Episode 27: Success! Actual, definable success!

It’s been a long year, in terms of success. Actually, it’s been a long life. As a young, competitive musician, success was laid out for you in exacting terms: Play well, humiliate that annoying twelve-year-old with Beethoven or Mendelssohn, and when you do fuck up, don’t run off the stage while using your concert attire as a hankie. Snot is really obvious on black clothes.

But ever since I realized that the delicious tears of twelve-year-olds are not enough to sustain a career, it’s been a bit tough to nail down exactly what makes me feel like I’m doing well in life. As practice children, my dogs often make me feel like I’m going to be the kind of mother who gets regularly ridiculed on the local news. (“After the children had been located doing what they described as “playing Firefly” in the Guns & Knives section of the Walmart*, the Channel 5 news team caught up with their mother, who was holding up the line at the liquor store next door while she attempted to convince her credit card company that $500 is not a suspicious amount of money to spend on gin.”)

*Walmart has this, right? I assume that’s what they put in when they decimated the craft section, which was coincidentally right around the time that I stopped going to Walmart.

The point is that knitting is usually the thing that makes me feel successful these days, mostly since I realized that birthdays, Christmas, and other gift-giving occasions are competitions that can be won or lost, and I can be a pretty serious contender given the time and supplies. (Except for MDMA Mario. Sorry, Corey.) One of my greatest motivations for tackling this project — other than money and the fear of having to show a seamstress my boobs — has been the conviction that I can somehow “win” at weddings if I’m just crafty enough. None of my other planning skills are remarkable in the least; for instance, I’m pretty sure I scared off the terribly nice manager at that awesome venue by being a bit over-enthusiastic in an email follow-up. She probably refers to me to her coworkers as “that creepy girl who uses awkward smileys in emails. What is this, 1997? Who does that? Also, her shoes were stupid.*”

*I have been informed that normal people don’t usually internalize other people’s unarticulated judgements to this degree. I’m working on it with my therapist, Dr. Mcgillicuddy**.

**Just kidding, I don’t actually drink that. It’s disgusting. Unfortunately, none of my go-to boozes have advanced degrees.

So, what was I talking about? Right, success. I did it! I succeeded, and not by some made-up hypothetical standard that I set for myself to maintain my top-notch self esteem! I actually did something right:

Yep, the first panel of the skirt is completed and is actually the correct size. I did run out of pins about halfway through blocking it and had to finish with needles, but let’s focus on the positive here: I’m 1/4 of the way done with the skirt! Except that’s actually not even true because this was one of the front panels, which are naturally a lot shorter than the back ones that include the train. So more like 1/6, generously.

Fuck it, I’m proud of myself.

Episode 26: All the Bacon and Eggs You Have.

Knitters are fucking sexy.  –Nick Offerman (Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation)

I’ve had more than my fair share of great nights lately, but last night was more than a little bit of amazing. We heard Nick Offerman talk about his fantastic, hilarious marriage to Megan Mullally (they’re a boring couple: they sit around watching HGTV, doing jigsaw puzzles, and snorting piles of cocaine) and how impressed he would have been if a woman he was dating had knit the dress she was wearing. Immediately before the show we had gone to look at a reception venue that we both lo-o-ooooved, and I chose to take Offerman’s tenuously relevant comments as a sign.

You guys, this venue. I don’t know if venues are supposed to be like the dress, where you’re not supposed to show people pictures before the wedding. Frankly, I’m so over the moon in love with this place that I don’t give a shit. If you’re so inclined, you can check out some strangers’ wedding photos here. What’s hard to tell from those pictures is that the ceiling is very light blue and the walls are burgundy. The floor, which is unfinished at the moment, is going to be done by the end of the year — and they’re thinking about staining it green. That’s right, the venue is decking itself out in my exact fucking wedding colors. 

Actually, I just found a good picture:

I have a giant lady-boner for this place, if you couldn't tell.

