Thoughts, unconnected

1. I thought I had a stash when I started this blog last year. Now I begin to know what a stash really is. This may be the first time in my life that I have put my birthday checks toward gifts to myself rather than deposited them in the account for general family budget purposes.

2. I'm finding myself on the edge of a new cliff: Fair Isle. Actually, it is a cliff that has always hovered temptingly on the horizon. But I'm now steering straight toward it. I thought I might dally for awhile in the land of fake Fair Isle: two-stranded knitting in which one of the colorways is variegated, giving the impression that one is using many more yarns than one actually is. This has resulted in a flurry of activity (and yarn and dpk buying) around the Three Tams patterns on this season's Knitty, as well as around other basic stranded projects on a small scale. (I've been trying Matrix, also from the current Knitty, with a solid and a variegated yarn, for example.) But as I continue to perfect my Continental knitting hold so as to be able to have one strand in each hand, I suspect that I am going to want to take the next step sooner rather than later. The effect in Three Tams is clever, but I dislike having no control of where the different colors fall (without strategically splicing, which of course is an option). And so, when I saw that all the Shetland Spindrift at my local shop was in clearance, temptation proved too strong. With the purchase this morning of 12 different colors of this classic Fair Isle yarn, I may be about to jump.

3. Maybe I'll try some swatches of my own design to start, rather than select a pattern. In for a dime, in for a dollar. I'll have good guidance from Alice Starmore's Fair Isle Knitting.

4. I think that in some areas, at least, I now am inching past the knowledge base of the women who run my local yarn shop. I mean no disrespect, but the past few times I've been in there I've asked for things that seem to stump them. Today they hurried around when I asked for some basic stranded knitting patterns, saying I wanted to try real multi-colored Alice Starmore-like Fair Isle. They showed me a few big worsted weight or bulky patterns in two colors. They didn't seem to know who Eunny Jang was when I asked whether they had back issues of Interweave Knits. They suggested I try something simple, "like a simplified version where you only use two colors per row." Which is, of course, not a simplified version at all but one of the rules of Fair Isle. I may not be able to do it yet, but I know how it's done.

5. I think I've figured out who these people are on Ravelry and elsewhere that amaze me by completing a project every few days. Judging by the conversations I listened to in the knitting shop this morning, they're 50-something women who have been stay-at-home mothers and whose children either have completed the college application process or have already left. They are now turning their prodigious energies to knitting.

6. As for my prodigious energies, they are supposed to be turned toward dissertating. So what's with the sudden burst of knitting obsession?

7. I don't know that I can blame Ravelry for my own weakness, but I will say that I never expected to develop such interest in spending time browsing a knitting site. I couldn't imagine the appeal until I tried it. But it's such a better way of finding pattern ideas than the shot-in-the-dark hunt through the limited set of patterns in a single local store.

8. I hope I'm not turning into one of those people who spend more time reading up on knitting than actually doing it?