Rachael

Almost-Flashdance.

That’s what it will always be called, in my mind. I told you a little about it — I tried it on for the first time and realized that I had bound off the neck four inches lower (and wider) than I should have?

And an off-the-shoulder gansey is not a good thing. In fact, it’s a very bad thing. It’s not in fashion here in the States, nor, I expect, is it in fashion anywhere in the world. And if it were, and I wanted to bring that trend here to Oakland, I would make a bad standard-bearer, because I’d be too busy clobbering all the folk who would be falling about in the streets in paroxysms of laughter to see me pass.

So, how did it come about, this near-miss? I have an orange sweater that I live in. I mean, almost every day I throw it on over whatever I’m wearing to ward off the chill. Wool is better than a sweatshirt ANY day. You know that. So it’s pilling and pulling, and it’s really only good for inside the house and I pray that the UPS guy drops-and-runs rather than requiring a signature, because no one but Lala and the dogs need to see me in this.

I wanted a new throw-on knock-about sweater. I chose a nice yarn, and decided to make it super simple. But I wanted a little bit of the guernsey about it, so I threw in some traditional patterns, lifted from Knitting in the Old Way. I chose three patterns I liked, and threw in a cable on either side of the main motif. (It is understood that this is not Traditional and therefore not a Gansey, but I call it my gansey in my mind, and that’s okay.)

It’s knit in the round to the armholes, then the sleeves are joined, and I made a simple raglan decrease every other round (and threw another cable in at the raglan line, for fun).

My problem came in that I THOUGHT I knew where to make a neck. Try it on first? What a silly thought! I didn’t, and got the almost-flashdance horror. Then, gunshy, I made a weird kind of turtleneck. Third time was the charm, and it’s now in the right place.  (And no, sadly, I wrote none of this down. But you could make up your own version! Off the shoulder for everyone!)

It’s a good knock-about. I can’t get a good color-match with our camera — it’s not periwinkle like this — it’s really a true lilac with a pink undertone. I love the color.

Specs:
Pattern: my own, inspired by Knitting in the Old Way
Yarn: Lang, Soft Shetland, 8 balls, 130m to each, color 701.0046/1057

(Bonus! Our camera has a nifty feature that lets you take ten pictures in a rapid-fire row, and then you get nifty shots like this one
. That makes me laugh.)

Sunday I was in a finishing frenzy, and kept digging things out to finish. Good at starting, good at doing, not so good at finishing. Hello, three unfinished but almost done novels, how are ya?

Let’s not talk about that, shall we?

So, knitting:

You’ve seen this before. Specifically, you’ve seen this back in 2004. Two thousand FOUR. Isn’t it 2007 now? I forget, but I think that’s right. She’s never, ever, ever been worn, except to take the finished picture (specs there) because I never put in the zipper.

Please. A zipper? I don’t even mind putting in zippers. I hate sewing, and it’s not that fun, but it’s satisfying to do by hand, because it ends up looking so neat. I decided I wanted to wear it Sunday, so I grabbed it and put in the zipper (which had been neatly folded inside the sweater for the past almost-three years. It’s not like I didn’t even HAVE a zipper, I did). And voila, Bob’s yer uncle:

The bottom ended up wanting to be scalloped because of the way the pockets pull, so instead of fighting that, I put the zipper in to accentuate it.

Love the pockets:

From the back:

I also had to finish the scarf that is so gorgeous I will wear it in summer. And I don’t even usually wear scarves, but I made it with Kyoto, which is the most stunning yarn in the universe, seriously. It absolutely glows, and it’s the softest stuff, and you must get some. I had some random balls lying around. I’ve never made anything with it, but when I go to ArtFibers, I usually end up walking out with one precious ball. Just because. And I’m glad I do that, because I got this:

I tried so hard to get a shot where you can see the yarn’s glow, and this is as close as I got:

I used Stephanie’s one-row scarf pattern, and I threw in stripes where I felt moved to do so. I swear, it was practically religious, and I usually hate knitting scarves. Highly recommended.

As if that weren’t enough fun, I finished up a baby sweater that had been done (as has the baby, as of last week) and only needed buttons and a bit of lace. I’d learned about the Ribbonerie last week (how did I not know?) and stumbled into the store, amazed. (I also stumbled out, as I happened upon their 10th anniversary sale, and as soon as I entered this amazing ribbon-wonderland, they pressed a glass of champagne into my willing little hands. Now, sitting in the sunlight, sorting through antique buttons and scraps of lace with champagne to hand? What could be better?)

