Thursday, February 17, 2011
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
State of the CW post
So I exparamented a bit with that merino I got last week. This is how it spun up:
Everybody say "Hi, Abbot!"
What I wasn't prepared for was how short the staple length on this stuff was.
"Staple" refers to how long the individual hairs are. This effects your draft--aka, the motion of pulling out fiber before you allow it to twist. (Interesting side note: The relationship between textiles and publishing is another thing on the spinning-related subjects to study list. I like how you draft a book the same as you draft the fiber. Poor drafting=poor finished product.)
Anyway, this is a staple comparison:
On the left we have the merino, then a piece of paper, and then the shetland wool I'm still working through. And then the kitty. Because we may do nothing without kitty. You can also KIND of see how much finer the merino is, in that you can only see this white blur, whereas with the Shetland you can see individual fibers. So it's about half as long as the shetland, and twice as fine. It'll be interesting getting used to, but as I already know, it spins up like a dream. It'll be worth the effort.
And the next part might trigger people so it's behind a cut.
Book Bitch: Night Tides
Today, my friends, is a very special day, because I have discovered a very special book (actually I discovered it months ago and only just found it again, but we're not going to discuss why my housecleaning skills sometimes bite the big one). Once again, we will be delving into the dark jungle of WTF-ness that is Paranormal Romance, exploring the darkest reaches of the human imagination and discovering whole new species of purple prose.
BUT! This book! This, my dear beloved readers, is no typical book. We shall not be dancing with demons or swapping hemoglobin with vampires. We will not be snogging angels or watching witches. No. No my friends, we have special fare today.
This is a book about a woman who has sex. With a lake.
Book: Night Tides
Author: Alex Prentiss
Readability: It's about a woman who has sex with a lake. With a lake.
What you need to know before you buy: This is on the back cover: (heroine) feels the water caressing her bare skin, teasing her senses, drawing her body into a lush erotic embrace. So this is not hyperbole. Sex with a lake.
BUT! This book! This, my dear beloved readers, is no typical book. We shall not be dancing with demons or swapping hemoglobin with vampires. We will not be snogging angels or watching witches. No. No my friends, we have special fare today.
This is a book about a woman who has sex. With a lake.
Book: Night Tides
Author: Alex Prentiss
Readability: It's about a woman who has sex with a lake. With a lake.
What you need to know before you buy: This is on the back cover: (heroine) feels the water caressing her bare skin, teasing her senses, drawing her body into a lush erotic embrace. So this is not hyperbole. Sex with a lake.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Fiber porn
Just got a full pound of merino top from the Woolery:
This stuff is heavenly soft, and I thought the Shetland top I've had the last year was fantastic. It's brillo pads compared to this merino.
I could do this all day.
Unfortunately I need to finish up the current project, that full pound of Shetland top I ordered three years ago, and the alpaca/merino blend I got two years ago, before I can start playing with the merino (OMG HEAVEN LET ME DO THIS AGAIN)
More fiber porn? You shouldn't have asked! (Actually you didn't, but I can imagine, can't I?)
This is my absolutely stellar spindle, made from a crochet hook and a toy car wheel (you can't see the wheel, unfortunately) and my even more stellar andean plying tool, made from cardboard and a dowel. You're actually supposed to use your hands for andean plying, but setting up the single will hurt after a while, and if you've got a lot of single, you can break your finger getting the central loop off (for those of you currently WTF-ing, andean plying is a method of folding a single strand of yarn, so that when you unwind it you effectively double it in half. It reduces waste). Fortunately a plying tool is really easy to improv.
This is the Shetland shawl. I'm almost halfway through the last pattern band. Up until this project I was used to knitting lace on a garter stitch (all rows knitted, rather than alternating knit and pearl rows) but the pi-shawl pattern means you knit in the round. Most of the elements here have pattern stitches in every row. I have no idea how this will work out when I block it, so I'm getting kind of nervy on this.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Book Bitch: Anthem.
So I saw my younger brother reading today. I know. Stunning, right? This is like the third Sign of the Apocalypse I’ve seen this week (the first two being a quarter inch of ice on EVERYTHING on Sunday and Unholy Bitch from work being nice to me when she came in for her shift). What stunned me even more, though, was what he was reading: Anthem, by Ayn Rand. Shocking. My brother, who never reads, was nose deep in a “real” book.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Knitting and feminism? A hypothesis.
