“What beautiful hyacinths! I have just learnt to love a hyacinth.”
     “And how might you learn? By accident or argument?”
     “Your sister taught me; I cannot tell how. Mrs. Allen used to take pains, year after year, to make me like them; but I never could, till I saw them the other day in Milsom Street; I am naturally indifferent about flowers.”
     “But now you love a hyacinth. So much the better. You have gained a new source of enjoyment, and it is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible. And though the love of a hyacinth may be rather domestic, who can tell, the sentiment once raised, but you may in time come to love a rose? At any rate, however, I am pleased that you have learnt to love a hyacinth. The mere habit of learning to love is the thing; and a teachableness of disposition in a young lady is a great blessing.”

Jane Austen,
Northanger Abbey

Oh, this one has been incubating and marinating for a lo-o-o-o-ong time in the fertile and terrifying back of my brain. And we’re out of Purdah at last, so here she is:

To begin with… have you ever noticed that the front half of your foot looks a little like a cultivated hyacinth? No?

Maybe you just didn’t put enough purple panicles on it.

Now, I will be the first to admit that it is a little fanciful to imagine these hyacinths actually growing on the grounds of the Abbey - given that it’s only March, more probably they actually come from the succession-houses of which General Tilney is so proud - but in fact there is very little about this design that is not fanciful. Besides, it amuses me to contrast the bright vibrant cheerful purple of the hyacinth with the gloomy weathered granite of the building. So indulge me. The hyacinths, then, grow right up to the foundations of Northanger Abbey, and the Abbey’s mouldering grey walls rise dark and forbidding above them.

Mouldering, dark and forbidding? Yes, well.

     An abbey! Yes, it was delightful to be really in an abbey! But she doubted, as she looked round the room, whether anything within her observation would have given her the consciousness. The fireplace, where she had expected the ample width and ponderous carving of former times, was contracted to a Rumford, with slabs of plain though handsome marble, and ornaments over it of the prettiest English china. The windows, to which she looked with peculiar dependence, from having heard the general talk of his preserving them in their Gothic form with reverential care, were yet less what her fancy had portrayed. To be sure, the pointed arch was preserved-the form of them was Gothic-they might be even casements-but every pane was so large, so clear, so light! To an imagination which had hoped for the smallest divisions, and the heaviest stone-work, for painted glass, dirt, and cobwebs, the difference was very distressing.

Yes, well.

I thought about creating The Abbey in that image, but it hardly seemed worth knitting… so I have replaced it with the Abbey of Catherine’s fevered imagination, as fueled by all the delicious horrors of Gothic romance.

Instead of a comfortable gentleman’s residence in Gloucestershire, furnished “in all the profusion and elegance of modern taste,” surrounded by “lodges of a modern appearance,” and approached via “a smooth, level road of fine gravel, without obstacle, alarm, or solemnity of any kind,” our Abbey is modeled after an ancient ruin, mouldering away in the best terrifying Mrs. Radcliffe style, set high and inaccessible on a gloomy wooded hillside, in that semi-Teutonic part of northern France now known as Alsace-Lorraine.

And about this ruin there is much to tell; not all of it apocryphal perhaps. There are those who refer to it as having formerly been a château where the by-blows of German nobility were sent to conceal their parents’ shame. Older legend has it, however, that the building actually began its existence in the early Middle Ages as the Abbaye Franchemontaise; home to the Schnazellines, a Secular Cistercian order whose particular field of sanctified manual labor was the manufacture of fine textiles. They were famed far and wide for their beautifully-wrought threads and cloths of every description, and it is in tribute to them and to their industry that we offer - for the first time - a Spinner’s Option with this sock; in tribute to them and to their founder, the high-minded and erudite Abbé Franquemont.

The irony of this is not lost upon me. As it happens, the Schnazellines were a discalced order, as such eschewing all but the most spartan of foot coverings - relatively unusual for Secular Cistercians, but an unerring reflection of their founder’s eccentric distaste for the production of hose. Spinners they were, and weavers, and as the innovation of knitting became popular in their part of the world it was not unknown to the good lay brothers; but the Abbé enforced a strict embargo on the making of warm stockings, considering the work a waste of time, its products an unwarrantable luxury.

