In which the gods are not kind
I didn’t get to London.* I can pretty much only get up off the sofa if I do it slowly. With pauses to rest.
And not one but two sets of proofs** have arrived to be read in the next forty-eight and a half hours (approximately). Hey, you can lie on the sofa and read proofs. Why don’t I feel happy?
And so, since I’m not in a very good mood anyway, and because I am lying here thinking about health, and because the size, extent and totally insane details of the row about Obamacare amazes me***, I am going to give you this link: http://e-moon60.livejournal.com/195083.html in which she says everything I might have said if I were better educated, better organised, better phrased, and didn’t feel like tumble-dryer lint. America has got to have some kind of socialised—YES! SOCIALISED!—health care. Where the Nazis come into it really escapes me.†
. . . And I’ve just cut about five hundred intemperate politically extreme words that are the sort of thing I avoid on this blog. I think I’ll go to bed and hope this headache is gone by tomorrow.
* * *
* I considered having my stand-in hellhound walker walk the hellhounds anyway and decided that would depress me worse. So we tottered out as usual. This afternoon we were walking past the sports fields and discovered an escaped soccer ball.^ Well, a large thick-skinned ball full of air, anyway.^^ Much too big for a hellhound to get his mouth around, and Chaos was carrying one of his plastic bottles anyway.^^^ Both hellhounds were very interested in it, however, and Chaos play-bowed at it just to check if it might respond. # Darkness, who has spasms of believing that he really is a grown-up, then trotted off. Chaos, however—still holding his plastic bottle—pranced at it, ran away, ran back, growled. . . . So I kicked it.
Canine joy.
We were in the stretch of ex-parkland that belonged to the Big Pink Blob, I mean House, that Peter’s mews used also to belong to, between the old boundary wall and the road. There’s lots of room to tear around but there is no way I’m going to let hellhounds off lead with the main road through town right there. ## Chaos danced, dashed, curvetted, courbetted, and generally went mad. It fascinated me that—and he was still carrying his bottle—he’d tag the ball with his nose and then arrow off again. You know those old paintings of dogs and horses running—and deer and rabbits and various other four-legged things, where the hind feet are stretched out behind but firmly planted on the ground, but the forelegs, stretched out forward, are at about chin level? No animal ever ran like that. Surely, I would guess, no animal fleeing for its life would run like that, but that’s exactly what a frisking hellhound in passionate raptures over a brand-new toy of unknown potential runs like. Or bounds and capers like.
It was too good. I kicked the ball again—not too hard: the extending lead only extends 26 feet. ### I kicked the ball in twenty-foot bursts down the entire length of the old parkland, watching my hellhound having the time of his life, and telling my guilty conscience that we were still opposite the playing fields even if we weren’t still opposite the soccer-playing end of them. And the ball is blue and yellow [sic]: it’s pretty visible.
And I was also thinking: if I’d gone to London I’d’ve missed this. Weeeeeeell . . . okay. Many things in life are a trade off. I’ve had worse.
^ I think it was a soccer ball. It is a deep spiritual quest for me to know as little as humanly possible about any sports concerning balls. Cricket makes this easy. The others you mostly have to work at a little.
^^ And that was, just by the way, one hell of a kick. There is a twice-human-high fence, a road, and two lines of trees between the soccer field and us. In three years of walking hellhounds on the far side of the road beside the playing fields, this is the first time I’ve seen a soccer ball. (If it’s a soccer ball.)
^^^ I can’t teach the blasted animal reliably to pick up his front feet to put his harness on—just when I think he’s got it for good he loses it again for a week or something—but he pretty nearly taught himself to drop plastic bottles into my hand if he’s carrying one and we stop beside a litter bin. They know ‘drop’ and Darkness, The Trainable One, drops things and leaves them dropped. Chaos drops on command pretty well, but he, like Holly of the last generation, has a negative attention span, and you can see him suddenly think, wait, what happened to my plastic bottle/stick/disgusting unidentifiable piece of discarded clothing??? I had it just a moment ago—and shoot back for it. But he mysteriously seems to get it when he watches me put it in the litter bin. This seems to me freakishly high-level comprehension, especially in a hellhound who can’t remember he has two front feet. But he never goes back for something that has gone into the bin. ??????? Critters exist to ensure that us humans never fall into the booby trap of thinking we’re getting stuff figured out.
