Life as a Spectator Sport

Sometimes you want to make a complicated project, or at least something that takes thought and consideration for the pattern and yarn, and careful construction of the item itself.

And sometimes you just want to whack something out, to have a finished object in the shortest time possible. I'm in the middle of socks. Socks everywhere: socks for me, socks for my grand-niece, socks for Christmas and birthday gifts, socks just because I like a particular pattern and yarn and I'll surely find someone to give them to if I don't decide to keep them for myself. And I'm really tired, right this minute, of knitting socks.

So I decided to make a pot holder, since I need some new ones anyway. I'm in the Coffee and Knitting group on Ravelry, and someone posted a link to a pot holder with a coffee cup on it. What could be better?

A nice pale mocha color yarn would have been the perfect color, but I didn't have any of that, and couldn't find the brown yarn that I do have somewhere. But I unearthed this dark burgundy from a bag of nasty old acrylic yarn, and it worked well enough. The picture is just a little fuzzy because I had to take it in ambient light to get enough contrast for the design to stand out, and it was hard to hold the camera still long enough for the required long shutter speed. But it shows the coffee cup with steam rising from the top pretty well.



It worked up in about two hours flat, not bad for instant gratification. It isn't blocked, but I can't see blocking a pot holder, so I'm not going to. I do need to weave in the loose ends, and then it will replace the yucky old pot holder that came apart in the wash.

Oh--the pattern is at Knitting Memories

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Still here, no time for blogging

Or knitting or anything else. My house is a disaster, stuff piled everywhere.

But I've finished very nearly all the work, just a few stores left to visit. So of course I'm worrying that I won't get any more work. I go through cycles of fear that I'm never going to get another batch of work, alternating with fear that I'm never going to finish what I have on hand.

Well . . . not fear, really. The world would not come to an end if the work did, though it would be a considerably less comfortable place for me. But mild anxiety, at least.

But of course I know better. It's entirely likely that by this time next week I'll be inundated again. For the moment, once I get this pile of work uploaded, I'll have time to knit, clean house, maybe even go to a movie.

The new pair of socks I'm making of Plymouth Sockotta is taking shape. The first one is at the end of the gusset and ready to hurry down to the toe, and considering how quickly it knit up, the second one won't take long either. I've found that I really like Plymouth yarns. I used their DK weight Encore for the Baby Surprise Jacket I made for my grand-neice, and have another sock finished in the Sockotta wool-and-cotton sock yarn. Plymouth doesn't provide colorway names, as far as I can see, but I think of this yarn as "Blue Denim." It's like knitting with strands from your favorite old faded blue jeans, and I really love the feel of it and the effect of the finished piece.



The pattern is not obvious in this photo, but it's one called a "garter rib." Very easy--one row of k2p2 alternating with a row of plain knitting. The heel has a 3-stitch garter selvedge, which I saw in Charlene Schurch's Sensational Socks book and like well enough to use for the next pair too.

Back to work, sigh.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

What are the kids learning?

Laura left a comment on my previous post, that I read and agreed with, but then put out of my mind while I went back to processing the mountain of paperwork created by a week's inspections.

But I keep thinking of what she said, and how it ties in with something Kate and I have talked about a lot lately. I had mentioned that my trainee, Lisa, complained that she wasn't used to dividing foods up the way the checklist requires us to do. Laura pointed out that "the most basic intellectual activity is to group things: same/different; compare/contrast."

This is true, but it requires practice and repetition and some structured training. Our brains are hardwired to make these distinctions, but without formal education, the groupings are large and not as finely differentiated. "Me/not me; food/not food," and so on, the same kinds of distinctions that any relatively intelligent species can make. And I think they are more emphatically divided: there is no middle ground, for example, between "Me" and "Not me." If you aren't one of "Us" then you're the enemy (which may cast aspersions on the un-elected leader who likes to make that comparison).

I don't know what Lisa's educational background is, but she comes from a local mountain family that probably didn't encourage anything beyond high school, and may not have thought even that was necessary. There are places in the Appalachians even now where "girls don't need no education." So she can probably be excused for having trouble putting food in more finely divided categories than just meat, fish, fruit and vegetables. In fact, she didn't really understand the distinction between fish and other seafood. I kept saying to her, "Fish have fins. All the others are things like crab, lobster, shellfish, you know." Except it was clear that she didn't know, and I'm not certain she is ever going to know it well enough to do this work. Yet she is certainly not stupid. She just, as Laura said of her acquaintance, has some real holes in her knowledge of the world.

