Bella Knitting

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

Sarah

I have a problem. I do not have enough storage space. Some would say I have "too much yarn" but that kind of comment only comes from people who don't knit, and therefore do not understand the Urge To Stash. I also have too many books, but for some reason, when people find out you own a ton of books they think it makes you intellectual, and when people find out you own a ton of yarn they usually think you are a little off your rocker.

Anyway, I decided that I should be displaying some of my sock yarn where I can see it (and admire it and pet it and maybe hug it a little, when no one is looking), so I took down a bunch of books from the bookshelf in the bedroom, boxed them up, and put a bunch of pretty skeins of sock yarn up instead. The books went into hibernation in the garage, where several other boxfuls await the day when we finally buy some more bookshelves. Which, to be honest, probably won't happen until we move to a bigger place. We have a lot of books.

This didn't solve the storage problem, of course, but periodically shuffling everything around at least makes me feel a little better. My long-term plan is to win the lottery (I didn't say it was a good plan) and invest in yarn and yarn storage. A dry olympic-sized swimming pool would do nicely, don't you think? I mean, what knitter doesn't occasionally fantasize about swimming through an enormous stash, like Scrooge McDuck swimming through his gigantic pile of coins?

Book Meme

Sarah

I first ran into this on Lynn's blog, and now it's popping up all over!

Look at the list of (100) books below.
Bold the ones you’ve read.
Italicize the ones you want to read.
Leave blank the ones that you aren’t interested in.
Movies don’t count.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25 . Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams) -- Actually, I think I've read every book Adams ever wrote.
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie(Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini) -- I even own this one, just haven't gotten to it yet.
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible -- I've read a lot of chunks. Not the whole thing, though.
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens) -- Loathed it. For some reason, I can't stand Dickens.
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card) -- What is wrong with Orson Scott Card, anyway? He writes the occasional really fantastic book, like Ender's Game, but for every good one he writes half a dozen terrible (or just terribly mediocre) ones. Sometimes I just want to slap him.
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood) -- Atwood is such a great writer. Read this book now!
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) -- One of my all-time favorites. Did you know that the main character's name, Raskolnikov, means "cracked?" I love that.
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down(Richard Adams) -- I've read and reread this book probably several dozen times since I first picked it up at age 8. I even took it with me to the hospital when I had my appendix out when I was 12, as a kind of security blanket.
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce) -- I don't know if it should really count, though: I read it in either high school or the first year or so of college, and I didn't really get much out of it. I took a lit class which covered Joyce last semester, so maybe I should have another whack at it now that I'm older and better prepared.

Huh -- from the ratio of books in bold to those in italics, it looks like I'm a little better at getting to books I want to read than I am at getting to yarns in my stash I want to work with. I'll choose to blame this on the fact that I've been reading a lot longer than I've been knitting, and not the fact that I'm a wool-pig.

Essential Reading

Laura

When Sarah asked me why my proposed "Read Your Stash" entries had little non-knitting content, I had to stop to think. I am not a big fan of packing and unpacking so when our family moved temporarily into a rental house last year many of our possessions ended up in boxes piled high in the garage. Only those items considered essential made it into the house. And that, my friends, explains the content of my bookshelves.  Since I was the arbiter of "essential reading" for the family, my vast array of knitting books, booklets, stitchionaries and old magazines all made it to the shelves, leaving little room for anything else.

I didn't have the heart to tell Sarah (just weeks away from her due date) that while knitting may have taken the place of some of my reading, it was the kids that completely decimated any leisurely reading time I may have previously had. This left me with only light reading -  a few mystery novels that could be easily put down and picked up hours or days later. Nothing worthy of quotation. There is, however, one set of books that I have devoted many hours of reading time to in recent years. This author has a wonderful ability to paint a picture with words, to draw you into the characters a make you beg for more. Here i€™s an example, see what you think.

"The house stood on a hill overlooking the village, some of its windows boarded, tiles missing from the roof, and ivy spreading unchecked over its face. Once a fine-looking manor, and easily the largest and grandest building for miles around, the house now stood damp, derelict and unoccupied. Half a century ago, something strange had happened there, something that the older inhabitants of the village still liked to discuss when topics for gossip were scarce. The story had been picked over so many times, and had been embroidered in so many places, that nobody was quite sure what the truth was anymore. Every version of the tale, however, started in the same place: Fifty years before, at daybreak on a fine summer's morning ..."

