No New Pictures

No new pictures today. I have a bunch of stuff to show (silk caps arrived, some cool fingering weight yarn arrived, some roving (which is actually top) that I ordered to practice spinning on arrived. I even did some spinning on colored fiber, because I was annoyed at only making white. And I have a nice, finished cone of white fiber, sitting on a straw waiting to be plied. But I'm not showing any of that now. I have thesis. Which is depressing me horribly, because I haven't actually made any progress on the material; I've just been fiddling with the form and the silly fluffy stuff that goes around all of the actual math. Which means that my thesis looks closer to being done, but which isn't. Which is really depressing.

(My friends tell me that the thesis is closer to being done, as I'm narrowing the field of things that I need to work on. However, since the things I'm working on don't actually resolve any of the elements that are weighing on me, this doesn't seem to help much, either.)

Four more days. I'm going to say it now (even though I just felt a horrible stab of fear, just writing that). Four more days. And I have cleaning and laundry to do, too. Someone rescue me, please. (Or at least send me good food! Or knitting.)

Speaking of knitting (you don't think I'd stop knitting just for something minor like imminent doom, did you?), I've been making a hat. This hat is knit flat. it's from Elsebeth Lavold's Viking Knits Collection, called Tyra. Isn't it great? I'm knitting it in a dark purple (so the pattern doesn't actually show up that well, but it still looks good) in Silky Wool. Have I mentioned that this yarn is amazing, fantastic, wonderful, great, and all good things? It is. I am absolutely madly in love with it, and if I weren't broke I'd buy a lot of it. Wonderful, wonderful, yarn. I'm really looking forward to knitting the sweater that my mother bought me the yarn for for my birthday, Ljod.

More spinning!

So yesterday, thoroughly depressed by my (a) lack of progress on my thesis and (b) failure at spinning, I trekked all the way to a yarn store that advertized itself as selling spinning supplies. I asked for a lesson, and the very nice woman who owns the shop said that she couldn't do one then, but she'd be happy to give me one tomorrow (that's today). So today I went over there for my lesson.

It turned out that I had been doing things almost completely correctly, except for one thing. I had top (where the fibers are combed lengthwise) instead of roving, which meant that I couldn't spin it lengthwise (the way people do in pictures) and instead needed to spin it crosswise, tearing it into small pieces first. Once I tried doing that, spinning worked! And it meant that instead of having huge monstrous uneven yarn I have thin uneven yarn! But I have fewer lumps (and fewer horrendously thin places), but it also meant that I didn't have to spend forever drafting, and I even managed to spin without stopping the spindle every two seconds. It was fun! And wonderful! And made me all happy.

So now I just need to learn to ply. That should be exciting. =)

Embarrasement

Several things. For some reason, the server in charge of my domain forwarding is down, so the blog is not at its usual location. Hopefully, I'll be able to change it back soon. (And then I'll have to change all of the image locations AGAIN...)

First, a few long-overdue pictures of things I've been knitting. First, my wonderful roommate Kathryn in Tubey (which I gave to her because she looked great in it, while I just looked lumpy).

Next, my equally wonderful roommate Hana, along with a "Plain Jane" purse I knit for her. (You can't see the purse that well (it was late, so sue me), but every other row is knit 1, slip one with yarn in front, and the WS rows are purled.)

(It was like 2 in the morning when I took this. I know it's all my fault.) And, lastly, my (also wonderful) roommate Kate in Odessa (which I gave to her because when I said "who wants this ugly orange hat?" she said "I do.")

So I'm all caught up now. (And in case you're wondering how many more roommates I have to show you: I have seven roommates.)

(OK, I lied. I'm not all caught up because I haven't shown you the orangutang shrug yet. You can keep waiting. I'll show it to you when I'm less embarrassed/mystified.)

Today was really embarrassing. I'm knitting a scarf to relax and use up the leftover yarn from Tubey. (I put all of the balls into a pile, and then I reach into the pile, pick up a ball, and knit only that ball until it's done.) It's just a lengthwise garter stitch scarf (and it's looking a little too short, but that's not that big a deal, it's a scarf). At the moment, I just have two stripes:

(I tried to get the scarf to sit up straight, but it insisted on kinking up on me.) The mistake? I was trying to knit in class, and I started knitting the scarf on metal needles. (I've been knitting on only wooden needles for so long that I forgot that it's possible for knitting to make noise.) After about 2 minutes I gave up; I couldn't knit. The needles just insisted on clicking every time I tried to make a stitch. I couldn't deal with sitting in class and clicking. Which meant that I got stared at my everyone in my class (my class is a little small) and then couldn't knit. It was awful.

