A case for lace (weight)

Over the last decade or so, I have observed a dismaying trend in the yarniverse.  Take a moment to locate your nearest settee upon which to collapse and now get your pearls clutched.

Ready? Lace-weight¹ yarns have been disappearing from shelves, never to reappear.  A number of my favourite stand-bys are now discontinued or dropped from the catalogues of many vendors and the one kind of lace weight I avoid as much as possible, the mohair blend, is often the lone lace weight on offer at any given yarn shop.

Is this a true crisis in the grand scheme of things? Probably not really. Has this calamity registered in the pysche of of the average knitizen? Probably not one iota.

Perhaps you haven’t noticed the dearth of lace-weight yarn because I’m totally imagining it, or, just as likely, you belong to the majority of handknitters, who do not knit with lace weight on the regular except maybe to combine a strand of mohair with an equally dear strand of premium yarn or two.²  Then again, you cannot knit yarn that you cannot buy for love or lucre.

I heard some time ago that lace weight was falling out of favour and hence, a number of yarn companies had started phasing it out and many indie-dyers did not consider the effort of wrangling 600-or-more-yard skeins worthwhile.³  If you’re anything like me, that sent chills down your spine.  Of course, there are other options for people who like knitting with tiny needles and working endless rows.    For instance, one can unravel commercially produced sweaters and rehabilitate the resulting yarn or combine strands from cones of superfine yarns spun for industrial knitting machines.  One can learn to spin.  But all that is going too far, even for the likes of me.  Besides, why steal the joy of shopping for a new hank of yarn from myself?   It ranks as one of life’s great pleasures.⁴

Pretty, right?

A bowlful of scrumptious lace weight yarns--most of them from the atelier of the super-talented and wonderful Julie Asselin. She has single-handedly kept me from the pits of knitting despair these last few years.

For a list of the yarns pictured above, please see footnote 5.

I do enjoy knitting at other gauges, but after decades of knitting, I seem to have found a sweet spot with lace weight yarn.  It’s not as if I did not appreciate the multitude of delightful pictures of people knitting blankets with their forearms (I did) or that I have any need or desire to wear lace shawls (I don’t).  I belong to a bygone era (spiritually speaking, since it is one that predates my birth) that prefers yarns that knit up at a tension greater than 8 stitches per inch.

Most people only think of knitting lace with lace weight but it doesn’t have to be.  Others will only knit lace weight if they own a standard gauge knitting machine but you don’t have to since needles smaller than 1mm exist and 2mm needles (my preferred size) abound. (Which has me wondering: if it’s so easy to find 2mm needles, why is no one apparently knitting anything with them?)

In all fairness, I do not know what the non-internet knitters are knitting but they don’t seem to be buying enough lace weight to make it worthwhile for yarn purveyors to sell it to me.  Except for mohair.⁶

I recognize that I cannot single-handedly bring back lace-weight yarn but allow me to make a case for its continued existence anyway.  You may still conclude that I’ve lost all contact with reality but perhaps you’ll consider some of my points.

1. Entertainment value — If you compare the number of knitting hours to dollar ratio, you get far more out of 100g of lace weight yarn than say, 100g of worsted weight. I consider lace weight to be roughly 800 yards per 100g and worsted is roughly 200 yards per 100g, which makes lace weight about four times the fun. If you just want a final product fast, yes, go big. Or get a knitting machine, which, incidentally, is quite an awesome device and so much fun as well! (Once you conquer the learning curve, that is)
   
   
2. Sustainability — If you still care, this fits right in with the whole slow fashion ethos, emphasis on the slow
   
   
3. Wearability — Admit it, garments and accessories knit with lighter-weight yarn are more comfortable and more versatile to wear, especially if you like to layer. Ever notice how commercially knit garments and accessories mostly do not feature yarn thicker than a sport weight? I went through the super-bulky yarn phase and it was fun but I was younger and more determined to overcome the discomfort of not being able to fully lower my arms or bend my elbows
   
