Show Me The Crochet…NOW!

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The Crochet Guild of America awaits your entries for the CGOA 2012 Crochet Design Competition. Our entry form is now live, ready for you to fill out, hit the submit button and then ship your design entry to the receiving location in time for the deadline, 6 June 2012. Thanks to the generous support and crochet love from our magnificent sponsors we have over $5000 in cash prizes to award. The competition is open to CGOA members only. For more details, see and download this information package.

Check out this post for a look at winning designs from past competitions.

Such an  uncharacteristic thing for me to get that out of the way first!  This makes two blog posts in a row where I have placed the lead, the most important bit of news, in the opening paragraph rather than burying it in a pile of inconsequential verbage. It’s like there should be a VIEW pull-down tab at the top of the page, with clickable choices for “normal cluttered view” and “cut to the chase view”. Can WordPress actually do that?  You think the FAQ section would have tips? Having the option of skipping the fluff might be useful if you’re pressed for time as I imagine there are other sites you need to be surfing.  Hey, aren’t there new cat videos that you haven’t seen yet? For that reason alone you might appreciate better efficiency here.

SO not gonna happen.  For those who might click the “normal cluttered view” we return now to catch up on the fluff.

In my role as producer of the CGOA 2012 Design Competition I have the responsibility of keeping the progression of events on schedule. This means I have to say, write and think “deadline”.  YIKES! You have no idea how conflicted I am about having to make the keystrokes to spell that dreaded word, much less presume to enforce the aforementioned date. Among my faults… well, fault is such a judgmental term, let’s call them my personality quirks…. is that I am forever late. Tardiness is nothing I plan or calculate; it just happens.  You can ask any of my employers which crochet designer has the worst on-time record for turning in design work. It’s gotten to the point where editors actually faint if materials arrive from me in time to meet their deadlines.  Overnight shipping is my way of life.

That doesn’t mean you should do as I do. True chronic tardiness is nothing to which one aspires. And there is no excuse for it, only the mitigating factor that creativity can neither be scheduled nor can it be rushed. Only partly in jest  have I suggested to editors that they NEVER tell me the real drop-dead deadline for any project. I’ve begged them to make up fake early dates just for me and then, perhaps, my designs would be done by the same time as everyone else’ stuff. But this is merely a mind game; lateness isn’t about not knowing or caring when things are due.

Tardiness bleeds over into my personal life as well.  My family and friends can count on my being at least a few minutes behind no matter what the occasion. I’d have to check with my mom, but, heck I think I was even born late. Well-meaning loved ones have never complained to my face, and yet often they gift me with time stuff, watches and clocks and calendars. I must have a staggering number of wristwatches, not a working battery among them, stuffed in a drawer somewhere. The thing is, lateness isn’t about not knowing what time or what day it is.

Put into perspective, tardiness doesn’t seem so awful. It doesn’t rank up there among the seven deadly sins of wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy and gluttony (my favorite!). What possibly makes tardiness worse than gluttony is that the former is a public sin and the latter is often a secret one. Mercifully, gluttony can be hidden.  You will never know, nor will it impact on anyone else if I inhale an entire box of Pop Tarts. My bathroom scale will undoubtedly know, but it isn’t talking.

However, when I am late turning in my design to a magazine it could throw off the smooth running of a chain of events, like cascading dominoes. It puts pressure on all those who in turn have to handle my work: editors, technical editors, art directors, illustrators, graphic designers, photographers and could eventually trickle down to the printers, publishers, shippers, distributors and retailers. OMG! Could it be that you got your magazine subscription issue in the mail a few days late because I procrastinated about writing the sizing for a garment pattern and missed the deadline?

Not to lay any guilt on you, dearest competition entrant, but that’s why I gently urge you to submit the form, prepare your design package and ship it to arrive by the aforementioned date, 6 June 2012.  Don’t make me type the D word again, please.

For those not involved in the design competition, it would still be a wonderful thing if you’d visit our sponsors’ sites and let them know that you know that they love and support crochet as much as you do.

Hope to see your designs and best of luck!

