Very Superstitious

It’s true – I’m a superstitious creature even though I am all about the science.  Rationally I know there’s “no such thing” as sympathetic magic, but having spent most of my formative years in desperate search of proof of unicorns, I can’t help but hope.

Sympathetic magic, for those of you who have not whiled away work hours reading “The Golden Bough” is based on imitation, or contagion/contact. Imitation involves using effigies to affect the environment of people, or people themselves – like poppets and voodoo dolls that contain scraps of hair or fingernails as a “link” to the person they were modeled off.  Contagion/contact is the idea that you leave behind “trace” energy on things you own, and this can be manipulated or detected, or even transferred – like a warrior who eats the heart of his enemy to obtain his courage.

Seems pretty logical, right? Well, logical back when the caloric principle and the humors were hard science! But still, though I turn my nose up at it I’m careful whose hairbrush I use, lest anything be left behind that could be turned over to the wilier practitioners of folk hoodoo or santeria (or cloning technicians).

As a former theatre major, I’m all too familiar with the trade superstitions.  Though, I enjoyed flouting them or enraging actors by shouting “MACBETH!” back stage or wishing an actor GOOD LUCK with a wide smile.  I didn’t know, however, that it’s not done to knit in the wings of a theatre!  Makes sense, if you’ve seen the way actors behave backstage in the dark.  Someone could lose an eye!

Knitting superstitions intrigue me though, here’s an activity that women and men have been doing for thousands of years.  It wasn’t an artsy thing then, but a utilitarian function.  Many other utilitarian activities have scads and scads of superstitions associated with them, farming especially.  But why are there so few surviving bits of folklore and superstitons about knitting?  The only ones I could remember I heard from my Yetta (that’s great-grandmother to you, she’s Serbian by birth). She assured me that if you thought very hard about someone you hate while unravelling knitting you could hex them, and that you are not supposed to unravel something you knit for someone you love, lest you unravel your relationship (I assume this excludes unravelling contract or commercial knitting).

Some knitting superstitions floating about are especially silly, like never handing your friend the needles point first or at all, lest you damage the friendship (sorry J! We’re still friends, right?).  Well, I suppose no one likes to get stabbed by a pointy object. And the idea that empty knitting needles brings bad luck?  That’s a stash justification if I ever heard one! 

 Others seem to make a little more sense  – never knit your boyfriend a sweater until you have the ring or you’ll doom your relationship.  And the offshoot of “never buy your man shoes” is to never knit your boyfriend socks or he’ll walk away from you. Well, yes, if you knit him acid green lace socks he’ll run a mile, who could blame him?  Or an embarrassingly dorky and fussy sweater in fuzzy wool that YOU loved, but your boyfriend – not so much.  Couch common sense about male dress habits in with superstitious sternness and you have a line only the most fool hardy of knitters would cross.  Although when I was in London I did see some awesome boot socks in a posh outdoors store – burgundy with lime green toes and a contrast heel…but I digress.

They say if you knit your own hair into the garment – which happens a lot to me on accident, I have lots of hair and it seems to like escaping my scalp – or think tender thoughts of someone while you knit (but not while you frog) you’re supposed to be binding yourself to the garments recipient, or knitting yourself together with the object of your thoughts.

Which can only mean that if I send Daniel Craig my cardigan we’re destined to be together!

And with that clumsy segue way I am so pleased to say that I have given in to my Aussie pal’s siren song encouragement and have started…a sweater.  It’s the Dusk pattern from Kim Hargreaves’ Dark House collection, and I must admit that the leap from 2.00 mm needles to 4.5 seems pretty enormous.  I’ve been knitting sporadically and I still can’t believe the growth on this thing.  Doing the yarn substitution so I could have something warm and cozy to wear around the office was a pain, but thus far it’s worth it.

If I finish it I will have made my final leap from being a garter stitch scarf knitter to a Knitter in the course of a year!  A very exciting prospect…

Also: Have you heard any knitting lore from an elderly relative or reputable source? Care to share?

 

I take that back

What I said about the Lantern Moon “sox stix” in ebony – they sort of blow. I have ONE needle left out of the five and I’m only done with the foot and a couple inches of the ankle.