I had a thought that probably has nothing to do with anything and is probably total bullshit, but I want to write it down so I can remember it later, and I'd like to open it for discussion.
One of the reasons lace knitting was such a strong industry where it appeared was that it gave women an additional source of income. A woman who could knit well would have been a very valuable person because she could contribute something of great importance to her household. The same would go for all of the "women's work" things in European culture--knitting, spinning, weaving, sewing, embroidery. All these things weren't just keeping houses pretty for husbands. They were things they could take to market and sell, like the veggies and the other things their husbands did.
Because the finer stuff (ie wedding ring weight shawls, brussles lace, anything involving silk) was more valuable than the rougher stuff, the women had to avoid rough work. You CANNOT work with fine fibers if you have rough hands (as proven by the amount of hand lotion I go through when I'm spinning lace wool, an option women in the 'teens wouldn't have had). So the husbands would have had to do the heavy lifting and the digging and the other things considered "men's work" while the wives stayed home to do the jobs that wouldn't ruin their hands, and to knit, or sew, or embroider. Both members of the household were doing something that would earn money. It was (in theory) an equal division of labor with both members of the household contributing.
Then you had the industrial revolution, where thread, cloth and clothing production were shifted out of the home and into factories. There was no longer any value in handcraft skills, and the women who had them lost their value. Lacemaking, knitting, spinning and such were the industry of the poor. When the skill was made obsolete by factory production, the women who had them became, well, useless ornaments. The division of labor had been set in culture--because in a culture where spinning and knitting HAD value, a woman who had to work outside the home was a woman without valuable skills, and could be looked down upon by her neighbors--so the devalued woman had very few options available. They couldn't regain a valuable skillset without first changing the culture to allow it.
If the above is true, then one could argue that feminism and sufferage was an outgrowth of a (relatively) sudden devaluation and not a long-term cultural disregard for women. The girls stayed home because the work they could do at home earned more money than they work they could do outside the home. When handcrafts lost their value, however, a women who could only knit and embroider and who couldn't do something more valuable in the NEW skillset became an ornament for her husband, a way for him to say, "look, I can support someone who is worthless", the way footbinding worked in China. Feminism did not alter gender roles. Rather, it fixed them.
I think I shall study both and find out if this argument could be made reasonably, and if it might have historical support. Should be interesting if nothing else.
One of the reasons lace knitting was such a strong industry where it appeared was that it gave women an additional source of income. A woman who could knit well would have been a very valuable person because she could contribute something of great importance to her household. The same would go for all of the "women's work" things in European culture--knitting, spinning, weaving, sewing, embroidery. All these things weren't just keeping houses pretty for husbands. They were things they could take to market and sell, like the veggies and the other things their husbands did.
Because the finer stuff (ie wedding ring weight shawls, brussles lace, anything involving silk) was more valuable than the rougher stuff, the women had to avoid rough work. You CANNOT work with fine fibers if you have rough hands (as proven by the amount of hand lotion I go through when I'm spinning lace wool, an option women in the 'teens wouldn't have had). So the husbands would have had to do the heavy lifting and the digging and the other things considered "men's work" while the wives stayed home to do the jobs that wouldn't ruin their hands, and to knit, or sew, or embroider. Both members of the household were doing something that would earn money. It was (in theory) an equal division of labor with both members of the household contributing.
Then you had the industrial revolution, where thread, cloth and clothing production were shifted out of the home and into factories. There was no longer any value in handcraft skills, and the women who had them lost their value. Lacemaking, knitting, spinning and such were the industry of the poor. When the skill was made obsolete by factory production, the women who had them became, well, useless ornaments. The division of labor had been set in culture--because in a culture where spinning and knitting HAD value, a woman who had to work outside the home was a woman without valuable skills, and could be looked down upon by her neighbors--so the devalued woman had very few options available. They couldn't regain a valuable skillset without first changing the culture to allow it.
