G. Knerd

I can’t remember when the first time I went to Third Place Books to see the Yarn Harlot when she came to Seattle was, but I’ve gone for every single book tour since.  The first time I’d just started reading her blog, and for some reason in my head I pictured her as a tall woman with a high soprano voice.  I was expecting to have fun at the book reading, but really I was going to get a book signed, because really, when you can get a book signed why wouldn’t you go for that?

In reality, the Yarn Harlot was not tall and sported an amazingly rich and lovely alto voice.  She was also so hilariously funny that I nearly fell out of my seat laughing, and I was simply charmed when I finally got to meet her in the signing portion of the evening.  I walked out that evening with stars in my eyes and haven’t missed a Yarn Harlot book signing in Seattle since.

That night, I also made it my mission to get myself onto the Yarn Harlot’s blog.  I figured if I could do that I would really be a knitter.  (Yes, this is after I started seriously knitting at twelve years old.  I might have a bit of hero worship going on.  This is one of the reasons why I consciously don’t follow celebrity gossip – I would take it way too seriously if I ever started.)

It took a few iterations.  I tried bringing baked goods, but they weren’t very special.  I was somewhat hampered by the lack of free time and lack of advance planning that always cripples me for important events like this.

In 2007, I thought I had it made.  I’d picked out a couple balls of a lovely mottled blue sock yarn made in Italy, and presented them to her as if she were my queen (because she really is knitting royalty).

There’s no yarn in that picture because she snatched it out of my hands and secreted it away before the shutter snapped.  I think that means she liked it.  I also got a nice picture with Stephanie, but…

…I made one fatal error.  I brought with me my friend Jimmy, who was currently working on his second knitting project – a fair isle scarf for the binary code for a computer virus.

It was really no contest which of us would be mentioned in her blog post for that visit to Seattle.

The next visit, I brought an in-progress wedding ring shawl which frankly looked like a gooey pile of yarn while it was being worked on.  Stephanie was still vocally appreciative, and mentioned that when I finished I should let her know so she could feature it on her blog.

I, of course, completely forgot to do so when I finished the shawl, but hearing about her latest book tour jiggled the memory in my head and I managed to get it together enough to bring not only the usual baked good (this time peanut butter cookies baked around a peanut butter cup center) but the shawl as well.

And this time, I am in fact on the Yarn Harlot’s blog!  Scroll down past all the other knitters and babies, and find the picture of two girls holding up a shawl that is way to0 big to be useful for anything, and that’s me on the left!  With my massive shawl that still somehow manages to pass through a (large) wedding ring!

I must be a knitter now, I’ve been mentioned by the Yarn Harlot.  I can cross that one off my bucket list.

Every now and then, I put down a knitting project only to come back to it weeks or months later and realize that I have no idea what my past self was thinking when I was knitting on it earlier.  Generally, it’s obvious that I had a plan and that I had every reason to believe that it would go well, but when I come back to it I have absolutely zero recollection of what’s going on anymore.

It’s at times like that where I wish I could go back in time and just ask myself, “What were you thinking?”  Mind you, in these circumstances it’s not in the smack-myself-in-the-face, what-were-you-thinking way, but a calm, interested hrm-didn’t-quite-follow-you-there, could-you-explain kind of way.

For example, I started a pair of socks while The Blanket Thief and I were in Europe.  I wanted something relatively simple, but not so simple that I was bored, so I decided to make up a two-cable traveling pattern that’s inspired by a couple kids playing tag.  The idea was that one cable would chase the other back and forth across the socks, bouncing off of the “walls” and going through a round of tagbacks whenever they crossed.

Recently, I dragged these out of the basket and started working on them again, only to pause and realize that the back cable crossings (above), didn’t match the front cable crossings (below).  Namely, while on the backs I’d apparently decided to stop moving one (but only one) of the cables, on the front I’d kept at the full pattern as established.

I spent a good amount of time trying to figure that one out.  The back was going to turn into the heel, so was I planning to have the one cable travel to the other side of the sock and mirror the placement of the first, stopped cable?  Had I intended the first cable to double back and meet the other one, to kind of check on why it hadn’t started?  Was it even possible that this had just been an accident, and I somehow hadn’t managed to pick up on it for four rows?

Eventually, I decided that, barring time travel, I was never going to figure out what the plan had been, and without a plan it was just silly to continue with a deviated pattern.  With that decision, it was time to engage the Knitting Surgery.  I picked back the four rows of the affected stitches, making a neat-but-really-confusing section.

Then I knit it all back up in the original pattern to match the front.  I’ve got a new plan for how it’s all going to go now, and I’m sure it’s much better than my original plan.