   
4. Hand pain — As in, less of it. I have some nerve damage in my hand and I seem to have chronic wrist pain now that I’m old. Knitting with laceweight has been a mercy. Yes, yes, I was advised by multiple professionals to lay off the knitting and I mostly have but when I absolutely must pick up needles to soothe a (my) troubled soul, a lightweight project knit with very little strain on my hands is just the thing.^[7]
   
   
5. Stash volume — You could easily hit SABLE and your entire stash still fits in a single tote bin. That bowl of yarn pictured above will easily keep me knitting for years
   
   
6. Portability — A lace weight project is very easy to pack and carry. It’s tiny and hardly weighs a thing
   
   
7. $$ — The other, and perhaps more important value-add is the amount of money you would need to spend on a lace-weight project. This is of course dependent on multiple factors but 100-200g of laceweight will be all you’ll need for most anything you’ll knit at this weight. Compare this to a comparably-sized garment made with worsted weight yarn
   
   

My last point is possibly the least relevant to you unless you are absolutely desperate to knit the patterns I have not revealed anywhere,⁸ nearly all of which feature lace weight yarn--half of which have been discontinued and the other half may be facing extinction if the tide does not change. I’d rather not be stuck with a bundle of patterns that are designed for phantom yarn. But it seems I may be late to the party once again.

Nevertheless, I still have plans to publish my patterns over the coming months (or if past performance is any indication, years) and maybe my tiny plea for the lace weight category will be joined by other tiny pleas to create a sound heard by yarn shops and yarn producers that can’t be ignored.  My patterns are still likely to be, but that’s a different issue altogether.

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Footnotes

¹ When do you hyphenate "lace weight"?  Copilot gave me some contradictory instructions but I am attempting to follow them as best I can because damned if I know any better.  Copilot also adamantly insisted that "laceweight" is not a thing.  I beg to differ but, again, who am I to say?

² Statistically, you belong to the majority, however, if you’re here reading this, I think that puts you squarely into micro minority territory so maybe you hear me and your alarm bells are clanging too...but still not likely

³ I think full-on lace shawls enjoyed their little resurgence with knitters back in the aughts but have fallen out of favour (except among the die-hards)—probably for another hundred years^3a

^3a I would worry about the pushback this tongue-in-cheek prediction would receive from the contingent of devoted lace knitters out there but then I'd have to have some faith that this blog hasn't lost all of its two readers in the last few years of complete radio silence

⁴ If one is a knitter or married to one

⁵ Nurtured Fine, by Julie Asselin. Colourway: Anémone
Merletto, by Julie Asselin. Colourway: Noir d’Encre & Licorice
Anatolia, by Julie Asselin. Colourway: Après La Pluie
Silky Alpaca Lace, by Classic Elite Yarns. Colourway: 2413 Night
Silkpaca, by Malabrigo. Colourway: Paris Night
Lacegarn Birdies, by Rohrspatz & Wollmeise. Colourway: Casablanca
I fully endorse the purchasing of lace weight yarn, whether indie or not.  Have at it!

⁶ By golly, the mohair. It photographs beautifully but its virtues end there. However, that isn’t going to stop me from exploring its uses for a pattern

⁷ Also, an egg timer to remind me to not knit for too long or else I may never knit again

⁸ Because that would require me to finish editing and we all know that is a task that is never complete(d)

Gear Shifting

It’s been a spell.  The past twelve-month has been many things, none of it business as usual. (Except for my long-standing tradition of not developing this website—that has carried on without interruption.)

I haven’t checked in here for some time because my world shrank considerably with the start of the pandemic and making knitting-related content wasn’t anywhere on my top-50 list of things I needed or wanted to do.  Don’t get me wrong—I totally agree with people who feel that the pandemic is a great time to knit (please stay home and avoid sharing particles with other humans!)—I just had a long list of things that suddenly jumped the queue.  I did knit a whole scarf in the fall when I was sidelined by an injury (nothing serious, just maddeningly persistent) and as much I love to knit, this past year I wanted to be too busy to knit.