If the above is true, then one could argue that feminism and sufferage was an outgrowth of a (relatively) sudden devaluation and not a long-term cultural disregard for women. The girls stayed home because the work they could do at home earned more money than they work they could do outside the home. When handcrafts lost their value, however, a women who could only knit and embroider and who couldn't do something more valuable in the NEW skillset became an ornament for her husband, a way for him to say, "look, I can support someone who is worthless", the way footbinding worked in China. Feminism did not alter gender roles. Rather, it fixed them.
I think I shall study both and find out if this argument could be made reasonably, and if it might have historical support. Should be interesting if nothing else.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Stuff in the New Year
First of all, this made me snort my breakfast up my nose:
http://www.jimchines.com/2009/09/20-neil-gaiman-facts/
In other ... stuff I've been knitting a lot lately. I like it, I've missed it, and this project became a challenge about the time I ran out of pattern charts before I got the size I wanted (this is why checking your gage is a GOOD THING)
One of the things I've discovered in my desperate hunt for easy-access patterns (the internet is devoid of proper shetland or orenburg knitting motifs) is just how ... odd fine openwork traditions are. Apparently it "lives" in six places: Iceland, the Faeroes, Shetland (all of which are islands) Orenburg (isolated in the middle of mountains) the Ukraine and Estonia. And while these are all noticeably different traditions, they are also very, very alike. Kind of like looking at Latin-derivative languages and recognizing the source of certain words. The connective thread (ha ha) appears to be the Vikings. I'm gonna have to go get a map and color the areas this stuff comes from. The weirdest thing is the most complex and similar traditions are in Shetland, Estonia and Orenburg. Admittedly Estonia and Orenburg knitters communicated somewhat, but the Shetland isles are (according to Wikipedia) little piles of rock out in the Atlantic and if you did lace knitting during its heyday you were also poor. Too poor to make trips to Europe (or to want to).
So this is really cool. You know, to me. I remember reading a book about a mermaid when I was a kid which never identified the geographic location of the family. I knew the book took place on a coast, probably on an island, that the people in the book were Irish/Scottish, and that was all. Well, there's a couple of paragraphs halfway through it where the grandfather of the family (who has sailed away because the mermaid wants to kill him. It was one of those not-for-kids kids books) has sent his wife a lace shawl because both these foreign knitters and his wife can knit lace that passes the wedding ring test. Now I know where this island is.
So I have decided that one of my projects this year is to study the living crap out of this old-fashioned, unpopular hobby and see where it gets me. I know most people don't find knitting to be interesting, but damn it, I do.
http://www.jimchines.com/2009/09/20-neil-gaiman-facts/
In other ... stuff I've been knitting a lot lately. I like it, I've missed it, and this project became a challenge about the time I ran out of pattern charts before I got the size I wanted (this is why checking your gage is a GOOD THING)
One of the things I've discovered in my desperate hunt for easy-access patterns (the internet is devoid of proper shetland or orenburg knitting motifs) is just how ... odd fine openwork traditions are. Apparently it "lives" in six places: Iceland, the Faeroes, Shetland (all of which are islands) Orenburg (isolated in the middle of mountains) the Ukraine and Estonia. And while these are all noticeably different traditions, they are also very, very alike. Kind of like looking at Latin-derivative languages and recognizing the source of certain words. The connective thread (ha ha) appears to be the Vikings. I'm gonna have to go get a map and color the areas this stuff comes from. The weirdest thing is the most complex and similar traditions are in Shetland, Estonia and Orenburg. Admittedly Estonia and Orenburg knitters communicated somewhat, but the Shetland isles are (according to Wikipedia) little piles of rock out in the Atlantic and if you did lace knitting during its heyday you were also poor. Too poor to make trips to Europe (or to want to).
So this is really cool. You know, to me. I remember reading a book about a mermaid when I was a kid which never identified the geographic location of the family. I knew the book took place on a coast, probably on an island, that the people in the book were Irish/Scottish, and that was all. Well, there's a couple of paragraphs halfway through it where the grandfather of the family (who has sailed away because the mermaid wants to kill him. It was one of those not-for-kids kids books) has sent his wife a lace shawl because both these foreign knitters and his wife can knit lace that passes the wedding ring test. Now I know where this island is.
So I have decided that one of my projects this year is to study the living crap out of this old-fashioned, unpopular hobby and see where it gets me. I know most people don't find knitting to be interesting, but damn it, I do.
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