Indeed, along with an unparalleled knowledge of his art and its history, the Abbé Franquemont cherished a number of powerful if not always comprehensible tastes and convictions, among them some curious prejudices in matters not only sartorial but also architectural. How unfortunate for him that he happened to be away on a pilgrimage during the early stages of the Abbey’s construction! for had he been present you may be sure the building would never have been permitted to flaunt its unconcealed Flying Buttresses before all the world. How the good Abbé did despise these new-fangled naked excrescences! Unnecessary; impractical; indecent. (Some contemporary accounts claim that on his return he was actually heard to refer to them under his breath as “sale espèce d’arc-foutant”; but let us fervently hope that he was alike incapable of both the pun and the obscenity.) Buttresses, he averred, like limbs (if not feet), should always be decently covered. Nevertheless, there they were, flying and flagrant and irrevocable, for by that time it was far too late to tear them down despite all the Abbé Franquemont’s fulminations; and there they remain to this day, as the rest of the structure crumbles dismally around them - an enduring monument to one artist’s frustration in the face of Philistinism.

In their honor I have erected a new kind of heel, the Flying Buttress Wraparound Reverse Flap, which rises directly from the sock’s foundation in the best High Perpendicular tradition.

The Flying Buttresses support a Gothic-arched clerestory…

…while the West front - again in tribute to the tools of the Schnazellines’ humble calling - features an elegant rose window whose tracery emulates a fine old design known as the Spindle Lattice.

Rising above, the upper cloister occupies two storeys:

And atop these the roof is edged with… wait for it… terrifying winged gargoyles, poised as for flight.

Such is the “silent, lonely, and sublime” edifice where “Fate sits on these dark battlements, and frowns”; the edifice of which Catherine Morland “expected with solemn awe… a glimpse of its massy walls of grey stone, rising amidst a grove of ancient oaks, with the last beams of the sun playing in beautiful splendour on its high Gothic windows”; a fit setting for the luridly-imagined woes of “the wretched Matilda.”

The Abbey. Ships to the Tsock Flock club starting on Monday.

And in other twisty news….

One advantage of being a spinner?

I no longer have to struggle with the problem of what kind of yarn to use for Jennifer’s birthday present.

Remember that dilemma from a couple of years ago? (Yeah, it’s OK if you don’t. That’s a long time to be paying attention.)

Anyway, now I can make my OWN yarn, so no more agonizing over whether it’s cheap and cheesy of me to use Jen’s yarn, i.e. leftovers from our joint working materials that are supplied by her in the first place at no cost to me, or whether on the other hand using someone else’s yarn somehow implies insufficient solidarity. (Yes, I know that second one is silly, especially when the someone else is a good friend to both of us. Nevertheless, you shoulda seen me worrying about it. Because, you know, I don’t ever have enough to worry about.)

This is the perfect solution, because what better gift for a fiber person than something one has knit out of one’s own handspun?

Of course, the challenge there, if the recipient is a spinner, becomes measuring up to the standard. Jen’s been spinning for coon’s ages, and I though a quick study am way behind her in the seniority department, so instead of worrying about whose yarn to use I now get to worry about whether or not mine can cut it.

Luckily, I had a leg up there, because the yarn I chose was something she had enthusiastically admired when I showed it to her, back when it was newly spun. Over a year ago, no less, which made me feel pretty good after only 6 months of spinning.

If you’ve been around here for a while and have been keeping a close eye on your score card, you may recall that at Rhinebeck 2008 (hey, at least it’s not as long ago as that Jen’s birthday story I linked above) I bought this beautiful merino/tencel from Creatively Dyed:

… and you may also remember that I began spinning it a few weeks later and fell deeply, madly in love, producing some 380-ish yards of this:

…which I loved so much I could hardly bear to let it out of my sight.

Well, I showed this yarn to Jen at Georg’s birthday party (cheer up, the history is getting less and less ancient; that party was only a little over a year ago), and Jen fondled it and particularly praised the plying, and I had me a big proud - that nice little shivery feeling you get when you realize, “hey, fer realz - she’s not just saying that.” So from that point on I pretty much knew it was going to be made up into something for her. Possibly not soon, because I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to part with it. But eventually you run out of room for storing the Petting Skeins, right? and a yarn like that just cries out to be used and to be worn.

