First things first

After my last knitting-related post, I was still feeling pretty antsy to cast on for a non-sock knitting project. I started two and have already completed both of them.

First up: a bonnet based on the one Lyra wore in The Golden Compass. The story behind this yarn is a sad one. My friend Gina has a colleague whose mother died recently, and the colleague gave Gina her mother’s yarn. There were two balls of Lion Brand Jiffy Thick-and-Quick, and when Gina was at my house last week telling me the story, she asked if I wanted one. We both decided to knit charity hats with them (part of our admission to Knitters Day Out this fall), and I like to think that her friend’s mother would’ve have liked to see the yarn used this way. This was a very quick knit, done in maybe an hour and a half.

Next, I set out to knit something for Maggie, the daughter of one of my college friends. I’ve knit Maggie a few things already (a jester hat and a novelty-yarn scarf), both of which she’s appreciated. She just turned six in March, so I thought I’d make a foray into full-on garments this time. I started with the vest pattern in The Knitter’s Handy Book of Patterns: Basic Designs in Multiple Sizes & Gauges (a very excellent book that belongs in every knitter’s library) and tweaked it here and there. I opted for a button-front style (rather than a pullover) and knit it in the round out of yarn I’d gotten in Vermont over the past few years. This was a lot of fun to knit!

The result? Apparently, it was a hit! It arrived on an 85-degree day, and Maggie insisted on wearing it anyway. As you can see, it mostly fits yet still has lots of growing room, so she should get to enjoy it for at least a couple of years!

In spite of what recent posts here may have led you to believe, I haven’t just been taking pictures of flowers these past few weeks. I’ve actually done quite a bit of crafting!

In early spring, I decided to start on my first “real” (i.e., not teddy-bear-sized) top-down raglan. At Christmas I’d received a copy of Barbara Walker’s Knitting from the Top, and after reading through it felt pretty confident that I could knit a top-down sweater for myself.

So in March I dutifully swatched and found the gauge I wanted for the many skeins of Nature Spun I had in my stash, then cast on. All seemed to be going well at first, and when it came time to set the sleeve stitches aside and continue on the body, I tried on what I’d knit so far and double-checked with some of my knitting friends that it was turning out all right.

But somehow, in spite of my gauge checking and careful measuring and getting a thumbs-up from my friends, something went terribly wrong: in mid-April, when the sweater length was about four inches below the arms openings, I tried it on again and discovered that it was too big. No, “too big” doesn’t do the size of this thing justice. It was ginormous. I spread it out on the table, whipped out a measuring tape, and was astonished to find the width of this thing at 22 inches. That’s 44 inches all around. That’s nearly a foot more than was I was aiming for. I have no idea how this happened. It’s so bad that I’m not even going to take a picture of it. Needless to say, at that point I was feeling pretty discouraged about the whole top-down sweater thing. I’m sure I’ll give it another try, but I need to put this aside for a while first.

Fortunately, I have managed to get a good dose of project-completion satisfaction recently. For the last year or so, I’ve taken to having a sock-in-progress with me at all times (well, whenever I’m taking my sling bag somewhere with me). My sock projects fit neatly into the awesome bag that Deborah gave me last fall, and it’s amazing how a-few-rows-here and a-few-rows-there can turn into a completed sock faster than one might expect. The pair of socks I just finished is for me, and I made it out of the fabulous Sea Wool yarn that Chelle gave me a year and a half ago. I loved working with this yarn, and the socks feel very luxurious. They’ve been packed away for the summer, and I look forward to wearing them when the weather turns cold again next fall.

And here’s another recently (as in “two days ago”) piece of knitting. I knit a lot of ball-band washcloths a few years ago when the first Mason-Dixon Knitting book made them all the rage, but then I ended up taking a break from them for a while. Now I make them as gifts for friends, and I really enjoy the process of making something by hand that contains thoughts of the recipient and is likely to be appreciated and used. My latest thing: monochrome cloths. I really like the simple look of these.

I’ve been doing some experimental sewing, too! I recently did the “seasonal switcheroo” in Sylvia’s room (put out-of-season clothing and bedding into a storage box, make sure the in-season stuff still fits) and remembered that there was still a stack of receiving blankets in one of her underbed drawers. When she was born, we got a gazillion of these as gifts. They didn’t get used for swaddling—partly because Sylvia was born just as spring hit its stride and the weather was warm, and partly because she was ten pounds at birth and from the get-go was just too big for them—and were mostly used by Sylvia when playing with her stuffed animals.

