Don't Be Afraid to Let 'er Rip

Thanks everybody, for your well wishes on my anniversary post. Mr HalfSoledBoots even read it, after I told him his anniversary card was online and he'd have to go to the blog to see it.


These photos are very dark - I took them outside hoping for some natural light, but there was just enough to disable the flash and not enough to show the colours.

Drifting is coming along beautifully. I've finished the sleeves and the front, which means I would be completely done the knitting except that I need to knit another back since I ripped out the first one.

When you're knitting fair-isle, as everyone knows, you have to be careful to keep your floats loose or the knitting pulls in and ripples the surface of the work. To make tensioning easier, the designer calls for a needle change just for the colourwork band - you move up to a 4.5mm from a 4mm. The problem was, I usually handle the tension issues myself, by pulling the stitches along the right hand needle as I work. This, combined with the larger needle, made the colourwork band simply too loose and sloppy-looking. You couldn't tell from the picture, but it just wasn't good enough for Ruby.

So I ripped and I'm now one inch into The Back, Part II. I should be done it by this weekend, and then I can block, seam, and knit the button bands.

The pattern itself is a good one - these vivid colours really keep my interest. I also like the natural sections of the pieces - it keeps you knitting to the end of that section. You knit merrily along, enjoying the feeling of the wool, then suddenly the purple is over. So you start the colourwork, and then you feel like you really should carry on just until that's over, but then the beautiful blue starts and the decreases begin, and you think "Well, it's only a few inches, it would really be a shame to stop now." Then it's 1:00 AM and you bind off in triumph.


The front.

I do have two criticisms, though. One is for the book in general - I really do feel that "Fair Isle" should be done in finer yarn. It looks pixelated and clunky when it's in anything above a sport weight.

The second is that this pattern (and, probably, other patterns in this book) should really be knit in the round. A steek would not be necessary - you could knit in the round from the hem to the underarm, then divide. That way, you do the colourwork band in the round and save yourself the torture of the purl rows, not to mention the abhorrent looseness at the edge of each piece, when your yarn ends are dangling there looking pointless and sloppy. I think no matter how carefully I block, steam, and seam, there is going to be some rippling at the side seams. AND THAT BOTHERS ME.

This shows the colour better.

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Piper is six months old now.

And after putting up a 6+ foot fence to keep the hateful deer at bay, I have blooms on my hydrangea for the first time in three years.



So altogether the world is spinning nicely today.

Beyond The Horizon of The Place We Lived When We Were Young

I met Mr Half Soled Boots when I was 22 and he was 23, and we had both just been hired to a research project at the university.

We spent a lot of time that summer hanging out with people from the project - just as a group, nothing more than friends. I was seeing somebody else at that time, so wasn't on the lookout for a new person. As the months went on and my engagement was moved from serious condition to critical, showing signs of coming apart at the seams, I started to notice how much I liked this blond guy at work. He was funny.....really funny. Side-splitting. It was the kind of humor that a lot of people don't get - he's a laconic dude, from that day to this, and you have to be pretty quick to catch the remarks.

One night he had a friend visiting from out of town, and a group of us went out. We ended up back at his place and after an hour or two there were only three of us left: me, Mr HSBoots, and his best friend. We were all sitting around smoking (well, they were smoking...I was mostly trying not to cough too much) and listening to Pink Floyd. It was well into the night and getting on to the time when, if there had been a fire, we would have been staring into it. As it was, we just sat in the dark and listened, while the PULSE album, discarded on the floor, flashed its quiet heartbeat.

Where were you when I was burned and broken
When the days slipped by from my window watching

The weeks went by and my personal life went from bad to worse. It didn't matter, though - there was no way I was giving up on this relationship I had invested almost six years in. In retrospect I can see what I couldn't at the time: that he really didn't want to marry me. That the proposal and the ring and the engagement were a stalling tactic. And that in my heart I did not believe I could ever do better - find anyone else.

And where were you when I was hurt and I was helpless
Cause the things you say and the things you do surround me

On August 12 the project group went out again - this time to a beach about a half hour from the city, away from the lights, to see the Perseids. I had arranged with my roommate to borrow her vehicle and was going to drive everyone - all these carless UVic graduates - but by the time we got off work at 11.00 PM, three of the group had decided they wouldn't go after all.

Only two of us were left.

