Dogs Steal Yarn

The rumors are true

It's all true, what you've been reading on the other knitting blogs. The mighty Yarn Harlot did indeed make an appearance at the theater at Lord & Taylor last night, and there was indeed wine involved. I don't drink, so I got to sit there and sip my water with lemon and observe the many ways in which knitting and wine don't really mix.

No...kidding...no serious stitches were dropped, no fights broke out over any Koigu. No one had their Clapotis snatched (but EVERYONE was wearing one. Kate, you've singlehandedly accessorized the knitters of New York. I think it's official now. Confession: Cassie and I hid ours in our bags when we saw all the other Clapotis. It was just a bit too much, everyone draped in the same knitterly uniform...). It was a lovely evening. Stephanie couldn't have been funnier, or smarter, or more charming. She's also really little. Especially when she's at the front of a roomful of like two hundred knitters and you're at the Drafty Ladies/LES Splinters combo pak table in the back. Here. Look how tiny. (It's a tiny Harlot. Awwww.)

Don't worry. She's full-sized up close. Here. (There were a lot of bad photos taken last night and precious few good ones. I seem to only have mediocre so you'll have to suffer with me on that count.) This is Em, me, and that woman we were all there to see:

And here's what you get when you combine wine and photos:

It was really exciting, being in a room with so many other knitbloggers. Mindy started climbing on the furniture at one point, but she's cute enough to get away with that kind of aggressive photography:

I wish I had a photo of our whole knitblogger gang. Here's who was there with me (as if you didn't already know from the other blogs. I know, old news). Going around the table in my mind and then inserting the folks who came over to say hi from other tables...: Mindy, Cassie, Valentina, Jackie, Sarah, Regina, Em, Anne, Irene, Melissa, this other Cassie, Cara, and that other Cassie.

It was a very Cassie evening.

Oy vey, that was a lot of linking. Next major yarny event? Norma and Carolyn visit on their way to Maryland!

An official Springtime Apparently Means Babies update

Good news on two baby fronts:

My sister-in-law was given meds to stop the contractions so the baby could hang around a bit longer and go to term. The meds seem to have worked (knock wood, please) and a c-section has been scheduled for mid-May. Please think good thoughts for my sister-in-law (Amey), my brother (Joel), and baby-who-has-been-named-but-I-won't-tell-you-what-for-fear-of-jinxing-etc-etc. I'm quickly running out of yarn on that baby blanket. I've ordered more. Hopefully it will arrive soon or I'll be forced to (gasp!) knit something else for a while.

My friend Rebecca had her baby girl yesterday! (See the post from 4/15 with that placket-front baby sweater. That's for her little girl.) Her name is Olivia and she is over eight pounds. Eighteen inches long. Rebecca is tiny tiny. Seems all these spring babies have been a combo of overly tall men and overly petite women. If Rebecca and her husband Matt give their okay, I'll post a photo of the little one when they send some around. The parents are gorgeous things, so I'm sure Olivia will be pretty fantastic too.

And now I'm paranoid that I've gotten her name wrong. I was so excited when Rebecca called me from the hospital and Rebecca was so tired (and sneaking an illegal call on her cell phone from her hospital bed) that I'm afraid I've misheard. So...apologies in advance if that's the case. The good news is that Rebecca probably won't read this until I've had a chance to correct any mistakes. Heh.

Tomorrow the mighty Yarn Harlot rolls into New York. A big girl gang of us has plans to attend, sock knitting in hand. I'll tell you all about it and post photos on Friday.

And now back to work with me. This working for a living crap is for the birds. Gah.

Happy Wednesday. It IS Wednesday, right?

Emergency baby knitting

It looks like my nephew-to-be may be making an earlier appearance than scheduled. He's officially due at the end of May, but he's been making moves to get out early. And just like his father, he seems to like to jump into new ventures with both feet. Yep. Breech, just to be difficult. He's clearly one of ours. The longer he cooks, the better, so hopefully he won't be arriving too soon. More news when I have it.

In the meantime, all previously scheduled activities have been tossed aside in light of the greatly accelerated deadline for a certain baby blanket I'd promised a certain sister-in-law.

