Resolving to Progress

One of my Resolutions for 2011 is to do more needlework. It’s easy for me to forget, while in the throes of creating a plausible murder mystery, that one reason these books are popular is that almost every character in the books does needlework, and so a discussion of needlework is necessary – perhaps including some helpful hints.

In aid of that I have taken out my knitting needles and am re-learning how to do the plaited basket weave stitch. I thought I was doing all right, but if you take a close look at the photograph of my meager progress (I had to start over three times!), you can see that things are not going well on the left side of the pattern. Maybe it’s a tension problem; I’m going to try stretching the knitted yarn to see if things even out. . . . . . . . . .

Yes, that was the problem. It looks better now.

I also finally finished the Romanian point lace butterfly, a Christmas gift to a very good friend. She does marvelous beadwork, I actually had to ask her to come over and show me how to insert the tiny beads into the loops of the piece. It turned out I almost had it right, but again, I learn better by watching someone do it rather than by reading the instructions.

I think I’ll also get out one of my unfinished projects, counted cross stitch or needlepoint, and try to make some progress on it.

Meanwhile, I’m learning how to dye wool yarn. Well, actually, I’ve got permission to watch someone else dye wool yarn. There is a wonderful woman over at our Science Museum in Saint Paul who can not only dye wool, she can spin it as well. So far, to me the most amazing dye is indigo. When you first pull the yarn from the pot of dye, it is an attractive shade of green. Then right in front of your eyes, it interacts with the air and turns blue-jeans blue. This woman can also card wool, weave yarns into fabric, and sew. She can literally go from raw wool to finished plaid skirt, all by herself. She gave me some cochineal dye to play with, in case I want to try turning some white wool a bright red. Cochineal is composed of insect bodies. It was used first in Mexico, and the British used it in the eighteenth century for their army uniforms – that’s why they were called “redcoats.” Cochineal was the first dye that made a real, colorfast red. It was very expensive and the British elected to use it in huge quantities for their soldiers’ unforms as a way of showing the world how rich their kingdom was. It’s still an expensive dye, but aniline (chemical) dyes have replaced it, and most other natural dyes.

I love doing research!

Going in Circles

The knit and crochet group I belong to has been learning how to knit in the round using two circular needles or circs as the hip woman in the You Tube video called them. Doing anything in the round is much easier in crochet and some of my characters in the crochet mysteries would probably think I was a traitor, but I was curious how it worked with knitting and it was something I could use in the proposal that seems to be taking forever to finish.

For anyone who doesn’t know circular needles are really short versions of knitting needles joined by a cable. One set is already unruly with the plastic cable part snaking around. But working with two at the same time?

When I first tried, I hyperventilated when I looked all the stitches and needles going every which way. I couldn’t imagine that it would ever be easy. Somehow it reminded me of being an O operator. It was a long time ago back before everything was computerized and the closest thing to a cell phone was a mobile phone and there were few of them. Actually the big change was answer machines.

I wore a headset that pinched my ears and I sat hooked into a switchboard. I plugged in cords to make person to person calls. I was the one who said you’re three minutes are up. I also was the one who asked for more money. I could tell how much was deposited by the sound. It was also before the 911 system, so we Os were who you called in an emergency and we summoned help. If someone yelled “help” and dropped the phone, I had to put a trace on the call and get the phone number and address and stay on the line until help arrived. Oh, and I had to fill out some kind of card for each call.

The point to all this is that when I first got the job and was going to be trained, I took one look at the operators and all those cords and clips on the coin phone cords and thought I’d never learn how to do it. Of course I did learn how to do it, and it became second nature. Then I wondered how it had ever seemed impossible.

That’s the cool thing about learning something. It forever changes your world – maybe not in a big way, but it changes it.

So even with dealing with snaking cables and brain freeze when I tried to figure out which stitches I was supposed to work with which needles, I wanted to keep going. Thanks to Linda in my group who sent me the link to the You Tube demonstration, I began to understand what I was actually doing. But I needed to be able to think it through in my head before my fingers got another shot at it.

I let it percolate in my mind and then like a curtain opening and light coming in, the pieces fell into place and I “got it.”

I wouldn’t say I’m flying through knitting in the round yet – I’m closer to making a bracelet than a sock – but it has forever changed my world. When I look at a pattern for making sock using two circular needles, I will now understand. Even be able to picture how to do it in my head.

