I’m responding to Nat’s excellent question in its own post, partially to give myself some room to ruminate and partially for future reference. I am by no means a knitting expert — there are a lot of techniques I just don’t care to learn, and I’m pretty blissfully ignorant about designing — but, gosh, I’ve been knitting for eight or nine years now, and I’ve learned some things and developed some opinions since then.  I’m still learning how to sew (and that is a craft with a million techniques and nuances out there to discover, I tell you what) but, at this point, I learn more from random blog entries and forum posts than I do from cracking open my Reader’s Digest Guide while sitting in an easy chair.  So along those lines, some knitting-related thoughts.

When so many patterns have been made with countless different yarns, and when every yarn has what seems like equal numbers of lovers and haters, what is one to do? Especially when one is still learning and other than “cannot work with mohair,” doesn’t have much firsthand experience with fibers?

Heh, “cannot work with mohair” is something I learned for myself the hard way.  Fiber preferences and tolerances are entirely a matter of trial and error, and work in mysterious fashions.  I find alpaca incredibly soft and warm, except for some varieties, which turn sneakily prickly on my neck after half an hour.  I find most varieties of wool to be extremely scratchy, except when it’s winter and my skin is apparently too chilly to complain.  I find cotton soothing and soft, except I’m working on two projects with it now and it’s just killing my wrists.

That said, I picked up a copy of The Knitter’s Guide to Yarn from the library a few years ago and thought it was stellar — not only does it give you an exhaustive rundown of different types of fibers, but helps you understand and predict how they’ll behave in different garments, and when combined in different ways.  (Yeah, I should pick up a copy for myself.)  It also gave me necessary confidence in understanding yarn substitutions — for example, not only looking at the recommended gauge, needle size, and fiber content of a similar yarn, but also eyeballing the yards per gram.

So, both experience and vague understanding are my guides here.  Oh, and price.  Just to narrow the field, I shop a lot at Elann, Knitpicks, and a couple of vendors that sell Cascade 220 & Eco Wool, then comb through the reviews at Ravelry on whatever yarns have caught my eye.  (For example, I recently bought some Knitpicks Palette to make some mittens because it’s super-cheap and comes in a huge array of colors; the reviews tell me that it pills a lot, though, so I know that it wouldn’t be a good choice for a sweater or something less tightly knit.)

Ravelry is an incredible resource. In fact, it has SO much information that I’m still trying to figure out how to keep from being completely overwhelmed by it all.

I tend to use Ravelry more as a reference, and not something that I just comb through aimlessly (except when I’m bored).  For example, I had my eye on Vivian for a couple of months before I decided to make it, and in the intervening time I read through the reviews and looked at the photos that people were posting of their own sweaters.  I figured that, since I don’t have a hard time following charts, I’d be fine with the instructions given that I spent some time sifting through them first; I also used photos and comments to guide my decision about what size to make (and to size up the arms, which were apparently very tight.  Conversely, I’ve been wanting to make the Petal Halter — even have the yarn for it and everything — but the reviews have totally scared me away.  If the seaming and sizing and just about everything about it are going to make me want to rip out my hair, it’s not worth it.

I do also tend to browse through the most popular patterns in certain categories when I’m in the mood, too.  That’s how I found Owls, which is so stinkin’ cute I can’t stand it, and Vinterblomster Mittens (ditto).  And seeing projects on Real People is invaluable; I mean, you can never guarantee how your project will turn out, but noticing that something looks like an ill-fitting sack on everyone with my body type is a pretty good thing to know.

A few other miscellaneous helps:

• The tutorials at TECHknitter, which are clear and often quite ingenious.  (I just started using her technique for joining items knit in the round, and wondered where it’s been all my life.)
• Math.  These days, I end up resizing just about everything, and it’s oh-so-liberating knowing how to make my gauge work for my project.  What’s more, it’s really not hard: if I know the number of stitches I’m getting per inch, and look at the number of stitches that make up the circumference of the sweater, it’s pretty easy to figure out how large a certain size will actually turn out to be.

In sum, I guess my thesis is: the internet is awesome because it means that you can grok the knowledge of thousands, and not have to figure everything out for yourself.

Materials: 4 balls of Rowan Felted Tweed (50% Merino Wool, 25% Alpaca, 25% Viscose) in SH 165; size 4 needles. Pattern: a heavily modified Tilted Duster (originally in Interweave Knits Fall 2007).

