New design project

Working on a little something...

Everyone Likes the Grid Plan

I've been meaning to post this pattern for a while- I had already named it after a scene in The Cruise- Speed Levich's monologue about blind acceptance of existing designs and procedures, and how it hinders creativity and individualism (I think of it every time the grid plan saves me from getting lost in a new neighborhood).

Mr. Fox and I are so thankful to have been spared from power outages and flooding on our tiny hill in Harlem during Hurricane Sandy, and I've been off school all week due to the lasting damage in the lower part of the city.  If, like me, you are seeking a little bit of comfort and predictability by staying in and knitting, here you go. 

So here's a pattern with a good balance of predictability and visual interest, in a grid formation, of course.  Wear it with very sexual slacks, but don't let it hinder your cruise!  Change the colors!  Knit it bulky, you innovator. 

If you do use this pattern, please consider making a donation to the American Red Cross.  This unprecedented storm has taken the Northeast by such surprise.  Lets hope we are able to learn from this disaster and rebuild with new innovations.

 Materials:
1 Skein KnitPicks Stroll Tonal- Lettuce (Color A)
1 Skein Malabrigo Sock- Eggplant (Color B)
(or Approximately 450 yds each of two colors fingering weight yarn)
US Size 4 Circular Needles
Gauge: 
6 sts/inch in stockinette, if you're into measuring for gauge on a scarf/shawl.
Finished Measurements: 15" wide, 49" long, blocked and stretched.

Garter Edge:
I created a 6-row garter edge alternating color every row as follows:
Cast-on 135 stitches in color A.
Row 1: (Color A) knit
Row 2: (Color B) knit
Row 3: Turn work around and purl back using color A
Row 4: (Color B) purl
Row 5: Turn work around and knit back using color B
Row 6: (Color B) knit
*Tip: Weigh your work here to determine how much you will need to save to create the other edge.

Starting with Color B, begin working in Gathered Stripes Pattern (Taken from The Ultimate Sourcebook of Knitting and Crochet Patterns, Reader's Digest, 2003).

Gathered Stripes:
Row 1:  (Color B) [k1, sl1] 5 times, *k12, sl1 [k1, sl1] 4 times; rep from * to last st, k1
Row 2:  (Color B) [p1, sl1] 5 times, *p12, sl1 [p1, sl1] 4 times; rep from * to last st, p1
Row 3:  (Color A) k2, sl1 [k1, sl1] 3 times, *k14, sl1 [k1, sl1] 3 times; rep from * to last 2 sts, k2
Row 4:  (Color A) p2, sl1 [p1, sl1] 3 times *p14, sl1 [p1, sl1] 3 times; rep from * to last 2 sts, p2

Continue working these four rows until your scarf reaches the desired length, or until you have just enough left for the Garter Edge.  Repeat the Garter Edge, and bind off.  Firm blocking will flatten the gathering.  If you would like to keep it gathered, you will likely want to double the yarn amount to make it a useful length- it roughly doubles after blocking. 

Block with T-pins at the middle of each stockinette row.

Be well!
The Foxes

See 'de wittle wips? See'em? See'em?

So, as you can see, I have added a few more rows to my Hot Lips project. I have modified the game plan to include the hot lips in a "Sanka Break" kit, complete with jar of Sanka, kicky mug yet to be purchased, and adorable mug jumper (It's like a tiny sweater to keep your Sanka piping hot!). This kit may or may not include other accessories such nips of liquor or fun slippers.

God, she loves her Sanka!

Hot Lips!

So I don't know if you have a "Meme", but I think that in order to call your grandmother "Meme", she has to meet some criteria that make her fall into the "kicky old lady" genre. There are no timid Memes out there. Mine, por exemplo, wears rompers much like this (only around the house, of course, she's not that kind of Meme.):




Only she has her giant 2" wide bra straps exposed, and she is short and busty as hell. Footwear of choice for this getup is a pair of duck slippers that quack when she walks. I am NOT making this up.

She used to make us pillows with appliques of a pair of lips on them. She called them hot lips, and they were kinda awesome. Mems turns 80 next month, and so I am working on a tribute to the hot lips, a knitted hot lips pillow with a motif that consists of many tiny hot lips. More to come soon!

Arts and Crafts and Meat on Trees!

So. We mostly know that I work with clinically silly children. By far the most silly is NR. He's particularly good at pulling concepts directly from the ether and spewing them out of his mouth. This one will stop you in the hallway and ask you if he can ask you a question. Here is a sample of some of his most nonsensical queries:

- Nicole, do you like big things or little things?
- Nicole, can you dance like a mad scientist? How about like a platypus?
- Nicole, could you give me a blowtorch and some peanut butter? I would like to knit you some new glasses.
- Wait! Did you just call me Lola?
- Can I poke you?

