Dear Father Christmas,

Love, Karie x

Last night I cast on for a project that has nothing to do with work nor is it one of my own designs. In fact, it is a completely frivolous project that I only cast on because – gasp – I wanted to knit it. I don’t think I have done that for a very, very long time (and typing that makes me feel a bit sad, actually). Kastanie is going to be a jumper. I bought the first issue of knit.wear a couple of months ago because I loved the simple, wearable Wendy Bernard pattern. Of course it transpires that the pattern is a re-branded Riverstone Boatneck jumper which makes me very angry as a consumer. Pay $5.50 to get the one pattern or pay £10 for a magazine? I know which one I would have preferred.

Anyway. In my stash I had two large skeins of New Lanark Aran in a one-off colourway that I bought on a visit to the Mill back in 2009. The colour is a gorgeous heathery chestnut (‘Kastanie’ is Danish for chestnut) and I am loving up it works up with the stitch pattern. I reckon I have maybe 600g of yarn which may or may not be enough for the jumper, but we shall see. The jumper is a bog-standard, easily-modified top-down raglan so I can play around with fit and yardage. All in all, this is not an earth-shatteringly new direction for my knitting but I just really want a cosy winter jumper that I can knit up fairly quickly and without too much stress.

Speaking of stress, I use WordPress to power this site and sadly their new update makes it incredibly cumbersome for me to blog. This entry has been entirely hand-coded, for instance, and while I do like coding, I am not particularly keen on handcoding every single blog post. It takes too much time. I’m off to find a solution. If you want to see another photo of Kastanie, please visit its project page on Ravelry. No link because that would require about three different windows open and additional handcoding. You get my drift.

I was sitting on my flight last night and seeing it was a clear night, I could follow our path moving northwards through England. After the pilot informed us we had just passed Manchester, the lights below started become more and more scarce. I leaned against the window. Some time later I saw a massive flood of light in the distance and seeing that the flight path would not have taken us towards Newcastle, there was only one city that could be that big, that lit-up: Glasgow. Home. My body and mind relaxed in that moment with that undefinable, warming sense of belonging there. I have spent so many years feeling like I did not belong somewhere that I still bask in the glory of being home.

Knitterly content: I have three Finished Objects to show off, but no photos so that’ll have to wait. I only have one WIP which is completely disgusting. I do have one project in mind which I’ll start later today..

I have also read several books recently. I’m in a very Victorian mode at the moment.

A few links and quotes:

The New Statesman published an excellent column recently: “You should have your tongue ripped out”: the reality of sexist abuse online.

While I won’t deny that almost all bloggers attract some extremely inflammatory comments — and LGBT or non-white ones have their own special fan clubs, too — there is something distinct, identifiable and near-universal about the misogynist hate directed at women online.

I contacted the columnist afterwards and told her briefly about my own experiences with “interesting” comments on my old literary blog. A male blog reader started stalking me in real life claiming I was “putting it out there” and I had to get the police involved (which was problematic in its own gender-political way).

Nowadays my blog is .. well, I guess this is a craft blog, of sorts, which is situated within a mostly-female space or community. There are still gender issues at play within this ‘community’  – first of which is “can we even lay claim to this being a community”, of course – but it is definitely a different set of issues.

Sarai Mitnick of Colette Patterns went to Quilt Market and was slightly ambivalent. However, I was struck by one thing she wrote:

My impression is that crafty women today (and I include myself) are interested in all kinds of handmade stuff, including clothes, items for their homes (like quilts), food, gardens, you name it. It’s all about bringing the magic of the homemade into every aspect of our lives, of living a life of creativity and meaning, of renewing and reinvigorating a range of traditions.

Finally, have you seen Margaret Atwood has knitted a Great Auk? She is on Ravelry too, of course..

