Teen Witches!

So I was going through a box of old photos yesterday and I found a binder containing a LOT of first-year-university poetry and a 3-page outline of the novel that I mentioned in this post. I took it out of the box, but I just haven’t been able to read it. Every time I start, my vision goes blurry and the words don’t sink in. It’s like my brain is protecting me from the embarrassment.*

I let Curt, my boyfrusband, read it. He tittered at it**, naturally, but also declared it decently plot-heavy for something written by a teenager. I had to tell him that I was 21 when I wrote it.

The funny thing is, this outline is only 7 years old. I routinely take 1 or 2 years to complete a creative project. I started a novel 4 years ago and it was actually pretty decent. But this outline seems so much older than that. It’s embarrassing the way old high school yearbooks are embarrassing. It’s probably pretentious. The lives of the characters probably resemble my own teenage life in unintentionally revealing ways. I can’t say with any certainty, because I haven’t been able to read it yet.

Another funny thing is, many of my writer friends routinely work on stuff that’s 7 years old -- ideas that were left unfinished, or projects set aside because life got in the way. But there seems to be a cut-off for me. Anything written before age 24 = juvenilia. Anything written after that is probably okay. Whenever I am sad about getting older (and how I now get a hangover after just thinking about drinking), I should keep this lesson in mind.

* It's a novel about teen wiccans who are also bisexual. Or one of them is. Or something.

** Curt can't titter too much because I know where his book of sad divorce poems is kept.

Vintage knitting photo of the day

Another photo from the 1972 Bernat booklet:



Am I wrong, or is she kind of rocking it? Kind of a Robyn/claymation/pixie kind of thing.

Tons of effing sequins!

This is why you shouldn't broadcast live from the Seattle Goodwill's "glitter sale", where they sell all the designer clothes that have been donated in the previous year:

Afghans of my youth

While I was visiting my parents, I took a moment to photograph an afghan that my mother made in the 70s.



My mom made several, but this is the one I liked best as a child.



It's made from mixed knit and crochet squares, each one in a different stitch pattern.



Several of the squares are made from yarn that my grandmother brought with her from Denmark when she emigrated to Canada in 1955. The teal and light green squares are made from this yarn, and they still look good after 55 years and plenty of use

This was the kind of crochet I was thinking of when I designed my Inuvik mittens. It feels really familiar and homey to me.

My mom says, "It's not surprising I became a quilter. Even when I was knitting I just wanted to put squares together."

Vintage crochet photo of the day

I'm in the Okanagan visiting my parents right now, which naturally means thrift shopping and lots of yarn talk. My mom saved me a Bernat booklet from 1972.



She looks a little worried that someone might see her in her shag carpet yarn vest.

Mystery scarf!

My sister and I flew to the Okanagan a couple weekends ago to visit our parents. When we saw my mom, she was wearing this glittery novelty yarn scarf:



Shortly after greeting my sister, my mom thanked her effusively for the present. "She bought it for me in South Africa," Mom explained to her friends, who were standing near by. My sister frowned a little. "I didn't buy it in South Africa," she said. My mom expressed some confusion -- everything else in the recently-mailed parcel had been a souvenir from my sister's World Cup 2010 trip.

"When we got that parcel, it was torn open and had a tire mark across it," muttered my Dad. "Canada Post just threw the whole thing in a plastic bag and slapped our address on it."

My sister looked a little confused, but let it go. We were standing in the middle of a hockey-arena-turned-craft-fair, where my mom planned to spend the day selling hats and quilts with her friends. We looked around for a while, made some purchases, and left for home with my Dad.

A note on my sister's present state of mind: following a stressful period of immigration trouble in the US, my sister had just moved from Washington DC to Toronto, Canada. Her brain was a little shattered by the ordeal of putting half her life in storage and moving the rest to a new city. This explains why it took her until the car ride home to realize that she really had no idea where that scarf had come from.

"Maybe someone gave it to you and you forgot?" I suggested.

"Maybe," she replied. "I honestly can't believe how terrible my memory has become. That scarf doesn't look familiar at all."

"Are you sure I sent it?" she asked my Dad. "Did Mom get it from someone else and get confused?"

Dad assured her that it had been in the package. Or rather -- in the plastic bag Canada Post used to contain the exploded parcel. "Their explanation was that 'this had been found in the mail stream.' Like they had nothing to do with ripping it open or putting a big tire mark on it. Can you believe that?"

"'Mail stream' is a weird word," I observed, not very wittily.

Then it dawned on us.

"They must have burst several packages at once," said my sister in disbelief.

