Gauge Rage

Oh knitting incompetence! How I loathe thee! Looking up patterns on Ravelry requires more skill than I have. I thought if I just clicked that little search button that said ‘4 ply’ I would be sorted. But using 4mm needles for 4 ply wool? What madness is this?!

Gauge is a thing I struggle with. Mostly I assume it will turn out roughly alright, so I never do it. In my defence, thus far I’ve only ever knitted hats, scarves or cowls, none of which really need to be strict with gauge. The hats have all turned out well though. This must be dumb luck, because it’s certainly not by design. We shall not mention the miscounted stitches of the Star Crossed Beret. It fit though, despite the star on top looking like a dead spider. Ahem.

So this time, for some wacky reason, I decided to try out this funny ‘gauge’ thingy. The needles are clearly the wrong size for the wool. It looks terribly overstretched. So either the ply quoted is wrong or the needle size is wrong. 4 ply is a standard, right? It can’t get thinner or thicker surely.

Notice how slickly I slime out of blaming myself though. This reminds me of a story my grandmother told. When she was a girl, she hated piano lessons with a passion. One day her mother was trying to get her to practice, but she burst out, ‘I can’t practice, the music is written wrong!’ Her mother decided then that if classical composers couldn’t write music properly, then maybe she should stop playing the piano.

Similarly, if accomplished knitting designers can’t write patterns properly, maybe I should give up knitting! (Stubbornness is clearly a family trait.)

Cat picture included for illustration of rage only. He was pissed off. So am I. Grrrrr! Gauge rage!

Yellows and Woes

Before I can buy more wool there is a slight problem. I have no room. In fact, I already have too much stuff. If I can word it a different way, I have a surplus of non-space. Suitably confused? So am I.

The wool in the photo (taken by Q) is fairly decent stuff I bought in Kolkata in November last year. The grey wool I was going to knit into a hat for myself since it will be winter back home when I go. The yellow wool is softer (I think it’s a wool/nylon mix), and I’m desperately in love with it. It is also due to go to my friend who stays in Delhi who was there when I bought it and who similarly fell in love with it. The hat she liked was the Sixty Cables pattern on Ravelry and so the second project was born.

So my current plan is to quickly finish up these two hats so I can replace the position of all that wool in my bag with different kinds and colours of other wool. I’m also more than prepared to further cull other items in order to accomplish this. My mother would be disgusted if she knew.

Having this yellow wool around is bittersweet I must say. I have the colouring of a drowned rat, which makes anything yellow that I wear look like a tropical disease. Gone are the delicious mustards and sunflower hues on the shelves; on me it is jaundice. I am left to become a mere voyeur of yellow, an unrequited lover staring longingly at people who look much better in it.

My alternative to buying new wool is to look at the squishy, artily photographed stacks of wool on non-English language websites. The purpose for this is simple; I don’t understand the prices (what the hell is kr 38,-?) and so am not tempted to buy anything. My favourite website so far is Pickles, a Norwegian site. I love the sheen of this (yellow! My love!) and the colours in this.

They also have a pattern for a baby turban which is too much fun. If I ever have a daughter, I’m definitely going to make her this and dress her up as Gloria Swanson. I'm sure she will hate me when she's older.

Mumbai Yarns

Mumbai is truly not a city for knitters. The weather is all wrong; too much humidity and no cold winters. Even now during the beautiful monsoons it is too humid to wear a jumper for long, even though things start to get cooler. The wool supply is also as a consequence not that great. Most of the yarn is nylon, and the most fancy thing you can find is pure wool (scratchy) or a wool/nylon mix (passable).

My knitting sources tell me that there is a man in Bangalore who supplies pure silk wool if you contact him and ask nicely enough. There is also a store in the Fort area of downtown Bombay, the entrepreneurial owner contacted me through Ravelry. It’s almost time for me to leave the city though, and my house is in disarray for packing. Even so, I plan on making room in my bag for more wool just in case my Fort trip proves fruitful. I like to think that knitters are practical in that regard, albeit in a really impractical way!

In honour of this beautiful and maddening city, I have created a list of the twenty things I will miss the most.

1. Paani puri
2. Filter coffee
3. Monsoons
4. Disgustingly over the top saris
5. Fresh hot pav rolls from the bakery around the corner
6. The woman in the train from Vadala to Bandra who sells (at various times of the year) meetha orange, meetha phanas, lichi and mosambi. [translation: sweet orange, sweet jackfruit, lychees and sweet lime]
7. Hinglish
8. Hot milky chai in little plastic cups
9. Hot salty pakode in greasy Marathi newspapers
10. The Arabian Sea
11. Aunties of various descriptions; the old disapproving ones in the trains, the younger ones with friendly kids, the hot ones who exercise up and down parks all along the seaside, the lovely ones who feed you and house you and give you mangoes or laddoos to take home, the shocked ones who can’t stop staring at you because of your skin colour/height/weight, the overly friendly ones who shove their children in your lap to take photos. Last but not least, to the two aunties on a late night Borivali to Churchgate who tried (through my broken Hindi and their broken English) to set me up with their son/nephew who worked for Air India.
12. Ashish book sale
13. Stray cats
14. Stray dogs with furry, curly tails
15. The smell of cooking kebabs on my way to and from the train station
16. My downstairs neighbour, who sounds like a turkey whenever she’s angry
17. My downstairs neighbour’s son, who sings out of tune at the top of his little lungs
18. Harbour Line trains
19. Making fun of Navi Mumbai
20. The ease of communicating with auto drivers without needing to know the language well.