I have been perpetually putting off building up this website into what I had planned and it seems I’ll be continuing on the same track for a little while longer.  So while I haven’t been doing much in the way of knitting lately, here are a few photos of things I knit pre-pandemic but haven’t shared here:

(I’m sorry if the captions are difficult to read. I have never taken the time to work some CSS magic on this straight-out-of-the-can template.)

The oldest yarn in my stash

This was the deepest of deep stash. I bought this yarn at a Michael’s (from their clearance bin) because I was a student and couldn’t afford to buy yarn at the one nice LYS I knew about in Toronto at the time. This yarn was so old that it could legally buy alcohol by the time I pulled it out of my stash. Note to self: if you are keeping yarn for more than two decades before you knit it, you did not need to buy it no matter how good the deal was.

DIY hand-speckled yarn

Because the yarn had almost no value to me and I clearly wasn’t going to use it for anything else, I was more than willing to sacrifice it to my first (but hopefully not my last) yarn painting experiment.

Thief of Time

I had just enough yarn to crank out this sweater. It’s a modified version of Camilla Vad’s Magnolia sweater pattern from Laine Magazine, Issue 4. I had a whole post near completion about how I speckled the yarn without using dry pigments (and therefore, did not put my future lung health at risk) and how I modified the original pattern but I never published it because I never got around to taking decent FO photos (as you can see). And with all things that linger too long, the moment for it passed.

I love/hate variegated yarn. I love the yarn while it is in the form of a skein and I hate knitting it—all that unpleasant unpredictable pooling and general mess of colours. Then I realised that it could be made to behave with planned pooling.

Taming of the yarn

I won’t lie, it takes some work to keep the colours in line, but it was rather satisfying being the boss of a variegated yarn for once.

The Beginning of the Ends

The number of ends I had to deal with because nearly half of the 18 or so balls of yarn I used were riddled with knots, was not even the worst part of making this sweater, which was a years-long saga.

I might possibly privately consider this one sweater a testament to my stamina when it comes to knitting and my sheer obstinacy to make something work, come hell or high water. Or rather, come knots or innumerable froggings.

I’m quite astonished that the yarn survived not only the countless froggings, but the entire pandemic so far. I have been wearing this cardigan like a security blanket since it was completed just before lockdown last year. This photo was pre-pandemic (which is why there isn’t any pilling from the constant washing and wearing) and I can see now that the hanger (cool, Danish, and designed for a Viking-sized person) was not the best choice for showcasing my sweater. It definitely fits me better than it fits the hanger but only one of those two models was made to be in front of a camera.

All’s well that ends well

I’m going to toot my own horn here: I slayed the details on this sweater. The smocking, the garter-ridge pocket edge, the visible raised seams (which I didn’t photograph because then I’d have to explain how I did it to curious knitters and it would have melted their brains, as it very nearly did mine in the process. It involved the intentional dropping of edge stitches all the way from top to bottom). I felt like Gandalf emerging from his battle with the Balrog by the end of it—I even had more white hair. Don’t trouble yourself about the pattern. It’s not really the same sweater now since I reworked most of it after wasting several attempts at knitting the original pattern. I sound embittered because this project and I battled it out for years. (But I won, so I ought to be more gracious about it, I know.)

I’m signing off for the foreseeable future but as always, I wish you and your loved ones good health, both of the body and mind!