"They just guessed at what items went in which package," said my Dad.

"So we got someone else's scarf?" I asked.

"And my memory isn't as bad as I think it is. Thank God," my sister concluded.

So my mom now has someone else's scarf! We have no idea who it belongs to, where it was going or where it came from. I hope that whoever lost it is hoping that it found a good home -- because my mom really likes it. It's really the best thing that could happen to a lost object, short of it finding its way home again.

Matters of Opinion

Librarians have a nuanced understanding of censorship. There are ways to discourage people from a reading a book that don't involve removing the book from the library: you can put an age restriction on a title, file it in an incorrect section, or keep it behind the desk so that people have to ask for it by name.

Some libraries use these methods as a sort of preemptive strike -- by hiding the book in the system, they are making it less likely to be noticed by the people who might wish to censor it. Of course, this means that it's much less likely to be read by its intended audience as well.

These ideas keep springing to mind as I read the interviews in Shannon Okey's The Knitgrrl Guide to Professional Knitwear Design. There are some strong opinions in these interviews. Try to imagine someone saying the following on Ravelry:

"[Online pattern sales] have dumbed down the standards of knitwear design. Why do you think Vogue Knitting has fewer and fewer sweaters? Because the socks and shawls and scarves are all the Ravelers etc. want to make. They don't have to fit, they don't reflect a point of view or a trend, and they aren't daring." (Adina Klein, p 180).

"Sizing had become political in knitting ... look at how many more options there are now for plus-sized patterns, every single magazine, nearly every single knitting media outlet responded to the need for bigger sizing, and for articles on customizing patterns. To me, that's incredible. Did anyone say thanks? There's very little appreciating going on, only asking for more." (Jillian Moreno, p 165).

"There are no perfect patterns for anyone at any size, full stop. And it is not economically feasible for the knitting media to keep adding sizes or specifics to every pattern. I would love a magazine that's called: Short/Stumpy Armed/ Fat with big boobs and butt, but I do have a waist -- though not as much as I imagine/Mostly Cable, but some Lace/Only using the yarn I currently have in my stash/Really quick knits that look totally complex/and Every Pattern Would Look Freaking Fantastic On Me Every Time without Doing Math. If knitters keep clamoring for patterns that can't exist, they are no longer advocating for themselves, they are victimizing themselves." (Jillian Moreno, p 166).

"My heroes in this business are eating beans and foreclosing on their homes or abandoning their careers because the simply don't give a damn about the internet. They are designers. They don't want to be bloggers, they want to be designing. They don't want to be answering questions from idiot knitters 24 hours a day. Inferior designers who are tech savvy or who have tech savvy boyfriends or sisters or whatever are making money hand over fist and the people who created the foundation of this industry are being left in the dust." (Adina Klein, p 180).

I love Ravely, but the forums are generally not a good place for thoughtful and considered conversations. None of these opinions are outlandish, but if you posted them on Ravelry (or Twitter or Facebook or any other social media platform), people would FLIP OUT at the perceived elitism. Any point you were trying to make would get drowned out in a sea of reactions, and at least 10 people would publicly avow never to buy your designs again.

But if you put these statements near the end of a 240 page book, no one seems to notice.

This issue isn't so much about print v. digital issue as it is about free content v. paid content. The Knitgrrl Guide to Professional Knitwear Design is available in pdf format -- but you have to pay for it. This seems to be the reason it hasn't garnered any commentary.

One thing that paid content is good for is limiting your audience. I'm not sure how it would be useful to Okey to provoke a swarm of angry knitters discussing how designers are sizist/snobby/elitist etc. The only people who would shell out $20 for this book are people with some kind of serious interest in knitwear design, and they're interested in strong opinions, whether or not they agree with them. Ravelry, by virtue of its openness, tends to flatten conversation and opinion. Long documents with a small financial barrier create shelter for opinions that a more democratic medium would ultimately dismiss.

Get me some rubber balls!

So I've seen a few tutorials for this kind of thing, but I was pretty indifferent until I saw this page from the new Anthropologie catalogue.



Maybe I just want to dress like a fancy llama, I don't know.

Seriously though, the opaque fabric and the mix of solid and prints makes these necklaces seem wearable -- like a good way to brighten up a simple black dress.

I have a (clean) flower pot filled with silk scarves that my grandmother gave me. I bet I could use a couple to make a reasonable facsimile. Now I just need a handful of rubber balls and some wooden beads!

