Silence great and small

I saw the film Into Great Silence back when it was in town- what, a few months ago? The experience was nothing I'd ever experienced before, but I never was able to process it into anything I could share. Fortunately, Ponder Anew has a response that could just as well be mine.

Sound and silence move me in powerful ways. My brain responds to them. I need both in my life. But silence is incredibly difficult to come by, and when I finally find it, it's initially painful. The detox process for the sound addict is very, very uncomfortable.

It happens too often: I bombard myself with input. I start to get used to having music playing in the background, having the TV on when I do other things, listening to my books on tape instead of reading them. I get used to talking and talking, and listening to other people talk, and listening to many people talk very fast and all at once, and eventually my brain just wears out.

It's a crash. I have taken in so much and have processed so little of it that my brain simply runs out of memory. It refuses to take any more. I can only hear so much before I just can't hear any more.

Seeing Into Great Silence was like the first few days of being sober (I gather). For a few moments, the silence is nice. Then it's excruciating. It's not just the lack of sound but the visual silence, too: the review has it right when it says it's like watching a still life. A few minutes in, watching a statuesque monk at his prayers, and I started to get fidgety. Then I started to feel desperate. The temptation to move, to make some sound just to avoid being left with that awful, deafening silence, was overwhelming.

And then it got easier to bear, and easier, and eventually it even became refreshing. I even started to envy the monks, whose way of life gives them the liberty of not having to speak. Frankly, I'm still envious at times- when I'm interrupted at prayer, or when I know the only words I have are unkind, or when I'm just too overloaded to speak. There are so many times when I am socially obligated to make noise, when it would be better for me to let there be silence.

This is such a challenge for me, to allow myself some silence. It feels unproductive, awkward, inefficient. But it also, when I am in the midst of it, feels so fully human that it seems cruel to break it. How can I reclaim that freedom to be still, in the face of a supercharged, fast-moving world?

Well, whaddaya know?

The Ubiquitous Brown Plaid does have a name.

Now I can sleep at night.

Uh-oh.

Yarn Harlot!



I have a bone to pick with you.

A few days ago, on your blog, you shamelessly posted an image of the Baby Surprise Jacket, without giving any thought to how this might affect the welfare or safety of others.

My human, being equally thoughtless, made a brave attempt to knit the aforementioned jacket from the picture, without a pattern. While her efforts were admirable, and for a while there it actually looked like the finished product might fit a human infant, the end results were not pretty.

Not pretty at all.



Ms. Harlot, I am holding you responsible for my pain and suffering. Maybe next time you'll think before you post tempting, patternless garments on the internet.

Amusing the muse

You hear that?

That endless noise like cosmic giggles?

That's the knitting muse, laughing her head off as I knit the first row of a 250-stitch-wide afghan, only to realize I started knitting with the cast-on tail. Try to ignore the noise; she's probably going to be cackling for a while.

The Harry Potter House "Sweater" needs two more things:

A left armhole and a really good blocking. I promise, that picture is not distorted; it really is that wide. I also promise that I am definitely not that wide.

It turns out I didn't have anywhere near enough yarn to put sleeves on this thing. Turns out, I have just enough yarn to finish that armhole. Fortunately the pattern was written with unbelievably huge amounts of ease, so I'll be blocking that dubba-wide vest thing into something with recognizably human proportions. That's tonight's project: tomorrow, the show!

Speaking of things in odd shapes, would you believe that this...

...is a hat?

It's a pattern I'm test driving for the fiber arts ministry I'm hoping will get going in August. The pattern will come with beginner's kits:

... so that total newbies won't have to suffer through the misery of a garter stitch scarf. Unless they knit the largest size hat, which is roughly equivalent. Instead, they'll have something hat-like and not rectangular at the end, which is definitely more interesting than a scarf. That's the theory, anyway. I'm still, er, fine-tuning the pattern.


Meanwhile, on the Dark Side: the Death Star strikes again.


The one blanket just wasn't enough, so I pulled out all my [s]crap yarn and... ended up with another WIP that looks like a [s]crap yarn blanket. At least it's not bland.

And, as though I didn't already have way, way too many WIPs, the Silky Wool got Hooked.

