One Decade

Dear Devil,

This past week you turned ten years old, and the top of my head exploded. How did you get to be 10? How can it possibly be that time has gone by so quickly? (How can I possibly have been a mother for ten entire years? The universe quakes on its foundations...)

Turning nine.

This past year has been one of much upheaval for all of us, but I think it's been a particular challenge for you. You've unexpectedly had to change schools, and go from the hothouse environment of a London private school, to the somewhat-less protected, vastly more diverse and chaotic life of a London state school. The upside of the move is that your confidence in your academic abilities has gone up, and we are hearing a lot less of "I can't" and seeing a lot more "I can".

I can fire a cannon...

Although it's been a tough change for you, you have weathered it like a champ. You've also managed very recently to face some pretty serious stuff head on and, with a bit of encouragement from your parents and your teachers, are doing a much better job of speaking out and standing up for yourself. I couldn't be prouder of you.

You have also begun to learn the ways of delayed gratification - you've worked hard to get on top of schoolwork so you could get access to The Game That Shall Not Be Named. You've also set yourself a goal of saving up a chunk of money so you could get your own iPod - this challenge brought out your entrepreneurial side, as you leafleted our street to get jobs walking dogs, and then followed up with neighbors, For someone who's natural tendency is a bit more towards passivity, particularly when interacting with adults you don't really know, this is a Big Deal.

As hard as it is to believe that you are ten, I only have to look at your face, getting ever closer in height to mine, to realize that time is passing very, very quickly. And its so important to recognize and take advantage of those moments when you are still my little girl who wants cuddles - they are becoming less and less common in the onslaught of impending teenager-hood and the overwhelming embarrassment of having me as a mother. Just you wait...

I love you so very much,

Mummy

The Design Diaries: just keep swatching...

In the first instalment of The Design Diaries, I talked about the inspiration behind my current project. Today I'm going to talk about everyone's most favourite topic: swatching.

Part 2A: Yarn Choice

In this particular project, I knew which yarn I was going to use almost as soon as I knew what I was going to design. At last year's Unravel, I was Allison's booth babe at the Sweet Georgia Yarns stand. We were right next to the wonderful and lovely Rachel Coopey, who was selling her then-most recent book. She also had a couple of crates of Titus yarn, from Baa Ram Ewe, and I was totally smitten with a couple of the colours. When only one skein of one of My Colours was left, I kept flinching every time someone picked it up. Finally, I just bought it so I could stop glaring at people who were fondling My Yarn. 

When the idea for the Boat Race Hats popped into my head, I knew that this was the project for that particular skein of yarn, in that particular colour. Thankfully, Baa Ram Ewe has just released this year's new colours, and one of those was perfect for the other side of the river.

So after deciding on the yarn and the colours, the next question was: how many people will want to knit a fingering weight hat (mostly) in reverse stockinette? Or rather: could I knit a fingering weight hat in reverse stockinette quickly enough for the time frame I have in mind?

The answer to that question was, as you may have guessed, a resounding no! So I decided to swatch with the yarn held doubled, hoping that it would knit up faster AND be a bit warmer against bitter river winds.

Part 2B: The Swatching

I am one of those odd people who really enjoys swatching. Well, I really enjoy it up to the point where I'm sick of it and just want to cast on already. So I pulled out some needles, some graph paper and some stitch dictionaries and tried out some combinations.

Swatch #1:

Worked on US 6/4.0 mm needles, the standard Tree of Life stitch pattern from Barbara Walker with slipped stitches, but worked in twisted stitches instead of normal.

Verdict: needs a smaller needle size, and no slipped stitches. Twisted ribbing is good though.

Swatch 1 - good for ruling things out

Swatch #2:

US 5/3.75 mm needles, again with twisted rib, but no slipped stitches. Also tried alternating the branches (oars) coming in to more closely mimic how a rowing shell looks from above.

Verdict: fabric is better, but probably still needs to drop down one more needle size. Working twisted stitches every row way better then slipped stitch version, not sure about the alternating oar arrangement.

Swatch 2 - getting closer...