Drool-Worthy Crochet

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Let’s not bury the lead with a gang of my usual fluff.  The preview for the Vogue Knitting Crochet Special Collector’s Issue 2012 is live here.

WAAAAAAY down the list, in the middle of the preview page, within the segment A Fine Romance, is the motif tunic I contributed.

Vogue Knitting Crochet 2012, photo by Rose Callahan

The issue will hit the newsstands on May 8, but you can order a copy or view it if you have some sort of app for your iPad.  Just remember, it’s OK to drool over crochet, but not acceptable to drool on it.  Just saying…

Forgot to add this link:

http://www.vogueknitting.com/crochet/crochet_tips_from_the_stars.aspx

Vogue Knitting appears to be making a commitment to crochet (it’s about time) and in doing so I believe they have chosen wisely. :-)

Crobotics: Automatic Crochet

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How I envy my friends who crochet simply for the joy of it.  Examining my own output, I regret that nearly every crochet project for the past decade has been completed under the scrutiny of editors and the crushing pressure of deadlines.  Being a control freak about my design samples, I am obliged to crochet them all myself.  Each one demands fierce concentration because I demand perfection.  There is zero tolerance for crochet mistakes, wandering gauge or indifferent technique. What keeps me from burning out is my deep, abiding love for the craft and the self-knowledge that I can’t not crochet.

However, as driven as the process gets, there are moments, fleeting ones, when I am working on a design and establish a nice rhythm.  This is the groove, the state to which we all aspire, where hands, head and heart are one with the hook. Too soon comes the buzz-kill of having to stop and take notes, count stitch repeats and calculate proportions for the written pattern. I guess if my crochet designs weren’t so fracking complicated, if I didn’t persist in my devotion to seamless construction, if I made only rectangles in simple stitches, then I, too, could be a happy crobot.

Don’t worry if you’ve never heard the term.  I think I made it up yesterday after a conversation with Vashti.  If I’m not the first to use the term, then I bow to the crocheter who coined it.  Crobotics perfectly describes the practice of mindless crochet, not necessarily machine-like or robot precise. A crobot is more like a person who has reached the level of soothing comfort and rapturous, zen calm that comes of mindless, automatic crochet.

Crobotics is when you’re curled up on the couch with a glass of wine and good company or TV and you’re drinking, talking or following the program and crocheting.  Crobotics hinges on having a project that lends itself to casual inattention and incidental slight inebriation. This does not mean the crochet has to be plain, dead easy or boring. For example, even if you’re doing a multiple row repeat lace stitch pattern, once you’ve memorized the repeat you can go crobotic, not have to think about every change-up and if you’re truly in the zone, not even have to look.

My conversation with Vashti followed her weekend crochet-fest with our friend Marty Miller.  Vashti and Marty attended a workshop given by another friend, Kristin Omdahl at a Sarasota, Florida yarn shop.  Naturally Vashti had to call me and dish. I sincerely hope she doesn’t mind that I’m sharing stuff here.  Kristin is an awesome teacher who charmed the gathering (I’d have expected nothing less), and graciously fielded questions and talked about her design process.  As related by Vashti later, Kristin offered this nugget of insight:

“She emphasized the importance of how the yarn-holding hand feeds the yarn because after awhile, letting it share the work enabled her to crochet while not looking at it, like people usually can only do with knitting.”

I think this ability to not look at all is the ultimate in crobotics and it is something I just can’t manage.  I have to look; I have to look so intently that it makes my eyes bug out.  I am sure that if I didn’t have to look I would definitely be able to pick up speed.  Kristin can both knit and crochet super fast without looking; I’ve witnessed it.  Another friend, former world-record speed crocheter Lisa Gentry (also a knitter) likes to demonstrate how quickly she can work while staring right at you.  It’s eerie.

Not looking at knitting I can grok.  Knitting stitches are laid out in a neat row and there’s absolutely no question which is next.  There aren’t that many places you’re asked to stick your needle, knitwise or purlwise, in the front of the stitch, in the back of the stitch, working it or slipping it. I think most of us can train our fingers to find the next stitch without peeking. Heck, I could probably knit without looking, really, and I suck at knitting.