I'm not even going to tell you what it is yet. Look at that. Look how lovely it is. I don't think you could make a bad project with that yarn. You could knit up a trash can cozy or crochet the world's strangest toilet lid cover, and the Silky Wool would be like, oh, I'm so glamorous in an understated and elegant way, I totally transform any tacky purpose you put me to into something noble and glorious.

Revere the wool. Pray that it never turns its powers against you.

Musings: Hospitality, Generosity, Opportunity

(With any luck, tomorrow will be the day for knitting pictures- possibly including one of the HP movie ensemble. Fake grafting of the House "Sweater" shoulders is in progress; neckline and armhole ribbing is scheduled for completion tomorrow, followed by a very long session of weaving in ends. If I have any strength left after that, you'll see pictures.)

For the first time in my life, I think, I have hit what I could fairly call "hard times". The past few months have taken their toll, and I sit at the end of them tired, sick, broke, and now without income. It's not a particularly pleasant place to be. These circumstances have, however, given me just the right amount of time for reflection.

I knew it would be best if I stayed in the same town while my medical issues sorted themselves out. This meant putting off my dreams of grad school or, alternatively, a short-term mission placement. My life was put on hold while my survival took center stage. I was disappointed. But finally, after months and months of tough times, God delivered his whack of the clue-by-four.

I'm starting to realize that having to give up my plans is not a setback: God's timing is best. It is an opportunity. I believe I have work left to do where I am, both for myself and for my community. What exactly that work is, I can't say. I'm still waiting for the Cruise Director to hand out the itinerary, if you catch my drift. But I am learning to trust and wait. It's not an easy lesson.

Meanwhile, I'm struggling to figure out how exactly one serves God while dirt poor. Maybe the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, but the lack of money sure makes it hard to serve God the way I want to. How can I show hospitality to people when I can't spare a can of condensed soup to feed them? How can I put in my two pennies in the offering plate when it's all I have to live on? How can I be generous when I owe people money and I could run out of food next week?

But in my good moments, I find joy again. When I'm at my best, rather than panicking about how to get things, I'm weeding things out of my life that aren't necessary. Extra blankets. Extra clothes. That second coat in my closet that belongs to the person who's shivering in the cold. (Well, not shivering today, maybe.) In some ways, this lean time is a blessing. I feel less cluttered; my purpose is in clearer focus. Not to sound too proud about it, because I'm only making meager beginnings, but I'm learning to throw away everything that separates me from Christ.

It's a fast of sorts, and I'm grateful for it. I have never been poor before, and though I'm not anywhere near real poverty yet, I feel like a layer of scales has fallen off my eyes. I'm just not quite sure what I'm looking at yet.

I do not fear change.

In fact, I embrace it to the point of undertaking it just for the heck of it. (It's the furniture-rearranging gene that was passed down from my grandmother.)

Today's significant changes are two in number and bloggy in nature. The big one first: I'm consolidating my blogs into one big blog. The old pages will stay up, but I won't be posting there any more. That means that this page will be Me HQ.

This move is totally contrary to my usual behavior, so I fully expect myself to feel a little wrong-footed when it comes to what goes in the blog. Enjoy the ride with me.

The second is that I am instituting a monthly Yarn Weigh-in, to occur at the end of each month. Mainly I've decided to do it this way because keeping a running total was slowing down my creative process (read: making me think before I cast on yet another WIP). I figure a yarn diet is like every other diet: you don't stand on the scale until you see the number you want. You try to do things that are better for you and check in at the scale periodically to see how it's going. Besides, it's way harder to keep track of every scrap of yarn I touch than it is to do a half-hour monthly inventory.

What am I working on now? Well, after the Bridal Shawl I discovered that working on a deadline, with daily goals, really helps me get moving. And since I already had a deadline in place- July 11- I did the math and realized that that leaves me ten days to finish my House sweater.

Ten days is not a whole lot of time.

I started setting daily goals, because if I left it with just a deadline, I'd be hating my needles and cursing my yarn at 11 pm on July 10. The daily goals are pretty steep, though. For instance, at the end, I set a goal to knit a sleeve each day.

Haha. Yeah, right.

Fortunately, I've left myself an escape clause. This is as much because of my knitting speed as because I think I'm going to run out of yarn, and because it's hot in July. This House sweater may end up being a House vest. I'll do ribbing instead of sleeves and call the thing good.

