First things first

Remember that Baktus scarf I made last fall of two not-quite-full skeins of Koigu? Sylvia has taken to wearing it–which is great, because it’s the perfect size for her.

During last month’s heavy snowfalls, she spent a lot of time playing outside in the snow. Her pre-play preparations including putting on four layers of clothes* and finishing up with this scarf. After one outside excursion she came back inside only to discover that the scarf was missing. We looked in the yard and even revisited the small hill on the next street (where we’d tried sledding that day) but didn’t find it. Sylvia was a bit unhappy, but I was fairly certain the scarf was somewhere in the yard and would turn up eventually.

Lo and behold, as Jan and I were building a castle (complete with a snow bench long enough for all three of us!) in the front yard a week later, look what we found!

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*I know this may seem like overkill, but she’s not shoveling (and therefore not building up a lot of heat), and she does spend most of her time sitting or lying on the snow (so waterproofness is key).

Apparently the Baktus scarf was all the rage last year among Norwegian knitters–and the non-Norwegians who read the Norwegian knitters’ blogs. I heard about it only recently, when my friend JD posted about it on her blog.

As it turned out, I happened to have two balls of Koigu KPPM (both mill ends of slightly-less-than-standard size) that I’d received as a gift about a year and a half ago. They seemed perfect for the Baktus, so I set off knitting and before long this is what I had:

I thought about alternating the two colors every two rows but decided against it, preferring instead to have two big blocks of color. I love how it looks!

This pattern is very easy to memorize, which makes it excellent for mindless knitting. I like it so much that I’ve already cast on another one–this time using two 50g balls of sock yarn, so I’m hoping it will be a bit longer than my first one.

Incidentally, this is the very time I’ve ever knit with Koigu. Finally, I understand what all the fuss is about. I’m not ready to run off and join the Koigu Cult*, but wow, that stuff is really nice to knit with.
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*Two reasons: (1) I can’t afford to knit with Koigu; and (2) most non-accessory garments (e.g., sweaters) knit with Koigu look like a paint shop exploded all over them (and no, that’s not a good thing).

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!

After finishing the B.O.B. Sweater, I decided to knit a scarf for myself. I’ve had a copy of Scarf Style from Interweave for some time, and whenever I look through it I find that I like patterns that I disliked the last time, and dislike those I liked the last time. So as you can imagine it’s hard to me to settle on any project from this book.

This time, though, I had just finished looking through my stash, and when I came across the Midwest Moonlight scarf (Ravelry link here) I remembered that I had the exact yarn it called for: Cotton Comfort, from Green Mountain Spinnery. I love this yarn. I’d bought five skeins of it on a trip to Vermont a couple of years ago and used about two-and-a-half skeins for a baby sweater. The scarf pattern calls for three skeins, but I figured that two and a half would be fine. I don’t really need a scarf that’s seventy-two inches long.

Nor do I need a scarf that’s full of holes, apparently. This is technically a lace pattern, with yarnovers and k2tog and ssk all over the place. But it seemed substantial to me—certainly not flimsy lace. After knitting several inches of this scarf, though, I’m finding that I just don’t love it. It’s pretty enough, but just not me. And I firmly believe that, considering how limited my time is for all the things I want to do, I don’t want to waste any of it on something that I don’t really like. So I’m frogging this sucker.

Via Craft, I recently rediscovered a pattern I’d first encountered last winter via my SP8 downstream pal’s blog. It’s for a double-sided star scarf that looks awfully fun to knit. I’m thinking about giving this a try with a different motif or maybe even a set of motifs.

And here’s another scarf pattern—this one a foulard—from Topstitchgirl. She writes her blog entries in both English and French, so here’s a fun chance to try knitting from a pattern in another language (with as-needed peeks at the other), if you’re interested.

I couldn’t stop laughing when I first saw this O RLY scarf. If you want to know what’s so funny, check this out. Yes, I wear my geek badge proudly!

Here’s a lovely pattern for a scarflet that fastens with buttons. Me, I’m more of a long-scarf person—something that be wrapped around your neck a couple of times—but I do think this is a nice design and could work very nicely (perhaps in a luxury yarn?) for something a bit more formal.

Shortly after I started knitting, I saw some knitted “fruit hats”–you know, the ones that make babies’ heads look like strawberries or blueberries or whatever. I bought the pattern and realized that I didn’t know any babies. So I knit adult-sized hats as several gifts. (This was my first experiment with modifying patterns.) I knit one orange hat with green leaves and a green stem–I called it the Pumpkin Hat, and I wear it proudly every Halloween.

Apparently, some other knitters out there agree with me that pumpkin hats aren’t just for kids. Crazy Aunt Purl just created her own pattern for a knitted pumpkin hat–and a reversible one, at that. There’s another knitted pumpkin hat pattern at Crafty Crafty.

If you’re not keen on wearing pumpkins but still want them around, try knitting up some seasonal decor: felted pumpkins. The best part is that they’ll never rot.

If pumpkins really aren’t your thing but you want to keep warm while trick-or-treating, a knitted skull illusion scarf may be more up your alley.

Of course you need a bag to haul all that candy loot, right? This candy corn-shaped felted bag should do nicely!

We went up to New York for the weekend–first to upstate New York (to visit my mother-in-law), then to Manhattan (to visit a friend who just had her first child last month). I usually get lots of knitting done on these sorts of trips, and this time was no exception.

