Handwork – Page 47 – Deborah Makarios

September 11, 2015

I Made A Cake!

Not just any old cake. No, this is an intentionally inedible cake.

Ingredients: yarn (in this case, 75% merino and 25% possum), and a nostepinne.

This is the first time I have ever made one of these, because in New Zealand, yarns are almost always sold in a balled state. I was greatly surprised when I discovered that in other parts of the world, e.g. the Americas, yarn is sold in a twisted skein, and it is the knitter’s responsibility to ball it.

Of course, back in the day when knitting wool came from a sheep you knew personally, winding the skein into a ball was the natural last step before knitting it. I am just lucky that I don’t have to start each knitting project by following a sheep around to collect the wool it sheds, as with the Soay sheep – or combing the animal’s neck, as with a cashmere goat.

Despite the extra work involved, I can understand why people like to buy yarn in skeins. It’s certainly more visually appealing that way, and you can wind the yarn into any shape you like (e.g. A Complete Dog’s Breakfast). The benefit of cakes as opposed to balls is that cakes have flat bottoms and don’t go rolling about while you use them.

Also you don’t have to fossick about in their insides trying to find the inner end, as you carefully ran it down the handle of the nostepinne when beginning the cake, so as to have it handy when you need it. Indeed, I think this humble piece of rimu is going to join my list of treasured old technologies.

Yarn-caking can be very relaxing – once you’ve really got the hang of it, and don’t have to keep worrying about your cake losing shape. (MacArthur Park, anyone?) I myself have not yet attained to this height of nostepinne mastery, having only made one cake to date.

skein nostepinne cake — skein + nostepinne = cake

I have started knitting from my cake, and while the actual knitting is proving more problematic than I thought (due to gauge issues and use of techniques at which I am not yet proficient), the cake is performing splendidly.

It’s fat-free, sugar-free, suitable for sharing with people who are dairy- or gluten-intolerant, and a joy to both make and consume. What more could one ask of a humble cake?

August 21, 2015

Terrible Truth Revealed! Exoskeleton Tells All

Last Christmas my in-laws gave me a dress-form – one of those wire exoskeleton ones that you can shape to your own figure; or rather, have your dearly beloved shape to your figure, as it’s rather hard to achieve from inside the contraption.

Once I had been released, and the two halves appropriately wired together, we put it on the stand and took a look. Frankly, I was shocked. All right, I still had a waist, but when did my hips get so big? And my stomach? A look at the back of the form revealed the terrible truth: I was heading toward lordosis.

Not, as the name might suggest, a disease of delusive grandeur, but rather excessive inward curvature of the lower back. Basically, the tummy muscles go, and everything sags forward: stomach, spine, the lot. The opposite of this is kyphosis, where the upper back curves out too much and you get a hump.

Lordosis was all the rage in the Edwardian era – if you didn’t have it naturally, your corset would see to the ‘correction’ of your figure.

It is worth remembering, however, that this was over a hundred years ago and times have changed. Not only is a pigeon-breast considered unattractive on anything that doesn’t have wings, we also realize that having your lower back sag forward is Bad For You. (And so is being moulded by a corset. These days women are expected to turn their muscles into built-in shapewear.)

But what exactly is good posture?

According to the actress Shelley Long, “head up and shoulders back. Not only does it make you look taller and thinner but it gives you confidence and boosts your self-esteem.”

Presumably this applies to people of all shapes, sizes and genders. (Tall people: please stop slumping; this demographic is already taken.)

Very well then; head up (check!), shoulders back (check!), chest, er, up… and abdomen up and in. (Up where? Where I used to keep my chest?) Lower back flattened (but not flat), hips tilted back (as opposed to sagging forward), knees straight and feet parallel. That’s for standing. Sitting is another whole assortment of body parts.

But how does one achieve all this, without life becoming a ceaseless juggling of anatomical alignments? There’s always the old-fashioned finishing-school task of walking about the house with books balanced on one’s head (I’d advise against the Shorter Oxford unless you feel your neck is too long); or you can ask a helpful friend for the occasional reminder.

There are some simpler ways, though. One my mother taught me: grab hold of the hair at the crown of your head and pull firmly upward. It’s amazing how your spine will extend itself to relieve the pressure. And once your body knows the position, it’s easier to slide back into it.

But alas, if the problem is soft and saggy stomach muscles, there’s only one thing for it: exercise them until they’re tough enough to do their job.

Because bad posture isn’t just a bad habit, it’s a sign of problems down the road: back pain, neck pain, sagging here, slumping there… So heed your exoskeleton’s warning and change your posture before the problems come home to roost – or the pigeon breast comes back in.

NB: If you want your own exoskeleton, there’s a useful tutorial here. Bring duct tape.

August 7, 2015

Interchangeable Knitting Needles: A Thing of Beauty and a Joy Forever

You know how it is. You get to hear of something, you maybe see one somewhere, and then you see the price-tag and it gets firmly shelved under F for Fantasy. But you keep thinking about it. You keep looking at the options, and one day you realize you could actually make it happen. The idea frightens you a bit, but you keep thinking about it, and then one day you actually take the plunge and buy it.

And then, in my case, you sit back and wait for it to arrive, and wait, and wait, because they’re out of stock (although it doesn’t mention this on the website) and then there are manufacturing problems, and then you have to wait for them to be shipped from the manufacturer to the merchant, and then to you (all three of you being in separate continents).

The treasure for which I was so eagerly waiting was a set of interchangeable circular knitting needles, the apogee of knitting needle technology. First there were straight needles, then double-pointed needles or DPNs, then fixed circular needles, and now, at last, the inexorable march of progress brings us the interchangeable circular knitting needle. (Once we have accumulated sufficent spondulicks.)

The set I got is known as the Karnation set, despite this name not being mentioned on either the merchant’s website (eknittingneedles.com) or the packaging. It’s not the usual way of marketing a product, but then, they apparently keep selling out, so they must be doing something right.

This set has 13 colour-coded sizes of aluminium needle (2.75mm up to 10mm) with five different lengths of cord (16in to 4ft). That is the equivalent of sixty-five different interchangeable needles, even if you don’t take into account the possibility of linking two or three of the cords together to create a needle so long you can skip with it. Or knit a blanket in one piece. Although maybe not both at the same time.

Two cord-connectors are included with the set, along with a rubber pad and a couple of little key-wires so you can tighten the connections to the point where you can’t undo them by hand (nor, more to the point, by knitting with them). There are also a packet of end-caps (to hold stitches on a cord while you are using the needles with another cord) and a card which tells you which of the colour-coded needles is which size. This all comes in a surprisingly small black zippered case (about 18 x 20 cm, closed). It looks something like this:

On the downside, the shortest cord (16 inches with needles attached) is so short you can barely get the needles’ points to meet. On the plus side, it’s still useful as a stitch-holder, or an extension to one of the larger cords.

The only thing I don’t like about this set is that the smallest needle is 2.75mm, which, while not huge (and smaller than a lot of sets go), is still larger than I use for a number of things, most notably socks. And this is where the delay came in handy: as compensation for waiting so long, the merchant offered me a 20% discount, which I took up in sets of double-pointed sock needles (three, the smallest of which is 2mm).

Of course, once I had this equivalent-of-sixty-five-circulars set, I had a lot of old needles I no longer needed, so ‘sorting out the knitting needles’ became an important item on the July purging list.

In July I purged:
nine circular needles (of various lengths and widths)
three pairs of straight needles (ditto)
and nineteen books, including poetry, prose, and reference.

This may seem like a short list, but to a bibliophile, purging books is a slow and arduous task. I’m lucky I have my knitting to help me stand the strain.