I am wondering whether I should talk about this again. It seems personal and not very fiber-related.
When I found the *LSG Spinning group on Ravelry, I was interested because there seemed to be less of the newbie repetition and the G part of the name of the group would put off those smarmy women who think the only jobs women can ever have are being a housewife and mother. [*Lazy Stupid Godless]
There was something that went around and I PM’d someone who then mentioned there was a “local” LSG knitters group. It is “Bay Area” but 95% of all activities take place in areas the BART does not go. [Of course, some of that is a BART failing since south bay should be considered part of the Bay Area; San Jose has the largest population and its surrounding satellite towns have a lot of the jobs. There really was no excuse for not having public transit that goes all the way around the Bay.] Now since I do not usually take public transit, this is not a huge deal, theoretically, but in practice the only places far from BART all require at least an hour of driving. I refer to most of south bay as “orbiting Saturn” to explain why I never go there.
Recently someone set up an excursion in Berkeley. There is no parking in Berkeley. Except for the parts of Berkeley that are worse crime-wise than the reputation that Oakland has of being the murder capital of the country. Still, it is not a spinning thing, so I would only need a small bag of knitting to fit in, and I could get a ride or something.
Then I realized where they were holding it. Realized beyond the logistics. Jupiter is a campus bar.
(more…)
I am considering the Crown Mountain Farms fiber club. I like that you can choose the colorway or get something random. (Admittedly I would like the right to refuse the random, so I want to see, then choose.) CMF has a number of really good colorways.
The price is excellent, $15/month (buy any shipments you want) for 4 ounces of fiber, including shipping. It is not all the standard fibers either. A lot of the fibers are things that are harsher, but that certainly happened with the Spunky Eclectic club.
When I started spinning I wanted to be consistently good at spinning. I wanted to always be able to spin a sweater’s worth in my “regular” fiber. My regular fiber is BFL. When I started corriedale was still cheaper, but I really dislike it. I also dislike merino because of the short staple-length.
Now I am ready to really start branching out. I want to spin other things.
Of course, there is a problem in that I do not knit anywhere nearly fast enough to bother spinning yarn for my own use.
There were some issues with the CMF club. You have to register. Well, you have to register to buy their regular stuff anyway, so they already have my email address. When I signed up, it said my name would not be public, but my username would be. Then when I looked, my name was also public. That is uncool. (it was fixed) I added something to my “cart” and it goes to PayPal. It is a dealbreaker if I have to have a PayPal account.
I would have considered another year of the Fondle This! club from Susan’s Spinning Bunny because the price dropped to $150, but I did not enjoy it this year and cannot find any enthusiasm.
I looked for other fiber or yarn clubs and did not find anything that was open and not ridiculously overpriced.
[edited Saturday 1:30pm]
I started and finished something today.
It was the swatch bunny. I created a diagram that explains this extremely simple process. I got the idea of doing this with swatch squares from Kira of KiraKDesigns, who got it from artsy-fartsy-mama.com, but this is a standard technique found in any basic sewing book.
Basically you knit a square. This is a good use of swatching squares, hence the name. After binding off, tie a secure knot with the seaming yarn at the left midpoint of the square. Baste the seam from left midpoint to right midpoint to top midpoint and back to left midpoint. (see diagram). Pull the seaming yarn to gather fabric together. This makes a pocket which forms the head. Add stuffing and stitch closed. Ears are magically formed and can be fixed in place with a stitch as desired. The body is formed by seaming the “spine” (indicated in green on the diagram) and adding stuffing. Run the seaming needle through the cast on stitches, then gather them, grabbing a small tail tuft from the stuffing before final cinching.
I have successfully tinked 2 of the 4 lace rounds on my pillow. (Please insert cursing and animal noises here.) This was needful because of the error-riddled pattern which lacked corrections. Since I was the one who added it to Ravelry, obviously I cannot expect someone else to have annotated the problem there. [I did pause here and add an errata notice to the description of the pattern.] But I certainly did expect the publisher or author to have a modicum of pride and to acknowledge the mistakes.
Thank you to everyone who responded to my plea for actually useful patterns. I have collected them and added them to my projects list. (Not the queue on Ravelry, I find that too frustrating to use until I have started something.)
Since then I have started on making a stuffed rabbit starting from this: http://bunnikins.livejournal.com/47512.html . It is not a complete pattern since it references: http://geobabe.livejournal.com/227621.html for assembly instructions. I knitted half the body and then frogged it because it was going to be too large.
It looks like I will be making a new sample project for my knitting group, make a rabbit from a square. A friend shared the instructions, which basically say to baste a triangle onto a knitted square, gather it, stuff this as the head. Sew the body seam most of the way closed, stuff, and use a crochet hook to pull a tuft of stuffing for the tail. (The triangle is oriented as if there was a diamond inside the square.)
