HPKCHC: February Wrap-Up

February went fast. I suppose that shouldn't come as much of a surprise, since it's the shortest month of the year, but it gets me every year.

On the knitting front, progress was somewhat slow. I accomplished three knit projects for HPKCHC, but nothing nearly as monumental as last month's stash cleanup project. Still, I can add this little guy to my list of achievements:



He's an Ood, and I'm enormously proud of him because I knit the whole thing without referring to any kind of pattern at all. That little brain is even crochet, and I figured the whole thing out on my own. It turns out that if you understand how to knit a garment to fit a part of the human body, you also have a pretty good idea of how to knit something that looks like that part of the body. Go figure.

I feel the need to address one point of last month's HPKCHC accomplishments: the 12-month plan. Now, I knew full well that I was never going to follow that plan. I am just not that kind of knitter. I get distracted. I am unfaithful. There's a reason I never posted that plan here, and that reason is that I only ever half-heartedly (maybe only quarter-heartedly) intended to follow it.

With that disclaimer, I think I can feel pretty good that I even picked up something off the list at all: those pink cable socks that I was going to knit while I was in North Dakota. I did in fact start them while there, but size 0 needles and splitty Tofutsies got old after a while. This month I did actually pull them out of hibernation, finish up those blasted cables on the ankle, and turn the second heel. Currently, these socks are the purse socks, and they are roughly mid-gusset. That is much more progress than I made on them in the last several months, so I'm giving myself a (small) pat on the back.

As far as HPKCHC goes, the secret project will remain secret from the blog for the time being, as will the song I wrote for History of Magic, because I'm totally embarrassed to be one of those people who writes filk and then posts it on the internet. Also, mine is nowhere near as cool or funny as Tom Smith's, so if you want to listen to filk from an Ann Arborite, go listen to his.

I don't know what next month will bring, knitting-wise. I'm hoping to do some knitting to sell on Etsy, as a small financial experiment, and I have a commission to finish up. But I won't know what the HPKCHC assignments will be until the month actually begins, so I've lined up a few interesting things in my Ravelry queue, just in case they happen to fit the assignments... stay tuned.

Denominations for beginners

The diversity of American Christianity can be confusing even to people on the inside, but today the masthead quote at the Boar's Head Tavern provides a useful illustration of the differences.

“… Besides, the Word is the principal part of baptism. If in an emergency there’s no water at hand, it doesn’t matter whether water or beer is used.” - Martin Luther

The major demarcations in American Protestantism can, I think, pretty much be summed up my their reactions to this quote.

Liberal Mainliners: You know, that's a good point.

Emergent/emerging: Our next baptism will be performed with a pint of Guinness.

Baptists: Where will we get enough beer to fill the baptistery?

Southern Baptists: Beer?!?

DADA: Pimp my Bible

It just struck me how appropriate this particular project is for a class called Defense Against the Dark Arts. Bible accessories vs. Dark Arts. Nice.

The February assignment for DADA was:

Expecto Patronem: Make something having to do with your patronus. Extra points for explanations of what your patronus is, and why.

I was a bit slow to figure out what my Patronus would be. Last month's Charms assignment also had to do with Patronuses (Patroni? Sounds like a really tasty pasta), but I never made it past the association with purple. For this month, though, I wanted to work on developing the idea of my Patronus a little bit, since this assignment focused more on the Patronus itself, rather than its effects.

I went back to a name I'd been given previously. There's a whole story about fire names, rooted in the tradition of summer camp, and it feels a little silly to talk about it outside the circle, as it were. Essentially a fire name is a descriptive name that represents something about your character.

I was given the fire name "Unyielding Granite", which I have since decided is something like calling once-Cardinal Ratzinger the "papal bulldog" (only a bit more Protestant). I like having conversations about religion and matters of doctrine, but I'm also pretty unmovable on the things I'm convinced of. Luther said- reportedly- "Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders," and I'm of much the same mind.

So I got to thinking about what animal might best represent this aspect of my nature, and I arrived at the obvious answer: the Ox.

Well, it was obvious to me.

I have other associations with the Ox, too: I was born in the year of the Ox according to the Chinese zodiac. Also, the ox, in the Bible, is associated with those who teach the Bible- fitting, I think, for someone who wants to work in Bible translation.

Having settled on the identity of my Patronus, I took a longer time trying to figure out what project I could possibly knit to tie in all those meanings. The ox is not the animal most likely to be represented in knitted form. Cue inspiration number one: The oxo cable.

I knew that the project had to be small, because I wanted to knit it from the leftovers from last month's Charms project, which was two-thirds of a skein or less. And it had to look good in purple.

Finally, two weeks into the planning stage, I put together the meaning of my Patronus with its function, worked out the sum, and found its form: Bible accessories! (Is there anything more Sunday-school-Protestant than Bible accessories?)

Introducing the Purple Patronus Pen Pocket:



...modeled by the lovely ESV Journaling Bible (the best investment I ever made. Seriously. Dead useful). I had been keeping a pen tucked under the elastic strap that holds the book closed, but it kept falling off or poking me or flipping around at inconvenient times. I think the pocket will be much less likely to cause injury. (Plus it looks prettier. ^.^)

The PPPP is the latest upgrade in a series I'm making to this Bible. The very first thing I did was make more bookmark ribbons, because one bookmark isn't very useful at all. Next up, I think, will be adding a little accordion file-ish pocket for the scrap paper notes that are currently sitting free inside the front cover and fall out the instant they get a chance. We'll see.

Greener

I've spent a fair amount of time marvelling at the Yarn Harlot's way of knitting, which she calls "Irish Cottage knitting", though the rest of the world seems to know it as "lever action knitting" or, more picturesquely, "armpit knitting" (or "crotch knitting"). It's a variant on English knitting that keeps the right needle stationary, and though I don't fully understand how it's worked, that's probably because no one has ever been able to slow down an armpit knitter enough to see what they're doing.



She's fast. Really fast. But then I stopped to consider how fast I knit, in terms of stitches per minute, and I found that I wasn't that much slower. If I'm concentrating, I can whip them off the needle at about that speed. (Stopping to scoot the stitches along the needle every ten stitches or so is what slows me up.)

So why does my knitting look so slow and hers look so fast? I think it's because she uses such big motions to work the stitches. It's counter-intuitive- you'd think that to go faster, you'd want to minimize motion. So I thought about this a little bit.

The Harlot and I knit at about the same speed, stitch per stitch. The difference is that she can keep it up for a long, long time, whereas I get tired easily. It turns out that it's the little motions- like the small motions I use when knitting Continental- that cause repetitive stress injuries. By knitting with those large, sweeping motions, her hands are getting less tired.

So now I'm weighing the costs and benefits of switching knitting techniques again. I know that I'm running up against the grass-is-greener principle here, but really, what can it hurt? If I try it and don't like it, I can switch back. All I have to lose is a few hours of feeling clumsy and uncomfortable at something I'm pretty good at. It's just a matter of steeling myself to survive those hours, which sounds silly, but feeling like a total beginner again is rather stressful. The question is, is it more stressful than having to lay off knitting and ice my arm for the days after Christmas?