Faster Than a Speeding Swallow

A certain chic knitblogger gave me just the encouragement I needed the other night – I’d been thinking about lace and had my eye on the Swallowtail Shawl . “It’s easy” she said, “you’ll be done in a week.”

Crazy, I know, a lace shawl in a week, but here it is...



Fine, it’s been more like 10 days, but that’s still pretty fast. I think I’ve discovered the secret to lace knitting – Don’t Look Back. If I don’t have enough stitches I just pick one up; too many and I k2tog. Tinking lace is just about as fun as the wax based method of personal epilation and in both cases I usually just end up making the situation worse. When knitting lace it’s best to just embrace your mistakes and soldier on, rather than obsessing about the finer details. (Some may argue that the whole point of lace is the finer details, but those people also have alphabetized spice racks.)

If I can find some pins I'll be blocking tonight and have FO photos tomorrow.

A Rotten Start

Thank you all so much for your kind baby wishes - I really appreciate it!! Hard to believe I only have about three months left.

My 2007 got off to a pretty foul start. Here are just a few tidbits of the awesomeness that was last week: The bloody nose I got while wandering tissue-less somewhere on 16th street between 8th and 9th Avenue - hello meatpacking district revelers, I’m not a derelict coke addict, just a pregnant lady bleeding out the nose into her scarf. (Don’t worry, not a handknit, just a fake pashmina.)

Then, on the same theme, some bloodletting at the doctors office, and then the waiting, and then the taking of more blood, and then, well, perhaps a bit more waiting. Just drink this, it will only give you a headache for two days straight.

And also death. What week wouldn’t be complete without the death of a beloved grandparent, and the accompanying funerary type ceremonies.

But yesterday was my birthday, and it was lovely, and I believe the heinousness has ended. At least I hope it has ended, because I can tolerate no more. Fortunately, I’ve had plenty of time for knitting. I’ve been working on a mitten, here’s a peek



And a blurry EZ February sweater lounging on the couch, accidentally sized for some very husky little girl



Knitting as therapy, right here chez moi. I expect to have an entire afghan completed by next weekend if this bad streak continues.

What’s Up With All The Baby Knitting?

So there’s been quite a bit of baby knitting ‘round these parts, and some of you may be getting tired of it. Just bear with me – you’ll be able to see all these clothes modeled by a real person in about three and a half more months…



Yep, those little red things are my shoes, and they’re getting harder and harder to see. I’m due in late April and we already know it’s a boy. And he likes Chinese takeout.

Despite all the little half finished sweaters sitting in the knitting basket, I found some time to finish my Shedir and I looooove it.



Yarn: Lana Gatto Prestige 100% Cashmere, 1.5 balls
Needles: Size 3 dpns
Pattern: Shedir by Jenna Wilson for the 2004 Knitty special issue, modified for only three pattern repeats rather than five.

Darling, Where Do the Mets Play?

Yet another unpronounceable knit. I started Shedir with two balls of cashmere I won in the Yarn Harlot’s MSF thank you gift drawing, and I have no idea how to say the name of this hat. To avoid another Clapotis incident (wherein I go around mispronouncing the name of my garment for a year or so) – does anyone have a suggestion about the pronunciation of Shedir? I’m thinking it’s pronounced the same way you’d answer the question in the title of this post.

It's In The Bag, Baby

My knitting looks pretty much the same, just a little bit longer. But those very same projects pictured in my last post are so much happier now, so much more cooperative on the needles, so much more fun to knit. Why? They’re now traveling in style…



This great box bag made by misocrafty and gifted to me by Carrie in our Spiders gift exchange. Ever since my pinsripe jaywalker (suffering from serious SSS) started traveling in the pouch rather than a ratty old Ziploc bag, I’ve made inches of progress. Thanks Carrie!

Open Issues List

Back when I was a lawyer I used to have to make “open issues” lists – multipage documents listing and classifying every contentious issue that had to be settled before a transaction could close. The parties would then argue about whether certain issues should or shouldn’t be included on the list, thereby adding even more open issues and prolonging the agony. I love thinking back to those great lawyer projects, just remembering that drudgery motivates me when I’m feeling a little too tired to work the night shift at the restaurant.

