Too much information!

Ravelry is like drinking from a fire hose.

Mass quantities of information about knitting (and crocheting, whatever that is) by intimidating, talented, beautiful people and a few of us clinkers. I especially liked the cardigan sweaters modelled by actual overweight Grumpy Gus grandfathers.

Essentially a giant scrapbook that everyone else can see, but everyone's got one and everybody shares. Not a familiar concept, just like Open Source!

Update 28 July - The pronunciation is interesting. You can hear different voices say rivalry, revelry or ravel-ry.

Project #1... check!

My little knitting project turned out to be a samurai needle caddy. It was a rectangle about five inches wide by three inches deep, all garter stitch as befits a newbie project. Slide your needles into the weave and hang it on the wall horizontally. Samurai knitting needles.

Oddly enough, it turns out that gauge depends almost entirely on the needle size. And those Silvalume™ needles are useless¹ — they slide out of knitting loops like a maglev rail gun. Bamboo works fine.

¹De gustibus non disputandum est. YMMV.

The Last Knit

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6ZjMWLqJvM

Special Rules for Men Learning to Knit

#1. THERE ARE NO KNOTS IN KNITTING. Make loops. Do NOT tighten them like tying a fly or belaying a sheet!

You can even dispense with the ubiquitous slipknot that most knitters start with. The slipknot is merely a convenience; it attaches yarn to needles. Purists, at least those who use double cast on, consider it redundant. Got it? There are no knots in knitting, only loops.

So don't make knots. Knitting is easier than that, and what holds the work together is math (specifically topology), not physics or friction. Zero force required.

If you can't help using slipknots or snugging everything down small and tight, at least use 100% wool yarn, not acrylic. Acrylic yarn has the elastic properties of a brick.

BAMBOO KNITTING NEEDLES can help a newbie calibrate yarn tensions. If the yarn is too tight, the work won't slide on the needle. Huge problem. Aluminum needles seem friendlier, but they're slick as a hockey puck and give newbies no real clues about tension, other than causing it.

#2. As the Gerudo assassin tells Link, don't take her craft lightly.

Learn the Continental method of knitting. It has a mystique, mainly because the videos tend to feature older women who speak with German accents. It's easy, fast, efficient — and impossible. I use the American method.

I used to do Motorola 6502 assembler language for fun, and maybe I'm nuts, but I see a strong similarity between that and knitting. Massive attention to picayune detail that produces a sudden, beautiful result like magic.

Ok, some correlations... 1's and 0's live in computer chips, knits and purls live in yarn, and Somebody Makes Them Happen. Simple ON and OFF makes a universe our grandparents can't understand. Simple loops left and loops right make a world our grandchildren can't imagine.

Computer program printouts are like printed knitting patterns. These are static instructions. What the computer does, what the knitter does, is execute printed instructions — algorithms — and that's dynamic. Add wool and needles, keyboards and pixelation, class libraries (steek, Fair Isle, cable, bobble, moss...) and you get Art, whether blogs or cardigans, Firefox or ski caps.

This is immensely appealing.

#3. It's possible to drink beer and knit. Requires a straw. Beware of yogurt.

German pilsners only, please. In a pinch, Dos Equis or Corona (hold the lime). Kirin is ok. Avoid American beers except Bud, Hamm's, Stroh's Fire Brewed, Cool Brewed Piel's or PBR. Substitutions allowed include Lapsang Souchong, Instant Folgers Flavor Crystals, Swiss Miss Instant Cocoa, Canada Dry or 2% milk. Don't smoke near acrylic yarn. It melts, then burns.

Smaller needles, thinner yarns, make smaller, neater work. Beer makes everything too big, including errors — like spiders on LSD make crazyweb.

#4. Other recipes for disaster.

My only accomplishments as a knitter to date (I've been learning for several days now) are two different kinds of casting on, and garter stitch. I don't dare purl yet. The thing that holds me back is pretty simple: MY YARN EXPLODES.

I can't explain it. My wife just laughs at me (she's not entirely onboard with this masculine knitting thing, but it tickles her funny bone) and says she was a better knitter than me at the age of 10. (But she also quit knitting that year, so... ;-)

I have, by dint of close observation and tongue-biting concentration, discovered what happens when my yarn explodes: The needle slips out of one or two inches of almost-finished knitting. That, or it slips out of my cast-on stitches and I lose about half an inch from the pointy bit.

This allows the loops to vanish in an unintelligible mass of soft, warm, chaos. Worsted which has lost its twist and been knitted flat several times tends to forget where its loops were. As far as where the blinding flash and incendiary fulminations come from, I haven't located the source of those, possibly Chicxulub.

I have no solution, sadly. However, I've stood on dignity and promised my wife I would still be knitting ten years from now. I just hope I'm knitting with the second third six feet of yarn from this ball of dark green 100% Peruvian Highland Merino Wool.

#5. Sheep or goats? Aptitude or attitude? Pearls before sheep?

Before you even start, be honest. If someone were to hand you a Fender, could you do the instrument justice?

