No time for a real post, but here are two photos of the August Chicago trip. One is produce at Patel Brothers grocery on Devon Avenue (Indian/Pakistani corner of town), and one is a street scene downtown (Argo Tea is on the far right corner).

Since I did not spend lots of time on my computer, I don’t have recent photos for you. However, here are a few random photos I developed in the last few months but never posted.

The squirrel who had been so hot this summer… found a nut and made enough noise eating it that I went out to investigate. Same exact spot. This was maybe a month ago, actually, when the leaves were still green:

The parking ramp at Lansing Community College, where I had my class this weekend. I think this view of the exit ramp is quite striking, if unreal in a city-sort-of-way:

A view of the lakeshore (the west shore of Lake Michigan) in Chicago, from the viewing deck of the Sears Tower. I usually get dizzy up there (not on the Hancock building, oddly) but this day it was not windy (we could not feel the building sway as usually happens). It was misty and cloudy which may also have helped, perhaps being able to see too far is also dizzying. We got up there in the 15 minute timeframe that whole day when people could actually see something through the clouds.

This was in late August, I went with Altu and a young Ethiopian friend who had never been to a city of this sort…. and who was enthralled to be there.

You know, I adore Chicago from many angles. At this height, the horizon looks a little bit curved. So cool!

Teaching Knitting to Beginners

She also pondered the teaching of children and what style of knitting? I had a group at a magnet school last year who I decided to teach using the continental (left hand holding yarn) method. I had maybe a dozen kids. In the end almost half just did not have the manual dexterity to control the yarn in that way, at that age. In fact, the difference between 6 years old and 8 years old is remarkable no matter what style you teach.

With the group at the magnet school, teaching half one way and half another did not really bug the kids too much, they knew there was more than one method, but then when they would help one another it made things a little harder. In the end I decided that in order to use my time as efficiently as possible I would go back to the good old way that Mr. Johnson taught me in 1969.

It is a little more complex when teaching adults. I ask if they crochet and/or if they are left handed. If yes to either question, I teach continental method. If not, it depends on the situation what I do. Often I show them the right hand way first, and show them continental pretty soon afterward as an alternative. They at least know that there are two ways, and you never know which way folks will choose.

Sheer Enjoyment

In the end, knitting is not about speed. It’s about the comfort of making a loop, then another loop, then another. In my opinion we should absolutely love how the yarn feels in our fingers, and we should enjoy the making of loops. The speed of making loops is not as important as the enjoyment of the process. Yes, we often knit because we want an end product, but I would guess that an end product is just not enough for most folks to stick through as many loops as are required. You have to love the process.

Social Knitting

Today I spent some time with Erin at Schuler Books, after the rest of the knitting-for-others group had already left. I had a cup of very strong English Breakfast Tea and we chatted happily as she made a hat and I worked on a sock. We talked pets and places to live and jobs and computers and yarn and relationships… and food… and more. Such a nice time. Thanks, Erin.

Computer Class

My InDesign class went pretty well. At this point I can only use the program on my old laptop, while I wait for Adobe to decide that I have in fact purchased my software legally. It takes multiple phone calls and faxes and letters from seller to purchaser and and and and… more phone calls. And so far I’m approved at every phase but there continues to be another phase every time I call them. Sigh.

ZigBagZ Report

Karen, my cousin in Houston who is knitting a BurlyZig Bag for me, has sent preview photos of the base of her bag. I’m using the photo of her yarns and two photos of the base here for color and interest (she used the right-hand skeins for this part of the bag). With any luck I will have her completed bag for photographs, perhaps later this week. For now, enjoy the colors!!!

With word processing I know there are things I don’t understand, but that does not bother me since everything I need/want to know, I have figured out down pat.

But page layout has always been hard for me. After all, I spent how long as a secretary? And how much longer as a word processing instructor? I still teach word processing one day a week part of the year. It seems word processing and page layout have significantly different ways of thinking about text.

I have no problem that typing more stuff makes things pop to an extra page. That is just fine with me. But Word flips out when you place too many photos… all of a sudden your 6 page document is 15 pages and corrupted. Or the third photo you place on page one somehow lands on page 7. Ugh.

