Aspirations

Someday, I will make myself a Mr. Rogers sweater. I have photos of it (taken in-person, sort of), and when I get motivated enough, I'll find more.



But I'm not quite ready to design a sweater on my own just yet. I also have ideas for a breastfeeding sweater and kids' pajamas... so much crowded into my little head, I tell you.

Instead, I've been working on Clapotis, a scarf/wrap from knitty.com, in Rowan Tapestry, and so far am liking it (even though my knitting-uneducated husband pronounced the drop-stitch sections to "not look right")...



And I also spent the weekend learning how to knit in the entrelac style... sounds all fancy and requires a fair amount of attention but wasn't too hard. I'm making a little pouch/purse sort of thing, just big enough to carry my wallet, cell phone and keys. I know, I already made one - does anyone really want to question a woman's need for more than one bag?

Purl THIS!

In other exciting news, aside from socks marking my first foray into the realm of double-pointed needles (DPNs, to the already-initiated), that project was also my first effort at using Continental-style knitting. As I posted in my other blog, I knit weird. Here, I'll copy it here, seems like it belongs here anyway:

January 4, 2007
I just had an epiphany.

I knit weird.

I was - yes, I understand, by admitting this I am baring a truly geeky and uncool side of my soul; I am at ease with this - watching a show that is so insanely faux-trendy and irritating that it's like having Grandma's gaudy ceramic turkey salt and pepper shakers on the table, where it's so bad that it's actually kind of sweet and comforting, called Knitty Gritty...

...I'll just pause while you fight off the nausea that the cutesiness of the name inevitably incites...

...and I happened to notice, "Hmm. That man is knitting differently than I do." It's subtle, and I had already known that my way - which I believed was the Continental method - looked different than how my sister and a few of my friends knit. They knit in the American method (I know it's the same page as the last one, scroll a little!). I'm a mere beginner - I learned the basics about 3 years ago, and have only really been into it for the past few months, with my first project, a really loud blanket, finished in April 2006 - but I can knit pretty quickly, and without looking at the needles. The purls and the knits just feel different. Shut up, it matters to me.

Anyway, it was interesting to me that I had learned the Continental method, which isn't rare but it's less common than the American method, at least in America (I tend to think there's something about the naming convention that would suggest this to me, but I can't think what). Interesting because I learned from my great-grandmother, whom everyone called Grandma O. You'd have called her Grandma O, too, if you knew her. This is not cute blog-shortening to protect her identity, that's actually what we called her. We're Irish, she had an O' last name... you get the idea.

I miss her so much, and somehow more this year than last, likely because I was in such a deep dark depression this time last year that no one thing stood out as a stronger sadness than the others. (I must have been SUCH fun.) Growing up, I spent two or three weeks every summer with her in the Adirondacks, in this kitschy summer-only trailer neighborhood thing that we all referred to as "Camp." She was 70 years older than me, almost, and being the much-oldest grandchild, I was mostly there with her alone. So we talked some, more her than me, and we just sat together. She gave me a lot of freedom and trust, and taught me how to crochet, and cook without using recipes, and build a decent fire.

I can't put it into words well, other than that I am so unspeakably grateful to have had her in my life, and I ache for my children that they won't know her. How many other 80-year-old women do you know who got kicked out of an Irish bar on St. Patrick's Day, for lecturing the cook on how to properly make Irish stew while her traveling companion - my other great-grandmother, Grandma B - was demonstrating an Irish jig, on the bar? How many other people consider Parcheesi to be a full contact sport? She died in June 2005, just days after our last visit.

But, like I described here, I did not learn how to knit at Camp. Dunno why, just never did. So the fact that I found the time and motivation to learn from her later, in a nursing home, while she was still coherent and herself, is a point of pride for me. And now my only regret is how clueless I was; I didn't even realize there was more than one way to knit, much less that there was anything unusual about the way I was learning. I didn't know I should ask her how she learned that way.

