November 2007

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Portland (the Vintage Plaza), listening to the rain and relaxing. Tim and I came down for a two-day get-away, time to relax and catch up on sleep without the kids. This morning we went to Powells and I added to my library with Deborah Newton’s Designing Knitwear (Powells link, Amazon link) and Ann Feitelson’s The Art of Fair Isle Knitting (Powells link, Amazon link) as well as looking at some others that I’ll put on my Christmas wish list. We also added some non-knitting books to the library of course!

Lunch at the Rogue brewpub, followed by a visit to Knit Purl, lots of lovely yarns, friendly service. I got some Baby Ull for a cardigan for my daughter that I’ll start after the New Year, it will be my first Fair Isle project - I’ve always been a little nervous of colourwork so I figured a size 3 cardigan was a good place to start. I also stopped in at the little needlework shop next door (The Playful Needle, no we address), also very friendly service, even though all I bought was a magnetic chart-holder for my needlework charts. Apparently they do blocking and make needlework into cushions, bags etc, so maybe I’ll do that with some of the needlepoint I’ve had languishing around the house for years, to finally get it into a form where it’s not just sitting in a cupboard.

Only one person knitting in the cafe where we had coffee; not many coffee shops around downtown apart from the ubiquitous Starbucks. And although I have nothing against Starbucks, I do like patronising the smaller places where possible. I must look on delocator before we go out tomorrow.

It’s still raining outside, but even so it’s time to venture out again.

Yup, there were a few glitches in the Madrona Fiber Arts registration system, but they seem to be cleared up now and on the second time around I got most of the classes I wanted. I’m doing the classes on knitting different shapes on double-pointed needles, double knitting, and intarsia. The latter two are with Lucy Neatby, I have one of her DVDs and like it so I was glad to get into her classes. I know nothing about Margaret Radcliffe, the instructor for knitting shapes, other than what I’ve read on the Madrona site.

I’ll hang around the rest of the time and watch people and go to the market etc. I’ve never actually been to a fiber arts festival before so I don’t know what to expect; fortunately I’m going with a couple of friends. It should be fun!

I finally finished the seed stitch swatch for TKGA Level 1. It’s hard to get an even fabric with no holes. I don’t know how many rows total I ripped back to redo because on holding it up to the light I could see some obvious hole. In the end, I found I had to consciously relax, and rotate the stitches on the needle after each stitch to get the right amount of yarn in the knit/purl/knit transitions. It’s still not perfect, but I think it’s as good as I’m going to get it. Tammy and Louisa did some quality control at our Ravelry knit meeting, which helped my sanity on getting it done. And as soon as I got home I put it in the folder, to make sure no little fingers or sharp claws get to it.

I’ll take a photo when it’s blocked and post it.

I signed up for TKGA’s Master Knitting Level 1. So far it’s been more absorbing than I expected, and I’m only doing the swatches! I’ll get to the questions and report later. I’ve been practising cast-ons and increases trying to get them to look right before doing the final swatch. In a way it’s a lot freer than knitting a real project, these little swatches don’t take long but they do take concentration.

Now I’m wondering whether I’m using the right yarn. The LYS I went into to get yarn only really had Mission Falls 1824 wool in a light-coloured worsted weight superwash, and it doesn’t seem to hold the stitch definition very well. And it looks horrible if I need to frog or tink it. I don’t have anything light-coloured in worsted weight in my stash; it’s all darker or double knitting weight. Or something other than wool, and I want to use superwash wool as it blocks up nicely.

My current plan is to knit a couple more swatches and see how they look after blocking, and if need be I’ll redo in something else. And at some stage I need to take some photos and post them and see if I can get comments on how to improve them before submitting…

I thought about it for a long time, and finally decided to set up a separate knitting blog. I’ll still cross-post to my other blog, but having a knitting blog gives me more freedom for obsessive posts that would likely bore non-knitters to tears.

It’s called Lauren’s Knitting due to a lack of imagination on my part.

I finally got my Ravelry invite today. I got on the waiting list about a month ago, so it didn’t take long. I spent a few minutes poking around, though I will have to be careful as it could prove to be an immense time-sink for me, with all the discussion about knitting and crochet. There’s even a group for KnitML there, which I hadn’t heard of before.

