Adventures of a Desi Knitter

A post high on colour and short on text. Captions and snapshots from the sprawling yarn extravaganza at Santa Clara Convention center yesterday.

In front of the giant Ravelry poster:

Before and after the Slaughter, or Spotless Fibre Loses Battle with Dye:

ManDuka peers through the lattice work of an Orenburg shawl at the Skaska Designs booth:

People go crazy at the massive sale pit in which crawled bags and bags of Debbie Bliss Cashmerino, Elsebeth Lavold Angora and lots of lots of Drops yarn:

My precious, bank-breaking, luscious, awe-inspiring, Brooks Farm acquisition, Mas Acero worsted wool-silk:

A monster storm cometh our way in the Bay Area in a few hours, and in the time it took me to upload the photos and write this post, rain clouds have already smothered the sun. But nothing can smother the high I am feeling after inhaling all those yarn fumes yesterday and just swimming in a sea of stunning handknits on display! I do believe I saw the largest number of triangular shawls in one day. I also squealed in delight on spotting Nancy Bush and shamelessly asked for her autograph. She looked a little startled but took it in her stride, the good woman.

Now I do have some of my own handknitting to show you, but you have to excuse me. I have to pack and cross my fingers for good weather at the airport, because I hope to be listening to some Fado very soon:

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Hope everyone has been having a good holiday season! These past two weeks have been crazy busy, way busier than my normal semester is. Between a busload of guests, two birthdays, a wedding anniversary and a major holiday, I am grateful for all the red wine and sugar to have come my way. I have hardly had any time to sit and knit, but you know how it is - a row here, a row there, and suddenly, you have a finished creation, just in time to wrap up a year’s knitting. Here’s the “Back-to-School Vest”:

I am not into the whole speed knitting thing, but this one was super-quick even for me. Took the total of five-six days’ knitting time. Apart from some clever but simple shaping, it is mindless, productive knitting. To say nothing of the fact that it took less than $25 to make.

Project Specs:

Pattern: “Back-to-School Vest” from Stefanie Japel’s “Fitted Knits”, size 39 inches
Needles: Size 7 bamboo
Gauge: 19 st to 4 inches in waffle stitch
Yarn: Cascade 220

Seriously, Cascade 220 is wonderful. This shade is a silvery-grey heather flecked with maroon, and matched exactly the kind of colour I was looking for to wear with the dark shirts I have. It took just under 3 skeins.

Notes: For all the loveliness of the yarn and pattern, I am, quite honestly, not as taken with the FO as I should be. It fits okay, but tends to ride up a bit. The next size up (41″) would have made it too baggy, though. I’m hoping that a decent blocking, or just plain wear should settle it down a bit. But for all its shapeliness and darts, this empire waist thing places a bit too much emphasis where it perhaps ought not to, and I don’t know if I care for the roundish neckline. Also, I made it mainly to wear to teach and be comfortable in the slightly cold classrooms. But when I wore it yesterday, I found myself doing what devoted Star Trekkers would recognize as the famous “Picard Pull” or the “Picard Manoeuvre”: straightening one’s uniform every few seconds like the hot and gorgeous Capt. Jean-luc Picard does on the Starship Enterprise. It’s okay when resisting the Borg, but I imagine in class it will annoy me to hell. Am not sure yet if I’ll rip or wear it a bit more and see. But it is very comfy and warm. Incidentally, if you make the vest, do be sure to check the errata for the pattern.

Ah well. I will leave you some mist, redwoods, and sunlight. Enjoy the rest of the holidays, dear readers, and see y’all in the new year!

