Hidden Away

I’ve always suspected that my DNA is just a few nucleotides shy of giving me OCD. Although I’m far too messy to have OCD, in addition to being a packrat, I can understand the need to establish a routine and maintain order.

I try not to articulate my thoughts about some of my preferences because it gives me the sense that my quirks, which seem to have ballooned as I’ve gotten older, push me closer to the category of being truly strange. Then I read Anne’s July 27 post on “favorite rows”, and I felt a little less weird. I, for example, will always stop knitting cables on the purl side, and preferably on the fattest (untwisted) row possible. I never leave rows in the middle—the house could be on fire, but I’ll knit to the end. (And, yes, I have a favorite lane in the lap pool, I have a favorite pen to use when writing checks, I always start entries in a notebook on a new page—the list goes on and on.) A major obsession in knitting is where I should attach a new ball of yarn.

When I started knitting, perhaps because Depression-era parents shaped my upbringing, I felt that you had to use up every last bit of yarn before attaching a new ball. This made it necessary to have knots in the middle of pieces that had perfectly good seams where the ends could be tucked in invisibly. Without letting my mother know about my extravagance, I began to leave a yard or two of yarn over so that the new ball could be attached at the seam and body pieces would have smooth fabric. I knitted happily this way for years and years. All my early sweaters were knitted flat from the bottom-up—I didn’t have circular needles until the 1980s. A routine was established and order maintained—how great is that!

My first shawl disturbed the sense of euphoria I get from having a knot-less garment. Egads, I realized. You have to attach a ball in the middle. Luckily for me, Myrna Stahman, the designer of my first shawl had great instructions on grafting, and so I attached nearly invisibly a new ball of the beautiful Haneke wool-merino mix I used, and you can see that it has felted in nicely over the years I’ve worn and washed this shawl.

Things weren’t so easy on the Shetland Triangle. The yarn didn’t lend itself to grafting—it is a three ply and it tended to fall apart. So I had to knit a few stitches with new and old yarn and weave in the ends. This looks pretty neat, but it doesn’t really make me happy because I can find the join too easily on the wrong side.

On Bee Fields, as I began to knit, I realized that inevitably I’d have to attach yarn, and I spent hours pondering where I might do that. I had a eureka moment, when I realized that I could do it on the back of a sl1-k2tog-psso, and it would be invisible.

There are tails on the wrong side that can be woven in neatly.

Last night I finished the first section of Bee Fields, and I start the bee swarm section today, and so I’ll be on the lookout for another place where I can hide one more of the joins.

Ed finished the deer-proof tomato cage, and with almost as much delight as hiding this join, I discovered hidden among the tomato foliage about a half-dozen marble-sized tomatoes.

Comments

[Dorothy]

I had to laugh because I could so identify with your post. I sometimes think I do border on OCD because I, too, have a few "quirks". One of the reasons I do love knitting flat is because of the ability to not have joins in the middle. But I also hate seaming, so what do you do? I'm kind of jealous of your tomatoes. I have a little plant in my sun room (way too cold to grow them outside) and it's got two little tomatoes on it!

[robin]

You crack me up!! As I rarely knit anything with seams, I just join the new ball under the arm where a seam would be.

[tiennie]

You sound like me. We're not quirky - we just know what we like!