My Karise shawl has been chosen as a pattern for the next Old Maiden Aunt knitalong on Ravelry. To celebrate this, I am offering a whopping 20% discount on the pattern until November 30, 2011! Just cite OMAKAL as your discount code. More information in the Old Maiden Aunt Ravelry group.

I have been re-jigging my social media commitments, so I now have an open-to-all Twitter account that you can follow. If you used to follow me on Twitter, you may want to follow the new account instead. Knitterly stuff guaranteed, but I’ll basically be tweeting about anything that takes my fancy. A condensed version of this blog, if you like.

(Speaking of which, I have managed to delete my entire folder of knitting blogs from Google Reader. I have tried to reconstruct my reading list of 300+ blogs but if I usually comment on your blog and you think I haven’t been around lately, do let me know.)

This Saturday I will be teaching a lace shawl class at Wool 4 Ewe in Aberdeen. I think the class has filled up pretty well already, but any Aberdeenshire dwellers can check with Kathy whether she has had any cancellations. Hopefully I will see you there – and if not, feel free to drop in after the class to say hello!

So, yes. Busy times!

I have actually finished quite a few things, but I’ve not even made any Ravelry project pages for them, let alone managed any pictorial evidence.

This is a brand-new project. I’m using one ball of Rowan Kidsilk Stripe for a very straightforward triangular shawl.

Kidsilk Stripe is a new Rowan yarn: essentially 2 balls of Kidsilk Haze in one ball and combining shades of KSH to create lovely stripes. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much life the stripes have. Purple isn’t just solid purple but has all sorts of subtle variegations. I hope my photo hints at that. I’m using the Twillight colourway for this shawl  (greens and purples) but I also really like the Cool colourway (teals and deep pinks).

And I have new specs! I was lucky enough to win a free pair of spectacles from Edinburgh-based Spectacles Direct via a Facebook(!) competition. I never win anything and I was in dire need of new spectacles, so I was very, very thrilled.

How do you like my “awkward MySpace photo pose? Ahhh, what you don’t do to appease your mother when Official Photographer is at the other end of the city.

Finally, I finished reading Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child last night. It is exceptionally well-written (as you’d expect from Hollinghurst who is probably the finest stylist of his generation) but it is also exceptionally dull. I was going to write a full review but I would struggle to find enough interesting things to say.. ironically enough,  the exact same problem the book has.

Except I have now spent more time rewriting the pattern than I would have spent designing and writing my own pattern. Sometimes you get what you pay for with free patterns:

• spelling mistakes to the point of rendering the pattern incomprehensible
• using wrong terminology to explain specific actions (CB4/C4B clearly means something different to the designer than it does to me)
• Instructions that look like short row instructions – except there are no short rows in the pattern
• And if you follow the pattern you end up with a fingerless glove which looks very weird on my hand (the thumb goes where?)

Maybe I am the odd one as a handful of people have knitted these gloves and they all loooove the pattern? Or maybe they are best friends with the designer? I’m in a very cynical mood today. The lone glove is going to the frog pond to die and I am going to find a tried-and-tested pattern (at least 100 projects) for my autumn knitting.

Grumble.

But lovely, lovely things happen too. Look what landed on my doorstep yesterday!

Ms Mooncalf had run out of wool for a current project and I just happened to have ½ a ball of the right yarn in the right colour.

One swap later and I have the pincushion I so desperately need for my dress-making adventures – handmade and in my favourite colours! – and she even included some gorgeous coasters too. Bless her, Casa Bookish is not a household that uses coasters but I shall think of a way to put them to good use.

Thank you very much, dear swap partner!

The Guardian wants to hear from “[p]rospective partners [who] will need to have traffic figures of at least five figures”. This is the really interesting bit:

The first possibility is a non-commercial content-sharing model, where we swap stories. (..)What’s the advantage to you, as a blogger, you ask? The Guardian site has a huge reach (..). Your content will appear on our site, which we hope will give it the showcase it deserves, and get you higher up those all-important Google rankings than you might otherwise be.

