Updates and Musings

Morganeve's mitts have been cast on, after much swatching and calculating. Because I failed to swatch in the round, however, the cuff is coming out far stretchier than in the flat swatch I made. I ripped out and am convinced that I have the right number of stitches, so now I'm making sure that my tension in kept in check.

I finally got up the courage to undo and re-knit all three offending fingers on Mel's left glove. In a poignant hour yesterday, all of us at Revere St. (except for Dylan, who is on tour) sat around crafting/facebooking/making the cat comfortable while listening to "This American Life" amid a growing sea of boxes. This was my chance to weave in all. those. ends. So now, the glove is blocking peacefully and is mere days from going with its counterparts to a loving home.

Jeremy and I seem to be releasing new South China songs only on compilations this year, which is way easier than putting together an album, let me tell you. Last Thursday we recorded an instrumental song for a compilation to be put out by Tea First Records. We used a loop Jeremy recorded a while back, to which I added a couple of cello melodies (and harmonies). As we were thinking of what to lay down next, Jeremy started playing with a random fire ladder in the band room, and decided this would be the perfect "percussion" for the song. I, as the half of South China with way better rhythm, volunteered to play the fire ladder:

These I show you at the risk of also showing what ridiculous faces I can make...

As we were working out this new piece, I thought about the parallels between the knitting designs I've been working on and the process of songwriting. Thinking about songwriting as a design process is something I've never done before. Both processes involve the same types of fears: Is this idea going to go anywhere? What if I put all of this work into this idea and it doesn't work out? Am I really considering all the possibilities with this idea? Is this really any good? etc.

Somehow, frogging a piece of knitting seems way less frustrating than spending days and weeks trying to make a song work that is just not, well, working. It's as though I feel I have a never-ending supply of design ideas, but only a finite number of musical ideas, and I must cling to them, tooth and nail. Whitney Smith, a ceramic artist in the Bay area, often addresses the subject of having to let go and not become too attached to her pieces. In her case, when she puts her perfectly thrown and glazed items in the kiln, there's no guarantee that what comes out at the end of the firing will be usable: things crack, glaze runs all over the place, sculpted bits fall off and stick to other pieces, etc. Though a song or a sweater design is not a physical object that could explode if something goes wrong, the idea is the same--things don't always come out the way you want them to, and you can't be heartbroken with crappy results, or you might not want to make anything ever again!

One last photo:

One of our room mates found this upstairs as he was packing. I love maps, and I love origami, and using old maps to make origami? Such joy. I've made a ton of these over the past few years. Someday something amazing is going to be done with them. So just watch out.