More on his website, linked through the photo.

But I wanted to catch up on Needled, which is a wonderful blog chock full of history and lovely views of Scotland (and sometimes Ireland), knit design process, and personal recovery. So the past couple of nights, I’ve just been reading and reading and reading (and bought two patterns meantime).

Tonight I clicked on the link for “Kate’s Correspondence,” which is actually an entirely separate blog. One comment, which was not linked to the entry at all, said:

Dear Kate,
On a Google search of owls, I came across your owl sweater. I have the most amazing girlfriend in the world, and I want to have one of your sweaters made for her as a gift. Owls are her favorite and I know she would be elated to have one. Her favorite color is forest green and she has yellow-green eyes (very rare) and I would like to have buttons close to the color of her eyes on the sweater. Do you do any custom orders or can you direct me to someone who will use your pattern and create one? Please let me know if it is possible. Otherwise I will order the pattern and seek out someone to do it. I just have no knowledge of what to ask for or the terminology required to even begin!
thanks,
Frank Butler
Temecula, California

It was left back in May, and I don’t see any contact information. Otherwise I would write to Frank and ask him whether he ever found someone to make an owl sweater for his girlfriend. The thought that went into that comment is pure love.

1. The $200 Microhouse

2. Composting with Edible Mushrooms

I finally decided to take the plunge, and what did I find? A new jacket on her site that is equally exciting, and which I chose over Folklore in the end – the Rokoko Coat:

So, one of these days when I’m feeling ambitious enough to tackle Danish, I’m going to plunge right in – I can’t wait!

From NYT

Musk Oxen Live to Tell a Survivors’ Tale
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, December 13, 2010

Among the various large, charismatic and visibly winterized mammals that one might choose as a mascot for life in the Arctic belt, polar bears are, let’s face it, too hackneyed, reindeer too Rudolph, caribou too Sarah Palin’s target practice, and woolly mammoths too extinct.

There’s a better choice, though few may have heard of it. According to Arctic biologists, the quintessential example of megafaunal fortitude in the face of really bad weather is the musk ox, or Ovibos moschatus, a blocky, short-legged, highly social ungulate with distinctively curved horns and long hair that looks like shag carpeting circa 1975.

Ovibos’s common name is only partly justified. The males do emit a musky cologne during mating season, but the animal is not an ox. Nor, despite its back-of-the-nickel silhouette, is it a type of buffalo either. Its closest living relations are thought to be goats and sheep, but taxonomically and metaphorically, the musk ox is in an icy cubicle of its own. Once abundant throughout the northern latitudes worldwide, today they are found only in Arctic North America, Greenland and pockets of Siberia and Scandinavia. The musk ox is a holdover from the Pleistocene, the age of the giant mammals memorialized in natural history murals everywhere — the mammoths and mastodons, the saber-toothed cats, the giant ground sloths, the 400-pound beavers. Yet while a vast majority of the frost-fitted bigfoots disappeared at the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago, Ovibos hung on, as stubbornly as the ox it is not.

Scientists are now seeking to understand how, exactly, the animal has managed to persist through repeated climate shifts and habitat upheavals. Researchers see in the musk ox’s story clues to help guide efforts to conserve other large land mammals now at risk of extinction. They also hope to raise the profile of a species they consider magnificent, at once stalwart and supple, a page of living prehistory whose social and behavioral complexities they have just begun to decode.

“There’s evidence that they have an elephantlike social structure, and even some form of culture,” said Joel Berger, a researcher with the Wildlife Conservation Society and a professor at the University of Montana. So why is everybody flying to Africa to see elephants when we’ve got this marvelous species living in our own backyard?

In a presentation last week at the Bronx Zoo, where the wildlife society is based, Dr. Berger described preliminary results from field studies of the musk ox that he has performed with Layne Adams of the U.S. Geological Survey and other collaborators. He talked about the challenges of catching animals to weigh and measure them, check their teeth, take their blood and furnish them with G.P.S. collars. One group of musk ox in Cape Krusenstern National Monument in Alaska had such bad, broken teeth you’d think they were subsisting on a diet of Pepsi and Snickers bars, said Dr. Berger, and the researchers worried that the population was unhealthy and on its way out.