Giving myself a day or two to recover, I'll have another week to finish off some Quidditch socks to complete my book release ensemble for the party on July 21. I hope no one will blame me if after this, I refuse to ever knit anything again.

But the outfit will be awesome.

Deviant

First things first: I finished the gift knit, a shawl for Checkers' bridal shower.




I am enormously proud of this thing. I designed it all by me onesies. The yarn is Rowan Cashcotton (YUM!), and you see the cast off? That's a long chain crochet cast off. That's right, the c-word. I was a little nervous about this initially, but once I got going it was sort of addicting.

So I moved on to my first real crochet. (gasp! shock! horror!)

I started an afghan in single crochet, after which I realized that this was not all that much faster than knitting, and after all, the prime advantage of crochet was supposed to be speed. I frogged that, and then I remembered the first book my aunt had given me when attempting to trick me into crocheting: granny square afghans.



Feel the granny square love. I've started assembling them now, because the idea of sewing a hundred thousand granny squares together at once makes me woozy. There's no real pattern; I'm just putting them together in big blocks, and I'll organize them later.

Meanwhile, earthchick passed on some really fat baby yarn that had gotten passed on to her. I knew immediately what this had to be, so I pulled out my N-hook, and roughly 5 hours later:



It's Beth's star-shaped baby afghan, and my first crochet FO. Am I proud? Enormously.

I never thought I would learn to crochet. It's been six years since I first started trying to crochet, off and on, and I was sure I would never get beyond rectangles. Now I'm churning out crochet things like I've heard they're discontinuing Red Heart Super Saver (and why are all the crochet patterns I have written for that sad excuse for yarn?). It's addicting. It's crack for knitters.

There's just one major crochet drawback: When I went back to knitting, I started wrapping the yarn backward.

As they say in the Vaterland...

Ich bin dran. The lovely earthchic(k), originatress of the Seven Things project, has tagged me. The meme? 7 random things about me. I don't think this is coincidence, do you?

1. I was a conlanger in my youth. I made up languages- words, grammar, alphabets. Now I just make up alphabets and study conlangs that other people make up. This leads to the world's most awesome penpal arrangements. (!Shorah brehgeltahnteeokh D'ni)

2. I am considering consolidating all my blogs into this one.

3. I use the Dvorak keyboard layout, which is easier on my wrists (and therefore allows me more comfortable knitting time). However, people no longer like to share computers with me, since I have a habit of forgetting to switch the keyboard back, leaving the next unlucky person to wonder why the keyboard is typing gibberish.

4. I only eat cucumbers with feta cheese. I cannot stand either one of those foods separate from the other. This is a leftover from my trip to Greece, where the one food we could count on having at every single meal was a "salad" of cucumbers, feta, and tomatoes. And I don't like tomatoes.

5. This did not stop me from growing tomatoes last year on the patio last year.

6. My favorite prime number is 17, which totally pwns 23. 7 is my least favorite prime number, because I feel it gets overused. 5 doesn't get enough attention as a prime number, and 3 is too obvious; 2, on the the other hand, is too showy. I mean, isn't it enough of a distinction to be a prime number without having to be an even number, too?

7. Far, far back in the recesses of my childhood lies the beginning of a recurring dream, in which I find levels and levels of extra rooms under the church I grew up in. There are all sorts of odd statues, artifacts, sculptures, and parents of Sunday school classmates with the bodies of giant tarantulas. Going downstairs is more interesting, but after having this dream for about ten years, I finally discovered that if you climb up through the attics, you'll come out on a mountaintop where there's awesome snowboarding.

I, as usual, will decline to tag anyone.

Detailed knitting updates will have to wait for the weekend, but suffice it to say I'm on a manic knitting streak and I'm wearing my arms out trying to finish up a gift. You'll get to see it once the recipient has seen it first.

I'm going to my first SnB tonight- wish me luck!

Infodump!

I moved the yarn pile from the living room into my bedroom today. (Apologies to PSD, who was probably having a quiet moment in his office while I was doing this upstairs. I didn't keep dropping things intentionally, I promise.) As I relocated, I also took a detailed count of what was in the pile, and I came up with:

19 works in progress
179 balls, hanks, skeins, and blobs of yarn

Not as bad as I feared. It helped that there is no longer a frog pond: I threw all that stuff away. Thrift, shmift. Ripping out old sweaters is a pain, and for cheap cotton, it's totally not worth it.