I must get with the program. Except I know so many hints and tips and tricks and work-arounds in Word… and I know almost nothing about Adobe InDesign.

I have done PageMaker (never made sense even after classes), and Publisher (the interface was Microsoft but it’s far too simple a program), even CorelDraw 4, for one single project (the CD art for our In The Garden CD, which Brian planned/designed and I put into the program acceptable to the CD manufacturing company).

InDesign is clearly better than all of the above for laying out knitting patterns. I can only hope that I will learn enough to start using it immediately when class is complete.

The leaves are still beautiful, and they have not all fallen yet. Even with all this rain, they are hanging on. One hard frost and we will be bleak and colorless, but for now it is a fiery sky on every street. Really, really beautiful!

Enjoy your fall weekend, whatever it brings you. Mine is bringing me learning and color. That’s a pretty good weekend, I’d say.

Photos: more of the trees in the few blocks behind our house. The city is full of beauty but these trees often are some of the best. This year, it is doubly true. So beautiful! So ColorJoy!

It occurs to me looking at these photos just now, that they are every bit as majestic as some of my favorite photos that I took in Africa.

I went to bed at 2am or so (a little early for my typical schedule) after posting a blog entry. I got up at just before 8am and ColorJoy.com was not responding. Ack!

I have known that the woman I’ve had handling my domain name was selling her business. I got a note from her and then I thought a note from the folks taking over. Wrong. Of course I could have read the note better and that part is my fault. The end result was that my domain went silent, probably around 6am.

Thanks to my ever-helpful life partner/spouse Brian, and an email to the woman who has held my domain name since the beginning, I’m up and running again. I was probably only down for about 4 hours.

I was so tired, so cranky, so disrupted this morning. I burned *two* batches of oatmeal while running between the kitchen and the computer. I am sad to say that I was not as nice to Brian this morning as he deserves… I think I need to bake him a pie or something, very very soon. It is my belief that one should be kindest to those who are in their closest inner circle. I did not stick to that belief for an hour or so this morning.

But now as I write this, I’ve had some caffeine, some lunch, some time to decompress. I have a working website/domain name again (if you sent me an email during that half-day, please re-send it). And I’m ready to go back to class for the afternoon, rested and refreshed.

One day at a time, one hour at a time. Back to class!

That took my mind back to my childhood. I loved the leaves, I would collect all the prettiest ones I saw on the way home from school. It took me an eternity to make it home from school those days. I would have an entire handful of beautifully colored leaves, sort of a bouquet, by the time I got home.

And then my mother consistently told me I had to choose only a few to bring into the house. I was crushed. They were all so pretty, it was painful to choose. I am sure it took almost as long to do that as it did to wind my way home!

Mom would try to console me by promising to iron the chosen ones between two pieces of waxed paper. Theoretically that would seal the leaves and make the colors stay nice longer. However, I knew that I would have to view those colors through the wax and paper. This effectively made them barely-colored as far as I was concerned. I was not consoled.

Today, I found two lovely leaves, looked at how beautiful they were, and enjoyed their colors fully. Then I left them in the yard (noticing that we have a few blooming wild violets again in the side yard). And I came inside.

I hope I still love the colors every bit as much as I did as a child. I just do not love cleaning house. I think I understand now, where mom was coming from.

Photos? I took these in the several years I have been blogging… since 2003.

I am taking a computer class (Adobe InDesign) this weekend and so I saved time by going back and finding lovely leaves from previous years. They illustrate my point perfectly, though they are long gone at this point.

Non-knitters, you will want to skip this post and visit me again tomorrow. Thanks for coming by!

You do not want to know how I work at my desk… I’m relatively messy and inefficient much of the time when it comes to paper. But as a knitter, I work relatively efficiently. I have learned many ways of holding my yarn over the years, and every way was my favorite for a while. Who knows if I’ll change my mind again.

