Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!

Until today, the last time I won anything, it was a gigantic bag of fertilizer at the county fair when I was 5 years old. My parents were thrilled, as they'd been wanting to re-do the lawn, but I was S-O-L.

I chose the handspun. Very much worth the 28 year wait.

The minds, they are a'changin'

(With apologies to Bob Dylan: Sorry, dude. I can't resist puns. Or whatever it is that's in the title).

Sarah would like to know whether I've changed my mind about anything.

It is a worthy question. I am a pretty rigid person, usually. My mind, once made up, will generally stay that way, if not forever, close enough to it that you'd have to wait around a really long time. The times I have changed my mind are so rare and golden that I should start a hall of fame for them.

1. Ch-ch-ch-changes

One that leaps most readily to mind was my prejudice against science fiction books. I liked some TV shows (okay, just Star Trek, the Next Generation) and movies, but for some reason, the concept of the science fiction book conjured up all sorts of childishly mean-spirited images around the theme "dorks reading bad fiction." My husband once pointed out that, sure, there's a lot of crap out there, but some good stuff too, and anyway, Jane Austen was no great shakes, either.

After I recovered from this (!), he handed me a copy of Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut. With its finely drawn characters, acerbic wit, and a dog who travels the space-time continuum with his master, I was happily engaged in this book from page one. What sets this book apart, however, are the grand themes that surface as the plot unfolds. The denizens of Amazon.com have given it a much more knowledgeable and thorough review than I ever could, so I shall direct you there for more information.

But Sirens probably isn't true sci-fi. Certainly not as I defined it in my knee-jerk aversion to sci-fi. So, I stuck my toes in a little deeper with the Ender series, by Orson Scott Card. There are a bunch of these, starting with Ender's Game, which in the grand tradition of series, is probably the best one. It certainly got me hooked enough to read up through the fourth book. After that, I was a little Ender-ed out, but I could see myself re-reading some of these, or continuing at some point.

Very basically, Ender is a young boy, and an outcast in society, for a big reason that is clear from the get-go. He gets recruited into an elite military school at younger than the standard age, where the kids train to be the best warriors possible in order to kick the butts of the aliens who kicked our butts a decade or so previously. From this fairly simple premise, Orson Scott Card got 3 really good books, and 1 mostly good book (and the rest I can't speak to) without having to thoroughly exhaust his bag of writerly tricks.

Though less in the way of grand themes, there is definitely a lot to hang your hat on intellectually, e.g., dystopia, family dynamics, ethics of war, cultural differences (esp. in Book 4)... and so long as the action is interesting, the characters are engaging, and the writing is good, I am up for pretty much anything.

2. Turn and face ...

More significantly, answering Sarah's inquiry got me thinking about why I had this prejudice. There is no logic to it at all, which makes it a true Capital-P Prejudice. I never had any highfalutin standards for my reading material, and though I do read what you might call literature every once in a while, I never thought of myself as being literary. I have read romance novels. I have no business talkin' smack about people who read sci-fi, y'know?

I will readily confess my other ____-snobs, i.e., wine snob, music snob, yarn snob..... But a book snob, I am not. If DH asks you where his Star Trek novels went, don't tell him they're in my book basket next to the bed.

3. The strange...

As for yarn, I am changing my mind about cotton. My second sweater was a white cotton tunic from a Spring/Summer issue of VK, maybe 5 or 6 years ago. I believe the pattern called for Classic Elite Weekend Cotton. Back then, I was a new knitter, and pretty much everything I made was either a Lion Brand Pattern or kit, and I used the requisite Lion Brand yarn. When a pattern didn't call for Lion Brand yarn, I substituted. This wasn't a conscious thing. It was an access thing. I didn't make much money, there weren't lots of yarn shops where I was living, so I knitted with what I had.

For this cotton sweater, I chose a Lion Brand cotton (and I can't remember the name - it might have just been called Lion Cotton), and knitted away at K1P1 ribbing (ouch!) for ages until the sweater was done. It looked good, actually. Not as light and summery fabulous as in the magazine, but respectable, especially for one's second sweater.