Instead, I am now reveling in my pile of indulgence yarn, and hoping I can make it last a while. Here, friends, is where those forty yarn blobs were added:


Merino Sei. This almost doesn't count, since it was marked down from $8 to $3 per ball. I wouldn't feel guilty about it, except that I pounced on the opportunity and bought enough for two sweaters. I did not know that fate led me to just the right colors for this:

My Harry Potter House sweater. I am in a little bit of denial about the color of the stripe; I'm telling myself it's blue and not purple and that it really is in Ravenclaw colors (blue and bronze), so play along, okay? I am so looking forward to wearing this in the middle of July, when the Peony and I are going to our Hometown, which will be turned into Hogwarts Central for the night. I have already started praying that the man in a kilt and a poncho will show up. (Go read Book 4 again and come back when you get it.)

Moving forward. This...

...is the reason it's a bad idea to talk to me about how much yarn I buy. This was a revenge purchase. 19 hanks of fairly nice cotton. It's not much to look at now, but... well, I'm making up the sweater as I go, so it may not be much to look at ever. Just don't tell that to the evil person who hounded me about my yarn investments. (He, of course, has been spending my annual yarn budget on woodworking tools.)

In moments of happiness and sale-price hypnotism, there was also this:

(Sierra and Silky Wool)

...and this...

...the A-squared sweater, so named for the angora and alpaca yarn it's made from. This sweater is partially knit from the stash; the angora was a birthday present from the Peony. The alpaca, on the other hand, was a problem. If her book had come out sooner, I might have heeded the Harlot's advice: don't stand by the counter too long. 600 glorious yards of undyed superfine alpaca? Of course I had to get two colors. It's doubled up in the sweater to match the worsted-weight angora.

I do have exactly one guilt-free item, knit entirely from the stash:

The Mermaid sock. It's one of Lucy Neatby's patterns in Cool Socks, Warm Feet, and I love it. I changed the heel and the toe, of course, because I can't follow a pattern to save my life. But I really like the way the pattern works with the stripes. At the hospital, though, they apparently thought it was dangerous:



...because it came back to me in a biohazard bag. Maybe the size 0 needles scared them.

Now, gentle reader, I am off to eat dinner. And after that, I'm going to pick up a project from my pile. Between all the sweaters, afghans, socks, and stuffed animals on my WIP list, I suppose I shouldn't have any trouble finding something interesting to knit- in theory.

Battles and wars

Some of you may have noticed that it's been several weeks since I posted anything on any of my blogs. I am glad to report that I am making my way, slowly but surely, out of the blog silence. With any luck, my life will decide to be less absolutely maddeningly crazy, making it possible for me to become acquainted with the internet again.

What have I been doing in the meantime? Well... falling off the stash wagon. In a big way. I didn't even make it all the way through Lent. There are times in life, I feel, that require comfort yarn no matter what previous resolutions one might have made, and I hit several of those times. I think, though, that my LYSs (both of them) are partly to blame: they have been putting things on sale especially to tempt me. I mean, Malabrigo and Koigu PPPM at 50% off? How am I supposed to resist that?

While the stash wagon was rolling off into the sunset, the WIP wagon was not far behind it. I've been on something of a sweater kick lately, and I've been starting one with pretty much every new yarn purchase. Alas, I have not been in the mood to finish things, so I have- wait, let me count- four sweaters on the needles (I think it's just four, I could be wrong) and still no more actual wearable sweaters than I had a year ago. But boy, knitting sweaters sure is fun!

However! I am not giving up! I'll be relocating the yarn swamp soon (from the living room to my room, since roomie has moved on), and when I do, I will update the yarn stats on the sidebar. Try not to look to shocked when I do. I think my yarn weight now exceeds my body weight, which is a strong statement coming from the woman who's eaten Cocoa Crispies for dinner for the past week. I'll be chasing the wagon down and hopping back on it, whether the other yarnoholics want me on board or not. And when I do, I'll flash my stash again and give a tour of my WIP pile, including such items as:

• A sweater or two- or three- or more
  
• Various half-hearted attempts at stashbusting
  
• More Ann and Kay-inspired thriftiness
  
• Evidence of total lack of thriftiness
  
• ...and some items that will come in handy on July 11

Stay tuned. You won't want to miss it. (Well, I don't want you to miss it, so come back anyway.)