Tuesday, March 27, 2007

hard core

a few weekends ago, the boy and i were visiting with his brother and wife. my sister in law is beautiful knitter; she loves cables and they love her. when we visit i like to paw through her knitting books. i've been on a bit of an elizabeth zimmerman kick lately and so pulled "knitting around" off the shelf and started flipping through it. my sister in law dug around the tv and pulled out a video and handed it to me: wool gathering #39 an aran coat.

ez and her daughter had a public television series (in the 80s i think) and in this episode they are recreating an aran coat that ez had knit years earlier.

i felt a bit like a hard core knit geek sitting there watching a video of two women knitting but it was so interesting. i'd never seen anyone create a pattern from scratch before (even though they were basing it on an existing sweater) and it was amazing to watch them with their pad of paper, calculator, and original sweater. they made it look so easy.

and watching their fingers fly in the continental style really makes me anxious to give it a go and give up english style knitting. the next little project i start, i'm going continental!

the video even had a shot of ez knitting on the back of her husband's motorcycle as he zipped along.

the best part of the video was watching the two women cut the steeks. steeking has always scared me silly. the idea of taking a pair of scissors to a sweater and willfully cutting a hole just seems so wrong. what if you make a mistake? but i'd only ever read about it; i'd never seen it action. watching ez and meg do it gave me great confidence that i too could someday cut up a sweater on purpose.

on the knitting front, i haven't had any time to knit in days. we had company this past weekend which meant cleaning and cooking and hosting. maybe i'll have time today...

3 comments:

Ms. Hedda said...

I'm years away from continential knitting, but this is still inspiring. And EZ's hubby was a brewmaster!

No knitting here either. I was gonna get started last night, but didn't have a calculator for all the math, and instead wrote the first half of my wine club post.

Trixie said...

ohh! right! wine club! do tell!

Ms. Hedda said...

I'm working on it! I'm so busy at work right now, and last night (besides an hour run with McPie and making risotto for supper) I spent some time on the piano rather than blogging or knitting... Sigh.

We cram it all in when we don't have kids... Need a juggling strategy!