Crobotics: Automatic Crochet

Posted on April 6, 2012 by dorischancrochet

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

Posted on March 27, 2012 by dorischancrochet

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 crystals, 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

Posted on March 8, 2012 by dorischancrochet

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. 🙂

Coloring Crochet

Posted on March 3, 2012 by dorischancrochet

You just never know what odd-ball stuff you’ve kept in deep storage in your brain will surface and, seemingly for no reason, invade your consciousness. My brain remains mercifully uncluttered day to day because I’ve stashed this stuff, like so much yarn, in a maze of backroom compartments, crammed into plastic cerebral tubs. How else can a person deal with all the input?

There are facts gleaned from reading and research, stupid bits of trivia stumbled upon while browsing the web or watching cable TV, techniques and information learned in the classroom, inspiration and gossip picked up over coffee or during the course of four-hour long phone conversations that were only supposed to last four minutes. Gazillons of bits will never be called up again in your life. That’s probably a good thing.

Unlike yarn which you purposefully choose, purchase or otherwise obtain and collect, that data amasses whether you want it or not. Also unlike yarn, which you can easily eject from the stash and without regret give away or toss, the brain stuff is irritatingly persistent. You can’t just dump the drive.

It would be nice if I could free up the bits of brain I am using to store the information about how many times Brad Pitt has been nominated for an Academy Award, and replace that with the number of centimeters in an inch, which I still have to look up every fracking time I have to do conversions. 2.54, huh? Sorry, Brad. Done.

So this stuff remains to ripen and possibly fester in your darkest back-alley neural pathways. Then one day something pings it to life. Trust me, that crap is so ecstatic to be free from the confines of the tub that it will rampage around in your head until you do something with it. Purge it. Allow it to streak across the pages of your blog. My friend Vashti and I call this blog-letting, which is sort of like blood-letting only without the horror.

Today’s blog-letting concerns color. Years ago I took a class given by Laura Bryant, who is the founder of Prism Yarns, specializing in hand-dyed classic, fashion and luxury yarns. Laura is a textile artist, a virtuoso with colors, an entertaining speaker and a wonderful acquaintance, all of which I discovered during the course of the class. Even though I can’t remember the name of the class, only that it contained the words color and knitting, I did appreciate the awesome and awe-inspiring information she taught. That day I learned to look at color in a whole new way, and you can, too.I wish I could say that it stuck with me and that Laura’s words changed my life, but naturally they didn’t. I locked all that cool stuff in a cerebral tub and blithely went about working with color in my crochet work with the same old, same old unsophisticated eye as I have always. I truly suck at color. Although I can design crochet that’s outside the box, my coloring is very much inside the lines. I am so matchy-matchy it hurts.

Laura’s favorite axiom is “You don’t get WOW by doing the expected!” and isn’t limited to color use, but right this moment these words are rolling round in my head like a Technicolor mantra. For some reason I am accessing all that class material and am once again feeling my color empowerment. I will do the unexpected. I will do the unexpected. Soon.

I am not about to spill the secrets here. If you get the opportunity to study at Laura’s feet and learn from her how you to rock your color world, then do it. Check the Prism Yarn site for her teaching schedule. Or you can enjoy her latest DVD, A Knitter’s Guide to Color with Laura Bryant, which you can preview and purchase at the Interweave store here. I just watched the DVD workshop and it’s just as mind-blowing as taking the class, although you don’t get to play with Laura’s piles of gorgeous actual yarn the way we did in person. Unless you have a world-class yarn stash at home. 🙂

Awarding Seamless Crochet

Posted on February 15, 2012 by dorischancrochet

WOWSERS! We had ourselves a party the past couple of days. A big welcome goes out to all who stopped by to help me wrap up the blog tour for Kristin Omdahl’s new book, Seamless Crochet: Techniques and Designs for Join-As-You-Go Motifs
I noticed two distinct threads running through your comments: an outpouring of love for Kristin and a nearly universal hatred of weaving loose ends. I can totally relate on both counts.

As promised, I have a free e-copy of Seamless Crochet to award tonight. The lucky winner is…

Sharon AKA Twirlygig!

Hey, Sharon, congrats! And many thanks to Interweave Press for the play. Now, which of you fan girls is gonna volunteer to help me sweep up the virtual confetti?