echo knits

The thing about knitting is that it can be as simple as knitting one stitch, or as complicated as advanced lace or fair isle work. This is true for the technology that surrounds knitting as well.

When I first learned to knit, I was about 8 years old. I knew one stitch, had access to one kind of yarn, and the needles I had were hand me downs from my great aunt. I never finished anything because I didn’t know how to bind off. Which was probably just as well, because I didn’t have the patience to make anything big enough to make it worth finishing.

When I relearned in college, I kept track of my rows with hatch marks on small pieces of paper, or the familiar stitch markers that stay on the end of your needle. I never liked these much because you couldn’t move them one handed and they don’t work well for knits in the round on dpns or circulars. The problem I have with paper is that I loose track, my post-it goes missing, or I misplace the original pattern, or similar ridiculous mishap. Those seem to follow me for no reason.

I’ve made and tried to use an abacus style stitch counter, but I either don’t have the patience to use them, or mine doesn’t work quite right, because I’ve never really gotten into the swing of using it.

What I do use to keep track is my iPhone.

There are two really good stitch keeping applications for the iPhone, Knit Buddy and StitchMinder. I use both, having found the other ones available on the iTunes store unreliable.

StitchMinder, on the left with the purple background, has been around longer, and is free. I’ve been using it since I found it and like it a lot, except that you can’t set the names of the counters to anything except the preprogrammed choices. This makes it mostly useful for one project with several things to keep track of, but not several projects at once. However reliable and makes a satisfying clicking sound, and was the first knitting app available for iPhone.

KnitBuddy is more than I usually spend on iPhone apps, at $4.99 it’s on the higher side of the scale. However, it has several features not found in StitchMinder, the ability to add several projects, keep track of needles or hooks, and of your yarn stash. I especially like the fact that you can photograph your projects and add as many counters as you need to each project. Since I keep track of my needles and stash in Ravelry I haven’t used the needles, hooks, or yarn feature, but if there were a way to import it from once place to another I’d do it in a heartbeat. I wish I knew cocoa so I could volunteer to write a Ravelry app. It’s pretty tedious to enter that much info into a phone app, especially when it’s already online somewhere.

Anyway, you can set up multiple counters for each project so you can keep track of row repeats and pattern repeats, increases, decreases, and stitches. There’s also a note section in each pattern, to keep track of needles, yarn, special notes or whatever. You can also switch between US and Metric sizes for your needles and hooks, and add size, type, length, and material as well as any special notes. The yarn section is set up similarly, with sections for weight, fiber, color, dye lot, number of skeins, yardage and grams, as well as a section to keep track of your swatch gauge and notes for each. You can even take a picture, or use an existing picture of the yarn in question. So all in all, worth the $4.99.

Coming later, an actual knitting update! I’m still not back to my usual amount of knitting because of the tendonitis, and I’m theoretically supposed to be packing, but I haven’t stopped completely. That would be ridiculous.

I have a confession to make. I have a problem with knitting monogamy.

A serious problem.

At the moment I don’t have a ravelry project widget, and there’s two reasons for that. The first is that I can’t get either of the premade ones to work with my Wordpress theme, and the second is that I have more WIPs than is frankly sane. I finished Seraphim at the beginning of March, and then a pair of socks, but I’m back to bouncing back and forth between projects again. Currently I have, on the needles and not hibernating: Lace Ribbon Scarf, Kiri, Anastasia Socks, Icarus and Bramble.

The hibernating/half finished projects alone are kind of ridiculous so I won’t even try to list them here. I keep telling myself that I should finish one project before I start another, but then I get distracted by gorgeous yarn or a pretty pattern, and then I can’t help myself.

This is especially bad when I just want to finish whatever I’m knitting, but is even worse when I get distracted by other crafts.

Like these:

Oranges, lemons, and eggplants in various stages of completion

Or this:

A shawl pin I’m playing around with

Or this:

An orifice hook I made for the one I um… broke.

Or, the first bobbin of a two ply yarn I’m spinning from some superwash top I bought a few years ago

I’ve had a few tendonitis flares for the past few weeks, which is part of the reason I try to alternate my crafty pursuits, but it’s also just that there are too many things I want to make and not enough time to make them in!

Back when I started knitting again, after a long sabbatical while I went to high school and made a lot of jewelry and polyclay things, I taught myself how to knit on dpns. I eventually tried to make the famous blueberry waffle socks, but never got past the cuff.

When I graduated from college and started working full time, I had disposable income at last. I fell in love with the gorgeous self striping yarns that Village Yarn Shop had in it’s old location, tucked away in an independent bookshop in Midtown Mall. I started my ridiculous stash this way, acquiring sock yarn (and later, a crazy amount of lace-weight) but not knowing where to start knitting.

In the days before Ravelry, I found it difficult to find a pattern that I liked. I knit widdershins, but because I am terrible about checking gauge, they came out much too small. I tried another top down pattern, and didn’t keep track well enough of my stitches so they ended up lopsided. I started and ripped and restarted the same pair of plain black socks for my husband, and tried in vain to jumpstart myself by joining TWO sock clubs in ‘08. I started the first installment of Blue Moon Fiber Art’s Rockin’ Sock Club, but got distracted by other projects and other knitting. So my socks and sock yarn languished, my poor feet missing wonderful hand knit socks.