Here’s a little list of the open knitting issues in my life right now.

Looks like it’s time for a new pair of felted clogs…



The fair isle sleeve of the yolk pullover is going well so far…



What’s this?



Part of a super secret surprise in progress to be revealed soon – so cute you may need to wear sunglasses when viewing the FO.

You’ll notice that none of these projects look like holiday presents. That’s because it’s only December 11th. Plenty of time, right?

Riotous Vacation Day

Today was the first day of my three day weekend. When you work in a restaurant, holidays mean tourists and long hours, not time off, so I’m enjoying my Thanksgiving vacation a little late this year.

How did I celebrate?

Smiley’s Yarn RRRRRiot!!!

Here's some riotously colorful cheap yarn



And some of the other rioters



The line stretched around the store; the crowds were dense and moving fast. Most of the yarn was flammable. I’ll confess here and now that I cracked under the pressure and, after a brief scan of the pickings, fled to Philly Slims for a therapeutic cheesesteak. Maybe next year.

You may notice that I also did a little redecorating around here using a new template, hope it's an improvement!

A Handknit Holiday Season

There has been knitting of sleeves in the wrong places (oh, hello new parent, does your child have an arm extending from the center of his or her back? If so, I have the perfect sweater.) and soon there will be frogging of baby sweaters. I have not started the fair isle sleeve. I unfortunately went out and bought 18 tons of baby yarn in an overly ambitious project to knit sweaters for all of the babies due to arrive in the next six months (six, at last count). I am now sick of baby sweaters and want to knit something for my selfish self. Just in time for the holidays.

Last year I had a “No Knitted Gifts” policy. I didn’t want to make my hobby feel like a job. Last year I was a lawyer and I could afford to spend more than $36 total on holiday presents. This year I am a cook and my annual salary puts me well below the poverty line. I made so little that I don’t think I’ll owe any income tax. Lavish gifts are not an option. Family and friends – I bet your hands feel chilly, don’t they? I bet you wish you had some nice warm mittens. Don’t run out to the store just yet – Santa may have something special for you!

Flashes of Brilliance

Thank you all so much for the advice on the fair isle colors! I apologize for not responding to your comments, I had some email inbox craziness going on, so consider this a great big THANK YOU!

Those of you who suggested swatching are totally smart and right (although it does sorta eliminate the possibility of reusing the yarn). The truth is that I am a terrible swatcher, and I’ll hide the sweater under the bed rather than doing a fair isle swatch. Instead, I think I found a great solution. Here’s the sweater…



I’ll just start with the sleeve! That’ll be a nice test run for the fair isle, and not too painful to rip if it ends up being uuuugly. This solution was painfully obvious and staring me right in the face, but it took forever and a day for me to figure it out.

I’m also working on another EZ baby sweater for a friend whose baby is coming very very soon! As usual, I made it a little big. I just cant bear the thought of it being worn for only a month or so!

Advice Needed

I’m still knitting away on the bottom of the yolk sweater and am very close to starting the fair isle portion. I went down to Purl the other day and picked out some yarn, but now I’m having second thoughts.



Are these colors too bland for a brown fair isle sweater. Will the blues and grays just blend together into one cool color mess? I love the icy hues but I’m afraid they just wont show up. Do I need to exchange these for some peppy reds and oranges? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!!

NaNoWhat??

November is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Participants attempt to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November, with a focus on quantity rather than quality. For those of us that just aren’t ready to commit to a whole novel, November is also NaNoBloPoMo . One blog post a day for the whole month.

Fortunately I learned of these two events today, November 2, blissfully too late to sign up for either. If I had learned yesterday, I may have done something rash while in a caffeine induced frenzy. For those of you participating – good luck! I’ll be cheering you on from the sidelines, and perhaps trying to post a bit more myself now that my schedule has calmed down a bit.

I continue to knit around and around on the Brown Tube, but it is not at all photoworthy, so instead I will share with you a knitting confession.

I do not save these little yarn repair cards that come with sweaters.



