Have I Been Busy!

Oh, boy! Changes, they are a'coming. There are a lot of exciting things on the horizon for my little yarn studio this month - a big location change and a huge increase in space, which will hopefully give me some more time to focus and figure out just what it is that's been tickling me so much about fiber for the past few years. 

In the meantime, my yarn stash is packed up and even my spinning wheels have gone into hibernation! I couldn't put it all away, though, so I figured keeping a set of dpns and a skein of sock yarn out couldn't hurt me… right? 

HA.

It's amazing how there's a yarn store in every town. A yarn store with the perfect skein of sock yarn that's been waiting for you, obviously, like a rescue puppy that just needs you to take it home. Ok, I made myself sad there. I don't know why every X-Files marathon on Chiller needs to have multiple animal-abuse ads thrown in there. What demographic are they aiming at? It's breaking my heart!

I got sidetracked. Sorry.

When last we spoke, I had just started yet another sock, with yarn I found at a yarn shop in Frederick, MD. It was with the best intentions - the yarn was the perfect color for my ailing aunt, and I thought it would match up well with a pattern I'd been eyeing for a while.

The yarn is French Market Fibers Warehouse Sock yarn, in colorway "Muses"

The yarn was nice to work with - very soft and drapey, and I like the way the colors marbled rather than striping. The socks flew together, thanks to the easy pattern (with lots of lovely stockinette, something I haven't done much thanks to my propensity for choosing absurdly complex patterns) and many, many plane trips. 

Socks are perfect for airplanes. They're small, repetitive, easy to pick up and put down at a moment's notice, and identifiable (if you have people constantly peering at you). This past month I flew to Portland, ME, Los Angeles, and back to DC. And every single flight had a connection. Hell. But very productive for my sock empire.

As I was making these socks for my aunt, I tried to size them a little smaller than usual. I may have gone too small - we'll find out tomorrow when I give them to her. I'd never done an anatomical toe before, but I really like the look and feel of it. I did have one toe start to unravel oddly - as in, not from the end - when I tried them on. Maybe I fouled up the kitchener? I did some lumpy grafting and it seems to have sorted itself.

I did find myself with a few… not complaints, but quibbles as I finished the socks and tried them on. It seems I've reached a comfort level with sock-knitting where I now have opinions about what I like and don't like. I thought the cuff on these was a bit short. I also didn't like the straight stockinette heel flap - every other sock I've made does the thing where you slip every other stitch on the knit rows, and I like the thicker, elastic heel that gives you. But the pattern was fantastic - easy to knit, and I love the look of the finished product. 

So what to do? I decided I had to repeat the pattern immediately, subbing in my preferences! My first shot at altering a sock pattern. And wouldn't you know, I had just found the PERFECT skein of yarn at an awesome shop in Portland. So away we went.

Yarn is Frolicking Feet (a Maine company!) handpainted in colorway "Seafoam"

First of all, I LOVE this yarn. The pictures don't do its color justice at all - I'll have to try to get some in better light. It's a lovely slate blue, with shots of greenish ocean color - particularly suited to this pattern's wavy structure. It's a little thicker than most of the other yarn I've used, and feels stronger.

I really feel like everything came together with these socks - it's the first time I've put on a finished sock and thought, "Yeah, I could wear this all day!" 

I did an extra half repeat on the cuff to lengthen it, and knit my preferred heel. The sock feels snugger and more structured (which is also probably because of the yarn, which is much stiffer than the purple). I think I've gotten the hang of picking up the heel flap stitches, after many, many messy attempts. No gaping holes!

In conclusion: I've gone sock-mad. But I think I've found a keeper pattern, and a great new yarn - an appropriate one, too, because in less than a month I, too, will be a Maine local!

On Incorrigibility

I'm great at beginnings. I have at least a dozen screenplays started on my computer, half-finished knitting projects tucked into dedicated bins, and sketched-out paintings stacked behind my filing cabinet and under my bed. This tendency, to start something full of promise and fail to follow through, reveals itself in more harmful ways too: at 30 I've never settled into a career, skipping instead from city to city, from job to unfulfilling job. I want to be a painter, a cheesemaker, a small-business owner - and I can't follow through on any of it.

Sometimes, this gets me down - I feel like I've failed at being an adult human, or that this flightiness is the outward manifestation of some deep, fundamental flaw. On the other hand, I like being a dreamer - I almost always feel like there's something big and special out there waiting for me, and I just haven't found it yet. But maybe just around that corner --

I've started yet another pair of socks. The yarn just leapt out at me, a purple glow in a wonderful shop in historic Frederick, MD. I was in town for my aunt's wedding, but the yarn reminded me of my other aunt, who has had a tough year health-wise and is preparing for major surgery. Her favorite color is purple.
I tried to make vanilla socks -- I tried. I started a perfectly nice ribbed pattern and realized, not even through the first cuff, that I was going to be bored. So I frogged it and went back to a pattern I've been poking at for a few months, a little scared. It requires reading a chart and the toe is anatomical, which I've never seen before. And I was just getting the hang of the kitchener stitch!

The pattern is called Kalajoki. It's a plain stockinette sock with a meandering, wavy ribbed river that rolls all the way from the cuff to the toe. The chart isn't complex - as usual, the hardest thing is keeping track of which line I'm on! The flowing line appealed to me for my aunt - undulating and unbroken, maybe it will convey some relaxing quality to her as she convalesces.

When I reach the end of this sock, I'll start on its mate - or maybe I'll see something shiny, find another skein of yarn, decide I'm done knitting and take up throwing pots. Until then - the wave continues.