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Two years ago on this day, I took the plunge into blogging. I gave myself three months, then six, and then a year to see if I was really going to stick with it. I had picked the name randomly for a knitting forum login and just went with it. My first anniversary didn’t even register. In between periodic bouts of angst about ‘Why Am I Photographing This’ and ‘Who Is Reading This Anyway’, doing a roughly weekly post over the past two years has validated my tag-line about keeping me (almost) sane more than I realised. I have learned so much about new techniques, adapting patterns, and am much more disciplined (in a good way) about my knitting now. (This is clearly not the time to ponder how obsessed I am with it). The best part has been making blog-friends from all over the world and being part of a wonderful circle of creativity that has taught me so much about the craft. Thank you all! I know there are many who read regularly without commenting, but if you can, do stop today to say hi.

I had hoped to have an FO post by today on the Ogee Tunic, but it has to wait a few more days - definitely by this weekend. Instead, am sharing with all of you a plate of my Diwali faraal.

Clockwise from top -
1) chiwdaa, which is spiced, flattened rice, available in Indian stores as ‘thin poha’. Basically you roast it and make it crumbly and crisp, then mix it up with a bunch of spices. An excellent recipe for this snack is here.

2) karanji, a deep-fried crescent filled with a mix of fresh grated coconut, brown sugar, powdered cardamom and crushed almonds. The dough is a mix of all-purpose flour and semolina. I made myself sick in childhood once by eating too many of these. This was my first attempt at making them from scratch, and they didn’t disappoint! If anyone wants to try them, the recipe I followed broadly is here.

3) chirote, a kind of south-Indian beignet, if you will - layers and layers of a deep-friend pastry dusted with powdered sugar. As my friend Spud said recently, this combination is a *very good thing* and she is quite right! Here is a good recipe for it.

And now, I think I must celebrate my second blog anniversary by going to the gym!

Tags: Life, Food and Drink, Uncategorized by desiknitter
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It’s Diwali: the annual festival of lights, spread over these four days from now until Sunday. Diwali wishes to all! May the new year bring good cheer and happiness, renewal and fulfillment all around.

This is the one festival that my family celebrates with abandon, and the one festival I can never be home for, given the dratted semester system. To be sure, there are religious ceremonies, and a mythical tale of good triumphing over evil that ensures renewal and prosperity - but what is Diwali without new clothes, fireworks, and food? The centrepiece is a snacks package called faraal in Marathi - about twenty different types of eats are made specially in each family, depending on their resources, taste and enthusiasm. Everyone exchanges faraal over the Diwali weeks and you give yourself over entirely to fried dough, powdered sugar and clarified butter. It is a good time. I am attempting an ambitious faraal myself this time, but more about that in the next post - cross your fingers that I manage to get it all together.

My festivities began spectacularly today. I had a very intense, exhilarating graduate seminar class, and came back home to open a package from Finland, containing this:

Silja sent me the most gorgeous sock ever in the whole wide world, encased in a wonderful little bag, along with a spare skein of Regia silk for me to knit the second one in the pair.

I love the colour, the fit, the pattern - thank you, thank you, thank you single sock partner! You chose everything just right, and this is just the perfect, timely festival gift. I cannot wait to knit its pair. I have been wearing the lone sock all over the flat already. That Cookie A. is a genius designer, just look at the twisted flower stitches:

Finally, this evening concluded on a pleasant note with this finished object:

Although not mine, I am proudly featuring it on the blog, as the first FO of my friend who learnt how to knit not two weeks ago! Isn’t it gorgeous? Just look at the elegant shape. She switched to DPNs in our neighbourhood Chinese restaurant this evening over dinner, and we walked home to cast off and photograph the hat amidst much squealing and glee. I am amazed at how smoothly she transitioned from circulars to DPNs, and from ribbing to stockinette to decreases. Definitely a natural at the craft! I think I have some idea of what evangelists feel like, finally. She left the house muttering, “cabling without a cabling needle…” even without my broad hints about knittinghelp.com, Ravelry, Zimmermann, etc….. I think we might have a convert!

It’s not for nothing that all the photos in this post have a warm glow, eh?