I left the store with two old mother-of-pearl buttons and a half-yard of ribbon that was quite literally worth more than the sweater, but don’t they look nice together?

Specs: 5 hour baby sweater pattern, free (bootie pattern there, too)
Yarn: (Wait for it) Caron Simply Soft, color wine, NO DYE LOT. Gotta love machine washable.

Click HERE
for a detail of the embroidered white-on-white ribbon.

All right. I’m tired of typing, and I haven’t even shown you the new sweater, the one you’ve never seen a scrap of! That’ll come tomorrow because right now I have to go for a run. Or a Cadbury Creme Egg. Whichever comes first. The eternal question, isn’t it?

A nice Sunday morning — the migraine that felled me yesterday (the acupuncture has been SO great, I was super disappointed) is gone, although Lala is sick as a dog and has gone back to bed. Poor thing.

But the day is pretty and sunny and warm enough to sit out on the porch, and the dogs seem to know that there is a new dog park opening today and we’re going to the party for it this afternoon (Joaquin Miller park, yo, off Sanborn, party till 2pm), and we’ve heard there might be an agility demo, which Clara really wants to see.

I feel like today I should finish knitting the There But For The Grace of Flashdance gansey that is NOT off-the-shoulder anymore, and I should work on getting some other things out of my To Make basket. It might be a purge week, actually. There are some projects that I know with all my heart are going nowhere, and I don’t even like the yarn enough to rip. We’ll see. I don’t feel like starting that right now. But maybe tomorrow. I can just imagine — me throwing all my yarn into the center of the yarn and starting from there. Doesn’t that sound fun? Overwhelming and fun?

Hey! Have you seen Emily’s new site and the fabulous scarf pattern she’s posted? She does the site and photography for Knit-One-One, and she’s just such a cutie-pie. Go say hello, and keep your eye on her!

And for your weekend fun, a picture of the picture on our fridge — Joni with godkid Dylan (months and months ago — he now has total control of his head) wearing the matching aran sweaters I made them. The picture was taken on her boat where she was living while she was pregnant, and it’s attached to our fridge with Maori haka magnets from New Zealand, which was unintentional but apropos — both Dylan and I are half-Kiwi.

I’m off to go check on the sickee. Enough Emergen-C will fix anything.

It’s very, very weird to be sitting in my condo which is rented out to someone else.

It’s been a bad week, condo-wise. Granted, it could be worse, but this last week required a major transfusion of money, into the new deck and into some work on pipes. Now that the pipes have been worked on in one part of the house, though, my unit has stopped giving hot water to my tenant, and the plumber who WAS working here is done with his part of his work and doesn’t want to be bothered.

As my unit is the only one affected now, it’s on me to get another plumber in, which is a pain. The pain is a bit lessened because my super-nice tenant is out of town and I can take care of this without inconveniencing her any further than she’s already been.

But that means I’m sitting in my old home surrounded by things that aren’t mine. And I have to say, she’s done a stunning job of decorating. I loved how it looked when I lived here, and this is just as nice and comfy. I don’t know if she gussied it up because I was coming (I would have, but I hope she didn’t feel she had to), but it looks so great. Makes me proud of the place. She was a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa, so her decorating style is a high-budget, pared-down Cost Plus aesthetic. It’s spare, and interesting, and there’s so much more ROOM here than when I lived here and all the yarn got in the way.

The sound is the same, though, that constant whooosh of the freeway outside, and interestingly, the smell is the same. It’s the smell I smelled when I first opened the door, the moment I knew I would live here, and it’s a mix of old wood and paint and fabric that’s been stored for a long time. My gaze falls on the walls the same way — the spatial relations make sense to me, but where I’m sitting at her table is where I had a bookcase before, so I’ve never sat in EXACTLY this place before.

Okay, the plumber just called and said he was on his way over. My biggest fear is that the problem is too big, that it won’t get solved before my tenant comes home on Monday, and that she’ll have to be inconvenienced some more. Last week there were two days when she had no water at all, and she had the flu, and her mom had a heart attack. And her power was briefly out, and I still don’t know how that happened, but thank god it came back on. That’s too much for anyone to bear, and she has been really good about it. (I did take two days off her rent. While that helped, it doesn’t take the sting out of showering at the Y, does it?)