Learning something new is so cool. First there’s the challenge, wondering if you’ll be able to do it. Then you start and probably struggle. Somewhere there is most likely a black moment when it seems like you’ll never get it. Then the big aha moment and nothing is ever quite the same.

What seemingly impossible thing have you learned to do ?

Try to Remember

The fiftieth anniversary of Morris (MN) High School graduation of the Class of 1959 was marked this past weekend by a reunion. Sixty-seven of the hundred and three graduates turned up, which is a remarkable number. For a gathering of people all the same age, it was surprising to me how different in age they looked. Some were seriously senior, others barely past middle-aged. But they were all happy to see one another, and soon were exchanging reminiscences of high school days. Teachers good and bad were recalled, band parades, sports, chorale, dances, tricks pulled, the list was endless, the laughter warm. Everyone was given a name tag with his or her high school photo on it and I was surprised at how many people knew one another without having to look. "You haven’t changed a bit!" was a refrain often heard – though to my eyes none of them looked eighteen. A lot of spouses were there and I thought perhaps we'd get together and make comments, but we were too busy being introduced and enjoying meeting the friends of our spouses' youth. A professional photographer had been hired to take a group photo. He got them lined up with the front row on chairs, the next row standing, the row behind that standing on chairs, and there were still people left over. "We need a row sitting on the floor," he called. "How many of you still have good knees?" That got the laugh of the evening.

I, of course, started thinking of how a reunion like this would make a terrific murder mystery.

I’ve been assigned a panel at Gaylaxicon in early October here in St. Louis Park (that’s a suburb of Minneapolis, where I live). It’s called "Collaborative Writing," and it’s supposed to cover both the benefits and pitfalls of collaborations. I was once half of Margaret Frazer. Gail and I wrote six medieval mysteries together before we called it off. She has continued the series alone, and done very well with it. I’ve also written some short stories in collaboration with my husband. The stories in both cases were much improved with two minds working on them, but I will also note that the worst quarrel of my marriage was over a short story we eventually sold to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Benefits? For sure. Pitfalls? Absolutely.

Tumbled into a plastic bag in a corner of my office are two big skeins of washable yarn and a pair of knitting needles. My church has a program offering "prayer shawls" to its members who are in grief or suffering serious illnesses. I want to join the the group and learn how to knit the shawls, but every time I find out who is running it and when the meetings are, the person resigns or the meeting is cancelled for some reason. And then I get busy with other projects and forget to pursue the matter. But on a Sunday when the offering is brought to the altar and with it comes a thick, cozy, folded-up shawl, I remember and promise myself I will try again to find out who is currently running the project. And I will, as soon as I finish Buttons and Bones. Stay tuned.

BASKETWEAVE KNITTING

Excuse me for barging in early, but I want to post two pictures and I'm not sure I can do it without help -- and my web mistress is NOT an early riser.

Another thing I ran into at the Quilt Show in Duluth two weekends ago was a yarn booth. I don’t quilt, so you’d think I’d be safe from buying things at a quilt show, wouldn’t you? But noooooo. The woman at the booth was knitting a scarf in this fascinating pattern, and showed me how it was done. It didn’t seem terribly difficult, and it was a very interesting pattern. So I bought a skein of yarn, as that was the only way to acquire the instructions for knitting it. She calls the pattern Basketweave and it took me several tries with scrap yarn to acquire the skill. I’m still not terrific at it -- you can see a couple of errors in the pattern -- but I’ve started the scarf on the yarn I bought which is a fabulous blend of silk, wool and mohair, and a gorgeous color. One thing I didn’t realize until I was well into it is that the backside is a completely different pattern. The pictures here show the front and the back – amazingly different.

We have a bed that is very high off the floor – I literally have to take a flying leap to get up into bed at night. There are drawers in the bottom of it, so you can’t get underneath. I knew I’d had at least one pair of reading glasses fall between the head of the mattress and the headboard onto the floor, so when a paperback I’d been reading went missing, I took a flashlight and peered into the narrow space and sure enough, there it was, out of reach. I pushed the mattress out of the way and squeezed my forearm down between the box spring and headboard and still couldn’t reach the floor. I resorted to a pair of kitchen tongs and came up with the book and three (!) pairs of reading glasses. I didn’t realize that’s where they’d all gotten to. On the other hand, it makes me feel competent to have figured out how to get them back without dismantling the bed.