Yet after suffering several seasons of declining numbers, the brown-toothers rebounded this year to match in fecundity and offspring survival a group living in the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve that had exemplary teeth. The cause of their rotten dentition remains a mystery, but the Krusenstern clan clearly was not biting the dust.

For all their storied past as co-prancers with mastodons, musk oxen are not huge animals. Adult males stand about four feet high and weigh around 600 to 700 pounds, less than half the weight of the average draft horse. Yet they look hulky as a result of their spectacular double-layered fur coat. The long, shaggy outer layer they keep year round, not only to help shield them against the brutal cold of an Arctic winter, when temperatures can plunge 40 degrees or more below zero, but also to deter the insect pests of an Arctic summer.

“You’ll see caribou in summertime trotting across the countryside trying to get away from all the mosquitoes and biting flies,” said Jim Lawler, a biologist with the National Park Service’s Arctic Network in Fairbanks. “But the musk ox just stand there with clouds of mosquitoes hovering above them. It’s hard to penetrate that fur.” For added insulation, musk oxen grow a second fur layer each winter, an undercoat called qiviut that is said to be many times warmer than wool and softer than cashmere — and how obliging of the animals to shed that qiviut in spring for use in scarves.

With their stubby legs, musk oxen are not migratory like caribou or great dashers like reindeer. Their basic approach to winter management is: Don’t just do something — stand there. “You’ll see them in a big storm, drifted over, covered with snow,” said Dr. Lawler. “They’re almost part of the scenery.” They lapse into a state of what might be called hibernation al fresco, as their oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production drop and their metabolic rate slows by about a third. “They’re basically shutting down some of their machinery so they can survive on less food,” said Dr. Lawler, who has studied musk ox energetics.

Whatever their occasional resemblance to the scenery, musk oxen are by no means as dumb as a post. “They live in loosely knit family-bonded societies,” said Dr. Berger, and they keep track of who’s who. The group is, after all, essential to their survival. When confronted with predators like wolves, a herd of musk oxen will famously circle the wagons, the adults forming a wall of horns facing outward, the vulnerable young safely shielded behind them. They also seem to have a keen memory for where the best foraging grounds may be found in the spring, the optimal mix of grasses and willow twigs to maximize the performance of the microbes at work in their ruminant gut. Musk oxen turn out to be very efficient at extracting calories to put on the fat they need to survive the long winter fast.

Historical records and genetic evidence alike suggest that the musk ox is a Rasputin, “the comeback kid of the Quaternary,” said Ross MacPhee, curator of vertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History. “They undergo periods where they really bolster their numbers for a few years, then they go down to an almost complete collapse, then later they come back like gangbusters.”

As a result of passing through repeated population bottlenecks, in which only a handful of individuals survived to spawn subsequent generations, today’s 100,000 musk oxen are thought to be notably homogenous, lacking in the sort of genetic diversity once thought critical to a species’ long-term prospects. “It would be hard to argue that musk ox are on their way out the door,” said Dr. MacPhee. “They are not weak sisters.”

Just ask that saber-toothed cat fossilized under the floor

“People doing good things on this earth, leaving the world a better place. It doesn’t matter what you do — if you do for cats, fine; if you do for Uganda, fine; if you do for trees,” she says. But “everybody owes it to the world to make it a little bit better.”

- Barbara Roche Fierman, as quoted in the New York Times, being interviewed about her tiny white apartment.

This weekend, someone in my life asked me to face one of my demons. This was not an intentional discussion, and I suspect that if this person knew me better, the conversation would have gone in a different direction.

So much of knit blogging discusses stash, Flash Your Stash, Latest Stash Acquisitions, photos upon photos of the endless stuff that we all collect. I even did this in the last post, but mainly to show off a yarn dyer that I like who runs her own business and was raising money for charity.

The consumerist nature of most of it fatigues me a little, but on the other hand, it IS exciting to have all this potential at one’s disposal.

I said something along these lines recently to Mel over at Purling Plans: What is important to me about having a wheel, fleece, a camera, needles, yarn, even dye, is the potential for creation that exists within each of these sets of tools. We combine them to not only create beautiful materials, but eventually produce a garment, which we like to photograph and stick up on the blog. Not all of my materials are used. A lot of them currently sit by the wayside, waiting to go to Good Will or be selected for a project. I’m a self-proclaimed packrat, and I have a hard time getting rid of anything, even those ugly, lonely skeins that I bought way back when, before I knew how to plan my yarn purchases. (Back when I was utterly astounded to read that Eunny kept no stash at all. How was that possible?)

