Finished Object: Color Blocked Bias Wrap

Yo peeps. While I could do 10 of a zillion things, I've decided to spend this (hormonally replete) weekend on my couch and in my yoga space a) knit swatching for a bunch of new projects, b) reading 3 new health-related books which were recently recommended*, c) lengthening the bits of my body that are scrunched into pain and d) trying out my latest online yoga discovery (you know how I love finding new home-based yoga sites).

That site would be Yoga International online. You may recall it was a well-respected paper mag for a good couple of decades. In the death-throes of that industry, it modernized with an online articles-meets-workshops-meets-yoga classes platform. While I cannot speak of this as yet (I'm still in the early stages of discovery), I sense that this may be my fave version yet. There's much more emphasis on alignment-based yoga here - and much less of that facile fusion everyone seems to be doing. Also, the people look just like those you'd see in your yoga class (real, if excessively competent).

I do have an exciting adventure on the horizon, which I'll speak more about soon. But in the meanwhile, let's look at one of the most satisfying knits I've encountered in a very long time:

Color Block Bias Wrap by Suzanne Shaw. I won't lie, spelling "colour" without the "u" is disturbing to me!

This is the yarn my parents bought for me in Charlotte this spring. I love it even more knitted than in the hank. These pictures really do not do it justice. The colours are delicious. The hand is awesome. The finished garment is the perfect size to keep you very warm all winter - even if your pre-renoed, century-home is a sieve. This is not skimpy, nor is it unweildy. When well-knit, it looks like an expensive thing you've bought in a fancy shop.

Who should make this? Everyone who likes shawls who's got at least 3 projects under his or her belt. You need to know how to cast on and bind off (but only in the most minimal way), knit, purl, increase stitches, decrease stitches, do clean colour-switch up (at the ends of each ball of yarn) and, natch, fix dropped stitches or other issues should they emerge. It also helps to block this with wires (found in any knitting store) because it will turn your finished project into a thing of professional standard.

What I Recommend:

• Knit it with the prescribed yarn - Classic Elite Chateau (or Chalet, if you like colours). There's a tonal beige colour-way and this grey one (and a few other neutrals to substitute if you prefer). This chainette, bulky-weight yarn knits up exceedingly fast. I knit at a fair clip and I got through this in 4 days without trying, particularly. Even a nervous newbie could do it in a month. Sure, other yarns will work - but this yarn has the PERFECT hand and drape for a shawl of these proportions. You will not regret it - and the yarn is easily found and well-priced.

• I won't lie, consistent tension is a must. That may become increasingly challenging for some as the needle size increases (and the project grows) because ergonomics erodes. When knitting in stockinette, consistent tension is always important but given the quality of this yarn, your project will not look optimal if the tension slips. That's why my point below is key.

• Swatch to ensure that your fabric isn't too open / loose. This yarn will grow with blocking and under its own weight - given its drapey fiber composition of bamboo and alpaca. Seriously consider going down a needle-size unless you are a super-tight knitter. I hate knitting with a needle of the recommended size, US13 (or anything above a US9, though I can force myself to use up to a US11 if the project entices me adequately). I swatched with a US11 to ensure that I would be happy with the fabric, and I knew how my decreased gauge would impact the finished size. I'm very happy with it but I wouldn't have been if I'd used the recommended needle size.

• Wet-block and use blocking-wires when drying.

• With appetite and budget, starting now you could easily pump out 5 of these as Xmas presents.

So that's my weekend. What's up with you? Does this shawl appeal? Will you make it? Let's talk!

*In case you're curious, the books are My Age of Anxiety by Scott Stossel, Ending Back Pain by Jack Stern, MD, PhD and (my mother's fave) How Not to Die by Michael Greger, MD... 

What I Do When I'm Not Doing Anything

I've spent the last week in a haze. I don't mean this poetically. My vision (a challenge over the last year - one of those I really don't feel like discussing) has been particularly fuzzy. My head is actually heavy (but not painful, happy to report). I'm encircled in the kind of exhaustion that only the onslaught of hard-core international travel, death and loss of daylight can produce. I feel dissociative.

This weekend, I'm calling a time out. It began last night at Enoteca Sociale (my current local), eating gorgeous blue cheese (with candied pecans, made onsite - the key is deep frying), the best dense, sourdough bread in the city, soaked in copious amounts of olive oil (I don't like bread, but I'll make an exception here). I moved onto gnocchi with a smoked tomato sauce and dollop of silky ricotta. Somehow I resisted dessert - the wine pairings helped. I didn't waste my time with vegetables. Everything ingested was to soak up the floatiness and replace it with grounding. And seriously, if you care about service - amongst my most coveted requirements - you cannot go wrong here. Our Enoteca server friends bring a beautiful experience.