Jen’s birthday is in November, shortly after mine (yes, see previous post re schedule, me being perpetually behind), so as usual I cast on right after Rhinebeck. The weather was just getting cold, and it seems that that’s becoming the traditional time of year for my handspun to start whispering “Mobius” in my ears. Nothing loath, I always listen when it does that.

Cast on for a Mobius in a nice reversible pattern, a simple 3-row variant on Grand Eyelet.

I love patterns like that for something like this - anything with either a garter base or an odd number of rows, so it really looks the same front and back. Since the front of the Mobius IS the back, and vice versa, this matters even more if possible than it would with a scarf. (The downside is that you end up doing every other repeat in reverse… unless you’re cagey like me. I don’t mind purling, but I don’t like humongous expanses of it, so when I’m doing something reversible like this, or like garter in the round… I cheat. Any time I have to reverse, I really reverse: wrap one stitch, turn the work, and change directions so I’m working on the RS again. Come to the end of that round, pick up that wrap and work it into the pattern, and nobody the wiser - 99 times out of 100 you can’t see the switch even if you’re really looking for it.)

It was knitting up pretty quickly and looking rather nice, and by the end of the plane trip to SOAR I was well into the second skein and thinking I might actually get it done close to the actual birthday itself. Of course there was NEGATIVE time available for knitting while at SOAR, so except for the odd stitch here and there I didn’t really look at it again until I was on the plane back from SOAR. (Which, incidentally, was how I spent pretty much the whole day on MY birthday, snif, strangled sob, etc. So worth it, though.) Picked it up then and continued working on it, and was nearly at the end of the last pattern rep when it became clear to me that I…

Did.
Not.
Have.
Enough.
Yarn.
To.
Finish.

Not even enough to bind off from right where I was - which I found out the hard way, by trying to do so, falling a good yard (of selvedge, I mean, not of yarn) short of the mark, then spending the next hour or so fiddling with the tension on the bound-off edge to see what more I could eke out, and then spending the NEXT hour or so painstakingly tinking the bind-off and putting that sucker back on the needles.

Sigh.

Is there anything worse than running short of your own one-of-a-kind handspun?

Well, I got home, and the first thing I did was fall into bed and sleep for two days straight.

And then I pulled myself together and I cast about for a solution, and boy howdy did I find one.

I had about half an ounce of leftover white polwarth locks - not merino, but close enough for government work and more fun to spin anyway. I also had a pretty decent supply of tencel in both white and grey. And miraculously, I still had the ball-band from the fiber braid, so I could check the percentage of the blend: 50/50.

Got out the scale, went to the drum-carder, and set to work making a pale grey shiny batt in the same proportions.

Spun it to the same grist and twist.

Thought over all the tricks I’d learned from AmyBoogie at SOAR (see above re: so worth it), broke out the food coloring, and started playing around with a little hand-paint job.

(I don’t seem to have taken any pictures of this process. I am full of BLOGGER FAIL.)

And damned if I didn’t manage to match some of the shades. Exactly.

Of course, since it was dyed after spinning instead of before there was no way I was going to match the frequency of the color sequence; the repeats are a lot tighter.

Under the circumstances, how much did I care?

Not.

Hey, I decided it was a feature.

I attached my new yarn and I started knitting. I finished my poor orphaned little pattern rep. Ah, what the hell, I thought then, and I started ANOTHER pattern rep. I finished that one. I bound off, nice and loose.

And I had about a yard and a half left over.

Surprised I didn’t dislocate my shoulder patting myself on the back.

Here’s the finished Mobius:

The outer stripe on both edges (because of course this is a center-cast-on Mobius) is made from my extra ounce, and everybody knows it - NOT because they noticed and could tell, but because… um, because for the next few weeks I wore the thing myself and I never missed an opportunity to show it off and tell the story.

I have to tell you, this did not tend to make me less fond of the yarn. For a while there it was touch and go whether I would ever block the thing and put it in the mail.

I mean… just look how shiny it is:

Shiny shiny shiny.

So I doubt it will surprise anyone to know that Jen’s birthday present was very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very late.

But she did get it at last. Just ask her. And make her show you a picture, wouldja? She says she loves it and she says she’s been wearing it, but she won’t show me how it looks on her, and it’s driving me crazy.

Boo.

Me again. Back in the saddle yet again blah blah blah. Just when you thought, etc. Rumors of my you-know-what have been greatly you-know-whatted.

