(Not a) Crafty Book Review

Ok, so this doesn't exactly fit with Freeze-dried's summer book club, but considering it's media and I hated the book I selected for this week's reading, I'm going to go ahead and review the videogame Kirby's Epic Yarn.

The book:  I tried reading Yarn by Jon Armstrong for this week, with emphasis on tried.  I couldn't finish it.  I think I've put down without finishing maybe four or five novels in my life.  It's got decent reviews on Amazon, and apparently got good reviews in Publisher's Weekly, the LA Times, and Locus, and was nominated for a Phillip K Dick Award, but I hated it almost as soon as I opened it.

Why?  It's supposedly fashionpunk, a twist on dystopic cyberpunk, and the story focuses on a master tailor who worked his way up through crime and intrigue from the neo-feudal corn based wastelands of America's heartlands to the global center of fashion.  I was pretty intrigued by the concept, since I love me some dystopic fiction and sewing, but I was very disappointed.  I've read my share of cyberpunk, and this was basically cyberpunk with programming replaced with sewing: the author seems to have a pretty good understanding of fashion and sewing terms, but threw them in in a way that, even as someone who knows the terms and is used to encountering a lot of jargon in genre fiction, I found off putting.  The writing, both dialogue and descriptive, was otherwise terribly stilted, with overly long, complex sentences put together with the same repetitive and boring adjectives.  And don't get me started on the gender politics: the only women I saw in about 150 pages were literally sex objects presented for the male gaze.

So that's how we get a review of a videogame rather than a book.  J and I picked up Kirby's Epic Yarn for the Wii on super-discount sale, so I'm not sure if I would love it as much if we'd paid full price (50USD), but for 20USD, I love it.  I tend to play a lot of games, but I would identify as neither a gamer nor the new-to-the gaming industry "female casual gamer" demographic.  Shooting zombies or matching jewels? No thank you.  Turning into a yarn robot who unravels sweater snowmen? Yes please.

I've never played anything in the Kirby franchise before, but the game doesn't require it to be enjoyable.  It's a platformer side scrolling game with about as much storyline as any Mario game (which is about maximum amount of story I want in my game, frankly).  There's no princess to save, and it's cooperative two player rather than competitive.  The aesthetics are awesome for someone who loves sewing/knitting/crafting, because the designers obviously put a lot of thought and care into tying both the game design and the game mechanics together aesthetically.  The image above doesn't really do the design justice: the fabric detail of the backgrounds and worlds are really detailed and beautiful, and the fabric design has a lot to do with the interactivity of the game play.  The point of the game is to collect points and objects to unlock more game, but a lot of the levels have such fun mechanics (ie, swimming as a dolphin, bouncing, etc) that they're very replayable.

The other thing I like about it is that it's challenging and varied but not difficult or demanding.  That is, there's enough puzzle solving to hold your attention, but it doesn't require you to try a level over and over to succeed or to memorize a bunch of nonsense key combinations to beat the bad guys.  I find overly dense interface to be a real barrier to my enjoyment of a game, so if I can't understand it without a long tutorial or memorizing a bunch of junk, I just don't play anymore.  Kirby has a good combination of being pretty, fun, and easy to play in short bursts while having more goal and variety than something like Bedazzled or Farmville.

Crazy Knitting

I've started what might be a crazy knitting project.  The image above is of a "coffee cloth" from Marianne Kinzel's First Book of Modern Lace Knitting, and I love me some lace knitting.  I haven't done any lace knitting in the past few years a. due to time and b. I never wore the scarves and shawls I made, so I stopped making more.

I never wore them because I'm not really a shawl person, and although I liked lace knitting, I wasn't really a lace wearing person until recently.  I spent the last few years of college and the first few years of graduate school trying hard to look grown up and professional, so there wasn't much room in my closet for frilly things. Due in part to having more room in my life to not dress professional (hello next year of no teaching!), my own changing taste, and more confidence that I can be taken seriously while wearing ruffles and lace, I wanted to go back to lace knitting.

But I'm still not really a shawl wearing person.  I do wear a lot of circle skirts, though, and I had several balls of a wool/silk blend in my overflowing stash.  (I have a newfound concern with clearing out my stash besides our impending move: I found another ball of 100% wool which had many of its wraps snapped, I assume from being eaten by moths.  We've never had moth sachets in our house before, but we do now!)

