The Sock Club Is Backing Up

That is some fancypants knitting if you ask me.
It is my June SCSC 2011 pattern – Falling Tears.

I think they are beautiful. I love the color of the yarn (KnitPicks Stroll, colorway Dusk). I love the color of my new DPNs (Boye is FINALLY selling DPNs in 5 needle packs, rather than 4! I can get metal 5 DPN sets locally and affordably!!!). I love the contrast between the gray-blue and the copper needles, and it has proved helpful for this fiddly little pattern.

I love cabling without a needle. Just twisting two stitches around each other is fun, in a sort of demented kind of way. These are going to be very slow going. I can see that now. It doesn’t help that I should have cast them on around June 1, and instead, I cast off my April socks on June 6th, cast on my May socks on June 10 (one of which is finished!), and my June socks were only cast on back on the 25th.

Speaking of May socks:

Yeah, Vanilla Bean Toe Up socks. That’s all I have the mental energy for, especially given the Falling Tears pattern requires so much of my attention, and that I am knitting May and June simultaneously at this point.

Um, yeah, I know July starts tomorrow. My July socks are Clandestine, by Cookie A. Looking at them, I am wondering what I was thinking; they look very complicated and Cookie A.’s designs and methods don’t tend to line up well with mine. She is a circular needle knitter and her designs run that way. Me…not so much. We will see if I will adapt or die with Clandestine. Eventually. Whenever I get around to casting them on. Hopefully it will be before August.

So, other works in progress include decluttering and reorganizing our house. We haven’t had a good culling of our crap in a very long time and we were seriously overdue. Now, we need more space than ever, and now we are much more focused on the long term goal of selling the house, so we have lots to do to the place to achieve that goal. The most basic thing you can do to get ready to sell your house is to just get rid of what you don’t need.

I have made 4 trips to Goodwill with drop offs. I have filled our garbage can to overflowing 3 Sundays in a row now, and I hope to make this the 4th one.

I built a much taller set of shelves for my kitchen last weekend to try and use some of the vertical space we have available with our 9 foot ceiling in there. The result was mixed. The shelf is wider than the wall it is against by about 5 inches, making it look odd, but the whole kitchen looks less cluttered and larger as a result.

Overall, I call it a win.

And my favorite work in progress:

Posing here with her favorite only semi-imaginary friend, Melvin.

I say semi-imaginary because at least the rest of us can see Melvin. We can’t see the rest of her friends, the entirety of the team of Teen Titans (I promise, I couldn’t make this up on my own). Robin and Starfire are her best friends in particular, or brother and sister, depending on her mood.

Finally, six years ago, on a hot and sticky July 2nd Saturday, Byram and I walked down the aisle together as husband and wife. This hot and sticky July 2nd Saturday, we will reflect on that, grill some steaks on the grill, light a fire in the firebowl, toast some marshmallows, sing some songs, drink a few adult beverages, and spend time together as a family, bound in love and honor and respect.

Thirty-two years ago, today, my parents took that same walk together. Now, all these years later, they are at the early stage of formally separating. The details are unimportant, though they are no dark, deep ugly secret. I haven’t gone into detail here because it is just not my story to tell. The realities of their ending marriage are still sinking in and we are still figuring out the impacts on our own household, but I know everything’s going to be alright.

Hug your loved ones. They probably need it.

Now, I leave you with this, for your knitting amusement.

(The best part? She has it spelled KN1TTY, which I would bet you means that somewhere in Virginia, another knitter has the license plate that says KNITTY. Just LOVE that thought!)

Making Myself Crazy

Looking for some passing amusement? Here are a few simple steps to make yourself absolutely bats-in-the-belfry crazy (if yourself is, well, me).

Go look at real estate you can afford as life is at this moment (carrying two mortgages). Realize you don’t want to live in real estate you can afford to live in as life is at this moment (I never did like the sound of banjos). Realize if you want to look at real estate you actually want to live in, you have to be able to sell your current piece of real estate.