A Y

Unearthing sunshine

I’m really glad there is such a thing as knitting because it seems quite a few people have found a lot of comfort in it these last few weeks as the world has ground to a halt and seemingly upended itself. I have a lot of faith in the calming and regenerative power of things like knitting or any kind of work that occupies the hands and requires a certain amount of concentration so that one can release a few brain cells being held hostage by feelings of anxiety. I’ve been keeping my hands busy but not with knitting so I haven’t much to share on that front except my last FO from a few months ago. Staying home in self-isolation with what is still statistically likely to be a cold but must be treated as if it’s a mild case of Covid-19 for the safety and sanity of all (my sanity excluded because try as I might, I can’t help wondering if I do in fact have it) has got me looking for the proverbial ray of sunshine where I can get it.

It was surprisingly easy to find it within my own home, it just required a slight recalibration of my eyes, or a change of perspective, in a manner of speaking. (There’s nothing like a global crisis to make a person realise they’ve taken a lot of things for granted.) Remember Marie Kondo and her signature line about only keeping items that “spark joy”? Yeah, trouble is, a lot of stuff sparks joy for me, I’m that kind of person. So I have a lot of stuff and a lot of it makes me smile. I thought I’d bring out some bright yellow things I have or have photographed to brighten up the interior.

Of course, there are the requisite handknits like these loud socks I made earlier this year:

Picot hem cuffs

Double-hem cuffs on ankle socks just make sense to me. They’re tidy and somehow make the socks look like you meant to knit them short and not like you didn’t have enough yarn

Faux quilting

Bubble stitch pattern

Toasty toes

Wool socks have become an essential part of my loungewear wardrobe—toasty without overheating my feet and there’s something comforting about wearing your own handmades, am I right?

The pattern is quite appropriately entitled Socks for Hermits and Homebodies. (My project notes are here). It’s available to Dawn Henderson’s Patreon members. If you are also a patron of Dawn and you’d like to know how I worked the cuff modification, get in touch! Incidentally, Dawn has offered her independently published patterns for free on Ravelry during the pandemic for the many people who are finding themselves stuck at home and short on funds. This despite being an independent designer and a mother of four who also suddenly lost her husband earlier this year. If you knit her patterns and can afford it, consider buying her a ko-fi?

And the houseplants, which as far as I’m concerned are sunlight storage modules:

Rooting a coleus cutting

This is the first year I have tried overwintering tender annuals from the garden. Some people take in stray animals, I take in stray plants. I’ve become that lady whose sunniest window is surrounded for meters around by half-deformed plants in mismatched pots. But you know, I haven’t regretted it at all. It’s like preserving a bit of summer in a (or perhaps every) little corner of the house during our long, long winters here. I can’t claim to be prescient but saving these annuals means I won’t be tempted to brave a garden center this spring.

Key limes and self-striping sock yarn

The socks were knit with Turtle Purl Yarns self-striping sock MCN yarn, colourway “Absinthe”

Coleus cuttings taking over

I had no idea coleus was so easy to propagate, it’s almost easier than propagating succulents which means there are coleus plants all over the house now because I don’t have the heart to chuck plants into organic waste

This old, bleeding heart

Lamprocapnos spectabilis from summers past

And books are always good for a dash of colour on a coffee table or display shelf:

Now, I’d like to think I’m not even remotely crass and I do not find scatological humour particularly funny, I’m not a four year-old boy after all, but I have to say, this little collection either says a lot about me[1] or about what book publishers associate with the colour yellow.

This book in particular has provided me with a certain amount of entertainment in recent days:

I picked this up at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale as a memento. It was one of a series of books dealing with individual elements of architecture and the only one I chose to bring back in my limited luggage space because a.) I guess I am a four year-old boy at heart, and b.) it is actually incredibly interesting. To quote bits from the introduction,

The toilet is the fundamental zone of interaction—on the most intimate level—between humans and architecture…. The domestication, privatization, and proliferation of the toilet is the great unspoken driver behind much architecture and urban planning…. The toilet is at once the most private and the most political element, subject to government interference…. Today, the toilet is the site of cultural superimpositions…, philanthropy,… and habits that only seem to be intractable…

Also good for a laugh: this Wikipedia entry on toilet paper. Given all the toilet paper panic buying/stockpiling, I started wondering: what did people do before the invention of toilet paper?