 

It’s not completely perfect. It’s still under construction; they don’t have air conditioning and likely won’t by next June. There’s a chance we won’t be able to use Black Dog, our favorite restaurant who agreed to cater, because they don’t have a catering license. Our guests might pass out from the sheer awesomeness of the venue. But when the universe starts blasting a message through a megaphone, I fucking listen, and this one is coming through loud and clear.

Earlier this week, wedding planning was giving me ridiculous anxiety and making me feel like breaking a wall with my face. Now I’m refreshed, renewed, and secure in the knowledge that every time I work on my dress, I’ll hear Nick Offerman’s giggle in my head. Let’s fucking  do this.

Episode 25: Try, Try Again

When it comes to this project, I’ve been defining success in terms of action. As long as I’m doing something — no matter how misguided or improbably correct — it still counts as successfully working on the dress. (Note that my definition of success will be much more rigidly binary come June 15, 2013; either I’ll be wearing a dress I made myself or I won’t be.) It’s sort of like being a writer: The only thing you have to do in order to succeed at being a writer (not succeed as a writer, mind you) is to write. For the last month, I’ve been riding a wave of success even while failing miserably by any standard other than the vague, easy one I’ve set for myself.

After a not-so-minor panic attack induced by seeing the dress pattern laid out all over and around my bedroom, I took a few days, nursed a bottle of gin, and regrouped. I tackled the first piece that looked like a shape I could manage (another rhombotenuse!), spent days extrapolating the lace pattern out on graph paper so that I could increase in pattern, and then I successfully knit for a few weeks.

Now we come to the point where I complain about something ridiculously specific and attempt to make it engaging to my non-knitter readership. In this case, I’m defining success by pageviews.

Math Sucks: Why Blocking Is the Devil’s Curse

By Antoinette Pomata

Math has never been my strongest subject, which is the least I could possibly say about that. It’s why I flunked dropped out of music halfway through college; I had assumed that as long as I could read the notes that were written by people who understood math, I didn’t have to understand the math myself. It turns out in knitting, as with music, asking Beethoven to dumb it down for you will only get you so far.

Sorry, that was awful. Let me try again.

I almost always knit from patterns written by other people, because it means they’ve done the math for me. When I started this project (specifically, this iteration of the project), I had no idea how much math is involved in the creation of a garment. The fact that I’m making the lace in the shapes of the sewing pattern — shapes that would otherwise just be cut out of fabric, but now have to be freeformed by increasing and decreasing strategically — turns the math from geometry into calculus. The big problem with knitting math is that it’s impossible to make a fraction of a stitch. For example, let me show you my work from the first piece of the skirt:

Based on the blocked* swatch: 32 stitches x 32 stitches = 6″ x 6″

32/6 = 5.333 stitches per inch

5.333 rounds down to 5, because you can’t make 1/3 of an increase

5 /= 5.333, as evidenced here:

That’s the pattern for the piece of dress I was making, covered in plastic wrap (so that the paper didn’t get wet), covered in a clearly inadequate amount of lace.

*Quick brief on blocking for non-knitters: When you knit lace, it comes out all lumpy and scrunched and fucked up. To make it look like normal lace instead of a toddler’s cat’s cradle, you run it under the sink for a couple of seconds, squish it between a couple of towels to partially dry it, and then pin it to a surface — in this case, my guest bed — in the shape you want it to be. Once it dries, it should hold its shape. As you can see, no amount of enthusiastic pinning is going to unfuck this one.

So obviously my math was bad, but the problem is I don’t know how to fix it. To my embarrassment, I enlisted my fiancé to help me with my homework; at lunch, we (he) plotted out the math for the next piece I was going to attempt. That was before I had attempted to block the rhombotenuse, which means he was banking on my math for that one being correct. Which, as we’ve already covered, it decidedly ain’t.

The important thing is, as long as I’m working on the dress, I haven’t failed. Even if I have to make that first piece over again, which I undoubtedly will, unless I stop moving forward in some capacity I’m still succeeding. So tonight I’ll go home and make pouty faces at the fiancé until he agrees to let me cheat off of his math, and we’ll work on unfucking this thing together.