At this point, though, I really hope I never do run into my past self to ask her what the original plan was.  I don’t want to find out that I’m wrong, and really her plan was much better than mine if I could have just remembered it.

I never thought I’d actually see this day.  Okay, to be fair, when I started the Wedding Blanket I had every intention of being done in time for my friend’s wedding on Sept 17th, 2010, and I’m only 13 months late (not counting however long it will take to get plane tickets to visit her and give it to her in person), but once I’d started the project and realized how much of a shrink hole it was, I’d despaired of ever seeing the end of it.

But, my lovelies, it is well and truly done.

All the ends are woven in, all the seams are done, all the pieces are blocked, all the parts are knitted – there is nothing at all left to do on this blanket.

Nothing, that is, but marvel at its beauty.  I’m not sure exactly where it all came from, but there is some absolutely gorgeous stuff in this blanket.  Such as the mitered corners on the border (which were in no small part responsible for my need to do corrective surgery on it).  Totally worth the hassle now, though.

Or the sheer elegance of cables and traditional stitch patterns worked at scale.

Or what a lovely package it makes, all folded up and ready to be gifted to a not-quite-newly married couple.

Now that it’s all done, I’m starting to wonder…

…what if I kept it for myself and told her I’d lost it?  That would be wrong, right?  Sigh.  Maybe I’ll just have to knit a second one for myself.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve had counting problems in the past.  I’d like to say that usually I can make it to at least twenty without an issue, but experience would say otherwise.  For the Wedding Blanket II, though, I’m not sure if what I’m experiencing is a counting problem or negligence.

Remember when I started this thing, and I mentioned that putting the yarn together to knit from was like knitting from a kit?

So…each kit made four squares.  And I’ve gone through four kits.

However, I only have fifteen squares on the pile.

I really do not know how this happened.  I’ve got a few theories, though:

1. Gnomes and/or stash weasels
2. I didn’t finish one of the kits for some reason
3. I did knit a sixteenth square, but put it somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be

Now, if theory 1 or 2 is correct, I should cast on another square and just get it finished.  On the other hand, if theory 3 turns out to be right then I’ll end up with seventeen squares (because you just know I’ll find the missing square as soon as I finish the replacement), and since seventeen is a prime number that would make a pretty odd-shaped blanket.

For now, I’m somewhat ignoring the issue by doing everything else that needs to be done, like sewing up a small seam in the middle of each square and weaving in the ends in the center.  I’m not going to tell you how many ends that will end up being, but if you want a bit of a hint…

…it’s a lot.

Also, I really do have to figure out what I’m going to do about the border at some point.  Let me know if you have any suggestions…

Sorry for the massive gap in posting!  The home improvement project ended up dragging on for a couple weeks longer than it should have, so I’m only now getting back to my laptop for the first time since I started this whole fiasco.  I think pictures say it better than words, so how about a photo-essay explaining what happened?

It all started with a big hate-on that I had for the downstairs carpet.  When I got this place, the carpet was horribly, horribly dark with grime, and even renting an industrial carpet cleaner didn’t get all the stains out (it was, however, effective in getting a good portion of the grime out, so that you could tell where my passes didn’t quite line up because there was a dark line between them).  In the picture, the rug is covering up the giant stain from the previous owner’s feet when sitting on the couch.

So, in short, the carpet had to go.

Getting the carpet and pad off was actually pretty easy…except I had to play a game moving the furniture around to different sections of the room as I cleared off different areas.  It was kind of like that game where you have to move the yellow blocks out of the way to get the red block out of the cage…no?  Okay, just me playing that game then.  Never mind.

Pretty soon, all the carpet was out and it was time to remove tiles, at which point I learned that my kitchen’s subfloor had been raised half an inch in a way that was hard-at-best to remove.

So that meant I had to raise the rest of the floor half an inch to make it all match.  That alone added days to the work required.

But after all of that, I finally got to place the first board!  I really thought I was almost done at this point, which…well, that feels kind of laughable now.  But still, I’d finally moved beyond prep to actual doing.

Laying in the actual boards was pretty quick, actually.  In no time I had a measurable amount of floor done.

And then I got to the kitchen, where my plan was to work backward to fill in so that I didn’t have to measure something exactly to make it all match up.

That would have worked great, except for the last board – it had to fit under the trim for the door, and no matter what I did it was absolutely not physically possible to slide it in.  I tried to use The Force to make it work for about 10 minutes before I gave up and went to plan B.

Plan B was basically a do-over – take all of the kitchen floor back up, and start from the end that I should have started from in the first place if I hadn’t been trying to be so darn clever.