# The ever-hopeful. He play-bows at most things: cats. Sheep. Bicycles. Rosebushes. When any of the former run away he hopes that means they’re saying yes, and it is up to me to disabuse him. It astonishes me that he continues to like me, I’m such a spoilsport.
## People do. They should have their dogs taken away from them.
### And in fact it doesn’t even do that. This year’s leads are a good eighteen inches shorter than last year’s. I hope next year’s will be the old model.
** The paperback CHALICE and the new standard McKinley trade paper edition of SPINDLE’S END—the next in the series that all have the same ‘look’, including the cover illustrations all being statuary. And before we get into another argybargy about it, I like this series. I can’t remember now if it was Merrilee or my Berkley editor who said that a standard edition with a ‘look’ is a good thing and we wanted a McKinley brand.^ It’s also harder than you might think to come up with a ‘look’ sufficiently lookish and sufficiently flexible to incorporate a lot of books that aren’t very like each other—and allowing for an author who is hard to please anyway and has furthermore a total ban on graphic depiction of any of her books’ characters.^^ I think Berkley have done an amazingly good job.
^ Especially, I think, since I keep refusing to write that favourite of marketing departments and bookshop buyers, the series.
^^ I cannot sufficiently express my loathing for the repackaging of Eva Ibbotson’s backlist
etc. I hate them so much it’s hard to buy them, and I love these books and want to give them to any squashy romantics I meet who don’t know them yet.
*** I’m also old enough to remember Clintoncare, and to have watched in disbelief as they buried Hillary and the horse she rode in on. So I guess I shouldn’t be amazed, but I still am.
† http://guerillawomentn.blogspot.com/2009/08/barney-frank-insults-dining-room-tables.html
Interesting weather
Unfortunately we had to turn left at this point. We’ve been having one of those ‘mostly dry but with sudden sharp showers’ days.* This morning when we went out I squinted at the sky and thought we would get away with it. And we went striding along under blue sky with a pleasant light breeze despite the hot sun and all was well. But then as we slowly bent round to come back to where we started, we discovered that the big black stuff had been chasing us, and was now between us and Wolfgang. Frell. Hellhounds always hold me personally responsible for unseemly meteorology too.
But . . . it’s actually autumn. Look at that harvested field. I’ve been thinking about this the last week or so, because we’ve been having Indian Summer—about a month early. Indian Summer (in the McKinley definition) is when it gets summer-hot during the day but then undercuts itself (agreeably) by cooling off dramatically at night. Hellhounds are not looking like long-legged toast racks because by midnight** it has cooled off enough that they will probably suffer me to confront them with their dinner again***. Today it cooled off so early I had to wear a fleecy warm thing over my t shirt when I took them out for their late afternoon hurtle.† Which may perhaps also explain why they ate their dinner (almost) when I first presented them with it. The drawback to this essentially desirable outcome is that they have learnt to keep a low profile if they aren’t eating but since they have pleased the hellgoddess by taking in calories at the appropriate hour for the first time in several days they want to romp around in a ludicrous manner, including relentless hellgoddess-incorporating persuasion of the leaping, poking, barking and gnawing variety. You’re three years old, guys. That’s twenty-one in dog years. You’re grown-ups. Are you listening to me?
Hellhound chorus: arrrrng arrrrng arrrrng. We had lovely new toys for our birthday! Play with us!
Meanwhile . . . I’m supposed to be going up to London for the day tomorrow to have high glossy tea with black and white waiters, tiers of silver pastries,†† and a piano player, with American friends who are only here for a few days, and whom I haven’t seen in forever. And my internal weather includes . . . a touch of The Hellhound Disease and a general sense that up might be sideways.††† What Will Tomorrow Bring? I have never liked cliffhanger stories.‡ I might almost say arrrrng arrrrng arrrrng.
* * *
* I suspect early experimental prototypes of cloud ships. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1205040/Cloud-ships-cancel-effects-global-warming-century-5-3bn.html
Try harder, please.
** or . . . later. . . .
*** which has now gone soggy and disgusting, of course, but one of the hellhounds’ many oddities is that this doesn’t seem to put them off. If they’re in the mood to eat, they eat. If they’re not in the mood to eat, wild cantrips couldn’t pry their jaws open.
† Which happens to say MAINE on it.^ I bought it . . . ahem . . . at the Bangor airport several decades ago^^ when some frelling flight to Boston was delayed. It used to be a law of the universe that American Eagle flights to Boston were always delayed.