Tags: Food and Drink, Caps, Hats, Etc., Uncategorized by desiknitter
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Sometime this past summer, a friend of mine emailed me to say that a picture of my Rangoli hat had seized her with the desire to knit one for herself, and asked me how difficult I thought this was. Said friend is, in a word, intrepid - she regularly reports on seventeen-mile hikes as if these were like a walk to the nearby grocery, and her attitude is generally to beam at any challenge in welcome. So I didn’t even bring up the “don’t you want to start with a garter stitch scarf?” line. Garter stitch scarves, I am convinced, are a horrid way to introduce most people to the craft - yes, the stitches are simple, but boy is the boredom of it off-putting! This wretched fabric is what I’m poking every stitch in the ass with this needle for? you say.

Yet, my own mind boggled at the prospect of teaching someone to knit cables on their first try (well, second - her first was an unhappy childhood encounter with booties and a bad teacher that ended after a mere six rows of stockinette). So we settled on a stockinette watch cap from one of my favourite books, Hats On! by Charlene Schurch. Today we went to Stash, and bought her a lovely Araucania Naturespun skein in shades of crimson.

Apart from Schurch’s book, we were fortified by some chai and Zimmermann’s Bible for moral courage. Not that she needed any. Before I knew it, she was off, knitting, purling, casting on and ribbing. First a small swatch, then 120 stitches cast on, and wheeeeeeee. It was great fun to actually see her figuring it out and answering her questions - so, what happens to the tail? How do I know this is a knit stitch? What do you mean, ‘knit them as they appear?’ Gauge?? Do I really need a marker? Aaah, so you can tell when you’re coming up to a decrease? And so on. I swear, I could actually tell when her hands relaxed on the needles, and the stitches began to get loose - very very quickly for someone who swore she was going to be a disaster at this. It was a delightful Saturday afternoon. Made me wish I could remember when I learnt the actual process. All I can still recall is clutching the red and white acrylic in one hand and my mother’s hand with the other, climbing the stairs to Sushila teacher’s house to learn how to crochet, as a seven year old.

I also started playing around with something else, hoping to make it into another Rangoli pattern, this time with colourwork. Just a peek, since I’m not yet sure what (if at all) it will morph into.

Watch this space!

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Okay, this is the new place. I’m still unpacked and have to figure out the fixtures and the neighbourhood, but so far so good! Please do let me know what you think of the decor; any tips with home improvement are most welcome. I’ve tried to keep it like the earlier one, but clearly there’s still work to be done. Since this move has exhausted all my tech skills and more, I’m going back to some basic knitting now.

But I thought that after the awful dancing in the last post, I’d leave you with one song that has been playing in my head all day - it’s a classic from the ’50s movie “Howrah Bridge” (sung by Geeta Dutt), and the dancer is the gorgeous Helen. Nobody can wiggle it like she could, no matter how much the hip actresses of today try to. O.P. Nayyar, the composer of this film’s songs, would later bring in a lot of Punjabi folk tunes and rhythms into his music to brilliant effect, but this song is also a great example of how he incorporated swing into some of his early tunes too. This song was part of my regular Geeta Dutt repertoire in the college band days. Those were good times, we always had a blast performing it!

(The words go - “My name is Chin Chin Choo, The night, the stars, me and you, hello mister, how do you do?”)

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Thanks for the comments on the socks, everyone! I’m glad I’m not the only one who wasn’t bowled over by Opal. I actually find the bamboo 0s easier to knit with than the metals, which really hurt my hands. But they do get all bent out of shape.  Better them than me, of course.

I really should be working on my shaped triangle shawl, but it’s unbearable to hold the black yarn in my hands right now. Somehow makes it hotter. MIL’s just going to have to wait till winter.

California is beautiful. The cool, misty mornings are great, and it’s lovely seeing so many flowers everywhere. But if one more person tells me how lucky I am to have such gorgeous weather, I’m going to fervently pray for some snow.
Mallige, I’m going to try to post photos: if not of des or knitting, at least of food.