So. Here I am. Waiting. More to follow.  (No internets here, so I’ll post this later.)

Later – Okay, now I’m home – and I’m SO HAPPY. He totally fixed the problem, and I got to call my tenant and tell her that it’s all fixed, and she was so happy, and I’m so happy and I want to spread the love so not only am I writing this little blog, but I’m writing a post (the one below this) that will be of no use yet, but someday might be where some people find good people to work in their houses.

Because it’s hard! I don’t know what the hell pipes are doing under my house, and whatever someone tells me, I’ll believe. I don’t know how to DO things around my house — I’ll give it a good shot, and I’ll get out the home repair book (thanks, Becca!), but in the end, I’m a knitter, people. Not a painter/plumber/spackler. Although I can spackle with the best of ’em sometimes.

So when I find someone I want to recommend, I want EVERYONE to use that person. My new plumber, Abraham Tingey, of Mr. Rooter in Berkeley, is the BEST. He was on time, he gave me the best and worst case scenarios right up front, outlined the cost before he started doing any of it, and then he TOOK THE TIME to explain everything he was doing as he was doing it. Seriously, I dogged his heels in the house and under it, and he pointed things out to me, explained what had happened in the past, speculated on what could be done in the future, and when I got a blank look on my face, he slowed down and explained the words to me. And brass nipple is always going to be funny to me, because I’m 12 years old that way. I don’t think he saw me giggle, though. 

And he was so sweet! And nice, and smart, and he’d lived in New Zealand for a year, and he put booties on every time he entered the house, and he charged me for fixing the garbage disposal (a separate problem) but he explained that he was actually charging me for the lesson, because then he showed me what to do next time.

So. I trust the guy. And he fixed a problem that I wasn’t sure was fixable (only triaged, actually, will need new pipes, but they live to serve another day). So I’m posting the post below, which will eventually, as it is found on teh intarwebs, bring a bunch of comments together in one place on good service techs and how to find them.

That was so long! If you made it here, you deserve a cute animal picture or two!

    Adah, in her bed which is ON THE FRIDGE.

    Cat-of-my-heart, Digit

    Boy-of-my-heart, Dylan on elephant.

Welcome!

This will be a little space for the residents of Oakland, Berkeley, and the East Bay to come and leave comments, recommending people and businesses who do home repair. It will not be moderated or sorted, so please keep the format established here.

To post a review/recommendation:
*Click on Comments.
*In the comment box, please type what type of repair-person you’re recommending (plumber, handyman, contractor, painter, etc.).
*Then go down a line and write your review. Include a phone number for the service, and first and last names for the workers, if you have them, and any impressions of the work they did. 

I’d like these mostly to be positive reviews, a place for people to promote the good service they’ve had. However, if you’d had bad service from any of the people listed here, please let us know. Negative reviews of a company that is not recommended here should go to the Better Business Bureau instead.

Now click comments, and let’s get started (I’ll post the first two). Good luck with the work you’re having done!

Valentine’s Day, for me, is not that big a deal. In fact, this one kind of slipped me by. Yesterday I was driving around and noticed the impromptu flower stands that pop up around any Hallmark holiday — vendors hawking their bouquets to cars idling in traffic, caught at stop signs. I wondered, "Huh?" Then I realized that it was the Big Day of Love in consumerland.

But really? Love is good stuff. Love is good stuff every single day, and I don’t need a special day to remember that. I’m lucky enough to remember that all the time, as often as possible. Today I won’t see Lala at all, actually. I left for work at 5am (she won’t be home until after I’m asleep tonight), and as I kissed her goodbye, I said, "I love you," as I do every morning. Usually she doesn’t wake up at all, just kind makes a sound that could be translated as "sheep" in some languages, but today, she kicked her feet and yelled "I LOVE YOUUUUUUUUUU!" And I’m sure she doesn’t remember that a bit.

Heh. She’s totally gonna be embarrassed by that little story. That makes it more fun! Now, THAT’S Valentine’s day. She can share embarrassing stories on her own blog (only she doesn’t, luckily, not often), and all I can say now is:

    (from bachelorette party last year)

Love is good stuff. No matter where you get it.