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explaining my life to strangers

Archives for November 2008

Hail the gauge swatch!

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Some of you might ask, “What’s a gauge swatch?”, well, I wrote about this particular gauge swatch way back in March. (A gauge swatch, by the way, and for those of you who really don’t know, is when you knit a small piece of about 10 x 10 cm or 4 x 4 inches to determine what size needles to use, and how many stitches you will need for the thing you intend to make.) The swatching for this particular sweater was the most extensive I have ever done. I knit a long piece of fabric with three different sizes of needles, measured all the parts to determine how many stitches and rows gave me 10 cm, then I washed and blocked it, let it dry and measured again. And I had something of a revelation because after washing everything was much bigger than before.

With the needles that I used I had 16 stitches and 23 rows on 4 inches pre-washing, and 15 stitches and 20 rows after washing. You’d think that isn’t much, won’t you? What’s a measly stitch? Let’s see: for this particular sweater I cast on 141 stitches. 141 divided by 16 is 8.8 that is 88 cm. And trust me, that is not enough to fit me. But after washing it’s 141 divided by 15, and that is 9.4 which is 94 cm, much better. So just by washing the sweater and blocking it it would become 6 cm (or 2.3″) wider. That’s how much difference the measly stitch makes.

So, back to the actual sweater. I did everything right, I swatched, and measured, and washed, and measured, and chose a size that would hopefully fit me, and then I knit the whole thing in one piece instead of making a lot of weirdly shaped pieces that have to be sewn together. The sweater is quite fitted, and the designer obviously isn’t afraid of sewing everything on, including the buttonbands. (It’s the L’il Red Riding Hoodie by Jennifer Stafford, by the way.) And while I do love the design, and while I’m certainly not afraid of seaming, I don’t like it much, it always looks wonky, and I stubbornly refuse to sew together a raglan. Raglan yokes are meant to be knit in one piece.

The knitting experience was quite interesting. I was knitting something that looked about two sizes too small. I had to put together the instructions for the fronts, buttonbands, back, and sleeves in one place at one point, and these weren’t of the “now decrease two stitches every fourth row” kind. Even though the whole thing is in plain, boring stockinette, it was more challenging than knitting lace. Also I don’t really like the yarn. I wanted something plain, not too expensive and hard-wearing, and that’s what I got. In a color that goes with everything I own, so the color isn’t particularly exciting too. It’s no wonder that I actually started two more sweaters before finishing this one. (Actually, upon further thinking I recall that I started three more sweaters before finishing this one.)

But at last, and through sheer stubbornness, I finished it. There wasn’t much seaming, of course, and I even managed to graft everything that needed seaming nicely together (a first for me). But then there was the zipper. I had to put a zipper into a knitted garment. Argh. Here are pictures of the unwashed hoodie, pre-blocking and pre-zipper:

Of course it took more than a month before I even bought a zipper. I managed to wash and block the sweater, and, alas, finally it matched the intended dimensions. For months I had been sure it was all a mistake, and I’d end up with a hoodie fit only for my son. I even worried about what to do about the waist shaping and bust darts, something he really has no need for.

I carefully measured the hoodie, went to the store with my huge gauge swatch for color-reference and bought a zipper. When I came home I immediately was sure that the zipper was too long. Also too heavy. And I didn’t know how to put a zipper into a sweater. I’d certainly not use a sewing machine but what to do? Thanks to ravelry and the internet I found two excellent tutorials, one by Grumperina and one by Claudia. I mostly followed the latter because of the, as Grumperina put it, “absolute quality in every shortcut”. I’m very keen on shortcuts when sewing (come to think of it, I like them in knitting as well, only you can’t use any in music). And I actually basted my zipper in! I never baste anything in, but finally I have been convinced to make exceptions for zippers. Some shortcuts aren’t shortcuts but time-wasters. It’s a good thing to know the difference.

