Vintage Sewing Books and Weird Knitting

I bought several books on this trip. I have been trying to avoid accumulating books—I have two large bookshelves of knitting books in my office and no room for more—but I have decided that when I find worthy sewing books, especially vintage ones, I am going to buy them. AI is spreading so much slop these days that I feel it’s important to have sources of correct information on hand.

There are three Half-Price Books stores I frequent in the Seattle area: Lynnwood, Tacoma, and Tukwila. I happened to be going through Tacoma on my way back to Seattle last Wednesday, so I stopped at that HPB and picked up three books for $23:

I’ve only glanced through them, but they look like they will be very useful, especially the pattern alterations one.

I’ve noticed something in the past several years with regard to teaching knitting classes. I didn’t teach knitting for almost 15 years and it’s only been recently that I am being asked to teach it again. I start every knitting class now by watching each student knit. I had to begin doing that because people were showing up in my classes having taught themselves to knit by watching YouTube, and some of their methods were so far off base that we couldn’t get to MY class material until I corrected what they were doing.

I don’t care if you knit with the yarn in your left hand or in your right. I can do both, although I prefer to throw because it’s how I learned 52 years ago. I really don’t care how you make the stitch as long as you understand what is happening with your stitch formation. However, I had one woman show up in a lace knitting class at Sew Expo a few years ago and tell me that she couldn’t knit lace because the holes always closed up. After watching her knit, I determined that she was twisting her stitches on her purl rows and indeed—she was closing up all the holes she had created on the previous row. I showed her what she was doing wrong and how to “read” her knitting, and she found me at Sew Expo the following year to show me a beautiful lace shawl she had made.

Last week, a woman came into my Knitting Tune-Up class and said she was trying to knit socks but she couldn’t get them over her heel. The alarm bells went off again. Sure enough, she was twisting her stitches on her purl rows. When the stitches are twisted, the knitting loses its elasticity. I gave her some options for fixing that problem and by the end of class, she had learned to make her purl stitches so that they didn’t twist. (She was also a rabid crocheter and we think that was contributing to the problem, because she wanted to make the same wrist motions in knitting that she did in crocheting.)

I never saw these issues 20 years ago. I have seen more bizarre ways of knitting in the past three years than I saw in the previous two decades.

Get off my lawn, LOL.

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Vacation is over and I am back to work. Yesterday, I caught up on construction company paperwork, recorded this week’s podcast, and canned 14 quarts of tomato sauce. I plan to do another 14 quarts of sauce and that should be enough for this year because we still have some left from last year. Any tomatoes after that will be going into salsa. I probably need to can up a good 50 quarts of salsa this year because we’re almost out.

We’re supposed to have a couple of dry days before another system moves in this weekend. Tomorrow and Thursday have to be devoted to getting squash and beans moved into the greenhouse. I should have pulled the beans as soon as I got back, but I didn’t think we were going to get as much rain as we did yesterday. The beans will dry out in the greenhouse. The current system has been sitting over us and dumping water. Overnight temps are still in the 40s—not warm, certainly, but at least we don’t have to cover the tomatoes.