So, back to the present. I was watching my dorky show, and realized that the guest knitter (ah, yes, a new life goal) was doing it differently, and since my laptop was right here all wifi'ed up and ready to go, I went to my favorite knitting website (shut up, it's got videos) to investigate. And it turns out that I don't knit American - I knew this - nor do I knit Continental. Instead I use a rather obscure and unusual method called Combination knitting.

I had no idea that such a thing even existed, much less that I was doing it. HOW did Grandma O learn this way? Who taught her? Why can't I be twelve again, sitting on the porch at Camp, listening to the rain and one of three channels on the TV ("just on for company") and another Grandma O Story?

And, to step out of the maudlin for a moment, how weird is it to learn something like that about yourself? This may not seem like a big deal to those of you who don't knit, but it's a bit like suddenly learning that everyone else holds a pen between different fingers, or ties their shoes up-side-down, or something. I barely even recognized myself in the mirror.

The end result is the same, as far as I can tell, but the process is different. How's that for armchair couch philosophy?

Anyway, so, yeah. Apparently it is possible to knit Combination on circular/DPNs, but I wasn't having much luck with it, and thought I might as well learn a new method anyway. Turns out, it's not appreciably harder OR slower than Combination, when knitting. The purling, that was another matter. I was just clumsy and ineffective with it for the longest time (read: 45 minutes or so, until I got tired of it and went online for help). I returned once again to knittinghelp.com for purling wisdom, and scrolled yet farther down to the Norwegian purl. And after watching her little video about 400 times, I finally got the hang of it, and can purl *almost* at a reasonable speed. I can do it almost as fast as I knit if I don't let myself think about it too much, but as soon as I stop and pay attention to what I'm doing I get all tangled up and confused again.

But the moral of the story is, I can now, officially, say that I can knit Combination or Continental with comparable effectiveness. Go, me.

Bags 'n' Socks

...and a scarf, a completed and - if I do say so myself - very nice scarf, too. Here are a few views, including actual modeling by Nisa, herself. It's Firebrunette's Candleflame scarf but in Reynold's Whiskey yarn on size-4 needles.





Mary's bag is done! Hooray! It's not quite what I initially envisioned, but what patternless project ever is? I like the colors and the shape and the plastic-canvas lining gives it some rigidity without being bulky or high-maintenance. I really hope it fits her and her wheelchair as needed... there are plenty of buttons for adjustableness.
Please note the evenness of the top flap - initially, after felting, the edges shrank inwards quite a bit, but Sara the Felting Goddess saved me from inwardly-shrunken edges. A close call, that one.



I also sent a bag for Sarah, one of my adventures in felting that came out a bit smaller than I needed for myself... but it just exactly holds a bag's worth of Hershey Kisses.



...and then I succeeded in making the right sized bag for myself, just something for wallet and keys and cell phone.


And, last but not least, on Friday night, after finally finishing Nisa's scarf and wanting to start something new but not feeling mentally competent for too much of a challenge, I decided to break out the sock yarn and double-pointed needles, and after about 6 hours of knitting (not all at once, but only because I didn't start until 11:30 Friday night and fell asleep while knitting), viola! Socks! And let me just say, these are truly magical, miraculous socks. The pattern I used, here (but without the knit/purl pattern at the top, because I'd never used DPNs before and wanted to keep it simple), had nothing to do with the yarn (Marks & Katten's Clown), plus I altered the pattern to accommodate Emily's almost-7-year-old feet, and the yarn colors have a fairly long pattern - totally by coincidence, it turns out that one Emily-sock is precisely one repeat of the color pattern, and the two socks match *precisely*. This is astounding to me every time I think about it, and my only hope is that there is someone out there who can properly appreciate this miracle, because the ones I live with just don't.

Anyway - look, I can make socks!

Renegade Yarn Crisis Averted

A few weeks ago, I got a hank (skein? wound-around pile?) of hand-dyed yarn from a friend, and thought, "Oh, since it's just wrapped in a nice circle here, I'll just lay it gently on the floor, clip those little ties off it, and wind it into a ball!"

SIX HOURS LATER I was done untangling the horrible nasty knotty mess, and swore I would never do that to myself again.