She’s been in need of a light cotton blanket for summer, so when I saw these receiving blankets I figured, “Hey, I can just sew these together to make a big blanket for her.” And that’s what I did. Sort of. My plans to make a huge blanket were foiled when I realized that the dozen or so blankets in the drawer were of two different sizes—and some had been stretched or poorly cut or whatever and weren’t as square as I’d like. So I ended up making two blankets: one with six blankets, and one with four. Here’s a picture of the smaller one (which lives in our den now). I can’t provide a photo of the larger one because it is on Sylvia’s bed—she loves it.

Recycling + something Sylvia will actually use = Hooray!

It’s taken me a few days to recover from all of those wild Pi Day festivities (okay, not really), but here I am with a whole bunch of good news!

News the first: I just had my car’s annual inspection this morning, and my little 1993 Saturn SL1 (yes, it’s official: I drive a beater) gets to live for another year! Yippee! I’m not looking forward to the expense of replacing this one when it’s no longer (legally) drivable. And I just love my little car, which has traveled to both coasts and back again several times since I bought it new.

News the second: I knit these socks for my friend Valerye for her birthday. They arrived a day late (she lives in Australia, and it’s hard to gauge how long international mail takes these days), but she didn’t mind at all—she thinks of late gifts as just prolonging the birthday celebration. She loves them! And they fit, too—no small thing, considering I don’t know her shoe size. I’ve never even seen her feet, since we’ve never actually met. We’ve been pen pals for sixteen years. Wow.

News the third: My garden is already off to a great start!* A couple of weeks ago we had a break in the cold weather. It was one of those freakishly warm days when you see pretty much everyone outside and hear lawnmowers revving throughout the neighborhood. Sylvia and I took advantage of the day to clean out our garden beds. We found several wiggly earthworms (which she enjoyed holding in her hands before finding a nice patch of dirt for them), cleared off dead leaves, and set up stakes for our peas and other climbers.

Yesterday, on St. Patrick’s Day, we planted our pea seeds—as instructed by Mike McGrath. Once we find the staple gun (it’s somewhere in this house…) we’ll set up trellis netting on the stakes, and those climbing peas will be able to go nutso!

News the fourth: On Saturday, the three of us attended a regional theater production in Old City, Philadelphia, of A Year with Frog and Toad. Wow. I am pretty sure that this is just about the best show (professional or amateur) I have ever seen. This particular production was terrific, but the show itself is just utterly sweet and charming and well-paced and cleverly structured. It’s based, as you can probably guess, on Arnold Loebel’s famous Frog and Toad stories.

The best part? Watching Sylvia’s almost-four-year-old face just light up while watching the show. Since Saturday, we’ve been listening to the soundtrack pretty much nonstop. And she’s got Jan and me doing pretend play with her based on the stories. Usually, she likes to be “the snail with the mail” or “the red bird.” I’m usually cast (she is the casting director, of course) as Toad, and Jan is usually “the blue bird.” On Sunday morning, she asked me to show her how to write “Dear Toad,” then she copied it onto a piece of paper, then—as “the snail with the mail”—very, very slowly delivered it to me.

News the fifth: On Monday I went back to Philly to meet an old friend (and his fiancee) from Oregon. They live in Portland now but are in New Jersey visiting her family for a few days. Mike and I met when I was doing my fieldwork and he was doing his doctoral research in marine biology and ecology. We kept in touch but this was the first time in ten years we’d seen each other. We met up at our favorite Chinese vegetarian/vegan restaurant in Chinatown. Yum!

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*Sylvia is taking a picture here with her “new” camera (my old point-and-shoot), which she got for Christmas. She is quite the shutterbug. It’s fascinating to look at the photos and catch a glimpse of the world through her eyes.

Last June I received a wonderful, yarn-filled package from Karen at Yarn Is My Métier. Almost immediately I cast on for Karen’s Mia Shrug (there’s a pattern link on the front page of her blog), using the Jaegar Shetland Aran. It is a lovely pattern (clear instructions! fun to knit!), and the completed shrug was sent—before I remembered to photograph it, alas—to my friend Valérye in Australia.

What to do with the Jo Sharp Silkroad Aran, though? This is really luscious yarn—the sort of thing I wanted to use for something that would be used for a very long time. About a month ago, I realized that in nearly five years of knitting I had yet to knit a scarf for myself. (Gasp!) I couldn’t believe it. So I started looking at scarf patterns. Plain stockinette or garter stitch were out (too boring), as were cables (ate up too much yarn).

And then I remember Wavy, from Knitty’s winter 2004 issue. I’d actually knit this scarf once before as a gift for a friend and had really enjoyed the pattern.* The result is slightly funky, not full of holes (lace scarves are not my thing), and easily dressed up or down.