Which brings me back to what Kate and I have discussed. Kate is the most organized person I have ever met. Everything in her office has its place, and it's a logical, well-thought-out place. Not only are her file folders color-coded, but she has a printed sheet on the front of the file cabinet specifying which item goes with which color, just in case someone needs to find something when she is out of the office. Yet every time she is gone, she comes back to find piles of paper scattered across her desk, with a note from someone that they couldn't find what they were looking for. So she not only has to get it out for them, but then re-file the mess they left behind. Did they not see the explanation on the file drawer? Did they not believe it? Or did it just make no more sense to them than my explanation to Lisa of the difference between fish and other seafood?

That's a scary thought, that many people nowadays are simply unable to perceive fine distinctions. I'm not certain what aspect of education is lacking. Perhaps many of them just had little exposure to a wide range of experiences as they grew up, the old "Eskimos have a hundred words for snow" example. But I worry that it's more a matter of not being taught how to think. How to make judgments, how to make comparisons, how to see the major distinctions between large groups of things, and the smaller distinctions between sub-groups. How to distinguish the stranger from the enemy, the morally wrong from the simply inadvisable, the "good for you" from the "tastes good."

This concerns me a lot more than whether someone can multiply and divide without a calculator. Teaching the "fundamentals" is fine, but if kids don't know how to apply them once they're out of school, we're in trouble. And from the distance that separates us, I can hear Kate saying wryly, "You only just figured this out?"

No, but I only just began to really worry about it.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

I think I owe my kids an apology

I've always assumed my children were of more or less average intelligence--no geniuses, but a long way from stupid. I may have to revise that, or else I'm going to have to move the benchmark for average a long way farther up than I thought it was.

I trained both Shelley and Kay to help me with the grocery store inspections. Kay only did a few of them, but it was Shelley's main source of income for over a year. I took them both out with me a couple of times, and then turned them loose, especially after getting one of those "Puh-leeeze, Mother!" looks from Shelley when I tried to explain something to her one too many times. "Don't you think I can figure this out?" she demanded. "Yes, dear," I replied humbly (and gratefully).

Now I'm training another woman to take on some of the work. She managed a local business for years, has a high reputation for carefulness and accuracy, is clearly not un-intelligent, but is so agonizingly slow to catch on that I'm tearing my hair out.

"Work from the food to the form, Lisa," I say for the tenth time. "Don't worry about the eggs--we're standing in the middle of the produce department. Look at what's around you."

I watch as she slooowly traces her finger down the list of vegetables to figure out where to put the total number of cucumbers. She stops at Greens and begins to write.

"No, Lisa," I say. "Look down here, the cucumbers go in with squash and zucchini and pumpkins. They're all cucurbits. Greens are leafy things like lettuce."

"They go in with squash?" she asks in obvious astonishment. "I thought cucumbers were greens."

"They're long and round and have a rind and seeds in the middle," I point out. "Lettuce and mustard and turnip greens aren't anything like that."

The really pathetic thing here is that no one has to know the difference between brassicas and cucurbits and the other vegetable families. The food checklist clearly spells out which items go together.

Lisa shakes her head. "I'm not used to dividing things up like this." She glances over at another section of the checklist and mutters, "Beef, veal . . . Let's see, do they have any lamb here?"

I tell her again to wait until she gets to that department before trying to fill in that section. "When you think you've recorded everything, then look down the list and see if you have missed anything. Don't worry about blank places on the list until you've gone all the way around the store."

We're inspecting a store that has roughly the same square footage as my 14 x 70 mobile home. It would take me fifteen to twenty minutes. After two hours, when we still haven't finished, I hand her the page for the floorplan sketch and tell her I'll take the pictures while she does the sketch. She is still struggling with one corner of the sketch by the time I finish the pictures. And this is not the first store she has done with me, more like the fifth or sixth. I'm beginning to doubt that she is going to be able to do the work.

So I think my kids must have been a lot smarter than I gave them credit for. Sorry, guys.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

They're done! They're done!

