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I'm about to write about something scary, so let's all calm down first of all. Here's a calming photo to get us in the mood: (It's a view overhead at VanDusen Botanical Garden, of the leaves of the Albizia (Silk Tree) silhouetted against the sky). I've been scared before. Hosting cocktail parties, producing original musicals, walking a dog who will occasionally lunge at passersby carrying bags he doesn't approve of (I can never tell which) ... my life is fraught with tension. Once, as a child, I went to my grandmother's home for dinner, where she had also invited an elderly couple who would go right up to you and look at your teeth (or so my mother claimed, when she insisted I brush them) .
I was at my fave local yarn store (Three Bags Full) having a chat, as one does (when it doesn't seem too busy and the staff show every indication of keeping the conversation going--occasionally I can indeed pick up on some obvious social cues!), and the topic turned to knitting holding two strands together. (For the young and innocent among you, some people knit holding two strands of yarn together, presumably from two separate balls (only daredevils and the criminally insane pull from the outside and the centre simultaneously) ... you have to constantly knit two together, but since you're knitting with two strands of yarn this will create two loops instead of one (if you only knit one loop
I strongly considered calling this post "Knitting After Dying" but suspected most of you would think I don't know how to spell. So, my mother's moving to a lovely new house and she's anxious to downsize, which in her case means "move to a larger home but put fewer things in it." We've been going through boxes, drawers, cabinets, closets, shelves, chests, and other nooks and crannies, and among the treasure (a Staffordshire ceramic tin with lid, lovely) and detritus (one of 1,000 programs for some event I sang at that I now retain little memory or affection for) were my grandmother's assortment of crocheted doilies. Now, I like doilies as much as the next person (i.e. not that much, although
It's almost time to steek. If you're a beginning knitter, you may have no idea what I'm talking about (but then again, as a beginning knitter, you're probably used to that). A steek* is a set of extra stitches you add to a garment so that you can cut them out later. I know, I know, it sounds crazy (but so did the ICord* bindoff, before I tried it and realised it worked). The concept stems from the fact that stranded knitting in the round is easy, but flat, back-and-forth, knit-side purl-side stranded knitting is only ever done by hardened criminals in Turkey for whom this is their sentence. So if you want to knit, say, a Fair Isle hat, then easy. But if you want to knit a Fair Isle dish