Then, start a list of things that have to be done to sell your house. Wonder if you can make any sort of profit selling it “as is” or improved a little. Price other houses on your street. Find an almost perfectly comparable house, in similar condition, and realize you will take a $30K bath on your house if you sell it like it is.

Then start thinking about how much money you have to put into it, just not to take a bath on selling it (forget making a significant profit).

Let the realization sink in that whether it looks that way on paper or not, you are underwater on your home.

Stop looking at real estate websites and start looking at home repair sites and reading up on local contractors. Consider the loan you have to take out just to sell your house to pay off the mortgage, so that you can take out ANOTHER mortgage and buy another house.

Start thinking about all the luxury apartments going up in Richmond, and wonder why you ever bought a house in the first place.

These are exactly the steps to take if you want to find yourself banging your head against the Wall of Futility.

(Oh, and if you really want to send yourself screaming into the wilderness, just start reading up on how to remove contact paper from sheet rock…there are suggestions to just layer new sheet rock over it, implying that new sheet rock is just easier. Then proceed to fantasize about wrapping the individual who contact papered the bathroom in contact paper, entirely except for one hand, and then handing them the hair dryer and Goo-B-Gone, and wish them the best of luck. That is a free, one-way ticket to Crazy-Town. I like the free part. Frugal is chic these days, you know?)

PS: This really is all in good fun. Read it with that in mind.

The Sea Change

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.

Shakespeare – The Tempest

My Summer Mystery Shawl is deceased. Dead on arrival. Pulled off the needles and mourned appropriately (meaning I didn’t fling it across the room, but only sighed as I tucked it away to rewind the yarn later). Somehow, as I got to the last 10 rows of the third repeat of Clue 3, it became clear I had Screwed Up ™. I had 9 more stitches on one half of the shawl than the other. How did I not notice this before I was 95% finished with the shawl? Those nine stitches allowed the pattern to still work out almost perfectly. I still cannot see how I added (or subtracted from the other side) all the extra stitches without noticing. The pattern is not muddled or messed up looking on the body of the shawl itself, but the problem was when it came time to bind off, one side would be ready to bind off several rows before the other side, and there was no fixing that.
Edited to note that I went back and discovered there were several mistakes posted in the patterns, and because I was away from the computer so much while all these were coming out, I never checked to see if there was any errata! Maybe the fault is not all mine afterall! Remember, knitters, ALWAYS keep an eye open for errata!

Ah well. It was a lovely distraction while it lasted. I am going to turn that handspun yarn into a pair of fingerless mitts now, I think. It is silken and beautiful, but not really right for a shawl, I now believe.

I was supposed to cast on the June socks too. Beautiful German cabled pattern called Falling Tears. They were intended to be knit for my grandmother for Christmas (remember, most of this Sock Club is about getting my Christmas knitting done), but the pattern is intended for a Size 9 women’s foot, and I cannot see a way to shrink it down for my grandma’s dainty size 7 feet. I needed smaller needles than I currently have just to make it a size 9. I guess they will get knit eventually, just not for Grandma, and just not this month.

Instead, I went back to the May yarn. A KnitPicks self-striping yarn intended to become a pair of Jaywalker socks for my Dad. Instead, with a mind too frazzled and hands too sore to function well, I chose to cast on the most vanilla of basic socks and start a pair of toe up striped socks to end up under the Christmas tree most likely, just not for my Dad.

I am pulled too thin to wrangle intricate and beautifully structured cables on a pattern called Falling Tears, and I am too raw and hurt to knit something for the man who is literally pulling the yarn and unraveling my entire family.

My extended family is in a state of flux at the moment, and will likely remain so for a very long time to come. Byram and I are strong, united, and we adapt well to sea changes, but it doesn’t mean that the ride won’t be rough.