Swatch #3:

US 4/3.5 mm needles, and more variations on the twisted rib and Tree of LIfe. 

Verdict: right needle size, hooray! I'm intrigued by carrying the twisted stitches from the oars along the vertical. Some variation of this will work well for the beanie version with a closely packed stitch pattern, but it's not going to be strong enough for the slouch, with a widely spaced stitch motif.

Swatch 3 - right fabric, maybe

Swatch #4:

US 4/3.5. mm needle, a larger motif that I'm looking at for the slouchy version of the hat. 

Verdict: I like the three stitch wide twisted stitch boat, and I'm also a big fan of having the oars stop when they reach the 3 stitch column, rather then feeding in a becoming part of it. 

I think the oars need to be longer then they are in the lower iterations, but this is just about right.

So now I'm at the stage where I've got a good sense of what the fabric is I'm aiming for, as well as the bones of the stitch patterns. And it's definitely time to start the prototypes:

I love 1x1 twisted ribbing...

The Design Diaries: Inspiration Strikes!

Knitters have access to a wide range of patterns, of all ranges of complexities and beauty. But how do such things come to be? How do designers come up with their ideas? What is the process like? How do they get from idea to final piece? I was recently struck very forcefully by a flash of knit-design inspiration, and thought that it might be interesting and/or entertaining to share some of my design process with you. Keep in mind, this is only my way of working through the design process, and it is going be different for everyone. 

Part 1: The Inspiration

I usually have a pretty good idea in mind of what I am designing before I start. Sometimes the inspiration is a building, sometimes a place, sometimes the pattern of leaves or branches or the outlines of mountains against the horizon. But this particular design was inspired by a van parked alongside the Thames with the following logo on the side: 

I live in Putney, which is the starting point for the annual Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race. For those of you unfamiliar with the event, this event ha been running for almost 200 years, and pits the top crews from Oxford and Cambridge against each other in a head-to-head battle over a 4+ mile course running from Putney Bridge to Mortlake. As with any event with such a long trajectory, there is much history, many controversies and a pile of breathtaking moments.

The reason I look forward to the race is a pretty complicated one. When I was 8 years old, I started taking ballet lessons after school. I started off with one lesson a week, then moved up to two, then three. By the time I started high school (Year 9 for those not familiar with the US educational system), I was dancing for a couple of hours a day, five days a week, and most of the day on Saturdays. I was also 5'8", and not exactly built like a ballerina (to put it mildly). It became abundantly clear soon thereafter that I was not destined to be the next prima ballerina of the Boston Ballet, and I ended up stopping cold turkey.

So there I was, used to partaking in strenuous physical activity more or less constantly, but with no activity any more. Enter my newly-formed high school rowing team, which saved me. In so many ways, crew was the perfect sport for me: I was tall, strong, heavy and had pretty good kinesthetic awareness from many years of ballet. And for the first time since hitting puberty, I didn't feel like a bull in a china shop. Instead of feeling like I need to minimise myself to fit in with the smaller, skinnier dancers around me, I could suddenly be proud of my size and strength, instead of feeling like I needed to apologise to everyone. In my novice year, I was the stroke of my boat, and had one of the fastest erg times on the team. That was the start of fifteen years as a rower, ranging from that high school crew team to Junior National Camps in the summer, to winning the Club Four event at the Head of the Charles and the collegiate league championships in my last year of college, to rowing at the club level at Potomac Boat Club during graduate school. After grad school, I moved to Arizona, where crew teams were non-existent, and took up cycling and triathlon. When we moved to London, I found rowing again, and while I haven't started up back in the boat myself, I can see the shells out on the water on a daily basis.

All this is a very long way of saying that rowing has a special place in my heart, and the Boat Race van kindled my design inspiration in a major way. So what is it I'm going to design?

A hat. A rowing hat, to be precise. Actually two hats: a rower's hat and a spectator's hat, sharing a boat-inspired stitch pattern, but in two different shapes. A slouchy version with only a few motifs for those of us shore-side, and a beanie with an all-over pattern for keeping a rower's ears warm. Because even in April, it can be cold and raw out there on the water. In the next installment of the Design Diaries, I'll talk about swatching for needle size, stitch pattern and the yarn. Oh the yarn...