So we are working on cut-paper springtime collages in OT this week. Generally, most children wanted some type of fruit on their tree, so, when I asked NR what kind of fruit he wanted for the tree he had just made, he asked for a list of examples:

Me: apples, oranges, lemons, pears, peaches. . .
NR: grapes?
Me: Well grapes grow on a vine...
NR: Blueberries?
Me: Bush
NR: What do tomatoes grow on?
Me: Vine
NR: How about corn?
Me: Stalk
NR: BEEF JERKY!!!
Me: (brief explanation about beef jerky's non-tree origins)

-Thoughtful pause

Me: So what kind of tree are we gonna make here?
NR: Beef jerky.
Me: For realsies?
NR: (nods)

I had to walk away to keep from laughing and let him snip and color away. Here are the results. I think it looks more like bacon, but what do I know?

The one where I describe an amazing album.

"I feel so little on the inside, but my skin is persistently life-sized."

I know this guy Gavin Castleton. He's a musical mad-scientist. Always composing, recording, producing, whatever. He can't stop, and most of the time, its delicious. We met a while back. He was the singer/keyboardist for the Providence futurock pioneers Gruvis Malt, who I used to bother for guest list spots and CD's in exchange for photographic documentation and college radio airplay. I was pretty annoying. At some point, that turned into "dating the drummer (Scott McPhail)", which turned into slumber parties at the half-built loft where they all lived and practiced at the time.

Here is where I describe said loft. It was an old mill complex that was under renovation to make artist lofts. The walls were not fully built in their unit, heat was not fully utilized, and cleaning was rarely partaken in. They were living there for very little money while they "helped build". I'm not sure how much building was done outside of some dry-wall application, plywood placement, and half-pipe fabrication (serious. there was a half-pipe in the living room). None of the walls reached the giant ceilings, and Scott's bedroom was perched atop the bathroom. Classy.

There was music all the time, from band-related practice and recording to concerts and openings in the adjacent gallery (which could be reached through the aforementioned bathroom....One time 2 girls heard them practicing from the gallery and ended up searching for the source, finding themselves in the awkward position of being in a filthy bathroom, trying to peek out of it stealthily....it didn't work for them. "Who the hell is giggling in our bathroom?!?!?! Show yourselves!", i believe, was the next line to come from rehearsal). This was while they were recording the album "Simon", and I would show up at work with loops of songs ridiculously stuck in my head. One time Gavin was recording a cover of MJ's 'Billie Jean' with one of his female singer friends (around bedtime). There were several takes. I was toast the next day.

Why would such a sweet, professional, relatively clean female ever want to find herself in this environment, let alone sleep in it, you may ask? Well I'm simply not sure. I think part of it was that I was between apartments and staying with my parents for a little bit of that time, but for other parts of it I did have my own place, so lets chalk it up to the fact that really funny shit went down there all the time, I was in that much love with Scott, and also that Gavin's dog, Lumas, is amazing.

Anyway, these guys would all challenge themselves to play tough chord progressions and funky time signatures. Stuff that my feeble 4/4 loving brain can appreciate, but was not always comfortable with. (Being that I work with children with self-regulation challenges, I wonder sometimes if playing in 5, 7, and 11 so frequently actually does something tweaky to one's equilibrium).

So, since that time, a lot has changed. We could write a novel about the 6 or so years in between, and I've simply not got the time. Gruvis stopped making albums together, and Ebu Gogo formed from three members, and on top of that, Gavin was doing some solo stuff. A while ago, he left RI and moved to Oregon.

My favorite thing about the solo stuff he's done in the last few years is that he picks a theme (it's very "This American Life", really), and goes with it for an album. You've got your Hospital Hymns, written from the perspective of an uncomfortably religious central supply worker in a hospital. You've got your A Bullet, A Lever, A Key, written as though Gavin quit musicking and continued his life in another direction. You've got your (personal favorite) For the Love of Pete, which is all about his relationship with his former girlfriend; a delicious work of mostly 4/4, frosted with the sweet ups and downs that come standard in relationships. It was my favorite at the time, because, having been getting over my own breakup with Scott, and also, being a girl, I was able to relate to so much of the subject matter. So much of his stuff before then had been about the music industry and those interactions, and I found Pete to be accessible on so many levels. Not to mention that I was familiar with the characters personally, and had even creepily paralleled that relationship (Scott and I had gotten together and broken up along a similar time line)

And now, you've got your Home. Home takes that same relationship, and dissects it completely. If you read through or listen to Gavin's interviews about it, he talks about how it was his way of processing everything that happened, and getting to a place where he could move on. He wrote it sequentially, and follows the relationship from beginning to end. His ex initially helped write the female lyrics for it for the first couple tracks, and then as that became more challenging, he took over writing for the female part, which gave him some deeper (painful) insight into the other side of the story.

I should mention that the whole time, it plays out almost like a musical (sorry, i live in NYC now. Everything can be made into a musical. I've written 3 musicals today, in fact). There is plenty of 4/4 to keep me feeling regulated, and the rhythm and melody change brilliantly to match the mood in each of 14 'numbers'. Its gorgeous. I know it doesn't work out in the end. I watched it not work out in the end. I talked to him about how it didn't work out in the end. But I STILL FALL IN LOVE when they fall in love. I reminisce when they reminisce. There are also little throwbacks to Pete, like where the track Parallel Rabbits on Home uses the same music as Bad Rabbits from Pete. I'm supposing here, but I would imagine that the use of the term "Home" is an allusion to the line in Pete's final track, Hibernatal: "You feel like home to me."

