The Reverse Boyfriend Knitting Curse

There is a lot of folklore that revolves around knitting.  Regular knitters will be familiar with the boyfriend jumper curse (or the boyfriend sweater curse for American readers).  For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, it goes something like this: never knit your lover a jumper, or you'll be doomed to break up shortly after the gift is handed over.

photo credit: Lululemon Athletica

There are a number of reasons for this mysterious phenomenon. Firstly it takes a long time to knit a jumper.  I've been knitting one for almost a year and I haven't even started the sleeves.  This gives many relationships time to go from starry eyed to bitter and twisted. Another theory is that the recipient of the gift takes one look at the wonky, homemade garment, pictures a lifetime of being forced to wear fashion tragedies and runs like the wind.  Along the same line is the theory that the hard working knitter slaves away on the jumper, then seeing that their partner refuse to wear her brilliant work, dumps the ungrateful bum.

Recently I've discovered a related but opposite knitters' curse, I call it the Boyfriend Gift-Yarn curse, or if you will, the Reverse Boyfriend Knitting Curse.  Let me explain.  I was recently cataloguing my yarn stash (yes, I'm that nerdy) and I noticed how many unused balls of yarn I had that had been gifts from ex-lovers.  In a way it was nice, a reminder of good times (and a few bad ones).

photo credit: EraPhernalia Vintage

Now, it's not that I have been deliberately avoiding using this yarn, and it's good quality stuff, my lovers have excellent taste (they chose me after all), so why is this yarn outlasting my relationships? (Insert joke about my number of exes here.)  Of course there are a number of reasons, gift yarn is usually given in one or two ball lots, meaning your choice of project is limited, and it's not usually given with a specific purpose in mind.  I'm also a notoriously slow knitter, and yes, I've gone through a few lovers in the last few years.

So now that I've discovered this new curse, the question is, what should I do about it?  I mean, I don't want to doom my relationships, but on the other hand, I like receiving gifts of yarn.  So I've decided I'm not superstitious.... and I don't believe in knitting curses.  In the meantime, I want to ensure I keep getting given yarn by making sure news of the curse doesn't spread. So be sure not to read this post.  Thanks.

A Tropical Baby

Our family is celebrating this week.  Our clan has a new member.  Little Felix Ali has been welcomed to the world, first child of Emma and Chris and nephew to yours truly.

I've been ohhing and ahhing over photos of our gorgeous brown-eyed boy, but I am still waiting to meet him.  While I'm rugged up in my mountain home outside of Melbourne; Emma's job means that she, Chris and now Felix call Bangkok home.  Now the tyranny of distance has all sorts of implications on family life, but our extended family has always been tight knit despite being spread across the globe, so today I'm going to focus on just one important aspect: Its affect on my knitting.

Now, as you are all no doubt aware, knitting is an important part of welcoming any new baby, and here in chilly Melbourne there are plenty of things to choose from.  Like this blanket I knitted for baby Jordi-Lee:

But a baby in Bangkok isn't going to need woolly blankets, beanies, bootees or jumpers.  You see my dilemma.  Never fear though, brave reader, I found a knit-worthy solution: soft toys.

Now that I've started looking, there are some seriously cool knit toys around.  I'm very keen to knit a Henry Rollins doll from the pattern in Stitch and Bitch Nation, but I had to admit that that is more a gift Felix's dad Chris than for the bub himself.  I've also found patterns for knitted mobiles, vehicles, puppets, even stackable blocks... so much to choose from.

Just as I was sitting, confused and overwhelmed amid a huge pile of toy patterns, Nanna Olive came to the rescue by giving me a Patsie the Possum kit from Panda yarns.  Patsie is not only perfect for a new born (cuddly and easy to wash) but she's an Australian native, and will hopefully become a reminder that little Felix is an Aussie deep down. (Well a Thai-born Maldivian-Dutch-Aussie, but what's more Australian than that?)

So I embarked on knitting my first toy, hopefully the first of many.  It took a while to get my needles around the slippery, fluffy, synthetic yarn that would make Patsie so soft.  Everytime I had to do any shaping (and there is a lot of it) the needles would split the wool wildly.  Once I came to terms with that though, knitting Patsie was pretty easy.  The curly tail was particularly fun to make.  One warning though: it's not the best project to work on while knitting in public.  I spent much of the time looking like I had a squashed squirrel coming off my needles:

But after a long wait, little Felix has been born and Patsie is finished and ready for posting.  Here's a final look at her before she's shipped off to Thailand.  I must remember to poke a few breathing holes in the box.

