As a new parent, one of my most common activities is looking for evidence that my brain is still working. There isn’t much of it, to be sure. The only book I’ve finished since M and S arrived is The Best American Comics 2006; all of my Harper’s from the last five months are sitting, unread, in a pile on my nightstand; I let my subscription to The New York Review of Books lapse, unintentionally at first, and then quite intentionally. I’m incapable of doing the most basic arithmetic in my head, I’m overly reliant on my spell checker, I’ve left my grocery list at home on at least three different occasions, and were it not for union protection, I’d probably have been fired from my job by now. My twins are creating a bazillion new neurons every minute, but I’m losing them at the same rate. At least the ones that aren’t propped up by caffeine.

Which makes this a perfect time to learn a new knitting skill! This is what I’m telling myself, because if I can learn a new skill, it’ll show that at least some part of my cerebral cortex is still operating at pre-twin levels. So what technique have I decided to tackle?  The one in which you actually take a scissors to your knitting and cut it into pieces. To this end, I’ve just completed the knitting portion of Eunny Jang’s Deep-V Argyle Vest.

Now, in my mind, steeking isn’t an actual knitting techinque. It’s an anti-technique. Like committing suicide by holding one’s breath, there are certain things that humans are simply not able to do. Steeking seems like it ought to be in this category. I mean, the photograph above represents weeks of two-strand color work. I’m supposed to cut that up? Crikey!

The purple stitches are the reinforcements for the future edges of the v-neck. There are three more sets; both armholes and the back of the neck. They were done with the stiffest, stickiest wool I could find in my stash. Eunny Jang’s instructions are fantastic, and she’s done everything one can do to assuage the fears of the novice steeker, but I’m still not ready. So I’m going to knit a quick swatch, set the steeks, and cut. Let’s see what happens.

Holycrap, it actually worked. Z even tugged on it to see if any ends would come loose. They didn’t. But does this mean I’m ready to cut the steeks in the actual sweater? We’re about to find out. Meanwhile, as a stalling technique, I’ve looked up “steek” in my Oxford English Dictonary, and the first definition is quite revealing:

1. a cask of wine

Clearly, this definition has everything to do with knitting. If you’ve ever done any steeking yourself, you know that it’s a piece of advice for how to approach your first cut. I’m not a big fan of wine, though. I’ll be stiffening my resolve with something else.

So I’ve been a low-level website designer for a little while now. By “low-level” I mean that I’ve worked mostly for friends, or friends of friends, and I’ve told myself that my development skills weren’t thorough enough to be a “real” web designer.

A couple of months ago, I was brainstorming with a friend about various ways to make more money, now that I have two little ones to support. I’ve been working  part-time as an admin in the Ob/Gyn department at UCSF for a while now, and while the health insurance is awesome, the paycheck is . . . well, you know how that goes. Anyway, my friend asked me about the websites I’ve done, so I told her.

“You’re not doing this for money right now?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“You’re an idiot,” she said.

Okay, so she didn’t really call me an idiot, but nevertheless, my idiocy is ending now. I’m officially introducing . I make websites that don’t mess around. If you like the way Yarn Boy looks, and you like the rest of my work, then pass on the word. You’ll be doing my twins a good turn.

WARNING! I officially retracted this endorsement a few weeks after writing it. See the retraction here. My nerdly excitement was so endearing, though, that I’m keeping this post around as an object lesson. Read on.

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If you are both a parent and a knitter, and your status as a knitter precedes your status as a parent, then you are familiar with this phenomenon: as soon as your child(ren) arrived, all of the objects in your house mysteriously rearranged themselves. Nothing was where you left it, and nothing stayed where you put it. Not your house keys, not your wallet, not your glasses, not your underwear, and certainly not your shoes. If you were lucky enough to have some time to knit, then you probably discovered that your notions had suffered the same fate.

I was never much good at keeping all of my notions in one place anyway, but as soon as Miss M and Mr. S arrived, my notions bag somehow emptied itself out. My needle gauge ended up under the bed, my stitch markers were in the bathroom, and my scissors . . . well, I won’t tell you where I found my scissors. It’s enough to say that every time I managed to sit down to knit, I had to get up another five or six times to find whatever stupid notion I’d lost.

Enter The Knit Kit. Back in February, Z discovered an advertisement for The Knit Kit on Ravelry, and she quickly discerned that it combined two of my favorite things: knitting notions and well-designed gadgetry (she also discerned that I wouldn’t want to share it once I had it, so she wisely ordered two of them). And she was correct.