So you're listening to this doomed relationship develop. And then. Halfway through. Zombies.

FUCKING BRILLIANT! Zombies take over and now its a chase. The thing about zombies is, they're gross and rotting. They should be dead but they lurch forward. Slowly, deliberately, unnaturally. How did no one ever relate zombies with the way we try to patch our love back together? Its so plainly obvious to me now!

So then you've got an album about zombies. Love in the time of the zombie-pocalypse. Its tough, let me tell you, making a relationship work whilst hiding in an abandoned supermarket. And ultimately, she secretly communicates with the outside world, and gets rescued, leaving him to his secret supermarket life.

There are two endings. He gets trapped by the zombies, and breaks down alone and kills himself and gets eaten at the same time. But wait! He is then visited by (what else?) two ladybugs, who convince him to move along. The following track, "the Human Torch", is where she comes back in a helicopter and rescues him to bring him to a delightful new island home. And then you notice (if you're smart) that there's no female in this awesome uplifting track. Yeah, its totally because its a fakey ending. I love that song. It's this whole denial fantasy song, and its beautiful. The female vocal (sung by Lauren Coleman, a delight) comes back in the next and final track 'credits', where its all kinda explained and packaged nicely. Years of pain summed up in a few well-written lines.

"There is no clear agenda. There is no safe retreat. There's just the lengthy process of filling in the you-shaped hole in me . . . home is not the place you dwell. Home is where you see yourself."

This one is really great. I've been taking it apart and exploring it in my brain since I downloaded it when it came out on itunes. And, thing is, it doesn't even really run parallel to my life this time. My own recent relationship fell apart quickly and bizarrely, before any real substance could develop.

This break up was more like a terrible J-Horror really. Not classy in the least, and purely for shock-effect. Like horror porn. I'm pretty sure Elisha Cuthbert was involved, actually. Maybe that's why I like Home so much. If you're gonna lament, you may as well pick something worthwhile.

There is more delicious media and info on his blog, here.
Home is Available now on itunes, and will be released in hard copy in April. He'll be touring the US in a week or so. Of note (to me) is the upcoming show on 3/24 at Googies lounge on the LES.

Check it out.

The one where I update my recent knitting projects and reveal the preliminary bi-coastal birthday cele-cation plans.

So after the holiday season, I like to try to fit in a few 'me' projects. The first of which was the shalom cardigan [ravelry link]. I modified the pattern by adding buttons all the way down. Don't get me wrong, I'm a sucker for the top button only. It looks ADORABLE, but not so much with the flattering of the figure. Finding 8 suitable buttons was an adventure I don't care to recount, but suffice it to say, I ended up doing 4 of each of two different types, with sexy results. I christened it on the train ride back to NYC from a few days spent in RI finishing the thing over my April break, and then promptly wore it to work and made a co-worker take photos of me on the swing in my office (ALWAYS an embarrassing question to ask).

I then promptly started up on owls [ravelry link], having suddenly become quite ill for the better part of a week, canceling private clients, calling in to work sick, and, most terribly, not that excited to eat ANYTHING. So towards the end of my extended vacation on the couch, i took the bad boy off the needles and gave it the old belly-warmer tango. I had many concerns on this one:
1. Why did I choose a mostly acrylic cheapo yarn? Will this ever do?
2. Its kinda heathered. Am I OK with that?
3. Does it fit?
Enter hilarious alone in the apartment belly-warmer dancing with subsequent gchat updates, and you have this:

The saucy look was just for a friend whom I had enlisted for realtime online color/yarn consultation. So. As it turns out, the color and yarn will do. The size is too big. I need to go down to XS, which means big-ass delay now that I am feeling better and back to my 5 clients on top of my full time job (not to mention studying for the GRE's, which I take on 4/3). I think I will also take the increases and decreases (not visible here, but Kate designed them to go in back), and put them along fakey side seams, like the design of the shalom. I prefer that look i think.

So, now that I'm feeling better (I made, ate, and enjoyed a long-overdue soup yesterday- really big whoop), we commence with the GRE prep. I have put the belly warmer in my yarn pile, waiting to be unraveled and re-done on various subway excursions and long meetings.

In the back of my head, however, as I look at algebraic equations and analogies, I will be planning the celebration of the 30 days of my 30th april, which may include such tasks as: doing 30 things I've never done, eating 30 pieces of candy, taking 30 different shots (don't worry, we have all month), obtaining 30 phone numbers, walking 30 miles, eating 30 things outside, stealing 30 little things (beer coasters, pens, hearts, you know...), listening to 30 new songs... let me know if you have any other good adventures. April will involve many checklists indeed! I'm also going to SF for 5 days in mid-April, and taking some friends along for the ride to celebrate with my former roommate Julie, who turns 30 the week before me. We're catching at least 1 Sox game at Oakland, and I will hit at least one yarn store.

So far its looking to be pretty fun. Let me know if you have any other ideas! I'm going to spend the rest of the day reviewing mathematics, and eating the delicious soup I made yesterday.