Only a third of the way through it and I'm already bored to tears. (Actually that should be a quarter of the way through it, but I don't have enough yarn to do the full 36 inches that I'd planned. I'm going to block the hell out of it and hope to get close to 36" that way.) My sister-in-law specifically asked for a blanket, so a blanket she will have. The things we do for those we love...

The reading last night went well. Really well. It was the first time that the novel went out into the world outside of the safety of workshop, and it was encouraging to see how well it was received. People I didn't know kept coming up to me and telling me how much they'd enjoyed it, asking when the book was coming out, drawing all kinds of connections from what I'd read...

In workshop people read to find what's wrong, what can be made stronger. That's great--it's necessary. But when people go to a reading they're looking for what works--they want to like it. And so that immediate response you get from the audience...well, it feels really good. I think I could get used to it.

Thanks to all my friends who came to hear me, and to fellow readers and MFA'rs (and good friends) Philip and Emily. And the knitbloggers were there! Em, Jackie, and Regina (included in the friends category, of course, but I want to single them out especially since you know them) sat at the table right smack in front of the podium and whipped out their knitting. Gotta love knitters. It was fantastic to look up while reading and see those three smiling at me.

Free Time: A How-To Guide

If you're anything like me, it's been so long since you've had a significant amount of free time that you aren't quite sure what to do with it when you finally get some. You don't quite trust it. You're sure if you look at it too directly in your schedule book that it will somehow disappear, filled with forgotten dentist appointments and the like. You're hesitant to make any plans for this free time at all, afraid that it will get used up too quickly. You also feel a bit guilty when tempted to spend the entire time planted on your ass in front of a stack of dvds, mindless knitting in hand.

Well, I have had the entire weekend, from the time my workshop ended at nine on Thursday evening through to when I go to sleep tonight (Sunday) with no work to do, no writing to do (I'm on a break while my readers read second draft), and nowhere in particular that I have to be. No family gatherings. No baby showers. None of that. In spite of my lack of practice, I think I've managed to cobble together a pretty fantastic weekend. Here's the rundown, for those of you also somewhat lacking in the free-time skills. I offer this as a guideline only. Feel free to tailor it to suit your own needs, desires, regional options. Don't have Fridays off? No problem! Change Thursday night to Friday night and skip over Friday entirely (or call in sick! I won't tell, I promise).

Thursday night:

• After the last obligation of the evening (fiction workshop, in my case) take a friend out to dinner. Invite him or her spontaneously. A method I found particularly successful was turn to a friend while we were both riding the 2 train home from class and suggest we go right past both of our stops and on to another neighborhood entirely for dinner, rather than returning to our respective caves, as we usually do. If there's something to be celebrated, this works even better. (There was something to be celebrated. I've been accepted to one of the artist colonies I applied to for the fall. Still waiting to hear from two others. I'll tell you more when I've decided for sure which one I'm going to.)
  
• Arrive home, thoroughly stuffed (vegetarian burritos work really well for this), just minutes after your charming partner, who is also thoroughly stuffed (roti also work really well). Fall chubbily side by side onto the sofa with cups of tea for both of you and knitting just for you and watch a dvd. (We opted for The Wire and I finished the first sock in a belated birthday pair for Cree.) Moan about how chubby you feel all stuffed with burrito but don't really mean it, because there's something really nice about being all full and cuddling on the couch with dogs and a boy and knowing you aren't blowing off a deadline to do it.
  
• Go to bed and keep your partner up too late by singing really silly songs you make up featuring vikings and chickens and your dogs. He has to get up early, but ignore this and keep singing. Eventually he'll join in. Really, he will.
  

Friday:

• Very important: Sleep late. Make yourself a nice hot breakfast and a big pot of coffee and drink the coffee on the deck while the dogs play "Find the cat shit the neighbor's cat left in the yard last night." Don't have a yard or dogs or a neighbor with cats? Lean out a window that looks out onto the street and pretend that each passerby has some deep dark secret they desperately don't want you to know (they probably do). Figure out what it is. Failing this, make up a secret and assign it to them.
  