Kay's red socks are finally finished. This has truly been a labor of love, because it feels as though I've been working on them forever. The other sock yarns I've used recently were mostly self-striping, so there was some variety in the color as they progressed, if nothing else. This Opal Mosaik has color repeats on the order of about half an inch, so there was really nothing to give a sense of making progress, besides the verrry slow increase in length. But as anyone who knits socks knows, there can be an incredibly short time between the plaintive wail of "I'm never going to finish these," and the moment when you realize you're five rounds beyond where you should have started the toe shaping. And so it went with these. I was plugging away on the foot section, knitting at every traffic stop and slowdown in northern Virginia, when I decided to check it against the foot of the first sock and realized I was within a couple of rounds, at most, of being finished. This afternoon I did the toe, wove in the loose ends, and they're done!

On the needles also is this baby blanket of Paton's Baby Boucle (yes, an acrylic and polyester yarn--I can't afford what it would cost to make it of something more expensive). It is just a ballband pattern, but exactly what I wanted for my grandson, who was promised a baby blanket at birth and never got one. My daughter always loved yellow duckies, so this should please her too. As written, the blanket makes up about 24" x 27", but the baby is now almost four years old, so I'm going to make it larger. It has a yellow ducky in each corner, joined by white stripes against the blue background.

I would have finished Kay's socks sooner, of course, if I hadn't detoured to make the mitred square heart, the first corner of the yellow ducky blanket, the vintage baby pixie cap, two aborted attempts to start a pair of lace mitts, and probably some other things as well. Those are the only diversion I can remember at the moment. But I can't work on just one thing at a time. The others were what I picked up when I was thoroughly bored with the socks.

Now to finish the second half of the Sockotta pair I started for myself back around Christmas.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

I'm in!

About six weeks ago, I added myself to the waiting list for Ravelry and today I received the invitation to sign up as a beta tester.

I'm not certain exactly what Ravelry is. I'm not certain it is exactly some particular thing yet. It's a work in progress. One of the neat things about something like this is that you don't quite know at the beginning what it's going to turn into, like the internet itself. So far, Ravelry is a giant database of crafters and their projects and their materials stashes, their works-in-progress and their finished objects and their raw materials and themselves.

Ravelry's founders describe it as a "knit and crochet community," but it is far more structured than the typical multi-forum-based community. For example, because users enter the yarns and the patterns they are using, it's possible to see how many people are making something with a particular yarn, or are making a particular pattern. When I entered Opal Mosaik (the yarn I'm using for Kay's socks), there was immediate feedback that 7 other users were making socks with it.

That could be just sort of a nifty feature that becomes ho-hum after a while. What will make the site a long term success will be the interaction among the knitters and crocheters themselves, and that part of it is still in its infancy. There are 42 knit-a-longs of various items, from the mitred-square blanket in Mason Dixon Knitting to the Monkey Sock to something called "NASCAR Knitting." There are nine forums (yarns, patterns, techniques, etc.) One nice feature is the ability to see who is where, and even to see who else is online at the moment. I asked to see who was also located in Virginia, and got a list of about thirty others, one of whom (besides myself) was currently online. There was a huge long list of fiber events, not only in the US but in other countries. So it's well underway, and it remains to be seen how it will grow and mature.

In any case, it's a huge endeavor, and I wish the founders well. It will be fun to see what it turns into.

Sunday, July 01, 2007

This summer's big project

I badly need another storage building. I could buy a prefabricated one of plastic or metal, but I've had bad experiences with both of those. I could buy a more expensive prefab building of wood, and may do that yet for another location, but it would be so much more expensive that I haven't justified it yet in my mind. All I need is four walls and a roof. And, you know, a floor and a door, and maybe a window or two. Nothing fancy. So I'm going to build it.

I've begun clearing out a space in the back yard, which is a huge project all by itself, as the back yard is awash in viney stuff and brambly stuff and junky stuff. But here is the first picture of where it will sit, more or less.



There is still a lot of clearing away to do, obviously! That amorphous gray mass on the left is a stack of storage tubs with a tarp thrown over them, and it will have to move. The ground doesn't have to be level, which is good, because it isn't. But it does at least have to be ground, and not a six inch layer of vines, blackberries, poison ivy and old pine straw.

In the meantime, it's back to cleaning up the front bedroom, as I'm hoping Mike will stay with Clarence this week so I can go work in Northern Virginia by myself. If I don't spend some quality time with this mess, there won't be anywhere for Mike to sleep.

No knitting.

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