Not going to go into a lot of blather right now about all the stuff I’ve managed to miss blogging during this latest fallow period (though, let’s see… my third blogiversary springs to mind, and so does the birthday on which my age and my name diverged for the first time in three years, and so does SOAR, and so does the Rouet Round-Up, and… oh, right, I wasn’t going to blather about all this right now, was I) - I may get around to some of it retroactively and I may not; I cannot be positive which, as dear Hilaire Belloc put it so beautifully, but a girl can dream. Also not going to go into a lot of tedious detail about reasons - I will say, though, that I’ve been unusually swamped with complicated life stuff, even though most of it hasn’t been very event-y, as such. Basically, there’s kind of a recurring black hole going on because of a long-running illness in the family. I hasten to say I’m not the one doing most of the heavy lifting, but even so this kind of thing really eats into one’s personal and even professional bandwidth, if you know what I mean - and I suspect you do. Hence the greatly diminished blogginess; hence the dearth of web-site-update-iness; hence the fact that I am generally and officially behind schedule on just about anything you could name. (OK, OK, not that me being behind schedule is anything new, I know. But still.)

Anyway, what I really wanted to talk about is… one of these running-late things, and because it’s been running late, and because I still don’t seem to be able to kick the Tstealth habit, it seemed only reasonable to offer some teasers about what it’s going to look like… and by “it” I mean Tsock #6, i.e. the final instalment of this season’s Tsock Flock Club.

Because we are doing something new and different and exciting with Tsock #6 - at least it’s new and different for us, and I think it’s exciting.

It’s this.

That, my friends, is sweet shiny superwash BFL top, hand-painted by Jennifer in colorways to match those of the yarn for Tsock #6, which comes with… wait for it… a Spinners’ Option.

Jen has outdone herself yet again, and in the process she has produced a colorway that is not only jaw-droppingly beautiful but also unphotographable.

I’ve done my not inconsiderable best to get the color balance right in these pictures, but I may as well tell you right now: none of them is quite right… and yet… at the same time… all of them are right. (The purpliest ones are the rightest of all.)

To clarify - the kit still comes with our default sock yarn, Jennifer’s Flock Sock, and I made the prototype in that before I even started sampling for the handspun version. But any club member who spins, and who would like to spin the yarn for this sock, has the option of doing it either way or both ways - can get it with fiber instead of yarn or, for some reasonable cost, with fiber as well as yarn. This is known as eating one’s cake and having it, and I’m hoping that eventually, if all goes well, we will start extending the idea to some of our existing kits. Who knows, perhaps making it an option with nearly all our kits? Remains to be seen, but I for one do not find that possibility the least bit horrifying.

Is there a particular reason we are doing it for the first time with this kit?

Of course there is.

Am I about to explain what that reason is?

Not yet. (See above re: just can’t break the Tstealth Habit.) That’d be telling.

But you can be sure it ties in with the theme in some insane and far-fetched way. So what else is new?

Because of all the behind-schedule-ness, actually, I won’t get to knit up much of the handspun prototype until after the kit ships (which I fondly hope will be very very soon - note to self: hurry it up and finish this post and get back to work on formatting the pattern). But I’ve done some sampling and swatching; I’ve spun the yarn (I’m not usually a big fan of superwash fiber, incidentally, but I have to say this stuff is delicious to work with, drafts like a dream); and I’m here to tell you that playing with both - both millspun and handspun in the same colorways and design, I mean - is more fun than decent people oughta have.

The skeins are handspun; the center-pull balls are millspun. The handspun looks a little darker and more saturated - it isn’t the same dye-lot, of course, but I think the real reason is that the colors in the handspun are more blended-looking, because I’m not spinner enough yet to duplicate the pattern of the variegation the way Jennifer laid it out in both the yarn and the fiber. I mean… I mean… wait a minute… of course, I mean I DID THAT ON PURPOSE, and that’s part of the fun of spinning the yarn myself, right? that I get to play with the ways the colors interact.

I’m also not quite spinner enough yet to have spun this as a workable 4-ply (I really love our 4-ply millspun, and as a sock yarn spinner my goal is to emulate that some day), though I have to say I’m getting damn close. So close, in fact, that I actually got gauge with my 4-ply sample! but I decided it was still a little too dense for my taste, so I ended up going for the 3-ply instead.