So here's the plan: I cast on and knit a stockinette stitch yoke to a little more than my waist measurement, leaving the ends unconnected so there will be a slit to get me in and out of the skirt.  I gradually increased the yoke so that it measured both more than my hip measurement and had the right number of stitches to repeat the lace pattern. (Rather than starting with the very center of the pattern, which was all just [k1 yo] rep to get the piece to size, I started a few rounds down where the actual lace pattern started).  When the yoke got to the right size, I connected the ends and knit a few rows in stockinette in the round, then started the lace pattern.  The original pattern has eight repeats of the pattern; my skirt has twenty five.  And rather than wearing just the lace, which is intentionally see-through, I plan on making a silk or other light fabric circle skirt to go with it, and stitch them together at the yoke, leaving the hem of the lace to do its own thing.

Does that sound like a crazy project?  Have you ever had a technique you wanted to do, but didn't know what to do with it that would be wearable/useable for you?

That was quick

I love the pattern for this sweater--I've never really made a sweater for myself (except for one shrug/vest), because they seem like such a huge time commitment, but this went together so much faster than I expected that it gives me confidence to try a larger sweater pattern.  Although I've already started a second project with the same pattern in a different yarn with a different lace pattern, so a big sweater will have to wait.

The first picture is probably more representative of the actual color, but I wanted to show off the back lace detail.  I like this pattern because it has good spaces to play around with lace patterns which don't change the stitch count, and it goes so quick.  It's cast on from the neckline and worked down, with the sleeves worked separately when the underarm is reached.  The other reason I like this pattern so much is that it doesn't require seaming, which I hate.  The pattern as written calls for seaming the sides of the sleeves together, but I picked up a few stitches in the underarm and worked the sleeves in the round--seamless!  

It's a nice feeling to finish something when so much else is in limbo.  Besides the move, I feel kind of adrift in my research right now.  I had a direction before going to New York, both in planning the trip and because I had a colloquium (workshop) deadline to meet, and before that I had the fellowships to work on cranking out.  Part of the problem is summer--my first summer in grad school I had a finite research project to work on, and my second summer I had exams to prep for.  Now I have a master's and I'm supposedly qualified to figure out my own research direction (that masters supposedly qualifies me for a lot of things I don't feel prepared for, but that's another post).  

I've spent the weekend (and really, the last few weeks) kind of bouncing back and forth between transcribing/spreadsheeting what I already have, reading secondary sources, and trying to track down primary sources.  (Part of the problem with trying to write a dissertation which breaks old paradigms with new research and new sources is that you can't just raid old footnotes to find your sources).  My dissertation covers about 300 years, and I haven't got a clear chapter deadline to work towards.  

Knitting, sewing, and garden projects seem so much easier to start right now because they have definite start and end points, and gardening time comes up whether you're ready for it or not.  And the end of grad school (or at least my funding for it) will come up whether I'm ready for it or not, but I have to find some way to break the next few years without teaching or outside deadlines up into manageable chunks, because even right now, at the beginning of the gathering stage, I already feel overwhelmed by my sources.  Organizing my bibliography and primary sources helped make it feel more manageable, but cataloging it all isn't the same as finishing going through it.  Would that research projects could go together quickly and seamlessly.

On Handspun and Handmade

 

I have a terrible secret to tell you, dear reader:  I used to hate handspun yarn.  It's lumpy, it's irregular, it comes in crazy colors, it slips around on the needles, it's hard to afford enough of it to make anything bigger than this:

That is, if you can't tell, a fluffy mohair handspun knit in an open pattern which will hopefully be put together into a pillowcase soon (it was my project on the train to and from NYC).  I prefer more tailored clothes and a more sedate home-look, and something like the above is not really my style (although I'm hoping that in small doses it can be a nice accent piece).  Because I don't care for handspun, I've ended up with an entire drawer full of it:

Why do I have a crazy drawer full of yarn I supposedly don't like?  My mother.  My mother doesn't knit, although she crochets a little, and she's friends with handspinners and likes to go to craft fairs, so she sends me tons of yarn for birthdays, holidays, whenever.  (She also sends me a ton of thrift store cloth and vintage clothing "to make something cute out of" which is why I have a dresser and a rubbermaid full of stash, but that's another post).  What a problem to have, right?