Time: 1 month.

Cost: $0.  Thanks, Mom!

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Materials: 3 yards of poplin blend from the ever-popular 3-for-the-price-of-1 Fabricville sale. Simplicity 3835 pattern.

Time: Two weeks, very intermittently?  This is a straightforward pattern.

Cost: $8.

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Google Calendar really facilitates my anal-retentive streak in new and surprising ways.  There are occasional cleaning tasks that I remember to do without external prompting, like throwing the shower curtain liner in the wash with some bleach when it becomes too stained with rust, or others that I perform yearly, like cleaning and polishing my boots and washing all my winter scarves and mittens.  (Seriously, scarves that smell like neck grease?  Nasty.)  But gcal — we have little nicknames for each other, you see — (not really) — gives me a place to write down random tasks that no reasonably sane person would otherwise remember. Maybe most people are okay not knowing when they last changed the filter on the cat fountain or rotated the couch cushions, but I take great pleasure in knowing that my Brita filter is changed every three months on the dot.  See?  Gray matter and time spent squinting and scratching my head in front of the box of filters, both preserved.

Lest ye think that I’m the only compulsive one in these parts, I’d add that Pete’s absence is making me realize just how much he’s quietly refined his own standard cleaning duties.  Normally, the linen closet is his domain, since I am for whatever reason completely incapable of neatly folding rectangles into smaller rectangles and piling them into stacks that do not teeter precipitously over the shelf edges.  After doing a load of towels this weekend, though, I realized that not only is our linen closet extraordinarily tidy, but that all items are rotated in an orderly fashion through their respective stacks, towels are folded lengthwise and then crosswise so that you only need to flip them open once and they’ll be ready to hang on the towel bar, and that bath towels are stacked in color-coordinated groups, with a matching set of hand towels, bath towels, and washcloths all arranged geometrically on top of the proper bath mat.  It’s almost enough to make me want to pen some sort of adoring love letter, except instead of “baby, I see your eyes every time I watch the sun set” it would be more like “baby, before I met you, I had no idea that underwear could even be folded.”  Aww.

I stumbled upon a couple of articles last week discussing Oprah’s health advice, and found myself particularly captivated, with mingled horror and fascination, by The Secret, which already had a vague place on my radar but which I’d failed to fully comprehend.

Apparently, the reason why we’ve been short on cash this month isn’t because Pete has had to spend several thousand dollars on as-yet-unreimbursed travel expenses, but because I have not been visualizing sufficient checks in the mail!  I have been blocking money with all of my negative energy, account-balancing and travel-expenditure spreadsheets! Verily, I am being punished by the Universe.  All this time married to an astrophysicist — someone whose job it is to explore the most ancient and unknowable origins of the cosmos! — and he has failed to teach me the Law of Attraction.  We will have A Talk in July, I tell you what.

I put my power of positive thinking into the Universe this weekend when I did the laundry, too.  We, like much of the Midwest and East Cost, have been having a thoroughly chilly and damp summer, and as I was changing the bed linens on Saturday I decided to take action and remove the electric blanket.  It’s almost July, I reasoned!  Summer is slipping away, and I haven’t even put forth the effort to enjoy it!  We spend three quarters of the year covered in, preparing for, or recovering from snow, anyway; seize the day, and enough with the damn electric blanket!

Unsurprisingly, I spent that night curled up in a chilled, achy, shivering ball, as enormous gusts of cold wind buffeted me through the open window.  Any time you’re ready, summer.  Any time.

Pete woke up at 3-something in the morning today in order to make a 6 am flight to San Francisco.  (These are the kind of glamorous hours that you travel at when you, combined with the Powers That Be in your collaboration, tend to decide that travel must be made approximately five days before your departure.  These spur-of-the-moment-type arrangements also mean that your wife’s jealousy at not having the fiscal resources to tag along are entirely assuaged by the fact that your wife’s aunt is out of town, and you will be spending the next 15 days in a local hostel.)  Pete’s travel is pretty routine at this point; I mean, I’ll miss him lots, but I’ve never really understood those couples for whom never having spent a night apart is a point of pride.

So I can’t be the only one who amuses herself by replying to her husband’s “hey, I got in OK, the flight was fine” emails by impersonating her cats… right?

DEER KTTYDADDY

WHER AR THE KIBBLEZ ?  WE WUD LIEK THE KIBBLEZ NOW, PLZ .