Sapphire Joust took a lot out of me this year, as I knew it would. That wasn’t the problem. The trouble came in the fact that Sapphire happened at the same time the unraveling yarn of my family began to pick up some serious speed. Additionally, between the three tick bites I picked up over a two week period, I picked up something more sinister: my symptoms line up best with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, but it could be Lyme or one of the other 24 different tick-bite transmitted illnesses (thus with the sore hands; painful joints is one of my symptoms). Either way, I am on a very potent broad-spectrum antibiotic, and the rubber band that is my life feels like it was stretched until it finally broke, and I am curled up and broken and useless right now. J.R.R. Tolkien described it through Bilbo Baggins as feeling like butter spread too thin over toast. That is me. That’s where I am.

We are going to be okay. Really. In life, you have to hike through the valleys to reach the mountain peaks, and I know that. My family will rally together, support my Mom, act as the safety pin you use to catch a running stitch, and we will pull her up back to safety. I am going to get over whatever crap I caught pretty soon. My husband, daughter, and I will grow and adapt, and love and learn. Tonight, I am going to pitch a tent in our backyard, light a little fire in our firebowl, and we are going to roast marshmallows and “camp out” per a request Grace has made (very earnestly).

Life is good, even if right now, we are in the midst of a sea change and our little boat is a-rockin’ and we are too close to the rocky shore for comfort. I will knit on, pray on, live on, and on the other side, I will be stronger and smarter for it all; my household will look and feel different, but change always comes. It is up to us to either embrace it or adapt to it, but you cannot reject it.

I wish you a happy Father’s Day weekend.

Solitude

So, what day is it? June 7th? Sounds like the perfect day to debut my April 2011 SCSC socks.

I actually finished them on Saturday (yes, the April socks were finished in JUNE). Wet blocking did wonders for what otherwise looked like a stranded mess.

Pattern: Vellamo
Yarn: KnitPicks Stroll Solids, one skein each of Aurora Heather and Mustard (Mustard is being discontinued)
Needles: 2.75mm DPNs
Modifications: My only modification was to change the cuff. I felt like the socks were so fancy they needed a showier cuff, so rather than a 1.5 inch 1×1 ribbed cuff, I went with a picot edged cuff. My first ever picot edge. I am a little disappointed that the socks are not all that “clingy” since I don’t have a nice stretchy ribbed cuff to help hold them up, but they look like some fancypants knitting, so I can live with them being somewhat saggy.

In other news, the week before Sapphire, I cast on the Summer Mystery Shawl that Wendy Johnson of WendyKnits started publishing. I wanted a distraction and something to invigorate my will to knit once the event was over, and it seems to have worked. I cast on in the handspun green merino/tencel (or it might be bamboo) blend I bought on Etsy last year and spun last Autumn. I don’t know how I feel about the yarn. Having never spun something like that, I didn’t know what to expect. I overspun a lot of it, and some of it is underspun. None of it is especially consistent. It is knitting up a lot like pure silk with little give. I think it will look nice once it is blocked out, but right now, I am somewhat taken aback by the mess every time I look at it.

Anyway, Wendy has put out all of the charts now, but the main body chart came out the day I was loading the Uhaul to go out to Sapphire, so I only started that chart over the weekend. I am taking my time with it, but the project is speeding up as I go because I am getting very familiar with the chart and because each right side row drops off two stitches.

I bypassed May’s Sock Club socks altogether. I had a feeling when I set up the club that May might wash out and sure enough. It doesn’t hurt that the socks are intended for a pair of Size 12 feet, and those feet belong to someone on my Not Too Happy With list, at the moment. I had little heartache in skipping over those socks. My June socks are waiting to be cast on very soon. The pattern is Falling Tears, and the yarn will be more Knit Picks Stroll in Dusk colorway. My main delay is that I need to replace my 2mm DPNs and I really need a 2.5mm set too. I think this sock is going to need me to go down a size from my normal 2.75mm needles.

Maybe this weekend I will have time to cast on while I am back at Tom Scott Park for Warfighter.

I am really suddenly looking forward to the event this weekend. We won’t have an “encampment” to speak of. It will just be Byram and I alone in our normal location, and there is a better than average chance that one night, it might even be me by myself. He will understand (I hope) when I say that the idea of a night alone in a tent, completely by myself, is deeply appealing right now. In the wake of Sapphire, of autocratting, of my job, of life in general, I feel a bit like I have had a 60 grit beltsander applied to my soul and I need some time to heal up. I need some quiet time. I need some solitude.