I reread this and realised how much of it was about food. Oh! But who could go past it. The next time I go back, hopefully I can add another Aunty to this list. An Aunty who will teach me how to cook!

Touch of Bronzer

Orson Welles’ 1958 film Touch of Evil is fantastic. Except for one thing; Charlton Heston. It’s mostly not his fault. It’s the make-up.

I assume it is the make-up because with black and white there is that ambiguity of what the colour of things actually was. I was too busy trying to guess whether he had a really strong natural tan, or whether the man was heaped with make-up to concentrate much on his performance. He plays a Mexican detective in the film, Mike Vargas, which is why I assumed the semi-blackface make-up. It’s off putting.

So is his thick American accent, mind you. The other Mexican characters in the film seemed to be played by South American or Hispanic actors, so Heston stands out like a sore thumb. I guess in that regard casting was a star vehicle; they probably didn’t have an option to cast someone better suited to the part.

Welles is deliciously ugly as the corrupt cop Quinlan. Even though her scenes are brief, Marlene Dietrich oozes... well, I can only think of clichés, but whatever it is she oozes makes me weak at the knees. That woman was a goddess.

Welles as a director is incredibly good. I hate to sound like a wanky film nerd but Touch of Evil is why films should be made. The choreography of that opening scene is just masterful, as is the lighting, the angles at which characters are shot and the editing. This is one of the last noir films to be made, but unquestionably one of the best.

If truth be known it makes me feel quite bourgeois. That is, it makes me want to discard all the lowly second rate films and books and TV around and only watch the best. The best of the best of the best, the classics, those things that have lasted and are still loved and worshipped; the epitomes of genre and the revelations of changes in style. None of this reaching the end of something and saying, ‘It was okay, but....’ That *meh* kind of feeling you get when something turns out to be not as awesome as you first thought. No More Meh! Who’s with me!

Knotting

This picture was my second attempt at making Natalie Larson's Star Crossed Slouchy Beret on Ravelry.

The first time I counted the stitches completely wrong and ended up with a Crossed Star Slouchy Beret. But this second one was yummy, and correctly made!

Which is why I name this post 'Knotting'. I'm borrowing it from Elizabeth Honey's book Fiddle-back in the hope that she is as sweet as her name and won't really mind. The kids in the book try to knit something but end up messing it up so badly that they call it 'knotting' instead. My knitting is largely knotting, and I will explain this through two anecdotes, one relating to the hat above.

First, when my mother was teaching me how to knit back in 2007. She taught me how to hold the needles correctly, and how to hold the thread properly for the right tension. By the time I came to the end of that ugly terracotta coloured rib scarf I thought I'd conquered the world! Alas, I moved away for a year to a different country, away from my mother's patient knitting coaching and thus developed bad habits. Once not long after I got home, we were sitting in the living room with our respective knitting. Mum stopped after some time and looked at me. She then said; 'It gives me pain to watch you knit.' My technique, it seems, was not unorthodox as I had hoped; it was just plain wrong. And continues to be so! Bad habits are tricky to shake.

My second example of knotting, as I mentioned, relates to that glorious squishy blue hat. I am proud of it, despite the labour pains it brought. See, I know there is a Magic Loop method out there when using circular knitting needles. When I youtube it, it looks fantastically easy and straightforward. I would love to be able to knit socks with ML method! (As it is, I can barely knit competently with two needles; four would be far beyond my skill level.) But the Magic Loop method, when competing with my unorthodox/wrong knitting technique has failed me at every turn. If you can help, please tell me how!

I must here confess that when the stitches became fewer and fewer towards the crown of my Star Crossed Beret, there was much swearing and sweating over stretched and strained plastic circular needles. My solution (when I couldn't figure out the ML method) involved raiding my Dad's shed for wire which I fashioned into circular needles. The beauty of those makeshift wire circulars was that when the stitches grew fewer and fewer, I could simply snip off the end of the needles with wire cutters and continue on my merry knotted way.

Terrible, no? But it worked. See that crown? It's a squashy little star. And the recipient of that hat (admittedly a non-knitter) was none the wiser. Viva la Knotting!

Blogtroduction

First mango of the season, an Alphonso.

There will be knitting on this blog, but not as often as the name suggests. I am mostly inept, but I enjoy the smugness of finally finishing something knitted. People become amazed at how creative you can be, when really all I'm doing is following a mathematical pattern that someone else has had the genuine creativity to come up with. The momentary smugness makes me feel slightly less inept.

So in the meantime, feast your eyes on the delicious glowing mango and let me feel the smugness of a full belly.