This wouldn’t bring you any money, though. For that, there’s a commercial possibility, where the Guardian Select team sell premium advertising across publisher blogs and sites.

So, The Guardian gets a blogger with a proven demographic readership. From a marketing point of view, that is excellent news. The blogger gets to be associated with the Guardian brand. If I read this correctly – and I may not do so, because I do not know anything about detailed textual analysis mixed with cynicism – it does sound very 2004 to me.

I think it was Ewan Spence who pointed out that some bloggers have more of a readership than some regional newspapers. Food for thought: is it worth a blogger’s while to associate him/herself with a newspaper?

In other news, the podcaster from A Playful Day has responded to my reluctance to knit in public and Fridica has responded to both me and A Playful Day. I’d be interested in hearing from other people’s KIP experiences – both good and bad.

Take one ball of Rowan Kidsilk Haze, a pair of 4mm needles, and start charting a lace repeat. Then simplify your lace repeat. Then simplify it again. Then realise you have probably just made something that looks like it is straight from a stitch dictionary (which it is not) and then sigh. And knit.

I always get asked about my naming practices. Florence is meant to replace Larisa, so I wanted a name that was both a European city and a girl’s name. That probably means that next year I will make a Geneva, followed by a Venezia, and then a Paris (perish the thought). But this is the year of Florence.

And that leaves me with nothing on the needles. Woah! I am still designing things, though, but am yet to figure out where to take two specific ideas**.. it is so frustrating! I also know that I’ll be starting my winter knitting in little over a week when the Nordic Tweed book hits the shops. What can I make in a week..?

Thank you so very, very much for the fantastic response to Karise. I cannot wait to see finished Karise shawls cropping up and I simply cannot wait to see what everybody will do with the pattern (remember: it is easy to customise). I seriously love seeing what other people do with my ideas. That is so cool. Oh, and Lilith is slowly restocking her shop after the Knit Nation carnage in case anyone wants to use the original yarn.

In other knitterly news, I happened to see someone wearing a long-sleeved version of this cardigan yesterday. The cardigan is apparently knitted in one piece and then you ease in the sleeves. It is so pretty, isn’t it? I did a bit more research into it and it was apparently the it knit in Denmark in 2009. Trust me to finally discover all the good bits about Denmark when I do not live there any more..

Finally, my friend Jo gave me the link to Poppytalk, a cracking little blog showcasing inspirational design, crafts, and homes. Inspirational, not aspirational – I think that is a very important distinction to make. Bearing that distinction in mind, what are your favourite inspirational blogs? I yearn for colourful, beautiful things carefully curated.

** – since one idea involves a four-different-yarns-in-one-row colourwork lace shawl, I clearly need to step away from my design table.

Recently I had conversations with other long-term bloggers (I’ve been at this for over a decade) about why we continue to blog. One remark stuck with me:

Because I love it. Many new bloggers think it is a quick and easy short-cut to fame and fortune. It is not. It is hard work. I do it, because I cannot NOT do it.

I have been thinking about blogging and my blog’s various incarnations. The posts I will never post but which I have written in my head so many times. Posts that would increase traffic, get linked and re-blogged, and maybe even get some attention from outside the blogosphere. Stories that will never be told because they are not mine to tell. Two go back six years. One goes back just a few weeks.

I am thinking of these blog posts as I watch big-scale news unfold here in the UK. People who told stories that were not only not theirs to tell, but also obtained illegally (allegedly, I hasten to add). I have a hard time believing that they told these stories because they loved writing or because they truthfully believed them important stories to tell.

Words are powerful – even in these increasingly visual times.

And I am sitting here on a Friday night and I think about my little, totally insignificant blog and I think about the written word and readership.

And.

I have been very good at walking away from my blogs when they became too unwieldy and too .. too widely read. I was always very proud of Bookish, my literary blog, but I was also relieved when I pulled the plug.

