"And we'll live offa th' fatta the lan'..."

So for the past several months, I have been stuck in law school purgatory, working a fun but full-time job while finishing a bunch of loose ends for my J.D. Let me tell you, there's nothing I've been looking forward to more than finishing up all these damn papers and celebrating with sticks and string.

To give you a sense of just how psyched I am to be making time for creative pursuits once again, before I headed back up to school in Connecticut I dug out my knitting machine (a fine-gauge Studio SK-830) from the Abandoned Projects Division of my parents' basement and brought it up to school with me. This machine broke my bank and my patience about two years ago. Here's an official portrait of the beast [Exhibit A]:

EXHIBIT A: Studio SK-830 Fine Gauge Knitting Machine

Here's some of the wishful ad copy about the SK-830 that got me fishing for my credit card back in 2003:

"250 fine needles mean that you can knit all those wonderful textured industrial yarns into dream garments which drape and handle like the most expensive designer fabrics."

And here is a very wise and realistic machine knitter's observation about what a hand knitter should really expect when buying a knitting machine:

"When a hand knitter moves into the field of machine knitting, it is often a shock to the creative side of ourselves. The common thought is that machine knitting is cheating, or that it is easy. Just throw yarn at the machine, right? But the fact is that machine knitting is much more complicated and difficult than hand knitting."

[If you are at all thinking about machine knitting, you ABSOLUTELY MUST read the rest of Angelika's site]. I read that post before I bought my machine, and it still didn't deter me from making the purchase... but it does give me some rueful comfort to read it now that I've been humbled by the cantakerous Studio SK-830. I think it was two Christmases ago, I knit my final swatch of jacquard and got about 8" in before the patterning gave way to blips and errors, and my last shred of hope that I would ever figure out how the damn machine works vanished in a cloud of expletives.

Idealism and High Technology are a dangerous mix.

I sort-of learned this lesson during college, when I really needed a car, and I convinced my then-boyfriend that it would be really cool (cool = fun, economical) to buy an old junker Toyota Land Cruiser and fix it up as a daily driver. My friend was an engineering student at the time, and had access to this co-op student auto shop, and he surprised me one summer by buying a 1969 International Harvester Scout (cheaper than a Land Cruiser, parts-wise) and hauling it up to school so we could work on it. See Exhibit B.

EXHIBIT B: 1969 4wd International Harvester Scout 800A

I dubbed the car "Lenny," because when we fantasized about the day when the Scout would be ready for the road, we sounded a lot like that doomed character in Of Mice and Men, who keeps asking his buddy George to tell him about how great it was gonna be in the future. "The best-laid schemes o mice an men, often go awry." Fixing the Scout was not always fun, and it definitely was not economical. On its maiden voyage home, Lenny conked out on I-81 in Pennsylvania due to a bent rod, which was due to the engine head being seated wrong, which was due to... In the end, the number of little things that could go wrong just exceeded our patience and the time we had to spend on the thing.

Just last week, I drove back home to West Virginia for a (successful!) job interview & stopped in to visit my ex-bf, and discovered Lenny parked by the roadside, now for sale. Just $1100 will buy you this sentimentally invaluable hunk of good intentions. This got me thinking... was it time to let go of the dream, and put the knitting machine on the eBay auction block?

When I rediscovered the box of fine-gauge yarn & swatches, and put the machine in my truck for the trip back up to school, I was definitely thinking I would try to find a new home for the SK830 this year (and hopefully recover some of my painfully large investment in the thing), but then I looked at those swatches and thought about that yarn and came up with a couple new theories about why the patterning didn't work (maybe my new computer, with better memory, will be better able to handle the Design-A-Knit software?) and started thinking that maybe I'd try playing around with it a little more before I sell it. And I looked at all those cool sweaters on Anthropologie's website and I thought about Eunny's Bonnie & Clyde sweater and I started thinking, maybe if I used slightly thicker yarn, and gave up on my expectation that a sweater knitted on a knitting machine should work up faster than one produced by hand(knitting), then maybe, just maybe, I could make peace with this machine and finally develop some kind of cooperative, creative relationship with it. And then we'd live offa the fatta the lan'...