Odds that I’ll still be working on the dress in the car on the way to the ceremony in 14 months: 10-1.

Episode 24: My Mentality

When I first started the project: Knitting your own wedding dress is a lot like building your own computer. Not very many people can do it, but with the right expertise, it can be more rewarding than buying it pre-made.

After failing the first attempt: Knitting a wedding dress is like building a computer before the Internet. Nobody really knows what you’re doing, including you.

While assembling the sewing pattern I bought: Knitting a wedding dress is like building a functioning jet engine. Not an advisable DIY project.

That's a king-sized mattress.

After assembling the sewing pattern: Knitting a wedding dress is like knitting a functional jet engine. Fucking impossible.

Episode 23: A Breakthrough, And the Nazis Love Me!

First of all, guys, we have to talk about something. A while ago I mentioned briefly that one of my (many) side projects is an afghan using Barbara Walker’s mosaic knitting technique, and that her book of mosaic knitting patterns is about 50% normal, pretty designs like stars and circles and stuff and 50% swastikas. I thought it was pretty random and funny enough to mention offhandedly, and I didn’t think much of it until I saw that four people yesterday alone found my blog by searching for swastika knitting patterns.

In fact, these are the top five search terms that bring people here:

What the hell, people?! Why has my blog become a haven for Nazi knitters? Why is this happening to me? I just wanted to knit a wedding dress…

On that front, commenter Sarah suggested that I try using a pattern to fill in some of those enormous question mark-shaped holes in my dress-making plan. I don’t know why the hell this never occurred to me before, but it took about 5 minutes of Googling to find this gorgeous, perfect pattern:

I’m so excited about this, I spent the entire day biting my nails, giggling quietly, and waiting for the minute I would get to go home and start knitting.

However.

I don’t sew. I wish I did; friends and family keep encouraging me to. I picked up knitting/crocheting as a way to keep my hands busy while watching TV, which meant it was a pretty social (well, for me) thing to do. Sewing, at least machine sewing, requires time in isolation with a loud machine, so I never picked it up. That means I’ve never learned to read a sewing pattern. And holy shit, you guys, they are INSANE.

This one is 82 pages long. EIGHTY TWO PAGES of strange, foreign symbols and lines. I bought it as a printable pattern, which was apparently kind of dumb because when you buy them as a book the pattern comes as this huge transparent sheet that you’re supposed to put on top of your fabric before you cut it. By contrast, a knitting pattern for an article of clothing is usually 2-4 pages long and comes with a nice little line drawing to show you what the dimensions are supposed to be. I guess I was just expecting a line drawing, maybe with some arrows or something, and helpful brackets explaining how long each piece should be. That, it turns out, is totally not what sewing patterns are.

This is not at all what my sewing pattern looks like.

So stay tuned for next time, when I hijack a room of my house and tape 82 pages together on the floor, then attempt to decipher it! Exciting! Fun! Not at all intimidating!

Episode 22: Halp

Everything I know about wedding dress construction I’ve learned from watching Say Yes to the Dress, which is remarkably non-technical in its treatment of the subject, or from poring over pages and pages of Google Image results for lace wedding dresses. I get really close to my monitor, squint really hard, and try to find the seams.

Here’s the thing about professional wedding dress designers: I think they’ve evolved past the point of visible seams. Every damn dress I find looks as though it was assembled by making a model stand very still while the designer hand-weaves the lace around her.

That leaves me squinting really hard at pictures like this, muttering “Hmm…well, I guess they might have…no…huh…HOW THE HELL DID THEY DO THIS?”

BY MAGIC??

I’ve been knitting this large rectangle, which was hypothetically going to be the back/sweep train part of the dress. A few days ago it occurred to me that when I made my ridiculous hobo toga dress (and turned myself into a human pincushion), pleating the fabric of this rectangle and fitting it inside the other skirt piece where they met at the butt area didn’t look completely awful. However, bedsheets are not the same as knit cotton lace in so many ways, including thickness. Following this theory, I tried folding the piece I’m working on like I’d done with the sheet and wound up with a bundle of fabric the size of my Cairn terrier.