A week and a half to go until I turn in my thesis... I'm not sure I'll survive this...

Spinning!

So my spinning kit arrived today. (Stop looking at me like that! I have a midterm, ok? I need to relax before it starts...) Also, I finally set stuff up so that I can put pictures here. So prepare for the onslaught of pictures! I promise that there usually will not be this many.

My spinning kit looks like this:

(It actually had a little more white fiber.) I tried some spinning (it was fun, although a little slow) and I got some yarn that looked like this:

I kept having the problem that I would only have part of the fiber going into the yarn... like, the roving would be as wide as my hand, and only about a quarter of it would be going into the spinning. Anyone know how to handle that? (Anyone out there who spins? I now know that there are people out there, because I got a comment yesterday! I was so thrilled!) I finally gave up and split the roving in half lengthwise, and only fought with half of it. Is there a better solution?

I then tried to find a way to soak the yarn. I don't have a bathtub, or a bucket, or a clean sink with a stopper (I live in a dorm, so this isn't as strage as it sounds at first) but I didn't give up, and I ended up with this:

(I couldn't get hot water out of the sink, so I ended up sticking my water bottle in the shower, and got thoroughly soaked in the process. But I finally ended up with soaked yarn that looked like this:


I hope that this isn't too awful for a first try... my biggest concern is sorting out the "only part of fibers going into the yarn" problem.

In other news, silk hankies arrived. What people don't tell you is that they are HUGE. Look! (A standard business card is added for scale.)

Aren't those big? I didn't realize that they would be so big when I ordered them. They're not hankies, they're bandanas!

Sheep Shawl

I am currently in the process of becoming obsessed with lave. Lace is bautiful, interesting to knit, and rewarding to block (which most knitting patterns are not). In addition, people seem to take joy in designing lace knitting patterns that I want to make. (Also, part of this obsession is fueled by the five miles of lace yarn I likely have waiting for me in California...)

I have recently bought some yarn from handpaintedyarn.com, which has absolutely gorgeous lace yarn. My favorite yarn is this:

(The picture is theirs; I still haven't set things up so that I can take digital images easily.) Isn't it great? Isn't it cheerful? It just makes me want to hug myself. I can't wait until I get it. I want to use it to make the Sheep Shawl, by Fiber trends. Wouldn't that be great? A cheerful scene in cheerful yarn? It just makes me tingle all over. (Ok, I know it makes me unreasonably happy. But it's sheep! and yellow! and sun!) This shawl, just lie the other shawls by its designer, is a garter stitch lace shawl. It seems to me that the garter stitch is unnecessary; it should be just as good if the even rows are purled, thus making it stockinette. Does anyone know whether this would work? (Is anyone reading this?)

Oh, and my spinning kit should be arriving any day now. I've made a bargain with myself: I wont' make myself wait to use it as long as I don't read Yarn Harlot before my thesis is due. Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? I spend hours and hours a day reading the archives of that blog; it should be better to spend an hour or so a day learning to spin. Right? Right? (I am not going to mention that my reserve copy of Knitting Rules! is RIGHT NOW waiting for me in the bookstore, just itching to be picked up... it won't take that long to read...right?)

And on a completely different note, a friend of mine wants to learn to make Klein bottle hats. Does anyone know of a good Klein bottle hat pattern that would be easy for a beginner to make? (Is anyone reading this?)

Gauge woes

(I know this is the second post today and I should be working on my thesis. Shut up.)

I just want to tell all of you (who are not reading this) about my Streakers shrug. You know, the one I posted about a couple of times? (I know that I don't have photographs. I should. Just another thing to do in my "copious free time.") Well, I finished knitting it, and I blocked it, and I sewed it up. And Houston? We have a problem.

