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Ready, Set, Knit! (…Maybe)
It’s true. This is a post about knitting. Don’t blink or it just might disappear. 
Once upon a time, when I had oodles of free time, summer was my planning season for when the weather finally cooled down enough to permit knitting to commence. Unlike my former home in Minnesota, the coast of Israel is warm 10 months of the year and not having central A/C is the biggest deterrent to my knitting year-round. The weather is changing, enough so to get me thinking about picking up my 3 projects languishing in the UFO cabinet. This year I won’t be dashed on the shores by the Siren Song of NaKniSweMo. Oh, no, no, no. I’ll be content to just finish the current lot of projects. (Though I am coming to the belated realization that the Kaffe Fassett “Kill’em Cushion Cover” may eternally be a UFO, as it requires some serious solitude and quiet to work on. I haven’t seen either of those in months/years.)
With one magazine subscription and few online knitting newsletters, I’ve tampered down the constant pull of new projects to a minimum, but the temptation to start new projects instead of turning UFOs into FOs is certainly there. Who doesn’t love to start something fresh?! One-Skein Wonders, which I received recently, could be my Achilles’s heel! (Woo hoo! Now I need to knit a camera cozy!)
Speaking of newsletters, does anyone else think the noise-to-signal ratio on KnittingDaily is nearing the breaking point? When they first started out, it was pretty low. Now I’m sorely tempted to unsubscribe from the newsletter to avoid getting the at least twice to three times a week ads in my mailbox. I think Knitty is much more in tune with its subscribers.
To my delight, I discovered today that Ravelry members blogging on WordPress.COM now have their own group. Rock on!
And to spammers targeting WordPress.COM’s “knit” tag, take note of this important announcement from the fellow who does the clean up http://mark.wordpress.com/2008/01/15/knitting-a-tip/ (Sorry for the lack of linkage.) If you are knitblogging here on WordPress.com and surf the WP.com tag surfer, I can hear you chuckling from here.
Are You A Yarn Collector?
Wow. As of today, there are 1677 comments on that Knitting Daily post. That post and the wonderful comments left on it were a huge reaffirmation that as long as there are knitters, there will be yarn collectors.
My first website “Yarnaholic Confessions” was born out of my addiction to collecting yarn. In the 9 years that my site has been online, I’ve received a lot of yarn collecting stories, some of which were published on the Knit Natterings page or entered in my site’s guestbook, or received privately by email (and some of those were SCARY). Personally, after nearly 28 years knitting and collecting, I can now say I’m a rehabilitated yarnaholic, although the FO to unknit yarn ratio is still screwed. (The hard evidence is on my blog’s Loose Ends page.)
Further to my previous PSA
of (gulp!) April 11th:
The Wool Peddler’s Shawl was wet-blocked at last on this finally cool and breezy morning. The other shawl drying in the background is my original, single hank, garter-stitch shoulder shawlette that I knit about five years ago. I fell in love with this particular colorway of Jaggerspun Heather 3/8 yarn and just had to order more for another shawl. The subtle colors at play in this yarn are sadly lacking in the photo, but it’s full of blues, greens and purples. Lucky me, there’s enough left over from the Wool Peddler’s Shawl for another shawlette, but that will have to wait.
I’ve been pouring over my back copies of Interweave Knits, the patterns on my hard drive and the Internet to try and narrow down the possible sweater patterns for November’s NaKniSweMo. My only absolute rules for NaKniSweMo are that the sweater must be made with Stash (with a capital “S”) yarn and that the majority of knitting has to be done during November. Unfortunately for me browsing through magazines like this tends to be counter productive because I keep getting sidetracked by all the lovely patterns that I know full-well haven’t got a chance in hell of my knitting them.
Top picks at this point include (listed in terms of “absolute rules” as defined above):
- Jenna Wilson’s “Banff“, from Knitty Winter ’03
- Ann Budd’s “Pullover Flair”, from IK Spring’06
- Mags Kandis’ “Serape Jacket”, from IK Summer ’04
- Kristi Porter’s “Leo“, from Knitty Fall ’04
- Kathy Zimmermann’s “The Very Thought of Him“, from IK Spring ’00, and which is now available as a single PDF download on the IK site (ignore the Fall ’04 date, it’s incorrect)
- Annie Modesitt’s “Sideways Spencer“, from IK Fall ’04, which I have been itching to knit since seeing it, but of all the sweaters I’ve listed here, this is the most unlikely for NaKniSweMo.
Are you starting to see a trend here? 
This is where the beauty of Ravelry comes in. I can check out each of these patterns to see if anyone has knit them, what yarns they used, approximately how long it took them to knit, and if they had any blog entries linked, I can read those too. Jess and Casey deserve a special reward for coming up with the idea. Knitters have been networking like crazy since the early, early days of the Net, via Usenet, mailing lists, forums, blogs and now the very latest version of our own social network.
Another NaKniSweMo update in a couple of weeks, after I make a decision, check for pattern Errata, dig out the yarn and start swatching.
Second Annual NaKniSweMo at knitgrrl
Second Annual NaKniSweMo at knitgrrl
Now that the weather is occasionally on the slightly less than broiling side, I have to admit that I’m rather excited about this KAL. Most of my recent knitting has been small, nearly instant gratification projects. It’s been ages and ages since I knit an entire sweater. The question is what sweater to knit. The main factor, of course, is what stash yarns to use for this project. Being that the NaKniSweMo is in November, at least there’s a little time to decide and sign up for the group on Ravelry.
On a tip from a friend who works at Israel’s largest book retailer, I hopped over to our local branch of the shop and picked up a new knitting magazine published by Vitalgo, formerly one of Israel’s largest yarn producers, now one of Israel’s largest yarn importers. Vitalgo picked up on an idea previously done by Knitter’s magazine of showcasing knitting patterns written by yarn shop owners or employees. The cover sweater, a lovely bolero, was done by none other than our own Orly of The Gourmet Yarn Shop in Ra’anana. With a couple of exceptions, the majority of the sweater patterns are still stuck in the 70′s and 80′s, the heyday of Israeli yarn production. Israeli fashion trends pretty much mimic what’s going on in Europe rather than the US, but somehow I imagine even European knitters rolling their eyes at some of the sweaters in this magazine.
None-the-less, I’m not worried about finding a pattern to go along with the stash. Besides the books, there are several years worth of Knitters’, Vogue Knitting and Interweave Knits lying around here to thumb through and just a few gigabytes of patterns downloaded from the Internet.
Since this KAL has to be completed during the month of November, I better go start looking for the yarn/pattern now.