Luckily, putting the wood down was super quick once it was cut to shape, so it was less than an hour to get it all back to where it had been before (plus the one extra f*&%ing piece on the end, of course).

The next challenge was removing the tile that had been cemented to the floor in front of the fireplace.  I wouldn’t have had to do this, except the idiot who flipped my house at some point cemented the tiles over the carpet, so…yeah.  Three hours of my life were spent hunched over this 5 square foot section chipping cement off the wood floor.

And then there was a bunch of trim work that I didn’t take pictures of because I was in The Zone™, and some caulking to make the trim look perfect, and some painting to cover the caulk, and…yeah.  It took a long time.

But then?  When it was all said and done, at the end I had this:

Beautiful, gorgeous, glowing hardwood.  I’m so in love with this floor that if I wasn’t already married I’d consider marrying it.  I have favorite pieces that I’ve picked out.  I even catch myself staring at it and thinking, “Oh, goodness, it’s so lovely.  I could just look at it for days.”

Even the closet has hardwood now – there’s something so utterly decadent about having a hardwood floored closet, isn’t there?

Of course, the closet doesn’t have a door anymore, but that’s a detail I can fix later…

Apparently despite an update that seemed very promising, the WordPress app for Windows Phone is still practically useless and will not upload pictures with posts. Once I’ve got my computer out from under the rubble, I’ll post some pics.

Tonight’s regularly scheduled knitting post will not be happening, as I’ve one again destroyed my house in an effort to improve it. Unfortunately, the improvement is taking much longer than I expected: the current state of the house is…

When I was in first grade, we had a unit on learning to count.  We’re not talking just one through ten, either – oh no, we were graded on whether we could recite, in front of the entire class, the numbers from one to one hundred.

It doesn’t sound so hard now, but at the time…terrifying.  I was a shy little Asian girl in a really, really white elementary school with a racist teacher who thought I had Down’s Syndrome (and then yelled at me when I did better than the other kids).  Getting up in front of everyone scared the living snot out of me.

Also, I had trouble with the eighties.  To this day, I’m always a little cautious about counting past seventy-nine.  I’ll pause for a moment, think really hard, and cautiously go with, “eighty? Eighty-one…”

The other day, one of my friends and I were arguing about counting in base-ten vs. base-two, and he commented that “No one has trouble counting!  It’s an inherent human trait!  Who could possibly have trouble counting?!”

At which point I raised my hand, and I swear I lost like three whole Respect Points™ in that moment.

Anyway, all of that was a really long way of explaining why when I suddenly realized that I’d recently finished knitting a few more squares for Wedding Blanket II, and was well into yet another, but I hadn’t actually counted my progress in a long time, I felt a moment of panic.  In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d counted my progress.

I’m sure if I went back in the archives, it would be on this blog, but…er…I’m inefficiently lazy.

Anyway, I dug out all the squares for the blanket, starting with the most recent additions.

I…er…might have a habit of making small little bundles as I finish each one.  It serves absolutely no purpose, but it tends to make me happy and that’s all that matters, right?

Anyway, I unfolded those and laid them out on the stack with the rest of them and started counting.

That, my friends, is thirteen whole blocks for this blanket.  I think that means that if I’d wanted to bail at a 3×4 block blanket, I missed.

However, luckily, I was planning to knit a 4×4 block blanket, so I’m still good to go.  I mean, sure, in the back of my head was the thought that I had an escape route planned if it became too much, and the recipients would never know… (Except now they would, and I think I’ve mentioned the plan for 16 blocks before, so that was really more of a fairy tale I told myself.)  Just three more squares, and I can start the border for this thing.

Anyone have a good idea for a border to go with this one?  You know, without me showing you what the blanket actually looks like, because I have to somewhat hide it from the newly created husband-and-wife duo it’s intended for?

My hosting service is acting up, so I can’t seem to upload any images at the moment.  Hopefully they’ll get that situation resolved soon, but in the meantime, here’s a link to an epic yarnbombing.

I’m completely done with sewing on one side of the border of the Wedding Blanket I. One side.

There are three more to go. It’s at this point that I start thinking maybe a circular blanket isn’t such a bad idea. Sure, the edge is longer, but on the flip side there’s only one of them.

I think if that made any sense to you, you should probably consider taking a nap. Seriously.

Speaking of, the Wedding Blanket I is currently enjoying a deep sleep in the bookshelf, out of reach of monkey kitty.

Doesn’t it just look so peaceful? I’d really hate to bother it by taking it out to sew on it some more…

Not buying it? Crap, I didn’t think you would. Maybe next time I post I’ll have 1.25 sides done…