• Once the coffee is gone, pick up your knitting. Finish something--like a baby sweater. You know there are a million babies you need to knit for right now. It's spring and the babies are EVERYWHERE. Oh--and then make more coffee. Pick up one of your other projects. Knit for hours--until your fingers start to cramp up because they aren't used to you having this much time to knit.
  
• Go to the gym so you can feel virtuous.
  
• Get a cookie on the way home. Something chewy and fresh from the bakery conveniently located only a block away from the gym. (Oatmeal raisin worked really well for me.)
  
• Fingers rested up? Get back to knitting, preferrably in front of another dvd. (Howard's End this time.) Try to forget how much better the book was. The book is always better.
  
• The boy is home! The boy is home! Pop in another episode of The Wire and then off to bed! More singing!
  

Saturday:

• Saturdays are especially cool because your friends with 9 to 5 jobs are now available to play with you! Call your best friend at noon and wake her up because she and her boy were out until four a.m. at some party. Feel strangely happy that you almost never stay out this late anymore. Feel strangely happy for her that she still does.
  
• Meet your best friend and her boy for brunch. This is ideally done with your boy in tow. Sadly, mine has been busy TA'ing a PT course all weekend, so I had to go for the boyless option. Go someplace that has asparagus goat cheese omelets and yuca hash browns, if possible. (Beso on Fifth and Union, for you local kids.)
  
• Walk through Park Slope with friend and friend's boy if you're in Park Slope. If not, walk through your local Park Slope equivalent. Stop off for oatmeal cookies, and then keep walking until you reach a museum. In our specific case, this meant the Brooklyn Museum for the Basquiat show.

• Walk through the Basquiat show. Feel free to not quite connect with the work. But then reach one painting in particular, Eyes and Eggs I think it was called, and see Basquiat's footprints all over it and feel his presence there, in that moment on the canvas. See the footprints of a dead man, the steps he took as he created this painting, young and brash and most likely not expecting to be dead anywhere close to as soon as he would be dead...and then view the entire show differently hinging on those footprints and that moment when you connected the work with a living, breathing, human presence now gone. Want to cry a little but resist because really what's the point? See another piece with crowded grafitti panels and one little panel of textured blue sky squeezed in and ache just a little bit more at the way this city can crowd out the sky. Sigh.
  
• Leave the museum and walk through the park to get a cup of coffee. Run into friend/mentor (Ernesto, if you're following my day to the letter) and his baby. Kiss the baby and babble to him in Spanish and make him smile that fantastic baby smile of his.
  
• Head into Manhattan. Knit a sock on the train while friend and friend's boy read. Marvel at the guy across from you on the J train with the most miraculous long, curly, white hairs growing from a mole on his cheek. Try not to stare, even though there are like six hairs and some of them two inches long or longer. Resist the urge to braid them.
  
• Eat dinner at a health food store that has a nice food counter and rickety tables in a bizarre upstairs room that's more a covered roof deck than a room. Flirt right back when the French counter guy hits on you, and somehow don't mind at all when you know he's watching your ass when you climb those stairs up to the weird roof deck room. Don't wiggle it any more than you normally would need to to climb stairs, though, because you don't really mean it. Baby, you're married. Harmless fun, though, especially if they're French.
  
• Go see another friend's band play. They will, most likely, rock.
  
• Go home and find your boy waiting for you. Watch another episode of The Wire and knit some more on that second sock.
  
• Go to sleep. Too tired for singing.
  

Sunday:

• Wake up crazy late. Drink a ton of coffee on the deck while watching the dogs play "Find the cat shit the neighbor's cat left in the yard last night." See Friday for more options.
  
• Organize all your loose knitting patterns into a binder after sticking them into those clear plastic protector sleeves. Feel super productive and organized.
  
• More coffee.
  
• Worry that you're drinking too much coffee for someone who's supposed to be relaxing.
  
• Cast on for another baby gift.
  
• I haven't figured out the rest of Sunday yet. How about we call Sunday afternoon and evening Freestyle Free Time? You're on your own for this part. Good luck!
  

