OK. I’m not really that bad at spelling, although daily I make small sacrifices to the word processing gods to thank them for the gift of spell checking. It’s just that I’m up to the K in my sort of self-imposed alphabet themed post title thingy, which I haven’t done for a long time. So work with me here, OK?

one fiber, two results

It all started because Kathleen and Bobbie both bought the same roving at OFFF and had Sharon of Stitchjones dye it in the same colorway.

Kathleen and Bobbie thought it would be fun to both spin the same roving and then knit it and then compare to see what they both came up with. So, for several week, the Wednesday night Sip-N-Stitch crew were treated to little peeks that were carefully hidden so that Neither Kathleen nor Bobbie would see what the other was doing. Strangely enough, they both picked the same triangular shawl pattern to knit. Great minds think alike, and all that.

Last Wednesday was the great unveiling where we all got to see the finished objects side by side. Kathleen went for a stripey sort of look, and Bobbie went for a more heathered appearance. But aren’t they both lovely? You can find out all of the nitty-gritty that I don’t know because I’m not a spinner over at Bobbie’s place.

No, I’m not going to start spinning. Don’t ask.

Spirogyra

When I saw Cindy knitting these, I knew I had to join in. This is Spirogyra from Knittyspin.

Yes, I do have two of them. When one is too cheap to buy good stuff challenged by the lack of good photography equipment, photography can be interesting. It’s not that easy to take a picture of your own hand. And, when one does not have a decent tripod – and I don’t, my shots are all hand-held – taking a picture of both your hands is pretty much impossible. Neither of the cats, alas, has learned to push the camera shutter button on command.

This particular yarn was chosen because it was just about the only thing in my stash that was the right weight. I was afraid that the combination of hand-dyed colors and the stitch pattern would not be a happy one. But I am pleased with the results. And they are wonderfully warm, cozy and soft. Tina asked me at the destashing if these were her Christmas present. I suggested she knit her own, since she has some yarn at her disposal. These are mine.

The Particulars:

• Yarn: Blue Moon Silkie Socks That Rock (81% Superwash Merino, 19% Silk / 3.5oz, 360yds per skein); a portion of one skein of Count Cluckula
• Needles: a pair of Addi Turbo 24″ circulars, US#3 (3.25 mm) and a pair of Addi Lace 24″ circulars, US#2 (3.00 mm)
• Pattern: Spirogyra by Lynne Vogel
• Modifications: none. Really.

the new colorway

Looky, looky what I have!

Don’t you just love these colors? If you are reading this on the blog vs. on a feed reader, do the colors look… familiar?

This is the newest colorway from Stitchjones. It’s so new that it’s not even up on her website yet. But, just in case you want to contact her to see when it will be available near you, here’s a picture of the other side of the ballband:

yeah… !

Yeah. That’s right. It’s named Persistent Illusion.

I’ve never had my very own colorway before, and I’m totally stoked. I’m not sure yet exactly what I’m going to do with it. It most likely will be socks – but they will have to be very cool socks. Since there are already two pairs of socks on my needles this does, don’t you agree Gentle Reader, warrant careful consideration. I will keep you informed of what I come up with.

Right now, all I can say is ooooo… pretty… !

I think this is going to be a regular colorway. But, if you like it, it never hurts to let Stitchjones know. And while you’re at it, click on the “shop online” button and check out the Glam Socks. OMG! Yes, there may be some of this in my stash, too. Just saying.

Houdini socks

Lest you think that I did nothing up north but eat and pet alpacas and eat and buy a little yarn and eat and twist my mind around multi-dimensional knitting projects and eat… I also knit socks. How surprising, eh!?

Cat Bordhi presented her new sockitecture – The Houdini Sock. Please hie thee over to the fall 2008 edition of Twist Collective, where you will find the basic pattern.

Cat once again proves her knack for thinking way outside the knitting box and coming up with unusual and inventive ways of approaching something that most of us thought had been all thought out hundreds of years ago. The basic idea behind the Houdini Sock is that you start at the toe, knit a foot, knit a heel and bind off. You then have what Cat calls a footprint – a vaguely foot-shaped, flat tube, closed on both ends. There’s no place to get your foot into it. But it looks cool and you can knit a few or a dozen and pile them in a basket or some such (if you don’t have a fiber-eating feline sharing your living quarters). Then, when you want a sock, you decide which side is the instep side and thread your needles through two rows (one row apart), right about where you want your leg to go. And then you snip the yarn and unravel a hole and knit a leg. Done.