But crochet is not always so straightforward, sometimes requiring you to stick your hook in all sorts of unexpected, unlikely and often illogical places, in front, in back and around, working or skipping stitches, strands, loops, stems, rows, sides, edges and spaces with abandon. It’s kinda like knitting is two dimensional and crochet is three dimensional. (I hope I have not pissed off any knitters.  This is not a value judgement, just my way of putting the two processes in perspective.)

So crobotics is a source of happiness and a growing pile of crocheted FOs (finished objects), as well as the path to speed.  Sadly, I will only know the pleasure of crobotics in limited ways.  That doesn’t mean I’ve never had a cromance, a corollary to crobot. A cromance is evident when you’ve made the same design more than once and you’ve gotten so lovingly comfortable with the pattern that you don’t have to refer to it ever again and you’re now crobotting the thing. Over and over. Joyfully.

Theoretical Ball Winding and Crochet

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Having blogged here about yarn twist, I was asked if it mattered which end of the yarn skein you pull first, the outside tail or the inside tail.  I had to think about that.  Eventually I came to realize that it does not make any difference in the twist.  Once there is a twist in the strand, that twist is the same no matter which end is up, because S or Z twist are determined by looking at the strand laid flat and is the same upside down or downside up.  Does that make sense?

It took a while for me to come to that conclusion. I am the one for whom the retort “No, your other left” was created. Left, right, east, west, clockwise, counter-clockwise, RS, WS… it all gives me a headache. This mild disorder of mine is the reason why I (and any of my employing editors who are wise or forewarned) grudgingly fork over large sums of money for technical editing.

A world-class crochet tech editor is worth her or his weight in dilithium, make that naquadria, or at least well worth the 30-plus US dollars per hour that is the current standard fee. Considering that on my part, the process of designing, crocheting the sample, writing and sizing the pattern for a crocheted garment design (depending on the complexity) can consume well over 40 hours of my time, this hardly seems fair. I will never in my lifetime be offered $1200 for a single design that took me 40 hours. The way things are, I often don’t make minimum wage, and that’s the truth for most designers. But nobody said this career was fair.

Anyway, my problem with directionality was recently put in high relief when I began playing with my new in-line ball winder. A ball winder is a useful tool for any yarn work. It makes happy yarn cakes and is indispensable for turning hanks into usable form, for straightening up tangled skeins and for ripping.  My old one, a Royal ball winder has served me well for many years. The Royal winds with a tilting motion, but essentially spins carousel style.
My new toy is a Lacis In-Line Ball Winder which turns Ferris wheel style.

Why would I bother buying a second ball winder when the one I already own works fine? You sound like my mother, who might ask the same thing. I got the idea while making a sample for DJC: Spirals in ribbon yarn.Tess’ Designer Yarn Microfiber Ribbon is a flat, woven nylon ribbon, about 1/8″ wide. It has no twist, but it will show you how Z-twisty your yarn gets as you crochet because as we previously discovered, crochet puts Z-twist in the yarn.

Like many hand-dyed or specialty yarns, it is put up in hanks so you have wind the hanks into skeins or balls in order to use it.  This stuff is so totally slick and slippery that it cannot be wound in the customary way.  Trust me, the first time I worked with this ribbon I tried using my favorite wooden umbrella yarn swift to hold the hank along with my Royal ball winder.It was a disaster, where the hank kept sliding down off the swift and the balls kept flying apart on the winder. The trick, according to the warning on the back of the yarn label, which I did not see until too late for that first attempt, is to use the swift sideways, Ferris wheel style, so that gravity doesn’t cause the hank to fall off the spokes. So  I switched to the metal swift which can be tilted.

I don’t like this swift as much because there are metal fittings and rings that sometimes catch yarn strands.  But using this orientation coupled with winding the ball by hand and not with the Royal winder proved satisfactory, if a pain in the butt. It occurred to me that if I had a ball winder that worked Ferris wheel style in the same way as the swift, maybe it could be used for this and other similar problematic yarns.  So, ever the optimist, I got the Lacis In-Line.