But, this post is not so much about stash. It is about the value of finishing things.

The day after the conversation I haven’t yet told you about, I opened my Interweave Spring 2009 to work on the Fountain Pen Shawl. Pulling out the shawl was a direct result of a previous conversation about finishing things – I picked up a UFO and started working toward finishing. In the magazine, there is a one-pager by Vicki Square that encourages us to start as many projects as we like. The idea is that finishing just for the sake of finishing doesn’t feed the creative juices. There are many other aspects to the type of knitting we do now (compared to the utilitarian fare of my grandmother before, during, and after WWII for example) besides just binding off and sewing on buttons.

My intent is not to just start a million projects and never finish any. But I suppose I have different levels of investment in each object’s finished status. If it’s cold and I really want to wear it, I’ll finish. If a baby is coming along, hopefully I’ll finish! When my aunt was diagnosed with cancer, I knit three hats in no time flat. Socks – I wear ‘em lots, so I finish. Holiday gifts? Usually.

If there is a hard deadline, of course I finish. Not a problem.

But for me, knitting is a state of being, a constant activitiy, and part of that state wants meditative repetition, creating a tendency to put something down when I reach a hitch in the work. Another part wants experimentation, which leads to seeking out new patterns, new yarns, new techniques, new visual experiences. So, sure, many times I stop before finishing. This doesn’t mean the project is doomed, but frankly, it bothers me not a bit if it takes three years to complete. Not a bit.

The other day, I was confronted by someone completely confounded by this approach. I was told that I should not start so many things. I was told that the time I spend on knitting could be spent on other activities (Like what? -work. Work!). Sure, I suppose that’s true. I could clean more, read more, watch more movies, exercise more, cook more, pick up another hobby, or simply finish more knitted objects.

I’m content to ignore the advice, because I find that I’m interested enough in finishing. Most of us are more interested in starting, and I find no problem with that, unless you’re broke or there’s no more room in your house.

The aspect of finishing that is not so interesting is the elimination of potential. I know I keep using that word, but I find it’s the essence of why I collect stitch and pattern books, why I swatch, why I like having skeins or bumps hanging around and imagining their final destiny. Once finished, they’ve met their fate, and there isn’t so much left to the imagination.

Maybe my projects are more like large swatches, with the potential to actually become something one day. Would anyone wonder about finishing if all I had were a big box of swatches instead?

Don’t get me wrong, there is a great sense of satisfaction once something is finished, when we wear it around and someone asks about it, even knows that it could be handknitted. We all know that bashful pride when we say, Why yes, I DID make this myself.

In the mean time, I’ll keep plugging away on anything and everything that catches my fancy. This is my pastime, which feeds my need to create, to have color and texture in my life. I see my (slightly disorganized) collection of materials in my living space as a studio, in which I am responsible only to myself.

So what if I never finish?

Look how beautiful it is!

You can see more of this special dye batch here.

I’m going to design something extra special for this – thoughts?

My Barbara Walker Vol 2 arrived in the mail as well so I’m going to spend the weekend nerding out on knitting design.

After reading this article, I would approach my visit differently! It talks about three hand crafters, all women, that currently operate in slow-paced Venice, which is, of course, also a great place for walking, since there are no vehicles to speak of. And, it notes an intriguing historical trend of platform shoes taking off amongst the general population after being prescribed for courtesans in the 16th century to discourage “street walking.”

The comment I most appreciate comes from Gabriele Gmeiner, who says:

The fact that there are no cars slows down the pace of life, so that it fits in with the tempi of traditional crafts.

The article also mentions the average price range of these handcrafted shoes, which is anywhere from 700-1500 euros. To me, this says that although handcrafting shoes (or other) won’t make one rich, there is a clientele out there that appreciates the artisanry and is willing to pay for it.

Only one link mentioned in the article gives an idea of the shoes these women create, that of Gabriele Gmeiner, who has several other interesting projects described in photos on her site, including children’s boots made by Venetian prisoners.

You’ll have to follow the link to see these delightful creations.

Here’s an example on Flickr of Giovanna Zanella’s shoes, and a blog link with more info on this artisan.