It was also massively heavy and had all the drape of a hunk of siding. It wasn't very soft to knit with or to wear, so into the closet it went, until I ended up packing it into a bag of clothes I donated after losing my "living at home during law school" weight. I never touched cotton again. I bypassed it disdainfully in yarn shops, and found the Spring/Summer issues of knitting mags to be utterly devoid of anything knittable. I might have liked the pattern, but I wasn't touching cotton with a 10-foot needle. Nope. Not me.

That might have all changed. A few weeks ago, while browsing in Urban Knitting Studio for a light pretty something to make into a springy shrug (I was thinking silk, or maybe microfiber), I fell in mad crazy love with Blue Sky Cotton, from the wonderful folks who make Blue Sky Alpacas yarn. It was the shade that called out to me: a very light petal pink, so delicate it is only found on babies' toes. I had to have it. I didn't care what it was made of. Okay, I did kind of care, but when I picked it up and felt how soft it was, I was sold.

I started knitting with it this weekend, for another iteration of Stefanie Japel's Minisweater (made my first one a couple of weeks ago, and now I am addicted). Ladies and Germs, it is like knitting with cotton balls. I love it. I love that stitches don't squish up together like wool does, and leaves the fabric uneven. It really is just a touch uneven, and in such a charming way that I am not sure I want to block it.

I probably won't change my stance on eyelash yarn any time soon, but stay tuned for further developments.

A Rash of Stash

Lots of talk about stashes lately. Lots of talk. Folks de-stashing, cataloguing stash, knitting from stash, justifying stash, measuring stash, reading stash....

I like reading stash, because it is one of those fluid concepts that have always appealed to my liberally art-ed brain. It's the classic essay question that consists of one sentence describing the topic, followed by one word: discuss. Just dive in, bang around for awhile, and out comes genius. Or, what you hope is genius anyway. You could write a poem if you felt like it, and it might work. Not on the bar exam, but pretty much everywhere else.

But the other boats, I missed. I wasn't even on the pier. In fact, I was probably sitting at the cafe next to the pier having a glass of wine after a successful yarn shopping excursion. Except for a de-stash to charity around Thanksgiving, and a stash re-org after the New Year, I haven't seriously addressed the stash question in my home apart from, apparently, adding to it.

Here's the thing. On an individual level, I get it. Knitter has too much yarn and commits to knitting a bunch of it before buying anything new, or Knitter has yarn she knows she will never knit, and finds a recipient for same. I find it curious, however, that so many people are seized by the same impulse at the same time. De-stashing is all the rage. De-stashing is the new knitting, or new yoga or new... something?

Ordinarily, I'd start ruminating about why this is the case. What is it about all of these Knitters that draws them to De-stashtown, while I am heading the opposite way, to Los Altos, home to two great yarn shops? Why was everyone knitting Clapotis, and my impulse to do so began and ended at printing out the pattern? It's really beautiful, and in a yummy yarn, and I love pretty much anything that could reasonably be called a shawl; yet I was so off the Clapotis bandwagon, that I didn't know it was pronounced Clap-oh-tee. How did you all know that? Here I was, six years of French classes under my belt, calling it Cla-paw-tiss.

The answer doesn't truly lie with all the de-stashing, Clapotis-knitting Knitters out there. They are all doing it for various worthy and perfectly unassailable reasons. I am not doing it for the same reason I have not done many, many other things:

I am not a joiner. You could have tattooed it on my forehead in Kindergarten (someone threatened this to my parents, I am sure), and it would still be relevant today. I am considering putting it on my tombstone.

One of these days, though, I might get around to somehow cataloguing or quantifying my stash in some way. Of course, I'd do it and never keep it up to date, but that's another story.

By the book....

Somewhat belatedly, here is my inaugural entry in the Read Your Stash Project .

Before I was an obsessive knitter, I was an obsessive reader. That tapered off a bit when I didn't have a commute. I lived walking distance from my office, and somehow, it didn't seem wise to wander through the Tenderloin and the Financial District with my nose in a book. The former might get my ass kicked, the latter would annoy all the other Fi-Di denizens because I would be in their way. Either could get me hit by a car.