If only I could share this with my kids, teach them how to use a wide variety of adjectives and adverbs in their creative writing homework,  show them with examples like this the power of the written word and instill in them a love of reading at an early age . . . oh wait! I can, because this is an excerpt from page one of Harry Potter 4. Every book read by our daughter at least twice and read by me out loud to our son page by page, all three-thousand three-hundred and forty-one of them.

So while my reading habits may have changed over the years it doesn'€™t mean they are any less enjoyable today. Now we wait impatiently for Saturday, July 21st - if you have to ask why, you've got six books to start reading. You may finish in time if you hurry!

It's Not a Comic Book...

Sarah

...It's a graphic novel. Alan Moore's Watchmen, that is. I have to admit, until I was introduced to comics like Watchmen and the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman, I thought all graphic novels were a lower order of reading -- books for people whose attention spans were too atrophied from excessive television viewing to handle "real" novels. I still have no idea which superheroes belong to DC comics and which to Marvel, but Jason and I have a shelf full of books which have proved the folly of my predjudice, and I've thoroughly enjoyed them.

Watchmen is special because it took the whole superhero genre, blew it to smithereens, and reconstructed it. For many years, fanboys have been hopeful and fretful by turns that it would be turned into a feature film (some critics pointed out that the Disney film The Incredibles could be considered a really good adaptation of Watchmen, as its plot is essentially the same). Now, it looks like it's actually going to happen. It could be good -- or it could be incredibly disappointing. Films seem to be made through some sort of bizarre and unpredictable alchemy, so you never can be totally certain which way it will go until it actually hits the screen, but I'm hopeful.

Do you have anything in your stash -- books or yarn -- that changed your mind? (The yarn in the photo, by the way, is approximately 100 grams of yarn I spun as a Read Your Stash prize. If you've joined in, be sure to write a Read Your Stash post in your blog soon -- I'll be raffling off the yarn and an Amazon gift certificate in the next few weeks.)

Seeing

Sarah

A new camera lens I ordered arrived yesterday, and I think I'm in love. The reason I chose this particular lens, a 50mm fixed lens, was its amazing depth-of-field, which is razor thin. The area in focus is narrow, with everything in the foreground and background a buttery blur.

Playing with this new lens got me thinking about what I've learned in art and writing classes over the years. I've got bookshelves full of these lessons, and they really all boil down to the same thing, no matter the particular artistic discipline: learning to see is the most important skill an artist can have. One teacher I had in high school had us do drills, over and over, in which we would sit staring at our subject and were forbidden to look at our paper. He wanted to teach us to draw what was in front of us, instead of what was in our heads.

In creative writing classes, the drills are a little different, but the principle is the same: use concrete language, because that's how we "see" with words. One of my favorite professors would hand out prints of photographs and paintings, and our goal was to reproduce the image in words -- by "showing," not "telling." It's not easy. Too broad a focus, and you're swimming in too much detail. To little, and you lose the big picture.

All this thinking led me to my bookshelves, to Charles Simic. Simic has a gift for showing his reader something ordinary -- silverware, a pair of shoes, a broom -- and giving us fresh eyes, making us look at how strange these things can be, seen through Simic's lens. Here's one of my favorite of his poems.

Fork

This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird's foot
Worn around the cannibal's neck.

As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.

The stuff I'm spinning, by the way, is what I'm thinking of using as a prize in the Read Your Stash project. It's a wool roving hand-dyed by Mountain Colors. Tempting, no?

Memories in the back of the closet

Laura

Sarah’s got me peeking in my closets and Reading my Stash. It’s one of those projects I was kind of afraid to start. I haven’t gotten to the books yet but way in the back of the closet I did find a bag that reaffirmed my long-term addiction to mohair.

Like many, I learned to knit as a child at my grandmother’s knee but never took up the craft as an adult. It wasn’t until an Irish house mate named Frances brought back some mohair that I started to knit again. I fell in love with the vibrant Irish mohair, started knitting a tartan afghan (it seemed an appropriate use of the yarn) and 18 years later . . .  it’s still not done. It sits in the back of my closet, one of the only projects I never finished. I can’t seem to part with the tartan strips that want to be a blanket but to be honest, I don’t really want to knit with that mohair either. It’s scratchy, it sheds like crazy and it is just a bit too bulky.

