#knitting increases

[ub-sessed]

Toe-up sock knitters:

What's your favourite increase for knitting the toe?

[chiropteracupola]

once again i am posting hand-woven images!

[gender-trash]

the post about fast fashion/sewing one’s own clothes blew up again… honestly the more i think about it the angrier i am about it. with both clothing and furniture we sort of live in a world where the market is being overtaken by disposable items made with cheap materials at the lowest possible labor cost. and like, not to diss ikea or anything — god knows they’ve supplied me with enough cheap bookshelves — but this is exactly why i ended up building my own desk.

my dad tells stories about his mom, who was very talented at sewing — it wasn’t her “day job” but in that part of rural iowa in the 60s she was the person you called if, say, you needed a wedding dress on next to no notice. (i’m also told she was excellent at baking pies, but that’s beside the point.) at that time and place, it was legitimately *cheaper* to make your own clothes than to buy them from the store. they would be made of much the same materials, except that you would substitute your own labor for that of whoever assembled the storebought garment.

today, the fabric to make a shirt will almost certainly cost you more than an equivalent department store shirt would. to say nothing of the cost of your time and labor. part of this is that people who sew their own clothes generally don’t want to waste their time on shit fabric, so fabric stores don’t sell quite the same grade of shreddable polyester. part of this is that our modern globalized supply chain has minimized both labor and materials costs as hard as it can, and this optimization has intertwined labor and materials sourcing a lot more than they apparently were in the 60s.

let’s turn back to the subject of furniture. the equivalent of the cheap polyester department-store shirt is the ikea desk. the desk surface is made of laminated particle-board, which is lighter and cheaper than actual wood; the desk is sold to you flat-pak, and you assemble it yourself, thus saving on labor costs. the laminate surface will probably delaminate after a few years’ use. also as with the cheap shirt, any damage is near-impossible to fix — you could sand and refinish a scuffed plywood surface, but there’s no sanding laminated particle-board. it’s also harder to modify to suit one’s needs — i can drill a neat hole for a monitor arm in my plywood desk much more easily than in a particle-board surface.

in both cases, what do you do if you want a slightly higher grade of item? well, obviously you’ll have to pay more money — but it’s difficult to be sure you’re really getting your money’s worth. you have to spend ages and ages comparison-shopping and reading reviews about how quality has really gone downhill since production moved to [new country]. often — especially with clothes — the thing that your money is actually paying for is Style, as separate from Substance. or good advertising. i’ve been halfheartedly in the market for a decent couch for some time, and i’ve noticed that nearly every apartment makeover video on youtube is sponsored by the same furniture website, which of course has provided a free couch — that the youtuber assures us is Really Good, For The Price. as soon as a manufacturer acquires a reputation for Quality, it is in their economic interest to sell out as hard and fast as they can and pocket the increased margin from selling crap at the price of quality until people notice. and in a world where most shopping has moved online, it’s difficult to tell whether you’re still in the actual-quality period. i’m not sure if there even *are* furniture stores around here at quality levels in between ikea and danish concepts (suggesting a market for a mid-tier scandinavian furniture purveyor, perhaps hailing from norway or finland).

because of the sort of person that i am, i tire rapidly of the endless comparison shopping. i don’t want to become a damn couch supply chain expert, i just want to retire the folding chair from my living room. it can’t be *that* hard to build a couch, can it? well, not if one is privileged enough to have the tools and time and space to do it in. i think most of the comments and tags on the fast fashion post are from people wishing they had one or more of the above to make their own clothes with. speaking from direct personal experience, a sewing machine is at least both cheaper and easier to find space for than a minimally equipped woodshop.

the other common piece of advice is to buy used, buy from a thrift store or an estate sale. unfortunately hunting down all your shit used also takes a lot of time and effort, and particularly in the case of furniture hauling the stuff home is a nontrivial logistical problem. again, money or more nebulous forms of privilege (the friend with the truck) are needed to smooth these roadblocks. and it’s really amazing that the solution to “i want an item that is not garbage” is “buy an item manufactured at a time when they were not yet garbage”. yes, of course, the less-durable instances won’t have survived the passage of time, but that’s only part of the effect. things genuinely used to be manufactured to a higher standard of quality. my sewing machine is from ebay; it’s the same model my *other* grandma had, a baseline singer consumer-grade machine. all its gears are metal, and it has a heavy-ass cast metal housing, too. the other household sewing machine is a modern singer consumer-grade machine and for all its fancy stitches it looks sort of like a doll’s toy — the plastic gears are going to break at some point, or the motor will burn out, and if it turns out that the motor on the modern edition is designed to be user-replaceable i will personally eat a hat. i suppose we also used to ask a lot more of our consumer-grade sewing machines, back when sewing one’s own clothes was a baseline household skill for everyone but Rich People, instead of a hobby that consumes more money than it saves you.