I also happen to be wearing a t shirt with Penobscot Bay on it. This really is decades old and you have to take most of the faded geography on faith. I do not think that the hearty gentleman who, with his little band of hearty friends, accosted me for directions this morning while we were all out hurtling among the raindrops, was paying attention to my shirtfront. He said, Is this the Via Britannica Australis?
Probably, I replied. There’s a lot of it around here.
Ha ha ha, he said, patronisingly. By your accent, you don’t have any idea.
Okay. Granted I annoy easily. And maybe southern England is cram-full of middle-aged Americans dog-sitting for the English on holiday as a way of getting a cheap walking holiday for themselves here. And maybe I speak as a Dog Person. But my first assumption, when I see someone with dogs, is that the dogs are theirs.^^^ My second, admittedly more tentative assumption, is that they’re local. People do take their critters on holiday, but they more often don’t take their critters on holiday. Mostly they’re at home with their critters.
I live here, I said. I have lived here for a long time. But the Via Britannica is all over the place here, and I don’t pay attention to which bits of footpath are it and which aren’t.^^^^ I can tell you, however, that if you take that turn you’re looking at, you will end up in a bog.
^ As opposed to ‘Maine, New England’ which was a British clothing brand for ignorant dorks a few years ago
^^ nearly
^^^ Also anyone with two-thirds of a clue about hellhounds would recognise by the body language that our particular little group is a single integrated human-hellhound unit. But that’s probably asking a lot of the average clue-free goofus.
^^^^ Not to mention the way it moves around. I don’t know if this is poor map-reading on the part of the footpath-sign-erecting subcommittee of the local council, the English college-freshperson equivalent of putting bubble bath in the library fountain some time during the autumn term at Bowdoin College every year+, or the inevitable result of conflicting historical theories. Local famous civil war battles move around a lot too. It’s this field. No, it’s this field. No, no, it’s this field. . . .
+ . . . that was a long time ago. One hopes they’ve come up with an interesting new tradition since. Maybe something about moving historically significant signposts around. Especially if when they rebuilt the library they got rid of the fountain.#
# And now there are tales of the terrible foaming ghost fountain which appears during the first full moon of the autumn term very year. And anyone so unlucky as to see it will fail their midterms. . . .
†† Perhaps I mean silver tiers of pastries. Just at the moment neither sounds very attractive.
††† Although that may also be the effect of a Very Good Day with Pegasus.
‡ . . . [Hums a tune, averting her eyes from the extreme cliffhanger ending of Pegasus I].
Rubbish
Last night I started sweeping myself (and hellhounds) together to go back to the cottage late even by my standards. All that drivelling about music on the blog yesterday, on top of having had an actual breathing musician with a violin in residence for the two days before, positively forced me to the piano as if fired from a slingshot.*
I tore myself away at last, and I was rounding the end of the kitchen table and aiming for the All Stars and hellhound leads and saw . . . the flowers still standing in their bucket of water, waiting to be jammed in vases and stuck around the kitchen and sitting room. Arrrrgh. Our local florist is actually open on Sundays—she’s opening up as I spill out of the bell tower—and she’s fallen into the delightful habit of giving me the stuff past its best on Sunday mornings, and of course I have to buy something to go with it. I end up with a posy or two for the cottage and a small armful for the mews. Which I have lately developed the deplorable habit of thrusting in a bucket of water and forgetting.
Curses. Hellhounds looked at me in disbelief as I started pulling vases out of the cupboard and dragging the compost bucket over to the kitchen sink, and went back to their bed with much aggrieved over-shoulder looking. You’re feeling aggrieved, I said to them, I’m feeling aggrieved.†
So we finally got back to the cottage very late indeed.
Monday morning is rubbish pick up. It’s alternate weeks here—ordinary rubbish one week, green and recyclable the other week. My bins live at the top of a very nasty narrow plant-overhung steep stair, which I have to bump the bins up and down—and my compost bag lives on the other side of the greenhouse, in the garden—and the little area between the greenhouse and the gate to the stair is very small, very dark and very crowded.†† So it behoves me to get the bin-putting-out done in daylight, and not wait till I get back to the cottage in the middle of the night. I’m pretty good at this, rather surprisingly, although I have the scars from the weeks I forget. I had done it yesterday.