My gauge swatches were fine. My measurements while I knit were fine. The shrug looks fine. Except... it is a little wide. Like, 8 inches. And the sleeves? They're a little narrow... like, by two inches. How, you may ask, was it possible for this to happen, given that I knitted so carefully? Well, I think it was in the blocking. The pattern said to steam block. I have several problems with steam blocking, namely (a) I don't have an iron and (b) I don't have an ironing board and (c) I don't have room to put it all even if I did have them. So I wet-blocked. (Ok, you can come out from under the table. I know it was dumb.) I should have pinned everything out into shape, gotten a spray bottle, and wet-blocked that way. But, of course, I didn't. Instead, I just dunked the whole thing in the shower... and it stretched. In the wrong direction. And made my sleeves too long and too narrow. Somehow. This has never happened to me before. I have never even heard of this happening before. Does stockinette randomly stretch horizontally and shrink vertically? Apparently it does, at least when it really wants to piss me off.

If you hear of a really tall person with either really long thin arms or a really wide back, please tell me.

(The shrug is, actually, wearable. It's just a little more uncomfortable than it should be...)

Total Surrender

Ok, I give up, I give in, I surrender totally, completely, and without reservation. You have been hounding me for a month, you have written brilliant articles that make my fingers yearn to go over to the dark side, and you have addicted me to a blog where the writer does it. And, just to add insult to injury, you sent me samples with an order of patterns. So I am finally giving up all resistance and learning how to spin.

I am not (and please, someone, stop me from doing this) going to learn to spin on a wheel. I don't have room/time/resources to get a wheel or learn on it. I have bought a kit to learn to spin (some roving, a spindle, and Interweave's book Spin It. I have also (much to my regret and infinite contrition) bought some silk hankies off of eBay (prompted by Knitty's article on knitting silk hankies). So this is absolute, total surrender, and you had better appreciate it, all you people who have been clearly conspiring to get me to spin.

The only ounce of dignity that I would like to keep is to put it off until my thesis is done. It's due in two weeks (much as I hate to say it), and I think learning to spin before then would be just stupid. But I just want whoever-you-are to know that I have given up! Completely! Utterly! So you can just stop tempting me.

Spinning had better be worth the humiliation.

On Arrogance

In my incredible arrogance against large needles (and the fact that they are difficult for me to hold) I have not knit anything with needles larger than size 7 in a good long time. However, in working on the Streaker's shrug I discovered something that I (in my infinite delusions of grandeur) had forgotten: when you knit things on large needles, things go damn fast! It is possible to knit three inches in 20 minutes, even on a garment that stretches across your back! It's only impossible if you're knitting on size four needles.

Looking over my yarn supply I noticed something: I have no full skeins of yarn that have recommended needle sizes over 5. I'm inexplicably drawn to yarn and projects that will take me forever to knit and will take miles and miles of intricate lace, all the while neglecting all of the instant gratification given by large yarn and needles. (And remember how I said htat I hated double points? I could get obsessed by knitting socks (like some people) but my hatred for double points precludes such a simple solution...) I think that in the future I'm going to have to make myself knit things on big needles sometimes, just to make sure that I remember how rewarding it can be.

Have I mentioned that my bf is starting to knit? He claims that he isn't really into it yet (yeah, right) although he occasionally picks it up to knit a little at random times in the day. He doesn't have much time, so he doesn't knit that much. But his knitting is already even (although a little too tight) and straight, so I predict that he will be a wonderful knitter. The main problem that we're having is knitting style. I'm a continental knitter, but continental is more difficult to learn, so I showed him English knitting. (Which he learned in about five minutes, brilliant man that he is.) Unfortunatley, the two of us working together couldn't figure out how to both hold the right needle in the hand and put the yarn around the needle (to make the stitch). So he's experimenting with different ways to hold the needles. We'll see what he comes up with. You'd think that two intelligent college students could come up with something, wouldn't you? But, apparently, you'd be wrong.

All together, I have learned two valuable things:
1. Just because needles are big doesn't mean that what comes off of them is inferior (and in some ways it is superior). (On the other hand, looking at the size 50 needles that Knit.1 was advertizing just made me laugh. Is there yarn BIG ENOUGH for those?!) Don't be arrogant about needle sizes.
2. English knitting is faster to learn, even though the question of how to hold the needle can be challenging. Don't be arrogant about knitting styles.

And at the moment I am so fed up with grading (3 hours down and about a gazillion left to go) that I'm going to take a 20 minute bus ride (when I could take a 5 minute one and then walk for 5 minutes) so that I have time to knit.