I loved knitting this scarf again. It’s just long enough for a once-around-the-neck wrap with short tails hanging down—which is fine with me, because there’s no sense in using a lot of super-nice stuff like this for knitting that doesn’t actually touch your skin. The shifting rib pattern gives the whole thing some curves that keep it interesting both to knit and to wear. I may just make another one of these soon…

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*I did most of the knitting during the four hours I had to sit in a Quest diagnostics lab office while doing a glucose tolerance test for gestational diabetes. I’d flunked the “quickie” test my midwife gave me at the birth center, so I had to spend half a day drinking a sickly sweet orange solution, waiting an hour, getting my blood drawn, then repeating the whole sequence a few more times. This knitting project and an audiobook kept me from going nuts in the waiting room. And I passed the test with flying colors, fortunately!

Two friends of mine just had their first babies. One friend is someone I was close to in high school, saw a lot in early grad school (he lived in the same town where I was in school), and fell out of touch with for several years. We’ve recently resumed contact, and when I learned that he and his wife were expecting their first baby this month, I knew I just had to knit a hat for them. Their daughter arrived last week, and I knit the little red strawberry cap for her in one three-hour stretch; it will go out in the mail this week.

The other friend is someone I met in Oregon many years ago. A little over a year ago I made hats for her and her husband as wedding gifts (and apparently they still get a lot of wear—hooray!). Their first child, a little girl, was born just over a week ago. Not long before that, I sent them a sweater and hat for the baby: a simple boatneck and rolled-brim hat, both from Debbie Bliss and both done in Rowan All-Seasons Cotton left over from Sylvia’s first Wallaby—and both, unfortunately, unphotographed before I packed them up. As soon as I’d heard that little Orla had arrived, I just had to knit her another hat. The pink raspberry hat is for her, and I knit it in a not-newborn size, so she’ll have something to grow into.

Both hats were done in Lamb’s Pride worsted on the bottom, and Knit Picks Wool of the Andes worsted on the top. Lamb’s Pride is the very first yarn I ever knit with (and I did three garter-stitch scarves in a row with it), and I’d almost forgotten how much I love this yarn. Once I knit through my stash, I may just have to plan a project in Lamb’s Pride…

Shortly before my pre-Christmas mitten-knitting frenzy, I had started work on a sweater for myself. Not long after I first started knitting about five years ago, I got the idea of making sweaters for Jan and me out of the same yarn. I placed an order at Elann.com (my only one to date, now that I think about it…), and a box full of Gjestal bulky-weight 100% wool yarn soon arrived on my doorstep.

It didn’t take me too long to knit “the Beatles sweater” for Jan. I started on a funnelneck sweater for myself, put it down for several months, then ran into some problems. So I put the yarn away for several more months.

And then I saw the B.O.B. (Button on Blanket) Sweater and just knew that the rest of my Gjestal was destined to be one of these. The Ravelry page, with a link to the free PDF in the Ravelry library, is here. Those of you who aren’t on Ravelry can go here and ask the author to send you the pattern directly.

I really enjoyed working on this sweater, right until I got near the end of the raglan decreases at the shoulders. I was at the point there I should have been done decreasing (further decreases would have eaten into the cables on either side, thus messing up their prettiness), but I still had about six more columns than the pattern said I should. Hmmm. After consultation with–and lots of helpful advice from–my knitting group, I ended up winging it a bit. And it worked out all right.

Other than having to fiddle with the final decreases, I made two other adjustments to the pattern. First, I made the arms a couple of inches longer–partly to accommodate my long arms, partly because I wanted the sleeves to descend into the palms of my hands to increase their bundle-up-in-cold-weather utility. Second, I lengthened the body by about five inches.

I found some buttons I like at JoAnn, but after wearing the sweater for a few days I am finding that the buttonholes have loosened up, and I’ll need to get some larger buttons to replace them. Also, since I lengthened the body but neglected to increase the number of buttons (currently there are eight), the sweater has a little gappiness in front, particularly when I sit down. At first I didn’t think I’d mind (especially since the designer points out that “this is more a warm wrap around and bundle in on the couch for knitting and movies than svelte sweater-girl knit”), but now I’m think I will redo the buttonband once I find appropriate buttons.

Problems aside, this sweater was a lot of fun to knit (especially since it was for me–my first sweater for myself!). It’s very comfortable and very warm. I may very well make another one of these sometime!

So here’s what I’ve done with the yarn I won at Knitters’ Day Out 2008. (Some of it, at least. There is a lot of it.)

After knitting the We Call Them Pirates hat last summer, I was eager to try my hand at more Fair Isle, and the Squirrel and Oak mittens had long been on my to-knit list. (Like the pirate hat, this pattern is a freebie from Hello Yarn. This site is where I also found the hat that inspired the Totoro hat I made for Jan’s Halloween costume.)

