Still waiting…

Yep. Despite the fact that I was promised information by May 30th, it is now May 31st and I still haven’t heard about the status of my abstract. Now, I don’t want to be whiney, but I want to know. I hate waiting and the fact that the date has passed with not a word makes me assume the worst. But I’d rather know, than assume.

My newest FOs are not helping.

Pattern: My own
Yarn: Lorna’s Laces, Shepherd Sock in “Black Purl”, one skein
Needles: Inox metal dpns, US 0
Started: May 3, 2006
Completed: May 29, 2006

Thoughts: Well… I knit them from the toe up, which is nice when you only have one skein and aren’t sure how far it will go. I love the yarn. There aren’t words enough for it. So smooth, easy to knit, beautiful colors… The pattern was easy (though if I had it to do again, I’d increase a few more stitches at the toe before knitting the foot. I’m getting a little better at the short-row heel, though if you look closely (which you are not allowed to), you can see they are a little ragged. Why am I not pleased? Well… notice that I’m only wearing one in that photo? Can you guess why?

Remember a few days ago, I wrote asking about looser bind-offs for toe-up socks? Many of you wrote with helpful suggestions, including the sewn bind-0ff, which I used successfully on sock #2 (shown on my foot in the picture). I was so pleased with it, I immediately ripped out the bind-off of sock #2 (which worked, albeit very tightly), used the sewn bind-0ff, and immediately wove the end in and snipped it, all without trying it on. Foolish me. Because what worked so beautifully for sock #2 was an absolute disaster for sock #1. I have no idea why, but now I can’t even get the damn thing on. I’m so frustrated and disappointed that I can’t even bear to look at it. They are now stashed away, under some other stuff, and someday, I’m sure I’ll take the time to try and re-do it. But why? Why did this happen? Any ideas?

Between this and the problems with T-SALP, my confidence in my knitting skills has been pretty thoroughly drained.

Not drained enough, though, to prevent me from casting on for New England. Let’s hope this goes better… otherwise, I might throw down the needles for good.

waiting…

So remember way back in March, I submitted an abstract for the annual ethnomusicology conference? In Hawaii? Yeah. I find out whether I’ve been accepted tomorrow. Explain to me, then, why I am compuslively checking my e-mail today, as though the internet gods (and the people at SEM) are going to send me the ‘results’ a day early, not to mention on a national holiday? I’m crazy. And holding my breath…

Amazing Lace

I’ve posted about T-SALP and Amazing Lace here. So check that out. The end of this post is the same as the end of that post. I’ll just add that there will most definitely be so FO’s this week, so keep your eyes peeled.

What does that really mean anyway?

In the meantime, Orangina and I travelled to the Ralph Stanely Hills of Home Memorial Music Festival, which is up the mountain from my house. It was pretty fun, though it poured like the second flood on Friday and the sun shone like we were in the desert yesterday (I have nice pink arms and a cap-sleeve-tan-line to show for it). Here is Orangina with Ralph:

You can’t really tell it’s her, but trust me, it is. (By the way, for those of you who liked that O Brother Where Art Thou thing, he happens to be singing “O Death” in this photo).

And here is Ralph and the Clinch Mountain Boys singing in the rain. And when I say rain, I mean RAIN, which you can kinda see in this picture.

Overall, I had a great time, though it was really nice to come home last night, take a shower, and drink so good, strong coffee this morning.

Wednesday’s Happy Things

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve done this, but it’s Wednesday, so here are some things that are making me smile:

1. Coffee and the Last of the Cadbury Eggs

I wonder how many times coffee will make this list? Honestly, it makes me happy every day.
(Pardon the Cadbury Egg’s absence. My camera was out of batteries and I just couldn’t wait for them to charge before eating it — Thanks Mom!!).

2. Freshly cut grass

Yep, yesterday I participated in the spring/summer ritual practiced by most people, but absent from my life for over a decade — Cutting grass. I’ve lived on a college campus or in a major city for the last almost ten years. I forgot about cutting grass. But when the grass at my house here got about knee high, and my next door neighbor told me he was wondering if I’d moved out, I decided it was time to cut the grass. My landlord came by and weedwacked the stuff to a manageable height (and bought me a lawn mower!!!!) and yesterday, in a fit of warm-weather induced frenzy, I cut the whole thing (and I only had t call my dad once to figure out how to turn the thing on!). Now I understand why people have “yard goats.” My front yard is an absolute bitch to mow — up the mountain, right the road. I bruised the palms of my hands pushing the mower up the hill and look what a crappy job I did!