An Annoying Day

is a day when I don't have time for knitting. I was reading a book earlier today, and so I didn't knit during class. Then I knit for about 20 minutes before teaching section (which went horribly). Since then I've been working on my thesis (sorta). But not knitting, which is depressing. And it's 2 in the morning, which is intrinsically depressing. Altogether not a good day. And tomorrow looks worse: I have a lot of work to do, which means no knitting in the evening. On the bright side... there are classes during which I can knit.

Engineering Knitting

So last night I stopped working on my thesis and went and did my computer science homework. What did this consist of? Mostly drawing straight lines on a screen and hoping that the diagrams turned out OK. During the four hours I worked I had five minutes of thought. Which is a little depressing, and left me wishing that I could knit.

So today after class I went to the computer lab to print out the knitting patterns that I don't yet have printed. Obviously, this simple tast took me two hours and made me miss lunch. And after that I had another hour of putting them all away. But now I'm (almost) done, and I can relax. Except for the whole thing of a thesis due in three weeks (AAAH) but I'm going to ignore it for now and just knit a bit. I think that I had enough stress yesterday to excuse it. Or, at least, I'm going to tell myself that.

I have to say, one of the only things that is getting me through all of this is the knowledge that I will be able to go home and play with dyeing yarn and knitting some beautiful Angora yarn (from Elsebeth Lavold), which is all waiting for me at home in California. I'll be able to relax, catch up on grading (I am not looking forward to that, but at least I'll be able to do the math for it), concentrate on my other two classes, and read something fun without feeling guilty.

Visiting and Reading

Some day I'm going to learn not to read Yarn Harlot at four in the morning... especially when I need to get up early the next day.

Today I visited MIT (and started knitting the Streakers Shrug from the Spring 06 Interweave knits... is it wrong to start two projects on consecutive days? I'm going to claim "no", at least in this case, as I finished up three projects in the last week. Please don't mention my thesis). I attended some lectures (and knitted) and talked to some professors (without knitting). I really liked it, especially how many windows the different classrooms had, and the beautiful view to the river. So I felt all nice when getting back home.

However, when I got back here I promptly went to sleep, woke up at 11, and did homework until a bit ago. And then I decide to read some Yarn Harlot. (There's my mistake. You would think that I'd learn not to, but oh, well.) In the ay 2005 archives she points to Fiddlesticks Knitting, which is amazing, beautiful, wonderful, and superb. I've been looking at their patterns for hte last half hour. But I was good! I haven't bought anything yet! (Not that this has stopped me from fantacising about the patterns... but at least I'm trying.)

Resistance is NOT Futile

I am assiduously resisting the temptation to learn to spin. I know where that temptation leads: to buying way too much stuff, much of it I will likely never use. Like the yarn that I bought yesterday, which I had no need to buy then: I could have waited a month or two, since I am not planning on doing anything with it until I get back to Cali, anyway. (On the other hand, I've spent all day daydreaming about learning to dye that yarn, so maybe that'll acutally do some good.)

Why this terrible rise in temptation? Because I've been reading yarn harlot that's why! She makes spinning and dyeing sound like so much fun I just want to jump out of my chair and go out and buy stuff and learn to use it. Regarless of the fact that I have no kitchen / dishes / pots to dye stuff in, that I have a thesis due in less than a month, and that it's midnight and all stores are closed. I really need to become more resistant to temptation... or at least do something that does not expect a 100% commitment on my part.

I am a bad person

I am a bad person. Here are the reasons why:

1. Inspired by the Yarn Harlot blog, I looked at a few articles about dyeing yarn. This means that I spent half an hour reading three (almost identical) articles about dyeing yarn with Kool-aid, and another 15 minutes looking at yarn dyes at KnitPicks. (They're on sale at $10 each. Luckily I was good enough not to buy them.)

2. Because I had just spent almost an hour looking and dyes, and impressed by the low low prices of undyed yarn at said KnitPicks, I bought 15 skeins of undyed Merino yarn, each weighing 100g: 10 lace weight and 5 fingering weight. Which means that I have more lace weight yarn than I could ever knit; I have more than 5 miles of lace weight yarn, and a bit over two-and-a-half of fingering weight yarn. (Isn't that a scary thought?) I was smart enough to have it shipped to Cali, not here. I'm never going to have time to knit 7.5 miles of yarn (plus my current stash) and finish my thesis before June.

