Cure for the Snooze

My kid is a reluctant sock knitter's dream.
She thinks matching socks are boring,
and the world would be a happier place
if everyone had a pair of red shoes.

We haven't been in a happy place for a while, given all of the medical crap that's been going on. And my attention span in times like these is not so great. But I have no excuse whatsoever for not knitting socks. My child's feet are tiny, so socks for her would take no time at all. She doesn't care if her socks and shoes go together, because in her world, red goes with everything. (You should see some of the getups she's put on for school. But I chose to win the weather-appropriate battle over the colour battle because dressing like Cyndi Lauper's laundry pile never gave anyone pneumonia.)

And Twinkletoes does not see the point of matching socks. I can succumb to one-sock-syndrome all I like, because her sock drawer is a testament to Murphy's Law for Socks: "Remember fondly what it looked like to have two of these socks, because the minute they hit the drawer, you will only ever be able to locate one at a time."

Someone whose knitting and teaching skills blow me away
feels the same way about matching socks.
Look closer, and you'll see that the feeling
extends all the way to her Birkenstocks.

My buddy Kate and I had the pleasure this past weekend of meeting with and learning from one of the finest knitting teachers in existence: the ever-colourful Lucy Neatby. Now, I've been going through a bit of a snooze period with my knitting, thanks to a slight problem with what my brain thinks it can do and what my fingers decide to follow through on. I'm told that mucking about near the grey matter does this to a person, and that it eventually sorts itself out. Meanwhile, I've graduated from three-by-three horizontal ribbing to two-by-two vertical ribbing. Whoopdeedoo.

Still, when the opportunity to take a buttonhole class with Lucy Neatby arose, I mightily resisted the urge to snark, "Dude, that would require that my brain gets over itself and lets me knit a WHOLE SWEATER for once in my life," and instead jumped at the chance to meet Lucy in person. I've interviewed Lucy for "Made in Canada," I've used her DVDs, and I've marveled at how her clever techniques are the knitting equivalent of a V8 commercial. I've been on the receiving end of a lot of moral support from her regarding last year's surgery. But I had never met her in person. So the opportunity to give her a big thank-you hug (and see the four-colour hair for real) was too good to pass up.

Oh, and somewhere in there, I would perhaps wrap my brain around making a decent buttonhole that avoids (a) looking like it's been made to accommodate a small breadplate or (b) claiming that it was destined to be an eyelet in a lace design and thus is too good for my damned buttons, thank you very much. (What can I say? I've made some ornery buttonholes in my time. But if you were part of a 1980s intarsia cardigan adaptation of Toulouse-Lautrec's Moulin Rouge, I suppose you'd be ornery, too. Yes, really. I have a sordid knitting past.)

Kate and I did not find out until the night before the workshop that there was homework to be done. I.e., a swatch. So I went running around the house trying to find yarn. (Okay, okay, I know. There's yarn in every corner of my house. But it couldn't be just any yarn. To clarify: I was trying to find yarn that was aran weight, light-coloured, and was "leftover" enough to be used as a swatch, along with contrast yarn, brightly-coloured, that was also aran weight. See? Not as easy as it sounds in Variations-On-a-Theme-of-Black, Alpaca-Laceweight Land.)

This was the best I could do.
Yes, I know black is not "brightly coloured."
Shut up.

We learned several techniques for buttonholes, including an eyelet buttonhole that hides itself inside ribbing, a vertical buttonhole, the extremely cool Elizabeth Zimmerman one-row buttonhole, and the buttonhole that makes you say "Holy crap, it worked!": the Magic Buttonhole. Actually, I think I used a more colourful word than "crap," mainly because it not only worked, but it is essentially a piece of grafting, which I've never been good at, and yet it still worked. Lucy Neatby is a fantastic teacher, folks, if she can teach my hands to make one of these babies:

This is a magic buttonhole.
Colourful contrast yarn that is actually colourful, courtesy of Kate.
Shut up.

And this is a magic buttonhole saying,
"Why yes, I'd be happy to accommodate that button.
It's my job, dude."

And this is a magic buttonhole that, clearly,
I did not make, because it is perfect
and it is tucked into the garter-stitch edging
of a stunning vest Lucy designed and knitted.

This is what cool hair dye was made for.
The lovely-in-every-way Lucy with Barbara McKee
of the Montréal Knitting Guild,
teaching her how to finish her magic buttonhole.

This is an eight-year-old
doing an interpretive knitting dance we like to call
"Buttonholes are very cool, especially when they work."

I discovered along the road to making a gazillion buttonholes that feeling bored out of one's mind with one's knitting is completely curable in the presence of Lucy Neatby, no matter what she's teaching, and that I don't have to make a sweater to use buttonholes. Her cufflink buttons on a hat, placed in eyelet buttonholes hidden in ribbing, were so cool that I am now seriously worried that someone's going to have to stage an intervention. If my husband posts that he can't find me, it will be because I've decided to camp out in the antique button store down the street with my circs, a hat pattern, and a pile of sock yarn. You know, the stuff I haven't made socks out of. Of course, if Lucy has her way, the sock DVDs that somehow landed on my doorstep will convert me. If I can put buttons on the sock cuffs, I might consider it, okay, Lucy? Sneaky knitting teachers....

This is how Lucy gets knitters to move onto the next step
and listen in class. It's a bike bell.
Twinkletoes loved it...flowers and an eyeball. Cool.

If this isn't a cure for the snooze,
I don't know what is. Gorgeous stuff.
These are all samples of Lucy's designs.

More samples, more wake-up calls.
I'm falling in love with the hems, too,
and double-knitted pockets, and folded buttonbands. Lovely.

Another interpretive knitting dance we like to call,
"If you jump up and down for four hours
while your mother knits buttonholes,
you can steamblock your own shirt!"

This class was, in fact, my first real knitting class. When I took up knitting in college, I started with a pseudo-lesson, a pattern for a raglan, and a pile of itchy, cheap Shetland. The kind that makes people cringe when they hear the words "Shetland sweater." I have since learned that good Shetland is lovely and soft, and now I've learned that four hours knitting buttonholes can feel like about five of the coolest minutes you've ever spent.

We didn't want to leave. Here's Kate chatting with Lucy
while the building manager shuffles around us
wondering how in hell we can still be talking about knitting.

As for my current projects, I will finish my bustier, especially since in about three inches I will be done with the ribbing and can get to the fancy edging stuff. I need fancy edging stuff. Especially because I'm hoping the fancy edging stuff will make it long enough to reach around my middle, because if it doesn't, I'm going to have to either scream and throw it in a corner, shouting out obscenities about that lying s.o.b. otherwise known as gauge, or exercise more. But the next project I do is going to have to be embellished in some way. (Okay, so a bustier is rather a bit of embellishment in itself, but still....) I desperately need colour. And fun. Also, possibly a mental kick in the posterior. This winter has been far too emotionally strenuous, and I haven't been using the resources at hand to pull myself out of the muck.

A pair of these would probably help.
And yes, she's got a pair just like them at home.

Happy mud season, folks. I'm going to go hit the replay button for the fiftieth time on "Clap! Shake! Jump!" I defy you to sit still on that one, Daddy-O....

March 29, 2007 1:33 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (38)  | Print