Comfort Movies - October Sky

Do you have movies that are security blankets, warm bowls of soup, familiar old friends? I do. When I went to college, I brought a binder with about 20 favorite movies, and popped one into my laptop whenever I was feeling nervous or lonely. When I moved to Portland, OR and didn't know anyone, I spent many evenings watching old classics on the couch. 

One of my favorite comfort movies, for whatever reason, is the slight, but excellent, October Sky. The Jake Gyllenhaal-Chris Cooper period drama about the clash between father and son, coal country and the space age, never seems to pop up on anyone's list of… anything, really. Maybe it suffers when compared to Chris Cooper's other repressed-father-of-a-heavily-eyebrowed-son performance of 1999, in the Oscar-winning American Beauty. 

I first saw October Sky during its theatrical run. Washington, D.C. used to have a fantastic eat-in movie theater, where you sat on sofas and enjoyed cheeseburgers during the movie (I've been to the modern equivalent, Ipic, but it just doesn't have the same magic). I was in D.C. visiting family, and we all went to the theater together. I was 13. I have no memory of my initial impression of the movie, but I never forgot the fun theater experience.
Maybe that's why my sister and I reached for October Sky years later on a night when we needed some assurance. In 2008, we spent seven weeks traveling through New Zealand (a trip I'll elaborate on some other time, since it was majorly inspired by a certain movie series!). Almost without exception, we had a fabulous time and stayed in weird, but comfortable, hostels. Almost. 
We never planned farther ahead than the same evening, and it had always worked out, but one night we found ourselves coming into a little town that had remarkably little in the way of hostels. Nothing, actually. Night was setting in, and I had started to contemplate sleeping in the car, when we found a sort of oddly empty looking motel. 
We seemed to be the only guests, and as we were led to our "room" we started to think we might end up as cannibal food -- our bed for the night was in a freestanding structure that was, pretty much, a shipping container. We locked ourselves in and noticed that the interior walls were... fuzzy. And there were snails crawling on them. We huddled together in our bed, a hemisphere away from a familiar face, and decided that we needed to be transported. We opened our travel-DVD stash (because we are a family that always has a movie stash) and pulled out October Sky.

Spoilers ahead: 

It's a solid movie with a great cast - besides Gyllenhaal and the always-wonderful Cooper, there's Laura Dern as the inspiring teacher and Elya Baskin, a familiar face, as the shop tech who makes Homer's dreams reality. Gyllenhaal plays Homer Hickam, a real-life NASA engineer who started his life in the most poetically unlikely place - destined for a life underground in a West Virginia coal mine. He was inspired by Sputnik to build a rocket, and the movie is the story of his quest to escape his birthright and reach the stars. It's about how much help he gets, and how hard it is to let go.

The movie is full of cliches, but it works - maybe because it's true, but also because the actors and the script give everything real weight. It's almost absurd how perfect the balance is between Homer's two futures - down in the coal mines, breathing black dust with his father in his tiny hometown, or out in the openness of space, part of the first global effort. Joe Johnston, who also directed the first Captain America movie, may not have an auteur's flourish, but he knows how to make a solid, emotional movie. The climactic fight between Homer and his father is fantastic. The score is beautiful, in the way that so many 90s scores were. There's a moment in the movie - when Laura Dern's character, dying in the hospital, sees Homer's last rocket plume straight up into the clouds - that gives me chills every single time.
The movie's got great texture. It takes place in 1957, and Johnston lets a lot happen with that. There's the overwhelming fear of technology and the Russians - the newfound ability of humankind to utterly destroy itself is referenced throughout. Elya Baskin, working in the machine shop, is a European immigrant (like Homer's hero, Wernher von Braun) and refers obliquely to the horrors he escaped. 

There are a couple of weaknesses in the movie. The first I can forgive - the complete glossing over of Wernher von Braun's more questionable characteristics. The character appears only in a cameo, but Homer name-drops him throughout the film and regularly writes him. Von Braun was, of course, the father of American rocketry. He was also a Nazi, brought to the US through Operation Paperclip. He lived out his life in comfort. I don't think October Sky had the time to go into his past properly (nor did it need to, narratively) but it's still hard to see a Nazi treated like a hero.
The other problem is the TERRIBLE characterization of Homer's love interest, Valentine. The character has MAYBE three lines. For most of the movie, she moons over Homer while he moons over the peppiest girl in school. Then, with a weird, slow motion stare, she seems to hypnotize him into submission. Later, they are together. It's totally unexplained, undemonstrated, and unfortunate in movie that has two really wonderfully drawn female characters - Homer's inspiring teacher, Miss Riley, and his stubborn, loving mother. It would only have taken a few lines of dialogue to turn Valentine into an interesting person too.

The strongest part of the movie, for me, is in the characterization of Homer's father. John Hickam, in the hands of a lesser writer and actor, could have been one-note - the set-in-his-ways grump, the obstacle keeping our hero from his dreams, or at worst, the abuser. Homer's father, instead, is shown to be an honorable, admirable man, who wants Homer to follow in his footsteps not only because it's all he knows, but because he loves his work and believes in it. Homer's success is his tragedy - he has to let his son, so like him, go off into a world where he can't follow, can't help, and can't understand. By the end of the movie he accepts this. Homer's tragedy is that he has to leave his father behind. The brilliance in the movie is that this true story, which runs the risk of being cloyingly saccharine, is instead approached with enough depth to reveal its underlying sadness. 

Overall, October Sky is a wonderful movie - an interesting look at a crucial moment in recent history. It feels like home to me, although nothing could be further from my real home than the claustrophobic hills of West Virginia coal country. I identify with Homer's wonder at the rapid evolution of the human experience, and desire to be part of that change. I identify with Homer's father, afraid of losing everything he knows as the world changes too quickly. And I'll always be grateful to October Sky for keeping my sister and me alive on a creepy night in a fuzzy box on the other side of the world.