Except I had put out my green bag and recyclable bin and my neighbours had all put out their straight rubbish bins. FRELL. FrellfrellfrellfrellungleblargFRELL. So—very very late indeed—I bumped the straight-rubbish bin down the steps and painfully dragged the full recyclable bin back up the stairs again, and the green bag. In the dark. Furthermore the green bag was dead full—I’d been chopping stuff down the last couple of days partly in anticipation of being able to get it hauled away on Monday—so I was going to have to take the beastly thing to the dump††† myself. FREEEEEEEELLLLLLL.
I’d also put Third House’s very full green bag out by its gate. I went round (. . . rather late) this morning where Atlas was mending the flat tyre on the wheelbarrow‡ and discovered . . . an empty green bag. I stared at it. They picked up the compost bags today, I said in strangled tones. Atlas looked at me in astonishment. Well yes, he said. Didn’t you put it out by the gate?
YOU MEAN IT WAS RECYCLE WEEK THIS WEEK? MY NEIGHBOURS AT THE COTTAGE HAD ALL PUT OUT THEIR RUBBISH BINS.
Atlas, the ratbag, was amused.
The rest of a rather snarly hellhound hurtle ensued. In fact an extremely snarly hellhound hurtle. My recyclables bin was also dead full, and while I can haul the frelling green bag to the frelling dump without a lot of (frelling) difficulty, which is to say it will fit in the boot of a car, dustbins are big heavy stiff plastic things that will most emphatically not fit in the boot of a car and furthermore, to get more in the thing you tend to tear everything up which means its contents are not going to transfer to car-friendly containers at all gracefully.
Hellhounds and I had taken a last loop past the pet shop and were on our way home when . . . what should my disbelieving eyes alight upon but the rubbish lorry . . . and it was headed toward the cottage, not away. Don’t tell me they hadn’t got to my street yet. . . . it’s hours later than usual.
They hadn’t got to my street yet. I’d missed the compost run, but that was less important. I banged hellhounds into the kitchen with what they considered very unattractive and unseemly haste—hellhounds are thoughtful about things like climbing up the steps to the door—there may be a snail on the wall or some other riveting piece of wildlife—and sitting to have their harnesses taken off has philosophical implications.
I tore back outdoors again, dragged the green bag back down the greenhouse stairs so I could get to the recycle bin. I could hear the lorry’s roar getting louder as it munched its slow but steady progress down the main road to my cul de sac. Yanked the rubbish bin up the stairs . . . pulled the recyclable bin down the stairs‡‡ again. . . . And there was a nice rubbish collector coming up the hill to take it away.
Who knew rubbish collection could be so exciting.
* * *
* For anything I’m trying to write for anybody but Oisin^ I keep saying that I don’t want to make it wildly demanding and difficult. I’d much rather at least try to write something that ordinary people who fool around with music when they aren’t saving the world or riding jump-offs at Burghley or weeding the gravel that they put down to suppress weeds^^ could have a go at. I said this to Nadia who suggested that one guideline for the violin would be as few sharps or flats as possible.^^^ No more than two, she said. So of course what I’ve started writing has three flats. You start with the noise in your head, you know? Just like writing a story. And you start getting it down on paper and then you discover what it is, because it already is that. It’s not up to you. It’s never up to you.
^ I enjoy watching Oisin sweat. And he’s so good-natured about it it’s hardly worth trying to resist temptation. Fortunately the muse is willing to collaborate about this.
^^ I laughed hollowly when I saw the little gravel courtyard out the kitchen door at the cottage (I having been in love with the cottage from the moment I set foot across the front door, which is only about eight feet from the back door). I know about gravel. But I’m afraid I do watch with a rich durable amusement when someone puts in a gravel garden with a few artistically arranged boulders and some desert grass in what is fairly evidently the fond belief that they have now done the garden and don’t ever have to think about it again. Ho ho ho ho ho. There’s one of these around the corner from Third House. The weeds are getting almost as tall as the desert grass and are rapidly drowning the Ophiopogon Planiscapus Nigrescens http://www.guardiangardencentre.co.uk/Index.cfm?fuseaction=product.standard&continueaction=category.standard&category_id=466&producttype_id=48210
probably to the latter’s great relief since it tends to like shade.
† But the shades-of-hot-pink explosion in the hall is very successful, I think.
†† Water butt, spare bricks, bags of compost, bricked-in flowerbed whose edges are perilously lined with pots, two dustbins, etc
††† Ahem. The Household Recycling Centre.