So, after about nine months I finally have a nice everyday hoodie that I made all by myself. It’s thick wool which will help me to stay warm through winter, and I love the fit. It will surely get a bit longer since I have knitted it all in one piece and there are no seams to prevent it from sagging but that suits me fine, it’s a bit short now anyway. Here are the pictures of the hoodie after washing and blocking:

Also I seem to be in sweater knitting mode. I think it has something to do with several things: a) it’s becoming quite cold, b) I am a bit sick of my two winter sweaters, the red one and the terracotta one that I have been wearing all winter long for the past four years (and both of them have sleeves that are too short), c) I realized that knitting a lace stole or shawl doesn’t take more time and work than knitting a sweater but while I clearly don’t need more than four, or let’s say five, lace stoles and shawls I can easily need more than four winter sweaters.

And now that I have experienced the wonders of knitting gauge swatches, and measuring them, and even of such extreme steps as looking up the measurements of the finished sweater in the pattern, and – instead of just assuming that I need something in size M – actually measuring me, and some sweater that fits, and choosing the size accordingly, well, they might even look good on me.

Which is why I set out to knit a sweater in November. It’s red. I love it so far but since it’s not been washed yet it’s still too small for me. I started on November 8th, and completed it two days ago. Happy NaKniSweMo!

All these women inside of me

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Do you ever feel like there’s a couple of you who want out? (and no, I’m not schizophrenic)

Susanne, the jazz singer:

She wears a red satin dress and very high heels and sings very sophisticated jazz in very sophisticated bars.

Susanne, the psychic:

She’s a tarot reader. She’s overweight and wears layers and layer of ruby velvet and shawls. She smells of incense. She is very warm, and has piercing eyes.

Susanne, the home maker:

She’s always made-up. She’s very organized with very sensible shoes and a string of pearls. Her hair is short and permed. She bakes every day, and her home is impeccable.

Susanne, the punk rocker:

She’s the drummer in a punk rock band. She has long red hair. She is very skinny and wears only black. She wears Doc Martens, leather coats, and a lot of silver jewelry. She lives on beer, potato chips, and fast food.

Susanne, the Bossa Nova singer:

She is tanned and slim. She wears very fashionable clothes, mostly in white. When she sings her soft tunes people melt at her feet.

Susanne, the Buddhist:

She’s a vegetarian. She wears baggy clothes of organic cotton. Her hair is short and streaked with gray. She lives an ascetic life, and is fasting every year.

Susanne, the mommy:

She wears jeans, t-shirt, sneakers and no make-up. She lives for being a mother. She does projects with her son every day. She breastfed him till he started going to kindergarten. She firmly believes in attachment parenting.

Susanne, the academic:

She wears trim suits, and white shirts. She lives for her research. She doesn’t have any friends. She only exercises because it’s the sensible thing to do. She’s living in her brain.

Susanne, the writer:

She wears turltenecks, and no make-up. She writes novels that are recognized for their deepness and insight. She lives on her own.

Susanne, the loser:

She’s adipose and wears only sweats. She’s a couch potato. She eats only junk food, and never leaves her bed if she can help it.

Susanne, the crafter:

She makes everything with her own hands. She kneads bread, spins her own yarn, owns a big loom, and a flock of sheep. She works from dawn till dusk.

Susanne, the dancer:

She wears very stylish but comfortable clothes. Tights and legwarmers. She aspires to become like Martha Graham and Mary Wigman. She lives in a dance studio.

Susanne, the pianist:

She wears black only. Every day she gets up early, and goes to her piano. She doesn’t leave it for the rest of the day. Everything else is unimportant.

Susanne, the blogger:

She blabbers on and on about her life. She only takes pictures for her blog, and forgets the people around her. She feels that things only have happened if she has written about them.

Susanne, the computer programmer:

She doesn’t care about clothes. She spends her days in front of a computer, feeling clever when her code works out, and feeling desperate when it doesn’t. She only shops online.

Susanne, the ordinary person:

She only things about mundane things. She wears what everybody else is wearing. She thinks what everybody else is thinking. She is moderately happy. She doesn’t want much from life. She has two kids and a husband who cheats on her.

