Check out my new home here. See you over there!
-Eunny
P.S. - eunnyjang.com will remain accessible, in much the state it is in now - though comments will be disabled (and icky spam deleted!) and there won't be much new content. But, I'll be keep-up-able by email, on my Knits blog, or on Ravelry, where I'm eunnyjang.
I'm doing my part in telling spring to hurry the hell up already:
Generic 60-stitch toe up socks, worked in 4-round stripes. The heels and toes are reversed on the pair because, well, I'm cheap - I had one ball of beige Koigu and one ball of cornflower Louet Pearl lying around, and wanted to use them up equally. I knitted both socks at more or less the same time, working from both ends of both balls, till I had about 5 grams left of each color - then I cut the contrast color, worked the top ribbing, and bound off.
The colors are bright and warm and happy-making, alone and together - too bad it's still 40 degrees outside.
I learned a new skill with these - I tried the first jogless join found here.
Not perfect (I don't think anything with continuous rounds can ever be), but it's still pretty nifty.
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Meta Stuff
Cara's got a really interesting conversation going on here. Me? I've been focusing on owning my words, taking reasonable criticism honestly and in the spirit it was meant, and being self-aware enough to separate legitimate critique from personal attack without getting all self-righteous or huffy or dismissive. As for the rest, I'm still thinking and still trying to figure it out. I put very, very little of my personal life up here, and it always sort of astonishes me to see the kind of assumptions people can make and what sometimes seem like disproportionate reactions. I can see, though, how and why that happens - so if I can't learn from it, I just try to shut my eyes (besides, what can you do? You can feel sick for a minute and then try to get over it, or beat yourself up, or try to fix it or backpedal or retaliate and make a bigger mess all around. The first option leaves the smallest footprint - I'll take it).
Generally, though, I'm of the opinion that it's all good. I don't necessarily subscribe to "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all" - there's plenty of room for civil disagreement and opinion exchange. What's the point of a medium like this if it's not for dialog and debate?
Just in time for the last blue day of Project Spectrum
Comfortable (drawstring!) and cool (fishtail!) - I'm going to live in this skirt this summer. It's knit at a fairly dense gauge, so I'm not worried about that whole sag/droop thing - besides, if it ever does sag or droop or pouch or poof, it just goes in the washer and then the dryer.
Pattern: Kat Coyle for Interweave Knits Spring 2007
Yarn: RowanDenim, in color 225 (Nashville)
Yardage: 8 50 gram balls (about 800 yards)
Yarn Source: Stash.
Needles: 3.5mm Addi Turbo circulars
Gauge: 5.5sts/inch over stockinette
Modifications: changed gauge for narrower skirt; added length to stockinette panel; added length to lace panel for below-the-knee skirt. Worked mirrored double decreases as k3tog and sssk.
The indigo is starting to fade already along the raised decrease stitches:
It's like if you could have your favorite pair of broken-in jeans made to order. Knitted. Denim. Skirts. Who knew that these three great tastes would also taste great together?
Cairi left me a comment way back around Christmas, tagging me for that fun 6 weird things meme. By that time, I'd fallen off the face of the earth, and never filled it out. But!! I'm here now, and I'm totally ignoring the ephemeral, quickly-staling nature of such things to tell you....
Six Weird Things About Me
1) I have almost no food hangups, but the ones I do have are odd. In context: as budget allows, I try to eat widely and intelligently, will try anything, in general take a great deal of pleasure in eating, and always clean my plate. Downmarket and upscale are both fine with me - a big sloppy burger with lots of fried onions and bacon sounds just as exciting as some precious little verrine of scallop tartare with osetra and fennel foam. As a kid, I grew up eating organ meats (cheap, you know) and things like salted squid guts (ethnic, you know); I still love marrow and tongues and codfish heads and Serious Kimchi. It strikes me as prety odd, then, that the only food-type items I strongly dislike would be ketchup (bottled) and chocolate (all kinds, in all forms).
2) I love karaoke - madly, truly, shamelessly. I also somehow already know, like, every single American pop song produced between 1959 and 1980 (thanks, Dad!). Add my complete lack of a voice and a little sake, and I am a threat to national safety.
3) I'm a certified PADI Rescue Diver, wakeboard avidly, and would love to learn to surf - but I can't swim worth a damn. An awkward dogpaddle is about the best I can do.
4) I have very strong personal preferences for certain spellings of some words. "Grey" over "gray", for example: "grey" just seems right, with its connotation of coolness, of absence. I also think it's better-looking on a page than "gray". Of course, I stick to standard American English orthography when working, but grudgingly.