That was what inspired me to look for more rabbity rabbit patterns.
Name one pattern, free or not, book or PDF or whatever, in English, that is ready to go. No mistakes, no doing my own math, no secret knowledge where “everyone knows” that you have to continue the corner increases while binding off, no “go find your own buttonhole method”.
I want one, just one, fully functional, totally accurate knitting pattern. It does not have to be for a garment. And it cannot be the generic variant like a plain stockinette hat with ribbing band.
Also, no plagiarism. So if it is a washcloth with the turtle on it from the Barbara Walker books, that is not really a self contained pattern.
Seriously. I have been knitting for 6 years and never has there been a single pattern that was perfect and fully functional.
Book after book with serious errata. (I frogged the sole sock I started from the Wendy Johnson book, I doubt I will start another one ever, since the errata appeared after I started the sock, so if I start a new sock, there will be more errata.)
Nothing sized ever fits me. Not hats or mittens or shawls even. Socks are always too narrow in the toes. But that is not the fault of the designer who is creating a one-size fits most pattern. But even the be-damned pillow has mistakes.
Right now I seriously believe that anyone who buys a pattern for any knitted thing is throwing their money away. I would like to be convinced otherwise.
Does anyone have anything that is spot on perfectly accurate and ready-to-go as printed? Or is this the little girl who announces she does not want a pony for her birthday, she wants a unicorn pony. And her special party should have a dragon karaoke band and a cake baked by Hansel and Gretel.
Work proceeds apace for the Maragheh pillow. I have finished round 30 of 40 for the first half. There were 2 serious errors in the pattern. On round 29 the instructions say you will have 14 stitches per segment; this is true. However, since every other odd-numbered row increases the stitch count by one and #27 had 14 and #31 has 16, there is a missing stitch. I went through and charted the pattern, realized that the “obvious” trend would place two YOs adjacent, I just added a knit 1. Later the error is a visibly obvious cut and paste error, repeating one line, but with the chart it was easy to see what should have been done. I will have to annotate the Rav link for the pattern to indicate the errata.
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I have a really difficult time understanding why anyone buys patterns. Whenever I use someone else’s pattern, even if it does not have fitting concerns, there are errors. It leaves me with the steadfast belief that other knitters are moronic since they rely on patterns which are inferior to thinking for oneself.
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I deleted the blog roll on the side. Since I have not updated it in two years and I assume most people read this via feed anyway, I doubt anyone looks at it. I might recreate it at some point, because when I started reading knitting blogs, that was how I found some of them.
I am in the process of migrating my knitting blogs feeds, so I can easily comment from a browser where I am already logged in. I like getting comments, I suspect that might be a shared feeling. Currently I read RSS feeds in a non-logged in browser, so commenting is laborious and error-prone.
I had not realized how much I rely upon Ravelry. One of the patterns for the fiber club, was Uyvonne Bigham’s “Spiral Star Pillow”. The book it came from is listed on Ravelry, but that pattern is not. Uyvonne Bigham does have patterns listed on Ravelry, even ones from that book, just not this one. [ETA. I added it. When I added my project to Ravelry, it asked me, so I filled out their form and it is right there now.]
The pattern is actually available as a PDF from free-knitpatterns.com which requires you to give them an email address. However someone kindly added a listing to bugmenot and I used that. I would not necessarily recommend them. The PDF is chock full of ads for Creative Knitting. I guess that will be a magazine I will never buy.
On the whole, that makes me a little disgusted about the supposed value-add of a pattern inclusion to the group shipments, knowing that one of the few patterns that was not just an accounting exercise was actually free despite the copyright notice at the bottom. It was, however, much much more difficult to find because of the lack of Ravelry listing. No one in the group made this pattern and linked it.
I am making it out of Silk Road yarn in a sort of green-gray color. It has been surprisingly easy with the exception of the cast-on. I finally just did a faux-round cast-on and left a longer tail to embroider a nice decorative element that will coincidentally cover any weirdness. The project is named after the yarn and the “spiral” and “star” aspect, Maragheh Pillow. (That is an astronomical observatory in Iran, which is a Silk Road country. It was chosen at random from appropriate astronomical terms because I liked the name.)
The pattern claims that you need a skill level of 3 out of 4. But it is explicitly written out, there is no purling, and it only uses knit, yarn-over, k2tog. If this is a level 3 project, then you must need to be a super-genius to make a BSJ (well, actually that might help since the BSJ does not have any step-by-step instructions, just general advice.) Seriously this has been much easier than expected.
My next new project is going to be a button-closure cowl.
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