But I did a nice job on the backyard and it looks so pretty and neat and smells so good. I finished sweaty, grassy, hot and feeling more accomplished than I have in a looooong time.

3. Home

Man, it feels good to be at home. I love my space, my stuff, my kitties, my time. I’ve been reading (The Nation and Confederates in the Attic), knitting (Anthropologie Sweater and T-SALP), and listening to the radio (WMMT – Voice of the Hillbilly Nation). Oh, and don’t worry, I’ve been

4. Working, too.

Yep. Work made it onto the list of things making me happy. How lucky am I? I spent a bunch of time yesterday transcribing an interview I did a week and a half ago. It’s an amazing interview and typing it up has been a pleasure. Tomorrow, I’m going up to the Ralph Stanley Memorial Hills of Home Festival, which is just up the mountain from my house. This is my job. I thank my lucky stars.

5. Orangina

I love orangina. What a pleasurable knit. I’m generally frustrated with T-SALP (gauge issues, needle issues, yarn issues), but Orangina makes me smile every time I pick her up.

Oh, and I’ve done an Amazing Lace post — so check it out!

Back Home in the Blue Ridge Mountains…

I feel like I owe the four people who read my blog regularly an apology. I stink. I’ve not had a substantive post in well over a week, and virtually no photos. But, to my credit, summer is a crazy time for my research — I’ve been bouncing from one festival to the next, home for two nights at a time and then running out again to another. This weekend is festival-free, but I’m home in Charlottesville, visiting with my parents, tagging along while my friend attends her sister’s UVa Law graduation. It’s nice to be home, and I’ve (finally) been getting some knitting done. When I get back to my part of the world, I’ll have photos, I promise. The “new advisor” footies are coming along well. I finished one this afternoon and am casting on right now for the second in the hopes that I’ll actually finish this pair (it’s been almost two months since I finished a pair of socks, despite the fact that I have five in progress right now. sheesh!). Question — Does anyone have any suggestions for a good elastic cast off for socks? I knit these footies toe-up and a regular cast off makes for a really tight ankle. I can squeeze my foot in, but it’s really not comfortable.

I hope for an Amazing Lace update/introduction on Tuesday over on my Amazing Lace page. I’ve been making good progress on Orangina and feel optomistic that I’ll be able to finish her by next week (fingers crossed). I’m thinking of her as a sort of warm-up teamate for the Amazing Lace, though I’m not sure she’ll really help prepare me for the T-SALP. I will continue to post links to that page here and probably most of the content except for the T-SALP. Mom has been very respectful of the secret page. We all like surprises…

If I were a different person..

[warning -- there is no knitting content in the following post]

You know how there are those times in life that call for the perfect comeback, but you don’t think of it until three hours later, when it’s waaaay too late? I had one of these today. I was sitting around the appalshop, waiting to go help out on a film shoot. I struck up a conversation with one of the nice, young interns about coffee (one of my first serious loves). I was telling her how I used to regularly get three or four hours of sleep a night when I was in college (keep in mind, she’s a sophomore in college now). She nodded. I then said that I stopped being able to do that when I reached twenty four or twenty five. Her eyes got wide and she asked me “How old are you?” I said that I would be twenty seven in July (because I will be). Her response? “Wow. Twenty Seven. What does it feel like?” I kid you not. I think this is the first time I have ever felt old. Or almost felt old, because how can you feel old when you’re not?

This was at lunch. At five o’clock today, I came up with the perfect response to this question. What does it feel like to be twenty seven? It feels just like twenty, but much, much smarter.

Seriously, I thought it was spring!

It feels minorly ridiculous to be working on lace when it is 54 degrees outside. What happened to spring? We had a brief teaser and now it’s back to winter for us for another week. People down here call this “blackberry winter”, “redbud winter” (which makes no sense, since the redbuds have long ago stopped blooming), “dogwood winter” (ditto the last one) or “indian winter” which is funny, because I’ve only ever heard of “indian summer.” In any event, it’s cold.

