More crossed stitches – Fantine

After several attempts that ended in disappointment, the first five rows of Fantine are done.

Please excuse the gross surface. It’s acutally my coffee table, which Ian and I are sure to clean several times a day. My ten-year old cat Seth has this thing lately where he likes to lay in the bathtub after someone showers. This, we believe, might, in his mind, take the place of cleaning himself, as he is going through one of those anti-hygiene phases. Anyway, after crawling out of the tub, he likes to ump up on the coffee table and lay down, usually rolling on his side to lean up against Ian’s beverage of choice at the moment, and taunt us with the prospect of his big belly or one of his equally large haunches knocking it off the table. The table ends up gross with cat-tub water.

I don’t do markers since I have so much waste yarn just lying around. There’s lots of counting with this pattern, but I prefer it to knitting to inches at least. It’s still difficult to tell with the crossed stitches. The execution is no harder than a standard K2tog, for example, but the twisting of the yarn gets confusing when trying to judge my adeptness. Very pretty though. More fun than sewing the pocket on the back of Zeeby’s bag, which is where I stopped with that one. Pictures coming when I finally get it finished. Any advice on whether to line or not to line would be more than welcome. Although I took a costume class during my first try at undergraduate theatre school, my skills with the needle and thread (in that fashion) are all but abominable.

In the morning I go in for my HIDA scan. Radioactivity and fasting are involved. You’re so jealous of my life.

This is not a knitting blog exactly.

I’m trying this blogging thing out again. I wanted to document my knitting, since its been so unorganized as of late. I have literally 7 different projects on sticks (real and imagined) at the moment, which is way too many. I’m super close to finishing Zeeby’s bag, but Ysolda’s opera gloves have been frogged about 3 times now. I just got Fantine in the mail and started on her, but the pattern is a bit beyond me. Ian’s scarf is a bit of a mess, but can be easily enough sorted out. A certain scarf doesn’t know if it wants to be from a Godard film or from a Rowan pattern book. The Vogue Cape got screwed up in Richmond when I tried knitting in the dark. Its a simple matter of un-purling a row, but the row is over 100 stitches and I’m annoyed at the idea of fixing it. And about a million washcloths are on and off needles all the time at this house, since I came, in a variety of ways, in possession of about 8 or 9 skeins of cotton of varying socioeconomic stature. That’s one half of it.

The other half of it is that I miss writing and blogging. I miss getting into something that isn’t knitting or schoolwork. I also feel the need to document this strange and fucked up time of my life where I vascilate between being merely annoyed at my inability to eat like a normal person and being terrified that I, like my mom, am being handed off from doctor to doctor who can’t figure out what’s wrong with me, while something horrible is just getting worse. I am afraid sometimes that I am dying. It sounds really silly. It scares my boyfriend. It makes me feel small and fragile and dramatic. And when the fear passes, I am simply angry again. Or if things are going well, just annoyed.

I’m up at 5AM and part of the reason is that I hate the choices I have to make when I wake up. There is a chance I’m going to wake up and not have a choice; it will be made for me. A bulbous tummy that will call all the shots. If I’m lucky, and I will probably be lucky, because I’ve had 3 months to learn how I can be lucky through my food choices, I won’t be in any pain. But it won’t matter, because nothing will fit the way its supposed to. I’m not going out today; I’m going to stay in and work. And knit. Or I will wake up and look almost like myself again. A curvy girl, yes, but a girl with an hour-glass figure, whose clothes feel familiar and snug against my round hips and flat tummy. So I’ll have to choose between hanging on to that for as long as I can throughout the rest of the day, or eating. Sometimes I choose hanging on to it, but a cup of coffee changes everything and out my tummy goes! Sometimes I choose hanging on to it and out I go! into the great city. I do my job, or go to my class, or to the doctor’s office, and when I get a chance, I catch my reflection, and I feel like myself, only better. I do whatever needs to be done and I try and tell myself that its stress, and look what happens when I don’t get stressed. Things are great! When I come home in the evening I notice that at some point during the day, after I saw my reflection for the last time, my figure changed, even though I didn’t eat, and my shirt is tighter; its riding up on my hips, my waist has expanded. I look unkempt. I look about 10 pounds heavier if I’m lucky and no one notices but me and Ian. If I’m not lucky, I look about 25 pounds heavier. I kind of feel duped. But at least I believed I had a good day.

I have gall stones. That’s the latest and first bit of news since this all began in June. I’m writing my Professional Decision Report this semester. It’s the equivalent of a thesis for my graduate program in Policy Analysis; slightly less academic and more client-based. I haven’t found a client yet. I was supposed to do that over the summer, while I was working at my internship, feeling too bad to come in more than 3 days a week, missing some days for doctor’s appointments, and coming straight home from the office and going to sleep. I’m working a little but not enough. I’m 30 years old. Vegan for six years, I drink tons of coffee. I smoke. I quit for three months and then began to understand the relationship between eating and feeling bad, so I started up again. I have always been heavy. In the spring I realized that I had gained 15 pounds and I coordinated qutting smoking with starting a diet and excercise program. I lost the 15 pounds. I worked out until my stomach started hurting all the time. These things were supposed to protect me. I like to knit. I live in New York City. My boyfriend worries about me. We are getting married after school is done. I want an autumn wedding. I am tired of going to doctors. I tried two different naturopaths and although they have good advice, and are willing to see you much faster than normal doctors, they A) want you to come in all the time, B) cost too much, C) yell at you for doing things your normal doctors tell you to do, D) make you feel like everything is your fault. They also E) sometimes give you hugs, which is nice but strange.

This is not a knitting blog. There will still be plenty of knitting.

Crossed Stitches

I like French Girl. I first noticed them on Dreamweaver Yarns. There’s something incredibly alluring in the unprofessionalism of the photos, the hotness of the not-too-skinny models and the seemingly simple projects. Lots of weather-non-specific items like shapely drapey shawls, twisty scarves and oh the capelets. I can’t get enough capelets. For a somewhat advanced beginner like myself, the capelet is the perfect triumph of more-than-a-scarf, not-really-a- shawl, certainly-not-yet-a-sweater.

Tonight I tried my hand at Fantine. For $6.50, you really get four sweaters in one; the pattern includes directions for a mandarin collar and a scoop neck, as well as cap sleeves and 3/4 sleeves. I chose to knit the 3/4 scoop neck version. I only orded the pattern yesterday, and amazingly, like the Christmas I never had, she came swiftly to my mailbox all packaged up nicely just in time for a trip out to my favorite yarn store in Manhattan. Three balls of Rowan Big Wool Fusion later, I discovered that French Girl has no concept of difficulty level.

Apparently lots or all of French Girl’s patterns require the cable cast on, since the link for directions is included on their site. I learned it and then sat down to struggle with crossed stitches. From what I can tell, crossed stitches work to make the appearance of cables or something rather cable-like, anyway, without cable needles. That’s great, since I think I will probably grow old before I try my hand at cables. My crossed stitches didn’t really look anything like cables, however, but rather like a child knitted a sweater. I did a little research, but there doesn’t seem to be much out there past the concept and the simple execution.

I plan to pick Fantine back up this weekend, in between finishing up my report from my summer internship and reading for Economics of the Welfare State. Crossed stitches are only the beginning of the narrative of this pattern beating the crap out of me, but if I can get through them it will be an accomplishment.