FO #3, the pointelle socks

Everyone say hi to my first (and maybe last) pair of hand-knitted socks! Together they are FO #3.



Want more? I posted about them in more detail on my knit-blog, and I took a bunch of pictures, some of which involve both socks AND cats.

My main gripe about socks is that they take forever, and I won't even know whether I like them as socks until it gets cold enough to wear them. I learned a ton of things though -- these were my first experience with provisional cast-ons, lace, short-row shaping, tubular bind-off, and k1p1 ribbing (highly enjoyable, the hands get into a nice jazzy swing. It may sound weird, but I could have kept knitting the cuffs for a long time). Kind of a long list, in retrospect. I'm not quite sure why I decided to do these before starting a sweater... there's a sweater I'm in love with, which I already have yarn for and have already swatched for and thought about a lot... I think it had something to do with job-hunting stress, back when I was too freaked out all the time to enjoy reading on the bus. Anyway, I've had it with the small projects. Sweaters are the whole reason I decided to learn to knit, and it's time to make one already.

Circus school, and thoughts

Yesterday was like something out of a strange dream... I went to NECCA to take a couple of circus classes, and if you know where that is and where I live, you know that I spent nearly six hours driving a little rental car all over Massachusetts. It was more driving than I've done in one day since early 1999 when I drove my Saturn across the country in four days -- and it was pretty astonishing really, how fast I and the little motor-stereo-pod were able to get from home to the middle of nowhere, but it still took a lot of nowhere and a couple of CDs to get to NECCA.

I split a private lesson with dancingcrow that was mainly handbalancing and silks, and another more chaotic lesson that involved entire families (I was a guest at that one, and stayed mostly on the ground. It was cool though -- parents, teenagers, and younger kids), and after some more driving I got to meet islenskr as well! Ah, it's always greatly reassuring to meet more people who think it's important to learn handbalancing even if it's hard to articulate why, and other adults who understand wanting to play with the kids. I even learned a wonderful phrase to describe this thing that's come over me: adult onset athleticism. It's happened to others, can you believe it? In retrospect, I was pretty lucky to begin catching the bug in my early 20s. :-)

I was feeling so warm in the second class that I risked doing a few cartwheels, which felt good, and today there's still no pain from them, so that's an excellent sign in terms of my hamstring getting better. I also succeeded in straddling up to handstand, and kicking over my hands from a backbend (although I don't think anyone saw me), and worked on (toward) back walkovers. I think I'll get there, especially if I can keep working on them in gymnastics, which is mostly a matter of resisting all the pressure to work on handsprings with everyone else. It's not that handsprings, roundoffs and flips aren't cool, but really... thud bump bang give me a break... that's some rough play, and look how many gymnasts mess up their shoulders. I'm 30 years old, and I want to still be putting the fun in "functional" when I'm much, much older. So my interest is in the lower-impact stuff... every kind of balancing, walkovers, strength moves and contortion.

As for handstands, nevers recently said something that really resonated with me, about wanting a solo handstand practice. That's pretty much what I want too, or what I want to feel: like I have some kind of ongoing practice. The teacher at NECCA gave me some "hollow body" excercises that I'd seen before, but also a way to TELL whether my body is "hollow" enough, which is incredibly useful. Like this poem about handstands says, it seems to be all about removing all the ordinary curves from the spine -- something I have a very hard time tucking my pelvis enough to do, but that's why my solo handstand practice should include psoas stretches and hollow-body exercises, right?

What I don't want is a regular driving into Boston practice. No regular "getting a ticket because what you thought was a metered spot is apparently a no-parking zone and that was someone else's meter" practice either. It seemed like next time it might be possible to take a train out as far as possible and get picked up from a train station, an option I was pretty excited about, and I may be able to lure islenskr into civilization as well.