That’s the 3-ply on the left, the 4-ply on the right. The 4-ply is nice and rounded, and yes, I was tempted. Very tempted. Maybe next time. They both swatch up nicely, I think.

The 3-ply doesn’t have quite the stitch definition of my dreams…

Millspun Above, Handspun Below

… but it ain’t chopped liver either, and I am not unhappy with it.

At all.

A few more teasers; again, these are from the millspun prototype since it’s the only one I have so far.

Do we detect a little touch of the cabled and twisted crazy here?

We do. Oh yes, indeed we do. It’s been kind of a lace-heavy season so far, you may have noticed, and I thought we needed a good strong dose of texture to finish things off with a bang. In fact… well, as you may already know if you hang out on the Tsock Flock Ravelry Group… I went so overboard with the twists and turns and ins and outs on this one that I actually had to invent a whole new system of cabling taxonomy and nomenclature so I could write the directions without going - and driving everyone - insane.

That is, I mean - you know, more insane.

I like a good crazy as much as the next person, but even I have to draw the line somewhere.

For right now I’m drawing it just this side of explaining what all those bits of texture mean. Because after all, I’ve got over a month of teasing and tantalizing coyness to make up for, here.

Stay tuned.

So yesterday… I had an unusually tough row to hoe.

Pity me. I spent the afternoon on Liam Duty.

Yup - for those of you who were wondering, Liam is the kid’s name. And as you can see, he and I do not get along at all.

He’s eight weeks old now, with a voracious appetite and a rudimentary vocabulary;

he’s pretty much got us all right where he wants us - and he knows it.

There’s rather a lot of him for his age, I’m told,

and I can’t say that’s anything to object to.

You’ll notice that he’s easily entertained. Well, one of us is, anyway.

His mother was very impressed with my multi-tasking abilities…

… until she caught me getting distracted.

Eight weeks is maybe a little old for this, incidentally, but I trust you’ll be pleased to know that I finally got a chance to perform the all-important initiation ritual; dunno if he’ll actually grow up to knit and spin (though if I have anything to say about it…), but at least the seeds of fiber-friendliness have now been planted - officially.

(It was a tough choice, but I figured I couldn’t go wrong with a Bosworth Mini and my default Harmony circs.)

Overall, I think he took it pretty well; at any rate he seemed suitably impressed with the solemnity of the occasion.

Sir… it is a very solemn circumstance; and I love to see it so reverently and awfully entered upon. It is a most excellent sign; for the most thoughtful beginnings make the most prudent proceedings.

You may have observed that there is something missing in these pictures.

Lauren.

Yeah, well - she gets to play with him after I go home.

Fair’s fair.

I’ll tell you a story. There; it’s begun. When we get to the end of it, we’ll know much more than we do now.

Actually, I’ll tell you more than one story. I’ll tell you two stories - three, really, though I’ll let Jennifer tell most of the third one.

There’s the story of the Tsock; the story of how in the teeth of all occasions informing against it the Tsock finally DID get written and printed and packed for shipping; and there’s the story behind the development of the Tsock.

What - did you get caught up on that second one? Well, then, let me just cut to the chase on that for a moment.

Yes, Club Tsock #5, “The Snow Queen,” is being packed and shipped today. TODAY.

I know I normally blog these things the moment I am out of Pattern Purdah, and in this case that happened three days ago, and I’m half-sorry I didn’t say anything sooner. But just this once, after all the obstacles and disasters and insanities, and with the stamina of the printer as uncertain as it was, I thought I’d better leave it a hostage to fate until I was sure the patterns were actually ready. So that’s done now - and now that you know there’s a happy ending, let’s go back to our stories.

We’ll know about the demon whose favorite toy was a magic mirror he had made for himself; a mirror that showed “the real, ugly truth” of everything - making beautiful landscapes look like boiled spinach and good people look suspicious and deformed. We’ll hear about how the devil and his imps tried to take their toy up to heaven and show the angels their distorted reflections, and how on the way up the mirror shattered into millions upon millions of pieces that fell to earth.

The Mirror Crack’d

The larger pieces were used as windows, smaller ones in the lenses of eyeglasses; everything seen through these became hateful and hideous. Some of the tiniest splinters, no bigger than a grain of sand, lodged in people’s eyes - with the same effect - or even in their hearts, which then froze solid.

