Somewhat later, after responding to toddler demands for a second breakfast…

I’ve finished the main knitting on the Baby Ull roses cardigan. I want to soak and block the body before cutting the armhole steeks, to see how much of the “embossing” effect I can get rid of. And at the moment I don’t have the energy for all that and then the finishing, so it’s resting. In the meantime I cast on for the Niebling Yahoo group KAL, the birch catkins doily. It’s reasonably easy to knit so far (mind you, I’m only up to round 31); all the hints the group had have helped with that. I find I’m getting into the “one more round” trap of wanting to keep knitting, just to watch it grow. I can see why knitting Niebling doilies seems to be addictive, judging by the people on the list. Ours is not really a doily house, so I have no idea what to do with it once I have it finished. I guess that makes me a process knitter, at least for these.

Susanna Hansson is coming to town at the end of September, and I’ve signed up for the workshop. It calls for “Knitters with experience making mittens and doing complex colour work”; given I’ve only done the one stranded piece and never knitted mittens, I guess I should knit a pair before then! I’m thinking of the endpaper mitts, or maybe the new ones from Knitting Daily, depending on what I have in my stash.

Tom Bihn bag

Tom Bihn bag, closed

Just the right size for my assorted bits and pieces, fits over my shoulder easily, and is hard-wearing.

For my knitting I treated myself to a Namaste pleather (i.e., fake leather) bag. I think I would have preferred the turquoise, but the stand at the marketplace only had green and pink and pink is Definitely Not My Colour. This is the Laguna in lime, it has lots of room for everything I need and enough pockets to keep things usefully separated without having too much choice to put things in.

Namaste Laguna knitting bag

I added to my collection of needles; after I frogged the tiger hat I decided that maybe some bamboo needles would be useful for colourwork, to help keep the stitches stretched the right amount on the needles. I also fondled some of the gorgeous glass needles and specialty wooden needles and crochet hooks (the ones from Asciano made out of rosewood were especially interesting) but ultimately couldn’t justify the cost to myself. I noticed though that the most useful sizes were gone by Friday afternoon, so lots of other people obviously could.

It was fun sitting in the knitting area outside the marketplace, watching people carry out their bags of goodies and then dive back in for more; I got a certain amount of knitting done while chatting to people, talking about yarns and colour choices. I’ve decided I’ve got a reasonable eye for matching colours although I wouldn’t call myself artistic; I often manage to come up with ideas for colours to go with some yarn that others might not think of but that seem to work. Mind you, it is hard with some of the multi-coloured yarns around, since what they look like in the skein and what they look like knitted up can be two quite different things.

After a while DD woke up and I amused her and the rest of the knitters (though probably not the other people in the cafe) by reading Derek the Dinosaur, a story about a knitting dinosaur who’s the hero of the day when the ice age arrives. The link there is to an Australian bookstore; all the US and UK ones I tried only had books that were inordinately expensive or no longer available. And that’s the version I’ve got anyway, so it seemed appropriate. The pictures of dinosaurs wrapped up in woolly hats and sweaters are awfully cute. In some countries the title is “Derek the Knitting Dinosaur”; that’s what it’s listed under in the Vancouver Public Library, for example.

We talked about this and that, including the problems you find when you renovate an old house (discovering live electrical wires in the walls and support posts that aren’t themselves supported by anything seem to be common issues). Some of the others are going to the Fibre Fest March 7-8, but I got enough of a fix at Madrona (not to mention spending enough money).

And then it was time to go, back out into the sunshine, one of those rare, warm, February days.

And one day maybe I’ll have an excuse to make something out of some of the more exotic yarns there. Bamboo, or maybe that Bouton d’Or Ksar, a really soft yarn with camel and wool. It was gorgeous!

Then down to Country Beads for all the people making the Ice Queen shawl (no, not me, I have enough on my project list right now), followed by coffee. We even got lucky in the weather - grey and gloomy of course, but no rain. Which is all you can hope for at this time of year.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.