Peeps, if your world is uncertain, eat Italian. I mean, really good Italian.

Next week will go back to craziness at work, each evening occupied by some activity (more often than not meeting with architects and design-build firms, cuz we've got to do that reno I've been avoiding). But for the next 2 days, I'm sitting on my couch with knitting and a book. There will be some yoga. I may make a chicken pot pie. Convivially, I will drink a couple of bottles of wine.

A propos of reading and knitting, I'm fortunate to have some good things on the go:

The Knitting: Do you know this pattern?

L'enveloppe by Sally Melville

It's one of those very interestingly constructed, hybrid garments. It's either going to be great or hideous - but I'm up for it.

I'm using a yarn which is currently NOT impressing me: Rowan Super Fine Merino Aran in the Soot colourway. It does have lovely drape and it's a very nice grey meets black, but Lord, it's splitty. I had to buy a bamboo needle with very pointy ends, just to accommodate it, and I still need to be careful because the yarn is barely plied. You can actually untwist it by hand and see the numerous threads that make it an aran-weight yarn. Mind you, it is machine washable.

Since superwash yarns are notoriously expansive after blocking, I opted to use a size US8 needle which got me a horizontal gauge of 16 stitches in 4 inches and a fabric that coheres. The pattern actually gives you any number of choices to achieve 4 different gauges and numerous different sizes in those gauges. I actually find it more complicated than helpful, but if you want to use yarns of a variety of thicknesses, theoretically, you can.

I did swatch and block before starting this project because it's a fitted garment, to some extent - and I wanted to feel confident about the sort of drape the final fabric would produce. I was inclined to use a US9 needle (not that I ever knit anything with needles that big - even a US7 is an oddity for me), but the fabric would have been too open for my liking. I think this garment looks sloppy when the fabric is loose.

I've finally come to an understanding that, if one must be careful about one's knitting volume (for reasons of pain), it only makes sense to knit with bigger yarn on bigger needles. Fingering yarn on a US1 is 8 times the work of aran yarn on a US8 needle. Not to mention that aran yarn knits fast. Yeah, socks are always going to be a slim-gauge undertaking but they don't use a lot of yarn in the scheme of things. I sense my days of fingering-gauge sweaters are over for the foreseeable future (famous last words).

The wildcard here is the size. I'm making the small - which is a 32-34 in the bust.  Now, the yarn (being of larger gauge) has more stretch-per-inch than a smaller-gauge one would. Not to mention, I'm a narrow person in the shoulders (where fit matters most in this garment). In fact, I'm surprised it doesn't give measurement by shoulder instead of bust circumference. Moreover, the next size up is 36-38. Where does that leave 35 inches? Point is, I don't think the sizing info is particularly robust (and oversized versions look unlovely in the photos) so I'm erring on the small side. We'll see how that plays out.

The Reading: Recently I was interviewed by writer, Matthew Remski, who's researching a book about modern postural yoga and the injuries it can cause / the premises that underpin yogic injury. (Here's the prospectus, in case you're interested.) The thesis is fascinating, IMO, and I'm so pleased to inform a small part of it. Since I discovered Matthew and his work (which is featured in a variety of online publications including his own blog), I've been reminded of an ever-polarizing school of thought about yoga (the postural vs the pranic) and it's really expanded my awareness.

Anyway, though I appear to have been living under a rock for the last 5 years (yoga-book-wise, anyway), I finally purchased a copy of Yoga Body by Mark Singleton. Full disclosure: It reads more like someone's PhD thesis than a yoga manual. It's an academic consideration of how modern postural yoga owes much more to Indian colonialism of the 19th century and the European gymnastics movement of the early 20th century than to the ancient Indian practices with which modern westerners generally accredit it. Note: No one's proposing that yoga isn't an ancient art, but that postural yoga (that stuff you do at your studio three times a week - that stuff I've been practicing and teaching for 25-years) is a modern, quasi-western construct through and through. Does that shock you? It's pretty well what I have always presumed - particularly since the onslaught of popularized yoga (what I like to call YogaLite) in the 90s.

This book, when published in 2010, raised the hackles (and undermined the foundation) of many a yogi and caused quite a bit of discourse. I recommend it, though I'm only part way through.

