I Be Steekin' (with apologies to Clarence Carter)

My step-brother and his girlfriend had their first child in January, and my mom asked me to make an afghan for the little mite. But you have to understand: I don’t DO afghans. It’s not that I don’t LIKE afghans—I just don’t DO afghans. And for a perfectly simple reason: I taught myself to knit when I was about sixteen, one boring and sweaty Georgia summer. At the end of which, I had one pair of sweltering, acrylic, Kelly green, garter stitch “slippers” with only a vague resemblance to human feet. The next project was a scarf (natch), an interminable RECTANGLE of boringness. I put down the scarf about a quarter of the way through, and didn’t pick up knitting needles again until grad school. Whereupon, I vowed to never again knit (damned) rectangles. I started back up with a sock—and haven’t looked back.

I was in a dilemma then: how to knit an afghan (which is, broken down to essentials, a really BIG rectangle) without breaking my vow? Then I discovered Sleepy Monkey. It’s perfect; stranded colorwork, knit in the round, steeked, then assembled together with a border. Voila! Instant afghan, no rectangles required. Plus, it’s cute as a bug (as we say here in the South). The only problem I could see is that I’m still a new knitter, and I’ve never steeked anything. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the handy sidebars in the pattern, I wouldn’t have known what a steek was.

It didn’t sound all that bad. People have done this sort of thing before, right? I mean, people have been knitting for damn near forever, and so, this stuff works, right?

I was sanguine—until staring at two tubes of (for me) painstaking colorwork.

Cut? My knitting? You must be joking. Who the hell would even think of that? Someone for whom every stitch isn’t still a miracle, obviously. Okay, so you sew reinforcement, but still.

It had to be done, though, unless I want to give the kid a couple of sleeping bags. Don’t catch your toes in the floats, Kid. Good luck. Have fun. Aunty Ms. is going to go have a large whiskey tonic now.

No. We must protect the kid’s toes. So.



All went well, except that I managed to cut some of my floats.

On the feckin’ monkey square, too. I’ll attempt to weave those in. Oh, superwash wool, why won’t you felt when I need you to?

Late to the Party

I am coming late to this whole knit blog thing and REALLY late to the general blog thing. Though this will probably be only so knit blog and more sort of a do-what-you-feel blog. Okay, so knitting is usually what I feel--but sometimes I read, and sometimes I rant, and sometimes I just babble. Yes, it’s going to be one of THOSE.

I am an All But Dissertated Ph.D. student in Genetics at a well-known southeastern university (if by well-known, you mean known for football). Like so many grad students before me, I almost dropped out, because grad school is. . .well, to put it truthfully, grad school is insane, and the people in it are even more so. You’d have to be to take the kind of abuse (at its most extreme) or neglect (at its mildest) we do, for the pay we do, with the job prospects we do. But hey, I’m on drugs now (the legal kind), so I stayed. After a certain point, it’s like Stockholm Syndrome. Oh, and I took up knitting.

Knitting keeps me just this side of bonkers. It empties my pockets, but it keeps me from being carted away by the men with white coats. When I was sixteen, my mom was a terrible alcoholic, and I became obsessed with sailboats. Now, I’m from Atlanta. Not a sailboat in sight (doesn’t matter what you say, sailboats in Lake Lanier don’t count). I’d never been on a sailboat, wouldn’t know a bowline from a bowsprit, but I was obsessed with sailboats. I subscribed to Sail magazine and read every issue from cover to cover. One of the pithy little jokes I remember from Sail magazine is the one sailors told themselves: a boat is a hole in the water into which you pour money.

Knitting is like that, too; only, in this case, at the end, you have something to warm to wear. I think I originally thought that I would (snicker) save money (chortle chortle) by (har!) making my own (sigh) clothes. Well, uh, no. No. But what it has allowed me to do is work off some steam and make some much cooler clothes than I would be able to have otherwise. So, at least I have the comfort of knowing that I’m going to be a really stylin’ bag lady when I fail to find a job in this “recovering” economy.

Knitting is for me now what sailboats were for me when I was sixteen. Why knitting? I have no idea. Maybe knitting provides a little (okay, sometimes a very little—but you get do-overs) control in an out-of-control world. I have always felt somewhat lost in grad school. Most of us do, I believe. Success in bench research is often (more often than most of us would like) determined by luck. We all know the bastards, the ones who fall into a project after all the grunt work has been done--and get that first paper out in year two. Everyone thinks they’re the bee’s knees or the mutt’s nuts, or whatever. And you’re still slaving away in year five, trying to get the fucking protein expressed. And your PI tells another grad student you’re “slow,” or whatever. Because data rained down on your PI like manna from heaven when he was in grad school, minimal work required, couldn’t get the fucking stuff to stop, in fact. Finished in four years, in point of fact. Three appendices in his thesis, in another point of fact. Because he was one of the bastards. The lucky fucking sod.

Not that this has happened to me, or anything.

But knitting. . .PI says you’re “slow”? So what? I can knit stranded colorwork like a mug. Western blot didn’t work? Who cares? I can knit intarsia, yo! World got you down? No problem! Knit yourself some bootstraps and pull yourself up. Or at least a wooly blanket to pull over your eyes.