Although Cat argues with me about this, I can’t help but think of it as an afterthought leg. I know it isn’t really, because there’s no waste yarn involved. But, if you’ve ever knit an afterthought heel, it’s kind of the same idea.

For my socks, I knit a star toe, followed by a foot, with a star heel on the end. I don’t think I’ve ever seen socks with a star heel before, but it looks pretty cool.

I know this is a lame shot — off-white socks with tan pants against bleached wood floor. Beige. But work with me here, gentle reader. I wanted to show them on my real feet (as opposed to my fake feet) so you can see that these socks actually fit. They fit quite well. In fact, I admit to being surprised at just how well they do fit.

My socks are not quite like the ones in Twist Collective. Mine are intended as house or bed socks, so I put heel stitch on the underside of the arch – it feels wonderful. There are some modifications to fit the socks to my rather skinny foot, and some experimenting (following Cat’s directions) with doing a higher arch. I knit both footprints at the same time, and also knit both legs at the same time, and I am pleased to report that this method lends itself to two-at-a-time knitting with no problem.

It appears that the Houdini Sock and all its magic will be the subject of Cat’s next book, where she will explain all of the modifications that are possible. But, while we impatiently await publication… if the idea of sort of steeking your socks appeals, give it a go!

(OK. I know it isn’t really steeking because you only snip one stitch. But you’re still making a hole in a perfectly good piece of fabric.)

These are great, by the way, for kicking around the house. I have mine on even as we speak and my tootsies are warm and comfy and feel very pampered.

The Particulars:

• Yarn: Chameleon Colorworks Evolution – 100% Merino Optim&#174 stretched wool, 2 oz (57 gr), 122 yd (111 m) – colorway Mourning Dove – 2 skeins
• Needles: two circulars assembled from my Denise kit (which I’ve supplemented with a few extras), US#5 (3.75mm).
• Pattern: Houdini socks by Cat Bordhi, basic pattern from Twist Collective with various modifications to make it fit my particular foot.
• Stockinette foot, 2×2 ribbed leg, crochet bind-off

double-knit moebius

It all started at the Island Retreat a couple of weeks ago. Some well-meaning knitter – I forget the exact context now – said something about double-knitting a moebius. I immediately wanted to do just that. Because I never had. And it sounded really cool. And you could have a moebius that had no purl side, but only a smooth knit side. And different colors. And what would those colors do when swirled around a non-orientable surface that has only one side and one edge?

I immediately headed to Island Wools for yarn. Cat, who is wiser than I, perhaps saw the gleam of scientific inquiry in my eyes because she smiled and nodded and said nothing but sounds fun.

Yeah.

Thus began a quest for how to cast the darn thing on. It kept twisting around itself in strange and other-dimensionally ways. After much frustration and frogging bad words were said in my out-loud voice several false starts, I finally hit on a method that seemed to sort of work: I cast on two individual moebii, knit 1 ring on the white one and purled 1 ring on the green one. Remember it takes two rings to make a round, so I had worked 1/2 round on each. Then I threaded both on to a single long cable needle by alternating stitches.

Gentle reader, I have learned more about topography in the last week than I ever expected to in my wildest dreams.

I turns out that when you take two moebii and attach them along the edge, essentially what I did when I threaded the two on to one needle, the result is a torus (that’s a fancy word for a doughnut) with a moebius twist in it. And that’s one representation of a non-orientable surface called a Klein Bottle. And such beasties do not live in 3 dimensional space without some contortion. And I haven’t yet figured out the knack of knitting in 4-space, where they live happily but I do not.

So what I knit in my little experiment is a Klein Bottle represented locally in my particular patch of 3-space by letting what I thought would be a moebius intersect with itself – which it wouldn’t do in 4-space. You can see the insertion point – it’s the point at which the green suddenly changes to white.The green has actually crossed through the white to reappear on the other side (if it could be said to have sides, although it really only has one), and the white has crossed through the green. But if you trace either color by itself, ignoring the other color, you will find that each is, really, a moebius. And together they appear to be a moebius. Sort of. If it weren’t for that pesky insertion point.