This is what happened to Kay; one splinter in his eye and another in his heart, and suddenly he became spiteful and vicious; his playmate Gerda seemed ugly and foolish in his eyes, and so did the roses, and the picture-books, and the grandmother, and everything else that had formerly delighted him. At last, when winter came, he found something that still looked perfect to him: frost and snowflakes.

Miniature Frost Flowers

Attracted by the cold and symmetry, one day he set out to follow the flakes, the “snow bees,” to their Queen. He found her; she kissed him on the forehead; he became colder than ever, and forgot everyone and everything but her.

SnowCaps

And this is where the miniature canvas of the sock becomes so cruelly constricting. There is room for the fragments of the devil’s mirror; there is room for ice and snow and frost; there is room for the powerful force that will save Kay at last - but there is no room for the marvelous adventures Gerda meets on her quest to find him and free him and bring him back. No crows, no princess, no reindeer, no Laplander, no robber’s daughter; no red shoes, no story-singing garden, no roses - for these you will have to read the book (or perhaps one day we’ll knit the shawl, which will give us scope for all this and more).

All I can tell you now is that, though it took her several years and uncounted miles and hardships…

… Gerda did eventually find Kay, cold and blue and alone in one of the frozen rooms of the Snow Queen’s palace - and the hot tears she wept over him melted the ice in his heart, washed away the splinters of the mirror, and set him free at last.

Gerda’s Tears

I want to dwell for a moment on Gerda’s Tears - after all, they are the most powerful force in the story; so powerful that they can overcome both the cold of the Snow Queen and the wickedness of the Devil’s Mirror to bring Kay back to life. When they meet the fragments of the mirror they melt them away, drop by drop. First one drop amid the shards; then two; then three; until at last the mirror is all gone, melted away in a lake of tears.

Tears Transition

(The pink line? not part of the sock. Just me belaboring the obvious in PhotoShop. The two pattern stitches use the same number of rows and stitches, so one flows seamlessly into the other.)

And the first tear of the flood - the one that washes away the mote in Kay’s eye - occupies a place of honor (optional, as usual) on the back of the heel.

Single Tear

So that is the actual Tsock; and as you may recall it was finished and written and being tested and adjusted - I was in the middle of the calculations and re-charting for the Large size - when the blow fell and the computer refused to compute. What happened after that… I really should have issued regular bulletins, but honestly I hadn’t the heart - went pretty much as predicted. It took us about two days to locate and implement the solution to the file rescue problem - a downloadable Linux installed on a device that would boot the machine and talk to the external backup devices we had available. Several iterations of Catch-22 later, the spirit of Rube Goldberg was upon us and we managed to get all the little pieces talking to each other - and sure enough, there were all my files, ALL of them, sitting on the drive, pretty as you please. Another couple of hours, and there they were, ALL of them, safely copied off to an external hard drive. Leaving me with all my data, but still no machine configured to handle it. At this point, however, there was nothing to lose; if necessary I could format the hard drive and start fresh, reinstalling everything. I could ill afford the time, but anything I did was going to eat more of that than I could happily spare, and the most important thing was that all the files were safe.

The rest of this story is not terribly exciting - in the event we managed to come up with the right mix of utilities so that I didn’t have to reformat and start from scratch, but it still took the better part of a couple of days to figure out what needed to be reinstalled, what settings backed into, etc. (In the middle of all this the adapter arrived. Hah - we don’t need no steenkin’ adapter no more. Still - not sorry to have it for future use; it would have made the file-rescue process a good bit less convoluted.) And of course, having failed to clone myself, I couldn’t be working on the pattern at the same time I was working on the computer. Mai frustration, let me sho u it.

When the carnage was over I was left with a mostly-working computer (somehow I still haven’t gotten around to reinstalling Flash and other media stuff, and you know, I’m not at all sure I miss them much) and a mostly-written and mostly-charted pattern. I did have to start from scratch with the Large sizing, some of it fairly complex (as with Blessed Thistle this tsock includes a different version of one pattern stitch for the larger size, with different increase and decrease schemes relating to it around the heel), and we had some moments during that process where my blessed Test Knitter had plenty of cause to doubt my sanity - but finally it did get all pulled together. It was still sort of a comedy of errors, because at each step along the way there’d be something to pull me up short. Go to format the pages? WHOOPS! Forgot to re-copy the style sheets from the backup. Go to generate the PDF? WHOOPS! Forgot to re-install the PDF driver. Go to FTP it to the site? WHOOPS! Forgot to re-instate the FTP settings. Mai fried brain, let me sho u it.