And don't forget:
Fiction Reading Series at Junno's Bar
Tuesday, April 19
7:30 pm

Philip Kadish
Cari Luna
Emily Mitchell

Junno's
64 Downing Street, Manhattan,
Near Seventh Avenue and West Houston Street, near the Film Forum

Psst! Hey, Rebecca!

I finished the sweater for my friend Rebecca's daughter (who is due to be born any minute now... Think good delivery and healthy baby thoughts for Rebecca, please!)

I used the Child's Placket-neck Pullover pattern from Last-Minute Knitted Gifts. Instead of the suggested Koigu Kersti, I opted for a machine washable yarn. This is Lamb's Pride Superwash, in the Romantic Ruby colorway. I also decided on an open fold-down collar rather than the button-up nehru-style band color of the pattern. This is the 6- to 12-month size. Since she'll be a spring/summer baby and I wanted to make the sweater in wool, this was made for her to grow into next winter.

Thanks for all the great suggestions in yesterday's comments. My brother and his wife are expecting their first child (a boy) at the end of May and my sister-in-law has specifically requested a blanket. So that's the next project. For other baby projects on the list (so many others!) I especially want to try the felted blocks and felted mobile ideas. And of course some baby socks and booties. I have mentioned once or twice that I like knitting socks, yes?

Free...time? What is this free time thingy and how do I use it?

Somehow I have found myself between freelance jobs (in a good way), without too much work for school, and without writing or revising to do because I'm waiting for feedback from my readers. This means that beginning yesterday and stretching out until next week, I'm working three days a week at my in-house gig, two evenings of class, and nothing else. Which means free time. Actual free time in the evenings. I haven't had this in ages and it feels like getting away with something.

Last night Billy and I watched The Wire on dvd and I worked on a baby sweater for the soon-to-be firstborn of my friend Rebecca. We don't have cable and neither of us watch network tv at all--the three stations we can get reception on, that is. We turned the tv on for the debates and the olympics and that's pretty much been it. We do, however, like to watch a few cable shows on dvd. Specifically Six Feet Under, Dead Like Me, The Sopranos, and now The Wire. We're one disc away from finishing the first season (thank you, NetFlix!) and we both love it.

The baby sweater is almost done. I'll finish it after class tonight (because I won't have to edit!) and will post photos tomorrow. Unless you want to be surprised, Rebecca? Speak now or have the surprise blown tomorrow.

I have a ton of baby knitting to do right now, as everyone has either just had a baby or is due to have one soon. Which means I'm looking around for options. What's your favorite baby gift to knit? What have you made for babies before that you wouldn't make again?

And....

my friend Jef's band, The Americans UK, is playing at Pianos this Saturday night. I'll be there. I hope you will be too. They support knitters--the drummer slings coffee at The Point. Shouldn't knitters support them?

Here's the deal:

PIANOS This SATURDAY, 4/16/05, at 8 PM, $6 cover.

"I'm kinda saving myself for the scene."

The new Hold Steady album, Separation Sunday comes out on May 3rd. There've been a few tracks posted here and there online, but I didn't want to share anything that wasn't official, not sure what the band wanted released and what got leaked etc. Well, we have an official preview, courtesy of the label.

Go listen. The link's in the very first sentence there on the homepage.

And remember, as always with The Hold Steady, that you've got got got to listen to the lyrics.

What comes next

Thank you all so much for your congratulations and encouragement. I'm thrilled that so many of you are looking forward to this book! I'm looking forward to sharing it with you.

So second draft is done... Several of you asked what the next steps are. Now second draft goes to my readers. I've revised it to the best of my ability (and with previous feedback from these and other readers in mind) and now it's time to hand it over and see how it looks to them. I'll then take their responses to the manuscript and work with those comments that feel right and set aside those that don't. And hopefully the result will be the third and final draft. The second draft readers are my teachers Michael Cunningham and Ernesto Mestre, and my friends (and fellow artists/writers) Christina, Alicia, and Lon. Christina is also keeping me honest regarding a main theme in the novel, as she's classically trained in that field and I'm just an enthusiastic dabbler. If I've gotten it wrong in the text she will call me on it.