I’ve added an additional teammate to my Amazing Lace adventure — well, not a “new teammate” per se, but rather one that tugged on my sleeve and said “Why not me too?” So, Orangina has begged her way onto Team Twinknit. She and top secret Amazing Lace Project (from here on out T-SALP) took a trip to the Breaks Interstate Park on Friday night for the first Crooked Road Music Festival. My friends’ band had a gig there and I got to dance a little. It was pretty fun, but a long drive from east Kentucky. I got another inch or so worked on the front of Orangina. I’d post pictures, but, as I’ve said, an inch or two added looks pretty much the same as it did before, and besides I’m using dial up right now and it’s too slow to wait to download pictures.

I’m almost done making Macaroni and Cheese. I’m embarassed to post this for a few reasons. 1) my previous and confidently expressed disdain for just-add-water-type food (see my rant about cake mix), and 2) the fact that I just finished reading this book, “Julie/Julia” about this woman who cooks her way through all of the recipites in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, vol 1 (a book which I feel 99.99% positive is on my parent’s cookbook shelf). But the Mac and Cheese I’m eating now is Kraft. Yep, it’s “Disgusting but good macaroni and Cheese Product”. Mmmmmm…

But, before I go, a few of you asked on the page I created for T-SALP whether the name “Twinknit” has anything to do with me being a twin. As a matter of fact, it does I’ve got a twin brother, named Adam. We’re fraternal twins. This may seem like an obvious thing to say (if he’s a boy and I’m a girl, there is no way we can be identical. Duh.) but I had a doctor ask me this once during a check-up. Needless to say, this made me feel a little wary her skills as a medical professional. When picking a name for my blog (and not being clever enough to come up with one that makes a pun about knitting) Twin-Knit seemed like a good fit. It’s also got this nice almost (well, okay, not at all) pallendromic quality to it. So yes, I do have a twin, and no, I haven’t knit him anything yet (he’s not one for wool). More on that later… my Mac and Cheese is getting cold.

A solution…

I’ve been frustrated with my inability to post about my Amazing Lace project, and this morning I came up with a solution. First, some beans to spill:

Mom, my Amazing Lace project is for you. I’m sure this is not a surprise. So for the next few weeks (months?), I’m going to be posting about this project elsewhere, and linking to this blog. Please, if you want to be surprised, don’t click on the links. If you don’t care about the surprise, let me know, and I’ll just start posting here. I love you. Happy Mother’s Day (a little early). Thanks.

So, for the first installment of the Amazing Lace update, click here. (again, Mommy, not for you).

In other news, I did not finish the orange blob last night because I was too busy winding yarn. For hours, I wound (and wound and wound). Lace weight is kind of a pain, huh? Hopefully more progress today.

A Walk in the Woods

Oh Oh Oh! I got my Amazing Lace (yarn) in the mail today. It has taken every single ounce of self control I have not to post pictures of it all over this blog, I love it so much. But it’s a gift and I’m trying to make it at least a bitty bit of a surprise. But… it’s a Sundara yarn and it crunches like freshly fallen snow in the middle of winter (my favorite sound, by the way, next to the sound of the screen door at my grandparent’s house on Lake George slapping against its frame — now that’s the sound of joy). And someday, I’ll find a way to post pictures where the gift recipient can’t find them.

In the meantime, a knitting update — This

orange blob is on it’s way to becoming a modified version of Peony’s Anthropologie Sweater. I’m messing around with it a little — longer sleeves, slightly longer body. We’ll see how it turns out. I’m hoping I’ll finish it tonight.

I’ve been working slowly on my Lorna’s Laces “Freedom” socks (with yarn I bought to celebrate my new advising situation). No pictures yet. They’re coming very slowly. When I finish one, I’ll post.

In the meantime, my friend Jennifer from Memphis is visiting with her husband. She and I took the afternoon off, after the rainstorm passed, and went hiking to Bad Branch Falls, on the Kentucky/Virginia border. Since folks have remarked that they like the “scenery” photos, I took a couple on our hike today.

Kentucky is beautiful. This is a view from the top of Pine Mountain.

We saw lots of small, beautiful flowers on the trail, like this woods violet:

and this blackberry flower.

There were also a lot of really interesting mushrooms.

The falls were beautiful as always, but the highlight was the walk there. The trail to Bad Branch is damp and dark, with bits of woods peeking through the dense, tree-like canopy of rodedendron. I love it.

