Speaking of bear hats

Observe: bear hat, the prequel!

I made this one for myself last year — a top-down beanie with a seed-stitch brim, half-assed seed-stitch earflaps and long i-cord ties. While everyone else was getting all dressed up for a giant party, I frantically added bear ears and asked everyone in sight things like “Do these curl enough?” and “Does this look OK?” and “Does this say ‘bear’ to you?”

I only got to wear the hat out twice before my boyfriend and I went to visit a good friend, whose 12-year-old daughter was hanging out with us one night at some crazy hour of the morning. I plopped the giant, fuzzy hat on her head and tied the ends under her chin, and then everyone in the room put their hands to their mouths and drew back and said “Oh my god! So cute!”

I thought Damn, I was really hoping to actually wear that one, and immediately gave her the hat.

Her dad’s a photographer, so we all trooped out to the studio, picking our way over the air mattress where my boyfriend was crashed out asleep in a small, pathetic pile, fired up some lights and took some pictures of her, being very careful not to step on my boyfriend’s head.

If you’ve ever wondered if a super-expensive, super-elite pro camera makes a difference, IT DOES. The detail is mind-bendingly stunning, the colors are vivid and the precision is off the charts. It also has the heft of a brick, practically, and makes you go all gawky and nervous when you pick it up. I’ve been interested in photography since I was 15 and a gadget nerd since I was born, and touching this thing made me feel so awed that I snapped a couple shots and handed the thing off like a hot potato immediately. I am an idiot.

As to giving away the hat — that happens a lot to me. I keep finding things that I think are awesome, or making things that are awesome, and then I pretty quickly stumble on the person the item should actually belong to. Sometimes the things need a little work — a novelty yarn that’s beautiful but just not meant to be mine, a bike that needs cleaning, shoes with a slightly loose heel, or — most memorably — a beautiful old velour men’s jacket with a falling-apart lining that stank like it had been steeped in a cigar-smoking old man’s sweaty armpits for two decades.

I fix the bikes, repair wobly bits, re-skein yarn, soak the the jacket overnight in two gallons of water and a whole box of baking soda and then painstakingly whip-stitch the lining back to the jacket, and then pass the things along to their rightful new owners. There aren’t many things that I love too much to give away.

I’m not saying this to sound sanctimonious or overly angelic. Get anywhere near my iPod, my Elsebeth Lavold Silky Wool, my ice cream or my skull collection, and you’ll find out what a selfish, unyielding pig I am.

Also: Robot crochet

Anyway. There is a little crochet going on. I am working on a toy: a little red robot, inspired by one of my very first true Internet loves, explodingdog. If I could make crochet toys with a fraction of the expressiveness of Sam Brown’s wobbly, deceptively simple stick figures, I would be touching genius.

I love the red robots that show up in the drawings (not as much as the people, but close). I’m not a big fan of making direct copies of other people’s ideas, so I cracked open my little ideas sketchbook and drew something cuter. It’s funny: with animals and people, I like bizarre, grotesque imagery, but with things that aren’t alive or seem especially alien to us breathing types, I like them to look cute or unnervingly humanoid. I want my animals freaky and my toasters adorable, I guess.

Also: knitting

And knitting: I mostly finished inventing another cabled fingerless glove pattern, then lost a stitch, increased to make up for it, and then a couple inches later found the lost stitch gleefully unraveling itself down through several cable crossings, waaaaay beyond a point where I could retrieve it. I was already slightly uneasy about the length and fit of the glove, so I figured the hell with it — might as well rip it all out, start it over, adjust the width and have something that’s perfect instead of “almost there.” Which means I get to start over again.

The only thing keeping me from hurling the yarn to the back of the dark, damp cabinet under the kitchen sink or someplace equally dank and remote is that once they’re done, I’ll have the pattern written out all the way in two sizes, and I’ll be able to make a pair for myself.

And they will rule.

A sense of progress

A piece of the purse is done! This is mostly because instead of cleaning the garage or going out to a party in the city or clearing the desk or handling the pile of thrift-store fabric piled between the bed and the dresser, I hung out watching “A Life Less Ordinary” and crocheting. This is alarming: I haven’t started any other projects since I started working on this bag, and I haven’t abandoned it halfway through and stashed it in with the growing yarn pile. Yet. The bag will have four feet of strap instead of six because I was losing my mind with the stupid seven-stitch-wide boredom machine. I was running out of yarn, anyway.