But at last the pattern was done and uploaded, and the charts were done and uploaded, and the cover was done and uploaded, and I was just working on the last bit - formatting the techniques booklet pages - when I got a call from the Tserf. Now, I knew before I picked up the phone that the news couldn’t be good, because if it were good it would have come by e-mail. Sure enough… the printer, which has been tottering on its last legs since before Rhinebeck, and which we had just recently jollied into working again by cannibalizing a part from an old printer of mine… had gone half-way through printing the covers and then decided to throw a tantrum and refuse to handle cover stock any more. In fact, it was so sulky that it didn’t even want to hear about plain paper.

I told her to put it in time-out. Shut it off altogether, I said, unplug it in fact, and just leave it for a couple of hours; let it cool down and reflect on its sins. Then try it again, and if it’s still acting ornery, then we’ll think seriously about panicking.

Two hours later the phone rang: we were printing again. Not happily… but still, cranking out the copies. I uploaded the final file for the tech book and crossed every extremity I’ve got.

I also ordered a new printer.

Anyway, that was when I decided it would be wiser not to blog this thing until I was sure that the patterns were completely printed and assembled and actually out the door. Last night I got the assurance that they were ready to go, and that Georg was going over to Jen’s with them today to assemble and pack and label, and I almost reached for the blog - but then I saw the post script to her note saying, “of course, they’re predicting snow for tomorrow.” So I shut up, re-crossed all the extremities, and held my breath for good measure.

Today I got the welcome all-clear at last. But even then I couldn’t type at first - had to wait for my lungs to start working again, and for the circulation to come back to my newly-uncrossed fingers.

Remains only to tell of the origins of the Tsock, and aside from the obvious sources of inspiration Jennifer has already told that story better than I can. (Well… except for her favorite story about me wanting her to produce a color BETWEEN two shades on the Pantone chart, which is base slander I’m telling you. She totally made that up. I may be crazy, but I don’t have a DEATH WISH. Ahem.) Not to mention that her pictures do far better justice to the colorway. I can only add that I loved the original Polar Bear Inna Snowstorm colorway when I saw it, and I hoped against all reason that it would work for the design I’d had in mind ever since we first started talking about it.

Especially since it chimed so perfectly with the real colors of the frozen North. TheBoy^TM took one look at it and made a beeline for his photo archives, and next thing I knew I was deluged with pictures he’d taken of the Herbert Glacier. Sure enough, check out the ice color in this detail of the terminal moraine:

I tried, too - tried really hard - tried to fool myself into believing that I could overcome the laws of nature and make a complex colorway and a complex pattern stitch work together instead of fighting to the death and canceling each other out.

Might as well have saved myself the trouble.

The pattern stitch is a scaled-down version of the old Frost Flowers, and the scaling-down was already complicated enough, further complicating an already complex stitch. I can’t even tell you how many different versions of the faggoting section I tested before nailing down this one; I literally don’t know any more. Anyway, add this riot of arctic shades in quick succession, and… we all know the rule, right? busy colors + busy stitch = mess. As always. There are contexts in which you could do something like this and produce a result that is opulent rather than chaotic… but a sock ain’t one of them. Just too much going on here.

So much so that I had to re-swatch the umpteenth version of the stitch in solid white to make sure I wasn’t imagining that it could work at all.

Nope, wasn’t imagining it. The stitch structure works at sock gauge. (It doesn’t at lace gauge, but that’s a story for another time, perhaps.)

And that’s when we went back to the drawing board on the yarn. The colorway we ended up with for the sock is, I think, about as lovely and as just-right as any yarn I’ve ever seen or imagined; it had better be, considering what Jennifer puts herself through to dye every skein. (Hey, no looking at me. It wasn’t MY idea to make things more complicated for her. She did that all by herself. So much for me having the monopoly on perfectionism around here.)

When it came time to put the pattern together, however, I was careful to come up with a completely different name for it in the context of the sock; subject to Jennifer’s approval the sock version will be known as Winter Palace. Meanwhile, I’m hoping the original Polar Bear will continue to swim in his own Arctic Ocean and be a standalone colorway as originally envisioned.