3. In order to use up this yarn that I had foolishly bought, I spent another hour looking for lace shawl patterns. I did find some nice ones. On the other hand... that's two hours wasted, $60 down the drain, and no thesis work. But I will likely never have to buy lace weight or fingering weight yarn again, and I have lots of spares in case I mess up some yarn.

4. Instead of sleeping (which I honestly tried to do, and will go back to trying to do later) I am now reading Yarn Harlot some more and writing this.

I think this all adds up to at least one day of pure torture right before my thesis is due.

Wait... who'm I kidding? I'm going to have to pull at least three all-nighters to finish it, and very likely more.

KnitNet

Am I the only person pissed at Knitnet? It's already March 6th and their February issue hasn't come out! Here I am, in the middle of a thesis-induced panic and lethargy (I don't know how it's possible, but it's happening) and I don't even have a new issue of a knitting magazine to look through! Gaah!

Inner Dialogue

Inna: You know, you should really work on your thesis. You have another meeting with your adviser on Tuesday, you've really done nothing since Friday, and the thesis is due in less than a month.

Inna: A Month?!?! *picks up knitting and begins to knit*

Inna: See, this is how you get into these things. You worry about your thesis, can't concentrate on it, decide to do some knitting in order to calm down, and waste hours that you could have been working on your thesis knitting instead.

Inna: *gibbering in terror while knitting*

Inna: Although I'm really glad that you finished that hat. And the yarn you bought for the Danica scarf is really nice. But that doesn't mean that it couldn't have been put off.

Inna: But I like knitting! It makes me feel much nicer than my thesis does!

Inna: But now what are you doing? You're not even knitting! You're blogging! And you're reading Yarn Harlot! Can't you even pretend to be productive?!

Double Points

Have I mentioned that I hate double pointed needles? I think I did (like, two days ago), but I'm currently knitting on double points with a scratchy yarn in a color I hate, so I'm just going to say it again: I hate double pointed needles. (Why am I doing this stupid thing, you might ask? Because I have never done beaded knitting before (I am making a beaded hat), because I accidentally bought some ugly orange beads on eBay and I want to get rid of them, and because I though that if I ruin yarn wiht beads I'd rather it be ugly yarn with ugly beads. And now that I'm halfway done with the damned thing I'm going to finish it.

Part of the motivation comes from a strict rule I have that I may only work on 4 projects at a time. My bedroom is 8ft by 8ft and my suitemates don't like my knitting all over the common room (it is anyway). I cannot afford the space to have unfinished knitting projects around (or, at least, not many). So only four. I currently have two working slots open, but I want to have three. (One is taken up with a wrap for my mother that I only work on during class. One is taken up by the damned hat. There's also the Stripes and Bobbles scarf, but that one doesn't count because only assembly is left, and the only reason I can't do assembly is because I lent Scarf Style to a friend. (I'll assemble at knitting circle, where my friend will be.) So it doesn't count.) But having three slots would be even cooler than having two, and I really only have half of the hat left to do. That's nothing! I can do it, easy. And then I can (a) take the second ball of ugly yarn back to the store (b) buy yarn for the projects I want to do (c) crow in victory. Three slots open is the most I'll ever likely have, since I don't think I'll ever be able to finish everything I'm working on at a time.)

But on to why I hate double points. You have to move the stitches around all the time, and it's ANNOYING. You have to tighten the stitches at the end of each one, so as not to get a ladder. And there's no good way to hold them when there's really only one or two left on the needle. And they slip and slide, and they're diffficult to put down in a way that doesn't stretch the knitting, and they sometimes randomly slip out of the knitting (even though I use wooden needles). I don't understand how anyone could like them, why anyone would want to knit socks, sleeves, or anything else on them, and how come socks appear (by the sheer volume of published patterns) to be the most popular garment to knit. They involve double points! If you want to knit something fast, or small, knit a skinny scarf. Or a dishcloth. Anything reasonable!

Well, you might say, why not just be reasonable and use a circular needle? You really only need to use double points for the top. Well, you see, short circular needles make my hands hurt because they're difficult to grip. And since I already have some version of RSI I don't want my hands hurting any more than necessary. And two circular needles have almost all of the same problems that double points do (except for the slipping out, even metal circulars don't seem to fall out of the knitting), and anyway, to use needles long enough for my hands not to hurt I'd need to use 24" ones or so, and a pair of those would just look ridiculous coming out of a hat. So I use double points, even though I hate them.