Now the strap is blocking. By “blocking,” I mean “it’s getting the hell blocked out of it.” I attached the two ends to make a big loop, soaked it with water, hung the loop over the shower head and hung one of my big enameled pots off the bottom with a coathanger. Now it looks stretched out like someone’s neck in the movies when a highwayman holds a sharp knife to someone’s throat and demands all their money and the person’s head is held so high up to get away from the blade that you can hear him breathing funny. Ahh, cotton, the fiber that takes all the abuse you can dish out and begs for more.

Now if I can just find my pins, I can cure the other two pieces that are supposed to be rectangular of their slight but definite trapezoidal tendencies and then the bag will be ready for assembly and finishing! And then photography! And then it will be flung as far from me as possible because no way in hell would I carry around a pink bag with me in public.

Not for more than a couple days, anyway.

So much pink

Pink! So much pink!

At least I’m getting to a point on the bag where I have to start thinking about finishing. This whole “create vast swathes of fabric from string” phase is nice, seeing as it’s near-impossible to screw up, but I’m spoiling for the more challenging parts of the project.

Yesterday my brain was practically spilling over with neat ideas for an appliqued design to go on the front of the bag and I can’t wait to get rolling on them. Note to self: Draw at least a few rudimentary sketches in the sketchbook before the ideas disappear into the ether, blown there by a few hours of pagination while I’m at work. Nothing like drawing boxes in Quark to slowly kill the spirit!

Man. The macro capabilities of the camera I’m using are, like, suck and a half. I’m all spoiled by the boyfriend’s beautiful digital SLR. I kept trying to get one part in focus and in all the pictures, the plane that’s nice and sharp is actually six inches behind where I told the camera to aim. I ain’t no raw amateur at macros, either, so I know it’s not just me, and I know I had it set to “macro.” The Cann S45 is a great, sturdy little camera, but it definitely balks at being told to take pictures of things less than two feet away. Which is a problem — who wants to see pictures of yarn taken from across the room?

Intermediator

I’m crocheting away like mad, showing an almost alarming level of dedication to that foofy pink bag I’ve decided to design. From scratch. As a first crochet project. For a pattern I’m going to write.

As I work, I also pause to add to the hectic, out-of-sequence scrawls filling several pages of a little notebook that at least half of the time I actually remember to tuck into my knitting bag. Those cryptic little notes will one day become a pattern.

Nerdy design geek that I am, I’m only a third of the way through the actual bag, and I’m already dreaming of the finished PDF. What will I use for accent colors?, I ask myself. How do I want to shoot the picture for it? And when I look actually look at the notebook to find out how on earth I did that one thing on the other piece that looks like that instead of this, I ask What the fuck is going on here?

There are a lot of scribbles and a lot of little circles with long lines rising from them, and there are things written next to the lines that I think are meant to clarify the mess beneath. They don’t do much about the omissions of little last-minute, “Uh … maybe this will work” adjustments and impromptu increases. (Corners, man. Corners are rough.)

There’s also the difficulty level. I was pretty sure that it’s a beginner pattern — straight lines, no increases, almost all back-and-forth rows — and then I got to the strap and thought “Hmm. Afghan stitch. That looks pretty cool.” It does, too, especially with a variegated yarn with short repeats. It’s such a narrow little strip of crochet that I don’t need the special hook for it, but does it still count as a beginner pattern if you have to learn a whole new kind of technique just to do it?

Not having ever made anything from a crochet pattern, I don’t actually know what a beginning pattern is. I haven’t found a beginner-level pattern that doesn’t make my eyes cross with boredom just looking at it, so making one is out of the question. And I must know what the skill level of the pattern is — how else do I design a really, really cute icon for it?

Update: To hell with Afghan stitch! Curled too much and wouldn’t behave. I may have come up with something cuter, though.

Crocheting at work, minus the crochet. Or work.

We’re finishing early-ish at work — well, I am, anyway — and all I want to do is break out the pink bag-to-be. I mean, dude, I just got to a part where the crochet changes color and direction! It totally psyches me up and gets rid of that “Oh god this is total drudgery” feeling. It’s like new project + feeling of progress from previous work, all rolled up into one ball of yarn so cheerful in color that I want to smack it around some, just on principle.

But it’s all dudes in this office, except for me, so the crochet is not so welcome. Women (and guys who really like women, or have fond memories of their moms or grandmas knitting or crocheting) will usually let me get away with it, but as soon as I pick up a project, someone here asks “Um, do you need something to work on?”