‡ I hadn’t realised it was flat till I’d tried to move a lot of bags of soil improver in it last Friday
‡‡ It is worth noting that I didn’t fall down the stairs myself and break anything, nor did I drop any of the damn bins, or the compost bag, or anything else. No scars. Amazing.
Music, various
Every Sunday morning 8:45 service ring gets earlier. Although it’s particularly early on mornings that it’s already hot by 8:45, like today.*
There were five of us to begin with, five being the magic number for ringing real methods rather than Dreaded Minimus on four, although doubles methods on five are a little volatile because you should have a sixth ringing tenor-behind. But the interesting thing about today is that it was four of our good ringers—and me. Our three weakest ringers—Penelope, Leo, and me—are, with Vicky and Niall, our most regular Sunday ringers, plus Leo’s daughter Cordelia who only rings call changes. Which leaves Vicky and Niall badly outnumbered. But lately Penelope has this dranglefabbing job that keeps manifesting on Sunday mornings** and Leo and Cordelia are on holiday.***
So this morning was McKinley and four ringers who know what they’re doing. I was thinking about it as I went sweating down the road to the tower†–that one of the measurements of the acquisition of a skill is the Dread Level, and in performance skills this is often, What can you do in public? In bell ringing it’s, What can you ring for Sunday service? It’s always hairy when you ring something for service for the first time. And then it goes on being hairy for an undefined period based on how quickly you learn and how easily you panic. I learn slowly and am prone to panic. I spend my bell ringing life longing to be able to ring the next thing, whatever it is, for service, and then spending months of Sundays after I have begun to do so worrying about it. You know, nobody has threatened to throw me out of the tower in five-years-next-month of ringing but I’m still braced for it.
I’m now at the stage, theoretically at least, that I can ring the standard†† service methods, so five or six ringers with me among them can in theory just get on with it. Which is what we did this morning. It was exhilarating, nerve-wracking and creepy to be . . . just another ringer, when the ringers in question are Richard and Dorothy and Vicky and Niall, and later on Roger. Yeep. Nobody asked me if I wanted to ring the treble or inside; no one gave me first choice of bells. We just rang. Yeep. Even my somewhat cataclysmic striking was better than usual. I generally am better with a good band, for the obvious reason: if they’re perfect, I don’t have to adjust, I only have to fit in, which is easier. I’m still the one rendering the rows less than perfect. But today Dorothy complimented me on my ringing on the two. It’s a difficult bell, she said: it’s odd struck††† and the wretched rope is still bouncy after months of use.‡ I stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. Getting complimented on my striking—I mean complimented as opposed to the polite version of ‘well that was less sodding awful than usual’—is a first.
Then I dragged hot, sulky hellhounds out on a brief walk facsimile and we all went down to the mews. I mostly spare Peter’s family appearing in these virtual pages but . . . Peter’s violin-playing daughter was here this weekend. ‡‡ She’s brought her violin here occasionally before, when she was working toward a performance—she plays with a variety of little amateur groups, which ebb and flow and reform, as little amateur groups often do—but this time I asked her to bring it. I’ve been—ahem!—more or less dared to write something for the violin ‡‡‡ and my protests that I don’t know ANYTHING about the violin and can barely tell a violin from an accordion or a hellhound § have been met with the brutal ‘you can take time to learn’. Oh. So I asked if Nadia would please bring her violin and explain to me why it isn’t an accordion§§, and, furthermore, what it is, and what it does.
Fortunately Nadia has a lively sense of humour and a willingness to play Walter Lewin to my back-row nerd§§§ and she claims to have enjoyed the experience. The only blight on this happy scene is that she was obviously expecting me to play something—perfectly good piano sitting there, what do I use it for then anyway? It’s not at all an efficient shelving system, even for sheet music, and as free-standing sculpture goes it’s rather unoriginal—and she is looking forward with interest to this violin piece I claim to be going to write. You know, life was a lot simpler when I kept things to myself, instead of blowing them off in public blogs and being forced to attempt to manifest aspects of my imagination much better left to fantasy.
* * *
* Yes. The hellhounds have stopped eating again.
** I was right about her heinous role in the handbell wedding. She confessed on Friday to suggesting handbells to the café owner. Then she had to stop her from agreeing to cover that day at the café when someone asked for the day off.^ You’re going to your daughter’s wedding, Penelope said. The café owner looked blank. I’ll cover, said Penelope. Which means Penelope can’t ring the Old Eden wedding that day either. Vicky breathed a long forlorn sigh at Friday practise when the news was broken to her that Niall and I are going to be ringing handbells for a wedding on 18 September—the 18th of September being another Friday, which means finding ringers at all is going to be difficult. Vicky said nobly that she guessed it was harder to find handbell ringers than tower bell ringers. The thing that amuses me abundantly is that of course Niall is taking a day off work^^ to ring handbells. It’s not even a question.
