Knitting pattern rule #1

I have read a lot of knitting patterns in my life. I have made a lot of things from knitting patterns in my life.

I am starting to develop some real biases against poorly written knitting patterns. Now, I know enough to be able to figure out most knitting patterns, although if I'm following a pattern it's because I'm feeling too lazy to write it myself and I clearly don't want to do a lot of figuring.

But new knitters often don't have enough experience to think for themselves and second-guess a pattern.

I teach knitting at the Library where I work and help people with a wide variety of skill levels.

I helped a knitter this week who was flummoxed as to why the fronts and back of the child's cardigan she was knitting were 1" off in length. I carefully "read' her knitting and she had followed the pattern instructions exactly, but still there was this difference - what was the problem? She guessed that maybe her gauge had changed drastically from the fronts to the back but she's a pretty even and consistent knitter, so that wasn't it.

Gauge, it turns out, was the answer. The pattern instructions for the back said to knit for 5" after casting on before beginning armhole shaping. The instructions for the back were written out line by line, since there was shaping at the bottom edge.

The problem was that her row gauge didn't match the row gauge of the pattern. The back was 5" to armhole and the front was 48 rows. If her row gauge had been on those two would have been the same but in reality the fronts were 1" longer because of the gauge difference.

I understand that the onus is on the knitter to know what's going on with gauge (To Save Time Check Gauge - we've all read it!) but how hard would it have been for the designer to specify the number of rows to knit the back so it would always match the front in length? Hmmm?

So my first rule of knitting patterns is this: Specify length for all pieces in the same units of measure.

So there.

Feeling my years

I am feeling every one of my hard earned years today.

Saturday night I was the ultimate mom: I chaperoned an all-night Girl Scout overnight at a mall.

My 8 year old is in a girl scout troop and loves it. Her scout meetings are on Friday afternoons and that's a hard day for me to get off work, so I try to help out with her troop in other ways. This year one of the things I offered to do was to help with the Bay Area wide Mall sleepover.

Picture this - three to five thousand sugared up girls in a mall, all night, with activities scheduled throughout until mandatory departure at 7:00 am.

We actually did sleep, although not a lot. Both Punkin and I are still tired.

It was crazy and the girls loved it. Being in a mall for 12 straight hours reminded me of why I quit the garment industry and why I'm doing my best to raise my children without the commercialism and consumerism of that kind of influence, although you can't hide from it forever. I really have a hard time with the way that part of society pushes the notion that there is one standard of beauty and if you can't/won't force your body into that norm you are less than acceptable or desirable.

Punkin just thought it was cool to be up past midnight. I love her.

Shades of beach

A couple of weekends ago we went to the beach for the afternoon. I had wanted to go to the beach this summer but between my broken ankle and our trip east the sumer got away from us. So on a nice sunny day we went to the beach.

Which, being Northern California, meant it was cool and overcast on the coast. (In November, though, it'll be clear and beautiful on the beach).

We stayed and played anyway and had a nice time. The overcast was variable - sometimes you couldn't see the horizon for all the fog, and sometimes the sun broke through.

I played with the kids for a while, then sat down and enjoyed my beach chair for a while. I was looking around, watching a guy standing down by the water when I took a picture.

Before I show you the picture, I should explain. We've been having conversations about color around my house lately. The Italian and I both went to art school and have a reasonably decent vocabulary to talk about art and related subjects. Then of course we have two small children and are exposed to all sorts of things we might otherwise miss.

An example of which is a TV show call Fetch! with Ruff Ruffman. It's a live action / animated show created by WGBH in Boston (a PBS affiliate) with funding from the National Science Foundation. It's one of those shows which the kids love but is clever enough to be entertaining to their parents as well.

A recent episode started with a bit about color which had my husband laughing fit to bust a gut. Take a look:
Fetch!

This was weeks ago and I can still make the Italian laugh by just saying "zingy grey".

Anyway, the beach trip was shortly after seeing this episode on TV. The fog and haze was doing amazing things to the sunlight, and I took this picture to try to capture the roughly a bazillion shades of grey:


I took it with my phone and the colors aren't quite right - the actual colors were all shades of French Grey, but it still captures all the different shades. It was really beautiful.