Some background: I am a hardcore DPN user. I learned to knit in the round on DPNS because circulars annoyed and frightened me. I started out on those annoying Lion Brand plastic DPNs which were sticky but useable and then moved on the Boye Baleen needles because they were nice and bendy. Unfortunately the tips were easy to snap off and I was easily annoyed and disheartened. The ladies at Quarter Stitch in New Orleans introduced me to the awesomeness of bamboo, but I still held out skepticism that I couldn’t take those frail wooden needles anywhere without having to stop knitting on account of a broken needle. But the little Crystal Palace needles proved to be very durable (and are currently tied up holding place on the unfinished Alpaca socks…) and I was instantly converted to a wood-only DPN user. A lot of people give me looks and ask “Do you know you can do that with two circulars?” and I give them Withering Look and mutter something about not changing a perfectly good system for something new fangledy with a lot of potential for tangles.

I’ve had problems with 2.00 needles made out of regular wood before I just couldn’t keep the Brittany Birch needles from shattering for various reasons (although in those needles defense when a pal accidentally sits on your bag o-knitting they didn’t have much of a chance at all). That and the Brittany needles were annoyingly short – the free end hit me right about the heel of the hand on both sides as I knit and I discovered I was developing an entirely new knitting callous!

Its possible that I have some serious tension issues when it comes to holding my DPNs, in fact I can’t knit with metal DPNs as I intensely dislike the way the evil little metal sticks bite into my hands when I’ve knit more than 3 rows. I don’t have this problem with knitting with metal needles in bigger sizes Most of my sock needles inevitably turn from nice upright little lines to wonky curves in the course of one sock. Chigoo type bamboo needles, while affordable and nice to knit on, always develop at least one central stress crack while I’m knitting with them, which means I knit on three instead of four and keep the last as an inevitable backup.

When I first embarked on knitting socks as a constant thing I bought myself some incentive goodies – a frail pair of blonde wood sock needles (by Lantern Moon) and enough skeins of black and colored yarn to knit the rose stockings of my dreams in Ethnic Socks and Stockings. I was instantly charmed at the notion of knitting on “toothpicks” but because of the high cost of the needles I absolutely do NOT take them out of the house. Which sort of defeats the portable and awesome part of knitting socks.

I thought about consigning the Ebony sock sticks to the “house only” needle collection but said “Sod it, I want to get these 54 inches of eventual sock done some time before the cold goes away,” and cast on at Dadzillas. I just throw my knitting into my ginormous purse, I’ve yet to get up off my arse and make them a little special sack or cube or something to hold all the sock stuff so that stitch holders do not mingle freely with lipstick and Ipods, so perhaps my needles are at a higher risk than others. But still, every time a Sox Stix broke…it was in my hand.

And they don’t just break folks – these things shatter. I got a couple harsh splinters off of them, which only made the feeling that I’d just broken a 4 dollar stick that much worse. The Sox Stix weren’t horrible to knit on, they chugged along nicely but it was hard to maintain nice tension for all the fiddly lace bits on the socks when you fear a shattered needle or find it hard to scoot the yarn along. But the Sox Stix weren’t so awesome that they could justify the 20 something dollar price tag they carry at the LYS. They are incredibly gorgeous, but they aren’t phenomenal.

Maybe it’s because I’m spoiled by my precious, precious Addi bamboo DPNs. These things are pretty much unbreakable, slick but not frustratingly so, and I can breeze along any row no sweat. Also they are long enough that stitches don’t just vanish off the needles. Addi still comes through as the only knitting needle worthy of having its own religion.

If you need to know anything else about the Lantern Moon “Sox Stix” you can check out the Knitters Review site also.

 

Dating a Knitter

urious thing, this “dating” in the digital age. It’s not so tough when you’re going out with a 35 year old who is still delighted by the novelty of booking a holiday online, or someone even older who has a blog but doesn’t actually operate it themselves. Being a child of the digital age I find this sort of techno-luddite befuddlement adorable, but pitiable.