^ Some feeble excuse about her ticket having come up for the time machine and she doesn’t want her miss her chance to sightsee the Early Cretaceous.
^^ Colin took early retirement and still dabbles in consulting. And I . . . am finishing a novel. I am.
*** I hope they’re somewhere with a bell tower, and turned up for service ring.
† Today I left early enough I did not have to sprint.
†† This is going to vary enormously by area. I ring the standard six-bell methods for this area.
††† I don’t know how much bell jargon to keep redefining, so forgive me when I get it wrong. Odd struck means that the bong happens at a nonstandard point of your pull. The rule is that the bong you hear as your thumbs pass your nose—as your hands follow the rope up and down—is your bell. But a lot of bells don’t sound at precisely that moment, which means if you want good crisp even striking—and you do—you have to adapt to your bell.
‡ New ropes are always bouncy. It’s like ringing with Slinkies.
‡‡ It is really too ridiculous to give aliases to Peter’s kids, but I can’t help myself. Everybody has an alias on this blog, except Peter and me. And Merrilee. And possibly the occasional editor. So Peter’s violin-playing daughter is going to be called Nadia, because there don’t seem to be any famous women violinists with amusing names, and Nadia Boulanger is one of my heroines. http://www.nadiaboulanger.org/
‡‡‡ None of you reading this would know anything about that, of course
§ I’m pretty reliable about hellhound identification, but the accordion might be challenging.
§§ I think I can wing it why it’s not a hellhound. Although I suspect their dogfood ingesting habits are similar.
§§§ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/education/19physics.html
Or, for that matter, Nadia Boulanger to my Aaron Copeland
Guest blog by Jodi Meadows
An epic adventure of socks and spindles and fanciness
Part one: THE YARNING
by Jodi Meadows, aged twenty-six and three and a half months
For years, I have loved yarn. It’s so soft, and it does these crazy things when you stab it with needles, or hang it with crochet hooks. Yarn violence has been a big part of my life since I was fourteen and my mom gave me my first crochet hook. (Okay, there was a pause for things like school, work, getting married, but eventually I did rediscover my love for yarn.) I made blanket after blanket with my crochet hooks, foisted my hobby on various friends, and a few years ago, one friend and I made a pact to learn how to knit.
We bought the same how-to book, which came with the same needles and notions*, and even the same kind of yarn to practice on. She dropped out early (slacker!), but I immediately learned the most difficult ways to do things, became frustrated and yelled at things, and then learned the easier and more efficient ways. I didn’t understand basic things like why stockinette stitch curls**, but I knew I liked knitting. And you know what else I like?
Socks.
You know what knitting was made for?
Socks.
Okay, so it was probably made for a lot of other things, and I hear you can knit things like sweaters and shawls and whatever, but….socks. Right?
It was at this point I discovered real yarn stores that sold actual wool yarn. Not the scratchy stuff you can find in mmmphthfff big chain stores, or acrylic (plastic!) yarn. Real wool. Nice wool. From sheep! There was silk, wool and silk put together to make a SUPER YARN, cotton, llama, alpaca, cashmere, angora, and blends of all manner of wonderful soft fibers.
And then I saw it. A light shone down from Heaven, angels sang the Hallelujah Chorus, and my husband clutched his wallet and gave a manly whimper.
Shelf after shelf of glorious, cheerful-colored sock yarn. Yarn made specifically for socks. Because there are more people like me who think knitting is made for socks. Sisters. Brothers. (But usually sisters.) I have found you at last.
Fast forward a year and dozens of socks later. I joined a web community called Ravelry (www.ravelry.com), widely known as a bastion of enablement, and this is where I learned that some people make their own yarn. With spinning wheels. And spindles. Some of them (gasp!) even have sheep and make wool yarn from their sheep’s hair. So I said to anyone who would listen that I wanted to learn how to spin, and lo, my mother listened and sent me a kit for my twenty-fifth birthday. (At which point my bank account, sensing its demise, shuddered and tried to think of happier days when my hobbies were less expensive and/or non-existent.)