Susanne, the philosopher:

She never stopped studying, and still gets money from her parents. All her clothes are black or grey. She spends her life in bars debating Heidegger and Adorno. She’s worried that she is drinking too much wine.

Susanne, the traveler:

She only touches base with her hometown to earn enough money to fly away again. All her possessions fit in the trunk of her car. She doesn’t care for family or permanency. She wears bright and colorful clothes that she bought in exotic places.

There are even more but I’d say, the list is long enough for now. So, how about you? Are you one person through and through? Really?

Should we make this into a meme? (The people inside of you don’t have to be female, by the way.)

Happy Hat

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I have been wanting to show this to you for weeks now. Before starting to knit on October 24th I took a picture: I wrote about it on ravelry:

All of a sudden I had this urge to knit something from my handspun. What good is all this new yarn if it’s only sitting around looking all artsy? So I looked for patterns. Since there is only so much you can knit with 90 grams of very bulky and uneven yarn (this is the second yarn I spun on my wheel), I was glad to find this pattern [Urchin] by Ysolda. I knew I probably had just enough yarn to make it. Of course I wanted to cast on immediately but then I had to first wind the yarn into a ball, and then wait until work was done. Friday in the evening I sat down and started making it in the smaller size but with bigger needles to compensate. Because it’s all garter stitch I got confused about which stitches were wrapped and which weren’t a lot. At the end of the evening I had about a third of the hat, and was afraid that it would be too small. So I started again on Saturday. I went up a size and knit a bit more loosely. It all went beautifully and was much fun to knit. Then I started the final wedge and found myself eyeing the ball of yarn every other second. Would there be enough? With about 1.5 m of yarn left and eight more rows to go I remembered the leftover singles I still had on the bobbin, and went to ply them very sloppily. I went back and knit the remaining eight rows, and found that the yarn was just barely enough without the “emergency yarn”. I had two little snippets left in the end, about 5 cm altogether. The hat looks much better than I thought it would. I’m very, very happy with it. Now I only have to take pictures…

Since then I have been waiting for the stars to align so that I can take pictures of me wearing the finished hat. I wanted three things to come together: a) the sun should be shining, b) I should be wearing make-up, c) I should have time to take pictures. Today I realized that the next time that would happen would probably be in spring, and so I decided to take pictures anyway:

How I did with my goals

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Two weeks ago I wrote about some fancy new goals that I had set for myself. I thought I’d try this “public accountability” everybody is talking about these days. Of course I thought I’d be back to report a week later but I wasn’t. Mostly because I had this really annoying persistent cough that made me want to do nothing but stay in bed all day. My goals were:

  1. only eat at mealtimes. That is: breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, and dinner.
  2. exercise at least three times a week for at least 30 minutes. Walking while doing errands doesn’t count.
  3. play guitar or piano for at least ten minutes a day.
  4. post on my blog 3 times a week.
  5. write at least 100 words of fiction every day.
  6. meditate every day for at least 10 minutes, and write morning pages.

I did quite well for about five days by the way. I went walking almost every day, I played guitar and piano, I wrote my words, and I was quite consistent with the meditation and morning pages. Meditation and morning pages has been something I have been doing for years, and so it wasn’t that hard to get back into that. Playing music and writing fiction was a bit harder because I found I never got around to it until late in the evening, and so I really only played for ten minutes, and I stopped writing after 120 words or so. But even when I felt like I was much too tired for writing or playing I enjoyed it nonetheless. And a 100 words isn’t much. It takes me less than 10 minutes. Also I never got the feeling that the story was making much progress at that rate. But then I wrote about 700 words on it in five days.

And then I felt terrible because of the coughing, and then, and then, and so I let everything slide. I’m still doing quite well with points 2 and 6. You can see for yourselves that the blog-posting three times a week did not happen. I may have to resign myself to the fact that these days it’s more about twice a week if that.