I don’t think there’s any way to get around the color change, short of knitting the whole thing in one color. But then what would be the point of double-knitting? I’ve decided instead to make the intersection a design feature by adding in random ones scattered about various places. We’ll see how well that plan works out. I may end up with a mess. And I have no idea how I’m going to bind this thing off, but I’m open to suggestions.

I hope I don’t sound like I understand what I’m talking about, here, because really my math is not good enough to understand it in more than lay-person’s terms. All of this stuff makes my brain hurt. But, nonetheless, this is the sort-of-moebius that’s on my needles and that I will be knitting today with healing intentions.

I do think it’s cool that, even though there are two colors, there are really no sides. And although the green and white started out as completely separate entities, they have now merged in new and unexpected ways.

Knit on!

This morning I received the following email from Cat Bordhi. It was sent to the participants of her two island retreats. Cat has asked that it be passed on to knitters all over the US, and I think it’s a lovely idea. I currently have a moebius on my needles, and I will knit along with Cat tomorrow with healing intentions.

November 3, 2008

Heal the Election Wounds and Embrace Humanity with a Moebius

By Cat Bordhi

I awoke this morning realizing that publicly knitting a beautiful Moebius scarf as I begin to float (I live on an island), drive, and fly toward Stitches East on Tuesday would be a beautiful and profound public expression of my hopes and dreams for the world, as well as a symbol of the healing that our country will need after the election.

If you want to follow along, I recently made a Youtube video which will clearly teach you how to knit a Moebius whether you have my books or not. Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVnTda7F2V4

So – here is why the Moebius is a perfect expression of the best of humanity, and the healing of the fractured country and world that I trust is coming:

1. The Moebius appears to have two surfaces and two edges – ie, polarities such as black and white, right and wrong, good and bad, Republican and Democrat – but when you follow the surface around you will run right into your starting point without ever having changed to the other “side.” For there isn’t one. Everything flows into itself. Polarities are an illusion. What lies beneath the apparent polarities is oneness, beauty, and grace. In a Moebius you can see it, hold it, be awed by it. Once the frenzy dies down, hopefully those with opposing views will slowly rediscover their common humanity.

2. Like the surface that flows into itself, so too does the Moebius’s single continuous edge – thus everything is recycled. In fact, I would not be the least bit surprised if the ultimate alternative energy involves a Moebius form or dynamic. By the way, the recycling symbols (2 are in common usage, one with a single twist, the other with 3) you see everywhere are actually Moebii (too hard to say Moebiuses – try it!). I think we are all hoping for significant and effective new discoveries in alternative energy – and the Moebius would be a great symbol for this global effort.

3. Once you complete the first ring (it takes 2 rings to make a round – watch the video) of your Moebius, you are in for smooth and happy sailing. All you have to do is to knit the stitch in front of you, then the next stitch in front of you, with not a care in the world for what came before or what has shifted into the “future”. You’ll look at the mysterious shape on your needles and wonder how “those stitches” can ever come to you . . . well, they will, without your needing to understand how. And they will all come in perfect sequence, resulting in a beautiful and graceful Moebius. The Moebius rewards your faith in its mystery with the easiest knitting you will ever do. And the result is always graceful – for this is the very nature of the Moebius. You can knit along while you watch the election results, while walking, while standing in line at the store, wherever you may find yourself during these days to come. You will be knitting the graceful healing and ease that I believe is flowing toward us, requiring only of us that we stay true to the powerful sense of loving kindness that resides in the center of every person. No one could ever possibly understand enough to make the healing happen, but if we all just knit the stitch before us, as they come, marveling at the innocence and sweetness of it all, with our oh so familiar continuous strand of yarn, the healing will happen. We need not understand either one fully – the Moebius or the world. They both operate with inherent grace.

4. I looked through my stash and chose a luminous yarn in deep watery colors from Blue Moon Fiber Arts – LSS (Luscious Single Silk), and did not realize until I looked at the label that the colorway is absolutely apropos: Lunasea. Tina no doubt named the colorway after the moon and the sea – and after lunacy? So let the lunacy of the election months give way to Lunasea – the grace of the moon, the sea, the Moebius, and the beautiful heart of humanity, of all people, the “us” and “them” who merge into one. I shall be winding the skein on the ferry tomorrow, then knitting all the way to Baltimore. I hope to see many, many of you there.

With love from Cat Bordhi

Note: If you alternate sets of knit and purl rounds, you will have purl ridges all around. Then your Moebius will not curl along the edges when you are done.