Left...Left...Left, Right, Left.

For the last few years I've been searching for a decent pair of ANZAC Day gloves.  For those of you who aren't from the Antipodes and can't be bothered following the link, ANZAC Day (standing for Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) is like our version of Veterans' Day.

ANZAC Day gloves are not a weird Australian tradition, it's just that the band I play with performs at the ANZAC Day parade in Melbourne each year.  That's me up the back:

 

Although we don't do the dawn service, it's an early start.  April mornings in Melbourne can be quite crisp and my joints don't like to get cold.  I'm a percussionist in the band and for me, ANZAC day is all about the bass drum.  I spend around three hours keeping the beat, loudly.  In order to keep on keeping the beat I have to tape up my wrists to stop the nerves from pinching.  I think you'll agree it's a good look:

The problem is that the taping is anchored on my palm.  Just ten minutes of drumming usually has the ends of the tape curling up and tangling in my bulky bass drum mallets.  So I have a number of requirements for my ANZAC Day gloves:  They need to keep me warm, they need to leave my fingers free enough to play and they need to cover my palms well enough to keep the scraggy ends of my tape covered and out of the way.

Now as a keen knitter, I already had a few pairs of fingerless to choose from:

Now the purple pair, made by me out of a beautifully soft possum merino mix my mum bought me from New Zealand, could be discounted immediately.  They clash horribly with my black, white and blue band uniform.  They are also a bit long around the fingers for drumming.  You can see from the photo that my little finger can barely peek out, no good for grip.

The second pair, knitted for me by my friend Elisabeth, made me more hopeful.  They matched my uniform so I wore them the first ANZAC Day we played at.   They were pretty good but the covered thumb reduced my grip and the mitten flaps, so useful in my cold and mountainous home town, were just too, well, flappy for drumming.  They did hold my strapping tape down well though.

This year I seem to have stumbled across the best ANZAC Day gloves ever.  They were a birthday present, again knitted for me by Elisabeth:

To begin with, they have an obvious and glorious musical motif, and in black and white they'll match pretty much any band uniform ever.  It gets better though, they are so low cut that all my fingers are completely free, but high enough to cover the strapping, leaving me wonderfully tangle-less.  This ANZAC Day, although I came away tired and sore from hours of bass drumming, my wrists were warm and protected and my fingers unemcumbered.

Here they are in action, what do you think?

Welcome

Well, this is my first entry for the Reclining Knitter, a blog about my knitting adventures.  During the day I'm busy working on my PhD in musicology, or writing articles for various disability related publications.    Given that I spend all day writing for a living, you might wonder why I choose to use my spare time writing a blog.  The simple answer is that I want an excuse to bang on about knitting.  It's become an obsession.  I spend my days thinking about yarn, planning projects and surreptitiously fondling passing fibres.  I'm hoping that writing this blog will help me get my obsession out of my system.

As you may have guessed from the title of this blog, I do most of my knitting lying down.  Okay, not exactly lying down, I am usually propped up on a heap of cushions.  I knit lying down because I have a disability called CFS/ME.  Actually, I do lots of things lying down.  Of course I sleep lying down, but I also watch TV lying down, eat and drink lying down, read and study lying down, I'm even writing this blog lying down.

Most of this lying down (apart from the sleeping bit) happens in our lounge room on the couch I call my nest.  My big, blue, squishy couch has had some pillows removed and lots more added to prop me up while giving me room to sprawl.  The area around my nest looks pretty cluttered.  Getting up and down isn't exactly my forte, so I like to have everything I need within arm's reach.  From here I can reach two knitting projects, a needlework project, a drink and a snack, various medications, knitting books, cook books, research books, all the remote controls, the cat's brush, rubbish bin and my laptop, all without having to sit up.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not bedridden or housebound, not at the moment anyway.  Like I mentioned earlier, I'm a postgraduate musicology student and I write regular articles for Ramp Up, Link, and DiVine.  I help out in my university's archive.  I also play percussion in two bands (don't picture me as a cool rocker though. I definitely make musicianship look daggy, but I am great with a tambourine).  I have a large extended family and a love life which is, shall we say, eccentric.  I'm quite capable of doing all the things you can do, as long as I do them in short bursts.  In between times I'm crashed out on my couch, armed only with my knitting and my laptop. 

It's this view from my nest, in the house we've nicknamed the fortress of solitude, that I'll be discussing here.  Enjoy!