of time, but it broke the ice among the students because we had to keep trading yarn hanks around.

Vivian gave a presentation showing some examples of color combinations in fashion -- and many of them I didn't care for at all. Missoni may have color down cold, but its designs leave me cold. Plus, I think the projected presentation's color was off--Vivian commented a few times that we couldn't see what she saw on her screen. Not inspiring at all.

Things got much more interesting when we got to play with all the colors, not just the 12 in the color wheel. We were asked to pick a handful of colors that we didn't like or wouldn't normally use, as well as a handful that we do like. Then we had to knit a swatch using two "don't like" colors and one "like" color. I chose teal, kelly green, and ochre.  The teal and green came together OK, and the green and ochre worked OK, so I was able to make some transitions so that it wasn't horrible. That was a learning experience. Everyone had to explain what they did and why, which was fun. Everyone does approach color differently.

The next exercise was to work with complementary colors from the color wheel; that is, colors that are opposite of each other. I had a hard time with this one--I believe that these combinations are usually garish and/or cliched. Blue and gold just reminds me of school colors and pep-rally rah-rah; red and green makes me instantly think of overbearing Christmas kitsch. One of the most valuable things I learned from the class is that those combinations can be more subtle--they don't have to be that bald-faced. Vivan's tip was to make one of the colors dominant and use its complement as an accent. One of her sweaters was a midnight blue with small yellow blocks. The effect was of stars in a night sky.

But I struggled with the complementary exercise. I couldn't come up with a definite set of colors that I liked and that worked together. I meandered. Plus, I was starting to notice that other people were doing fancy slip-stitch patterns with their colors rather than plain stockinette stripes, so I was feeling a little inadequate about that, too.

The final exercise was to pair up with someone and pick a color combination and knit a swatch for them. This was really challenging to do for someone you just met a few hours before, and we all felt pressure to make something really good. It made us observe, and think, and talk to the person next to us!

Vivian brought a lot of her sweater samples and used them as examples while she talked. She told us that she didn't bring any brown, or many shades of gray, because  she thinks people use them as a safe fallback. I think for the purposes of this class, she was right. The point wasn't to make tasteful color swatches.

It was interesting to work with the line of Harrisville yarns that she designs with and creates colors for. Most of them are heathered, which gives them complexity and probably helps them work together. Also, they're so thin that they don't feel good in the skein, but I can understand that a double-thickness twined or stranded material would be a more manageable weight using this type of yarn. And it probably gets softer with washing.

She concluded by encouraging everyone to try on her samples, which everyone enthusiastically did. I saw that the construction techniques were interesting and probably really fun to knit, even if the garments aren't my style. And it made me wish that there were an event during the conference where we could look at all the teachers' samples, because they all brought amazing things.(Maybe that did happen during Saturday night's happy hour, which I missed.)

The final thing I learned in class was that there is no substitute for color swatching. You can't know how two colors will interplay until you put them together.

After class I had coffee with some work friends, and then met Janine, Ryan, TMK, and Gail for dinner. Janine took a class on Bohus knitting, which sounded wonderful. I really wished I could have seen Susanna Hansson's examples.

To the best of my knowledge, I haven't got a drop of Nordic blood, so I couldn't claim that as my reason for wanting to attend this conference; I just wanted to learn about more traditional knitting techniques and traditions. Since this conference was a rousing success, I think the museum is likely to host it again--and I would strongly recommend it to any enthusiastic knitter.

Seattle Knitting Sojourn

It's now the third weekend in October, so high time to tell you all about my first weekend in October. Thursday night I flew to Seattle for the Nordic Knitting Conference at the Nordic Heritage Museum.

The museum is housed in a converted school that was built in maybe the '20s or '30s. I was charmed by the architecture because I went to elementary and junior high schools that were built in the '60s, with completely character-free architecture. Y'know, open-plan buildings that didn't have classrooms, they had "pods."

So sitting in my first session of the conference, in a very old-fashioned looking classroom being lectured to by a rather formal older woman, I had a happy little "back in school" fantasy unrelated to any life experience of mine. But I thought it was a terrific reuse of a lovely old building. Apparently the museum would like to relocate to a more central location, but I think their mission of preserving and propagating the community's Scandinavian cultural heritage is very well matched to the site they're in now.

That first day's class was Viking Cables, with Elsebeth Lavold. I didn't exactly know what I was getting into, having merely flipped through her books and ogled some of her beautiful patterns and knowing that I like cables. So I really wasn't hip to the idea that Viking cables represented any kind of design innovation; aside from knowing that the designs were based on old Viking carving and metalwork designs, I never gave it much thought. I think I vaguely sort of wanted some help not getting lost when working multiple cable panels and complex cable patterns. I didn't exactly get that from the class, but I did get a more organic feel for what cables actually do (or what I'm doing when making them). Part of that came from learning to cable without a cable needle (yikes). When I didn't use the cable needle, it became much clearer that I was moving the stitches. Sounds like a big "duh," I know, but it made something conceptually click for me. Then talking about stitches "traveling" made sense--I could determine where a stockinette band went on that reverse stockinette field rather than just blindly memorizing whether a given symbol means "cable needle in front" or "cable needle in back."