Finally, BTW, I'm ready to put it out there that I have non-negligible issues with the decline of daylight at this time of year (steadily worsening till it's almost impossible to bear). OMG, it's RIDICULOUS. I can actually feel myself ebb. Yeah, if you look back in my archives, at autumn posts over the last 9 years, I'm sure you'll see this theme emerge at every turn. But it never ceases to floor me. How did people survive this before modern shelter and heating? Those Samis and Inuits are punished by geography. It's no wonder that alcoholism runs rampant in the far north of northern countries. At a certain point, hygge is everything and, while I realize that hygge more about good food, wood fires and coziness than booze, don't kid yourself. The booze is a meaningful part of that equation.

Today's questions are all over the place: Have you made L'enveloppe (or would you)? If yes, how did it turn out, size-wise? Have you read Yoga Body? Does it surprise you that yoga might owe as much to the west as to the east? Does it bother you?

And let's leave it on the seasonal affective note: If you live in the north (let's say north of latitude 40, to maximize the pool), how the fuck do you stand it?? Really, a fireplace only gets you so far. (PS: You can suggest exercise, but I've already got that one in the bag and, really, it only takes the edge off the worst of it.) Hibernation, alas, is not an option.

Mixed Media

In addition to the Mac, I got a tetralogy of books (but all in one volume): The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. (M, describing it to someone on the phone, called it a tetrapak!) When last I read this series I was at university. While I did study English Lit, I didn't read it as part of my course load. I was drawn to it, no doubt, having read something of a similar vintage (1950s masquerading as 1930s). It had been decades since I'd thought of it last, but a couple of weeks ago I had a riveting, boozy, intellectual Friday-night-dinner conversation about it with Steen. Really, for an hour, I felt like I was a member of the Algonquin Round Table.

It's not often that I use my EngLit-speak these days. Moreover, it's not often that I read an actual book. Which is odd mainly in that, for 30 plus years, I read a minimum of a book a week. I read everything - crap fiction, good fiction, change your life fiction, biographies, poetry, prose, short stories. Even, occasionally, non fiction (egad!). I was a book addict. Teachers admonished me for reading in class. You couldn't have a conversation with me wherein I wasn't throwing around some semiotic terminology, or comparing a friend's personal experience with that of one of my "characters". It really pissed some people off.

Fortunately for them, I found blogs and now I never read anything but (and the occasional print magazine).

Strangely, I do not miss books at all. One might argue that I've read enough of them to last a lifetime - thousands of books. I immersed myself in innumerable plots to live the lives of others, to avoid myself, to suffer the sufferings of those whose lives I would never otherwise encounter. It soothed my loneliness, my anxiety. Books filled me with hope and longing; they dragged me down with despair. But it was the despair of someone else.

Of course, no amount of books is enough for one lifetime...

I have an interesting quality - one which I don't see in many others, one which has served me well my whole life long. I go where my imagination takes me and I really do not overthink it. In all the years I read, I felt a chasm between myself and my creativity. The day I started writing (and in this case I'm referring to my blog) was the day I no longer felt the need to engross myself in the creative constructs of others. It was the day I found a voice to speak of my own life. And from that voice, my life developed.

Of course I still read constantly. Reading is a huge component of my profession. I also read more than 150 blogs a day - blogs that are intelligent, humourous, beautiful and artistic to observe. The democratization of self-expression thrills me. I do not feel that books surpass blogs. I feel they are part of the same creative continuum.

Which is why I'm pulling out some paper (like, a thousand pages?!) and getting with the written-word, old-style. Weird that this is the book to pull me back. I'm on the first novel - Justine, only about 50 pages in, and I'm reminded of the atmosphere - the heat and intensity of Egypt in the 1930s. So far, on this read, I'm amazed by the floridness of the text (it's practically purple, but smart!) and I'm on the lookout for cultural prejudice. One of the fascinating features of this text is that it doesn't sidebar sex. Passion isn't qualified by literary conventions - well, it is, of course, but they're more modern (dare I say, honest?) than the majority of fodder from that day and age. So far, we've had pre-marital sex, straight talk from the mistresses of wealthy Arabs, and child prostitution. And it's not wrapped up in a symbolic bow.

I'm curious to know - smartie-pants readers who, no doubt, have read this carefully and more recently than I have - what's the thing that jumps out at you? And let's say you haven't read it, what book have you read most recently that have changed your perspective on things? Do you read blogs instead of print? What's your story?