We also saw a lot of wildlife, like this snail:

and, the highlight (literally and figuratively):

this little, fluorescent orange newt. He was very patient and photogenic, though my camera kind of freaked out about his color (notice, not in focus).

I love spending time in the woods, particularly after it rains. I’ve grown to love it here, and feel so connected to this place, it’s hard to imagine leaving. I made the deicison, after my last trip to Philadelphia, to spend more time here. Originally, I had planned to return to Philadelphia this fall. Now I think I’ll stay through the winter (and lets be honest, who could leave here in the spring when it is so beauatiful), and write here, stretch my legs a little, get some chickens, and see how long-term rural life treats me. I feel really good about this decision. I just don’t feel ready to leave…

Thoughts related to the Amazing Lace,

or (One Reason) Why I Knit

Since I’ve signed up for the Amazing Lace, I’ve been thinking all things lace. Since my project for the Amazing Lace is, for now, top secret, and since my progress on other knitting projects isn’t exactly page turning (how many pictures of the back of orangina, slowly inching along to look exactly like the front, do you really want to see?), I thought I would post a little differently about lace. This is a post I’ve been promising for about three months, but now I have an excuse, because it starts with lace. It also seems appropriate, considering that sunday is Mother’s Day. So…

This is a sweater made by my maternal grandmother. She was born in the Ukraine, moved to Germany as a child, and then to New York as a teenager, where she met and married my grandfather and raised my mom and my aunt. I never met my grandmother — she died when my mom was in high school. But when I think back on my childhood, I feel like she was always a presence. My grandmother was amazing with her hands — she was an artist and an amazing seamstress. I wore dresses my grandmother made my mom to several dances in high school and I remember what a treat it was to go into the attic and carefully pull them, one by one, out of the trunk in which they were stored. My grandmother was also an incredibly gifted knitter. We have pictures of some sweaters she knit for herself and, as an adult, I have come into possession of two of them. This pink mohair sweater is one.

My mom taught me to knit when I was little (10 or 11, maybe). I’d been sewing for years (like my grandmother, my mom also sewed a lot of my clothes when I was a kid, and I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t putzing around with a needle and thread, inventing patterns for my dolls and making little quilts for my dollhouse), but had never tried to knit. Like my grandmother, my mom knits in the continental way, and this is how she taught me. At the time, I had a friend, Gretchen, who knit what I always understood to be the “American” way (holding the yarn in her right hand and wrapping each stitch). As is the way with 11 year olds, I decided to knit the way Gretchen did. Although I don’t remember the details of the conversation, I have a vivid memory of sitting on the stairs in my old house, talking to my dad through the rungs in the banister. I remember that he explained to me the importance of carrying on family traditions, and how meaningful it would be to learn to knit in the same method as my mother and grandmother. Although I don’t remember knitting much after this (I made a couple of mangled attempts at knitting in middle school, and again a long, ugly salmon pink scarf in high school), but this conversation made an impression on me. I don’t know if this was the beginning of my obsession with family and tradition, or if it just fueled a pre-existing fire. But when I picked up knitting again after college, I made a point of proudly learning continental method, and teaching it to several of my friends. When I knit this way, I always think of my grandmother and my mom.

After I started getting serious about knitting, I pulled out this sweater (I’m too afraid to wear it) and started looking at it more carefully. It is one of the most amazing knitted garments I’ve ever seen. My grandmother’s attention to detail is mind-boggling. It is an incredibly delicate cardigan — the entire sweater is beautiful, perfect, even cables.

It is perfectly pieced, with no “wonkiness” in the shoulders or side seams. She even made buttons to match.

And then, what seems to me the most amazing thing, she sewed and set a lining in the entire sweater.

Sometimes, like now, when I look at this sweater, I feel overwhelmed by the amount of care and detail that my grandmother put into its construction. It makes me feel sloppy and lazy about my own work, and reminds me that there is a Craft to knitting and a great deal of value in creating heirloom quality pieces. This is the love and dedication that I strive for, to make something that can be passed on, that my granddaughter can wear and admire and that will hopefully inspire her to knit too. It is this sweater that makes me take a deep breath and rip out inches of knitting when I make a mistake. And this sweater (and my mom, and the sense of tradition and continuity that I feel when I pick up my needles) is one of many important reasons why I knit.