Weekend Knitting (Manly… Knitting)

This weekend Isabelle taught me to knit.   Hmm… As hard as this is to say,  I am going to admit that I kind of liked it.  It is definitely not as fun as poking things (again don’t take that wrong… see last weekends post Weekend Felting) but knitting is enjoyable.   I am struggling internally with my newly found fondness for knitting… (does this mean I completely lose my man card?).  

Just to set things square… My goal is not necessarily to become a “Good Knitter”.  I want to become a “MANLY KNITTER“.   This idea came from watching a video this weekend on the web titled “How to knit like an Icelandic man“.  This man whose name is impossible to say “Þórgnýr” says he makes up for his difficult name by “being a very good (and manly) knitter”.  I don’t care about being  good at knitting (although I do believe anything worth doing is worth doing well) but I do care about being manly.  This means I am altering Isabelle’s patient teaching to fit my manly ego… i.e.  dropping all of cutesy names and replacing them with manly words like saying front knotting and back knotting… and refusing to wrap the yarn around my pinky.   All mistakes I made were really just my way of creating a manly “distressed” look. (Isabelle drew the line with this and many times… more than I want to admit… undid my work to fix the weird holes or lumps that comes from my manly knitting).

Here you can see me starting a “manly” scarf out of the alpaca yarn I have created.   Isabelle picked out the needles and I am mad that there were no black or brushed steel colored needles (manly needles)…  I was told that she picked the size and that was the color I was stuck with.  (pretty lame)  As you can see I am starting with the “wine” dyed yarn and I am just guessing at width.

  I like the uneven look that my “art” yarn (or uneven poorly done hand spun yarn) gives to this scarf.  It also hides the “perfection” of my knitting… (Isabelle had already fixed three big problems by now)  I decided to change yarn at this point to a mix of wine and avocado yarn (2 ply – one wine – one avocado).

Finally I move to only avocado dyed 2 ply yarn. This is 100% alpaca.. no wool is being blended with the alpaca fibers and I wondered if that would be ok. I asked Isabelle since I would not know if the yarn was not “elastic” enough for knitting.   She told me that the yarn works great.  (She is french so I don’t have to worry about her just saying that to spare my feelings… french never “spare feelings”). 

This is as far as I got this weekend not because I couldn’t do more knitting but because I ran out of spun yarn.  Because I have ended here…  I have decided to transition from this pink to the natural white. This is part “design decision” and part lazy running out of dyed fibers.  I washed more alpaca and carded it preparing for the spinning.

Here are the two colors (natural white and avocado pink) next to each other.  I think I will do the next section of the scarf with a white/pink ply and the finish the scarf with all white.  Any thoughts?… (kind of tempted to see if I can end the scarf with a chocolate dye… if that is possible)

JUST AN FYI… I have not been around for a week and I have missed reading all of your blogs.  My excuse is that this has been a crazy week for me at work.  I am not sure if you have ever felt like you are treading water… barely able to keep your head from going under… and then just when you think it can’t get worse… someone flushes.  This was my week at work… not that I am comparing my work to swimming in a toilet.    I have been given a new assignment… (replacing someone who was brillant) and with this new assignment I  am probably for the first time at my current job feeling less than confident.  Don’t read this wrong… I am incredibly excited… just humbled and I know that I have a lot to do and even more to learn.   (Hopefully this means growth… not failure)  I don’t want to go into too much details… bore you with my work… but wanted all of you to know I will be back reading your words and loving it.