Beethoven had talent, but no ears. We, you and I — we have ears to hear, but no particular talent, or at least not talent like that. Would you be a slave to talent, or satisfied with a simple soul that merely yearns to soar? A good listener. A music appreciater. Somebody who likes Veronika Part — on Dave Letterman's Late Show! (Not bad, though. All Johnny Carson could discover was... Tiny Tim. Bette Midler.)

Computer programming was the furnace I could walk through, although never entirely unscathed. Toward the end of my journey, I was scorched. But I knew the flame, I knew a kind of beauty.

If someone hands you a pencil and a sketchbook, will you be Leonardo? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, or da Vinci?

Can you match a $6 ball of wool and a couple of metal splinters with aptitude? I've been at this for a couple of weeks. In that time, the magic has sputtered and caught fire twice in my hands. I made an inch or two of stuff. I want to learn.

I want another beer.

Men Aren't Supposed To Knit

I'm 64, I'm retired, and I've given myself carpal tunnel syndrome over the years by "resting" my wrists on the hard front edge of non-ergonomically designed keyboards — especially the forest green, folded aluminum box keyboard on the old Kaypro 10. Also mashing buttons on videogame controllers for hours on end, which is another story. I have to relax my spasming hands and get some manual dexterity back, somehow.

Somehow. I could almost read in the dark from the lightbulb going on over my head. Aha-Erlebnis! What about knitting? I'm already impressed by the fibrous crafts, which seem to stretch in unbroken matriarchal lineage 2,000 grandmothers back to the Upper Stone Age. I can imagine the birth of weaving — sheep not quite domesticated, lambs slaughtered, skins scraped and pelts warm and woolly, some 12 year old genius kid pulling off yarn for a lark and fiddling with a bone discovering Loops. Discovering, in other words, What You Can Do With Yarn.

Because her Cro-Magnon brain works differently than her ancestors, she recapitulates half a million years of Paelaeolithic stone knapping, in fiber, in a single afternoon, and by the end of summer, this one amazing child has laid the foundations of a modern Craft for 15 billion thoroughly happy women.

The single most amazing aspect of fiber arts is their PORTABILITY. Think about that! The mother of all craft, no longer twelve years old, is a fully-grown matriarch of 17, respected in her tribe — probably a shaman — but her kid is no genius. Just bright at best, no more than curious. And, as primates do, mom shows her kid how to Do Loops, with slow, exaggerated, easy-to-see motions. Like nectar, knowledge pours undiminished from one silver-clad inverted skull into another. And because this is a society that values memory (no television, no books, no distractions except the normal terror of staying alive), the whole body of expertise passes whole. It's portable.

And, apparently, it's female. Right away, I've noticed that just intending to knit causes eyebrows to raise, while actually doing the untoward thing — buying a pair of knitting needles, e.g. — practically forces a flood of self-deprecating humor in order to get past the lady on the cash register. My wife, fortunately, has a stash of yarn and is prepared to part with a skein or two of the acrylic stuff, sparing me another gender-bending ordeal at Walmart. My wife... She is staunchly loyal and keeps her slackening jaw tightly closed without actually grinding. I think she Understands, on some high intellectual plane, what I'm trying to do here, but my daughter just laughs and blows it off. "Ok, Dad. Enjoy."

How? That's my question. How? So far, the results of this excursion into Tangletop have been unsatisfactory, if only because the air frequently turns incandescent blue in my vicinity. Things Happen. Thanks to the internet and a number of free videos at YouTube or places like LetsKnit.co.uk, I've picked up a few essentials, but... For example, when I do Two Needle Cast On, I make taut, manly knots and feel myself accomplished to see about a foot of tightly packed stitches with an even, pleasant keel along the bottom edge. Beauty, sez I. Then, like the girls in the videos lead on (I'm 64, they are girls! Women are my age), I begin to Knit The Second Row. Weirdly enough, some stitches are BIG, some stitches are small and — how to put this? — some are invisible. Or they lean like little yarn Cheerios out of the design, unattached to anything else. And, with just a momentary lapse of attention, the needle in my right hand Falls Out Of The Loops and lands with a toink! on the hardwood floor. Several opportunities for Blue Air have presented themselves in the course of these discoveries, but...

Once, just once so far, I managed to Knit The Second Row all the way back to within an inch of my starting point on the left needle. Then — and I don't know how this happened — the whole left end EXPLODED.

The goddesses of knitting are laughing at me. It's only just begun.

---

Update — Aha! The Yarn Harlot offers some helpful advice on this topic in her book At Knit's End, leaving aside her charmingly naive claim that knitting can't explode:

In the nineteenth century, knitting was prescribed to women as a cure for nervousness and hysteria. Many new knitters find this sort of hard to believe because, until you get good at it, knitting seems to cause those ailments.
         — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, A.K.E., p. 51 (2005, Storey Publishing, paperback)

Clearly, this applies to men too. And as far as brightly-hued and toxic atmospheres go, I'm struck by the similarities between knitting and golf. This afternoon, for example, I saw Michelle Wie mouth a perfect short bit of hyperfunctional Anglo-Saxon at the Jamie Farr Owens Corning Classic on ESPN2. Understandable, her missed stroke was the difference between tied for third at $73,224 and first place at $210,000. That's a lot of woolgathering.