Social Media

I’m about to head out to a social media forum at UC Davis. The idea is that there is a need to understand ways to communicate with college applicants if you want to attract them to your campus, but there are many other ways the technology can be useful to university work, and I want to find out more about those sort of things…

Being a social person I’m interested in social media but have resisted, for a long time, signing on to things like MySpace and Facebook, because, well, I have two blogs, they are already getting neglected.

And then Ravelry came into my life.

Ravelry is a social network for knitters and crocheters that this morning stands at 281,975 members. Lest this sound completely innocuous and old-lady-ish, I should fess up that among the 25 or so groups I’m a member of (some of them genuinely dedicated to bits of knitting and fiber arts) out of the by now thousands of groups (some are outlined here ), several are shall we say not particularly old ladyish. An IVF doctor, interested in a sudden spike in traffic directed to his blog from Ravelry, discovered not just one but TWO groups of knitters and crocheters who are childfree by choice, one of them a great deal more vociferous about it than the other, which at least tolerates the presence of self-professed parents (“parenttrolls” are apparently a feature of CFBC groups on the web). The Lazy, Stupid and Godless group not only tolerates but encourages profanity (“twatweasel” is the most interesting word to have entered my lexicon since my twenties, I think).

I will be interested to see what transpires at this forum. But I doubt they’ll be discussing much knitting.

(A phenomenon I’ve encountered though is that people don’t tell you they’re on Facebook. If they are, they’ll find you; if you aren’t, you don’t get it, and they’re not going to waste their breath. No such restraint exercises itself among Ravellers, though.)

Pre-Felting: Socks for a Giant

I’m taking a woodworking class in order to be able to build simple things (like bluebird boxes or a cold frame for my tomatoes and peppers). Carpentry is not unlike knitting, bookmaking, or dressmaking. Cut or make the pieces and put them together. Adornments optional.

Alpaca Koolaid

I found myself in this funky yarn store in Woodland with a scary McCain truck outside and plastic lining on the windows looking for bulky cashmere for my mother’s birthday scarf but all they had was baby alpaca so I took it and ran away but the color wasn’t quite right so remembering you could dye yarn with Koolaid I dove into Safeway where I never go and where I won’t be recognized buying koolaid for god’s sake but I don’t even know what aisle it would be on is it with spices or sodas or even controlled substances but a kindly mother helped me without raising any eyebrows which gave me pause because she ought to have unless she dyes her own yarn too and I got home and filled the crockpot with water and four packets of grape koolaid and the alpaca and the house stank of summer 1967 and I pulled out this bordeaux-colored handful of worms and rinsed it and dried it and rolled it up and knitted it and the cats would just NOT leave it alone worse than catnip it was and they pulled and snagged at it so I had to do it over and this time it’s blocking in the car with no way for cats to get in. But you should smell the car.

You probably can. From wherever you are.

Tvåändsstickning

Which is to say, the Swedish way of knitting from two ends of the same yarn, making a think double stitch and solid fabric on which it is possible to construct raised designs with clever positioning of the two strands.

Bit like burning the candle at both ends, though in theory you get something at the end of it (unless you have to rip it apart, no longer able to deny to yourself that if you were to continue to knit these gloves, they’d be three sizes too large).

It’s all a bit like my life, really.

I have many holiday cards left unwritten, unsent — forgive me if you’re one of the recipients, at this point it may make it as a new year’s card; the stacks of things to do around here don’t seem to diminish on their own. And tomorrow I leave to see a dear internet-free friend for a few days, leaving the cats in the capable hands of Numenius, who looks set to do a scary amount of radio.

But a wonderful surprise, today: picking up a copy of George Johnson’s sumptuously designed new book, The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, I found four illustrations of mine I’d done for him, last year, following my trip to the Santa Fe Science Writers Workshop. I know. It wasn’t writing, but it’s science…

Jennifer: I think this is pronounced tvo-end-stickning?

Second Pair of Socks

I’m getting the hang of turning a heel. I have now taught myself continental knitting, and purling (!), demonstrated to an accomplished continental knitter who said “you’re doing it.” Look out.

Ravelry (still in Beta!) continues to astonish and amaze. Over 200,000 participants, it’s a much larger community than Daily Kos. There are sub-groups (I now belong to, in no particular order, the ham radio Knitters, the thrifty knitters [why buy yarn when you can get a great sweater at the thrift store and frog it, or rip it up and knit it again?], the Terry Pratchett knitters, the birding knitters, composting knitters, the Patrick O’Brian knitters, the Continental knitters, plus the defaults I’m not sure whether to get rid of yet. There isn’t just one Linux knitting group: there’s general Linux and Ubuntu. There are numerous baseball knitting groups (the Red Sox one is predictably huge; the Giants one less so). There are no doubt hundreds of groups of fans of TV shows I’ve never heard of. No shortage of cat groups.

I’ve started entering my stash and needles and future projects (one of which is taking shape now, some fingerless bike commuting gloves for Numenius).

Jeez. I mean, who knew?

Ravelling

Oh no.

In other news, the warm weather we’re having is giving me lots of hope for the yellow beet seeds I put in on Sunday. I have no such hope for the carrot seeds I put in at the same time. Carrots are a bust. I found what grew out of the packet of seeds I dropped sometime over the summer — arugula? — and have put it next to the beet hopefuls.

We have bought a food mill and put a hopperful of cherry tomatoes through it. What emerged was pulp from one bit and seeds and skins from another. I made a slow-cooked tomato sauce, started in the solar cooker and reduced down on the stove. Yum.

A Day in San Francisco

As Numenius said, I had a wonderful day in San Francisco yesterday, hitting Open Studios, a cooking supply place in Japantown, Chloe’s cafe for lunch (see sketch), and the unbelievably fabulous Imagiknit in the Castro. An Irish customer in the shop explained to her friend she had spent months exploring all the yarn stores in San Francisco, and this was by far the best one, she should have started here; mostly, she said, because they were so helpful. (But also, I should add, because the place is like a dream palace of color and texture; it left me speechless.)

Yes, they were helpful. I haven’t done any knitting for over 20 years and I’ve never knit socks, but I have had the WORST hankering to do this. Kurt-the-helpful organized me with a beginner’s pattern and took me over to the fingering yarns. Then he sat me down to do a tension gauge. Hmm, he said. You were taught to knit by a Spanish person… (You have to picture this because I don’t have, and am not likely to provide, a photo: needle under my right arm, balanced on my right boob, and yes, my hands remembered what to do… fast. It’s a fast way to knit).

I ended up with some small bamboo needles for the socks. I can’t fit them under my arm and over my boob, alas. But I’ll just have to draw on my memory of English knitting (thumb under, rather than over, the needle). It’s slower for me but not excruciating, and the needles are lovely. The cats agree. Oh dear.