Costume Design in Black Swan

This morning I read theballetbag.com's interview with Amy Wescott, the costume designer for Darren Aronofsky's new film Black Swan. (Curt saw Black Swan at the Austin Film Festival and says that it's very good, but also kind of ridiculous, which sounds about right for an operatic psychological drama featuring two ballerinas.)



The interview mentions the film's colour pallet and high degree of realism, as well as the ballet costumes design by Rodarte. There aren't many photos, but it did make me more excited to see the film! Plus, ballet style is always interesting to think about: the shoes, the pale colours, and all the layers. Wescott says,

When I went to see classes I observed dancers would sneak some crazy knitwear over the leotard, like the sweater instead they would wear it like a skirt…they completely reinvent pieces that they put on top of their leotard.

Okay, that transcription seems a bit faulty, but I'm curious to see how dancers re-purpose clothing. It reminds me a little of that essay where David Sedaris goes to a nudist colony and observes, "Because clothing doesn't interest them, most of these people are liable to wear anything: stripes with checks, pants three sizes to large or small -- it simply doesn't matter to them. This morning, I saw a woman wear her sweatshirt toga style, the neck stretched beneath her arm to reveal a single breast." (Naked, p. 282-3).

Fun fact: Amy Wescott was also the costume designer on The Wrestler, Aronofsky's previous film. Further fun fact: in an MTV interview, Aronofsky revealed that Black Swan and The Wrestler were initially conceived as a single movie "about a love affair between a ballet dancer and a wrestler."

Now, delight yourselves with the colour pallet in this clip from the 1948 film The Red Shoes.

Crochet Hooks in a Basement of Trash

I learned to crochet because I really wanted to learn to knit, but I was broke, and living in a cheap house on the edge of the city, and I found the crochet hooks first.

In 2004, I moved into a modest 4-bedroom that my boyfriend Jakub was renting for $1000/month. I wanted to live cheaply because I was taking a year off school to travel and finally write my novel, which I think was about teenage Wiccans. Downsides of this arrangement included the fact that the house was a 25 minute walk from the end of the express bus line, which was the only way to get anywhere quickly. I didn't have many friends in the city then, and the few I had lived across town in Kitsilano. I ended up spending a lot of time alone in that house, reading library books, hacking fitfully at my novel, and learning to cook lentils (the cheapest food I could find). I was casting around for something–a purpose―but I hadn't quite found it.

The house was built in the 1930s. The structure was charming, but the surfaces were in disrepair. The hardwood floors were splintering and turned the soles of your socks black, even after washing. The top floor, where my boyfriend and I slept, had sloping ceilings and stained glass gems in the windows. The glass was rippled, and from across the room the neighbors houses looked like they were underwater.

Generations of tenants had filled the basement with stuff – old bikes, VCRs, everything that seemed too useful to throw out but not useful enough to bring with you when you moved. We spent days hauling everything out so that we could have some storage space. The only item I saved from the basement was an old blue train case. It had a bag of buttons inside it, and a set of crochet hooks in a blue plastic case. I was interested in DIY, and wanted to learn to knit, but I'd quit making things during my first years of university. I didn't know anyone who made things, aside from an old room-mate who took Fine Arts at UBC and spent a lot of time making lamps from wire and office supplies. I had no idea how to start. But now I had a set of crochet hooks that someone had left behind, and endless hours of rainy winter. I tried to find crochet instructions on the internet and ended up spending hours on Craftster.org. I bought Debbie Stoller's The Happy Hooker: Stitch 'n' Bitch Crochet and four balls of shiny Caron Super Soft. I made my sister a long, skinny scarf with vertical stripes and mailed it to her in New Hampshire. She accidently chopped part of the fringe off when she cut open the package, but I didn't mind. I was already on to the next pattern.

Time passed and I moved out of that house, left my boyfriend, finished my degree, applied to grad school, and left my boyfriend a second time. I spent a lot of time thinking that I was supposed to be working on my novel. I didn't spend a lot of time writing it. I taught myself how to knit on the bus rides to UBC. It look me an entire semester to finish a seed stitch scarf knit in pink self-striping yarn. In the end, it was too itchy to wear, but somehow this didn't discourage me.

I knit and sew more than I crochet these days, but it seems fitting that my first published pattern is a pair of crocheted mittens. Crochet often looks like the past to me. It recalls childhood afghans, old crafting books, and a '70s aesthetic. And it also make me think of my personal past, of that time six or seven years ago when I stumbled on that set of hooks in our cluttered basement. I had no idea then that crafting would turn into such a big part of my life, or that, of everything I had then―my boyfriend, my novel, my dream of being a journalist―it would be the one thing that would endure.