A Birthday Letter to Boo

Dear Boo,

On the last day of February, you turned eight years old, much to the chagrin and shock of your Mum. You'd think it wouldn't have been a surprise, and yet it was - how did you get so old?

Boo helping me out by modelling some finished knitting.

The past year has seen you do a number of quite impressive things. You sailed through the end of one school and into the next (although there were a few blips along the way) with hardly a wobble. You have gone from a small, extrememely nurturing private school environment into a large, busy and chaotic state school with the rock steadiness that you have always had. Your ability to be certain and content in yourself is something I admire greatly, and I wish I had come to that point much earlier in life then I actually did (i.e. sometime in my twenties). You have always been there, and it is an amazing thing to see.

The intrepid explorer in Norway

You have shot up like a weed - I can't believe that my adorable little cuddle bug is now this tall, gorgeous girl, but there you are. You're still a cuddle bug, thankfully, you just have more sharp corners and take up more space in the bed. And have developed a horrific predilection for Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, but that's another blog post...

One of the marvels being a parent to siblings is to see and acknowledge the differences between two children who have the same parents and have grown up in more-or-less the same environment. You and I had a talk last week about your sister's friends expecting you to behave in a certain way because, well, you're her sister and that's how she reacts. You were quite certain that you and Devil are very different, even though you look very much alike. I couldn't agree more. And I'm afraid this is going to be an ongoing challenge for you, particularly if the two of you continue in the same schools: everyone from peers to teachers to parents are going to think they know what they're getting when you come along, simply by virtue of you being D's younger sibling. It's further complicated by the fact that you are both girls - if one of you had been a boy, that expectation might be tempered a bit - but I am confident that you will have absolutely no problems setting people straight as to your existence as a completely independent entity.

Home cloning experiment

Watching you do math warms my geeky heart to its very cockles: in your ability to recognize patterns seemingly without effort, I see something of myself, and it is further evidence (in my mind at least) of the wonder of genetics. I may be a neuroscientist, but my expertise runs to the cellular and molecular rather then cognitive systems. The fact that I can see in you traits that your father and I have is an ongoing revelation. And it is a window on to myself that is hard to escape.

Thank you for who you are and what you bring to my life. You are my sunshine, Sunshine.

Love,

Mumma

And so it begins, with Unravel

This past weekend was the start of the Wool Festival Season here in the UK, and as always, it was a complete pleasure to make the journey down the A3 to Farnham for the wonderful Unravel, held at Farnham Maltings.

It's hard to convey the feeling I had sitting down on the train at 9:15 on Sunday morning with my mum, Allison, and her mum, knowing that I was going to spend the day surrounded by wool and color and creativity. We arrived just after ten, and after a brief photo shoot of Alli's finished Munchkin Baby Blanket, we headed in to the show.

Let me just get this out of the way now, since everyone wants to know: how much did I get?

That's 300 g of fiber from John Arbon (100 g each of Exmoor Blueface, Exmoor Horn, and an Exmoor Blueface/Zwarbtles blend). There were two skeins of Canopy Fingering from The Fiber Company (yarn support so it doesn't count as stash enhancement, right?) and a pile of shade cards for their different yarn lines which have my designer brain jumping up and down in glee. I also managed to snag an old needle gauge/row counter from Eliza Conway. Plus a lovely shawl pin from Textile Garden. Not pictured is my lovely poster of all the different varieties of colors and markings in Shetland sheep, from Judy Hardman.

More important then the buying were the people. We talked to people we'd like to see at the Yarn in the City Pop Up Marketplace in September, we talked to old friends and to (hopefully) new ones. I looked at lots of stalls to get inspiration for my upcoming Porpoise Fur stall at I Knit Fandango in May. I feel like I spent most of my time gabbing with people, but I came away from the show with lots of excitement and inspiration and full of creative energy. What could be better?