I am a knitter. I have a box in a drawer where I store these, perhaps by fiber or sweater type, so that I can reach in and grab the appropriate yarn in the event that I need to do some mending.

The thing is, I am not a mender. I do not mend. I will just wear a sweater with holes, the same way I will wear a shirt with wrinkles, because I don’t iron. I don’t even own an iron. I sold it at a yard sale in 1999 and haven’t looked back since.

Lots of Knitting, Not Much Swatching

Why am I knitting hats for bears? This hat is swell, from the summer Knitty. I was knitting it as a gift for an adult size recipient, but things didn’t quite work out as planned. You know how it’s really trick to judge size on circular needles, and things always come out a lot bigger than you think they will? Almost always.

Despite the size issues this was a delightful and easy pattern, perfect for my first fair isle project. As soon as the sting wears off I’ll be knitting it again in a much larger size.

A Little Sweater

It's finished (almost)! If you look carefully you'll see that the sleeve seams aren't sewn yet, but otherwise here's the final baby sweater.



The color problem ended up being far more significant than I originally anticipated, so I'm just embracing the two totally different oranges as a design element rather than pretending they may actually be supposed to match. Although the colors are gender neutral, I think the lace makes this sweater to girly for a boy baby, or am I just being silly? I don't know the gender of any of the babies I'm knitting for right now, but statistically one of them is bound to be a girl, right? As usual, I'm sure I wont get around to sewing on the buttons until the intended recipient is in his or her crib.

It's going to be a rough 10 days of work and travel around here. Hopefully I'll have plenty of time for knitting, but I'm not sure I'll be doing much blogging.

I Clearly Started Without A Plan

I wanted to knit the baby sweater in the Knitter’s Almanac without a major yarn investment, so I tried to use up some Zara I had hanging around from prior projects. Unfortunately, I ran out of orange…



I bought another ball but the difference was too noticeable, so I switched back to maroon, at least for a little Charlie Brown style stripe. Now I’m trying to decide whether to keep going in maroon or switch to the new ball of orange (and hope the difference wont be detected because of the distracting stripe) or switch to a third color (thus buying a second ball of yarn and thwarting the whole thriftiness aspect of the project). Ripping the entire sweater out and starting over is not an emotionally viable option at this point. Any suggestions?

Zimmermania - A False Start

Alas, my first Zimmermania project isn’t going quite as well as planned. I started the baby sweater in the Knitter’s Almanac using Knitpicks Andean Silk and something is amiss. The yarn is just too big, too fluffy, not baby-ish enough. The lacy pattern isn’t showing up well and I think the sweater will end up being toddler size rather than baby-size. As if that weren’t enough, I only have two skeins and I’m pretty sure I’ll run out of yarn before the end. AND, I already messed up the garter stitch button band.





Don’t worry, I got right back on that horse. I already started the new and improved (now machine washable!) baby sweater in Zara (possibly my favorite yarn ever) on slightly smaller needles.

Knit Your Own Stately Pleasure Dome – Save $388

In just a few hours on my day off, I managed to knit up my version of the Marc Jacobs Kubla Khan hat . Here’s his…



Here’s mine, gracefully modeled by Mr. Teapot…



And in the bathroom mirror…



I used Bear Creek Bulky (99% wool, 1% nylon), a bulky weight single ply that resembles roving more than yarn, and size 17 dpns.

I just sort of made it up as I went along. Here’s the pattern in case you’d like to make your own.

Gauge: Approx 2 sts per 1” but it doesn’t really matter, the hat is big and stretchy anyway. I didn’t even bother swatching.

Needles: Size 17 dpns (or two size 17 circulars, using two circs sock method)

CO 44 sts, join (don’t twist, although it wont show if you do, hooray!), knit around and around in 1 x 1 ribbing (k1 p1 ribbing) until the hat measures 8” (yes, this is very long, but you will fold it).

Knit 1 round as follows: *k2tog, k 9* rep 4 times. 40 sts remain.

Knit 4 rounds stockinette. (If you have a very small head, knit 2 or 3, a very enormously large head, 5 or 6. I have an average to biggish woman sized head, 4 worked for me.)

