Sleeve Island, Speedy Knitting, and Too Many Ideas
I’m not often a person who has multiple projects going at once - I like to see something through from start to finish without getting distracted. Maybe it’s just this month, maybe it’s the impending holidays, maybe it’s my ideas getting carried away, but I’ve had two or three projects going at once since the beginning of November. Some of them were easy decisions - I decided to pause knitting my Zweig and start my Occhiello Sweater (unfortunately for me, it's a sample knit which means I have to send it off soon!) before my trip to Vancouver, because I knew I’d have a lot of knitting time and I didn’t want to run out of something to knit. But for that, I just switched projects entirely and didn’t go between them, so does that count? In the last couple weeks, I’ve been switching between my Zweig (where I am firmly on Sleeve Island, which for this sweater feels somehow more unbearable than for Occhiello) and two other secret projects for gifts. It feels like I’m avoiding knitting my sleeves because they’re taking forever, but with that same logic, if I just knit them instead of pretending they don’t exist then I’d be done faster!
One thing that I’ve changed this year is that I learned how to knit continental style, for a variety of reasons. I’ve always been a tight knitter — my favorite story to tell is about when I first learned how to knit and was afraid that the stitches would fall off the side of the needle, which is literally impossible — and I’m a very slow purler. After watching videos of everyone speeding along with their continental style, I figured I might as well give it a whirl. So in March, on a giant shawl that was mostly garter stitch, I re-trained my brain.
Folks, it was agonizingly slow for a while there. It took me the entire shawl to get even semi-comfortable with picking instead of throwing, and I had to stare intently at each and every stitch. But now, six months later, I managed to finish that Occhiello sweater in two and a half weeks! I still can’t knit without looking at my hands (which I used to be able to do when throwing), but I think I’ll get there eventually.
I’ll admit, I went a little crazy with the yarn buying this month, and I only have vague plans for all of them. I bought two skeins of La Bien Aimée Merino Aran at the Tolt 5-year anniversary party, I bought some Lichen and Lace and Julie Asselin when I went to Vancouver, and I bought some Bedhead Fiber and The Dye Project from pop-ups at Seattle Yarn, plus a skein of my always-favorite Malabrigo for a secret project. Add that to all the yarn I bought in October, and I think I need to take a yarn-buying break for a bit to catch up on knitting everything!
What I’m consuming lately:
I just checked out the Knitter’s Book of Wool by Clara Parkes and Yarn Works: How to Spin, Dye, and Knit Your Own Yarn by Wendy Johnson from the library, and I’m looking forward to reading through them this weekend.
I recently finished the Ancillary Justice trilogy by Ann Leckie, which I cannot recommend highly enough. Each book just keeps getting better!
And I’ve been listening to Superstition, a podcast that’s delightful and creepy and full of small desert towns and mysteries.