I think she likes the idea of these yarns: she gets to pet them, pick ones she likes, and be involved in the things I make without having to commit the time to making things or storing them in the meantime.  She's a full time RN with a long commute, so she doesn't get a lot of down time or bus knitting time like I do (I'll say this for academia: it's a good thing there's a recent trend towards knitting in meetings and at talks, because otherwise I'd be bored out of my mind). 

But back to the yarn.  As part of my recent efforts to de-stash, I've been trying really hard to knit down/sew down things I already own, and finding patterns to fit the yarn, rather than find new yarn to fit a pattern I want.    I just started this shrug sweater pattern on Ravelry, and paired it with the blush-to-raspberry yarn at the top of the post, and it's changing my mind about handspun.

The pattern is fairly tailored, and the yarn, while not slubby, has a lot of thick-n-thin which gives the otherwise tailored look a little interest (I'm also doing an inset chevron lace detail on the chest, arms, and middle back which shows up as holiness here, but which will hopefully add a little interest when it's blocked out).  The yarn was dyed in the wool and then spun, so it's giving a nice ombre/tequila sunrise effect as it goes from blush to pink, and there's a lot of pretty changes in the yarn to look at as it knits up.  The reason this yarn and pattern combo is changing my mind about handspun is because it pushes me outside my comfort zone and will hopefully add a little twist to my otherwise fairly tailored (and increasingly similar-looking) wardrobe.  I think part of the danger of sewing or making so much of your own clothing is that it's really easy to make a lot of similar things (at least for me).  It's easy to make patterns you know work well, it's easy to select the same fabric types or colors over and over because they work, it's easy to make similar styles because they go with things you already own.  And as much space my mother's presents take up, it's kind of fun to jump into something feet first that I wouldn't have done if I didn't want to get rid of stash.

Progress

Of a sort. I finished Dr. Asiago's book, and I feel horrible saying this, but it was so boring. He does military/political/diplomatic history, and I'm much more interested in social/cultural/diplomatic history. We're interested in many of the same historiographic issues, and of course, the same groups and periods, but very different approaches to them. Not that I have issues with them as scholarly work--there are parts that I'll be re-reading because they say complex things very clearly, but the military/political angle puts me right to sleep.

Also got some writing done. J was off work Tuesday and Thursday (his days off are intermittant and a little random, since he's working retail) and he did some huswifery while I shut myself away in the office to write. Tuesday we got a lot done; we're starting to experiment with making liqueurs, so while J was rolling out forgotten Christmas cookie dough, I put some clemantines and cloves in brandy to sit. Hopefully in 2-3 weeks it'll turn out like homemade Cointreau. Also we drank beer while J made cookies and I wrote fellowship apps and my prospectus; a beer with lunch makes fellowship apps much easier to get to.

I feel like I spend the majority of my time applying for money to do research instead of doing research. They've definitely gotten easier to whip out once I get going, and doing the prospectus has given me some good canned answers to "why this topic? what the historiographic significance?" but they're still so time consuming. They all want slightly different things, and there's so much groundwork before the writing even starts. I just need time away from Overcast Town with no teaching to keep pulling me back here so I can get some research trips in. The library at Snooty U is good about ordering material and getting microfilm, but I hardly have time to keep up with the reading for the class I TA, let alone sit in the library basement for days on end and read microfilm. Especially if I keep getting assigned to teach 20th century courses I have no background or training in. Seriously, why assign an early Americanist to TA courses on 20th century music and politics? I know there's a value in teaching outside the comfort zone, but I barely had 20th century feminism in my comp fields for women's history, and there's not the remotest chance that I'll ever have to teach a 20th century survey.

But I've finally finished J's Christmas socks, so I'm starting a hat for me (pictures later). Yesterday we also finally got our pear cider bottled, after it sat in secondary fermentation for several months. We brewed it in October right after my exams, but never had time to bottle with the holidays, so the upside is that as soon as it's done carbonating, it'll be ready to drink immeadiately. It's definitely smoothed out quite a bit since it was racked. Tomorrow before J goes to work we're going to pitch a blueberry mead (honey wine) and put up a blueberry liqueur. We're just using frozen grocery store blueberries, but I'm excited, and it should be a pretty color.