So, last week, I picked up more of those loopy hanks of yarn at a close-out sale, and today I decided it was time to get brave and attempt to tame them into balls. And this time I laid the circle-loop-things around the back of an office chair, and viola! No tangles! No mess! A lovely little pile of center-pull balls! Halleluia!

Four down, four more to wind... someday, I may be grown-up enough for these mysterious swifts and winders that I hear about, but for the moment, this works just fine.

What? How does one make center-pull balls? Well, what do you know, I know the answer to that! It's much easier than it looks in writing...

• First, drape the hank of yarn around the back of a chair or something comparatively sturdy and stable to prevent it from declaring civil war and attacking itself.


• Then, clip off the little ties, and find the ends. It doesn't seem to matter which end you use.


• Open one hand - I use my left, because I'm right-handed, but it would really matter - and place about 6" of one end between two fingers. I put it between my ring and pinky fingers.


• Hold your thumb and index finger vertical, and start to wind the rest of the yarn around them in a figure-8 pattern, clockwise around one and then counterclockwise around the other. Pull the yarn over the top of the chair/yarn-holding-device as needed. Keep doing this until you're up to about the top of your thumb - whenever it feels like you've got a bunch of yarn and your hand is starting to feel weird.


• Carefull slip the yarn off your thumb/index finger and hold it around that center part where the yarn crossed for each figure-8, making sure that the 6" end stays on the side it started and doesn't get caught up with the rest of the yarn as you continue to wrap (one of these times, I left too long of a tail at the beginning-end, and wrapped it around my wrist to keep it from getting wound in)..


• Start wrapping the rest of the yarn perpendicularly around that which is already wrapped, as close as you're comfortable getting to the loops that were around the thumb and pinky, trying to distribute the yarn somewhat evenly. It'll start as a flat/cylindrical shape. Enough wrapping and it'll form a sphere.


• When you get to the other end, the end-end, you can tuck it into the already-wrapped yarn to secure it. I prefer to tie a simple slipknot, through which I tie the yarn's label for future reference..


• Resist the urge to grab that beguilingly loose end and puuuuullllllll - trust yourself that you make a nice center-pull ball and if you unravel it you'll just have to ravel it all back up again..

There are good tutorials of different techniques in various places online, I just don't have my camera here to shoot this one.

Sara, Goddess of Felting...

...totally deserves a shout-out and I totally forgot to do so until now. She suggested, in a comment, that a felted object can be loosened if soaked in white vinegar and then washed out and reblocked. I'm not totally 100% convinced it was the vinegar that did it, only because I haven't tried any other methods yet (like just plain water), but she gets credit for raising the idea that a felted object CAN be loosened in some way... thereby doing very nice things for the final, finished product which is my sister's bag.

Which I don't have pictures of yet, in its fully-finished form. Must remember to take some before I mail it off...

Evidence of Addiction

On Thursday night, I wanted to knit, but by the time I could start something I was so exhausted from the previous few days (work, child with projective vomit, you know... the usual) that I didn't dare work on Willem's sweater or Nisa's scarf, both of which require some minimal level of attention and focus. So instead I decided to throw together a quick hat for Willem, with a matching scarf... and what with him being a math geek and all, it seemed that the only appropriate scarf pattern, when keeping in mind the constraints of "simple" and "quick," would involve the Fibonacci sequence of rows to create the stripe pattern. The hat is a simple pattern off the back of a yarn wrapper, knitted on flat needles in a 2x2 rib and then stitched together. Three days later, viola! Math chic!




It wouldn't have taken three days to knit, but on Friday night we suddenly remembered that Jacob had a birthday party to attend on Saturday, and the weather was crappy so we didn't feel like going out then. So instead I adapted the same hat pattern and a simple flat-knit mitten pattern to make a toddler-sized set. And, of course, I had to use my in-house toddler-sized model to size them, but we don't let him stay up till midnight... so I had to take advantage of his ability to sleep like a rock, and I snuck in his room, accosted him with knitwear, and then took pictures. Just because I could.



I also took awake-pictures the next day, just because I could.