Nobody tell Pnina about this.

As you can tell by the expression on Kaylee’s face, that’s not a great look. So, to counteract the terrier-butt-bunching syndrome, I started gradually decreasing my rectangle.

AND THEN I FREAKED RIGHT THE FUCK OUT.

There’s something about changing from a nice comforting shape like a rectangle to a new, scary shape like a freestyle rhombotenuse (or, as I’ve been informed, an “isosceles trapezoid” for those of you who passed middle-school geometry) that induces full-blown panic in me. It happened before, when I started to decrease the original skirt; suddenly it hit me that I’m flying by the seat of my pants, and those pants might have a small dog attached to them.

So here I go, back to peering at 200 x 500 pixel blurry waterstamped images, saying “Well now, I think I know how to make a dress do that, but I don’t think I can quite pull it off.”

This picture was snapped moments before the model unhinged her jaw and devoured an entire craft services table.

That one’s kind of drastic, but almost all modern lace wedding dresses are done in the mermaid or fit-and-flare style, which hugs the hips and then juts out mid-thigh. Maybe that’s a sexy look if you want to emphasize your hips — if you’re not, say, ridiculously Italian, a genetic trait that allows every outfit from a burlap sack to a sandwich board to emphasize your hips. It’s a shape I think I could figure out how to make using strategic decreases and increases, but I would have to eat nothing but pencil shavings and red pepper flakes for the next 16 months in order to avoid looking like an amateur’s first attempt at artisanal sausage-making.

(I’ll have you know I just spent 20 minutes attempting to use the clone tool in Gimp to put Strong Mad in a lace gown to illustrate my fear of what I’d look like in mermaid lace. I have been defeated — in more ways than one.)

Once again, I feel stuck; I honestly don’t know what to do to my rectangle to transform it into a Magic Natural-Waist Dress With Sweep Train, Sausage on the Side Please. I guess I’d better keep watching trashy TV and squinting at Google until I get my Bridal Fashion degree in the mail.

Not About the Dress: Colors

As I’ve mentioned before, these last seven months of wedding planning (only 17 more to go!) have contained quite a bit more zen than I was expecting. Really, I shouldn’t be that surprised; instead of subscribing to the evil Knot, I’ve surrounded myself with wedding resources like A Practical Wedding, where maintaining sanity in the face of a huge life decision is emphasized over stuff like bedazzled chair covers. That’s not to say that I haven’t had my moments; for instance, trying to find a cheap, unconventional reception venue in a small Midwestern college town is proving to be quite frustrating. And I don’t really have faith that I’ll manage to pull off making my own dress, or that if I succeed in making the dress that it’ll look like something I want to wear around people. But nothing, nothing has driven me as crazy as the goddamn colors, and it’s all some bird’s fault.

Since we got engaged, I’ve spent hours poring over the palettes on colourlovers.com and wedding sites like 100 Layer Cake, making Word documents of colors plucked randomly from HTML charts, trying desperately to recreate a palette I thought I half-remembered from a picture of a bird I saw on the internet four years ago. The bird was burgundy, with green and light blue wings…or at least those colors were involved somehow. Maybe it was a red bird in a green tree against a blue sky. Maybe it was a green bird holding red and blue paint chips in its beak. I honestly think I may have dreamed this damn bird, but the image stuck with me because when I saw it I thought, “Those would make lovely wedding colors!”

This is not the bird.

And then before we were officially engaged, when I first started reading the internet’s enormous and all-consuming wedding information, I saw a picture from someone’s reception of burgundy flowers with bright green stems in a light blue vase, and it reminded me of the bird. Or maybe they were light blue flowers in a vase with a burgundy ribbon. Or maybe the flowers were actually a bird, and the vase was a tree.