When I have a final draft, then I'll send the manuscript around to agents. I've decided not to use the same agent that I had for the Spanish phrase book. (Since the book is literary fiction, I really want someone who handles a lot of it and has contacts at the top houses who are interested in buying literary fiction.) Through the mfa program and through my mother-in-law (you never know where help will come from! No, I won't name names. Don't want to jinx it.) I've got connections to some great ones. In an ideal universe, one of these agents will agree to represent the book. The agent will then send the manuscript around to the publishing houses until someone buys it. (Cue trumpets. Fanfare and confetti.)

And then a whole different set of headaches begins. Since I've worked in book publishing for the past ten years now, I'm afraid I know all too well what can go wrong after the book is sold to a publisher. But one step at a time. For now, it's with two readers and waiting to be given to the rest. Christina got her copy today and at midnight I got an email that she's read through chapter ten. (See, that's how you know your friends love you. They keep reading until their contacts dry out.)

Oh, and Em read the prologue today. No, she won't tell you what it's about. Not even if you ask really nicely. Those of you local folk who can make it to the reading on the 19th will hear that and the first chapter that night, though.

I met the drafty ladies at our new home away from home today. KnitNY is over. We're at The Point now, baby. Brie and green apples on pumpernickel. Free coffee refills. The convenience of the West Village. Ahhh....

Oh...and I finished the front of the corset pullover tonight.

I'd like to say I'll be knitting all weekend, but you know better, don't you? Yes, I'm on deadline. Yes, I'll be editing all weekend. It's okay, though. See, it's finally spring. The forsythia, tulips, daffodils, and grape hyacinth are blooming in my front garden. The crocuses are threatening to bloom soon too. If I'm not careful, spring fever may well get me and I could end up doing something drastic, like knitting with 100% cotton. (Ick.)

Second draft of the novel is done

The final interviews

That's right. The final interviews. There will be no more interviewing on Dogs Steal Yarn after the three that follow here. It was fun while it lasted, but all good things etc etc.

And so, the questions.

Rabbitch

1. If Elvis isn’t dead, what’s he been up to lately?
2. What was your biggest knitting disaster?
3. What, exactly, is a rabbitch? Do they make good pets?
4. I love the chicken hat. I really do. I plan to knit one for my nephew-to-be... But it does bear asking... What kind of sick mind came up with it in the first place? Imagine the scenario that led to the birth of that idea and describe it.
5. Drunken knitting, you say? Hmmm... Ever wake up in the morning to find out that you’ve engaged in some questionable intarsia while blacked out?

Anita
1. What was the strangest search engine entry that led someone to your blog?
2. Has V retaliated yet for the April fools coffee caper? If not, what do you imagine he might do? If so, what had you been imagining that would have been oh so much worse than what he really did?
3. What’s your most embarrassing guilty pleasure song?
4. What’s the very last place on earth you’d want to live? And if you had to move there, what would you do to cope?
5. Have you ever written a fan letter? To whom?

Andrea
1. So I’m interview number six for you... (What am I? Just another notch on your blogbelt? And I thought what we had was special! Sob, sniff)... What question do you wish someone would ask that hasn’t come up yet?
2. Do crocheters ever get needle envy? I mean, knitters get to use two but you guys only have that hook and all... And everyone calls you hookers, and frankly the knitters do get all the glory... How does it feel to be a crocheter in a world where knitting seems to dominate?
3. Or do you knit too and I missed that?
4. What’s the best, most gratifying reaction you’ve gotten from a handcrafted gift?
5. And the worst?

# # #

I spent the weekend at my mom's house. Today was my sister-in-law's baby shower. It was a great weekend, but I'm rather tired. No news to share anyway. Picture the front of the corset pullover with seven more inches added. Picture a little green cotton cap with a belly button knot on top gifted at the baby shower today instead of the blanket that I haven't even cast on for yet. (Whoops! I need to start that soon. The baby is due at the end of May.) Picture the Lopi cardi abandoned because not only is the chart screwed up, but the math is also wrong. I'll rewrite the pattern in the fall. Picture me with my head on my desk. I'm tired. Tired. I have to have second draft of the novel done by the 7th. We're in crunch time. Please send good revision vibes!