Even before we’d left, I finished two hats for my friend’s new son. I knit two sweaters for him earlier in the summer, but I hadn’t knit him any hats yet. And, you know, it’s getting colder–the kid needs handknit hats! From me! The brown-and-white one was done with three strands of a very lightweight wool-cotton blend, using this pattern. (I love how it turned out and am thinking about sizing it up for a toddler or even an adult!) The blue hat was knit in Wildflower DK, using the simple baby hat in Debbie Bliss’s Baby Knits for Beginners. (I love this pattern. I’ve knit it about a gazillion times, using all different types of yarn.)

While at my mother-in-law’s house, I finished a recordbreaking three items–and knit a fourth from start to finish. Three of them are gifts, so I can’t discuss them yet. But I can show you the one I knit for myself. It’s the dragon-scale scarf I started back in April, with Patons SWS (wool-soy) that my SP9, Lynnette, gave me. I finished a third skein on Thursday evening while knitting with friends and was considering calling it quits there, but they unanimously urged me to use up the fourth skein, too. And I’m glad I did–the result is something that can wrap around my neck several times without coming undone! I love the colors in this scarf, too! It’s still unblocked (how do you block something this long, anyway?), but I love how it looks and am really looking forward to wearing it this winter.

Ever since SP9 ended, my spoiler, Lynnette, and I have kept in touch. One thing we discovered is that we’re both new to lace knitting–”new” as in “haven’t done it before but would really like to.” We also discovered that we both have a fondness for dragons.

“Hey,” we thought, “wouldn’t it be fun to do a lace project together?”

After a few e-mails back and forth to discuss several possible patterns (the “Heere Be Dragone” shawl was mentioned but quickly determined to be not-a-good-idea-for-a-first-lace-project), we finally settled on the Dragon-Scale Scarf from Heritage Yarns.

By coincidence, we both started our scarves at the same time (around Easter weekend), but house-related concerns (and not having the scarf and my camera anywhere near each other whenever I thought to take a picture of the thing) have kept me from posting about it until now. As you can see, I’m nearly two feet into it (I started a new skein at about eighteen inches).

I’ve opted for a heavier yarn than the pattern calls for: I’m using the fabulous Patons SWS that Lynnette gave me, and I love how the scarf is turning out. The pattern’s twelve-row repeat isn’t difficult but is interesting enough to keep me from getting bored! I doubt that I’ll be ready for Heere Be Dragone after this, but maybe one day, after I get a lot more lace knitting under my belt!

Last November, I learned how to knit a Moebius using Cat Bordhi’s cast-on. The result was a lot longer and thinner than what I expected–not really my style as far as scarves go, but Sylvia loves it, so it’s hers now.

I knit another Moebius in December as a Christmas gift for my mother-in-law. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of it before I gave it to her, so all I can do here is describe it. I used three balls of KnitPicks Suri Dream (in Atlantic), cast on 80 stitches (160 if you could the top and bottom stitches separately), and knit until I ran out of yarn. The result was a scarf that hung down to my waist, could be worn as a double loop, and was wide enough that one loop could be pulled over the top of the head as an impromptu hood.

I was working on that scarf when I had my annual checkup at the satellite office (in my town) for the Birth Center. (The birth center itself is about forty-five minutes from my house.) The midwife who saw me on that day, Nancy, was the same one who’d been with Jan and me when Sylvia was born at the Birth Center in May 2005. She’s not a knitter but is new to crocheting, and she was pretty interested in the scarf I was working on. I like her tremendously, and I decided then that I was going to make one for her as a surprise. I ordered the yarn for it now long after, but various other projects have kept me from starting it until this weekend, when Jan, Sylvia, and I visited his mom (who lives three hours away) for a couple of days.

I started with 50 (100) stitches and knit for about two inches, but it was turning out much longer than I wanted. I was aiming for a short, fits-around-the-neck thing, so I started over with 35 (70) stitches, which turned out to be perfect. I cast on with #9 needles, knit one row and purled one row, then switched the right needle only to a #11 (keeping a smaller needle on the left, so the yarn would pass over it easier–this is a tip I just learned from my friend Beth, who read it in Bordhi’s book). I used one entire skein of KnitPicks Suri Dream Hand-Dyed (in the Falling Leaves color), and the whole thing took only about three or four hours. The large stitches give the scarf an airiness, but the alpaca and wool–along with the width of the scarf–make it warm indeed.

I love how this turned out, and I hope Nancy likes it, too! I’m going to put it in the mail to her this week. It will get to her too late for this winter…but just in time for Sylvia’s second birthday!

Last night my local knitting ground met at a coffee shop for our first-Tuesday-of-the-month not-at-the-community-center get-together. (On the third Thursday of the month, we are at the community center.) I had finished the heel flaps on both of my toe-up socks, so I was all ready for Pat to help me through the next step: picked up stitches on the sides of the heel flap and making the ninety-degree turn that makes sock knitting so freaky and mysterious. It went quite well…or so I thought. When I came home, I finished up one sock and discovered that I’d picked up about ten more stitches than I should have. Oops. I sent Pat a “oh crap, what do I do now?” e-mail about it this morning, and fortunately she was able to tell me how to fix it by decreasing before I start knitting the round top part. I’ll have to be extra-careful when I do the heel on my second sock, now that I know that my subconscious wants to pick up way more stitches than are good for me. These socks aren’t going to be a perfectly matched pair…but hey, they are my first real socks, and besides, all of these “idiosyncracies” are what make handknits so charming, right? Right?

Yesterday I also finished up the front of the pullover vest I’m knitting for a baby that’s due in mid-June. The top part looks kind of weird to me…like a halter top gone bad or something. I’m supposed to block it before seaming, and I’m wondering if blocking will smooth out the profile a bit. But I’m also wondering if I should rip it down to the base of the v and try again, this time modifying the pattern a bit to get wider “straps” up the sides. (I followed the pattern exactly as written this time.) What do you think? Any suggestions?