The point is, I’m really bad at bookmarking the right things. I still have a bookmark from 2006 on how to heal an enormous blister on the bottom of your foot really fast, but I will never again find either of those images no matter how hard I Google, and I can’t forget those colors.

This brings me to a few months ago, when I was doing laundry. I was pulling hangers off the rack in the closet and jamming them the wrong way into a broken hamper. Suddenly I looked down at my hand and I saw the fucking bird.

It looked like this:

At long last, my white whale red bird had been caught! I could finally rest easy knowing that my wedding colors had come to me in a pile of plastic hangers.

Somehow, though, I still wasn’t satisfied. I couldn’t shake the feeling that, just maybe, only crazy people find wedding design inspiration in their laundry. It took me a while to embrace the fact that every single thing I’ve done to plan this wedding so far has been exactly that kind of crazy, so why hesitate now?

And there you have it. I made a palette based on my dream-bird-inspired magic hangers. I used the Dessy Group’s new Pantone service, but it seems to be a bit buggy so I had to screencap it instead of embedding it here. Enjoy!

Episode 21: Here comes the bride, dressed like a maniac

No, I haven’t died. No, I haven’t completely abandoned my slightly-completely-insane wedding dress project. No, I haven’t found anything better to do with my time, sort of.

In truth, I did get a full-time appointment at my job, which puts some pressure on me to look like I deserve a salary (which means reading Cracked instead of knitting at the desk). I also spent a good part of the past month making Christmas presents for a bunch of people and then forgetting to take pictures of them, which I could have put up here to make the people who didn’t get handmade presents feel bad. Although most of those people got liquor instead, so at least they have a good way of dealing with the pain.

I have worked on the dress a little bit. Last week, Nick bought me this totally badass needle set, and I got really excited and immediately switched the dress onto the new needles. I even brought it to work, because the semester hadn’t started yet and the one person requiring my help desk assistance didn’t seem to notice the giant pile of knit lace in my lap. Then there was a freak accident involving some clumsiness on my part (I apologize if you just fainted from shock), and one of the needles promptly broke. So we’re on hold for a bit until I can order a replacement.

In the meantime, however, I decided that after this post I should probably try to figure out dress construction in a way that results in fewer gigantic question marks and imagined consternation from Bravo personalities. So this Sunday I woke up, spent a few hours communing with my dogs and working on my not-a-white-power afghan, and then decided to rip up some old sheets and pin them to my butt.

In case you’ve forgotten, this is what I was going for:

My hypothesis was that I could achieve that kind of train by stapling a rectangular piece of fabric into a skirt-shaped piece of fabric. I was originally thinking that the skirt-shaped piece should be a…uh…rhombus? No, that’s not right…Google, can I get an assist?

No?

Okay, I know the shape I’m thinking of exists, and it probably has a name, and your average third-grader could probably give it to you. But ten seconds of Googling didn’t reveal my solution, so here’s a crudely drawn image instead:

I’m calling it a “rhombotenuse”

Anyway, in making my bedsheet mockup I decided to eschew the rhombotenuse and go with two old-fashioned rectangles instead. Good, comfortable, name-having rectangles.

This is what happened.

From the front, Frankendress looks like an innocent, if ugly Goodwill bedsheet or an outdated vision of what a frat party is like. It also goes beautifully with my Target pajama top.

But wait, Frankendress has a secret…

BAM! My butt has a train growing out of it. Also, seven thousand straight pins.

As some of my more apt readers may be able to deduce, this does not look a whole lot like that Coral’s Bridal dress up yonder. In fact, it looks a lot more like an outdated frat party than a fancy wedding dress. On the other hand, I don’t really know if I need that much train anyway — you all know I would just trip on it.

What do you think? Would this look better if I had gone with the rhombotenuse + rectangle combination instead of sticking with a couple of bum rectangles (pun totally not intended but worth it)? Should I just give up and get married in this? Is it possible to pin yourself into a bedsheet mockup wedding dress skirt without sustaining multiple pin-related butt injuries? How awesome was my choice of footwear?