On the bright side, there are patterns for hats that are knit flat. (I love flat knitting, even though I hate sewing.) Elsebeth Lavold's are especially cool (everything that she does is especially cool). So I have hope. Not for this hat, though, which is turning out wonderfully (although very orange) even though it's knit on double points. Well, nobody's perfect.

Knitting Surprises

One of the coolest things about knitting are the unexpected things that happen in the course of the development of a pattern. I'm currently knitting Odessa, by Grumperina, and one of hte things that surprised me in the pattern was the yarn overs. In a warm hat yarn overs are not a really desirable feature, and I wondered why they were necessary. Now, after I've knit about 20 rows I'm finally seeing the point: the yarn overs are almost invisible, but the section of knitting right before each yarn over stands at a different angle from the section right after the yarn over. These are what produce the two different spirals of the pattern.

No matter how much I think I've figured out knitting surprises like this keep jumping out at me. I hope they don't stop. =)

More Knitting Stuff!

I wish there were more about knitting on the web. I don't mean blogs (although some of them are really great) and I don't mean patterns. What would be really cool (and maybe exists but I haven't found it) is a place to discuss designing stuff. I sometimes think it would be cool to design something; I sometimes even try to do it. What I don't have is a sense of proportion, of what works and what doesn't. For example, my grandmother's poncho. I did not know (a) how much yarn it would take (b) how much time it would take (c) how stretchy the top would be (d) how big around it should really be on the bottom. On the other hand, it would be great if there was a place where I could post something like "Hey, wouldn't it be a great idea to..." and have someone (like me right now, but of course "experience is what you get after you need it") say "Are you nuts? It'll take three million years and four miles of yarn and you still won't be done. Oh, and it'll be huge."

On the other hand, I'm sure that professional designers are not always willing to look at these, and the rest of us... well I don't know about other people, but I'm a pattern coward. I'm willing to experiment on little things but I am not willing to spend $100 and 100 hours on knitting something that will be fit for an elephant to wear. Or a chimpanzee. I want something that at least has some use, if only as a tablecloth (which is how a wrap that I made is currently being used...). Which I'm not sure my grandmother's poncho will, although she said that she liked it. (On the other hand, what kind of grandmother wouldn't like something that her granddaughter made?)

Well, I'm going to start doing it here, just in case someone is actually reading this and feels like returning me to sanity before I go completely off the deep end. In a positive-attitude attempt to start, here is my new scarf idea:

A few months ago the yarn store was having a sale. They had a bunch of bags of yarn that they were selling at $30 each. Now the idea is, of course, that you buy this bag, it has one skein of yarn in it of a bunch of types, and then you need more of the same yarn. One bag, however, had about 9 balls of Filatura di Crosa 100% silk fingering weight yarn in two colors. (They were all tangled together in a huge snarl, which is why they hadn't been separated.) I had just been planning to start a fingering-weight shawl, so this looked perfect. The bag had a bunch of other yarn, though, most of it incredibly ugly: some chunky yellow stuff, some very thin, very dark, brownish green ribbon yarn, some beige variegated varying-thickness yarn (i hate varying thickness yarn), some other beige fluffy stuff that doesn't match any of the other yarns, and so on. None of these are yarns for which I would pay money. (The Filatura di Crosa already cost $30, so these other skeins didn't count. And there was some reasonably nice stuff, too.) So I'm thinking: make a garter stitch scarf with all of this stuff. Then make a big pot of black dye (I'm interested with learning to dye anyway, so this'll be a good start =) ) and toss it in. The dye should kill the ugly colors and BOOM: you have an interesting textured scarf. I hope. =) Is this crazy, or sane?

It's 5:30 am. I can't sleep and I have a class to attend tomorrow at 11:30, office hours at 2. Tomorrow is going to be a terrible horrible no good very bad day. I've been thinking about my thesis (bad), my knitting (good, but what am I going to do with my stash while I go to England for a year?), and my friends who are all moving around the country next year, so that nobody is going to live in the same area any more.

I was talking to a friend, and I told him that I had bought some yarn to make presents. "You knit? You give knitted gifts? There's your mistake, right there." It was as though he thought that a knitted gift is something to be embarrassed about, as though it is impossible to give a functional and attractive knitted gift. I've had people tell me that my knitting is beautiful and that they would love a knitted gift, but statements like that always make me wonder: how much do people really appreciate a knitted gift?