But the orientation of the yarn cakes isn’t the only difference between these two tools.  When you turn the handle in the recommended clockwise motion (to the right, huh?), the spindle of the Royal turns in the same clockwise direction, but the Lacis spindle is geared differently and turns in the opposite direction, counter-clockwise.

The terms clockwise and counter-clockwise are not absolute; they depend on your point of reference. The prime example is the Earth’s rotation.  The earth rotates on the imaginary axis that runs from pole to pole toward the east. If viewed from the North Star Polaris, or if you’re standing at the North Pole, the Earth is spinning counter-clockwise.  But if you’re at the South Pole things get hinky and mirrored, so the Earth is spinning clockwise. Obviously the Earth hasn’t changed; only your perspective has changed.

BTW, the myth that water goes down the drain in opposite directions in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres is just that, a myth. It is true that due to the Coriolis effect on the rotational dynamics of our planetary atmosphere, cyclones (meaning not just tornadoes but large scale atmospheric disturbances that happen constantly) spin counter-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.  But at the level of a bathtub filled with water, the Coriolis effect is negligible.

So with that in mind, I should stipulate that the clockwise-ed-ness of the spinning is here being determined from the viewpoint of the end of yarn that you initially wedge into the slot. In the Royal winder, the slot is at the outer tip of the cone.  If you look down on the top of the cone, the end of yarn is going clockwise.  In the Lacis winder, the slot is in the disc at the base of the cone.  If you look at the disc from the bottom (your position while turning the handle), the end of yarn is going counter-clockwise. I know, too much information.  And I am just getting started.

Since we can see very clearly how twisty this ribbon yarn gets while crocheting, I wondered if it makes any difference which way the yarn cake (skein or ball) is wound?  You know I had to experiment.

With yarn that is spun and twisted, you can’t easily tell what the ball winding process does to the strand.  So I took a few yards of my ribbon yarn, fed it flat and untwisted onto the ball winder, carefully removed the mini cake, held both ends of the yarn and pulled it open.

Why was I surprised?  The Royal winder put S-twist onto the ribbon; the Lacis winder put Z-twist on it. This would not happen if we un-spooled the yarn in the same way we wound it.  In other words, if the cone or cake turns as we draw yarn, then the strand comes off without additional twist.  But we don’t do that.  The cake stays stationary, so the twist remains.

HOKEY SMOKES!  I never thought about that. I rushed to examine some purchased skeins to see in what direction they were wound and it was impossible to tell. When you look at skeins, the whirls of yarn look clockwise from one end and counter-clockwise from the other end. As I have said, the clockwise-ed-ness of the winding depends on the point of view of the beginning tail and with pre-skeined yarn you can never know which way the winding started.

So I looked at cones of yarn, where the beginning tail sticks out, usually visible at the base of the cone. Every cone I have, regardless of what yarn weight, fiber or twist, is wound the same direction, counter-clockwise, and therefore must create Z-twist in the feed as you draw it off the cone.

Oh, and one more thing I did.  I wound mini balls by hand as I would automatically do, without thinking too much about it.  Being right-handed, I see that I hold the beginning end of yarn in my left hand and tend to wind with the right hand, down the back of the ball and up the front.  Then I wound another ball in the other direction, down the front and up the back, which felt totally weird.  Each time I was careful to keep the ribbon feeding flat through the grip in the fingers of my right hand, but allowed the yarn to do whatever it wanted when it got past my grip.  Wanna know what I found?  Whichever way I wound the yarn, hand-winding added virtually NO twist.  YIKES!  Seems as though the instructions on the back of the Microfiber Ribbon ball are best.

My head hurts.  I honestly don’t know what this all means for my crochet, but you can be sure I’m going to do some more experiments when I am not so dizzy.

BACKSTORY: Spiral Crochet

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Everybody remember where we parked.

One of many memorable quotes (memorable to me, at least) from the film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, that line was delivered to amusing effect by Captain James T. Kirk after landing a captured Klingon scout-class warbird in the middle of Golden Gate Park in 20th century San Francisco. This reminder to the crew made sense in the context of the scene because the ship was cloaked and therefore invisible.  But even when walking away from your perfectly visible vehicle, it’s still a good thing to make note of where you’ve parked.

