This is my Learning Sweater. Not only is it the first sweater I ever knit (summer, 2001) it is the first thing I ever knit. The yarn is called No Dye Lot, and the creativity of its name extends to pretty much everything else about it. At 100% acrylic, it was singularly unpleasant to knit with, but at the time I didn’t know any better. The three enormous skeins I bought to complete the sweater came to a whopping total of nine bucks.

There were a lot of things I didn’t know about knitting when I started this sweater, but the biggest one was how to choose a pattern. The pattern from my Learning Sweater came from the same book that taught me how to knit, and that book was such a smashing success that I figured its patterns would be just as wonderful. Oops. There might be a person in the world for whom this pullover is just the thing, but I am not that person, for the following reasons:

1. Ribbing. My body does not look good in ribbed edges. Those sleeve cuffs? Yucko. That bottom edge? No way. That collar? The yarn is so dense that the collar actually stands up on its own.
2. Sleeve holes. Raglan sleeves are fine. Drop-shoulders are okay. Sleeve caps? Maybe. But these? These seams don’t know what they want to be. Part raglan, part caps, they inhabit some freakish nether-region where their only neighbors are mutant garments from garage sales. When I last put this on (something you will never see me do) it accentuated my chest in a way that was . . . well, wrong, just wrong!
3. Increases. See the way the sweater sort of balloons out just above the ribbing at the waist? And on the sleeves? Increases are a common technique when you want part of a garment to be loose while another is snug. This is fine for some people, but it makes me look like an idiot. I’m a skinny guy, so any kind of. . . er, enlargement tends to stand out. Loose-fitting shirts are fine, but puffy sweaters? No, no, and no.

The truth is that I knew I’d never wear the sweater in public the moment I finished sewing the last seam. And that moment was a full three and a half months from the afternoon that I cast on the first stitch. I did try the sweater on, but the horror that stared back at me in the mirror only strengthened my conviction.

But I’m not the least bit sorry that I knit this sweater.

The original question that started this thread was, what inspires me in a sweater design? What draws me to one pattern and not another? Well, I like projects that are long, that require a committment, that present a challenge, that will teach me something that I didn’t know before I started, and whose rewards are complex, enduring, and continually unfolding. This pretty much goes for all of my favorite things: novel writing, long-distance running, being married. I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, but it’s those things that made me choose a sweater as my first real project, why I saw it through to the end, and why I haven’t tossed it into the trash or handed it over to my cat.

Oh, I also like to knit things with cables. Lately, anyway.

A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed for a five-minute radio piece by a student from the journalism school at UC Berkeley. The piece aired last Thursday on KALX-FM, and it’s now archived on my radio page. If two clicks feels like too much right now, you can just click here once to listen to it.

“Throwing My Yarn, Part 3” is on its way, just as soon as I take some pictures. In the meantime, It’s time for another round of Google’s Greatest Hits, in which I take search terms that people have used to find my site and make fun of them (click here to read round one). This time the theme is How Did That Lead You to My Site? And just so you know, today’s post is rated R. For example:

slave husband looking under my skirt

What I love about this phrase is that it sounds like a complaint. “That slave husband! He’s always looking under my skirt! Why can’t I get a real husband?” Even more interesting is that someone thinks that their husband needs to be a slave in order to look under his/her wife’s skirt. I mean, come on. The average husband doesn’t even need to be asked. But what did this person find on my site, I wonder? A pattern for a skirt that you don’t need to lift in order to look under? One that comes with a chain for the slave husband? Sorry, don’t have any of those here.

how to to ask a boy out

So cute! I know the repetition of “to” was probably a typo, but it provides a note of uncertainty that reminds me of when I was, oh, thirteen years old. I want to find this person and give them a hug. I’ve never addressed this issue, either on my blog or in ask yarn boy, but for the discerning eye, this site is full of advice about where the good boys are, and how to get them.

free crochet instructions for a toddlers bikini

Okay, I can see how they found yarnboy.com with that, but . . . eeeewwwwwwwww. In more ways that I can count!

stuck up girlie dog clothes

I don’t even know what these are. Clothes for a snobby girl dog? Dog clothes that aren’t sufficiently masculine? Is it the dog that’s stuck up, or the clothes? Is this a style that I don’t know about? I may be in my mid-thirties, but I didn’t think I was that out of it. Sheesh. I’m sorry, but no patterns here for those, either. And while we’re on the subject of looking in the wrong place:

i and my wife we looked for a woman with photo to do trio sexual

Sounds like a poorly-translated confession, doesn’t it? When you plug this term into Google, my site comes up on the second page. If Google is a popularity contest, then I am hanging out with one hell of a crowd. But wait! Here’s another phrase that finds yarnboy.com on the second page, and I’m thrilled that someone found their way to my site with it. I must be doing a good job.

lovable husband

The shoulder is one of the most complicated pieces of machinery in the body. As a ball and socket joint, it is able to both lift and lower stuff, and even rotate at the same time. The shoulder has more flexibility and a greater range of motion than the body’s other ball and socket joint, the hip. Its components work in concert to absorb the all of the forces involved in flexing, extending, and throwing. The shoulder is home to seven muscles, three of which attach the scapula (or shoulder blade) to the rib cage. The other four make up the rotator cuff.

This sophisticated equipment has been on my mind lately, because I used to sleep with my right arm slipped underneath my pillow, and my shoulder no longer appreciates that position. The only other time it hurts is when I’m knitting. I have a runner’s approach to pain, which means that I endure it until it goes away. And it usually does go away——except when it doesn’t. And this is one of those times.

I knit with the English method, so my arm moves a lot on every stitch. There is no doubt in my mind that this is the culprit, because when I knit with my arm wedged between my side and an immovable object, like an armrest, or my cat, I’m forced to use only my wrist to move the yarn. That doesn’t hurt my shoulder at all, but it’s still not very good news.

So, I’m going to take a little break from knitting. I’m going to catch up on my New York Review of Books subscription, which has been stacking up on my reading chair. I’m going to reread Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, start David Mitchell’s new novel, finish season five of Six Feet Under on DVD, and write the third installment of Throwing My Yarn . Oh, I’ll be finishing work on my own novel, too.

And just in case you’re worried that I won’t have any material for this blog, I’m also going to attempt, for the third time, to teach myself Continental. I’m a fast knitter with English, so Continental always makes me feel like I’m learning to walk all over again. Especially when I work purl stitches. If anyone out there has successfully made the leap from English to Continental, I’d sure appreciate hearing about it.

And so would my shoulder.