Fourth Edition has grown into something to be proud of as well. It chronicles my journey from being a stuffy academic to an odd-ball creative type. And I meet so many lovely people thanks to this blog. Sometimes I get a bit overwhelmed too. I continue to walk the tightrope: I am continuously torn between my desire to maintain my privacy and my need to write these blog entries.

Don’t think I have not thought about walking away from Fourth Edition (because I have) but I also know I would just start over again. Lather, rinse, repeat..

I guess there was a point to this entry but I lost it along the way. I just remember what I was taught and what I went on to teach: always look for the gaps, the absences, what is not being said.

This is worth keeping in mind. Not just for blogging but also for news coverage.

Yes, I was aware of the response to The Gentle Art of Domesticity but I did not think this response particularly relevant to The Gentle Art of Knitting. I could write a long and boring paragraph about how I read books (I’m one of those girls who went to university and lost her intellectual innocence to literary theory) but suffice to say that I tend to focus on the book itself rather than any outrage surrounding its author.

And so I approached this new Jane Brocket book as I would any other knitting book: did I think it useful? did I find the patterns interesting? did it inspire me? did it teach me anything new? I hope I answered those questions in my review.

Some linkage:
+ Women of the Vortex. MARVELLOUS pictorial evidence of daring lady painters of a young 20th century. I find Vorticism endlessly exciting. I wish I could go to Tate Britain and shout about machines, speed and modernist epistemology. BLAST!
+ A Knitted Garden. This totally made my morning when I first saw it.
+ Modern day Hollywood has nothing on the stars of the Big Studios years. Clark Gable & the Scandal That Wasn’t is an excellent read.
+ Speaking of entertaining reads, this review of “Rushed to The Altar” from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books had me howling with laughter. The review is definitely not for the faint-hearted and it is NSFW, but it is also hillarious.
+ It is a good thing I did not have my own webspace back in 1996, because I would definitely have set up an early prototype of My Daguerreotype Boyfriend.
+ Neil Patrick Harris’ opening number at this year’s Tony Awards = possibly the best 6 minutes of 2011 so far?

I have finished no less than three projects this week, so there will be plenty more knitting content over the next few days, but I’m also trying to work out a response to China Mieville’s Embassytown which does not involve me muttering about Martian poetry. Cross your fingers hard.

The Gentle Art of Knitting is pretty in a comfortable, yet aspiring way. The photography is lovely, the layout is stylish (but not dauntingly stylish) and the writing has a spring in its step. I was not surprised to find that Brocket is a blogger because her writing has a certain immediate, chatty style to it. I know I’m supposed to be charmed by her book and herself, but I have problems with the book.

I am well-educated middle-class woman who likes making things. I also like things with a story. And I appreciate aesthetically pleasing things. I am the target audience for this book but I feel condescended towards:  Reading The Gentle Art of Knitting I feel like I am not good enough because I have not chosen the right wine to go with my knitting (but Jane can help!); I am not good enough because I did not pick up 20 skeins of Cascade 220 on my last breezy weekend trip to New York (but Jane did!); And I am not fun and retro enough to have a knitted tea-cosy for my teapot (but Jane sure is!). There is a sense that my own life is slightly lacking but that Jane Brocket hovering behind me will gently correct all my tiny flaws.

I am not sure where this lingering sense of inferiority is coming from. Ms Brocket’s designs are not exactly earth-shattering: a knitted apron, a bog-standard ripple crochet blanket, a chevron scarf.. There is exactly one pattern I like in this book – a pair of pillows – while the rest of the patterns feel nondescript. Designs do not need to be complicated, of course, but I somehow expected more from a book with such a heavy emphasis on aesthetics. I somehow expected a cohesive design strategy..

(There is even an strange bit devoted to “cult knitting patterns” which has her describing the Clapotis scarf and The February Lady Sweater. This section feels very odd, very tacked-on, and oddly dated.)

