Slow and not so steady

Not much progress on Venezia's second sleeve.



I have a problem: once I have knit one side of something, or one of a pair of something, I'm not so interested in the second half. But, I will get it done. Apart from my aversion to second sides/part of a pair, I also have a dislike for unfinished objects.

Unfortunately, that means I must finish Venezia and a pair of socks before I start this:



And, come to think of it, I would also really like to knit all these as well:





All from spring Interweave Knits. I love this issue -- it is full of very wearable items, I think.

This blogging thing, it is strange. I'm guessing everyone who blogs thinks about why it is they blog. The ease of use for tracking progress on UFO's is great. The fact that I have been typing so long I don't think that I can handwrite coherently enough for a journal is another. The ability to collate (colate?) information and links into one coherent web-based file is also appealing.

Why do other people blog?

Why

I thought I would address the 'why' of the title of my blog "Knitting with Parrots;" it is kind of dishonest because:

1. I have only one parrot
2. I don't actually knit with the parrots, i.e. I haven't found some chi-chi knitting boutique that sells rare artisan, parrot-bone knitting needles made in an obscure South American village and sold to support the local school


However, my husband and I do have one small parrot and because we feel guilty constantly and excessively because she is not flying free with a mate in South America (but she is NOT wild caught) she is almost always out of her cage. Because she loves fabric, and I cannot possibly convey how much she loves it, she is always, ceaselessly, 'helping' with my knitting.









Actually, the last picture is a loom, but since it is within the 'fibre arts' I think it counts.

Fondness for Fair Isle

Last post I mentioned Shetland wool. I happen to love Fair Isle/stranded colourwork knitting. I still have this vague feeling that it is extremely uncool to like it, but I do. I recently received my copy of Feitelson's Art of Fair Isle Knitting, and I love it. I love the history of it, the fact that it is a craft connected to necessity and artistry, and that it represents women's creative contributions to public economic life. From what I can gather it also represents a degree of exploitation -- if not outright oppression -- by brokers who bought wholesale and sold retail in the early part of the 20th century, but that history also appeals to the socialist side of me that enjoys feeling a bit of righteous indignation every once in a while.

Still...I look at the patterns and I desperately want to make them, yet have some difficulty imagining myself wearing them. There are some updated versions; a couple years ago I made a stranded vest from Rowan, and now I am working on this:



Eunny Jang's Venezia. I really want to make it a cardigan, and the class I am taking at Make One Yarn Studio provided a pattern for a v-neck cardigan version, but I would really like a scoop-neck cardigan. The dilemma is whether or not to risk totally and utterly f______ up all the work I've done by attempting to make said scoop-necked cardigan, or just be happy with the v-neck. A pullover is out of the question for me -- it is too fitted to wear much under it and I will itch like crazy. What to do...

Bica says I should just let her use the sweater as a nest and forget about it.

Spinny

A couple weekends ago I decided to bite the bullet and buy myself a spindle. It seems like everyone who knits is doing it and --despite many childhood reminders that the choice of others to jump off a bridge should in no way impact my decision making process -- I wanted to be a good little lemming. So I took myself off to Legacy Studio in Cochrane. Laura's business is primarily mail order; I did not know this when I phoned her and asked her for her business hours and address, and she graciously allowed me to come by her home and paw her yarn and roving. I'm not sure if there were hints that perhaps she would rather have her weekend to herself, but if there were I blithely ignored them and came away with this:



That is unbelievably soft merino roving and a beautiful handmade spindle -- I think the wood is called red heart.

I then carded it 50/50 with the grey alpaca roving from the previous post and made this:



I plied it using some method of winding it around my hand and then plying from each end -- Navajo plying I believe it is called? And, i used this as my plying spindle:



I think that I did not do too badly considering it was my first try, but holy s____, was my shoulder sore afterward. I also tried spinning with the merino alone. Nobody wants to see that, and I would like to erase all memory of it. Laura was right, merino IS hard for beginners. Laura also has some beautiful yarns: Alberta shetland laceweight, Alberta alpace laceweight. I happen to be a proponent of buying local when possible; I love knowing where my food comes from, and I see no reason not to expand this to yarn! Of course, local isn't always possible -- it would be pretty limiting. But, I like to try and support local producers and cut down on shipping emissions when possible.

While Bica was pretty impressed by the alpaca, she thinks the merino is pretty good too...

Hello

Here is my contribution to the thousands -- millions? -- of knitting blogs out there. But, what better way, really, to keep track of knitting life. I suppose I could have a beautiful leather bound journal wherein I thoughtfully lay out the creative process of my fibre art life. I aspire to this, just as as a child I aspired to cataloguing all my books with the dewy decimal system (anyone remember flipping through file cards at the library?). I still have a few old books with non-sensical combinations of numbers and letters. Ahhhhhh.

In any case, I'm coming to a point of acceptance: I am cyberspace dependent. I love blogs. I love the idea of connecting to people who one would never ordinarily cross paths with, although I am happy with the friends I have made through "ordinary paths". (for an interesting discussion on an -- in my opinion assinine -- argument about the nature of bloggers, particularly political bloggers, check out the debate raging around Michael Keren, a professor at the University of Calgary. It is worth noting that I had him during my undergraduate degree and in class he informed me that I was incorrect in my assertions that slavery existed in Canada; when I mentioned Canadian's collective moral and economic debt to our aboriginal peoples he disagreed and asserted that Canada's early settlers, and Canadians since, treated aboriginal peoples "very well." Hmmm, looks like I am a lonely, uninformed, bleeding-heart lefty according Mr. Keren.

Anyhoo, I switched from Wordpress to GoogleBlogger, and not sure how I feel about it. I can't seem to load pictures into the template, only into posts. If anyone happens to read this early post (though it seems to take quite a while for readers to come), any suggestions? Creating links seems to be a pain as well, since GoogleBlogger doesn't work properly with Safari and it appears I am going to have to create all my links manually. I do not want to do this. Perhaps I will have to change back to Wordpress. I only changed because GoogleBlogger seems to get a lot of traffic, particularly knitting traffic.

Oh well. Bica says "alpaca makes birds and humans feel better!" (even feel better about blog posting glitches. That alpaca is powerful stuff!)