You might have noticed that I didn’t write about the first goal on my list. Ahem. This is the goal that I didn’t reach once in the past two weeks. Not once. I definitely won’t be making any rules around food and eating for the moment. I don’t stick to them anyway. Which is extremely frustrating. But it doesn’t help if I pretend that it’s different.

So, I’m suspending the setting of goals again. What I did find out about myself was that I can only concentrate on one thing at a time. Before setting my new goals I was on the way to get a better grip on housework again, but the minute I concentrated on my new list, I got lax about housework again.

And then I got sick, and then I started knitting a sweater that I want to have right this minute, and that meant I have been doing nothing but knitting for the past week. I started it last Sunday, and if I can go on like I did last week it will be finished by next weekend. And while I really would like to accomplish other things too, there is something very, very nice about sitting around and knitting a warm ruby-red sweater while reading Miss Marple novels. So I’ll just do that for the rest of the weekend.

So for me, obviously, public accountability doesn’t work.

In response to my post about goals PiaPessoa said she wanted to work on exercising two times a week. I’d like to hear how that went. And Anne said that I should strive to reach the point where a new habit is like brushing your teeth. She is totally right with this, of course, and when I strive to form new habits it always helps me to remember how long it took me to brush my teeth twice a day without fail. You know, as a child I was taught to brush my teeth in the mornings only. And I did so for years. Then it occurred to me that brushing them in the mornings and evenings might be a good course of action. I think I tried to bring myself to brush my teeth in the evenings too when I was about eight years old. I never succeeded until I was about twenty. And then I lost the habit again, and had to re-install it when I was about ten years older. These days I never would go to bed without brushing my teeth first. So I finally reached that stage of forming a new habit where I do it every day without fail. But it took me about 22 years to reach that stage. 22 years!

There must be a way to speed that up. Really.

October Just Posts

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Again it’s the time of the month where we meet at our virtual round table and share what we found about social justice. Sit down with Mad, Jen, and me, have a nice hot beverage (or cold if you happen to not live in the Northern hemisphere) and read a bit.

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Last month there was the second annual Blog Action Day, and the theme this year was “poverty”. A couple of posts about this are in the lovely list below. The project I want to highlight this month also has to do with poverty.
It was initiated by Amanda Soule. She has launched the project Mama to Mama. Connecting families through the gift of handmade. I have to admit that my first thought was, “Well, great, now they are sewing caps for babies on Haiti.” But I checked it out nonetheless, and then I read Meg’s post about the project and about Haiti. She sums it up much better than I ever could so please go over and read it.
This is what moved me the most:

[…]the health and nutritional status of many (and in the poorer areas, most) mothers is very compromised during pregnancy, and therefore so is the health and nutrititional status of their babies. What our nurses have found is that the newborns, especially the premature and low-birth-weight babies are often very cold. A full-term healthy newborn has a store of fat which supplies sufficient calories to carry them for several days, and help them grow and thrive. Premature, and low-birth-weight babies don’t have this. Even though it is warm in Haiti, the ambient temperature is usually less than the body temperature, and if these compromised babies have to use their calories to maintain body temperature, it is not going toward growth, and lessens their chances to survive and thrive. So in the context of an otherwise healthy population, the caps would not be so critical, but in the areas in which we are working, and for the newborns we have connections with, they are important.

And if you, like me, are not likely to sew something to be shipped to Haiti, either because you don’t sew or it would be madness to ship something like that halfway around the world, go and read it anyways because you can also help by donating, or – the easiest option – by spreading the word.
I also want you to keep in mind that the Just Posts are a community effort, so I want to encourage everyone to write about social justice and tell us about it (you can find my e-mail on my about page), and to tell us about anything you read regarding this subject.