We were lying on blankets on the beach, heads on driftwood, surrounded by a crowd of recumbent strangers all chatting and gazing skyward, when Mr HalfSoledBoots took a deep breath and said he had something to tell me. He said he knew I was engaged, but he had a feeling I wasn't happy...and that he loved me. He wanted a chance to change that - to make me happy like he thought I deserved to be.

While you were hanging yourself on someone else's words
Dying to believe in what you heard
I was staring straight
into the shining sun

And three weeks after that, it was all done. The phone calls had been made, along with a few four-hour drives to and from the town my fiance was living in. The ring was returned, all three hearts were to various degrees broken.

On August 12, a year later, we were married. He moved in, carting boxes of CDs and headphones, speakers and amps. We sat on the floor listening to David Gilmour and Roger Waters and going through the CDs, tossing all the doubles onto a pile. Ten Summoner's Tales. The Wall: Live in Berlin. Cuts Like a Knife. The Tragically Hip. Jagged Little Pill. I laughed as I made room on the shelves for the his music - Grateful Dead, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, Carmina Burana - while he earnestly explained how I was supposed to pronounce Knebworth.

Eleven years later, I still haven't listened to it.

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since we got married. There have been lots of victories, and more defeats than I like to admit. We've had the health, and we've had the sickness...we've had the richer and the poorer. We don't really listen to music anymore - it's hard with all the interruptions of a family. When I get into the car after Mr HSB has been driving, I just punch the power button to turn the stereo off, out of habit, before it even has a chance to get fully wound up - with the kids strapped into the back seat and talking a mile a minute, music is a bit overstimulating. If I let it play, though, I know what will fill the car - he takes all six CD slots and fills them up with concert bootlegs, Jimi Hendrix, U2, Robert Plant, Jerry Garcia.

Yesterday I sat in the corner of the couch, knitting. The kids were playing in the sprinkler outside, shrieking and laughing. And Mr Half Soled Boots was on the other end of the couch, laptop balanced on the arm, listening to David Gilmour on iTunes. He's not a singer-along, generally speaking, but ever since I met him there's one refrain he doesn't even try to resist. Usually I join in, compelled, as he is, by the song. As it approached I waited for it, smiling and trying not to smile, glad he was looking in the other direction and didn't know I was paying attention. The low-voiced verse ended, the music changed from minor to major, reaching resolution in a moment of pure beauty.

There is no pain - you are receding
A distant ship smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move, but I can't hear what you're saying...

I have become
comfortably numb

It's the most he ever sings - ten or so lines of a surreal rock opera. Listening to him, the way he pauses - has always paused - along with David Gilmour in between "smoke" and "on the horizon", he became to me the same 23-year-old who had made me laugh all that long summer. He was the same funny, taciturn boy who played albums for me at night, turning up the guitar solos. I had been pushed back in time, just for a minute, to that night in 1996 when I sat in a smoky bachelor pad and heard the ringing of the Division Bell. Before my life was changed.

I took a heavenly ride through our silence
I knew the moment had arrived
For killing the past and coming back to life

Thanks, Ian. Thanks for loving me for eleven years, and for making good on your promise to make me happy. Thanks for saying what's important, even though, as a rule, you don't say much.

Thank you for my daughters.

I love you.

_____________________________________
High Hopes, from Division Bell 1994, by D.Gilmour, P.Samson
Coming Back to Life, from Division Bell, 1994, by D.Gilmour
Comfortably Numb, from The Wall, 1979, by D.Gilmour, R.Waters

Former, Future

Erudite Mondays at HalfSoled Boots

Volume 5 Number 2

Laying the Ghost

Judy Astley

Okay, if you have a few hours to spare in the next several weeks, this one should squeak onto your summer reading list. You've probably got time to read it - it doesn't take long to get through. It's laugh-out-loud funny with just enough unexpected elements to keep you interested.

How does a fifteen-year-old girl do this, Nell wondered. How could Mimi twist her face into something that so clearly expressed incredulity, disdain, disgust - all at the same time and all without losing her essential clear-eyed beauty? Anyone over twenty would look demented. This must have been what Picasso had been going for when he first painted two eyes on the same side of a woman's head.

It's about Nell, a woman who decides, after abruptly becoming a single mother, to seek out her volatile, long-term boyfriend from college. Through her own marriage and children, she has never quite gotten over him. It seems a good chance to pick up the thread she dropped all those years ago and see what happens.

