A little philosophy.

TechKnitter, both on her blog and on Ravelry, is an amazing source for tips, tricks, techniques, fixes, solutions, and Things To Generally Help You Knit Better. If you don't read her blog and you knit, you really should; posts are kind of sporadic but always worth reading, and well-indexed so that if you need to know how to do Japanese short rows next month instead of five minutes from now, you can find it again.

Today's post was a little different: adding some nuance to the "process knitter" versus "product knitter" divide by examining what she calls the "ephemeral joy of the knitting itself". The post really resonated with me, and I thought I should share.

Strike one more off the goal list!

I've kind of let my goals for the year go by the wayside - one thing it didn't account for enough was that "life happens", and projects came up that I wanted to do but couldn't possibly have planned ahead for. One I intended to hold myself to, though, was "Take a class on something!" - a good goal for every year, isn't it? And, much like the class on natural dyeing that I took last year, this one really brought home the idea that there's no substitute for learning from a human teacher.

Backing up a year: the first issue of Piecework that came in my subscription was the Historical Knitting issue for the year. At about that time I'd been looking for a way to make purling - or, more precisely, switching from knits to purls within a row - more efficient, and I thought I'd found it in the Portuguese knitting technique most associated with Andrea Wong, which was featured in an instructional article in the magazine - this is the method I'd heard about, also used in Peru and some parts of the Mediterranean coast, where yarn is tensioned around a hook-shaped pin or your neck. I gave it a try - and I failed, and kept right on with my old style of knitting.

I was delighted to hear a little while later that my LYS was trying to bring Andrea in to teach a class; I really was interested in the technique, and figured I could learn it from a human much more easily than even a DVD*. I was right. Purling isn't that much different from the way I do it now - but the way the yarn is tensioned makes it that much easier. Knitting with the yarn in front is a little different (and that's where I had trouble trying to learn from the pictures - the article didn't make clear that you really, really should start with purling) - but switching between knit and purl, once you've got the hang of the technique, is a quick, painless matter of flicking the yarn over or under the right needle with your thumb. We tried a little colorwork, too - you add a second pin on the other shoulder, and then just...use whichever yarn you need for your pattern. This could make some of those crazy designs where you use four or five colors in a single row of knitting much more manageable, because while you only have two hands, you could put an arbitrary number of pins on your left shoulder...

I remembered that in a class Yarn Harlot teaches about "Knitting for Speed and Efficiency", she advises students to practice the new style of knitting 15 minutes a day, and that's what I've been doing - right now I'm still kind of slow at this, but I think I'm getting better. I was right to say that this would be the perfect technique for the shadow-knit scarf (now about six inches longer than Hubby is tall, and likely to get another foot or so longer...I worked out that it's about equivalent to five socks' worth of knitting), but Andrea was also absolutely right to say that your gauge will change dramatically and you shouldn't switch mid-project. So, in light of a thought I had while sewing up the tail of my fish hat...I'm making a bunch of 20 stitch x 20 row swatches to practice proper seaming techniques on. Whip stitch is fine for fish hat tails, not so great for sweaters.

*If you want to learn this style of knitting and are not fortunate enough to have Andrea Wong come to your LYS, she does have a DVD out, another one being released in about a week, and a book-in-progress, probably released in the spring of 2010, that will cover a lot more than the DVDs.

And cooking.

I tried a couple more of Jamie Oliver's recipes last week - the "peppers stuffed with peppers" from Jamie At Home (still can't find this recipe anywhere on the 'net...) and "Tender and crisp chicken legs with sweet tomatoes", which came up a couple weeks ago on his "Recipe of the Day" RSS feed.

Both were awesomely good - although I appreciated the filling of the stuffed peppers more than the pepper shell - and the recipes really encourage you to play with color in your food (peppers and tomatoes both come in a wide variety). The chicken legs were beyond easy - put big chunks of tomato and potato in a baking dish, put chicken leg quarters on top, scatter whole cloves of garlic and shreds of basil around the dish, and bake for an hour and a half. Total cleanup, 1 knife, 1 cutting board, 1 baking dish...unless blood is spilled in a fistfight over the garlic cloves. I'm really looking forward to making either or both of these next summer when I have fresh tomatoes and basil from the garden - and both are a good answer to the dilemma I had about what to do with the bounty from my over-enthusiastic cherry tomato plant.