Blogsam and Jetsam

Flotsam is the part of the wreckage of a ship or its cargo found floating on the water. Jetsam is cargo or parts of a ship that are deliberately thrown overboard, as to lighten the ship in an emergency, and that subsequently either sinks or is washed ashore. This is my personal blog version of the above. Loot freely.

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Location: The Hinterlands, Upstate NY

I'm annoyed that the world is going crazier faster than it used to be. But it's interesting to watch.

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Steeking Re-Post

From my end it looks like the pictures posted this time. Here's the original in its entirety:

Steeking: the deliberate cutting of knitted fabric to create openings.

Also something that, like sex, is quite intimidating to interested parties who've never actually tried it, which is what I was till recently.

Oh I hadn't planned it that way--I had planned to have a Holiday Vest for this winter and finished knitting a big colorful cylinder in early November. Moved on with plans to use the vest as a "dry run" for the whole steeking concept before doing it on Something Fancy like the Wintergarden sweater.

Well.

My "holiday vest" sat on top of my sewing machine through all of November, all of Advent, all of Christmastide and some of Ordinary Time too. I had already decided that it was my practice piece for both two-color work and steeking and had therefore given myself permission to totally screw it up and make a very brightly decorated cat-bed. Didn't care one little bit if I made a pile of yarn spaghetti, either.

So it wasn't the whole "fear" thing holding me back...but I wasn't sure what was holding me back. I belatedly realized that it was the sewing-machine that was the rate-limiting step: no good place or time to set the thing up and actually do the stitching. Coincidentally right after I made that discovery my knitting newsgroup started up a steeking conversation which made the whole process sound very do-able.

On the night of the new moon I said "fuck that sewing shit entirely," grabbed a pair of scissors and just whacked through the thing. Guess what?

Nothing bad happened.

This is what happened:




Here's a closeup of the star pattern:

Oh sure, the yarn was very slippery (holiday acrylic with that plastic gilt thread and stash cotton) and wanted to unravel for a stitch or two at the cut edges but it wasn't anything major and was easily hidden in a rolled edge, which is what I did to secure the undersides.

Whacked through the underarms and just rolled those too...see?


I was all about "git 'er DONE!" when I picked up the scissors and I'm glad of it.

However in the future I would definitely plan my facings and cutting better since the inside of this piece has a very cobbled-together look:


The front edges are also rather thicker than I'd like but for my First Steeking it was overall a pretty good experience...better than my First Sex was.

1 Comments:

Blogger SamD said...

Thanks. I seem to have finally hacked out a working relationship with Blogger.

February 08, 2007 10:19 AM  

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