At any rate - I know what I’m planning to do with my prototype skein.

After my nap, that is.

We interrupt this edition of Pattern Purdah to bring you a long-awaited sequel.

So long-awaited that you’d be more than justified in not remembering that you were waiting for it.

Yes, it’s been well over a year now since the desktop computer went crackerdog - and some of you, instead of sympathizing with my tale of woe-cake, callously demanded to see the next computer go flop-bott.

Yeah, thank you SO much, guys. It took a while, but apparently your wish IS the universe’s command… and sure as hell, the other day the TARDIS went flop-bott.

Actually, its flop-bott symptoms are startlingly similar to the crackerdog symptoms of the previous machine; apparently it didn’t remember history and was therefore condemned to repeat it. Basically, it just up and refused to boot, in a manner that to my skilled diagnostic eye (hey, I’m only half-sarcastic here - fixing computers used to be my gig, remember) suggests that the drive is unimpaired and that the only problem is with the boot sector. I’m pretty firmly convinced - wait a minute, I gotta cross things and knock wood and ptui ptui ptui spit through my fingers before I say this - that my irreplaceable data (yes, even the most recent stuff, which - need I even say? - is the immediately mission-critical stuff that wasn’t yet backed up) is all just fine. Observe the consequence of progress, however:

I can’t get to it.

When the desktop machine crashed, you may recall, I grabbed a convenient external drive enclosure, slammed the recalcitrant drive into it, slaved it up to another machine, and sure enough found all my files intact.

I can’t do that this time.

Why?

Because the TARDIS is a faster fancier more powerful machine than its predecessor, containing a zillion newfangled more-compact more-efficient IMPROVED components, and one of the IMPROVEMENTS is that… of course… wait for it… they are incompatible with, and impervious to, all the old tried and true solutions.

I feel my inner Luddite burbling up toward the surface.

I can get to the setting that would permit me to change to a different boot device and read the drive… but there is no such boot device available.

I could slave the drive to a different computer, as before… but this time around it is a miniature drive with a proprietary interface. I need a non-standard adapter. The good news is that I can get a non-standard adapter. The bad news is that I can’t get it locally. That is… if I went into Manhattan, still the Alice’s Restaurant of electronics, I could probably locate one, eventually, by pounding enough pavement and going into enough seedy little stores and battling enough language barriers. Like I said - can’t get it locally. Hell, I could probably look up the pinouts and build the adapter I need in the time it’d take to track one down near here. Either way, though, that’d mean spending time hunting or soldering when what I really need to be doing is reinventing the wheel.

And I don’t mean the kind that spins.

So it’s irony time around here, for now.

I’ve ordered the adapter. It’s coming from California - I just got the notice that it has shipped, and apparently the seller conveniently disregarded my request to be contacted about expedited shipping. Can hardly blame him, considering that the part itself is a stupid little thing that costs under $2.00, and I suppose there’s a reasonable chance that regular mail will end up being just as fast under the circumstances. A girl can dream.

Anyway, here’s what’s going to happen. After a weekend of cobbling together workarounds from obsolete parts just to get on-line and complain about not being able to get on-line, I now have my hands on a loaner machine that can handle the applications I need to run. So I’m going to install said applications. And I’m going to download copies of all the outbound e-mails I sent to the test-knitter, and use them to reconstitute the text of the pattern I was working on (and, for my sins, hoped to have shipped by now). Will leave the charts for last because that’s a more onerous task, but ultimately you know how it’s going to go: just as I finish doing the hard part of all this, that package will arrive in the mail and allow me to recover the original files that meanwhile I have just recreated.

Like I said - irony time.

I don’t dare NOT do it, though, because sure as hell if I sit here twiddling my thumbs while waiting (well, OK, not twiddling my thumbs, as such, but you know… working on something else, which is about as close as I ever get to thumb-twiddling anyway), then either the damn thing won’t arrive, or it will arrive and it won’t work, or it will work but it won’t solve the problem. And my black toner will turn magenta. That’s Someone’s Law, and it’s no use fighting it, so as a sop to superstition I’m going to devote myself to getting this task done in the hope that it will by definition become redundant as soon as it’s finished.

Sisyphus, eat your heart out.

Mai windmill, let me sho u it; I iz tilting.