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Here they are, done! Lying on some kind of bush in the shade in Reno, NV. After seeing the shades of pink in the painted desert, the hues in these look a little tame to me, but there’s no denying it, Koigu makes some incredible colours.

I am quite kicked with this pattern. I picked out the cloverleaf stitch out of Barbara Walker, and it’s a simple repeat over 6 rows and 3 stitches. So with 60 stitches, it’s easy to adapt it to the overall sock pattern. I did the usual cloverleaf pattern for the left sock, which slanted leftwards and then came up with a reverse cloverleaf of sorts  ("unvented" to quote Elizabeth Zimmerman!) to have it slant rightwards. Am very pleased with it only! Hey, we’ll do all we can to avoid SSS, right? This afforded the right variation for the second sock to feel different. The pattern makes instinctive visual sense in terms of placement of the pattern (once the initial six rows are done you basically shift the cloverleaves three stitches over, that’s it), but am trying to write it up. It doesn’t lend itself to easy and clear narration. Let’s see, maybe a chart.

One odd thing was that all other things being equal, I knit the first sock on size 0 metals and the second on size 0 bamboos: the second sock is marginally larger. Not large enough for me to frog it, but noticeable.

Oh, so I finally didn’t go to Vegas. After seeing Phoenix, AZ I was all the more convinced that I didn’t want to see bright lights in the middle of the desert. Phoenix reminded me of Delhi in more ways than one, none of them complimentary, of which the heat was the most prominent. Walking in the afternoon in Phoenix gave me some idea of what to expect next month in ze good ol’ capital city, even though I’m *dying* to go back to Delhi after six years and visit some of my old haunts and friends. The drive to Reno from Phoenix was alternately hellish and heavenly: the desert was deeply depressing (and gas $4 a gallon: had to be, when I’m driving a car for the first time in two years, right?) but the Sierra Nevada mountains, esp. near Lake Mono, Tahoe and the Walker river were out of this world. Haven’t seen much of Reno yet but am mostly going to catch up on some sleep here.

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My friend and fellow blogger Spud was visiting me over the weekend, and we went to several NYC yarn stores and knit, and talked endlessly about knitting (among other things!). It was so much fun! She bought quite a lot of different things, but after agonizing over various Koigu colours, I bought a couple of skeins of a lovely, luminous gray. It’s greyish purple, actually.

I immediately cast on for a pair of socks, using Wendy Johnson’s Generic Toe Up pattern. You can see the blue waste yarn for the chain cast on. This is my first attempt at toe-up socks, but I really like the concept of knitting the cuff until the skein is over. No waste of yarn (yes I know, little leftovers can be used for other things, but those never really happen in my case). And this short-row toe concept is quite interesting. I am already in love with Koigu (yes, I haven’t used it before!).

The black shawl is also coming along, after a minor hiccup. All is well.

Am in the last stages of revisions as I approach my deadline this week. I cannot *wait* to turn the damn ms. in and settle down to a weekend of wild celebrations (yeah right…)

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So I am procrastinating some more, and ruminating on the kind of knitter I am, what do I find, but a quiz that helps me find out just that!

What kind of yarn are you?

You are Shetland Wool. You are a traditional sort who can sometimes be a little on the harsh side. Though you look delicate you are tough as nails and prone to intricacies. Despite your acerbic ways you are widely respected and even revered.
Take this quiz!

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The choices were Acrylic (Plasticky Countenance); Mohair (Warm and Fuzzy type); Dishcloth Cotton (Hard working and practical - there was no hope in hell for this one); Mercerized Cotton (Neat and Crisp, this one too was a goner); Novelty Eyelash (hip and happening); Merino Wool (easygoing and sweet) and Cashmere (chic and sophisticated). Am not surprised it wasn’t Eyelash or Merino, but must confess am a little bummed I’m not Cashmere. But what the heck, I’ll take reverence and respect over the rest.

I love the internet.

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