5) Jeff and I play a game all the time where we make up secrets for people - usually, it's while we're flipping channels. We'll see a talking head - some nice associate professor of history talking about the unusual weather patterns of the 16th century, or something - and immediately start telling "secrets" about him to each other. You know, like, "When he's teaching, he wears tight black jeans and a black shirt with the top three buttons undone - with no undershirt. When it's cold out, he doesn't button all the way up - instead, he just wraps a scarf around his neck...so you still get that triangle of sparsely-thatched skin between the scarf and his shirt. Also? He goes to student parties, and totally enjoys himself."
6) Billy Bob Thorton would not be that far down on my list of celebrity crushes.
Beating below all the advice and words of warning and preparations I've been told to make, there's been one recurring theme: everyone's been telling me to that pretty soon, I'll have No Time To Knit. What, exactly, does this mean? Most of my knitting is done in odd snatched moments anyway - maybe actually working in the fiber arts full time will just mean that I won't feel quite as guilty about those stolen stitches and rows. Still, I've been feeling a weird urgency: to make things, finish things, put dead or dying things back into raw yarn form. I want to knit and wear something Right Away - you know the feeling?
This is Silky wool in a marvelous teal shade, held double to knit this sassy little thing:
Mari Lynn Patrick's Provincial Waistcoat from the Winter '06 IK. I've been thinking a lot about this yarn, lately: I've got multiple hanks of it lying around my office, but I don't think I've ever knit a full project from it before. I like the unexpected colors it comes in; I like the papery-flecky-tweedy thing it's got going on; I like its light weight and its crunchy/warm hand. I like the interesting, unplain stockinette it makes (Lolly's knitting a gorgeous Glee out of it), and I love the way it looks with texture (Julia's stealth-cable Irish Moss comes to mind). In this vest, I think it'll be light and useful for three seasons out of the year - though it lacks the sproinginess of the yak yarn the pattern calls for, I think the additional structure will be really nice. I have the perfect button-down to wear with it, too - a very prim, structured poplin with cap sleeves and a delicate stand-up collar. Just right against that textured, nubbly knit.
(I've been drawn to knitting other people's patterns, lately - I'm in the middle of serious planning and plotting and pattern-writing for other projects, and it's pleasant to just enjoy the knitting of a tightly, cleverly constructed pattern written by someone else. This waistcoat features some seriously cool details - all the waist shaping is hidden along ribbed gussets; back panels narrow to a ribbed waistband and then flare back up into wide bands across the shoulders - and there's a kind of satisfaction in just looking at the work and thinking about how it's built.)
How this knitter celebrates:
For me, this comprises a lot of not-usuallys: usually, I don't do bulky yarns, variegated yarns, or thick-and-thin yarns (or posh yarns - though Manos, of course, is out there doing good things). But oh, that dusty rosy pink, moving from antique, pressed specimen to living petal and back! I couldn't resist.
I'm thinking something very simple, very clean, almost austere, to tame and showcase all that grist and color action. Something like Teva Durham's Ballet Pullover, perhaps?
(P.S. - Thank you, thank you, thank you for the wonderful notes and comments you left. I couldn't be more eager to get started - I'm so pleased you're excited, too!)
Running this knitting blog has been an endlessly interesting exercise for me: it's an enormous luxury to be able to write only about things I find exciting, fascinating, newsworthy - things I want to write about. It's hugely exciting, too, to be a part of an ever-growing, never-monolithic community that reinterprets, rethinks, and reinvents the craft every day. And of course, there's that delicious sotto voce whisper of possibility that seems to hover every moment in the blog world - what could happen next?
Usually, print mediums have very different enticements for both the writer and the reader: the broad reach, of course; the permanence; the sheer tactile pleasure of turning pages filled with saturated color and close-set text. No one at home on a sick day sits propped up in bed with a mug of soup and their laptop, you know? Besides, when the magazine is a really good one - with depth, taste, and stone-cold technical excellence - contributing to it is like writing for a blog, but better: you have the same freedom to put out smart, meaty content, but with incredibly powerful resources at your disposal. Developing that content in the first place is the only thing that’s missing from the equation.
Unless there’s something I’ve been holding out on. Maybe I have a secret to tell you.
Here goes: I’m the new Editor of Interweave Knits - truly, my dream job. It means being able to talk about all kinds of fascinating things - history, technique, design, the convergence of old and new, innovation in an ancient craft - in a Really Big Way. It means working with brilliantly talented people on an already-extraordinary publication. It means having the opportunity to distill the absolute best content out there into four outstanding packages a year, plus special issues. And possibly most exciting of all, it means that, well, I finally know what to put on my business cards (“Eunny Jang, Blog Bunny” never seemed quite right, somehow).
I’m totally thrilled, completely overwhelmed, so incredibly excited about the things we’ll do and the places we'll go. Interweave and I have always had a fantastic relationship – they love good design for its own sake, historical context, clean technique, and every other aspect of good, thoughtful knitting just as much as I do. I mean, as we do. Huzzah!
