I'll leave out the puns on "tie"*

Three good things about Miranda July:
1) She directed and starred in one of my favorite films of 2005, Me and You and Everyone We Know
2) She's from Portland, Oregon.
3) She's got great style**. Check her out on the May/June 2005 cover of RES.


I've wanted to make a knit tie and vest set like this every since I saw this issue at St. Mark's Books right before we went on our summer vacation (but I didn't buy the magazine at the time). When I looked for it at Powell's, they had already switched to the newer issue. Then, by the time we got back, St. Mark's was on the new issue as well. Now RES is sold out of this issue.

Anyway, I haven't gotten around to making myself this tie and vest set yet, though I did finally finish Aaron's orange knit tie! If I took a picture of it now, it would look essentially the same as it did when I abandoned the project in November (see this entry from the archives). Wait for the man to try it on. You'll be glad you did.

I'm so happy to give this tie to Aaron and I hope he likes it and wears it. But I'm also really happy to not have to knit with fonty velourine anymore. The "strand of shiny, slubbed viscose" became really hard to work with and kept getting bunched up and separated from the chenille. This didn't bother me so much when I was making the father's day tie, but it did this time, especially since I was trying to make a dense and clean tie. Oh, and I ended up having to switch to us O needles (!) to match the gauge of my previous work. Not that I measured the gauge, but looking at it, it was now too loose with us 1s.

* The pattern I used is "All Tied Up" (Susan Sternlieb's). One of my favorite wraps at the North Buffalo Food Co-op was the "Thai Me Up." I've been doing a lot of "tying up loose ends," lately. Yesterday, I ran into someone at the laundromat who was "fit to be tied." You get it.

** I should also mention that another reason why I am very drawn to this outfit is because when I met and started dating Aaron, he was going through a clothing phase where he wore all one color. Like he had a blue outfit (blue pants, blue shirt, blue jacket), a mint green outfit, a yellow outfit, etc. On the day we kissed for the first time, he was wearing the yellow. Incidentally, I was actually going through a "clash" period then, and one outfit I remember wearing was a green and yellow plaid shirt over a pink and white flower shirt and my roomate Urszula's black and white pants. Oh, with my burgundy velvet jacket. Ah, fun times.