Decrease as follows:

*k2tog, k 6* rep 5 times.
*k2tog, k 5* rep 5 times.
*k2tog, k 4* rep 5 times.
*k2tog, k 3* rep 5 times.
*k2tog, k 2* rep 5 times.
*k2tog, k 1* rep 5 times.
*k2tog* rep 5 times. 5 sts remain.

Thread yarn through 5 remaining stitches and pull tight. Weave in ends. Roll ribbed portion of hat twice to get puffy brim. Don’t even bother blocking.

As you can see from the above photo, it’s sort of a goofy looking hat, but it is WARM, and it’s so fluffy that it doesn’t really mush down my hair (though in the winter I imagine it would pose a major static electricity risk).

Just Say No

One hit isn’t going to hurt you. Just try it, you’ll like it. It’ll make you have a really good time. All the cool kids are doing it.

These rationalizations, we learned in Sixth Grade Health Class, would be used later in life by “drug pushers” to entice us into a life of addiction and misery. Just say no, we were taught, no matter what they say, no matter how fun it may appear. I never found this teaching philosophy to be very compelling, until now…



Some are just too addictive to sample. Thanks to a certain knitter's recent post, I took my first hit, and now I fear I’ll be going back for more.

Knitted dishcloths? Preposterous. (Actually, mine is a washcloth for my round pink face; I just couldn’t bring myself to put handknit to pot crud.) Still, I have plenty of washcloths. There’s just something about the excuse to use garish colors, something about the pattern too, I just don’t think I can stay away.

Magic Mushroom?

The Yolk Sweater still looks like a brown circle, and continues to grow.



I am still knitting this damn brown alpaca round and round and round, with a keen sense of déjà vu because that is exactly what I did with the frogged Union Square Market sweater. It makes for fabulous late night knitting, when I get home from work and it’s 2am and I just need to wind down enough to realize that I’m really quite tired.

I was walking past Marc Jacobs on my way to work yesterday and I noticed something eye catching in the window…



The Kublakhan (mushroom?) hat. For a mere $400 this hat could be yours! I’m not even going to go into my little issues about spending $400 on a hat that does anything less than enable the wearer to fly and simultaneously turn handguns into prosciutto and cheese panini. Instead, I’ll just point out that this hat looks pretty simple to knit. I am tempted, but I worry that I'll look like a portobello.

Brown

So far the Equinox Yoke Pullover (I keep wanting to write Yolk Pullover) is trucking along nicely, but isn’t exactly prime blogging material. Just picture a big (hopefully not too big) brown 2” circle. Woo hoo!

It’s a lot of stockinette. I find myself really looking forward to every 10th row, when I get to make four increases. I keep telling myself that this does not make me lame, it is all part of the meditative zenniness that is knitting.

You may have noticed that I’m knitting this one in the round. The pattern instructs you to knit it flat, but I just couldn’t imagine doing a front then starting all over again with a big backful of stockinette. Hopefully this won’t cause some great disaster that I was unable to forsee when I started. I know I’ll have to separate it into two pieces later, but that shouldn’t be too much of a big deal. Now I have cursed myself forever.

Because I know myself and my fickle ways, I am not planning to purchase the fun multicolored yarns for the fair isle portion (Nay, I am not even planning to set foot across the threshold of the den of temptation that is Purl!) until I have finished the stockinette portion of the body. Hence I will have a little reward for my success. Hence, again, I will not be going to Purl for about 4 months. Fortunately there are plenty of other yarn stores in this city!

Ready for Fair Isle

The camo socks are finished, and are now a far more flattering knee length.



They really are even, I don’t know why one looks shorter than the other. Also, my knees really are that knobby. They’ve never been my finest feature.

I also made a practice fair isle swatch.



Actually, this is the start of manresa, which I promptly ripped out after taking this picture. I realized that the likelihood of me wearing green fair isle legwarmers is just about nil, despite my desire to wear flip flops year round.

With the #3 circulars freed up from sock knitting, and the assurance from my swatch that I can make a fair isle garment that will at least hold together and not crumble on the needles, I’m ready to start the Equinox Yoke Pullover (again). This time in a slightly smaller size.