As for the cables, Elsebeth first had us work a pattern from her Viking knits book, starting a cable in the middle of an open field of stitches. Again, I really didn't realize that she innovated this technique. After we mastered that basic pattern she had us free-form knit a trapezoid, to figure out where those "ribbons" needed to go and to decide for ourselves where to put the curves in.

I'm making it sound like this came easily, but it didn't, really. I was quite resistant to giving up my cable needle, partly because I missed a critical tip from Elsebeth about using the needles to prevent having four live stitches at a time off the needles as you switch their position. Just like when I was in elementary school, my attention was a little spotty that first morning, and I probably absorbed about a third of what was said. Thankfully, most of it was written down in the handout.  I wasn't the only one with a furrowed brow, either. The afternoon was spent learning how to do a cabled mitered corner, which involves short rows. Until I make one of Elsebeth's lovely cardigan designs, that's going to just be knowledge for its own sake. Also, I attended the second Viking Cables session on Sunday, which started out with a reprise of the same material. I was a bit disappointed that there was so much overlap between the two, but I did get to review the information, really get what I missed the first time, and finish my swatches. What I wanted from the second class was some in-depth discussion of designing and charting your own knotted cables, but in the time before I had to leave for the airport, what was covered was basic sweater design, starting with calculating from a gauge swatch. Not exactly what I was after. I did break down and buy the book from the gift shop, and I'm likely to buy some more of her pattern books, which I know Article Pract stocks. (And on Sunday I ended up sitting between a woman who has apparently had knitting needles in her hands from the age of three and now teaches, and another woman who knits a LOT of cables. Their reactions to the aforementioned techniques were, respectively, "Oh, how lovely," and "Oh my god, it's so cool! This is easy! I know just what to do with this!" I would never criticize someone for their excitement about an idea--but I did wish the one classmate could have expressed her excitement silently to herself.)

Elsebeth gave a presentation during Friday night's banquet describing how she came to focus on Viking cables and showing examples of some of her inspirations. I loved that, because I've been inspired so often by patterns in other media that I'd like to interpret in knitting. Clearly, Elsebeth follows through on those moments of inspiration--I'm sure that being a designer by training and by trade helps. Her presentation also made me really wish, once again, that I could draw.

There were lots of out-of-towners at this conference, many from farther away than California (not including the speakers who traveled from Scandinavian countries). Among the Bay Area contingent were Carol and Susan, whom I met last year at the knitting retreat at the Olema Inn (which is holding its retreat again next month).

In class I met a couple of  women who turned out to both be friends of Feralknitter Janine, and it was a pleasure getting to know each other. Gail and I bonded over the mind-bending cabled mitered corner. I asked Regan how best to burn the two hours between the end of the session and dinner, and she invited me to head to the Fiber Gallery with her. About 30 conference attendees converged on the store at once. Everyone must have made a beeline as soon as class got out.  I gotta tell ya, that store has a niiiice selection of yarn and books. I bought Evelyn Clark's Knitting Lace Triangles. Then we met up with Janine at dinner, and I got to meet Marilyn van Keppel as well.

Tomorrow: Color with Vivian Høxbro.

High on my to-do list for the day:

1. Head over to Down Home Music before they close at the absurdly early hour of 6:00 and buy Chuck Prophet's new album, Soap and Water.
2. Figure out whether Annie Lennox's new album is worth dropping $15 or more on.
3. Wonder whether I'd love KT Tunstall's albums or be annoyed by them.
4. Buy the new Bruce Springsteen album for Jane.
5. Find a way to unload the Drive-by Truckers album I wasted $15 on a couple of weeks ago. (Pipe up if you want it!)
6. Consider doing the same with the CD by novelty-act Lily Allen.
7. Write on my arm in indelible ink: Do not buy CDs on impulse.

Without deadlines, I couldn't get anything done except breathe.

And eat. Of course.

There was a deadline to submit patterns for the winter Knitty and MagKnits issues, so I finished writing a pattern (and knitting it up and photographing it). It wasn't accepted, so I'll be publishing it here in a couple of weeks, after I knit up a kid-size sample and do a new photo shoot.

The past couple of Thursday evenings I took the lovely and talented PunkRawkPurl's Mitts with Moxie class at KnitOneOne, which was delightful fun. However, I did not meet the deadline to have a mitt knit up to the thumb gusset by class session #2--because I kept starting over and changing my mind about what I wanted to do.  I changed yarns twice and stitch pattern once--and I think I will start over yet again. I will get them done, though, because I need some mitts to wear on Hawk Hill. You need fingers free to adjust binocular focus but still stay warm.

I decided that I should knit a hat for our hawk watch day intern,  since she spent our first two days out with a muffler wrapped around her head (I feel a bit maternal). I didn't meet my self-imposed deadline of finishing the hat by our third day on the hill (blustery and damp)--but she had a big, furry hunting-style cap. That kinda blunted my motivation, but even though I wonked up the hat's edging, I did finish it. I'm not sure of this hat's ultimate fate.

I also finished my homework swatch for the Viking Cables class I'll be taking with Elsebeth Lavold this coming Friday and Sunday at the Nordic Knitting Conference.  I didn't go to the TKGA market in Oakland last weekend, and I'm not going to Rhinebeck, but this is plenty cool for me. And since I dragged my entire stash out to photograph it, my class supplies are very close at hand.