About two weeks ago I was brave enough to start a new pair, mostly because I wanted a portable non challenging project to take a break after I finished knitting Seraphim and took a small break from Kiri.

I ended up using Wendy Johnson’s basic toe-up pattern, since it seemed to be one of the most popular pattern around. I was actually good and checked my gauge, which is one of my least favorite parts of knitting, and figured out short rows at last. I actually feel kind of ridiculous that it took me that long, and it took several false starts. And now I have a pair of socks that fits perfectly, for the first time.

I cast on again for a new pair almost immediately, but frogged it because the colors started pooling. I started again with a skein I’d been trying to turn into toe up socks for at least 6 months, since I’d been keeping it with a set of needles in my Emergency Knitting bag. This is working much better, and I’m doing this pattern, which is based around Wendy’s basic toe-up pattern.

My recent acquisitions at my LYS are only enabling my addiction, especially when I should really be working on the fine lace Kiri I’m knitting for my grandmother. But this does mean my husband will be happy, since I can start knitting up all the sock yarn I’ve managed to acquire for the past few years.

I recently bought myself an Amazon Kindle. Being a technology-whore, I’ve wanted one since they first came out, but wasn’t ready to commit to a first generation product that kept selling out. The Kindle 2 is not only available and in stock, it also came out right around my birthday and right before my company distributed bonuses. I held out for the better part of three weeks, after I paid all of my bills and made sure I could still afford it, and then splurged. It’s estimated ETA is the middle of next week, so until then I get to plan what kinds of books to put on it, and what documents I might want to convert. Of the various features, the thing that drew me the most to it is that it supports .pdfs as well as several other formats.

You know what this means, right? It means that I can carry around a whole collection of knitting patterns all the time. Without printing pages and killing trees. Now, I know that full .pdf support isn’t quite up to snuff, but work with me on this one. The kindle has Amazon’s whispernet technology, like mobile broadband for cellphones. This means constant contact with the internet, which I clearly cannot live without, and constant access to Ravelry. Now, let’s be fair, I already have an iPhone, so I always have the internet around, but it’s hard to read patterns easily on the small screen, and browsing can be a pain. And I have an asus eee (bought after last year’s bonus), but you need wifi to connect, and it’s battery life is dismal. The Kindle though has a long battery life, is easily readable, and compact so I can add it to my knitting bag or larger purse. Now, let’s be fair, I don’t need one. I just wanted one. So all of this might be that I was seduced by a shiny piece of technology. But man do I love shiny technology.

The other thing I find intriguing is that there is already a decent selection of knitting books available for Kindle. Even patterns, like this one for fingerless gloves, and electronic copies of old knitting books and patterns, like this 19th century book of needlework instructions. I love that old texts and magazines are being preserved this way, even if they aren’t accessible outside of the Kindle format yet. Project Gutenberg has been making out of copyright books available for years now, I used to download them to read on my old palm 100 about 7 years ago. Google Books already makes many books available to read online, and recently made a deal with Sony to add it’s public domain books to the eLibrary. Many of these can also be downloaded in .pdf (the Sony devices aren’t natively compatible with .pdf files).

If the Kindle really takes off and similar products get produced, it’s likely we’ll see even more esoteric and rare books be converted to digital copy, making them actually available. Without the cost of printing, books that have been out-of-print for years could be digitized and downloaded and actually read. Which would frankly be kind of amazing. I would love to have access to a whole archive of old knitting patterns to pour over and translate into modern technique and knitting style.

If nothing else, I’m hoping it will actually get me reading books again, instead of listening to countless audio books. I love audio books for lots of reasons, the primary one being that I have my hands free while I’m listening. This lets me listen in the car, and then pick up where I left off while I’m knitting, doing housework, or whatever. It’s difficult to read a typical paperback while knitting because they don’t stay open unless you break the spine, and I treat my books better than that. I like that the Kindle will stay upright if you have the right case or stand, so I can read hands free.

However, this could all be speculation. I don’t have it in my hands yet, and it’s highly likely that I’m overestimating it’s usefulness. I’m hoping at the least it will be great for knitting patterns, all those classics I’ve been meaning to read, and all kinds of other documents I can get digitally and would read if they were more convenient. At most, I’m hoping it will do all those things and be a worthwhile investment for leisure and school (downloading scholarly articles from jstor anyone?) and possibly be popular enough to stimulate publishers into making more things available in digital copy. Hey, a girl can dream right?

Hi, and welcome to the new home of echo knits.

For a little while, I used to blog at wordpress.com, but I was a sporadic poster at best. This is my attempt at a new site, coupled with my acceptance to a graduate program in Textile History. I had originally planned to restart blogging in November, and then at the beginning of the New Year, so I’m getting a bit of a late start, especially compared to most bloggers around. About a month ago, I was just about to start up again, but my hard drive crashed completely, and this is the first I’m getting around to a new start.

My radio silence between the old echo knits and new was probably beneficial for everyone, since the past few months since I applied to grad school have been mostly filled with me worrying about getting in, changing positions at work, and lots and lots of on call.

This blog will not only follow my prep and planning as I move myself, my stash, my spinning wheel, my cat, and my husband (eventually) to start school in the fall, but also my increasing interest in the craft movement and the use of technology in craft. I’ll also be tracking my new foray into socks that actually fit, my new spinning skills, and occasional non-fiber escapades. And even maybe a little sewing.