Alejna with Blog Action Day
Billie with Registering the homeless to vote and Bolivia to USA: “Return Goni to justice”
Cecileaux with Thinking toward a new economy and Joe the plumber economics
Citymama with Letter to Wallie and Bunny before Election Day
Cyn at MOMocrats with National Happy Coming Out Day and No on California’s Prop 8
Defiant Muse with Reprieve
Emily with How I know that I live in the South
Getting it wrong with Hippie girl days
Girlgriot with This and that one
Her Bad Mother with Angelina And Me, Our Bodies, Our Selves, Our CHILDREN’S Selves, and Sings The Tune Without The Words
Holly with Blog Action Day (After)
Jaelithe at MOMocrats with Blog Action Day: Education is the key to escaping poverty
Janelle with Wealth…
Jen with the flood pt. 4 – everything is still really bad and I am a real American
Jess with Redemption Song
Josh with Rescue package
Julie with River raft beds and other reflections
Kimberly with The ugly side of politics and people
Kyla with Joe the Plumber
Laloca with The intersection of poverty, psychiatry and the law
Lara with Gone a year and Were you bold? Did you wear red today?
LesbianDad with Oh the posts, they are coming fast and furious these days
Leslie with A perfect world and Proposition eight, proposition hate
Lia with Enriching Our Lives
Lisa Lam on CraftBoom! with Blog Action Day – Poverty. It’s helping, that’s what counts….
Maggie, dammit with Awareness, What are you contributing with all that hate and Please Help
Magpie with Healthy Eating
Mary with what women want
Mary Murtz with Reclamation
Maryam with Ethnic cleansing: Rwanda style, Rwanda and the 12 wishes and Rwanda and a colored place
Mir Kamin on BlogHer with National Mammography Day is October 17th
PunditMom with Taking our daughters to the polls
Rebecca with Trying to find the words, Donate to your local food pantry, Local food economies need local processing to thrive and Tax the rich: a rant about socialism
Social Justice Soapbox with International Day for the eradication of poverty and An apple for the teacher
Susan Wagner on BlogHer with DonorsChoose Challenge – Well, color me happy!
Suzanne Reisman on BlogHer with October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month and Breast Cancer Awareness Month 2008: The Best of the Worst Marketing
Tiny Mantras with The early voting experience
Whiskey in my sippy cup with Just say no
Wrekehavoc with Kill the poor

Readers
Moosh!
Hel
Maggie
Holly
Alejna

As usual you should go to Mad and Jen too to see what they are writing about this month.

Things which I wanted to write about but didn’t

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  • how to learn to love exercise
  • how becoming a musician has changed the way I hear music
  • how giddy I felt because my husband has borrowed a drum set
  • how proud I then felt when my son played the drums
  • how much my son has grown in the past few months and how sweet he is looking with his blonde curls, blue eyes, and almost skater-like clothes
  • how happy the beret I made from my handspun makes me, and how happy I was knitting it
  • how I made a sweater out of yarn that I bought more than twenty years ago, and how much sentimental value that wool holds
  • how I still long to be cool, and how much I associate coolness with a certain kind of clothes
  • how I often feel that there are many different persons inside of me, and that I should dress accordingly
  • how I realized again today that the things that are most ordinary to me are quite extra-ordinary to others, when a friend of my son – who wanted to look at the borrowed drum-set – exclaimed, “Wow! You have a lot of guitars!”, and my son said, “These are my father’s guitars. That’s his favorite one, it’s a Jaguar. Shall I show you my mother’s guitars? I have a guitar too.” And we didn’t even tell him about the two that live on the wardrobe in the bedroom because we don’t use them. And the violin.
  • how I’m doing with my Christmas knitting
  • how I’m doing with reaching the goals I set for myself last Saturday (mostly good, totally bad on one account; I’ll keep you posted)
  • how pleased I am with what I’m currently spinning, and how I hope to make the yarn into a sweater someday (there are still about 400 grams left to spin, and – as I mentioned before – that particular sweater will make me look about as sombre as a parrot covered in tropical flowers)
  • how Germans celebrate Christmas, New Years Eve, Carnival, or Easter. Or the first day of school.
  • how much I’d be pleased if you sent me your links for the October Just Posts roundtable (You can send me links to any post about social justice written in the parenting blogosphere that you wrote or read.