I don’t usually use this space to shamelessly plug other people’s products (only my own), but The Knit Kit has saved me from wasting my precious knitting time. Since our Knit Knits arrived in the mail, I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve sat down to knit and suddenly thought, “Oh crap! Where are my sciss——” or “Oh crap! I forgot to grab my stitch mar——” only to follow it up with, “Wait! I have it right here! My life is not ruined after all!”

It’s not just the convenience, though. The designers of The Knit Kit gave it a few strokes of genius, not the least of which is the fact that the lock on the row counter actually works, and the little dials for the numbers are recessed, which means that tossing the Knit Kit into your notions bag won’t somehow magically advance you five rows ahead in your pattern.

Now, in case you’re wondering whether I’ve taken money to write this post, let me tell you my three complaints. Firstly, there is one notion missing from The Knit Kit: a gauge checker. It’s a little unfair to complain about this, though, since I’m not really sure where they would have put it, or how it would have fit. Number two: the pink accent is . . . well, pink. Never mind the gender issue, the number of locations that one can get away with the color pink is few and far between. The Knit Kit’s pink isn’t offensive, mind you, but it’s just . . . pink.

And number three? The Knit Kit bears an unfortunate resemblance, in appearance and feel, to another convenient carrying case:

But maybe this isn’t a criticism. Nothing wrong with being associated with sexual liberation, right? Which isn’t all you’ll be supporting if you buy The Knit Kit; you’ll be supporting intelligent design. The real kind.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve done one of these, mostly because the search phrases that pop up on my stats page get pretty repetitive after a while. It looks like March was the month that some really . . . um, interesting people found their way on to the ‘net, and there were so many humdingers and head scratchers that I couldn’t resist doing another round. For those of you who are new-ish readers, you can check out the earlier installations of Google’s Greatest Hits here. As you read these, please keep the following important things in mind:

1. People——actual, real-live human beings——typed these search phrases into a search engine.
2. The resulting searches turned up a link to this website.
3. The people doing those searches clicked on that link.

So! Let’s get going!

the good influnce that barbie has on girls

I’m not sure how this phrase led to yarnboy.com, but I know why the person came here: the search didn’t turn up any other websites. When I was a kid, the friends I had who were girls cut off their Barbies’ hair, pulled off their heads, gave them tattoos with permanent markers, and mangled them in ways too disturbing to describe here. The good influence? An opportunity to destroy an unattainable body image!

what to get a lesbian knitter

Easy! Lesbian yarn, lesbian needles, and a book of lesbian patterns. Why is this even a question?

if my son shows many feminine traits is he gay
can my son wear a skirt

Sigh . . . I’ve addressed these before, and they always break my heart. Anxiety about the sexual orientation of one’s progeny shows up in surprising amounts on my stats page every month. I picture some poor, anxious parent typing at their computer late at night after spending another evening watching their son dance around the living room in a skirt. The answer to both questions is, of course, yes. But speaking of skirts:

husband lifts my skirt
husband likes lifting my skirt

This doesn’t really strike me as a problem, given the number of husbands who prefer to lift skirts that aren’t on their wives. But if it is a problem, why not just ask your husband to stop? Seems much easier than looking for a solution on the internet. Or wearing pants all the time. But enough of this serious stuff! Let’s hear from the Department of Totally Random Google Searches:

nimoy s glove in invasion of the body snatchers

You know what’s really scary? I know exactly what that glove looks like without having to look it up. That’s scarier than the end of the movie itself, which, as you might recall, ends on a much bleaker note than the original 1956 version. Or maybe you don’t recall, which isn’t a bad thing. For you normal people who can’t remember exactly what Leonard Nimoy was wearing every time he appeared on a TV or movie screen, here’s a picture from Invasion of the Body Snatchers:

Now here’s what’s really scary: apparently, someone was looking for a pattern for that glove.

really knit stuff

Someone is either looking for stuff that’s really knit (as opposed to all that fake knit stuff) or wants to, you know, really knit stuff. It actually kind of makes me nervous, because I thought I was really knitting stuff, and now I think I might have been faking it all along.

cat vs deanna

This is either the smackdown of the century, or someone is contemplating a really unfortunate decision. If it’s the latter, well . . . I have to say that I completely sympathize. My cat is fourteen years old, and she’s outlasted all of my romantic relationships, with the happy exception of my current one (ie. my marriage). But if it’s the smackdown? Let the fur fly!

knitting won

So there was more than one mano-a-mano on my stats page last month. But in cat vs deanna, at least we know who’s fighting. I’m glad knitting came out on top in this one, but I’m dying to know who it was going up against. Maybe it was this person:

how do i stop poking my finger when i knit?