I was driven by a mad urge to take knitting photography out to the edge where Brooklyn Tweed lives, or where Interweave Knits finally is after they taught their photographers about focusing. (I used to play the “What’s the focus of this picture?” with that magazine, trying to determine which single part of the photo wasn’t a blurred-out, indistinguishable mess. “Model’s forehead” was a popular answer, along with “definitely not the knitted garment.” Best answer: “the non-knitted handbag in the foreground that has nothing to do with the pattern.”)

The S45 isn’t quite my boyfriend’s Canon Digital Rebel, which has spoiled me for little pocket cameras, but it’s competent enough — except for that damn zoom. The trick seems to be using the lowest aperture, propping my elbows on the desk to form a tripod, zooming all the way out, and praying.
I’ve been an atheist since I was 13 — any camera that requires prayer to keep a shot from being a blobby mess can kiss my ass.

Aaaanyway, in the picture is, like, an inch of the Odessa I’m making for the Pretty in Pink contest. I’m omitting the beads and I’m knitting it with lifted increases instead of yarnovers, to keep from having little holes in the fabric, but otherwise I’m sticking to the pattern.

When I was pawing through my yarn, looking for something soft enough for a chemo cap, I saw the cashmere … and I faltered. It was one of the only things soft enough to work that I didn’t already have set aside for another project, but dude … cashmere. My only cashmere. It’s a mind-bendingly delicious souvenir from my stint at the yarn store, a leftover from a store-sample swatch. It’s been parked in my yarn bin for over a year because nobody, including myself, deserves anything made from yarn this buttery-soft.

I think there’s something wrong in my head because every time I pat the yarn, my mouth waters. It’s not like full-blown synthaesia — I don’t smell orange blossoms or hear music when I cast on with it, or anything as awesome as that — but it’s still completely amazing yarn. Kinda makes me wish I had a ball band for it so I had a prayer (More prayer? WTF? I don’t like this trend) of finding it again. A hat made of this yarn would be an amazing gift, and one I’d be really proud to give, but … dude. My only cashmere. I picked up some black 100-percent merino instead and put the blue one back in its little plastic Ziploc bag.

After a little swatching, I saw I had two options with the merino: I could knit it on the recommended size and get a thick, fluffy fabric, but it would stretch out too much and let bare scalp show through. Eeek. Smaller needles gave better coverage, but they also gave a dense, unappealing fabric.

I sighed, and dug out the cashmere. I don’t wear soft blue-green, anyway.

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.

Not pictured: the Knucks I knitted for a friend. No lettering, just a band of skulls and crossbones running around each hand. My friend hounded me for them for ages, then once he got them, begged that I drop the temperature in Los Angeles so his hands wouldn’t get sweaty as he wore them everywhere. In August. Rico is a lunatic. Fortunately, 1. that’s why we like him and 2. he’s in Europe for a bit, exclusively on bits of the continent where gloves will be a very welcome thing now it’s fall.

Now my projects are down to various knitted projects I’m inventing, adapting and refashioning that will probably take months before they’re done, and that damned pink crocheted purse that only needs blocking, assembling, finishing, lining, and abandoning to its new owner’s clutches.

It’s actually pretty tricky. The friend likes very tight-fitting hats. This means I’ve had to come up with a bind-off that can stretch to twice its usual width but that still fits closely, without that horrible single circuit of too-tight bind-off that makes it feel like you’re wearing a skinny steel band around your head.

There’s a stretchy bind-off I tried that sorta works except it made the edge sort of … ripply. Almost lacy. Not a solution for a guy’s hat. But I got the idea of the bind-off; in it, you pass one stich over the next as usual, but then you pass that stitch back onto the left needle and knit it again. Essentially, it’s adding a crochet chain stitch in between the regular knitted stitches.

My compromise was a nice, neat bind-off where I worked the loops off the knitting needles with a crochet hook, and chained one between every other bound-off stitch. Stretchy, tight-fitting and neat-looking. I AM A GENIUS. Now I just need to add that last half-inch to it and crochet on the bear ears and it will be done!

Which is good, because of course the one thing my friends needs now (mid-July in California) is a 100-percent-wool hat, right?

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.

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?

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.

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.