-Eunny

P.S. - eunnyjang.com will remain accessible, in much the state it is in now - though comments will be disabled (and icky spam deleted!) and there won't be much new content. But, I'll be keep-up-able by email, on my Knits blog, or on Ravelry, where I'm eunnyjang.

Comfortable (drawstring!) and cool (fishtail!) - I'm going to live in this skirt this summer. It's knit at a fairly dense gauge, so I'm not worried about that whole sag/droop thing - besides, if it ever does sag or droop or pouch or poof, it just goes in the washer and then the dryer.

Pattern: Kat Coyle for Interweave Knits Spring 2007
Yarn: RowanDenim, in color 225 (Nashville)
Yardage: 8 50 gram balls (about 800 yards)
Yarn Source: Stash.
Needles: 3.5mm Addi Turbo circulars
Gauge: 5.5sts/inch over stockinette
Modifications: changed gauge for narrower skirt; added length to stockinette panel; added length to lace panel for below-the-knee skirt. Worked mirrored double decreases as k3tog and sssk.

The indigo is starting to fade already along the raised decrease stitches:

It's like if you could have your favorite pair of broken-in jeans made to order. Knitted. Denim. Skirts. Who knew that these three great tastes would also taste great together?

Six Weird Things About Me

1) I have almost no food hangups, but the ones I do have are odd. In context: as budget allows, I try to eat widely and intelligently, will try anything, in general take a great deal of pleasure in eating, and always clean my plate. Downmarket and upscale are both fine with me - a big sloppy burger with lots of fried onions and bacon sounds just as exciting as some precious little verrine of scallop tartare with osetra and fennel foam. As a kid, I grew up eating organ meats (cheap, you know) and things like salted squid guts (ethnic, you know); I still love marrow and tongues and codfish heads and Serious Kimchi. It strikes me as prety odd, then, that the only food-type items I strongly dislike would be ketchup (bottled) and chocolate (all kinds, in all forms).

2) I love karaoke - madly, truly, shamelessly. I also somehow already know, like, every single American pop song produced between 1959 and 1980 (thanks, Dad!). Add my complete lack of a voice and a little sake, and I am a threat to national safety.

3) I'm a certified PADI Rescue Diver, wakeboard avidly, and would love to learn to surf - but I can't swim worth a damn. An awkward dogpaddle is about the best I can do.

4) I have very strong personal preferences for certain spellings of some words. "Grey" over "gray", for example: "grey" just seems right, with its connotation of coolness, of absence. I also think it's better-looking on a page than "gray". Of course, I stick to standard American English orthography when working, but grudgingly.

5) Jeff and I play a game all the time where we make up secrets for people - usually, it's while we're flipping channels. We'll see a talking head - some nice associate professor of history talking about the unusual weather patterns of the 16th century, or something - and immediately start telling "secrets" about him to each other. You know, like, "When he's teaching, he wears tight black jeans and a black shirt with the top three buttons undone - with no undershirt. When it's cold out, he doesn't button all the way up - instead, he just wraps a scarf around his neck...so you still get that triangle of sparsely-thatched skin between the scarf and his shirt. Also? He goes to student parties, and totally enjoys himself."

6) Billy Bob Thorton would not be that far down on my list of celebrity crushes.

For me, this comprises a lot of not-usuallys: usually, I don't do bulky yarns, variegated yarns, or thick-and-thin yarns (or posh yarns - though Manos, of course, is out there doing good things). But oh, that dusty rosy pink, moving from antique, pressed specimen to living petal and back! I couldn't resist.

I'm thinking something very simple, very clean, almost austere, to tame and showcase all that grist and color action. Something like Teva Durham's Ballet Pullover, perhaps?

(P.S. - Thank you, thank you, thank you for the wonderful notes and comments you left. I couldn't be more eager to get started - I'm so pleased you're excited, too!)

Usually, print mediums have very different enticements for both the writer and the reader: the broad reach, of course; the permanence; the sheer tactile pleasure of turning pages filled with saturated color and close-set text. No one at home on a sick day sits propped up in bed with a mug of soup and their laptop, you know? Besides, when the magazine is a really good one - with depth, taste, and stone-cold technical excellence - contributing to it is like writing for a blog, but better: you have the same freedom to put out smart, meaty content, but with incredibly powerful resources at your disposal. Developing that content in the first place is the only thing that’s missing from the equation.

Unless there’s something I’ve been holding out on. Maybe I have a secret to tell you.

Here goes: I’m the new Editor of Interweave Knits - truly, my dream job. It means being able to talk about all kinds of fascinating things - history, technique, design, the convergence of old and new, innovation in an ancient craft - in a Really Big Way. It means working with brilliantly talented people on an already-extraordinary publication. It means having the opportunity to distill the absolute best content out there into four outstanding packages a year, plus special issues. And possibly most exciting of all, it means that, well, I finally know what to put on my business cards (“Eunny Jang, Blog Bunny” never seemed quite right, somehow).

I’m totally thrilled, completely overwhelmed, so incredibly excited about the things we’ll do and the places we'll go. Interweave and I have always had a fantastic relationship – they love good design for its own sake, historical context, clean technique, and every other aspect of good, thoughtful knitting just as much as I do. I mean, as we do. Huzzah!

Link to News Release (PDF)

Link to IWP Pressroom

Though I do say it, this is my absolute favorite of all the knits I've built from scratch. I don't say that easily - I'm usually incredibly self-critical, and unhappy with how far short reality falls of an idea that seemed quite good. This, though - this is something I'm completely, perfectly, beatifically happy with.

It's the very modernist of modern Fair Isles - long-line, closely fitted, with a deep u-neck and bold, wonderfully rich horizontal stripes. I love the fit - it's shapely, but not tackily tight. I love the compound raglan shaping (Maggie Righetti for the win), which makes for horizontally matched sleeves knit in the round with the body, that also happen to fit well, with nary a pucker or a pooch. I love the deep, open (steeked) neckline - so flattering to nearly everyone - which provides a nice balance against the, well, wool sweaterishness that might otherwise take over. More than anything, I love the combination of color and pattern - in these colors, my medallion motif is reminding me of cloisonne work, of stained glass, of tapestry. This, truly, is the kind of thing I like to see, would enjoy knitting, would love to wear: sweet and fresh and up-to-date, but with a sense of history and tradition lurking in the background.

I kind of want to keep it. Do you think they'll notice if I quickly knit, say, a plain stockinette tee in bulky yarn before the deadline and send that in instead?