It’s interesting comparing Ravelry to Facebook, as well. Surface impressions: completely different crowd, they don’t ask for any information when you sign up except for an email address, username, and password. Of course, you can add info such as birthday or where you live to your profile, but it’s not needed. Lots of links to sites outside of Ravelry, thus the site feels much more open to the rest of the world than Facebook. And maybe because it’s more focussed, it will be more appealing long-term (there already seems to be quite a lot of Facebook ennui out there in the blogosphere).

If you’re a keen knitter or crocheter, don’t be put off by the fact you have to join a waiting list; it doesn’t take long to get the invite and it looks like a worthwhile resource. One neat item: the yarn listing includes people’s destash info.

Originally published on Anyway, my other blog.

Eve’s XML and knitting analogy got me thinking.

You can think of a written knitting pattern as being the schema, with a set of instructions, just like the schema’s content model. Then each knitted item you make that conforms to that knitting pattern is like the document instance that conforms to the schema. Schemas can be restrictive or allow lots of instance structure variations, as can knitting patterns. And, to tie it into my previous post on knitting and copyright, a schema can be copyrighted (and often is). The analogy does have a few problems when you start trying to figure out the relationship of the set of tags in a document instance and the content within those tags; if you think of the knit and purl stitches as being the elements, then the yarn would be the content. Except for, yarn can’t really be original in the same way as the content in an XML document can be. Some people may disagree when it comes to hand-painted yarns, of course.

Originally published on Anyway, my other blog.

There was quite a lot of discussion about copyright issues in the comments to my knitted cushion piece; this is an important enough subject that it deserves its own blog posting. Obligatory disclaimer here.

The issue was whether a knitting pattern can be copyrighted. I believe that the complete pattern with all the words can be copyrighted in the same way as all my other postings are copyrighted. If it’s original content that I created, and I haven’t assigned the copyright to anyone else, then I have the copyright. So the main question is, can the straightforward description of the stitches (i.e., the “k1, p1″ bit) be copyrighted? Mark claims it can’t, because you can’t copyright the design and stitches. A related issue is whether you can impose licensing conditions on someone making the article described in the pattern (in the case of the cushion I designed, giving attribution).

Traditionally knitting has been about people making variations on known ideas. Elizabeth Zimmerman, one of the knitting gurus, used the word “unvented” to describe techniques that she discovered. She was convinced that someone else had probably discovered the technique long ago, but not written it down, so what she was doing was re-inventing, or “unventing”. She also encouraged people to make variations on patterns, to make things their own. However, there are the legal aspects of copyright to consider. In the US, a knitting pattern falls under the Visual Arts category for copyright as long as it follows the basic rules. Copyright protects “original works of authorship” that are fixed in a tangible form of expression. In the UK, I assume knitting patterns would fall under the written work category, as it includes instruction manuals (a knitting pattern is arguably an instruction manual). For Canadian law, it’s easier to refer to the web site written by an IPR lawyer. From there I read Section 5(1) of the Copyright Act specifies that copyright subsists in every “original” literary, dramatic, musical and artistic work. So my cushion pattern, since it is original in that sense, does have copyright protection. Including the arrangement of the stitches (or the basic “k1, p1″ stuff). The stitch patterns on their own, the modules that I built the cushion pattern out of, which are traditional, aren’t copyrighted, of course. It’s my arrangement of them to form the cushion pattern that is.

The other question is what conditions I can impose on someone who wants to copy the pattern, or make articles from it. In my pattern, I specifically said people shouldn’t copy the pattern, but should link to it instead. And that they can use the pattern to make articles, even for sale, as long as they give me attribution for the pattern. Most free knitting patterns contain the condition that the person not make the article for sale, but I decided I didn’t object to that.

From all my reading, it’s perfectly allowable (note I’m not saying anything about the moral aspects here) to impose such conditions on anyone wishing to copy the pattern or use it to make a cushion. You should not simply assume that because you have permission to make a copy of the sweater or afghan by following the pattern, you also have permission to deal with that work in any way, for example by selling what you made. In the knitting industry, it’s very common for people to say that the resulting article may not be sold, and this is basically a contract that the knitter agrees to in using the pattern.