I first learned to knit by controlling the yarn with my Right Hand. This is referred to as American or British/English style. Even within this style, folks sometimes wrap yarn around a finger or two on the right hand, and some (like me) pick up the yarn long enough to wrap the needle, then drop the yarn until the next wrap. This seems absolutely normal to me and is how I teach kids these days (though some go on to ask about how I currently knit and I show them that as well).

Mind you, I learned to knit in Mr. Johnson’s class in 1969. I learned a backward-loop/half-hitch cast on and the knit stitch. I do not remember binding off, but I figured out if I took the yarn tail and worked it through all the last row’s loops, the scarf would not unravel. This is how I knit scarves for 20 years. Nothing but garter-fabric scarves with fringe. I loved how relaxing it was. I must have known that some people knit sweaters but I did not. It never interested me.

So when I was a young married woman, probably around 1990 or so, I had a friend from Germany who knit a lot. She would not knit for me (good girl) but said she’d pick up yarn for me in Germany when she went back. I signed up for a class. I learned to purl, to increase and decrease, cable and rib. Maybe more, too. But the coolest thing was Continental knitting, where I learned to hold the yarn in my left hand and not drop the yarn between stitches.

When I was knitting my 6th pair of socks ever (one yarn), I listened to a Norwegian woman talk about doing stranded colorwork. She said she held both yarns in one hand. So when I found Nancy Bush’s book Folk Socks, I picked out the Lithuanian Amber socks as my 10th pair of socks ever (see photo, pink with black designs). And I tried to hold the yarns in one hand. Since I used more pink than black, the yarn tangled. I decided I did not enjoy colorwork, which was a sad decision.

Later I found out that the Philosophers’ Wool folks had a book out where you held one yarn in each hand over the whole row. I tried that and it worked great. Loved it. I knit my 13th pair ever, using this technique. That pair became my pattern which is called Eva’s Socks, my first pattern ever (see photo, blue with red/yellow/green).

Then long after that, I took a class on Norwegian Mittens from Beth Brown-Reinsel (see photo). She showed me how to hold both yarns in my left hand, but to wrap the yarns around different fingers so they can feed at different rates. Oh, wow!

I knit pretty darned fast already. I can knit nearly as fast with two yarns as with one now. Yahoo! Well, that is as long as I’m in the light and I can look at my knitting as I go. I can knit with one yarn in each hand, without having to look down very often at all. With two in one hand I need my eyes to be sure I do not pick the wrong color at any moment (the yarns are very close to one another as I work).

But this two-in-left-hand thing is really quick for me. And as a professional, speed is more important than relaxation with some projects. I’d like that to not be true, but work is work… although I do love what I do more than when I worked in an office. There are knitting deadlines now, though, rather than paperwork ones all the time.

Here is a photo of my left hand with two yarns held on one hand. I wrapped the green yarn first… over index finger, under middle, over ring finger, under pinkie. Then I wrapped the peach colored yarn. Over both index and middle, then under ring finger, and over pinkie. The tension happens between the fingers, which are held together, touching each others’ sides.

It works well for me. If you wrap the yarn fully around any one finger, this method may not work as well for you. My fingers are never fully wrapped, and they stay down, touching the left needle. They do not go up in the air at all. For me this method is just about perfect. I am really clear that everyone will have their own favorite way. Or they will choose knit/purl texture over colorwork. For me, the color is much easier.

Fortunately, I now am signed up for a page layout/Adobe InDesign class at the local community college this coming weekend. Therefore, the limitations I’ve had (particularly when I have tried to insert more photos than the system could take) will not be an issue. My learning curve and lack of experience in the program will take time, but the program will not be an anchor dragging me back as Word has.

Yes, I realize that Word is not made for layout. The issue mostly was that I know Word so well from the years I spent teaching its tiny details to corporate clients, that I could force it to behave. Mostly. And that did not require the learning curve and financial outlay that InDesign and the class required.

I am doing a lot of letting go this fall. I gave in and I’m changing programs. I also have a new computer this year which is still not making me happy but I’m adjusting.

I also got a new cell phone this week (which has such a confusing voice command system that I can not get it to work even with help from friends… and of course the book tells how to take photos and play music on the phone but doesn’t tell me how to dial hands-free. Why am I expecting a phone to be a phone these days? LOL. I’m obviously behind the times.