We’re going up to Cass County this coming Sunday, will be there till Wednesday evening. Look for a report next Wednesday on loons, a German POW camp, the source of the Mississippi River, and whatever else I can learn in aid of Buttons and Bones, the book I’m currently writing.

I took a one-hour lesson in driving, as that is my weakest part of my golf game. I think I came away more confused than helped, but we’ll see next time I play. Meanwhile, I’m going to go hit a bucket or two of balls to see if any of it has matured in my head since the lesson. Whoever thought hitting a ball with a stick could be so complicated?

Speaking of slow learning, I think I’m slowly starting to get the hang of writing a synopsis for film as opposed to a book. Think visually, that’s the ticket. But oh, how much easier is that said than done!

Speaking of visually, I think my eyes have at last started to improve.

A friend and I are planning a long train trip around this time next year and she came over this past weekend and we got out the schedules and maps and timetables and started plotting the stops we hope to make along the way: Fargo, Wolf Point, Cut Bank, East Glacier Park, Spokane, Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, Reno, and Salt Lake City. We figure we’ll be on the rails something over two weeks. If any of you are from one of these places, I hope you’ll come and see us wherever we're appearing, a library, a bookstore, or a needlework shop!

The C Word

In the crochet mystery I’m about to start writing, Molly Pink learns about yarn, which in turn means I need to learn about yarn. I know about the basic stuff – the reasonably priced kind you can buy at Joann’s or Michael’s. I want to see in person the kind of yarn I’ve only seen in books. For this I have to seek out small yarn shops.

I tried going into some of these small stores before, but frankly it didn’t turn out well. You would think a small shop keeper would be anxious to help a new customer. Not my experience. I thought it was just me and that I imagined their disdain when I mentioned crochet or asked where the crochet supplies were when all I saw was a wall of knitting needles. Even when I told them about my mystery series, they were weird and not very friendly.

Recently I picked up a book called Hooked for Life Adventures of a Crochet Zealot. It is made up of essay about crochet written by Mary Beth Temple. I happened to randomly pick one last night titled Crocheters, the Silent Majority. Mary Beth reiterates what I had read elsewhere – that crocheters far outnumber knitters, though nobody seems to know by how many. She also brought up hearing about people having the kind of experience I’d had in local yarn stores. To see if it was true, she went to a well known big city yarn store. When she saw that there were only three lonely looking crochet hooks among the huge supply of knitting needles, she asked the owner where the crochet supplies were. Mary Beth said the woman gave her a bemused expression and showed no interest in waiting on her.

So, maybe it wasn’t my imagination after all. Even though it seems crazy even as I’m writing this. How can these little yarn stores afford to be so snobby against crochet?

I will be finding out. Starting tomorrow I’m going give the yarn stores in my area another chance. I want to buy skeins of all different kinds of yarn and make up swatches so I can see what each kind looks like and what it’s like to work with. But before I rack up a big bill, I’m going to buy one skein of yarn and see how the shop keeper reacts to the C word. No respect and I keep moving. I’ll report on what happens.

Have you ever felt discriminated against?

Show and Tell

I realized I was the only one on the Malice panel who hadn’t been to a craft show. I was going to rectify it by going to the Knit Guild and Crochet Guild show that’s in Portland, Oregon next weekend. But buying plane tickets at the last minute is ridiculous. With two weeks advance purchase, a ticket was around $200. But with just one week in advance it was double that.

I found out The National Needlecraft Association has a show in the fall which ought to give me plenty of time to get a good deal on a plane ticket.

One of the reasons I wanted to go was that was to see all the specialty yarns. You can read about them in magazines and see photos online, but it isn’t the same as seeing them in person and being able to touch them. In the crochet mystery I’m about to begin both Molly Pink and I are going to upgrade our yarn experience. So far, I’ve stuck to craft super store kinds of offerings. Now I want to try cashmere and high end blends. I want to see how different it is to work with expensive yarn.

The same information will help with the knitting story I’m working on. Working with two pointy things still feels much more awkward than just using a hook, but I’m getting the hang of knitting. I picked up some knitting books and seem to be able to understand the patterns - at least in my head anyway.

I am looking forward to finishing the little coin purse I started, though I still don’t get what the big deal is about knitting. Crocheting feels more natural, is easier and faster. And it’s easy to rip out your mistakes. The hooks are shorter than needles and easier to carry.

But I like having a craft challenge. I like the idea of learning something new.

How about the rest of you? Have you learned anything new lately and how do you feel about it?