This is where things get complicated, and not just because of my obsessions with fiber and pretty tools and so on, but because my original version of this post was miles shorter, but Robin (hi, Robin!) wanted more. Lots more. She had many questions, and, knowing how I feel about yarn, probably realized I would be happy with complicated. (She totally planned this. Again, she proves why she is the BRIGHT PINK HELLGODDESS.*)
Ahem. So. As you can see above, I had a spindle. And some wool. And by golly, I was going to learn to spin.
For the next part of our adventure, there are a few things you’ll need to know about the construction of yarn. Here’s a brief tour:
1. Yarn is simply fibers twisted together. You can make it out of most anything fibrous — hair, wool, cat fur, dryer lint — though, as with most things, your final product depends a lot on what you start with. Dryer lint yarn won’t be very nice. *g*
2. Wool (and other protein fibers, but we’ll talk about wool for now) has scales that lock together nicely when you twist them. They grab each other and stick, so when you twist the wool into yarn, then try to pull it apart, it’s much more difficult than if the fibers weren’t twisted. You can try it with your hair. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
3. When you spin yarn, either on a spindle or wheel, you spin something called a single. It’s just one strand of twisted fiber.
4. You can knit/crochet/weave singles if you like, and there are good reasons to do it, but because because you’ve twisted the fiber all in one direction, whatever you make from your single will tilt in that direction.
5. To balance your yarn so it doesn’t tilt when you use it, you’ll take another single (or several other singles, depending on what you want), and ply them.
6. Plying is simply two or more singles put together. And remember how much stronger twisted fibers are than loose fibers? Same thing for plied yarn. The singles are spun together, and just like the first time spinning, the scales lock together, and the whole thing becomes much stronger.
Visual aids:
This isn’t as easy to see as I’d like, but here you can see the twisted fibers. See how they’re all turned one direction? That’s a single.
And in this photo, you can see two singles twisted around each other, sort of like a rope. (Though I assure you that ropes are entirely different things. I’m not sure exactly how, but I promise they are.)
To sum up: First you spin the singles, then you ply them together. Plying doesn’t take as much time as the spinning, but for many, it’s not nearly as exciting. Some might even call it dull. (Then you photograph the finished project and keep it as a pet.)
Generally, the more plies you have, the stronger your yarn will be. And the rounder. Two-ply yarn (two singles stuck together) is flat-ish, but three is rounder, and four is even rounder than that. Flat yarn is good for things like lace, and round yarn is good for things that might take a lot of abuse, such as, ahem, socks.
I should also mention that, like things in English don’t necessarily mean the same thing in other versions of English, saying things like “four-ply” and “two-ply” don’t mean the same thing in all worlds. When I use the terms, I mean the number of singles stuck together in the final yarn. Other people may be more familiar with them describing the thickness of the final yarn, regardless of the actual number of singles involved.***
TO BE CONTINUED……….
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*I have no idea why they call these things notions, but all that means is knitting stuff. Stitch counters, stitch markers, little doodads to stick on the end of your needles so stitches don’t fall off. Stuff, as I said. You don’t need all of it, but sometimes it’s pretty. Too pretty to resist.
**Stockinette is the basic knit stitch you think of, row after row of vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv. The front (right side) is made of knit stitches. The back (wrong side — but it feel so right, it can’t be wrong!) is made of purls, which look like ridges. Here’s the trick I didn’t get at first: they’re the same stitch, just backward. A knit is only a knit on the side you’re looking at. On the other side, it’s totally a purl. If you knit on one side, come to the end of a row and turn the work over (as you do), then start your purls, you’re making knits on the other side. The other side is going to look like this:
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
And the back side will look like this:
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The Vs are called stockinette stitch, and stockinette curls because the knits and the purls — in spite of being the same thing, just the opposite sides — are different widths. So it curls because that’s what uneven widthy things do.
It took me forever to figure that out.
***A long, long time ago, or so I hear, giant spinning mills usually just spun one size single. Little. To make thicker yarns, they’d add more singles during the plying process. So, for sock yarn, they might use four plies. For thicker yarn, they’d use eight. For ridiculously thick yarn, ten, or twelve. In those days, the number of plies was used to describe the thickness of the yarn.
Now, though, mills can spin singles all different sizes, so “four-ply” sock yarn might only have three plies. Or it might have six.
* I have added the bright pinkness. I have no idea why Jodi failed to add the bright pinkness. Some terrible oversight evidently. –Ed/hellgoddess