Tag / stories

by TechnicolorMom

Staying Up Til Midnight

In college, I could stay up late with the best of them. Two a.m., the Acorn Cafe, and I were very good friends. On occasion, I even hung out with Great Oaks Hall and the elusive all-nighter.

Not so anymore. These days, my eyes are drooping by 10:00 p.m. Baby J is a good sleeper and will usually sleep all night, but in the last two weeks or so, her sleep time shifted from 10:00 to 11:00 to 11:30. After a discussion with our pediatrician, we are moving her bedtime up to 8:00, and so far this seems to be working.

I don’t need to go to bed as soon as Baby J is asleep! This has been great — I can stay up and knit, play a game, or watch a show with my husband. It’s a double-edged sword, though, as I get addicted to the time, and I end up staying up later than I should.

Last night is the perfect example. Baby J was asleep and in her crib at 8:00 p.m., my husband was playing Battlefield 1 with friends, and I had a date with a sock.

I am not typically a monogamous knitter. I love to cast on whatever project grabs my eye. Yes, sometimes this means that projects don’t get finished for a year or that they eventually get frogged (ripped out so the yarn can be reused). But for me, the joy of knitting comes from the process: finding a pattern, discovering a beautifully dyed skein of yarn, casting on, and knitting (not always in that order).

These socks, though, are for my husband, and he is patiently waiting for them to be ready. Because he is paying attention to what I’m knitting, he would notice if I switched projects. So I need to finish them. Because I want to KNIT ALL THE THINGS.

Thus midnight and met once again. One sock is completed, and yesterday at Knit Night, I made great progress on the cuff and had even started the heel increases. So after Baby J was asleep, I went to town on these socks. By the time 11:00 p.m. rolled around, I was so close to being ready to turn the heel that I had to keep going.

I should have stopped. The later I stayed up, the more mistakes I made. This row was off by one stitch. That pattern didn’t quite line up. You get the idea. I felt like Tina from Bob’s Burgers, but with the enthusiasm of her sister Louise.

Fortunately, I made it through without needing to frog any of the work and was able to drop down one or two stitches to fix my mistakes, but it takes longer to fix the mistakes than it does just to knit! I made it to about four rows before the heel turn, and in the process, I qualified for the Night Owl Knits badge for the Eat.Sleep.Knit Yarnathon Booster Club!

This morning during Baby J’s first nap, I was able to finish the heel turn! Now for the foot of the sock. I WILL finish these this weekend so I can knit all the other things!

by TechnicolorMom

Unyielding Circular Needles

A friend taught me to knit during my junior year of college. A couple of months later, I had the awesome opportunity to take a college class on knitting. It was taught by two of my college professors (an Historian and a Psychologist) as part of my Liberal Arts college’s January Interim term.

For four hours, five days a week, and for a whole month, we went to class and learned all about the history of knitting, how to cast on, knit, purl (which I learned I had been doing incorrectly prior to this), cable, felt, you name it. We tried out different types of needles, including bamboo, acrylic, circular, straight, and double-pointed needles (DPNs).

One of our homework assignments was to straighten out our circular needles to get the kinks out of the plastic cable that connects the two needle tips.

Living on a college campus, I didn’t have access to a stove, so I tried being creative. First I tried to boil water in a crockpot, which didn’t work. I then tried to microwave my needles. This also didn’t work, and it had the added benefit of melting the glue that held the cable to the bamboo tip, so when I tried to pull the cable straight, it came clean out of the needle tip. I tried to put it back, but the glue cooled too fast. Logically, I put them back into the microwave to melt the glue again.

Eventually I managed to convince one of the Residence Directors to let me boil water in his apartment while he played Guitar Hero.

Last weekend, I found myself growing annoyed with my circular knitting needle cables going in all the wrong directions as I tried to knit a pair of socks using the magic loop method. Back to the stove I went!

If you need to straighten some of the curves out of your circular knitting needles, try this:

  1. Boil a pot of water deep enough for your needles to not be too curled when you dip them in. I used a medium-sized sauce pan.
  2. Have a hand towel ready.
  3. Hold the needles by the tips, and dip the plastic cable into the boiling water until about an inch of cable is left out of the water. You don’t want to melt any adhesive! (Also, wear a pot holder so you don’t burn your hands on the steam. Tip from a chemist: the water can only reach 212 °F, but the steam can get hotter!)
  4. Keep the cable in the water for 30-60 seconds.
  5. Pull the cable out of the water, then, holding one needle in one hand, use the other hand to wrap the cable with the hand towel near the top needle, and slide the towel down the cable to the end. This straightens the cable out.
  6. Repeat steps 3-5 as necessary.

I was able to remove most of the curls from my cables. Because I’ve left these in projects for long periods of time, I’ve got a couple of actual kinks in the cables that I wasn’t able to remove, but they will be untangled enough to lessen my frustration for a while!