In fact, the industry norm is that items made from any pattern that the knitter buys or downloads (even free patterns) may only be made for the knitter or as gifts. So in the absence of a copyright notice on the pattern, it could be argued that those would be the implied conditions of use. This is not universally accepted; here’s the starting point to one long discussion I read where this point was argued back and forth. I note, however, that even the person arguing that the knitted articles should be able to be sold also argued that credit should be given to the designer.

References

http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#wwp
http://www.copyright.gov/register/va-examples.html
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/copy
http://www.girlfromauntie.com/copyright/
http://knitty.com/ISSUEfall03/FEATcopyright.html
http://community.livejournal.com/knitting/8179698.html

Disclaimer

I am not a lawyer, I don’t know any lawyers personally who deal with the issue of copyright in knitting, and thus although I have read quite a lot about the subject, any detailed questions you may have should be taken to someone who is properly qualified. And all of this legal stuff does vary with the country/state/province you live in. Most of my reading has been based on Canadian and US law; the laws in other countries may vary considerably. I do hope that people who know more about the subject than I do will comment.

Originally published on Anyway, my other blog.

A friend in England got married, so I decided to knit her a cushion. Herewith the pictures, and the pattern, for those readers of my blog interested in my knitting posts.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was a few months pregnant when Tim asked when I was going to knit some bootees (aka booties) for the baby. I wondered why he hadn’t asked for the first child, he answered that he hadn’t known I could knit back then. Fair enough.

So I got some yarn in time for the trip to Hawaii, thinking it would be a good chance to get some knitting in. I tried two patterns, one from a book of my great-aunt’s, and one on the web; I preferred the web pattern (they’re the bootees on the right). Once the baby arrived of course, we rediscovered why we hadn’t used the bootees we had with our first child; they don’t stay on the feet! Socks or outfits with feet built-in are much more practical. Although I did discover that if you put socks on first, the bootees do stay on longer.

The results of the Hawaii knitting are here, showcased on a tablecloth I got in Hawaii…

The jacket is a seamless cabled jacket, knitted in Baby Soft by Lana Gatto from this pattern. The only slightly tricky bit was making the increases work into the cable pattern properly, that required a piece of paper and a certain amount of calculating. Other than that, a reasonably easy knit and the yarn is lovely and soft. I just hope she spends as much (or more) time wearing it as I did knitting it!

Originally published on Anyway, my other blog.

Some time ago I promised our son that I would knit him a sweater. He picked the pattern, and the yarn, picking something (of course) in a fine yarn that took seemingly forever to finish. However, finish it I did, eventually.

The pattern is Alice Starmore’s Fife, from the Fishermen’s Sweaters book. It comes in one size only, for an eight-year-old, so it’s a little big on him right now, but won’t be by next winter. There’s a picture at the virtual yarns web site, which is a show case for the Starmore designs (and sells kits and yarn). I knitted my version in Cleckheaton Machine Wash 5-ply Crepe, which I got in Australia last time we were there. They don’t seem to have the same colour any more for that yarn, it’s colour 2181 (pictured in a different yarn). For once in my life I got perfect gauge on the recommended needles! Both stitch and row gauges matched, which made knitting a lot easier - no calculating changes in increases and decreases to match a differing row gauge.

So here’s the sweater, nicely laid out on my new wooly board (great for drying knitted sweaters), photographed on a nice spring day in our back yard.

Originally published on Anyway, my other blog.

I’ve been knitting for most of my life, except for a long gap in the 1990s. I took it up again about 3 years ago and, due in no little part to Eve’s encouragement, am going to start showing off some of what I’ve done and am doing. Maybe blogging will even encourage me to finish things sooner - I tend to do most of a piece but not get around to finishing it for some time.

All that being said, here’s my first blog entry on the subject of crafts, my version of item 5443 in a pattern book called Inspiration 75. One would think that a book that calls itself “inspiration” could come up with inspired names for the patterns within it, rather than just numbers. In the book the top looks like the image on the left (note the link leads to an online retailer for the pattern books and yarn; I have no idea whether they’re any good or not but they did have all the images). Instead of the recommended yarn, I used Schoeller’s Micro-Cablé in colour 23 (yet another uninspired name). The link there is to Wise Needle, a great site if you want to figure out which yarns to substitute for that hard-to-find yarn from Europe. Tim took the photo of the results on a mini-golf course in Maui, hence the “shot on location” look.

Originally published on Anyway, my other blog.