If I don’t, they ask me to proofread pages, which is weird because whenever I ask if I should proofread pages, they say “no.” I guess it’s reassuring that there’s no eerily-in-accord hive mind going on, but some days I just want to hit my head on the desk until I don’t have to think anymore.

And maybe one day, if I work very, very hard, I’ll get a desk of my own and won’t have to render myself unconscious with the desk of whoever’s got that day off.

Rosy and indignant

Two more days until the DSL comes back on at the house.

Two more days until civilization returns chez Arlette.

Once that happens, there will be photos of the abomination I’m crocheting right now.

It’s a bag.

It’s all pink.

Pink, dude. Pink. This is weird. I only recently stopped wearing all black, graduating to mostly black with some red and gray. I rejected the color on principle as “too girly” from about the age of, like, five. I read “Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons” and learned plenty about the evils of pink. And here I am, making row after row of little rosy loops.

I flat-out refuse to turn in my angry girl-punk card — a legacy from high school — because, cop-out of cop-outs, the bag’s for a friend.

“Soft, baby pink, right?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“And your other favorite color is …”

“Hot pink.”

“I see.”

Not being able to find solid-colored soft pink cotton yarn at Michael’s — hey, no snobbery, I was making a run for sewing supplies and they had “Peaches & Creme” for, like, a buck fitty each — I went for the ombre shade colorway “Strawberry Cream,” which had some baby pink — and some white and magenta thrown in, as if the name didn’t boost the girly factor high enough. For a contrast color, I went with magenta.

Being a perfectionist when it comes to small, easily completed objects, I’m gonna line it. The perfect fabric turned up at the thrift store the other day: shiny, hot-pink fabric with little black polka-dots. I bought it, along with some — eek — soft pink fabric with white polka-dots.

I gotta say, this is the most pink anything, ever, in any place I’ve lived. On top of that, the other day I noticed the candy-apple red in my hair had faded to pink — and I like it.

Twenty years of vendetta against the color may be ending, folks. I don’t want to go overboard with it, since I still make fun of my sister for the time when she was about 11 that she named every stuffed animal she owned “Pinky,” regardless of hue. But the hatred just may be ending.

“The only reason to see ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth.” “Alex, that’s ‘What is David Bowie’s junk?’” “Correct!”

Learning to knit was a whole new kind of difficult for me. After a lifetime of being smart enough that I never had to think too hard about anything, and with a knack that let me pick up most crafts within about half an hour (except sewing, which is its own nasty beast), knitting broke my brain, broke my heart and broke my expectations in a hurry. It took weeks of maddened, constant work to get to where I could knit stockinette without thinking about every stitch, and if there’s one thing I was bad it, it was sustained effort and — OK, two things, sustained effort and not taking shortcuts and, well, three things, if you count working hard without an immediate reward and hey, I think that’s a pretty good place to stop counting my flaws, thank you.

It all fell in place while I was watching Adult Swim on Cartoon Network. There’s something about the very mild distraction of TV that lets your brain finally drop purling into your muscle memory instead of the requires furious concentration slot. In that moment, I finally learned how it feels to work hard on something without immediately seeing results, knowing that one day it will come together. It’s an “aha!” moment that I think most people have when they’re about, oh, ten, but just because it took so long in coming doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it. Finally, at 25, I’d learned how to actually learn something all the way through instead of picking up the easy bits and glossing over the rest.

So compared to knitting, learning to crochet a couple months ago was like taking a warm bath with gentle massage jets and a couple of attendant waiters handing me vodka tonics and asking me questions from the “David Bowie movie trivia from Ziggy Stardust through Everybody Loves Sunshine” and “Finding deformed skulls on eBay” categories of Jeopardy: easy like Sunday morning, baby. I picked up Stoller’s “Happy Hooker: Stitch ‘n’ Bitch Crochet,” a couple dozen thrift-store hooks I’d accrued for 50 cents each and a ball of indestructable, infinitely rippable acrylic yarn, and within an hour I had a neat square of single-, double- and triple-crochet stitches and was already starting on my first filet crochet.

If knitting’s a prissy bitch of a hobby on the uptake, then crochet is the easy, lovable little sister that puts out on the first date and laughs at all my jokes, no matter how stupid they are, and honey, I think I’m in love. I still love knitting to death, but it can get a little overwhelming having to mastermind every detail of a project instead of just winging it.

Now, if only my output were a little more impressive than two bracelets made from old mix tapes that I gave away instead of keeping, I might be on to something …