Laying the Ghost (which, by the way, has to win the award for the best book title ever) is like Bridget Jones - 15 Years Later. If Bridget married Mark Darcy, bore him two children, raised them to teenhood then ended up single, she'd Google Daniel Cleaver, I guarantee it. It also reminded me a bit of Tara Road. There was the winsome, somewhat scattered heroine whose point of view is charming, self-deprecating, and hilarious. There was the teenaged daughter, whose emotional journey, I thought, could well be developed into another whole book. There was a hapless group of girlfriends in various stages of partnership and unpartnership, with all their attendant anxieties and idiosyncrasies.

"Kate, no, I really don't need a man. When you've just had Pest Control round, you don't rush out and buy a pet rat."

It's a girly book, and one that I suspect would ring unnervingly true for a lot of women. It's all so realistic: Nell's slightly depressing circumstances, her preoccupation with her former flame, and the steps she takes to find him. It's so funny, though, that you put it down uplifted, rather than the opposite.

Laying the Ghost gets:

Reread? Yes
Given to Others? Yes
Bookplate? No

2/3

Funny, the things you remember.

I come from what you could call honest, hard-working people. My grandparents on my mother's side are both gone now, but my grandfather - we called him "Bobo" - was one funny, funny guy. He drank a lot and got progressively more hilarious and good-humoured with every ounce. He played the harmonica like he was born with one in his mouth. He smoked constantly. He would fall asleep on the couch with the mohair throw over him, and when one of his daughters tiptoed up to remove his glasses he would say, without opening his eyes, "Leave them - when I wake up I'll need to know where I am."

He used to sing this song, that I sing to my kids now. Does anyone else, anyone not in my family, remember this song? *

I took my gal to the ball one night
It was a fancy hop
We stayed 'til it was over, and the music it did stop
Then I took her to a restaurant
The finest in the street
She said she wasn't hungry
But this is what she eat.

A dozen raw
A plate of slaw
A chicken and a roast
Applesauce and 'sparagraus and soft-shell crab on toast
Oyster stew and crackers too
Her appetite was immense
When she called for a pie I thought I'd die
'Cause I only had fifty cents

I gave the man the fifty cents
And this is what he did

He tore my clothes and mashed my nose
And kicked me in the jaw
Gave me a prize of a pair of black eyes
And with me swept the floor
Then he grabbed me where the pants hung loose
And threw me over the fence

Take my advice, don't try it twice
When you only have fifty cents.

They had plaques on their walls, with quaint little sayings on them. One read as follows:

We are making a debt for our children to pay
And economists groan as they say it
But we also seem to be finding a way
To create enough children to pay it.

There was an ancient newspaper clipping on their fridge, that said

It's not my place to run the train
The whistle I can't blow
It's not my place to say how fast
The train's allowed to go
I don't take tickets at the gate
Nor even ring the bell
But let the damn thing jump the track
And see who catches hell.

Half the time I had no idea what was going on, at their place. Didn't understand the queer sayings on the walls, was unnerved by the alcohol all over the place, and couldn't keep my eyes off the three-dimensional monkey-shaped ashtray made of hollowed-out coconuts. I think it might have said something like "Aloha from Hawaii" but I could be making that part up.

I'm thinking about learning to play the harmonica, so my children can hear it. Those were my favourite moments, when Bobo would play for us.

I'd like to have a word with Grandma and Bobo now. I miss them a lot. Bobo's been gone since I was 13, Grandma since I was 23. It's been a long time.


---------------------------
Five minutes, a little Google, and look what I found: provenance of "I took my gal to the ball one night". This is an old, old ditty - 1885. Who knew?

Onward and Upward

Remember how I overpowered my poor $500 Kenmore sewing machine a couple of months ago? Well, it sadly turned out to be unfixable, and I was forced to replace it.

With this.

It's the Pfaff quilt expression 2048, and this is a lot of sewing machine. I don't do much quilting (yet....) but I wanted to get a machine that I wouldn't grow out of in the foreseeable future. I sew a lot, although it doesn't come up often on the blog, and I was finding that my old machine had frustrating limits. I think it'll take me a good long time to reach the edges of the Pfaff's capabilities.

I haven't had a lot of time to work with it yet, but yesterday, after burning my hand for the umpteenth time on the handle of my cast iron skillet, I cut up an old towel, wrapped it in scrap quilting cotton, and made this.

These are all quilting stitches - there are a hundred and fifty or so other decorative stitches - and I like 'em. I think my favourite is the zig-zaggy one.