SINCEERLY
GARTH PANTS AND SEBASTIAN

PS WE LOVE YOU VERY MUSH
PPS AND YOUR FEETS SMELL GUD
PPPS  PLEZE BRING BAK THE FEETS
PPPPS AND THE KIBBLEZ

Unfortunately, those of you who have never met my cats just won’t be able to appreciate how finely I captured the subtle nuances of my cats’ narrative voice.  Trust.

I occasionally see people post two truths and a lie on their blogs, but I’ve always resisted participating lest this site transform entirely into a rambling exercise in solipsism.  And then I was assigned to do it.  For French class.

I tried to explain the concept to Pete.  “You have to make a list of two things that are true about yourself and one that isn’t, and then everyone has to guess which one is the lie.”

“Oh, okay,” he said.  “So… ‘I’m 29 years old?’”

“No — for this, they have to be things that people can quiz you about, not just yes or no questions.”

“Ah.  How about, ‘I’ve read a lot of books?’”

At this point I was feeling pretty despondent.  “These are people who come from all over the world, and who have done a whole lot of interesting stuff.  It needs to be something that makes me sound really cool!”

“But you have read a lot of books!  Reading is cool!”

My husband’s faith in my inner beauty was heartening, but I eventually came up with a list on my own, mercifully presented below in a translated edition.  Because why pass up a chance to convince people that I’m cool?  (By the way, did you know that I’ve read a lot of books?)

1. I’m a big fan of professional cycling, and last year I watched every single day of TV coverage of the Tour de France.
2. I spent several years playing in a steel drum band.
3. I’ve never visited the country where my father was born.

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Last weekend was the Montreal World Cup, one of very few UCI bicycling events held in North America.  It was crazy: for me, cycling is something that takes place far away in Europe or maybe in California or Georgia in the spring; at any rate, it’s something vaguely European that happens far away and that you watch on TV, which takes the sport even further away from its decidedly more proletarian roots.  (It is, I imagine, kind of like being a WASPy soccer fan in middle America; no matter how genuine your love of the sport, there’s always going to be something that seems a bit self-consciously affected about the Manchester United scarf draped around your shoulders.)  So, it was pretty bizarre that suddenly, on Saturday, there was an honest-to-God race with actual world-class riders taking place a quarter of a mile away from my apartment.  Complete with video camera-toting motorcyclists, team cars, and the dude who rides in the passenger seat on one of the offical motorcycles and writes the current times on a tiny chalkboard which he then holds up for the riders to see.  Crazy, I say.

The race route goes up and down the mountain via Camilien-Houde, a road I’ve only been stupid enough to bike up once.  The easy route to the top of Mont Royal is to take the wide gravel pedestrian path, which loops lazily back and forth on its way up at a gentle gradient.  I attempted to take the actual road up the mountain, Camilien-Houde, only once at the end of the season last year, figuring that I was in as good of shape as I’d ever be.  I made it very nearly to the top before the unusual sensation of my heart and lungs both trying to escape my chest cavity made me pause, drape myself limply over the handlebars for a few minutes, and make an elegant and humble descent.  Camilen-Houde is the route that the World Cup takes, except the athletes competing go up, down, and around it eleven times.  Also, please note that this year’s winner, Emma Pooley, is also working on her PhD. Again: humbled.

Montreal’s Bixi bike-sharing program has made an extremely visible debut during the past few weeks, too.  I swear I pass an almost-empty station every couple of blocks, which… looking at the map, is about right.  My own bike was in the shop this week, so the fact that Bixi’s getting so much buzz, plus the fact that it’s finally gorgeous and warm outside, made me miss it even more.  But I will continue to reiterate the importance of a tune-up for even the most casual cyclists, particularly since I went in to get my front shifter replaced and ended up getting a new shifter plus a new chain, rear cassette, and cables.  (I might know how to true a wheel, but that’s about as far as it goes).  Anyway, I went to go pick it up this morning, and it is all shiny and new and rides like absolute buttah.  Without thinking too much about it, I went out to the bike path and ended up at the north end of the island, at Rivière des Prairies.  It is quite nice — apparently no longer a dumping ground for the city’s untreated sewage, which is always good — but the sight of the narrow river separating me from the ‘burbs of Laval was enough to make me add another entry to my imaginary list of places to go: “Ocean.”