Don’t be jealous.

Episode 20: I am the weirdest person in this laundromat.

Before we got Olive, I did significant research on what I was about to get myself into. Okay, I read a book about getting a puppy by the guy who pretty much founded the current school of dog training, and I had owned two dogs previously. I figured the feat of housebreaking a terrier made me pretty much qualified for anything.

The puppy training book for responsible grown-ups assumed that you were reading the book before you started looking for puppies, when you were still at the “You know what this house needs? More poop” phase of considering puppy attainment. I, however, read the book while driving to pick Olive up from the people in the boonies who had taken her extremely pregnant mother in from the side of the highway. The book also assumed that once you read what it had to say about getting either well-bred dogs from a kennel or, even better, well-bred and already trained dogs from a shelter, you would do one of those things. You would not, the responsible dog ownership expert assumed, get a free 7-week-old “Golden Retriever mix” from Craislist and pitch the deal to your partner with “LOOK HOW CUTE THE PUPPY!!!”

But look how cute the puppy!

The book’s primary training thesis was this: Start with the puppy described above, then make sure that they don’t have the opportunity to make any mistakes. If they screw up and shit in your shoes, it’s your own damn fault. This is true to an extent. We did everything he told us to with regard to crate training, except we had two major and unforeseen hurdles which the book did not address. First, getting little tiny Olive to stay in her crate proved difficult due to her conviction that the crate was full of demons escaped from hell who feast on puppy blood. After weeks of trying every possible method to get her to let us sleep through the night or even shower in peace, we finally brought in a priest to perform an exorcism on the crate and now she and any remaining demons more or less coexist in peace. The other issue, however, still prevails now that Olive is about to turn one year old: Rain is a completely incapacitating obstacle to using the bathroom outside.

When it rains, Olive goes outside and stands in the rain. She looks at the water falling from the sky as if willing it to tell her its secrets. But she absolutely will not under any circumstances do the thing that dogs are supposed to do on the ground if that ground is also covered in water.

In addition to being a cautionary tale about not getting dogs from Craigslist, this is also an explanation of what I was doing being weird in a laundromat yesterday. So now you know that Olive won’t pee outside if it’s raining; the other piece of the puzzle is that she thinks our mattress is both a springboard for playtime and the best possible place to urinate. A memory foam mattress is like a Japanese robot toilet for a slightly retarded dog with a full bladder.

So that explains why I was at the laundromat last night: washing dog pee out of a king-sized comforter. Like you do.

But the part that makes it even within shouting distance of relevant to this blog is that, as I mentioned before, I’m currently working on about eight projects for Christmas presents. With nine days to go, every minute that I’m not knitting is a minute wasted. So I couldn’t just awkwardly lug a king-sized comforter to the laundromat; I had to spend the time waiting for the comforter to become clean while knitting gloves for my dad. This doesn’t sound particularly weird in itself, but this is what my table in the middle of the laundromat looked like:

 

Not being terribly well-coordinated and knitting with double-pointed needles means that every eleventh stitch brought me dangerously close to poking myself in the eye. A woman dragging one leg behind her walked past me five times, each time giving me and my knitting a look of obvious suspicion. Perhaps she thought I was knitting a bomb, or maybe she could tell that someone with my grace and precision has no place operating that many pointy things at once.

In the meantime, as I was sitting in the laundromat realizing that I should have just played Angry Birds for an hour like a sane person, it also occurred to me that the yarn I had painstakingly chosen for my father’s gloves is the kind of yarn that would prompt random people to invite a 74-year-old man to join their game of hackey sack. My dad has never worn any of those colors before, much less all of them at the same time. The most flamboyant article of clothing he owns is a White Sox hat.

This post wound up being a completely pointless window into my terribly dull existence. So, in conclusion: Merry Christmas, suspicious laundromat patrons; Merry Christmas, everyone!

Ask and ye shall receive