It is a UK book, yet most yarns used can only be bought in a handful of shops throughout the country. We are not even talking unicorn yarn here, just straightforward US workhorse yarns: Cascade 220 and Blue Sky Alpaca. If Jane Brocket wants to use yarns that is more exclusive than what you can find in your average UK yarn shop, why use quite plain US workhorse yarn? Why not track down The Natural Dye Studio? Fyberspates? The Knitting Goddess? If exclusivity is not her aim, why not promote UK companies? Rowan? Debbie Bliss? Sublime? Her readers will thank her for being able to buy the suggested yarns.

But then again it’s a book for knitters that do not knit. It is lifestyle porn in the same way as Nigella’s cooking shows, Kirstie Allsopp’s TV crafting and the Sunday newspaper colour supplements are inviting you to buy into a lifestyle. As a knitter who does like to knit, I am not sure what to do with this book.

I have tried hard to think of The Gentle Art of Knitting‘s unique selling proposition but I cannot really find one. At the end of the day it is an aspirational lifestyle blog locked into a book. There are many knitting and lifestyle blogs out there – many of which are far better than this book – and I can read them for free. I can also buy far better pattern books at a fraction of the price.

I’m sure I wouldn’t have spent nearly 700 words on the Harry Hill knitting book. I’m also sure I wouldn’t have felt so disheartened either.

Like many other knitters and crocheters, I tend to make things whenever and wherever. I knit on public transport, when I’m waiting at the doctor’s, during my lunch hour, and even very occasionally at work (I work within the knitting industry so many people assume that means I sit and knit all day. Ha!). Oh, and at knitting groups! I love my knitting buddies.

My favourite place to knit is my bed (which is also my favourite place to read). I prop myself up with pillows and blankets, get my iPod out and just relax into a current knitting project. I listen to audiobooks and podcasts rather than music. My brain is wired to it learning as much as possible so unless I am knitting something horrifically difficult, I do not listen to music.

Lately I have been listening to:

• In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg. A BBC Radio 4 radio programme with heavy emphasis on the history of ideas, the arts, and humanities. I really enjoyed the programme about metaphors (I used to excel at hardcore literary theory and this programme really took me back to my smart days) and I’d also recommend the programmes on Aristotle’s Poetics and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (I cannot find a viable link to this one, but it is available on iTunes. It is fun in that particular way anything about Lord Byron is fun).
• Philosophy Bites – tasty morsels of philosophy presented by enthusiastic podcasters/academics. Martha Nussbaum on the Value of the Humanities is sadly far too topical in these university cut-back days, but I also recommend the podcasts on Neuroscience, Socratic Method, and Humanism. I have several their podcasts lined up – including one on Jacques Derrida and Foregiveness which I’m really looking forward to.
• Stash and Burn. My favourite knitting podcast although I actually prefer their early episodes to their more recent ones.
• Georgette Heyer’s “Friday’s Child”. More P.G. Wodehouse than Barbara Cartland, this was a delightful lightweight soundtrack to many of my recent projects. I had to stop myself from laughing out loud on public transport.
• E.M. Forster’s “A Room With A View” was also good, although it certainly didn’t live up to my memories of reading it when I was 17 (nothing is ever as good as it is when you are 17).

Today I finished my Catcher in the Rye shawlette (pictured next to that marvellous tea-cup above). Looking back, it was an underwhelming knitting experience but I think I burned out on making shawls during last year’s 10 Shawls in 2010 knit-along. I have already cast on my next project: I now have six rows of 270+ stitches in Kidsilk Haze to rip back because I did not swatch (gulp!).

Wish me luck.

You can find more blogs participating in the Knitting & Crochet Blog Week by googling 2KCBWDAY7. If you have come here as part of the Knitting & Crochet Blog Week, thank you for visiting. I’ll still be here once this week is over and I’m usually blogging about arts, books, films, language besides all the craft stuff. Do stick around.