Sexy Turkey Hat

Wow.  It’s THE crochet pattern for sexy turkey hats.

More turkey hat here.

Boys Don’t Knit

Today was the first real snowfall of the season and it got really, really cold. Every un-centrally heated room in my two-floor apartment was 48 degrees fahrenheit before turning on my space heaters. Then I roasted the ice crystals off of my walls and everything was OK again.

At school one of my teachers, who knows I knit, told me about a very effeminate man named Hirose Kouji who is an expert knitter with several books and T.V. appearances behind him.

I was amazed but not shocked exactly; when I attended DesignFesta in Tokyo a few weeks ago, all of the three people who I saw selling hand-knitted goods were men. And they were fairly manly men to boot. Clearly the men-who-knit trend is blazing far ahead of that in the U.S., at least publicly anyway.

Coincidentally, when I was a knitting instructor in the U.S., my first student was a man. He told me he wanted to knit lingerie for his wife. He was very charming, but clearly I have a weakness for that sort of thing…

Shetland Tea Shawl

Sometimes it amazes me how the secret to completing something is just having all of the right parts and skills put together. I’m always giving myself a hard time for being so slow on my projects and then everything comes together when some skill that was so agonizing to learn becomes easy, or a particular material finally comes into my hands.

A few things were made more complete in that way today; it was a very good day.

First, I finished the “Shetland Tea Shawl” pattern from Meg Swansen’s A Gathering of Lace; created from handspun Ashland Bay Merino Top in Sage. I knitted this on and off for three years and I realized halfway through that the reason I kept procrastinating completing it was because I knew instinctively that I didn’t have enough fiber, and because lace knitting was hard for me at the time.

I took the project back to Japan with me when I visited home for a week and ordered more of the fiber from Paradise Fibers, an excellent company who shipped very fast. I finally finished the shawl today. Even though there are mistakes in it, I’m quite happy with it; I see it as a chronological record of my improvements as a knitter and spinner, as the stitches and quality of the yarn improves as it fans out (to my eyes, anyway.) The pattern does not include the “Diamond Madeira” panel because I wanted the finished shawl to be smaller.

This is the shawl off the needles:

This is the shawl washed and blocked on my floor. Tatami was a perfect surface to pin to:

I also noticed today, after procrastinating practicing for my upcoming jazz gig, that pizzacato had gotten easier, my right hand has gotten stronger. It made practicing jazz feel fun, not agonizing.

Yay, me.

Hairpin Lace

I don’t know why, but I’ve been on a mission to drool over lace patterns today.

First, after wasting hours looking up the history of lace online at work (its birthplace was in Belgium! my birthplace too!), I came home to an email from one of my favorite pattern designers, Stitch Diva Studios, with loads of hairpin lace projects that are absolutely begging me to make them.

Must learn hairpin lace, immediately.

*sigh*

(;_;)