You wouldn’t think going to an SCA event would be the balm I need, but the way this weekend is looking, I think it is going to be perfect.

Now, I would like to leave you with some photos from my lost month of May.
Grace and I are exploring the River.

Admiral Achbar gives us a warning from what is one of the most random tags I have ever seen in the City.

My Beloved. Both of them.

A blooming magnolia; the scent took me straight back to my childhood in Hampton.

One of the most hellacious storms I have ever driven through.

My goofy girl and her wax lips.

Going for a run with a little added weight.

The Civil War memorial on Belle Isle.

And Grace.

The Social Credit Card Account

I am still firmly in autocrat mode here. Even though Sapphire is finished, the books aren’t closed yet, and now I am hip deep in getting ready for Warfighter, and also spending brain power on thinking out an event for September, whatever form it takes on. As an autocrat, I function on a theory I have developed over the years of autocratting and staffing SCA events. I call it the theory of a Social Credit Card. It actually can apply to life in general, but the SCA provides a powerful microcosm to play this theory out in very fast and real time.

In general, if you are playing nicely with others, serving the Society, contributing to your group and your kingdom, you are building credit on your “social credit card.” You might make occasional minor withdrawals on that card when you mess up, do something like file an officer’s report late, leave trash for others to clean up at an event, or drive where you shouldn’t and mess up the ground or worse, get stuck in the mud at an event. Those are just some examples of minor things that happen to pretty much everyone, and your Social Credit Card takes a little hit, but if you don’t screw up too frequently, you should still be flush.

The fastest way to drain your Social Credit Card account without doing something that gets you banned from the group permanently is to autocrat an event. The primary job of the autocrat is to find people who can work with you and with each other to make all the moving parts of an event move together in something resembling harmony. This means you have to have to ask people to work for you, and the bigger and more complex the event, the more people need and the more work you have to hand them. The great thing is that people generally want to work and will help you if you ask (remember, they are building their Social Credit Card accounts up), but every time you ask, you make a debit on your account. And every time you ask someone to do something else after they finish the task they have already done for you, the debit gets a little bigger. And every time you ask someone to do something really hard or something you know they really don’t want to do, the debits start getting pretty big.

By the end of Sapphire, there were people who probably wanted to run the other way every time they saw me coming in their direction with the look on my face of “I hate to ask this, but…” My SCA Social Credit Card was near or maybe even over the limit by noon, last Monday.

I am not trying to suggest that you shouldn’t “spend” anything in your Social Credit Account. I mean the opposite actually. The SCA really only exists through events, through real live, personal interactions with one another; not through online chats and Facebook. So, I believe that to have the SCA, you have to have events, and that means someone, somewhere, has to spend their Social Cred to make it happen. Like real money, you can hoard as much as you can get your hands on, but if you never spend it, it doesn’t really do anything for you. What I am saying you should treat the goodwill of others as a resource as valuable as money. You need the goodwill of others around you to thrive in the SCA. I cannot stress this enough. No one in the SCA operates in a social vacuum, not even our most severe introverts.

This theory doesn’t just apply to autocrats. It applies to Royalty, who must ask a lot of favors of a lot of people, but they have more ability to soften the blow to their Social Credit. It definitely applies to Landed Baronage who must also ask a lot of a lot of people, and have a similar ability to soften the impact on their credit, but the timeframe is a lot longer for them than for the Crowns. You must tread very carefully as a Landed Baron when it comes to your Social Credit Card. It applies to group officers too, particularly to Seneschals, who have to ask people to do things all the time, but have little or no way to rebuild their Social Credit until their term is over.

Like I said, I think of the Social Credit Card as a general life theory and one that I think we all abide by on a relatively unconscious level, but it is something I have become keenly aware of over the years. And if you ever wondered what I was thinking about on all those mornings I was awake at 0400 or thereabouts, this is exactly the kind of stuff I think about, and it is the kind of thing I hope future autocrats will think about too.