February 3, 2010: I've Found My Knitting Limit

I sat down to cast on the second front of the vest yesterday afternoon, thinking I would knit until I had completed six of the coin cables that make up part of the pattern. I often set goals for myself like that—it's one of the ways I get through my knitting when I am in production mode.

Well, I kept going for about four hours straight—sloppy joes in the crock pot meant I didn't have to stop to cook dinner— and by 8 p.m. I had knit nine of the coin cables. That put me at the halfway point to the start of the underarm shaping. At about 7:30, though, my lower back started to spasm and I had to take a quick break so the husband could massage it for me.

I knit in one of these (minus the footstool, which I don't use):

It's pretty comfortable, but I am going to have to dig out a lumbar pillow and use it. Obviously I am not getting enough lower back support.

I have an enforced knitting break today; the schedule is such that there won't be much, if any knitting.

We're having a discussion on a designers' list I moderate about the price of patterns. Several among our group have been asked recently by their customers to justify the price of their patterns. We're not talking expensive knitting books here—we're talking $6-8 for a sock pattern. And it's not limited to the less well-known designers. Take a look at the January 20th entry of Lucy Neatby's blog.

I have a friend on the fire department who (with his late wife) wrote and self-published a book on knives. We compare notes periodically and I never hear him talk about people trying to get him to lower his prices—his is a male-dominated field and I suspect he sets his prices and other men pay what he is asking without question or complaint. It's such a troubling phenomenon among women that we apparently are incapable of supporting each other in making a living wage. You would think that the gender that had to fight so hard for equality would be bit kinder to those in its own ranks.

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February 1, 2010: Power Knitting and Power Logging

Today I meet with our accountant to go over everything for our 2009 tax return. Last year was a challenging year for both of our businesses. It's hard to tell what 2010 is going to be like, but I hold out hope that it will go up—not down—from here.

And I am glad to have January over and done with. No, it's still not spring or anything even close to spring yet, but it's no longer January, either. And February is a short month (listen to me, I sound like Pollyanna).

I got quite a bit of knitting done this weekend, although it wasn't without some problems (more on that in a moment). Thursday night I cast on for one of the fronts of this vest I am working on for the Spring issue. I finished it last night during a marathon session of "Ax Men" interspersed with a bit of the Pro Bowl here and there. We have friends who are loggers and we know that "Ax Men" isn't a very realistic portrayal of what goes on in the woods (I always wonder how those companies do what they do without OSHA slapping fines on them every couple of weeks). Oh well, it makes for very entertaining television. We got a real charge out of the father and son who tried to drive their 22 year-old dually from Washington state to Florida (they can't log in Washington State anymore, having run afoul of some regulations there) and broke down in Montana. Seems they hadn't bothered to check the truck's road-worthiness before they left.

I took a break from the vest Saturday afternoon and was trying to do a few rows on the twist brioche shawl. It's a 3-row pattern, so it's a bit harder than normal to keep track of one's place in the pattern until there are a few inches of finished knitting. I was knitting along and then the husband came in and asked me a question and the next thing I knew I had worked row 2 on the second half of row 3. Of course, I didn't figure that out until I had tried to work row 3 on what was supposed to be row 1. I knew the pattern didn't look right, but I couldn't figure out where it had gone wonky. I ripped it back to where I had screwed it up and now all is well again.

Normally I don't have a problem if the husband talks to me while I am knitting. I excel at multi-tasking, unless—apparently—one of the tasks is twist brioche.

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