I really wanted to make mittens for Sylvia, and I figured that subbing fingering-weight yarn for the sportweight called for in the pattern ought to yield something the right size for a three-year-old, as long as I chose the correct needle size. That seems logical, right?

So last September I picked up my #1.5 DPNs and knit away. The result was too small (just barely) for her hand.

So then I moved up to #3 needles and knit another one right away. This time I used the purple yarn for the dark spots on the chart and the green yarn for the light spots. (I had reversed them the first time around and ended up getting confused every once in a while, which required some tinking here and there.)

This time I ended up with a mitten that was too large. D’oh!

After putting this project aside for a couple of months, I decided on December 20 that I really wanted to get them done by Christmas. So I tried again, this time with #2 needles.

And it worked! The mitten fit perfectly (with “perfectly” being defined as “there’s just enough extra room to insure that she won’t outgrow them this winter”). After trying on this mitten, Sylvia was so happy with it that she wore it (yes, just the one) around the house for half an hour.

I finished the second one after Sylvia went to bed on Christmas night. I am thrilled with how they turned out.

I love this yarn. Linda at Bearlin Acres grows, spins, and dyes some mighty fine fiber. If you have a chance to throw some on your needles, go for it. This stuff didn’t split or snag or anything, and it flowed wonderfully as I knit.

I love this pattern, too. It’s very well written, and the result is something worthy of a post on Cute Overload.

See the fuzz on the palms? That’s the result of some post-Christmas snowman building. Sylvia loves her new mittens. That’s the best part of all.

Last spring, I set out to knit a pullover sweater for Sylvia. I had a few balls of Noro New Ruby in a vibrant (but not blinding) color, but the yarn had been discontinued years ago, and there was no way I’d have enough for the whole sweater. So I used the New Ruby for the sleeves and solicited advice for what to do about the body.

From the many very excellent suggestions I received I opted for Gina’s idea of using a solid Dale of Norway fingering-weight yarn. She even gave me the yarn for my birthday—two balls of purple, and two balls of light forest green. I finished up the sweater during the summer, opting for a simple boatneck at the top so the sweater would be reversible. (Aw, who am I kidding? Purple-crazy Sylvia will always choose to wear purple in the front…) Since it was high summer when the sweater was completed, it went right into a drawer. A few weeks ago it emerged as temperatures started to dip, though, and now it’s Sylvia’s sweater of choice.

A finished object? And one that a three-year-old actually chooses to wear? Wow.

Jan attended a costume-required Halloween party last weekend. Once he decided on his costume earlier in the week, I knit this hat for him in two evenings.

Can any of you guess what it is?

(By the way, Gina and Katie aren’t allowed to answer this question, because they both saw me knitting the hat and we discussed it at length.)

Those of you who’ve been around here for a while may recall that during my family’s annual trek up to Vermont last summer, I knit a Wonderful Wallaby for Sylvia out of Rowan All-Seasons Cotton. If you take a look at that old post, you’ll see one of my first—and last—attempts to carefully document the parameters of a knitting project (e.g., start date, finish date, needles used). I jot down these things in a pocket-sized notebook that lives in my knitting bag, but somehow I just don’t manage to get that information into my blog, too.

When I was packing my knitting bag for this year’s trip, I brought stuff to make socks, mittens, and a Sylvia-sized sweater. The day after we arrived at the cottage, I suddenly felt the urge to knit another Wonderful Wallaby for her (I dunno…maybe it’s something in the water up there?). So I did. This one was made mostly out of Noro Kureyon, but I knew I wouldn’t have enough of it for the whole thing. So I knit the pocket in some dark green local Vermont yarn. And about halfway up the hood, I ran out of the Kureyon and used the green stuff there, too.

Yeah, the finished sweater is a bit large on her. But that gives her plenty of room to grow into it. And she loves it, so I’m happy, too!

You’d think I’d have the Wonderful Wallaby out of my system by now, right? Nope. I bought some local yarn to make one for Jan, too. I got started on it right away, and by the time our two weeks in Vermont were up I’d nearly finished both sleeves.

And I bought some local yarn to make myself a Wallaby, too. We’re going to be one of those families who wear matching sweaters—well, slightly matching, at least. I like that all three of our sweaters will include yarn from our favorite place.

My yarn expenditures weren’t that huge during this trip. The local worsted I bought was only $4.50 for each four-ounce skein. This stuff here, merino made from sheep who live at Shelburne Farms, cost twice as much—which is why I bought only two skeins. But Shelburne Farms is one of Sylvia’s favorite places (at our first visit there, last year, Sylvia had a memorable meeting with a chicken), and Jan suggested it might be nice to knit something for her with yarn from there. I’m not sure yet what I’ll do with it (Jan thought an intarsia sheep or chicken on a sweater made of other yarn could be fun). Suggestions?