But I digress. I’ve been working on the text for this five-bag collection. This weekend I can start placing the text and photos in preparation for a print run. At the same time, my cousin Karen and my sis-in-love Diana are knitting the final sample bags. Diana is making a sample and Karen is testing the text (she gets to keep her sample when it’s done).

I showed the before/after yarn choices and bag base for Diana’s/Rae’s bag yesterday. Today I’m going back in time and showing you my own bag, the zigzag sides. I’m showing again the yarn and the finished knit fabric (in this case after felting/shrinking, yesterday’s sample is before).

In this case, on my screen, the deep teal (dark turquoise) shows up as a little lighter here than in real life, though the other colors look about right. The bottom right teal is MC1 (main color/solid) and the multi sitting above it is the contrast used when knitting the teal. The solid pink bottom left is used in contrast with the blues/greens multi on top left.

Perhaps you can see that if the lines slant toward the left, I am using the solid teal and the multi pink. When the lines slant to the right, I’m using solid pink and multi cool tones. Can you see it? Perhaps it helps to see the base as a checkerboard for reference. The base was done in the teal/MC1 and the pink multi. Now can you see it?

What’s fascinating is that the stand-out colors are those which are neither teal/blue nor pink/orange. The yellow and green and nearly-black tones are what show up from this distance. Cool! It looks even more involved than it is.

I love this bag. I’m really pleased, very proud of the design. And finally I can see that maybe there will finally be a finished product. My goal had been November 1 and I’m seeing that maybe I did not give my knitters enough time… but it will definitely be November.

Maybe I’m jumping the gun… please don’t ask for the pattern just yet, though I’d be honored if a few someones put this on their “queue” of possible projects coming up. But today I feel like showing you the photo Rae took of me with the BiggieZig bag when it was fresh out of the washer and still a bit damp.

This BiggieZig bag is tall and wide but it has a slim profile. This theoretically means I won’t be taking up too much width when attending knitting events and trying to squeeze by others also carrying knitting bags.

The BurlyZig, believe it or not, will be larger than this. It will be the same height and just a little wider, but the depth will increase enough so that this can hold a whole sweater in progress or much of an afghan on the needles. Or that is the plan.

Stay tuned and you will get blow by blow information on this design, as it develops further. At this point it’s clear we will have a printed product. We just do not know exactly when…

Whew! One day at a time.

Diana wrote with an attached photo of the bottom of her BurlyZig sample bag (which will eventually live at Rae’s Yarn Boutique). The bottom of the bag is checkerboard although the sides are a zigzag pattern. (There are smaller bags in the collection which will call for only two yarns rather than four.)

The base of the bag is made from the dominant Main Color 1, and its appropriate contrast color. The first “zig” will also use these colors, and then the “zag” uses a different Main Color (solid) and a different contrast. Of course the zig/zag pattern is not shown here, though you can have a peek at this previous post.

I’m showing the four yarns she will use in this bag in the yarn photo below. MC1 is top right, and the contrast for it is top left. I think for some folks it’s very hard to tell how things will knit up, by looking at the yarns in balls/skeins. Voila! Diana has solved this particular mystery for you today.

The day started chilly, though by late afternoon it was 79F degrees, warm for this time of year. I was glad I took my camera, because the five blocks between our house and the diner are always beautiful in the fall. This year seems even more beautiful than usual.

The photo of me, Brian took. I was barely awake… this is how I look when I throw on something quickly to go on a walk first thing. I’m wearing a hat I made years ago, and my Kristi Comfort Wrap that Diana knit for me, plus the legwarmers I made from a thrift-store find, a Ralph Lauren crewneck made of Manos del Uruguay yarn.

But the leaves? So brilliant that no ColorJoy wardrobe can compete. The sky made them even more obvious. And now Monday looks the same. Woohoo! Now if only I could spend some time on the porch today… something happened and the utility company is digging up the front yard of my next-door neighbor, so the porch is not peaceful today.

Enjoy the leaves…