My love (dare we say obsession) with mohair has carried over to Bella Knitting. However, (and this is a big however) the two extra-fine kid mohair blends we selected are positively not scratchy or bulky. Cascade Kid Seta (with silk!) and Crystal Palace Merino Kid are lovely to knit with. Still not convinced? Just ask for a sample with any order and we will send it along for free. It’s all part of my secret goal to spread mohair through out the world.

So, here you go, my very first project as an adult knitter and my only long-term UFO.

Not every project has to be finished – sometimes they can just inspire us. This one lead to 18 enjoyable years of knitting and ultimately to a rather significant career change from IBM to Bella Knitting. My friend Frances? Still at IBM and chasing toddlers instead of new yarns but I know she will get back to her knitting roots when she's ready.

I sent Frances a note yesterday. We met in New York but now live cross country from each other. Me in San Francisco and she in Tampa. It was nice to get in touch. So read that stash of yours - you don't know where it might take you.

Embarking

Sarah

Two women, one fat and the other slim, sat on straw-bottomed chairs, knitting black wool. The slim one got up and walked straight at me -- still knitting with down-cast eyes -- and only just as I began to think of getting out of her way, as you would for a somnabulist, stood still, and looked up. Her dress was plain as an umbrella-cover, and she turned round without a word and preceded me into a waiting-room.
...
Often far away there I thought of these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall, one introducing, introducing continually to the unknown, the other scrutinizing the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned eyes. Ave! Old knitter of black wool. Morituri te salutant. Not many of those she looked at ever saw her again -- not half, by a long way.
               -- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Who hasn't been as engrossed with a project as that woman -- walking around, knitting as if sleepwalking? The sleeve pictured above is the only piece I've knit of Bridget, from Rowan's Vintage Style. When working on it, it was addictive, though frustrating (stranded knitting worked flat always just seems silly), but once I'd knit the pretty pattern at the sleeve cap, the temptation of the unknown was gone. Every other piece of the cardigan from that point on would be more of the same.  I tucked the sleeve in with my collection of Rowan Yorkshire Tweed 4-ply, and haven't knit another stitch of that project since.

Heart of Darkness seemed like as good a book as any with which to kick off my "Read Your Stash" project. Wading in to begin organizing my stash felt like embarking on a long and arduous journey, and the idea of a tidy, accessible collection of yarn, attractively displayed and stored, has always seemed the elusive stuff of rumor -- like Kurtz in his far-flung jungle station.

Want to read your stash along with me? Just leave a comment or email me letting me know you'd also like to blog about the connections between your books and your knitting, and I'll add you to the list. Once there are enough participants, I'll hold a drawing, and you could win either a $25 Amazon gift certificate, or a skein of my very own handspun!

Read Your Stash

Sarah

Nona's grey cardigan led her to begin enjoying Jane Austen. Franklin is cataloguing his stash -- of books. Norah has been writing, and writing about, haiku, senryu, and tanka. And then, of course, there was the plethora of poetry on the interwebs for the February 2 Blogger's Silent Poetry Reading, all while I've been trying to organize both my yarn stash and bookshelves. (There may be something to this "nesting" thing.)

Yarn. Books. Yarn. Books. More yarn. More books -- crammed so tight on one shelf it was bursting at the seams. ("Oh, yeah," Jason said to me when I mentioned this, "I think maybe I was supposed to nail something to something to keep that from happening." Thanks, honey.) More yarn -- in closets, in decorative displays, crammed into boxes.

So that's where I am today: I have two extensive collections, one of yarn, one of books. They are collections based on years of individual choices. I want to know if they overlap in some way, or if by examining both I might find some interesting juxtapositions. What are the classics to which I continue to return, and what do they say about me? Finding out sounds like a fun project. I'm going to look at both my books and my yarn, and see what connections I can make between the two. Here's what I might look into, to see what patterns emerge:

• What do I have on my bookshelves and in my yarn stash which embarrasses me?
• What books and projects do I feel guilty about not reading/finishing?
• Do I keep my books and my yarn in pretty good condition?
• Do I have a "system" for organization?
• What have I considered important enough to commit to memory?

It's a pretty open-ended project, so if anyone wants to join me, you are welcome to do so -- leave a comment or e-mail me, and I'll add your name and a link to your blog to the list. I may even offer some sort of prize drawing at some point, just to spice things up. Want a button?

Edited to add: Read Your Stash prizes were given out on Monday, April 9.