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Cleffage – part one of three

The Pattern

The Development

I’m afraid I’ve always had an on-again off-again relationship with blogging, and getting my sea legs might take a couple of false starts.

I don’t generally take requests for projects unless they pique my interest in some way. Some of the details are a bit fuzzy, but I recall talking to Ali about one of my least favorite yarns that I keep using in spite of its irritating splittiness. The yarn is Lion Brand Microspun, and it comes in a series of aggressively bright colors. I use it for testing lace patterns, because I have a mess of it leftover from other projects. It’s 100% acrylic, it’s incredibly cheap, it comes in preposterous quantities, and it splits like the damn hydra (bites much less, tho). It has an unexpected side effect – some of the colors, especially the lime green and the cherry red – get a cheerful glow under black light.

Ali really wanted some mittens out of this stuff. I raised what I felt were several valid points – an all acrylic, very smooth yarn wouldn’t be particularly warm (especially in Michigan), and there’s really no situation where you can have UV-reactive mittens on where eyebrows would not be waggled. This didn’t seem to faze her much. She wanted them green and black, and with a band of eighth notes.

I ended up doing a couple of runs – the first run taught me that I didn’t know as much about shaping as I thought I did. For the second run, I used the Generic Mitten Pattern from Hello Yarn, and the results were much nicer.

For both mittens, the backs had the bass clefs, which I will be presenting today. The treble and alto clefs will be coming over the next two posts, while I scramble to get another pattern assembled and in good working order.

There is a patch of blank real estate between the quarter notes and the clef – for Ali’s mittens I used this space to add text that related to her, and some Jolly Rogers (also from Hello Yarn, using their motif). I’ll be quick-knitting up a pair of these for myself and for pictures, but am unsure what to put on them. The current forerunner is “Bach is Bad Ass,” but I’m open to suggestions.

Posted by Sasha Brandt

Tattoos for the Trypanophobic

(Sorry about the dearth of photos – we’re trying to talk someone with nicer fingernails than I do into modeling. Trust me on this one; no one wants to see close up pictures of my fingernails.  I’ll update this as soon as they’re available.)

The Pattern

The Development

I generally like tattoos. I love hearing why people decided on them, how they picked an artist to work with, how they picked locations and colors and so on and so forth. I’ve considered getting them myself. I’ve been playing music in one form or another since I was about three, and having a permanent marker of it has its appeal. There’s a common tattoo I’ve seen on string musicians, of a pair of F-Holes situated somewhere on their body. On women, it’s oftentimes across the back, in homage to Man Ray’s iconic photograph of his model, Kiki. 

But there’s a tricky little twist. I hate the idea of the actual tattoo process; I’m absolutely terrified of needles. I don’t know why. With some of my other phobias (ie: Dentists) there’s a hilarious series of events, but I’ve never had a particularly unpleasant experience with syringes. My veins are remarkably easy to find, and my pain threshold is pretty high. The actual puncturing experience doesn’t bother me very much. But holding still while someone comes at me with a syringe is one of those teeth-grinding, slow breathing experiences usually reserved for New Wave French Horror films. Phlebotomists have to double their efforts to make comforting, cooing noises when I end up in their chair. Nurses are encouraged to put up with my terrified nonsense. Tattoo artists are noticeably less tolerant.

Clearly a compromise was required, so I got out the graph paper and got to doodling. An evening of stitching later, and I had an f-hole gauntlet. I decided to put F-Holes on either side of the hand – partly so I could justify fair-isleing them, partly so that I could wave to people, partly so I didn’t have to pay too much attention when I was putting them on to which hands were which.

This is a quick weekend project for fairly abbreviated gloves, though you can continue the ribbing as far up the wrist as you’d like. Ribbing forgives most sins. The purl eyelet castoffs are not particularly stylish, but I like for the cast-off edges to have some give to them.

Posted by Sasha Brandt

Chatty Introductions

I started knitting as a direct consequence of going to music school. I’d learned the basics a couple of times when I was younger, taught by my endlessly patient mother who would carefully explain to me why I had ended a row with 8 more stitches than I’d had at the beginning. I would usually get halfway through the project I was working on (usually dishcloths), become distracted, and put the needles down for another few years.

This worked for me until I got to college, and learned about some of the more unfortunate problems that plague large institutions – heating is expensive, and campuses will put off turning on the heat as long as physically possible. During classtimes, this was obnoxious, but could be solved easily enough with an extra sweater (If there’s one thing that my time in Michigan has taught me, it’s the value of layering). During practice time, this meant we string players would gather outside of our practice rooms, rubbing our hands in premature, rheumy pain and grumbling.

Most of my friends and I didn’t have the sorts of apartments that would allow practicing, and choosing not to practice from October to November wasn’t really an option either. Around this time, boutiques in Ann Arbor started carrying fingerless gloves. They seemed like just the answer – keep the pulse in the wrist and the knuckles warm, look stylish, stop irritating everyone with all of my whining – but they were expensive. Really expensive, for a full-time college student working some 15 hours a week. My roommate volunteered to teach some friends and me the basics of knitting, and it seemed like the answer to all of our problems. Everyone felt very smug and artsy.

Little did I realize that if I had just bought the stupid gauntlets, I would have saved a heap of money in the meantime. I now have furniture devoted to my yarn stash, and more double pointed needles than I care to acknowledge or sort through.

Which, after much rambling, brings us to the goal of this blog. Over the years, musician friends have asked for music-themed gifts, and I haven’t found patterns to meet their requests. So I’ve filled in the gaps when I can. I admit, design is not a forte of mine, and I apologize in advance for errata that may pop up in my designs. Additionally, I make things a bit more complicated by being a left-handed knitter. (I realize this doesn’t actually change much, but it makes me a bit spastic when I’m learning new techniques.) I’m enthusiastic for any feedback or ideas you might have.

My goal is to post bi-weekly on Fridays, starting at the end of this week with the pattern for the gauntlets I’m wearing as I tap this out. I admit, I have a fairly limited stash of patterns, but I’m brainstorming new ideas as I go along.

Until then,

Sasha

Posted by Sasha Brandt