Since I moved to the suburbs and acquired a really quite lovely commute on Caltrain, reading has been back on the agenda. Usually something light and funny, but occasionally I crave something more serious. On my current reading list is Kristin Lavransdatter, by Sigrid Undset. This classic medieval romance was written in 1928, and earned Ms. Undset the Nobel Prize for literature. It is also the first serious work I have fully committed to since finishing The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie two years ago.

The Moor's Last Sigh took a lot out of me. It gave me something, too, but reading it was such a tremendously emotional experience that upon finishing it, I cried good and hard for a solid 30 minutes. It is at once the saddest, most affirming, most vivid and most wonderful thing I have ever read. I think on some level I will never read anything that perfect ever again. It is a difficult thing for any other book to live up to.

After that, I re-read some old favorites, picked up a few authors I hadn't read before (Carl Hiaasen became a favorite), and occasionally tried something serious again, only to put it down after a few pages.

Knitting sometimes works that way for me, too. I commit to something large, time consuming, and/or complicated and spend about 90% of my knitting energies on it until it is done. After that, I alternate among some smaller, simpler projects, with perhaps a mediumish project in the background. At some point, the urge for something on a grander scale kicks in, and the cycle starts anew. It is a shorter cycle, I think, than for books, as I knit a lot more than I read most of the time.

But I have digressed. One of the things that strikes me about Kristin Lavransdatter is the time period in which it is set. Kristin lives in the 14th century in Scandinavia, a time period in which everything was made by hand, and in a place that has given us some of knitting's most treasured classics. Kristin actually doesn't knit (at least not so far), but she, along with her mother and sisters, spins and weaves. The cloth they make marks the significant moments in their lives (a wedding dress for Kristin, her trousseau, swaddling cloths) and is a part of their daily lives as well (bedding, tablecloths, everyday clothing).

For most of the people in the world today, the things we make are not a necessity of every day life -- not in the sense of "if we don't make it, we won't have clothes." In fact, crafting has become somewhat of a luxury, whether that luxury is time, money for supplies, a wealth of options from which to choose, or a combination of these. Happily, handmade things do still mark the significant occasions in our lives. Weddings and babies are both heralded with what most of us would consider our greatest masterpieces (wedding ring shawl, anyone?) and sweetest whimsies (like the watermelon hat I recently made for a friend's baby shower).

The act of making these things, however, might have an element of necessity, in the sense that this act gives us something adaptive and useful that we otherwise might not have. It gives us patience waiting in line, it gives us solace when we are too overwrought to read or listen to music. It puts us in touch with something traditional and handmade in a world that is increasingly detached from tradition and focused on mass production. Perhaps in this last way, making something by hand is a revolutionary act. How many of you have been knitting, crocheting, or cross-stitching in public, and encounter someone observing you who seems a completely shocked?

For me, the solace of crafting (in my case, knitting) has a particular relevance. At its most mundane level, it is something that helps me calm down when I am anxious, or feel better when I am upset. One time, it was a necessity for me. I was at work one morning last summer, when I got a call from my mom. It was a call I had been dreading for weeks, as my grandpa had been in the hospital with cancer for some time. She gave me the news we had all feared, that he had died, and then we hung up. I was literally incapable of speaking through the sobs, so I instant-messaged my boss to tell him I needed to leave.

On the train home, my book was useless. It may as well have been written in hieroglyphics, for all I was able to read of it. I had, however, been knitting my first-ever sock during my commute, and that is what I reached for when I needed something, anything, to keep my eyes downward and the tears at bay until I got home.

Reading Kristin Lavransdatter, I wonder if Kristin finds solace in her work. If spinning, for example, produces something her family needs, as well as gives her solace for her troubles. Ms. Undset does not really say. Kristin seeks solace in her faith, more than anything else. She is pious, and her faith is demanding. It requires obedience, atonement, and self-examination, which seem to add sometimes to Kristin's inner turmoil. Spinning and knitting, even with their occasional snarls and tangles and dropped stitches somehow avoid causing more troubles for the troubled. They soothe by giving the troubled person something external to focus on.