I can never remember.  I might attribute my lapses in recall to advanced age. But this is one instance I can’t play the “old” card because I have been losing track of the car ever since I learned to drive at seventeen.  You know that feeling, huh?  You emerge from a grocery store with a loaded cart, or from the movies with rowdy kids in tow, or from holiday gift shopping with arms filled with packages.  Your heart stops as you scan the sea of parked vehicles and you can’t find your car.

Only once in my life did I experience the worst case scenario where my vehicle was actually not there, stolen.  That’s another story.  In the back of your mind, especially after you’ve hiked up and down several aisles of the parking lot searching for and not finding your car,  this is a real, nagging possibility.  Most of the time, though, the car is there somewhere.

Way back when cars had sticky-out-y rod antennae, you’d often see funny things stuck to the tops of them to serve as locators.  I tried doing that for a while but annoyingly the stupid Smurf doll wouldn’t stay impaled.

If you don’t mind cruising for prime spaces, you could try parking as close to the front of the building as possible so your car is immediately and easily seen. This works well outside of destinations with only one entrance. But where there are multiple portals, like at the mall, it’s useful to park in the same place every time or within a few spaces in a specific area, someplace less frequented, quiet and therefore usually empty.  That’s why I automatically eschew the main mall entrance and head for an end cap, the door at the back of one of the anchor department stores. All I have to remember is which store, which entrance, and use it every visit.  After years of practice I now do it without thinking.

So every time I go to the mall I find myself winding through the same departments of the same store in order to get to the coffee, without which I cannot contemplate any shopping.  This path takes me through shoes, then menswear, then jewelry, handbags, women’s fashions and finally the scary, shiny cosmetics counters before I see the light from the mall. I routinely fly past everything, but once in a while something catches my eye and it’s always a garment display.

What captures my attention isn’t the garment itself, not the beauty or lack of it, not the style or even the color. I am drawn to fabric, the drape, pattern and textures of materials, knitwear, knits that mimic crochet and of course crocheted pieces. I see it all in terms of stitchwork and spend inordinate amounts of time dissecting the fabric and putting it in terms of crochet stitches and filing it away in my brain for inspiration later.

People who have the misfortune of accompanying me on these shopping forays get terribly disgusted with me. At first they might wait for me while I examine the enticing fabrics more closely, even when they can’t imagine why I’d be looking at those particular items. But after frequent long stops they generally abandon me and cover the retreat with “Hey, meet you at Starbucks later!”. This is why I go to the mall alone.

The point is, I see crochet stitch patterns everywhere, even where there’s no crochet to be seen. By stitch pattern I mean a set or combination of crochet stitches that have a cohesiveness or form an image, a discrete piece or parcel of crochet. We call that parcel a stitch pattern repeat, because that’s what gets repeated across a row and up the rows to form crocheted fabric. I encounter and experiment with many stitch patterns, but few can be counted in a rarefied group that has become my comfort zone.

And that’s where crocheted spirals live, in my stitch pattern comfort zone.  I am so familiar with the look of spirals, how they are made, and how they can be shaped and manipulated to get the desired results, that designing with them is really fun. Over the years I have used variations on spiral stitch patterns in several designs. With the release of the latest booklet in my self-published pattern line I think I’ve finally been able to get spirals out of my system and onto the page.

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So I present DJC: Spirals, a collection of seamless tops that puts spiral construction in your hands.  This top may resemble one of my old designs published in a now out-of-print magazine, but it’s so much more than a mere reclaiming and re-print of Sophisticated Swirls from 2006. With new, detailed written instructions, tips and techniques, options for body and sleeve lengths, a tutorial about interior shaping, stitch diagrams, fresh samples in current yarns, and extended sizing that covers XS through 4X with 12 sizes, DJC: Spirals is a master class.

DJC: Spirals is a 29 page pdf download, available for purchase at DesigningVashti.com.  I hope you will enjoy this pattern as much as I truly needed to write it.  :-)