i don’t know if my post really has a conclusion. i’m just angry that we live in a fallen world full of miraculous technology and yet we have not solved the seemingly simple economic problem of exchanging a reasonable amount of money for a newly produced durable good that isn’t a complete piece of shit. i am a *robotics engineer*, for the love of fuck; i have a complicated, rare, well-compensated skillset. it cannot *possibly* be a comparative advantage for me to spend my time building a couch or sewing a shirt instead of paying someone to do it for me (ideally also, if i may ask for a miracle, someone who gets things like fair pay and healthcare and vacation time). why is this transaction so damn hard??

[jonphaedrus]

i picked up this yarn on a whim because of how in love i was with the gradient and this is not either of the projects with deadlines i should be working on but it's the one i've been doing non-stop all week and i literally just want to stare at it for hours. i don't want to do anything else.

[dyke-arachne]

Crossed the 15% mark

[mutantenfisch]

Look! I've got new socks!

Pattern is Herbstblattsocken by Maren Wilczek (German)

[mintowls]

im going to make a really long cat wish me luck everyone

[gardenvarietycrafts]

Day 7

I finished the first sleeve! Only one more to go. I have short arms, so I did have to make some changes to the pattern to make all the decreases fit in the sleeve, and I have some ideas for next time to make it fit me better, but so far I'm happy with it! Hoping to finish the second sleeve tomorrow but I don't know if I will be able to based on how long the first sleeve took me.

I've also used about 2 less balls of yarn than expected. The first sleeve only took one ball of yarn, so I'm anticipating the second to take the same, bringing my total to 7 balls of yarn (approximately 1400 yds) vs the 9 balls I expected (a little less than 1800 yds). I'm not sure if the pattern just gave a lot of wiggle room or if not, where I used that much less yarn, but I have about 1000 yds of this yarn left over, since I usually buy a little extra just in case, and used less than expected. If you have any ideas for what to make with what's left, let me know!

[rainbow-femme]

Knitting pattern: To make this you’ll need to know how to increase, decrease, knit double pointed-

Me:

[ub-sessed]

In an effort to learn more about how different increases behave, I've decided to knit a bunch of swatches like this:

I am especially fascinated by the lack of symmetry: Why is the left side of the triangle longer than the right side? This is not blocked or pulled on in any way; the tape is just there to keep the swatch flat enough to photograph, and to line up that line with the middle column of stitches.

I'm gonna make a pile of these and then post my results.

What other increases should I test? What are your favourite increases?

If I'm still feeling motivated when I'm done, I may do the equivalent swatches with decreases.

[music-for-them-asses]

The older I get, the more apparent it is that western society (America in particular) is solely built on the idea of the single family home unit. Church used to be the social network that connected people. But as people have become less religious, nothing new has replaced it. As the average age of first marriage increases, and more people are forgoing kids, there are no communities or social bonds. Corporations step in and take advantage of the loneliness by selling us goods we don't need OR are bad for our health. Meanwhile, treatment for mental illness like depression is placed solely on the individual rather than a community problem. Do you see what I'm saying

[chiropteracupola]

my body is but a machine that turns yarn into rats and podcasts into mysterious and ethereal dreams

[buttons-beads-lace]

extremely offensive to me personally that this knitting stitch called a "knit left loop" or "left lifted increase" creates a stitch that leans to the right and should be done on the right-hand side of my project.

you'd think getting a degree in chemistry & spending weeks of class time just on practicing identifying chirality would have made me more chill about rights/lefts and less prone to getting turned around but no it did not.

Why are they Called that. I mean I know why it's called that but Why.

[jemmo]

I may have had to rip out 30 rows on the body and sleeves after blocking bc they were too long and re-do all the ribbing, but it was worth it bc she cute

[first-full-moon]

my favorite part of my night, sickness routine: knitting and zoning out to youtube videos

[itslookingback]