Frankly, even if I’m not able to get my hands on a pack of TP at the grocery store when we run out in a few weeks, I won’t really be worried. Not because I have spare goose necks lying about or a handful of pebbles in my pocket, but because as long as we have David Eddings on our bookshelf, I consider us to not be out of toilet paper.

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Footnotes:

[1] In my defence, all but one of those books were acquired in my youth, now long past. I have a lot of bookshelves and I stuck those in just for the entertainment of visitors perusing my book collection. Turns out I was far too optimistic that anyone would be interested in what I read (or, more accurately, what I have ambitions to read). Yet, I’m going to list some titles I am currently reading/re-reading/listening to during lockdown (some of which were only coincidentally very timely):

Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live by Rob Dunn (2018)

Although the author makes a very strong case for the benefits of diversifying our personal microbiome and “letting the outdoors inside”, in this day of Covid-19, I’m going to opt for annihilation of viruses in my home at the expense of the good bacteria, until instructed otherwise, thanks. I will, however, take his advice to grow more plants indoors.

How to Grow Fruits, Vegetables & Houseplants Without Soil by Rick Helweg (2014)

I’m hydro-curious at the moment because ordering potting soil for home delivery seems like a cruel and unusual punishment for my postman who is working hard and putting himself in danger’s way every day. I’ve always liked having houseplants but for the most part, they are all ornamental. That’s going to change this year because our local grocery stores are (reportedly) filled with people who seem to have no regard for either social distancing or government pleas to not panic buy and/or stockpile. I already have my first crop of lettuce greens germinating!

Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert (2015)

This book is in fact quite interesting, combining many topics and themes that occupy my thoughts, but I admit I’m listening to the audiobook version to help me fall asleep at night. It is exactly the thing I need these days: interesting enough to take my mind off my many worries for just long enough to fall asleep but not so exciting that I stay awake just to listen to the next 10 minutes and then another 10 minutes and so on. I’ll probably read the print version in the future because I’m missing 4 minutes out of every 10 at the moment.

Discworld by Terry Pratchett (1983-2015) (the entire series, books 1 through 41)

Collectively, the Discworld series is my personal bible. I cannot adequately describe the series to a non-initiate except to say that it is possibly the greatest series in any genre (that I have) ever (read). I’m a better person (than I would have been) because of it, I’m certain.

The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss by Jason Fung, M.D. (2015)

Although I read this a few years ago and I now only do 16-hour fasts, more or less daily, I’m skimming bits of this book again. I read it then because, for various reasons, I am at a higher risk of developing Type II Diabetes and I wasn’t waiting around for it to happen first. I used to joke that this intermittent fasting diet was basically the genius diet plan that Famine was promoting in Good Omens (by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman). In truth, intermittent fasting does mean you are likely consuming less food overall but for me, one of the most useful by-products of this type of diet is acquiring the ability to control your hunger, rather than having your hunger control you (hangry much?) There is an element of self-discipline in this, but as Dr. Fung explains, hunger isn’t simply an issue of willpower but rather “numerous overlapping hormonal systems [which] influence the decision of when to eat and when to stop.” I found that training myself to fast intermittently was only initially a matter of self-discipline and that eventually, as I acclimatised, my body was no longer demanding constant glycogen top-ups. Another way to put it, I went through a hanger-management program and it has profoundly changed my relationship with food (and probably my actual relationships) for the better. I’m not advocating this type of diet for anyone without seeking qualified medical advice first but if you were already interested in intermittent fasting, this might be an opportune time to explore it. (I’m only half-joking.)

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Jokes and half-jokes aside, please stay smart, stay safe, stay put, and stay positive. This won’t last forever and the better we comply with our public health officials and accept these temporary inconveniences, the sooner we’ll come through this, and gods willing, the fewer the people who will lose their loved ones during this pandemic.

Courage, friends.