Going out with someone my own age? Different story all together. There’s the process of Googling them, hunting down any Livejournals or blogs, Whois-ing them (its a new verb, look it up) or dirty internet secrets. The weird flipside to meeting someone “IRL” as opposed to online, is exploring that persons internet presence. Someone you really like in person might be the forum jackass that would trigger your “flame on” response.

For example, I seem a bit softer, or perhaps nicer on the web than I am in person, because the internet is forever, and anyone can see it if they really want to. That and the process of blogging and writing allows you to linger over your words, giving the process as much time as it deserves (it’s a lot harder to blow up in writing, but it can be done). A date or suitor might be shocked to discover a seemingly sweet and domestic “Anya” upon Googling me. If you post on the internet you’re blowing a lot of “secrets” and exposing yourself to your potential and curious “real life” suitors in the strangest ways.

Then there are the really thorny questions – do you break up with someone who has a repugnant blog or the creepiest friends on a networking site? Do our digital presences indicate what’s genuine in us, or what is constructed for show? I suppose the obligatory Google-ing is a new step in the modern relationship.

In my pre-knitting life the steps and milestones were different. Now when I think milestone I’m not talking about third date “rules” and whether or not your date calls you back within a certain number of days. Think about the first time you let slip that you have a hobby that could be misconstrued as a freakishly domestic activity, the first time you present a ball of wool for fondling, the first time your hands are free enough to knit and whip your project out of your bag to get a few stitches in, and the dreaded first knitted gift (when? what? why?) or explanation of the *lack* of knitted gifts…

I must confess to having an enormous aversion (or at least displaying apathy) to so those called “milestones.” I’m pretty laid back about meeting parents (though there is a system in place for meeting my relatives, for the preservation of *my* sanity), attending group functions, the baseball metaphor for sex – the whole nine yards. Running a relationship on a set societal schedule gives me the heebie jeebies, possibly because of the moral implications and emotional baggage inherent in abiding by those rules instead of just toughing it out on a person to person basis.

I can easily work with a fumbled date, a sports fan, or a weird movie selection (even a less than perfect first kiss), but as laid back as I can be, there’s just no getting around some things.

Like something as personal (to me) as say, knitting, cooking, or sewing. There’s just no getting around someone who thinks it’s too bizarre that you make your own clothes, or who eats for utilitarian purposes only and devours a carefully cooked meal like it’s a cardboard burger. There’s a fine line between a guy whose into the simpler food pleasures and a pig of a man who wouldn’t know a bowl of Kraft Mac n’ Cheese from the good stuff because he doesn’t stop long enough to savor it. The former may still love the sensuality of food under the right circumstances, the latter…well if they won’t slow down to savor food they probably won’t slow down for anything.

Could you, theoretically, date a person who was vehemently opposed to knitting? Or, for some bizarre reason, thinks it’s a bigger turnoff than mentioning their mother at an inopportune moment? I, luckily, have yet to meet such a person but rather think that they’d be on the BLOCK list faster than someone who isn’t turned off by an inopportune maternal namedrop.

Frankly, I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want to date most knitters, what with the idea of “sexy” knitting is getting kicked around a lot these days. You see a lot of pierced “punk rock knitters” whipping things off the needles between shows, and “naughty” knitted things but that’s not why I think it ought to be classed as hot. Good knitters know texture, and the sensuality of fibers is appealing to them, and making something by hand with naught but your wits and small sticks and string is pretty ingenious don’t you think? All that sensuality and ingenuity could translate very well for a relationship. And if that wasn’t enough, most knitters have patience and ingenuity, not to mention nimble fingers.

In what world is this not hot? Plus, most parents have a very hard time thinking horrible disapproving thoughts about knitters, we can look oh so sweet and unassuming with tiny needles in hand, providing we are not secretly plotting murder most foul with a particularly sharp sock needle. In the eyes of most parents a knitting project almost counteracts the shock of oddly colored hair or visible tattoos (though I’m afraid it has no power to counteract over exposure or the F-Bomb dropped in the presence of conservative relatives).

I suspect it is not the sort of past time the uninitiated associate with a tattooed science geek so often they require proof. But out of all my hobbies I think knitting is probably the most “normal” when compared to amateur entomology and a passionate dedication to graveyard preservation.