This machine has free-motion quilting, where you attach a special foot and drop the feed dogs so you use your hands to control the back/forth, side-side motion of the fabric under the foot. I tried it out on the other side of my little potholder.

So altogether I'm glad I spent the money on this machine. It carved out a huge hole from my settlement - to the tune of about $2500 - but it's undoubtedly worth it. I'll have this thing for the next 40 years, if it lives up to the manufacturer's reputation.....and now that I know to be gentle.

You wear a smile but it's...

Thank you all for your votes -- after carefully considering all the options, Joe and Dave chose Drifting for Ruby's second birthday.

On Saturday I went to my LYS for the yarn, and was, to say the least, quite keen to get going.

I'm loving this knit. It's so cute. The colours are gorgeous, and it will be so toasty warm. What I DON'T understand is, why is no one else on the interKnit making this? I was doing some Google-fu and couldn't come up with a single project. Ravelry is completely Driftless too, and in fact the design is not even listed as one of Inspired Fair Isle Knits' projects. It's very weird.

It's knitting up fast. I am almost half done the front, the back is finished (but it's a little bit bockety and I may redo that piece) and the sleeves, being raglan, will come together quicker than either of those.

I did have to do a little yarn sub for the blue on top. I couldn't find a satisfactory colour in the yarn I had chosen, so I used a different wool, Lanett Superwash fingering weight, and doubled it to make a DK. Knitted up, the doubled Lanett is gorgeous. The softness is incredible, the stitch quality is excellent - very balanced. I've used this yarn for a couple of things before, but the more I knit with it the more I love it. It's sold as a baby yarn, but the colour palette is impressively varied - not just pastels.

Anyway, it shouldn't be too long before this is an FO, even taking into account the probable reknit of the back. I'm not exactly sure of Ruby's birthday, but ideally I'll get this done, blocked, seamed and mailed by the third week of August.

Cry me a River

Erudite Mondays at HalfSoled Boots

Volume 5 Number 1

Binu and the Great Wall

Su Tong

I don't know much about ancient China - just the little bits you'd glean from being raised by a history-buff librarian mother who has a casual habit of coming out with little-known facts. When I saw the précis of this book I was intrigued enough to pick it up - the fact that it's another of the Canongate Myth Series, oft-mentioned at HSBoots, made it extra appealing.

I was surprised at how old this tale is: it has been passed down verbally for two thousand years in China. It's the archetypal quest book - a virtuous hero wandering, improvising, and persevering, until he is successful...or dead. We in the Western world are familiar with Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Odysseus, Aeneas, and the knights of the round table. What's refreshing about the tale of Binu is that the hero is a woman. Her gender affects all her adventures, and their outcome.

Binu's quest is a humble one. Her husband disappears one autumn day - conscripted with every other able-bodied man to Great Swallow Mountain to build the Great Wall. Binu, broken-hearted, ties a bundle of warm clothes for him and sets off, on foot, to bring them to her husband before the onset of winter.

In one way, her adventures are typical of epic characters. There are tricks played, disguises donned and discarded, theft of valuables. She falls into the hands of charlatans, hostile mobs, wealthy noblemen, feral children. The difference between this female character and her male counterparts is that she can never resort to force or even craftiness. Her greatest strength is her determination to reach the mountain, and at times the only thing that keeps her alive is her will to see her husband again.

I didn't love Binu. I often wished she would be more heroic - her special power of continuously shedding unending floods of bitter tears didn't seem very proactive to me. I couldn't help but pull for her, though. And by the end of the book, after all those miles of prefecture and villages, cruel, embittered amputees and reincarnated frogs, piles of excrement and hooded executioners, human ponies and gourd ladles, I cared about her. I wanted her to win.

The end of the book is a remarkable thing. It is the climax of all her adventures and misadventures, the last piece of the puzzle, the final question answered. At the building site of the Great Wall, where the labourers are driven mercilessly and the winter is coming down, Binu arrives to seek out her husband's fate. The tears she has shed on every page culminate in a torrent of water that devastates the landscape, washing every character in sorrow and bringing down the Wall. There is a sliding, anguished feeling of dropping sadness. For all its pain, the last metaphor is a beautiful one.

HalfSoled Boots Highly Specialised Book Rating System

Binu and the Great Wall gets:

Reread? Probably

Given to Others? Yes

Bookplate? Yes

2.5/3